The Tower of Bones (45 page)

‘Think harder.’

‘I’m so wound up. I can’t remember.’

‘Let the memories come. Do not force them. This experience, the feelings you shared with the Ship. It must have been frightening – terrifying.’

‘We connected … Somehow.’

In spirit, in his mind, Mark recalled the feeling, how overwhelming it had felt. Strange – so terribly sad. And then …

‘That’s what we did – we connected!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The union felt close, physical.’

‘Mark! Don’t you see?’

‘What?’

‘This union with the Ship – you became one.’

‘Yeah. But I’m not sure what that means.’

‘Can’t you see what is abundantly clear to me? We are becoming one. I see what you are thinking. I feel what you are feeling.’

‘It was different with the Ship …’

‘How different?’

‘I’m still not sure …’

‘If only I could slap your face!’

He laughed. ‘I’d slap you right back.’

In his mind, he blinked again. He tried putting it into words:
I need your help. I’m desperate. I need to return to my world – to Earth. I need to get away from the control of the Third Power. I need to feel my body again – Nan and I both need to. If it involves risk, we are prepared to take it. Because if we can’t feel our bodies again, if we can’t reach out and touch one another, we might as well be dead
.

He stopped, nauseated by his own words, his rising desperation.
It’s all a waste of time. No bloody good!

He felt weighted down, as if his body and mind were
trapped in lead. This would never change. There would be no escape.

Despair overwhelmed him …

He stood within a pentagonal chamber whose walls were liquidly golden. He had no memory of how he had arrived here. When he looked down at himself – when he held his hands before his face – he appeared to be real. He paused, finding it difficult to fill his lungs with breath, for several seconds.

Fill my lungs …

It had to be some new kind of virtual reality. Nevertheless he felt strangely at ease with the impression of a presence that went deeper than the sheen of the golden walls about him, a presence he felt even more strongly as he reached out to touch the golden walls with the tips of his fingers, and then the flats of his hands. The walls felt heavy and soft like mercury, and yet they were curiously devoid of reflection. They were pulsating. Not expanding and contracting, but pulsating with energy, in liquid-sheening waves.

‘Hey!’

He hardly dared to think of where he might be. It was the strangest feeling – the sensation that came back to him through fingertips, passing through his arms, like pins and needles, to arrive like a tranquil whisper in his mind.

‘My God!’

He was flooded by a new sensation. It was exhilarating, like … rapture. The depression, the sense of desolation, was gone from his mind. These walls, the entire chamber, were as sensitive as living tissue. They were alive in the sense that he himself was alive.

He laughed, abruptly, nervously, bringing his fingertips to his lips. He felt himself breathing again, even though there surely wasn’t any air, and he was breathing through non-existent lungs.

He knew, without pretending to understand the mystery, that he was confronting the heart of the Temple Ship.

Mark closed his eyes for a moment, and when he reopened them Nantosueta appeared, as if the thought of her was all it needed to make her real. Her eyes were very dark against the downy milkiness of her skin. Her hair was the gorgeous blue-black that he remembered. He felt the compulsion to touch it. He reached out, softly, with his left hand, and ran his fingers through it.

‘I can really feel your hair!’

He heard her whisper in his mind.

‘I feel your touch!’

His breath caught in his throat. He held her face with his splayed fingers, felt the firm roundness of the bone beneath, brushed with the backs of his fingers the features of her face, feeling the silken brush of her eyelashes as she blinked.

She lightly slapped his face.

He laughed. He couldn’t stop himself laughing. He could feel the tears that were rolling down his cheeks.

‘You said you would slap me back.’

He kissed her instead. The feel of her lips, kissing him back, was extraordinary.

‘Hold me!’

He held her. There was some awkwardness still in the tentative flow of their limbs, her arms now enfolding his neck, drawing him to her, and his embracing her in turn, each unable to quite believe how they had become so much more real in the soft, golden light, each needing to confirm the delight of the other, face to face, eye to eye.

He kissed her again, with a strange, delightful awkwardness, as if to confirm the most intimate touch of her, lips on lips.

She kissed him back, more certain of him, and this time he felt the soft, heavy brush of her lips without the need of communication, mind-to-mind.

He hugged her fiercely to him, even as he was aware that the world about them was changing.

‘The Ship,’ he whispered against her ear, ‘something’s happening.’

The golden glow of the Ship’s heart seemed to invade them, so they became one with the pulse of its heartbeat.

Their eyes met – a fierceness shared – before the golden aura receded back into the walls and their bodies began to melt away again. Instinctively reaching out, Mark
pressed his splayed hands against the yielding pulsation of two adjacent walls, yearningly, longingly, while he still could.

It was late evening, close to pitch dark, when Snakoil Kawkaw escaped the nosy attentions of the Preceptress, whose evening abasement before the foulness of her master would consume her for an hour or so.

Oh, my beloved Master! Punish me – make me deserving.

Such an obsequious litany, accompanied by the burning touch of the sigil against adoring flesh, such self-mutilations and floggings – might she inflict many more hours of it! He gloated at the thought of it.

The Shee guards were patrolling the waterfront so he had to be resourceful, moving quickly from rock to rock, and then biding patience.

He spotted the dark-haired one – the one they kowtowed to as their spiritual guardian. She stood in a triangle of figures that included that buffoon, Siam, and the lovely Kehloke, outside a tent erected for their meetings and war preparations. They were staring out into the ocean, in the direction of the Temple Ship.

Something’s going on – something has become the focus of their attentions!

Intrigued, Kawkaw crept closer to the rocks at one end of the bay, from where he observed that the Ship appeared to be changing again. How strange that he should have grown up in its shadow without knowing anything of its
secret nature. And what interesting secrets it had so deftly concealed! He peered out at it through a gap in the stones. He knew this was important. With a suppressed oath, he realised that he had allowed his enthusiasm to get the better of him, leaning too far forward, his boots slipping on the black volcanic pebbles as rounded as berries. He lost his footing, ending up with a sorely bruised arse on the rocks. But nobody noticed.

Indeed
, he thought, returning his attention to the Ship,
it changes so very rapidly this very instant
.

As far as he could see there was no one on board, other than ghosts. He had heard their voices.
Ghosts who appear to have plans of their own
.

He recalled the huloima called Mark. He had been one of the four brats who had appeared out of a snowstorm back at the ice-bound lake. Thanks to Snakoil Kawkaw’s insistence they had been called to account in front of the council of the Olhyiu. They had described killings back in their home world. Killings of parents, for the most part. Those killings had enraged the brats. They had linked those killings, and their coming here, to the Tyrant himself. And curiously, the Tyrant, and latterly the Witch, had behaved as if threatened by them. That made them all the more interesting. And this one, this huloima called Mark, had some curious link with the Ship. Anything to do with the Ship – any tidbit of news – would be of interest to certain ears. And this, in turn, made these changes in the Ship mightily important.

Yes! Yes, my beauty! I see you, I watch you as closely as the snake watches the mouse. And you are changing still, changing moment by moment, and all in utter silence and secrecy.

He stared at it from his perch among the rocks, his eyes protruding with fascination, as its shape went through a temporary amorphousness, resembling a storm cloud, to emerge somewhat like the raptor but more streamlined, like a diving cormorant perhaps. A shape intended for very rapid fall – or flight.

A bright glow permeated the thing even as it lifted, with hardly a ripple from the ocean, turning in a seemingly weightless fashion as if searching for its bearings. The prow directed itself heavenwards.

‘Serpent’s-tongued hogsturd!’

Snakoil Kawkaw stared, his mouth fallen open, as the streamlined shape rose into the night air like an upwardly directed bolt of lightning. It was gone in a trice, diminishing to a point in less time than it took him to blink. And then there was nothing. It had winked out, as if lost amid the stars.

Things grew askew here, perverted in their desire for light and form. The most beautiful flower was a trap. The water was putrescent. Slime moved. It changed patterns, played tricks with you when you weren’t looking. Then, when you noticed, those patterns had evolved some primal intelligence, so they were gathering and thickening, creeping towards you. The insects were vicious and stinging – they laid eggs that hatched into monstrous parasites inside your body …

A hand was shaking Alan’s shoulder. Ainé’s voice in his ear: ‘Wake up! You cry out in your dreams.’

‘Was it a dream?’ He sat up and rubbed his hands over his face. The events of yesterday had been so terrible, this place so threatening, he had lain awake for most of the night, assuming he would spend a second night without a wink – and then …

‘A dream of darkness, perhaps?’

‘Yes!’ He had been confronting the Tyrant again. But it had been here, in this haunted landscape rather than Dromenon. And yet the buzzing words of malice still echoed within his skull as he climbed to his feet, shaking his head fully awake in the cool of the early dawn.

‘Kate – where is she?’

‘She tends the wounded land.’

‘What – on her own?’

‘She’s not alone. She is accompanied by the shaman. And the dwarf mage watches over both.’ The Kyra paused, as if deep in thought. Then she added: ‘I understand now – why you insisted on saving her. And perhaps more.’

Alan looked up at the Kyra in the murky light. Was she reconsidering his offer to help her with her mother-sister’s memories?

He climbed to his feet, brushing ash and the wrinkles of sleep from his clothes. He had to remind himself of where he was. They had rested here when they had reached the furthermost limits of what had been the Forest of Harrow.

He said, ‘You were right, too – about the risks.’

‘There are times when risks must be taken.’

He scanned the figures among the ashes of the thorn trees, glimpsing Kate and Turkeya at perhaps fifty yards distance. They were hard to discern in the drifting mists. They were huddled over the sprouting shoots that were the new growth, brought into being by Kate’s power of healing. For a little while he watched Kate, as if needing
to reassure himself that this was real, and not merely another dream, feeling almost dizzy with the warmth of his love for her. He could just about hear the chatter of her voice, the soft Irish accent, even at this distance sounding curiously relaxed amid the devastation. Then, stretching limbs that ached with stiffness from a night on the ungiving ground, he accepted a dampened cloth from an Aides and used it to rub the sleep from his eyes. He knew that many Aides, as well as Shee, had died from wounds, but her face was impassive. He couldn’t help but reflect how brave they all were, Aides, Shee – Qwenqwo too.

He breathed in deeply, feeling ravenously hungry. ‘And you, Ainé – is your sleep tormented by this place?’

‘Normally I sleep without dreams – but here …’

Alan was silent, sensing she was of a mind to say more.

‘I awoke to memories of my grandmother-sister.’

He had to reflect a moment or two on that. Then he recalled a memory. ‘Once, at a time of great danger in another forest, your mother talked to me about her mother-sister. How she died in the Great Arena in Ghork Mega.’

‘My mother-sister, when still a child, was captured with her mother-sister at the fall of Ossierel. They were taken prisoner to the Tyrant’s city. There, in the arena, my grandmother-sister was made to fight in protection of her daughter. She fought a Legun – the one they call the Captain.’

Alan coughed ash from his throat. ‘It was this same Legun that killed your mother-sister.’

He saw the Kyra look at him askance, those glacial blue eyes that so easily could turn to a terrifying glare. How little Alan understood the Shee, or for that matter their Kyras. All that stuff about ancient lineages and the sharing of memories across those lineages! He knew, for example, that the Kyras were related by blood to the martyred high Architect of Ossierel, Ussha De Danaan, who had refused to use her oracular powers in defence of the ancient capital.

Then the Kyra surprised him, her eyes gazing away into the distance to where in the north sky the red glow emanating from the Tower of Bones was unmistakable, even in the early light. Her oraculum ignited to a gentle background glow in which whorls and arabesques of silvery light metamorphosed and pulsated. ‘If I were to dream, it would be to see myself kill that one. I would kill him a thousand times, in a thousand different ways, in a thousand different dreams.’

‘Huh!’ Alan dropped his head. It was the closest thing he had ever come to an intimate discussion with a Shee.

Once more gazing towards Kate in the distance, he couldn’t help but reflect on the strangeness of his situation. He wouldn’t have described himself as imaginative. And yet to be faced with Leguns! Witches! Immortals! How could an ordinary guy come to terms with this place? There were times when he felt such a desperate yearning
for his ordinary world, for Earth with its easy logic, its respect for what was demonstrable, measurable, comprehensible …