The Tower of Bones (26 page)

‘What about this Momu? Who, or what, is the Momu?’

‘Soon! Girl-thing meet – see!’

A prickle of apprehension swept over her. ‘I don’t follow.’

The dragon’s tail started to swish again, but more purposefully, not the gentle, day-dreamy whumping as
before. Kate looked askance at him. ‘I didn’t know where I was running when I got free of the Tower. Any direction would do. It was just chance that I met the wolf-man.’

‘Ummm.’ The tail was still swishing gently in the grass.

‘And then it was sheer chance where I fell down into an exhausted sleep. It just happened that your fossil bones were under my head. Under the oraculum all the while I was sleeping.’

His voice sounded surprisingly deep. ‘Not chance!’

‘What?’

‘Fate!’

The seed head fell from Kate’s loosened fingers. ‘What are you implying? Are you saying that Granny Dew is controlling me?’

Driftwood swivelled his lumpy head, with a knowing widening of the eyes. ‘Fate controlling Granny Dew.’

Kate hesitated, wondering if this could possibly be true. ‘We need to get away. The Witch and all the others – they’re out there looking for me. We need to run.’

‘Driftwood will not run.’

Kate’s heart faltered. ‘We have to get away. We’re both too weak to fight them. We’ll be slaughtered if we just sit here and wait for them to find us. We have to escape. If you won’t come with me, I’ll have to go on my own.’

But the dragon reared to his full height and simply shook his head. ‘No running. Driftwood and Kate fight. We fight – no running any more!’

Alan gasped for breath as another enormous wave struck them broadside, close to the bow this time, the great ship plunging down at a terrifying angle beneath the solid wall of water, then twisting and rolling as the fury of the ocean tore over the decks before righting itself to an uncertain juddering balance again. Soaked and frozen, his skin numbed by ice, his eyes almost blinded, he was only dimly aware that the spars and rigging were gone, wrenched away by the fury of storm and waves. Of the three great masts, only splintered stumps remained. How many of her crew, and of the guardian Shee, had also been lost? The tethering of his arms to the wheel had saved him from being washed overboard. Holding his breath, too exhausted to do anything other than squeeze his eyes shut, he hung on as another great wave struck, tearing him off his feet until his whole body was horizontal under the rushing tide of water. The force against his shackled arms was
immense. It felt as if his shoulders were being torn from their sockets, but then after what seemed an eternity it eased again, the ocean draining away from his pain-racked body and limbs, abandoning him retching and coughing, his limbs and senses struggling to recover.

Mark – are you there?
He pressed his call urgently, through the oraculum.

No response. Just the manic glee of the gale.

Mark!
He roared again, with all of his force and concentration.

I … I hear you … faintly …

What’s the hell is wrong?

… trying to call you … calling for hours … something attacking the Temple Ship … Ship’s telling me … corruption from within …

What does that mean?

… don’t know … getting to me too …

The Ship itself! The Temple Ship was communicating through Mark. But what was it trying to tell him? A corruption from within? It had to be the eye of malice – the red eye must be eating into both their soul spirits.

But his oraculum suggested the eye was empty. This didn’t feel right …

Alan tried to recall something Turkeya had said. Something he was trying to remember, if only his numbed brain would respond …

Turkeya had spotted something.

It’s as if some alien force is weakening us from within. Some
malaise of the spirit … It attacks us all, in heart and spirit. It’s turning our own minds and spirits against us … We’re becoming our own worst enemies …

Alan retched against the ice-encrusted woodwork of the great wheel. But there was nothing left to bring up. He stared around himself at the heaving and rolling decks, which resembled a breaker’s yard of spars and masts and bedraggled tatters of rigging. He didn’t know how the Ship had survived such a battering. But it couldn’t possibly survive much more of this. He closed his eyes and attempted the same scrutiny through the oraculum. He saw the Ship in ghostly outline, the heartbeat at the core of her weak, faltering.

It reminded him of something, a memory … a feeling of terrible sadness. He had felt this same communication of sadness from the Ship before – a sadness that had not come from his own heart but from outside, a feeling that had shocked him with the intensity of its communication. And now, when he scanned the Ship through his oraculum, he sensed despair. Could it be that the Temple Ship was sending him a personal message – a warning?

He poured what power he still retained through the oraculum into the structure of the Ship. But there was no response. If anything the weakness in the Ship seemed to worsen, its despair to deepen. Alan’s head fell onto his chest.

A corruption from within?
A malaise of the spirit
…
Maybe the malaise was within Alan himself – his failure to understand the warning message?

The threat, whatever it was, was capable of overpowering the oraculum. It was capable of silencing Mark, even his soul spirit in its powerful union with the Ship. What could possibly be so powerful? Alan recalled how the Tyrant had controlled him in their last confrontation. The Tyrant had overcome his oraculum. The Tyrant – not the Witch! But the Tyrant wasn’t here to do that. He thought about Turkeya’s warning: Mo had received a message from Mark.

A splinter of malice has entered the bowels of the Ship.

Not the red eye in the sky. Something attacking the Ship from within!

Alan clung to consciousness as a new cyclone tore through the wreck, hurling debris horizontally across the decks. About him the ocean heaved and pounded as if maddened with rage. The Temple Ship had been reduced to a shattered hulk amid the mountainous waves that pitched and tossed it with monstrous violence, its hull and decks groaning under the freezing torrents of water. The stumps of masts, a yard across at the base, were being further tormented and shattered, with dangerous fragments shattering and snapping, showering the air with potentially lethal splinters. There was no escape from the violence, no place of safety. The gunwales had been torn away and even the planks of the decks were being ripped from their moorings. Speech was impossible. The only
communication was oraculum to oraculum. Desperately, Alan reached out to Mark again. ‘What is it? You sent Mo a message – something about a splinter of malice attacking the Ship?’

Mark’s communication, at the core of his mind, sounded even weaker than before.

…
malice … here … attacking from within …

Bewildered, Alan directed his oraculum to that of the Kyra, who was invisible in the snow and spray, but somewhere forward in the prow. The Kyra responded immediately, a reassuring return of communication, mind-to-mind.

Can you figure what’s causing this, Ainé?

The Ship is caught in a deathmaw.

A deathmaw? Alan’s vision attempted to probe the seas about him but all he could make out was one gigantic wave after another. What was Mark trying to tell him? What could be attacking the Temple Ship from within?

Alan attempted to think this through, doing his best to shake the confusion from his head, the muscles of his neck so stiff it felt like an agony of slow motion. But he could sense no inner rage – no inner madness. All he had done was to fight the storm, to press every mote of his being into an effort to fight back against the raging elements, and by doing so help the Ship.

He still poured out all of his power against the enraged elements. It felt as if all that was right and decent in him was draining away, being sucked out of him. And yet he
was failing. Only then did he try to communicate again, mind-to-mind, with the Kyra.

Something has been brought on board the Ship. The eye is just a deception, causing us to focus all of our concern on the Witch. We’ve been looking outwards when the real danger is within. There must be some sign of it. I’ll stay at the wheel and try to communicate further with Mark. But you’ve got to organise a search below. Get Siam to help you – and Turkeya. Mo took Mark’s message to Turkeya – he knows the Ship. And he has a shaman’s instincts. Get Turkeya to conduct a search from top to bottom. If anybody can find what is wrong, it’ll be the shaman.

An exhausted Turkeya held onto a timber in the murky corridor below decks and waited for the violent impact of another great wave to pass. A malice was at large among them, a danger at the very heart of the Ship. But what could it be? All he knew was what he’d been told. That if and when he saw anything strange he was to blow on the whistle he carried in his greatcoat pocket. It would have been helpful to know a little more of what to look for since just about everything he encountered in the confusion seemed awry, like the look of terror in the eyes of everybody he spoke to. But doggedly he stuck to his task, questioning all he met and poking into every nook and cranny.

So it was, after many hours of stumbling throughout the debris-littered lower decks of the Temple Ship, that he came across the cook staring out of a wide-open porthole in the galley kitchen. Larrh’s white hair was a miniature
storm in itself, wild and drenched about his head. His tall body was bent so he could press his face against the porthole and peer out into the storm. Turkeya was shocked to find any porthole opened, for the sea deluged in through the opening with every wave that struck them broadside, and the galley was already awash with brine. The cook himself appeared oblivious to the shaman’s arrival. He was no longer wearing his apron. His body was enveloped in a greatcoat large as a tent that was itself dripping with spray. He was groaning and muttering to himself, his face haggard with worry.

‘How fare you, Mr Larrh?’

‘How fare I?’ The ponderous head of the cook turned and peered through red-rimmed eyes at the gangling youth, blinking with a weary deliberation. At first there was no recognition in Larrh’s eyes, just a flatness, a distraction of distance.

‘I find myself asking if there are still stars up there,’ he muttered, ‘stars that remain to guide us?’

Turkeya thought it again: the porthole open! When it should have been battened down tight against the waves. He attempted to slam it shut, but the bulk of the cook prevented him. For several tense moments they stood in a kind of exhausted confrontation with each other. No more did Turkeya know what to say in response to the cook’s strange comment. His own words, when they emerged, came from something less than conviction. ‘I’m sure the Mage Lord will find a way.’

‘Would that I were sure of anything any more.’

Turkeya hesitated. Larrh had originally hailed from Turkeya’s old tribe and village but he had not travelled down with them from the ice-bound lake. He had long abandoned his Olhyiu roots and found employment in the harbour at Carfon. If Turkeya recalled correctly, he had been recruited for this journey at the suggestion of Feltzvan, the adviser to the Prince, Ebrit.

‘What is it, Mr Larrh? You seem distressed. Is it something I can help with? A potion to help you sleep, perhaps?’

Larrh had inserted his right hand between the folds of his coat and he appeared to be scratching at his breastbone. His voice was low, halfway between a growl and a whisper. ‘Distressed, you say?’

‘Is it a spasm of the heart that ails you?’

The huge man withdrew his hand, blinking again, as if seeing the young shaman more clearly. ‘Forgive a foolish man! Why I have a son and daughter older than you. You are precious young, for a shaman.’

‘I do what I can.’

The man hesitated, then jerked his head violently away, consumed by some new spasm of torment. Crouching down again, his hand rubbing and scratching under the greatcoat, he pressed his head once more into the porthole, his face instantly drenched with more spray, yet his eyes blinking through it all, as if determined to discover an answer out there in the tormented ocean. All of a sudden he swivelled and took a powerful hold of Turkeya’s shoulders.

‘Am I not a responsible man? Am I not doing my very best, going about my duties to my fellow sailors aboard this Ship?’

‘Yes – of course you are.’

‘Did I not save the girl, your friend?’

‘You most certainly did, Mr Larrh!’

Turkeya was more than a little frightened by the look in Larrh’s eyes. The increasing pressure of the cook’s heavy hands on his shoulders, which appeared entirely involuntary, was causing the young shaman’s knees to buckle. Turkeya recalled the order of the Kyra that he should look for strangeness, in situations and in persons. The cook, Larrh, was behaving very strangely indeed. The young shaman tried to step back a pace of two but he could not.

‘What troubles you – in the name of the Powers?’

Larrh’s hands released Turkeya to move to his brow, where they clasped the tangle of his sodden hair and yanked at it. ‘In the name of the Powers, you say?’ He rubbed at his brow, as if trying to catch hold of his thoughts. ‘Hasn’t old Larrh been the epitome of all that is reasonable … all that is reputable and respectable … always?’

Turkeya had taken advantage of his release to withdraw closer to the galley door. Yet still, despite his fear, he felt a healer’s sympathy with the cook’s distress. ‘For pity’s sake, let me help you!’

‘Such things … such sounds in my head. Such visions! Tssssttttzzzz!’

Turkeya thought he could smell something burning, like flesh scorched in a flame. ‘You are troubled by dreams?’

‘Troubled? Troubled, you ask? Haunted more like.’ He groaned aloud, smashing his head against the timbers to the side of the porthole, hard enough to rupture an eyebrow. Blood ran in a thick stream over his eyelid and down his cheek without appearing to trouble him. ‘How can a man – a decent and respectable man – be so ravaged? I demand of you – shaman? Nightmares that come when asleep – that I might understand. But nightmares even more terrible when I am awake …’