The Tower of Bones (24 page)

‘Who was this Dark One?’

Driftwood’s eyes became very large, so large that Kate could see herself in their shiny reflections. ‘Call down great goddess. Raven of battlefields. Make sacrifice! Great sacrifice – the joy of dragons.’

‘Oh, no!’

Kate had never seen Driftwood so restless or excited. He was pacing around, hopping from foot to foot and running around in circles, while growling to himself, his eyes shining like miniature suns.

‘All the dragons died except you, it seems,’ she said gently, not wishing to excite him more, yet tremulous with sympathy.

‘Died me too!’

‘But …?’

Then she understood. The sacrifice of the dragons, the
tribute to the Great Raven – to Mórígán – had been the loss of their wings. To end the carnage, to save what still remained of the war-ravaged world, the surviving dragons had bitten off their own wings. The dragons had abandoned the source of their joy, and she saw them, all the poor dragons, as they plunged from the skies into the depths of the oceans.

Died me too …

Kate felt her heart breaking with anguish for her little dragon. She made no attempt to stop the flood of her tears. For a long time she just brushed her fingertips over the stumps of wings, grieving over their broken remains, feeling such a sense of loss she couldn’t think at all. She hugged the small dragon, huddled into a ball with the horror of what he had allowed her to see. She clung to him, feeling the immense discharge of whatever the oraculum did to her, whatever power it gave to her, itself the gift of a goddess. She poured her grief and love into the ravaged stumps where the wings should have been, feeling the changes already beginning to take place in the scarred and deformed flesh. Withdrawing her hands she watched the proliferation of new growth, swelling first like enormous mushrooms, then further expanding amid wrinkles and folds in which the throb of arteries could clearly be seen. She sensed the ongoing proliferation of nerves and bones and muscles, the growth of new life.

Then, her emotion too overwhelming for words, she
threw her arms around the long, scaly neck, squeezing his unresisting solidity.

The great wings, which must have been twenty feet in their span, opened out on either side of the dragon’s back like fabulous sails, stretching taut and moving in slow fanning exercises, their surface covered in gossamer scales that flickered into colour in sweeping iridescent waves.

‘Ooooh!’

With the sun behind him it was like looking up through the most beautiful cathedral window, her eyes dazzled by the kaleidoscope of gorgeous colours against the light. She could see a fine filigree of gold running everywhere, like marbling under the delicate scales, thrilling her all the more to realise that she was looking at the colour of his blood – that a dragon’s blood was not red like her own, but golden.

The dragon roared.

Kate clapped her hands. ‘Ah, sure – you’re magnificent!’

She tottered amid the powerful currents of air that blew back from the enormous beating wings. Wiping the tears from her face with the back of her hand, she made her way back up the slope, searching for where she had slept that first night … probing the rocky ground with care. There was such a crazy idea in her mind – she just had to find out – she just had to be sure …

And finally she found it, the place where she had fallen
into an exhausted sleep when she had first arrived at the island, her head resting against the knobbly black log of fossilised driftwood …

The log was gone. In its place was an empty outline in the rocks.

A day after the first spindrift of snow had scorched Alan’s palm the storm worsened to a blizzard. His face, though protected by a sealskin hood, felt like a frozen mask and his fingers, inside their fur-lined gloves, were numb. The wind howled about his ears as if competing with the angry roar of the ocean. At least they had managed to furl the sails and anything loose on deck had been stowed below. All the while the snow blew horizontally across the deck, hard as hail, bringing tears of irritation to his eyes and, as the cold deepened, the ice froze in his eyelashes.

This is crazy.

Crabbing across the slippery decks he clung to whatever solid structures he came across, making his laboured progress to the stern rail from where he attempted to probe the sea in their wake. But it was impossible to make out whether or not the fleet had been able to follow the Kyra’s order. Visibility was so reduced he could detect
nothing. He could only hope that, by now, they were tacking southwards, aiming to put as many leagues as possible between them and the storm-wracked Temple Ship, haunted by the baleful red eye that leered threateningly over it.

It’s downright unbelievable!

It made no sense that the Ship, which should have been their protector, had become a source of the gravest threat. Above his head the tempest tore and ripped at the masts and rigging, even as the snow was freezing and thickening, burying everything in ice as hard as concrete. The same ice was sticking to the decks and rails so that no matter how hard Siam’s crew picked it away with shovels it overwhelmed their efforts, making any movement on the pitching and rolling surfaces hazardous.

Alan clapped his gloved hands together, then stuck them under his armpits. But it made no difference. There was no escaping the fact that over just one day a power of darkness had invaded the entire fabric of the Ship. And that same darkness had weakened his oraculum.

Nearby a gathering of Olhyiu sailors, their sideburns frozen to icy sculptures about their faces, murmured among themselves. He saw fear in their eyes. The sharp sound of hammering sounded overhead, where Siam had sent a party of men aloft with mallets to hammer at the ice that had encased every inch of rigging. Taking what grip he could of the rails, and just holding on during the worst of the pitching and tossing of the decks, Alan made
his way back to the prow. When he got there he shouted into the ears of the captain, Siam.

‘Your sailors are panicking.’

‘Who would blame them? The Ship is accursed.’ Siam’s eyes fell on the oraculum in Alan’s brow. ‘Can you not aid her?’

‘I’ve tried. Nothing seems to make a difference.’

Siam’s eyes met Alan’s, as if to urge him to try harder.

Alan focused on the frozen deck, his eyes almost closed against the cold. He felt the power grow in him, felt it discharge through the oraculum. But it was as if he were shining a flashlight into the night sky. The battening darkness sucked up the feeble beam and it was gone. What slight effect it had in melting the surface layer of ice proved useless, the ice reforming in moments. And it left him exhausted.

‘What is it, Mage Lord? Why is it to no avail?’

Alan shook his head.

‘But what could it be, out here? Three hundred leagues separate us from the Witch and her plotting!’

‘The power in my oraculum feels weakened somehow. Try as I might, the response is too feeble.’

As he stood by Siam the sky swelled with black storm clouds and the wind rose to a hurricane. The great Ship twisted about on itself, yawing violently from side to side as if to cast off its Arctic shackles. A groaning rose up from the timbers below their feet. The movement and the deep, sad sounds were terrifying, throwing people off their
feet amid the clattering of belongings falling about the cabins and storerooms. Shouts from below decks alerted Siam to the fact that a fire was being put out in the galley.

Alan gritted his teeth. His stomach clenched with another of the monstrous yaws, seeing the starboard rail pitch so low it was several feet below the seething invasion of a great wave. He hollered into the ear of the chief. ‘Siam – you know the moods of the oceans. What do your instincts suggest?’

‘Strangeness is imposed upon strangeness. Yet this weakening of your power arrived as one with that eye in the sky.’

Alan nodded, peering up into the madness of sky, through which he glimpsed the baleful red glow.

As the Ship righted itself once more he glanced about himself in a rare moment or two of respite. He saw the breath rising from the sailors’ mouths in puffs of steam. But there was something odd about the way the steam was moving, something he wouldn’t have noticed amid the fury of the wind. Arcs of breath were coming from people’s faces and whirling away, to join together into a vague but definite stream.

He followed the movement of the stream:
It’s as if it’s revolving about the fulcrum of the Ship
.

But what could that mean? He wondered if he was looking at a clue to what was going on. But if so it was a clue he hadn’t yet figured.

Something resembling the eye of a storm?

Oh, man!
He sensed it could be important – he sensed it strongly, instinctively. Something in the way the Ship was rocking from side to side, and how their breath was circling …

‘O great A-kol-i, look down upon us from your leap on high! Save us, Lord of the Deep, from the red eye, and the Witch’s challenge!’

The youthful shaman, Turkeya, trembled as he knelt on the bare plank floor of his cabin, his numbed fingers clasped before him and his elbows hugging the wooden bunk for support against the heaving of the decks. Though younger than many of his fellow Olhyiu on board, he was privileged to have this billet to himself. But in truth he would have been happier to share the swinging hammocks of the sailors, with their grog-inspired shanty-singing. It would have made a welcome change from his gloomy solitude amid this terrifying blizzard.

No wintry storm, not even a gale of snow, would ordinarily have worried the young shaman, who had spent his entire childhood in the Whitestar Mountains where winter reigned seven months of the year. But this was no seasonal chill or blow of winter. This was a bane of malevolence arrived out of the blue to harrow these summer waters. It had proved impossible to sleep, with the wild rolling of the Ship, and with the porthole, though battened shut against the storm, pitching below the massive swells and the wintry forces seeping in past the wooden shutter
to freeze to ice inside the cabin wall. In the pallid daylight that filtered into the tiny cabin he had seen the rime of ice creep and spread. He could hear it squeaking like a horde of mice, as the living timbers heaved and groaned under the battering of wind and ocean. And with its icy presence the accompanying cold was invading the very air around him, freezing muscle and sinew, slowing the thoughts in his head as he attempted to pray.

With the new dawn a bizarre invasion of ice and rime encrusted his cabin wall, a bloom like a gigantic rose, but instead of the white of snow or the glassy reflections of ice this sinister flower was made up entirely of greys and darks, as if in its very nature it was devouring the light, and spreading in huge concentric florets around the focus of the porthole. The sight of it chilled more than mere flesh. And at the very heart of it, haunting the corners of his vision, was a shadow – a head cowled in black – in which the eyes appeared darker still, like windows into a soul of darkness.

‘O – O great A-kol-i …’ he stammered, the prayer failing on his lips, the image of the leviathan that, in the legends of the Olhyiu, was the creator of worlds, melting from his very imagination. His prayer faltered, and his courage with it.

‘Turkeya!’

He was only confusedly aware that someone was calling out his name. He recognised the voice, soft in his ears, but was unsure if it might be real or a dream, his
whole being still haunted by the cowled figure. He felt hands take hold of his shoulders to shake him out of his torpor, slim girlish fingers, yet surprisingly determined. ‘What’s happening? You’re like a block of ice!’

Allowing his face to be turned, he blinked slowly at the vision of his friend, Mo, who had entered the cabin on silent feet and who was standing over his still-kneeling form.

‘Mo!’ he whispered. ‘What is happening to us?’

‘Here! Let me help you back onto your feet. I’ve had a message from Mark.’

‘A message?’

‘Please listen to me!’ Mo began to rub at his hands, his face, to try to unthaw him from the clutches of the cold.

Turkeya’s eyes blinked again with a painful sluggishness. He began to blow into his numbed fingers, to stamp life back into his feet. ‘Mark? Your brother has spoken to you?’ He shook his head, wiped his face with what felt like somebody else’s awkward hands.

‘He’s sent me a warning.’

‘What?’

‘A splinter of malice has somehow invaded the Ship. It will destroy us all if we don’t do something.’

‘What can we do?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that time is short. We must hurry. We have to find Alan. He’ll know what to do.’

Climbing the central staircase proved to be hazardous, with their feet slipping and sliding over icy timbers and
rimy debris. Everywhere below the decks they encountered shivering sailors, their furry surcoats stiffened with hoar frost. Their very breaths were transformed as they exhaled, thickening to a freezing vapour that added to the deposits of rime and ice so the cabins and chambers looked like the interior of cooling stores. Even as they stumbled out into the middle deck, thick slurries of snow obscured their vision to a few yards, whirling down out of a wrack of storm, stinging and burning with the tiniest contact on exposed skin, all the while their numbed ears tormented by the shriek of the wind. Great waves pounded the Ship, coming in over the pitching sides, rushing over the decks and sweeping away everything in their path. The gaps in the ratlines were filling with thick panes of ice, like windows. Already the ice over the middle deck was a foot deep and the sheer weight of it was dragging the Ship, and all aboard, deeper into the turmoil of the ocean.

What few sailors they saw, clinging to rails or ropes on deck, stared at them with haggard faces encrusted with ice and snow. Everywhere they witnessed broken spars and fallen rigging. With every tread they had to negotiate an obstacle course of debris made treacherous by thick ice.

An almighty wave struck from starboard, and Turkeya and Mo lost their footing on the middle deck, their bodies skidding over the ice to be flung against the great pillar of the central mast.