The Tower of Bones (48 page)

Kate struggled against her fears to try to remember more of what the Momu had taught her.
Olc … dependent for her sustenance on cruelty, exulting in the agony suffered by the Momu as city after city was hunted down and discovered, then annihilated, spiritually sucked dry
. She poured out her own attack upon the Witch, delivering a great wave of healing, of rebirth, feeling it deluge from the oraculum in her brow and spread the force of life far and wide throughout the valley. Even as she did so she heard the scream of outrage from the incandescent monstrosity that had replaced the Tower, sensing the shudder of pain that came from the depraved soul at the very heart of it. For a fleeting moment, they faced one another in open confrontation, two minds, two wills, two soul spirits – and she felt the weakening of her enemy.

The lightning still poured relentlessly out of the Alan’s brow, tearing through and around the roiling furnace, erupting skywards where it struck, flattening overhead
against the black mountains of clouds that had grown into a gigantic mushroom of darkness, and then cascading back down again in a cataract of twisting, spiralling devastation that extinguished the raging furnace of the Tower. And still the First Power continued to pour out of Alan as if his rage was limitless.

How brave he was! Surely there was nothing left to fight in the great ball of lightning that had replaced the pulsating red. Kate’s heart flooded with admiration for him. She poured out her love for him through the oraculum in her brow, only wanting the terrible vision to stop. But it didn’t stop.

Her voice was little above a whisper. ‘Mo, I don’t think he can stop. I don’t think he’s in control of it any more.’

Mo’s face appeared to glow. There was something going on with Mo but Kate was too stressed to take it in. Her friend spoke urgently, ‘The Witch is defeated.’

‘I – I don’t understand.’

Kate stared uncomprehendingly at the new apocalyptic shape that was rising out of the ruin of the Tower. She watched as the colossus swelled and expanded, rising until it seemed to bury its head in the clouds, high above the dwarfed figure of Alan in the field of ash, then threw back its great horned head and bared its fangs, roaring with triumph into the maelstrom of clouds.

Mo fell silent, staring with Kate at the distant figure of Alan, and toying with the amulet she wore about her neck. She looked so very different from when Kate had
seen her before being carried off to the Tower; this new Mo was hardly recognisable. How tall she had grown, her face longer, hauntingly beautiful. Kate blinked, realising that there was also something different about the amulet she was holding onto. It wasn’t the bog-oak figurine she had expected. It was something circular, and pulsating with light. Kate caught a glimpse of a crystalline disc in which flickering motes and arabesques formed and reformed in a perpetual metamorphosis. The light of the disc was illuminating Mo’s face from below, highlighting the rapt expression of this rapidly maturing young woman.

Kate thought,
I’m not sure I know Mo any more

She grabbed hold of Mo’s hand, staring into the eyes of her friend, and trying to understand what was going on. ‘Mo – you know something I don’t. What is it? What’s happening?’

‘It’s the Witch, not Alan, who has lost control.’

Staring skywards at the monstrous figure, Kate was stunned. She found herself falling back onto the oraculum in her brow, examining the scene as if through a third eye. Her gaze found Alan, his distant figure looking so tiny and brave before the towering inferno that was the titan. Suddenly he looked more vulnerable still. With a cry of anguish, Kate saw that he had switched off the attack, the oraculum in his brow now spent.

The voice that spoke to Mo – that had been speaking to her from the moment Alan had first attacked the Tower – came through the Torus. It was the same voice that had spoken to her in the cave of the City of the Ancients. Now it was telling her what had become of the Great Witch.

Gone – destroyed.

‘Alan won?’

Through the First Power, the Mage Lord, Duval, has initiated the fate that was pre-ordained here, at the Tower of Bones. He was assisted by the weakening of her purpose wrought by your companion, in restoring life to the land through the Power of Mab. Through both their courage and endurance a great wrong may yet be righted. That wrong led to the wasting of these lands. It began long ago – before ever the Great Witch came to the Tower. So it was that even as the Witch imagined that she was fulfilling her own destiny, it was a much greater power and destiny that lurked and conspired beyond the veil of reality.

‘Then, in destroying the Witch, Alan may have completed the resurrection of the titan?’

This was ever Fangorath’s purpose. Knowing so, we gave you the Torus in anticipation of this moment. Now that he has been resurrected he will look to complete his original aim. He will attempt to open the portal that was sealed on his original destruction. In this he must not succeed. To prevent that happening, a terrible battle, fought out long ago in this very place, must be fought anew.

‘What do you mean?’

What ended that eons-old conflict was an error of judgement. It was expedient, for the danger that ensued would have been too terrible to contemplate. Mórígán was implored to intercede. But in answering such a desperate prayer the Third Power contravened the laws of Fate. So you glimpse a trajectory that was set in motion long ago. However indirectly, it was this error that led to your coming here. The laws of Fate cannot be broken again. Those earlier consequences must be redressed.

‘But what can we possibly do, if Fangorath is so powerful?’

Unknowingly, your companion, with her gift of the Second Power, has set a course in motion. Look to the south, to the life-giving oceans!

Kate blinked in recognition of Mo’s hand on her shoulder, this new Mo, curiously calm and purposive, encouraging her to turn around and gaze back in the direction they had come. Kate saw, through the clogging ash in her
eyelashes, the strangeness that was invading the lowering sky. And then it appeared to come alive. The entire southern horizon twinkled in the gloom, and something at the very centre of it began to swell and to advance, as if the air was transformed by the magic in its passing, cascading every colour of the rainbow over the enormous spread of what looked like wings. They stiffened in astonishment to hear it thunder, words too deep and strange to recognise as any familiar language, the challenge trembling through the ground under their feet as it swept forward and found its focus.

The titan roared.

‘Oh, Mo! It must be Driftwood.’

All around her, Kate saw the Gargs and Cill warriors fall to their knees. She heard their communal cries:

‘Omdorrréilliuc – Omdorrréilliuc!’

They were prostrating themselves, as if before a god.

The thunder erupted again, juddering through the rocks under their feet as if they were standing on lumbering tectonic plates. Driftwood, if it truly was Driftwood, had grown enormous, and the swirling waves of power iridescing from his wings made him appear ten times larger. Kate could make out the sinewy bend of the great neck as the long, serpent-like body undulated in a powerful rhythm, advancing through the resisting air. In what seemed little more than a few leviathan beats of his wings, his head, as large as a house, was directly over her. The huge eyes were slitted, as if streamlined for speed,
the orange sparkle within them like the inner heat of an iron-smelting furnace. This time she sensed the words speeding over her like the rattle of a passing train:

Dragon secrets – Kate – Greeneyes – girl-thing!

As if he had read her mind.

It was hard to concentrate, to think back about things, with her mind racing.
What was he, really?
Her eyes moved from Mo, holding onto her arm, to the figure of Alan in the distance, standing perfectly still though he appeared to be surrounded by a whirling hurricane of energy.

Dragon secrets!

She made herself think, recall the history she had discovered when she had entered Driftwood’s mind. The dreadful war between the dragons and the titans and how, in order to bring an end to the destruction, the surviving dragons had chewed off their own wings and drowned in the oceans.

But there was more … There had always been more. What?

Driftwood had warned her that he was the bearer of secrets. And now she understood something that had puzzled her on their very first meeting. How the ground had shaken with the impact when he had performed those somersaults. There had been something immense about him even then, when he was a very small dragon fawning over his shiny thing.

The titan turned to face the approaching dragon, one hand outstretched, every finger capped by an enormous
black claw. From the tips of the claws lightning poured in a crackling deluge to erupt over the head of the dragon. Kate saw that the dragon’s flight slowed. Then, with eyes ablaze and fangs agape, the titan issued a command that sounded like the same thunderous rumble of the dragon’s own tongue. Lightning exploded again, with multiple arcs attacking the dragon from head to tail. Fangorath reared against the sky, thunderbolts clenched in either hand. Dragon and titan circled one another like mountains, roaring challenges that crackled and echoed through ground and sky. The atmosphere flooded with oceans of red, as if the world were drowning in blood.

Then something exploded into a colossal turquoise brilliance, like the birth of a sun, at the centre of the conflict. The landscape about Kate shuddered. Cracks appeared through the rocks under her feet, through which clouds of incandescent vapour billowed high into the sky, with vast secondary trails and movements within them, amid which explosions took place from moment to moment.

Kate and Mo clung to one another, seeing the world dissolve around them. They were free-falling into nothingness. Kate heard Mo’s whisper as if it were addressed to somebody else. Mo was still clinging to her arm. With her other hand Mo was holding tight to the amulet strung around her neck. Her whisper was: ‘
Dromenon!
’

‘What’s happening?’

Kate couldn’t imagine that this was the Dromenon
Alan had described to her. He had talked in awe about an endless white plain. This was like falling into a nebula in space. Gargantuan clouds of light and dark wheeled about some unknown centre of gravity, moving cataracts of mauve and gold, rapidly changing shape and substance as they formed, and all so vast as to overwhelm her senses.

Mo whispered again – strange words, repeating some realisation that had crept into her mind:
Battle has entered Dromenon
.

Kate’s jaws ached from clenching them. She was screwing shut her eyes. ‘Mo – if you know we’re not already dead, or worse, will you explain to me what in the world is happening?’

Mo’s reply was strangely calm: ‘I don’t know any more than you do. But I suspect that Dromenon, or at least this version of it, is bottomless.’

Thunderous explosions rippled through the murk, evidence of the ongoing battle between the dragon and the titan.

‘Have you any idea what’s going on?’

‘Fangorath is searching for the Third Portal.’

‘Oh, lord!’

‘It’s what it was all about, all along.’

‘Do you think … I mean, this portal, is it close?’

‘I don’t know, Kate.’

‘What are you implying? He’s trying to break through into the Fáil? While we’re still here?’

‘I think that’s the idea.’

Kate shook her head. She would have screamed if screaming did any good. ‘Mo – I sense that Alan is near. He’s really close.’

‘Where?’

‘I’m not sure.’

As Kate turned, searching for Alan, there was another enormous explosion. It felt as if an atomic bomb had gone off somewhere close – not that Kate had ever been near an atomic bomb, but she’d seen films and she could altogether imagine it. In a gap in the whirling vapours of red, turquoise and black she glimpsed the reclining hill of scaly flesh that was Driftwood. He looked stunned. His eyes were half closed, his expression bewildered. His gargantuan frame was floating slowly away from the site of the explosion. Yet, as far as she could see, he was physically undamaged.

And then Kate heard Fangorath roar again. She made him out some distance away, arms windmilling as if clawing his way through the maelstrom, following one of the black arms of a spiral of matter or energy or whatever it really was, to approach an ovoid shape.

Kate blinked. Or at least she imagined she blinked – she was no longer sure how substantial anything, or anyone, was here. The ovoid was gleaming and semi-transparent. It might have been a gargantuan crystal.

Drifting closer, there was something a little too perfect about it – something mathematical. Its axes were delineated, as if its creator had left the original drawings in
space after its construction, so it was cut through by sectors like the slices of an orange, which, as it slowly rotated, proved to be glowing. It must mean something but it was beyond Kate’s ability to understand. As the titan neared the ovoid she saw that it was truly colossal, dwarfing the demigod like a bat against the moon. It seemed, perhaps, like some gigantic oraculum of power in which mysteries came into being and dissolved into unbeing, second by second – and from which radiating arcs of power, like luminescent smoke, billowed out into the surrounding chaos.

The Third Portal to the Fáil!

Kate gazed on it, stupefied with awe.

She could make out a ghostly outline within it, as if it contained an individual being. She sensed that the being was aware of her presence.

Kate found no comfort in that awareness. The being was cold, observing yet devoid of reaction, even as Fangorath began to batter against the shell of the ovoid with his claws and fangs. That coldness worried her. She flailed her legs and arms, every instinct telling her to swim away from it, her whole being overwhelmed by the sense of numinous power coming from the ovoid.

At last she found her voice: ‘Mo – help!’

Mo was fingering the glowing amulet around her neck. ‘I know, Kate. I sense it too. We have to get away from here – as quickly as possible.’