The Tower of Bones (41 page)

‘If it comes from my mother, I will treasure it. But tell me, please! What did you mean when you said I will become one with you?’

Silence.

‘Please – if you pretend to care about me at all – at the very least tell me more about my birth mother. There’s so much I want to know.’

The voice remained cool, detached.

To any other than you, the Torus would weigh as the burden of Aaiksi, who carried the world on his shoulders. In time, through the sharing of the same burden, you will discover more of your birth mother.

Mo couldn’t pretend to be strong any more. Her face
was streaked with tears. It took all of her resolve to reply at all.

‘I’m frightened. I want to believe what you’re telling me. But already it’s really scaring me.’

The Torus is capable of sensing you as different from all others – of responding in kind, spirit to spirit. For you it poses no danger. Rather, the time will come, and soon enough, when you will have need of its protection.

There was so much to consider, so much to take in, that Mo felt breathless, her heart pattering uncomfortably in her breast.

‘But Turkeya …’

Your companion is now caught in the enchantment. He will accompany your return, but he already imagines it a dream. A dream it will remain to his senses even when he wakes. Close your eyes, Mira, Léanov Fashakk. Still your understandable fears so that the extraordinary may blossom.

Mo closed her eyes. She saw, as if in her mind’s eye, a moonlit landscape in which a path weaved around islands of dark silhouettes, limned inside by the barest hints of colours. The path, which was so narrow as to allow just a single passage, was silvery, like a pebbled walk, illuminated by moonlight.

Can you feel it? Can you sense it guiding your return?

‘Yes.’

Now please attach the Torus to the leather thong about your throat.

Mo did so, feeling it jostle against the bog-oak figurine.

Thus shall you be true to your birthright and your burden. Do not call upon it needlessly. Only when you have grave need of it.

‘But how will I know when that time has come?’

You will know.

As Alan and the main party moved deeper into the gloom of the cave, illuminated by the smoky flame of firebrands, they saw fragments of walls and buildings emerging out of the rock. Alan was reminded of the pictures he had once seen of Pompeii, the Roman town buried under a flow of lava and ash from the eruption of Vesuvius. But the rock here wasn’t like volcanic ash or lava. It was limestone, the kind of rock laid down on the floor of the ocean by the dying shells and skeletons of marine creatures. The Ancient City appeared to be itself a gigantic fossil, its buildings unlike any he had ever seen, comprising sweeping curves and ellipses cut by rising needles and towers, in a mixture of different-coloured marble. If so it must have been laid down long before the present-day volcanic landscape. It might well be incredibly old.

‘I see light up ahead!’ the Kyra called.

‘Daylight?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The quality of the light is strange.’

‘It is said that there is a light that comes from the Sacred Pool,’ Iyezzz whispered in a voice of reverence.

Alan could certainly hear what sounded like falling water up ahead.

The young Garg was all the while sniffing and snuffling, clearly excited, his huge eyes glowing like yellow pumpkins. He went down onto his knees again as they came to a stone circle. It took Alan a minute or two of exploration to realise that they were looking at tree stumps, each five or six feet in diameter, the wood long ago fossilised to stone. In the centre of the circle stood a single enormous tree that still retained its organic shape, but the more closely he studied it the stranger it looked. Then he realised why, with a startled widening of his eyes. The tree, which seemed less ancient than the circle in which it had been buried, was upside-down. What appeared to be a tangle of branches reaching into the air were roots, some eighty or ninety feet high and perhaps a hundred and twenty feet in width.

Alan stood peering up at the curious canopy.

Iyezzz answered his unspoken thoughts. ‘It pays homage.’

‘What do you mean? Are you saying that this place might mark a burial? Like the tomb of some chief, or king?’

Iyezzz shook his head. ‘It is an Altar – to Death.’

Alan looked at the Garg prince, stunned.

‘Long ago, or so the legends say, the ancestors of the Eyrie People made such an altar. At a time of apocalyptic threat. They sent out scouts to discover the king of trees within the forests that were commonplace then. The roots were dug out of the earth and the tree brought here, where the underworld was strong. Life was buried within the earth and Death was freed to enter the world.’

Death was freed?

Alan stared up anew into the extraordinary symbol. ‘What crisis could have been so terrible?’

‘I think Duvalhhh knows.’

The young Garg prostrated himself before the upended tree, his skin turning a pallid grey, a musky new scent emanating from his pores. His whole being was consumed by grief, accompanied by a mewling hymn that came from the slits now visibly vibrating on the sides of his neck.

‘The coming of the Witch?’

‘The wisdom-that-was became lost. Long have we endured a world of anguish, where the lessons of history went unheeded.’

After several more minutes of abasement and prayer Iyezzz climbed back onto his feet, his face and bearing still deeply affected as he led them further, through half a mile of ruins and underground artefacts, to enter a chamber flooded with light. The sound of water was much louder here. And the source of the light became clear as Alan and the others approached it, the roof opening to
the skies overhead where an incoming river had eroded a massive cleft. That river now cascaded through hundreds of feet of jagged cliffs, to fall, in a never-ending filmy cataract, into a mist-shrouded pool in the floor. It was the pool that gave a greenish tinge to the light, itself glowing with pearly phosphorescence.

Alan’s eyes, accustomed to the previous gloom, were dazzled by the brilliance of the light in the chamber. But as he became accustomed to it he saw that the natural cavern had been moulded to a new purpose, perhaps by the same civilisation that had built the ancient city. Rockhewn tiers made an amphitheatre of the sloping ledges on two sides of the pool. And half of the amphitheatre was already occupied by hundreds of seated figures – Gargs!

‘Iyezzz – you said your father would be alone!’

‘It does not matter. I will protect you here.’

The Garg led them around the periphery of the amphitheatre, keeping to the shadows. He was heading towards a position at the top of a flight of steps hewn into the rock. All of a sudden Alan’s oraculum detected a powerful new presence.

‘Kate!’ He shouted it aloud.

‘Hush – it is not permitted to interrupt the ceremony.’

Alan didn’t give a damn about their ceremony. ‘I sense Kate’s presence. I know that she’s somewhere close.’

His shout alerted the Garg sentries, a provocation that might have led to a battle had Iyezzz not been there to talk to them. The sentries refused to allow the Shee guards
passage, allowing only Alan, Qwenqwo and Ainé to proceed, and forbidding any sort of weapon. Iyezzz had insisted he travel on ahead to talk with his father, and he was still engaged in furious argument with an elderly looking Garg wearing a gold regalia around his throat when Alan and the others were ushered into their presence.

This close the Sacred Pool looked wider and deeper than Alan had realised. It seemed enchantingly ethereal, bathed in mist from the waterfall. Enormous pillars of rock soared into the sunlit heights above. Alan made sure that the fifty or so Gargs seated on one side of the pool were unarmed, though they hardly needed conventional weaponry, given their fangs and claws. And now, descending the worn path that sloped down between the tiers, he allowed himself to be detached from the fretfully suspicious Qwenqwo to approach Iyezzz and the elderly Garg. They waited for him in silence, standing at the pool’s edge before a seated figure whose ageing skin was marred by a patchwork of blotches and wrinkles, and whose only adornment was a simple torc of gold.

The seated figure waited for Alan to come before him, staring at him with heavy-lidded eyes in evident rancour.

With his voice trembling with emotion, Iyezzz confirmed that this was his father, Zelnesakkk, King of the Gargs, and that the Garg wearing the regalia was Mahteman – the high shaman. Alan stopped before the trio, his eyes moving from face to face. His attention was arrested by the shaman, who regarded Alan with the same
hatred as the King, the slits in his throat visibly vibrating as the bass tones of his voice carried far and wide throughout the bowl of the sacred pool.

‘We have before us Duvalhhh the Slayer! Why should we be surprised that he profanes this sacred chamber?’

Alan felt a flush of anger colour his face. But before he could think of a reply, Iyezzz held his hand aloft, taking it upon himself to counter the shaman’s rage. ‘These are desperate times – times when, no matter what the history of bloodshed between us, the Eyrie People should make compact with former foes.’

‘No matter the history!’ The shaman stamped a clawed foot on the resounding floor, causing the metalwork over his breast to jangle. ‘You bring to this meeting a foe that cost us half an army at Ossierel. He who has grievously wounded the pride of the Eyrie Nation. This is who you would commend to your father!’

Iyezzz went down on one knee before the King. ‘My Father – and my liege! Once, before the coming of the Great Witch, we were hunters of the oceans. We caught the silver salmon on the wing. Now we inhabit a wasteland in which hunger and subjugation are the inheritance a father bestows upon his son.’

Hunters of the oceans?
Only now did Alan realise that the Garg’s clawed feet closely resembled the talons of sea eagles. It certainly made him see them differently – magnificent creatures skimming the surface waters, catching their food and bringing it back to those lofty eyries. The
sheening camouflage of their scales, the ability to change colour, would have helped them blend with the light so they became invisible in the meeting of ocean and air as they skimmed and swooped.

The Garg King spoke, his voice more solemn than hateful when compared to that of the shaman. ‘My son – we all hunger for what we have lost. But these are times of crisis.’

‘Perhaps the world that was is not entirely lost?’

The King shook his head, as if sadly. ‘What provokes you to bring this humanhhh into our presence?’

‘Duvalhhh is not the only oraculum-bearer here.’

‘Blasphemy!’ hissed the shaman. He swept a wing talon to within inches of Alan’s brow, his skin turning plum purple with anger, his body exuding a sulphurous stink. ‘This portal is abomination!’

Iyezzz’s skin rippled with bands of colour, as if consumed by an equal and opposite anger. ‘Thanks to generations of shamans and their superstitions, we have prostrated ourselves to the Witch. And what did it profit us?’

In spite of his age, the shaman reared to his full height, the wings expanding from his shoulders, wing talons dripping venom. ‘Who else survived, in the entire realm of the Southlands? Servitude was preferable to extermination.’

Iyezzz confronted him, stretching even taller than the shaman, his wings beating slowly and threateningly at the air. ‘Survival is not preferable to honourable death.
Are we not the Eyrie Nation, whose domain was the skies and oceans?’

The King intervened. ‘Come, now! We acknowledge that loss. But survive we must – and so are bound to be practical. This humanhhh – he destroyed the cream of a generation of warriors. My eldest son, and your brother, Gndirrexa, at their helm! Is it any wonder I, like Mahteman, am outraged at his presence. And should I not, in all prudence, be concerned as to why he is here? What manner of folly caused you, my son, to bring this foe to this holy of holies, and on this most delicate of occasions?’

At that moment the chamber shook to a faint earthquake, which caused the floor and walls to tremble, and ripples to wash over the pool.

Mahteman fell to his knees. ‘The Witch’s warning!’

‘A prognostication,’ Iyezzz said, ‘based no doubt on the fanciful interpretation of the movements of the sun and moon and the planets, and driven, as ever, by fear of the unknown.’

‘As opposed to the prognostication of my son, who is no shaman, yet assumes himself superior on matters spiritual!’

A second quake shook the ground under their feet. Alan stared into the water, which seemed to be lit from below. He was startled by a rise of bubbles, then a more diffuse disturbance in the water, followed by a sustained explosion of ripples and currents, as if something monstrous were making its way to the surface. The lake
seethed. There was a sound too, gathering in the echoing chamber, a harmonic musical sound, and all the time the explosion in the lake deepened and spread until – suddenly – two silvery eyes appeared, as big as saucers. Alan stared with astonishment as the eyes contracted in a slow, sensuous deliberation before expanding again. It was some kind of signal or greeting from the extraordinary being that was surfacing in the Sacred Pool.

The being’s head was decorated by enormous frills that reared backwards, in three tall rows, over the crown. The face, distinctly female, was bronze-skinned and finely scaled: it was enormously long if vaguely triangular, wide across the enormous eyes and tapering down to a generously lipped mouth. The elongated lobes of her ears bore ivory inserts that resembled minuscule drums. A crescentshaped crystal hung about her neck, in which a matrix of power throbbed and changed. Her voice was addressing him, mind-to-mind, cool and musical, yet behind the courtesy he sensed great power.

‘Duval! Oraculum-bearer of the First Power.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am the Momu.’

The reply puzzled him before he recalled that Iyezzz had mentioned the Momu; she was the leader of a people called the Cill.