The Tower of Bones (29 page)

‘Tell, tell – explain!’

‘She did something strange. She just plunged it into the fire. The fire didn’t harm her, didn’t appear to burn her.’

‘Yes – yes?’

Kate’s hand lifted to her mouth, trembled against it. ‘I – I think she moulded the silver flask in her hands, inside the fire. Then, when she lifted it back out again, it turned into an eagle.’

Kate’s eyes glazed over with the memory. Her hands trembled – pallid, drenched in sweat – and held her face. From the river she heard a triumphant howling. She didn’t dare to look in the wolves’ direction. She breathed hard, the image hanging on in her memory for several seconds. ‘We realised it had to be magic of some sort.’

‘Tell – quickly! Who was Old One?’

‘She crooned something like a name. “Graaannneee Dewwww”.’

The dragon’s voice was little above a growl: ‘Graaannneee Dewwww?’ He pronounced it exactly as the old woman had pronounced it. That startled her so much she was silent for a moment or two, recalling the extraordinary scene.

‘We thought it sounded like Granny Dew – that’s what we called her after that.’ Her eyes were wide open, pupils dilated. ‘She made us all drink something – something very strange, horrible. It felt in my mouth as if there were living things, like spiders and insects alive in it. We were all really afraid of her. But she was helping us in her way. Oh, Granny Dew – I wish you were here to help me now!’

‘Graaannneee Dewwww!’ The dragon growled the name over, as if chewing on it, turning it over in his mind. ‘This what Old One call her name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Kate – hear it here,’ he pointed to Kate’s right ear, ‘or here?’ He pointed to Kate’s head, her brow.

‘I had no oraculum. Of course I just heard it in my ears.’

‘Kate not understand. Words not name. Words from old language … Language of beginnings.’

‘None of us understood.’

‘Old One … Speaks language of makers.’

‘Makers?’

‘Makers.’ He waved a paw to encompass the mountains,
the river, the island, with its blooming magnificence.

Kate didn’t know how she wasn’t already dead from fright. Her throat was so paralysed by fear it felt as if she was squeezing each word out of a fist of ice. ‘Like … Like the Earth Mother?’

The dragon’s claw reached up to point to the oraculum in Kate’s brow. ‘Old One – she gives Kate this?’

‘Yes.’

‘What means this – this power?’

‘I think it’s the power of new life, of healing. But I have to learn how to use it.’

A sudden instinct yanked her attention back to the river. Kate was on her feet, unable to stop herself looking. The first creeping tentacles of the Witch were running between the wolves. They were reaching out to where the entire pack now pressed deeper into the water, until they were immersed up to their spines, then all of a sudden the entire pack surged forward, swimming into the stream. Terror took her legs from under her. She would have tumbled to the ground if the dragon hadn’t taken her shoulders and helped her to sit down again on the bluff.

Her voice trembled as she spoke out of lips so numb they didn’t feel her own. ‘Oh, Driftwood, it’s too late!’

‘Witch sees through wolf eyes. Must blind Witch eyes.’

‘But how? I have no weapons – nothing that could hurt her.’

‘Weapons not hurt Witch. Power only does she fear.’

‘But – but she is much more powerful than I am.’

‘Kate must listen. Wolves are Witch’s eyes. Here – now – Kate must blind eyes of Witch with her power.’

The wolves were about halfway across the great river, their gaping jaws held up above the stream, the furious paddling creating v-shaped eddies, with the leader well in front of the others. His eyes were still on hers, rabidly determined. In just minutes he’d be scrambling up the island shore.

Panic caused her breath to judder through her teeth.

The dragon spoke with icy calm. ‘Great dragon philosopher, he whose words were as reefs to ocean, he say, “In time of greatest danger, be most calm.”’

‘I bet he didn’t have a Witch, and a pack of wolves, around his throat!’

‘Such wisdom!’

‘This great philosopher wasn’t called Driftwood, by any chance?’

‘In philosopher’s dying words …’

‘Dying?’

‘Kate must be calm – if calmly she thinks. If she looks, looks deeply in her own heart, at what oraculum has done here. Old One gives Kate gift of Life. Life in land, in air … in water.’

‘In water?’

‘Power of oraculum – is not to give or to take away?’

Kate stared downhill to where the lead wolf, jaws ferociously
agape, was no more than thirty feet from the near bank. He would be out of the water and bounding towards her in less than a minute.

‘What are you saying?’

‘Is not obvious? – what may be given may be taken away.’

Kate tottered back onto her feet. She raised both her arms outright. She pressed her thoughts to the oraculum in her brow. Then she stared at the river, at the water where the current had carried the wolves maybe fifty yards downstream of the level where they had entered it on the far bank. She stared at how they thrashed their way across it, and she imagined how it might change with a dreadful thunderstorm. A burst of rain upstream? It was curiously easy to sense the mood and movement of the surface waters. She imagined how they might erupt with the instructions of her thoughts. Instantly they did so. The placid current changed to a catastrophic spate. Within the raging water there were living things, biting creatures, that seemed to share the water’s rage. Soon there were howls of a different kind, screams of pain and terror, rising out of the stream. With her eyes closed and her heart beating into a rage of her own, she poured her being into the turbulent current. She was shaking with the sheer savagery of it, barely able to contain herself on juddering legs, her eyes clenched shut, when the dragon touched her cheek and bade her open her eyes again.

‘Brave Kate. Girl-thing not coward. See!’

Kate opened her eyes. Tears of exhaustion, mixed with relief, flowed down her cheeks, as she saw the spate of water in which there was no trace of the wolves left. But then she also saw the Witch’s tentacles. They were swarming over the stormy waters and invading the island at extraordinary speed. Then the voice, thunderous through the oraculum, found her.

Foolish Earth-spawn. With such feeble power would it challenge us?

‘Driftwood!’ she moaned, collapsing to her knees.

The Witch’s laugh resonated within the vaults of her skull.

Its usefulness is done. The violator of our sanctuary no longer threatens the great purpose. Fangorath will rise and the portal will be ours. So there is naught to be served in keeping such meat alive. We shall punish it first – punish it mercilessly and long – and then take what is left to feed the Beast.

‘Witch lies,’ the dragon whispered.

Kate shook her head, mute with horror.

‘Witch searches – but will not find. Brave Kate – girlthing – has won battle. Witch is blind.’

What did it matter any more whether the Witch could see her or not? The tentacles were everywhere. Soon they would sniff them out, where they were sitting around not even trying to run.

The dragon stretched his wings until they became taut as bowstrings, in great shimmering arcs above Kate’s head.

‘On Driftwood’s back – now is time.’

‘I don’t think I have the strength.’

He lowered his hindquarters so his tail trailed on the ground. ‘Climb! Let victory give Kate strength!’

Somehow, though every muscle in her body was trembling, Kate climbed the long body as it were a staircase. She discovered a place to straddle amid the brightly coloured ruff, her chin resting on his crest, her arms around his neck.

‘Hold tight!’

With a spring the dragon cleared the cliff edge and swooped riverwards, but then, as his wings caught the breeze, he soared aloft in a great careening arc, while Kate clung on desperately, her hair streaming about her face, her eyes narrowed against the rushing wind.

‘Kate Shaunessy – girl-thing!’

She slapped his crest with outrage. ‘You … You could have done this all along. You had me wetting myself.’

It took several minutes for the fact to sink in – she was free. Free! It was so unbelievable, so exhilarating! Kate shrieked with joy as the great wings beat slowly, the passing desert landscape of hills and dunes giving way to a great coastal estuary. A scattering of small islands dotted the estuary as it widened out into a massive delta, its water streaming out into the ocean.

‘Kate hold breath!’

‘What?’

All of a sudden they were falling out of the sunlit sky.
Kate’s joy turned to panic as they plummeted towards the meeting of coast and ocean, her breath ripped out of her lungs, her arms locked around the scaly neck.

Alan and Mo stood together on the highest point of one of the craggy bluffs above a desolate bay of black volcanic rock, gazing out to sea where the Temple Ship had laid anchor, perhaps a hundred yards from the rocky shore. A brisk shore breeze ruffled their hair. Alan noticed how Mo suddenly tensed up. He felt the sorrow rise in her and he understood the reason for it.

‘Mark really is taking the Ship away?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

It was the evening of their second day in the Wastelands and the setting sun was igniting flames of red and gold over the deepening blue of the distant ocean. Below them, extending from the shore, the build-up of supplies was coming to an end, most of the goods and weapons already ferried from fleet to shore in smaller craft then transferred to makeshift sleds before being dragged further inland. The powdery green film that
coated the pebbly beach was already heavily scored with ruts from the sleds, the underlying black of the lava exposed like a series of wounds. So arid was the landscape that it could have been a piece of Earth’s moon. The small bay was encircled by volcanic calderas, the setting sun reflected on the crescents of their sharply delineated rims. Higher up the bay, stretching between the stony headlands, a palisade was being constructed from larger blocks of lava by sweating teams of Shee and Olhyiu, the first step towards a makeshift fort that would become their bridgehead. Here and there Alan could make out the distant, much smaller figures of the Aides, dutifully supervising the construction.

As one, they sensed it again: a wave of change rippling through the structure and fabric of the Temple Ship. Alan put his arm around Mo’s shoulders, holding her close for several moments in silence.

It had upset Mo deeply to leave the Ship, knowing Mark was on board. ‘Mark is planning to return to Earth.’

‘But how …?’

‘I don’t know how he’s planning to do it.’

‘He can’t be sure of anything.’

‘None of us is sure of anything any more, Mo. He’s afraid he will never be flesh and blood again.’

‘But how will this help?’

‘I’ve been trying to figure out what he might be thinking. When he came for me – when I was trapped in Dromenon – Mark was one with the Ship. Somehow, he
and the Ship combined minds. They became one in that raptor transformation.’

‘They became a single mind?’

‘I can’t think of any better way of explaining it. Don’t you see what it means, Mo? By combining minds they entered Dromenon.’

‘I don’t even pretend to understand.’

‘I don’t fully understand myself. The way I figure it, Mark has found a way of tapping into the Ship’s memories, the Ship’s ancient knowledge. Dromenon, if I understand it right, is some kind of halfway place between worlds. If the Ship can travel halfway, then it might be capable of travelling the whole way.’

Mo’s brow wrinkled. ‘I know he’s desperate enough to try.’

Alan shrugged.

‘And if he does it – if he manages to get back to Earth – what then?’

‘Who knows, Mo?’

‘Alan!’ Mo’s hand reached up to touch his where it still rested on her shoulder. ‘He’ll take on Grimstone. I’m really frightened for him.’

Alan hesitated, considering Mo’s words. ‘Mark’s pretty smart. I’ve been thinking about things. Like how he saved us all at Ossierel. We saw how he’d been cast into stone. And yet he got out of there, within the fabric and spirit of the Temple Ship. You talked to him. He’s an oraculum-bearer now. We spoke, oraculum-to-oraculum, before I left
the Ship. He’ll be figuring out what he can do with that kind of power.’

Mo stared out at the Ship.

Alan was still deeply worried at the idea of Mark taking the Ship. It looked fully restored from the wreck that had resulted from the gyre. That was a credit to Mark. Mark and the Ship – they had always been close. But now Alan guessed that they must be more than just close. They had really become one in spirit. In fact everything that had happened in the course of the last week or so – the red star, the gyre, the whole bizarre sequence of events – still puzzled Alan. The cook, Larrh, must have brought the amulet aboard at Carfon. How worrying, given that he was carrying such a power, that they had failed to detect it before embarkation and, even more so, in the confined circumstance of the Ship over many days’ voyage!

Mo interrupted his thoughts: ‘Where are the Gargs?’

Alan rubbed his hands over his face as if sluicing it with a splash of ice-cold water. ‘They’re everywhere.’

‘Watching us?’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘But they did nothing to stop us landing. And they haven’t even tried to attack us since we landed.’

‘I know.’

‘Surely it must mean something.’

‘Yeah.’

There were things going on that he didn’t understand.