The Tower of Bones (12 page)

‘But why – why would they do that?’

Can you still fail to see what I am offering you? The choice between life as a short and brutal struggle – or the ultimate control over your own destiny – eternity!

Over the estuary a fleet of ships commanded by Shee had taken to the water, racing toward the boat that was carrying Mo and Qwenqwo back to the shore. Mo was standing in the prow, screaming at them all to stay back. A sound filled the air, a keening so loud it caused widening ripples from around the great shape of the Temple Ship and echoed from the walls across the estuary.

‘Row – row! Turn back! Your very lives depend on it!’ The dwarf mage shouted to the Kyra, who was standing erect in the prow of the nearest boat.

The great manta ray wings of the Ship glowed, as if aflame with an inner light, its surface becoming incandescent.

It was the young Kyra’s turn to roar, a command she transmitted through the oraculum as much as her voice: ‘Back to shore!’

The Temple Ship began to rise from the water, deluging the sleek craft of the Shee that surrounded it. They were tossed and buffeted by the downdrafts, caught up in a
local cauldron of storm winds, as the air was battered down by the beating of the enormous wings.

‘See,’ Qwenqwo marvelled, staring upwards. ‘It’s changing.’

Feathers of the purest white sprang into being over the rising colossus. A raptor’s curved beak arose where the blind head of the ray had been, and the eyes above the beak were black, an all-consuming force of determination, in which they glimpsed a fast-pulsating matrix of silver.

‘Has your crystal evoked this terror, Fir Bolg?’ The young Kyra roared at the dwarf mage with the gaze he well remembered from her sister-mother.

‘This is beyond any power of mine,’ he shouted back.

Holding aloft the runestone, Qwenqwo groaned as he saw it turn black, the silver matrix pulsating so powerfully within it he could barely keep hold of it. Pride glowed in his eyes as he acknowledged the real source and nature of the communication.

‘Young Ironheart! Take with you all my hopes and blessing!’

Both Kyra and the dwarf mage paused for a heartbeat then their faces, as one, lifted skywards to behold the leviathan that dwarfed them rising out of the water, with the enormous wings creating a whirlpool in the ocean beneath as it gathered momentum with colossal down-thrusts. The great shape held still for a moment like a hovering eagle, then it spiralled heavenwards, rising at
such speed it seemed to gain a mile of loft with a few wing beats, until it had become a mere speck – and then was gone. The Kyra’s oraculum pulsated rapidly in her brow.

Across the estuary a host of watchers had joined them – the guard on the walls and the people of Carfon – all eyes staring skywards. A pinpoint of light appeared where the speck had been, expanding in an instant, until it seemed that a star was falling out of the heavens. A moment later they heard the screech of the tormented atmosphere as it fell, the air erupting into fire with its passage. The gasps of awe became screams of terror over the walls of the ancient city as the target of the approaching fireball became clear. There was no time to think, no time even to consider hurling themselves into the sea as the flaming mass engulfed them. But where the Kyra and dwarf mage expected the explosion of its impact into the stony fabric of the ancient city, the fireball vanished, leaving only the incandescent line of its passage still hanging in the air.

The robot towered over Alan. The ground-quaking thud of its feet, that slow booming drumbeat, had stopped. In its place the vile symphony of buzzing, clicking and ticking had grown deafening, echoing and reverberating inside his skull, as if his head had been invaded by the pestilential hordes of insects. He could smell the oils that lubricated the engine’s joints, he could feel the hot
exhausts of the engines that powered it, as if he faced the open doors of a gigantic furnace. As the golden arms rose to their highest point, he found himself helpless to prevent his fate, his mind numbed with horror. There was no point in trying the power in his brow – the oraculum was extinguished. He thought instead about his mom and dad, whose deaths the Tyrant had just blamed him for.

He whispered, ‘I’ve failed you!’

A hundred feet above his kneeling figure those glassy eye sockets reflected the icy white light of Dromenon.

What was it waiting for? To torment him for a few more seconds?

He raised his voice against the frenzy of buzzing. He brought to mind the last time he had seen his parents, before setting out on the skiing holiday at Aspen. ‘If I’m going to die, then I’ll do it on my feet, like an American.’

Struggling back so he was standing, it took all of his will to keep his jerky legs still enough to bear him erect.

Think, foolish child – a final chance?

‘I will never obey you. I will never betray my friends for you.’

At the top of its reach the enormous spiked ball strained its heavy weight at the end of its chain. Alan’s eyes closed, his entire being stiffened, waiting for its ponderous arc to fall. He felt his mind invaded by darkness, as if the Tyrant so coveted his death he had invaded Alan’s being to share the experience of it, the annihilation of his body, the complete subjugation of his spirit.
Alan did his best to hold onto the image that meant so much to him – that memory of Mom and Dad.

An explosion of light blinded him even through his closed lids. He heard words, mind-to-mind – a voice he recognised:

What’s it worth, Alan?

Mark’s voice – Mark’s sense of humour! It made no sense. Nothing made sense any more.

Then, abruptly, he sensed something else that felt like a sudden, overwhelming fear. It wasn’t his own fear – his own he was familiar with already. But there was no longer time to wonder as his body disintegrated. Alan felt the shockwave pass through him, an explosion so intense it incinerated his being. Yet, strangely, he was still aware, sentient. The universe in which his consciousness remained was a world of silence – nothingness. Then he saw them materialise out of the nothingness, standing immediately in front of him, their arms extended as if to embrace him.

‘Mom – Dad?’

He felt his soul spirit materialise as if it had come together again, even if only for a moment, like a single desperate thought lingering in this world of darkness. He felt the impression of tears well into his eyes and run over his cheeks. He saw the same tears fill their eyes. He strained to meet them, moving in a strange slow motion as if under water, yet somehow he closed the distance between them until they could embrace.

He was looking into his father’s eyes.

‘Hey – I’m sorry.’

His father’s arm embraced his shoulders as if to reassure him. His mother’s two arms were about his waist. They held him, comforted him, for several seconds. Then he saw Mom and Dad each reach out with an arm, their hands opening, fingers splaying, as if to show him something.

Alan stared about himself, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. The darkness had become suffused with stars. He blinked, blinked again, trying to clear his eyes of the bewilderment of tears. He tried to speak, as all three of them embraced, weightless, within a wheeling cylinder made up of the night sky.

But how could he still think like this? How could he think at all? Where was he? How could any of this be happening to him?

It’s really beautiful!

Kate was back in the place of utter darkness; a terrible place, a place designed for torment of the spirit. It wasn’t a darkness you could see with your eyes, but a darkness that was the opposite of seeing. Not a darkness you could reach out and feel, but the absence of feeling, a darkness that when you tried to touch it, it swallowed your groping fingers, it swallowed your entire outstretched arm, and then it devoured more of you, your arms and legs, your entire body, even your screaming tongue, until it left nothing of you behind – nothing at all. You couldn’t hear it, or smell it, or taste it. The only way you knew it was there was the feeling, the awful, ghastly feeling, of being swallowed whole by it, of being devoured.

The awful thing, the maddening thing, was that she couldn’t do anything to help herself. She was utterly powerless. She breathed in and out, deeply, repetitively, just to feel her chest expand. Her voice trembled as she tried to
remember the childish incantation: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones – but my … my memories … my poor memories …’

She was buried alive.

How could anyone come to terms with that? How could anyone survive manacled to the wall in a coffin-like cell of cold, and darkness and silence? She couldn’t help touching herself, putting her fingers into her mouth. She bit determinedly on the knuckles of her right hand, to make herself aware that she was still here. But she couldn’t bite on memory, on spirit, on the really important things such as love, or hope, or faith. The silence was leaching those important things out of her. And with their loss her mind was drifting out of her control. She had found a small comfort in constructing dreams. People thought that dreams were random. But in the dark and silence of her coffin-cell she had found a way of guiding her hopes into dreams. She had opened her mind into a dream in which she was lying on her back among the rocky outcrops on the slope above the sawmill high in the fern-scented field at the foot of the Comeragh Mountains. The sky was drifting overhead – that wonderful summer’s sky, a gentle whisper of clouds.

Was there ever a sky as lovely as that? And yet, under that lovely drifting sky, I’m growing excited … scared.

The trouble was that the dream was apt to change against her will. And now it morphed into the time when they had discovered they were experiencing the same
dream in their sleep. She didn’t want the dream to change. It so terrified her that she scurried up the rock-strewn hillside in search of peace … and she forced it to change back again, to gaze up once more into the gentle drifting of the clouds. Her mind began to paint the clouds again. How lovely to have nothing else to do all day other than to gaze, in perfect tranquillity, at the whispering clouds …

Oh, dreaming, let me just escape in dreams …

And yet the scary darkness was never far away, the silence all around her, invading her dreams …

Oh, God help me!

Desperately, she willed to mind that other sweet, wonderful day. The day she had emerged through the gate in the ivy-clad wall, wheeling her bicycle. And Alan was waiting for her outside the gate …

He kissed me
. She remembered it. She no longer cared that she was dreaming from the silent confines of her coffin-grave. She willed the memory to mind, caught hold of it and refused to let it go. She breathed it aloud, no matter how much her lips trembled over the words. ‘He kissed me!’

She clung to that kiss. It was the only hope that remained in the midst of so much darkness.
Alan!
She treasured that memory of him with all of her heart.
Alan loves me
. The memory of that single kiss would keep her alive for another hour. And then there were other kisses she would try her very best to remember. Each kiss had
the potential of becoming another dream, another moment of blessed escape …

I so love you too. I will always love you. If what must be will be, I will die still loving you.

Kate held onto the dream of that one kiss. She curled her being around it as if she were a minuscule thing, an embryo, snuggling for the comfort it brought her …

Wake!

No!
She refused to wake up. She squeezed herself even more closed, body and mind, her being ever more tightly curled about her dream.

Hear me, child! The Night Hag is harvesting a library of lost souls. When she extracts their experience from them, all of their hopes and fears, their loves and pains, their spirits are extinguished, like ash. All that they were is lost for eternity. Beware you do not become ash to her gathering.

‘I will not wake up!’

She felt strong fingers remove her right hand from her clenched shut eye, her hand prised open. She crabbed her fingers shut again around something hard and rounded and heavy, something cool as marble. Almost immediately she sensed light out there beyond her closed eyelids. Light invading the coffin-cell. And the pain was gone.

The pain is gone!

Wake, now – Kate Shaunessy! Take strength from what, once taken, is now restored to you.

Somebody was calling her out of her dream. A voice,
powerful and persistent. But her mind still resisted. Even in the dark silence of the grave, cocooned within her dream, terror could still reach in and clutch at her. She couldn’t take the risk. And yet her instincts insisted that something important was happening. Had Alan arrived? She knew – she had always known – that his arrival would herald death for her, her purpose, as far as the Witch was concerned, now spent. But she had consoled her self that at least the torment would end …

Wake, child!

It was hardly a voice at all but a rattle inside the walls of her skull. Yet there was a powerful sense of something up close … a shadowy being … a triangular shadow, looming over her. Perhaps it was Faltana, come to begin another hour of torment? But the voice wasn’t that of the succubus. This voice was within her mind rather than in her ears, a voice so deep and full of foreboding it sounded like gravel pouring into an old tin bath.

Wake!

Cracking open her matted eyelids she saw multicoloured rays of light splaying out between the fingers of her right hand. She opened her hand a little more to stare at it, seeing something familiar in the green matrix, the soft alluring green of spring, speckled with the metamorphosing, whorling specks of gold.

‘It’s … my beautiful crystal!’

I am here, child! Your time has come.

She gazed at it in wonderment, letting it dazzle her
dark-adapted eyes. So brilliant was the light coming from the crystal it was illuminating the entire cell. Then she blinked, slowly, rubbing at her eyes to try to clean them. She licked her lips, which felt fissured and dry as ashes.