The Tower of Bones (3 page)

Milish was aware of a stiffening in the posture of the Kyra. In the Oraculum of Bree she observed a heightened flickering. At the same moment a tiny bat-like creature erupted from the beach below them, close to the walking figures.

‘What is it?’

‘A snooper,’ Milish declared.

In a blur of movement, the dwarf mage’s arm reached back behind his left shoulder and in a flowing arc of movement the double-headed axe was in his right hand. But Alan reached out to block the dwarf mage’s purpose.

‘Why does the Mage Lord hold the weapon back?’ the Kyra asked.

‘To spy, a snooper must need a communicating brain – for it accommodates no more than a tiny mind. My guess is that he wishes to follow where that tiny mind will lead him.’

The Kyra followed the flight of the snooper until it passed through a crevice-like window in the city walls. From there, her eyes returned to the youth, whose attention had also followed the flight of the snooper. The movements caused the thick braid of her hair to strain against the silver clasp that tied it down onto her left shoulder.

‘The snooper has reported to a spy in the walls opposite. From what you’ve told me about this city we can anticipate spies aplenty.’

A frown creased the Ambassador’s patrician face. She couldn’t help but be concerned at the thought of somebody spying on them. With her striking beauty and regal manners and posture Milish would have commanded attention in any world. Her hair was a lustrous blue-black, the thick strands parted centrally over her forehead and falling down in careful bundles over her temples, with folds that hid the upper third of her fleshy lobed ears. On Earth, with her hair and coppery complexion, she might have been taken for an Oriental noblewoman.

The Kyra pressed her: ‘Would your instincts suggest that such a spy works for the Council-in-Exile?’

‘It’s one possibility.’

The Ambassador shivered as the offshore breeze blew a tuft of hair loose from her plume of ornamental silver, the liberated hair gambolling over her fine intelligent features.

‘Out – Earthspawn!’

Faltana’s figure filled the open door to Kate’s cell. The face of the chief succubus was like that of a porcelain doll, but with pallid blue eyes as cold as a snake’s. Her rosebud lips were tensed into a purse-string, drawn back over ivory fangs that had turned blue-black and hoary with age.

‘Your attendance is commanded!’

Faltana was spare with her flicks of Garg-tail, but cruelly accurate. The scaly whip, as wiry as steel and barbed at its end, raised a bloody weal on Kate’s thin neck, just below the angle of her jaw. Pain seared through her, sharp and sickening. She had to clench her fists to keep the scream from her lips. Faltana fed on such expressions of pain. To scream would provoke more attention.

‘Dung-eating wormchild!’

Faltana gauged the precise moment when the pain
had subsided to bearable levels to lash out again, raising a second weal, after which those doll’s eyes studied the effect, as if relishing Kate’s inner struggle to contain her anguish. It took all of her determination to rein back the tears.

‘My mistress is impatient. Do not keep her waiting.’

With an occasional crack of her whip Faltana drove Kate before her, shambling and twisting through the organic warren of passageways that formed the interior of the Tower of Bones, with its rancid smells and echoes of pain. In her mind, as always, Kate whispered the mantra remembered from the school yard of childhood.
Sticks and stones may break my bones! Sticks and stones may break my bones!
She no longer remembered what it had meant to her as a child, only that she had injected it with new meaning here. Let Faltana tear her skin. Let her humiliate her with words but she would never break her will. So, driven through the labyrinths of nightmare, she clung on to tiny comforts, using them to blot out the terror and pain.

‘Soon,’ Faltana’s pointed red tongue licked her fangs in exultation, ‘there will be feasting and celebration. The Ugly Ones have captured a singer.’

Kate was overwhelmed with horror: the Ugly Ones were the horrid bat creatures. And the singer they had captured must be a Cill child.

‘Make haste!’

Faltana had driven her into the great chamber of the
skull, opposite the pit that fell away into darkness. The chamber was filled with a choir of succubi who were crooning and writhing their bodies in concert with the Witch’s melody of triumph. Faltana brought the Garg-tail whip across the backs of Kate’s calves, causing her to pitch forward onto the bleached bone floor. Pain seared through the nerves of both her legs, from her hips right down to her toes. She gasped, feeling her muscles jerk and spasm, with the poisonous sting of the tiny barbs that added venom to the whip.

‘On your knees from here!’

Witches! Succubi! It was madness. It was impossible – a nightmare she would wake up from, and, as she had always woken from nightmares, she would go to the barn-like bathroom in her uncle’s house and douse her face in cold water over the big old-fashioned white porcelain sink. But Kate saw no hint of normality. And that meant that somehow the nightmare was more real than any memory of the echoing bathroom, with its brass plugs and castiron fittings, more real than her memory of her dog, Darkie – friendly, loving Darkie, who must have been really missing her. A nightmare shouldn’t go on like this, for day after day. A nightmare shouldn’t feel this real. A nightmare wasn’t filled with such pain and fear and loneliness …

Faltana grabbed hold of Kate’s hair and jerked her head around so she had to watch what was happening. It took all of Kate’s faltering reserves of willpower not to shriek in terror.

Gargs! There were seven or eight of them, forming a semicircle in the chamber, their folded wings merging with the deep purple shadows that jerked fitfully over the vault of fossilised bone that made up the ceiling. The Gargs were hugely tall and skeletally thin, their bat-like heads peering down at her and their oily skins reflecting the red glow that permeated the chamber from deeper underground. Faltana had told her that it was Gargs like these that had captured her and flown her here, in some perverted homage to the Witch. And there at the centre of the semicircle, bound and venom-dazed on the bone-scattered floor, she saw their captive.

The Cill looked very young, a boy of perhaps seven or eight years, completely naked, and bound into a ball, his body twitching and trembling. Kate was trembling herself, her teeth chattering. She didn’t know why Faltana had brought her here. She didn’t want to see what they were doing to the boy. It grieved her that she couldn’t do anything to help him. But she couldn’t just watch and let them do it.

‘Let him go, you … you monsters!’

Faltana twisted the fistful of Kate’s hair so hard it tore at her scalp. She forced Kate’s head down and round on her neck until her eyes were only a few feet away from the Cill. ‘Since you are so interested, you should relish the sight. A Cill so young, it is rarer even than your insolent self. See how its flesh is now diaphanous with fear! Why, it is no more substantial than a puff of smoke. But sever
those bonds and it would shift colour and form so fast the eye could not follow. It would become part of this chamber, invisible to every watchful sense.’ Faltana laughed. ‘Is that what you want to see happen? You would help it to flee?’

‘Why do you so delight in hurting him?’

Faltana yanked so hard on Kate’s hair that clumps tore from her scalp and a trickle of blood ran down over her face. ‘Why – but for the pleasure of hearing it sing!’

At this the company of Gargs laughed with their strange throaty gurgles in tune with Faltana.

The Cill were said to be very brave. The older Cill could maintain a stubborn silence even when they were being whipped and tormented to death. But Faltana knew how they could be made to sing. In death a Cill lamented the passing of its soul spirit with the strangest, sweetest song. Kate couldn’t bear to think how this child would discover his beautiful voice. He would shrill his death song. All this Kate knew because Faltana had exulted in telling her about it, again and again. The young Cill were prized above all others because they sang so plaintively before they were eaten. Kate had never heard a Cill sing but she had suffered nightmares of imagining those songs of innocence. Of witnessing what she knew would come afterwards. The shrieks of glee that would accompany the devouring. The stink of blood and the crunching of bones as the succubi fed like ravens on whatever remained. Faltana had gloated over every detail, how they would lick
every last drop of blood from the floor and then gnaw for days on the juicy bones. She took command, addressing the Gargs:

‘It must be unbound, in the position of supplication. Take care it does not shape-shift and flee. No shedding of blood – that honour is mine. First take a firm hold of its throat, so tight it can barely breathe. Only then cut its bonds!’

The choir of succubi sang, melodious and vile. At Faltana’s demand, a Garg took the Cill by its throat, then a claw extended from the bent wing joint of another, from which a venomed blade, as long as a dagger, slit through the thong that tied the Cill’s ankles to his wrists. Kate tried to avert her face. She was gagging from the stink of the Gargs’ oily secretions, which grew more copious and rank with their increasing excitement. When their leader spoke, it was through slits in the leathery skin high up in its neck, its voice emerging as a warbling hiss.

‘Are we to be honoured with the presence of the Great One?’

Faltana rocked from one foot to another, her quivering bulk preening like some love-sick girl: ‘Yes –
oh, yes
! My mistress is pleased with this gift. She will conduct the sacrifice in person. But first I must prepare the offering.”

High-pitched cattish squeals and cries emerged from the gaping mouths of the succubi, as their singing became distracted by Faltana’s tormenting the Cill with precise flicks and lashes of the Garg-tail whip, circling his body
with padding twists and turns of her figure on feet that seemed obscenely dainty and delicate, in a parody of a dance of joy. It was a belief amongst the succubi that the fully mature Cill had, through their ability to change form and colour, perfected the art of resisting pain. No extreme of torture could make them sing. Only the younger Cill could be made to sing, and the death song of a Cill child was prized as the highest delicacy by their mistress. Olc did not sacrifice children because she was merely hungry for their flesh. She devoured them because she coveted their spirits. This sacrifice would devour the child’s very soul, and the strange, sweet death song would adorn her act of spiritual plunder.

Alan paused in his stroll to allow Qwenqwo to reattach the heavy bronze battleaxe with its twin-curved blades to its harness at his back.

‘The snooper?’ the dwarf mage asked.

‘It flew directly to the Prince’s adviser, Feltzvan.’

‘You’re sure of this?’

‘I’m sure.’

A week earlier their arrival into Carfon had been welcomed by a barque of state. On board the barque, Alan’s hand had been taken by a short, corpulent man with a deeply pockmarked face and brown eyes as hard as glass. When he spoke his voice had been curiously soft and as high-pitched as a girl’s.

‘Permit me to introduce myself. I am Feltzvan, emissary
of Prince Ebrit, Elector of Carfon. You are most welcome to this beleaguered city. Be comforted that you are now among friends.’

Nodding his thanks, there was little opportunity for Alan to speak more than a word or two in reply, since he found himself being greeted by so many dignitaries at once. Within minutes the powerful oars had taken them across the estuary and through the Harbour Gate to enter the docking area, where they were welcomed by a band of musicians, adding a brassy medley to the cheers and general din.

Alan kept his focus clear, scanning the crowds for the bent old woman who had issued a warning, mind-to-mind on their arrival. But there was no sign of her now among these welcoming crowds.

‘The Prince Elector,’ whispered Milish, during a lull in her manifold introductions to people, ‘is not among them. He’s the head of the most duplicitous of noble families, the Ebrits of Werewe. It will be interesting to see who greets you at the Water Palace. Keep alert in your conversations, even the most trivial. Trust no one, least of all those who seem most welcoming.’

Alan nodded. ‘Are you in danger, Milish?’

‘The Family of Xhosa have suffered hard times through the prejudicial influence of the Elector, Ebrit, in our affairs.’ But she would say no more, not wishing to spoil the joy of their welcome.

Alan, Qwenqwo, Mo and Milish had been invited to a
civic reception in the Elector’s palace, where Alan had been introduced to Prince Ebrit himself. While Milish went down onto one knee before the Prince, Alan had refused to genuflect or bow. Ebrit smiled wanly, but he gripped Alan’s proferred hand in a two-handed clasp, his brown eyes gazing with frank curiosity into Alan’s own.

‘I mean you no disrespect, Sir – but in the country I come from nobody genuflects or bows before anybody else.’

‘Are there no princes in your world?’

‘Not in my country.’

‘Ah!’ The Prince regarded him with a cool amusement for a moment before affecting to bow himself. ‘Yet, if the rumours are true, you led a motley gathering of forces in the destruction of an entire army of Death Legion in the Vale of Tazan. And you defeated a Legun incarnate!’

‘Sir – if I can speak bluntly. Ossierel was just one battle. The war continues. And we desperately need your help.’

‘As, equally desperately, do we need yours. Come!’ The Prince turned to beckon all of the company. ‘A banquet is waiting, during which I hope to learn all about you and your adventures.’

The Prince had shown himself a master of polite conversation all through the dinner – a feast Alan had little stomach for yet felt obliged to partake in – and his obligation continued into the music, dancing and acrobatic entertainment that followed in a gilded hall, under murals of royal hunting scenes. Ebrit had acknowledged the dangers facing his city from the army of the Tyrant, but
it was clear that he also thought himself prepared for any siege. Having seen what the Tyrant’s armies could do, Alan disagreed with Ebrit.