The Unmaking (20 page)

“We danced and had punch,” she tried desperately. “Julian looked very handsome, aye.” She thought she saw a frown. “He kissed me when we were walking back to the dormitories.”

At this, Charlie made another gurgle and one of his hands twitched.

“We kiss all the time,” said Nell excitedly. “Even in a supply cupboard one time.”

“What are you on about?” muttered Ander, frowning.

There was a crease between Charlie’s eyebrows.

“Kissing and kissing,” babbled Nell. The white mist closed over them.

“What’s this?” came Ander’s voice, a growl. “Cannay see a thing.”

Nell squeezed Charlie’s hand. It was cold and clammy and felt not altogether hand-like, as if the bones were going soft. She let go with a shiver. “I wish Eliza were here,” she said. “It’s funny, lah, she’s so different in some ways from when I first met her but in other ways she’s exactly the same. I remember her very first day at the school in Holburg; she corrected Mentor Frist’s geography. I’ve loved her ever since. I dinnay think he ever forgave her, though.”

Charlie made a sound that might have been a laugh. She stroked his face. His skin was dry and didn’t even feel like skin. She was glad she couldn’t see him. She set about repeating every amusing anecdote she could think of from Eliza’s pre-Sorceress days, punctuating the stories by slipping a taste of brandy into his mouth. She stopped giving him brandy after she bumped one of his teeth with the edge of the bottle and it fell right out. Whenever she paused in her storytelling, she heard the hiss of the water under the boat. She was not sure how long they had been travelling when a wind swept down and the mist parted. She heard Ander draw in a sharp breath. The lake beneath them was a brilliant green, the sky above the colour of fire. In the distance, the dark shadow of the cliffs. Tian Xia. She felt nausea swirling up within her and she forced it down. She wouldn’t get sick. She had to take care of Charlie.

“What am I doing?” muttered Ander to himself. He looked very pale. He turned accusing eyes on Nell, then went a little paler and staggered to his feet to vomit over the gunwale.

“You’re going to be fine, aye,” Nell told the Shade. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, too nasal, somehow distant. “Once we get to the Cave, you’ll be fine. Are you still awake? Are you listening to me?”

Charlie said nothing. He looked like a deflating balloon, his features soft and indefinite, his body losing its solidity. Like he was melting, coming apart. Her stomach convulsed. For a moment she thought she would be able to master it, that through sheer strength of will she could prevent the sickness from overwhelming her. Then she buckled over, clutching her stomach with a groan.

The boat raced on towards the dark cliffs, which loomed larger and larger. Her stomach lurched, knife-jabs of lightning pain shot through her bones, hot flashes and icy chills swept over her. She forgot about Charlie. She forgot about everything. She pressed her face to the boards and moaned, hands in her hair, helpless against the agony of it.

Ander was more experienced when it came to pain. He had fought many long years in the war and his body was a map of scars. In spite of being feverish, half-delirious, and wracked by stabbing pains, he dragged both Charlie and Nell into the helicopter as the cliff approached and the black zig-zagging steps opened up before them. He did not know if the awful shapes on the wall, glaring beasts and ominous watching things, were actually carved there or merely his own hallucinations, and he didn’t bother himself about it. Nell was vomiting in the back of the helicopter as he started up the engine. As they soared up and over the wall, she leaned forward between the seats. Her damp hair stuck to her face, which was white as a sheet, and her pale lips trembled.

“Canyon,” she croaked, and pointed.

At first this meant nothing to Ander. He followed her shaking finger and saw only a dark forest rising up to the right. Then he spotted the canyon snaking towards it, and he put the helicopter down on the edge of it. As soon as the rotary wings had stopped he yanked open the door, stumbled out of the chopper, fell to his knees and then flat on his stomach, where he lay still. Nell pulled open her door and fell out. She barely felt the impact as she hit the ground. Rust-coloured clouds flitted across the sky like smoke and the red sun beat down on them. She rolled onto her side with a gasp of pain and lifted her throbbing head. A good distance to the left, near the black cliffs, stood what appeared to be a great many ruins. Nell squinted, not quite trusting her eyesight. She knew these should be the Temples of the Faithful but Eliza had described them as rather beautiful and busy domes. These were collapsed, open to the sky, and deserted. She turned her head in the other direction. The canyon and the Ravening Forest. She crawled to where Ander lay on the red earth. His eyes were open and he was breathing, thank the Ancients. When he saw her, he said thickly, “What’s happening to us?”

“Get Charlie,” she said.

He staggered to his feet. Nell tried to do the same, but she couldn’t, so she remained on her hands and knees. When she looked up, Ander had Charlie slung over his shoulder.

“I spec it’s too late, Nell,” said Ander.

Indeed, the limp, greyish form hanging over his shoulder did not look anything like a boy anymore. Something ink-black floated in long threads from the wet spaces that were once mouth and eyes. Nell looked away. She crawled along the edge of the canyon, and Ander followed after her.

Charlie must nay die
, she repeated in her head, over and over, like a mantra.
Charlie cannay die.
Her hands and knees were numb. Her vision blurred and cleared and blurred again. She longed to lie down, to be still. But
Charlie must nay die
, she repeated. It felt like hours, though it was not nearly so long as that, before she found the narrow trail down the side of the canyon that Charlie and Eliza had told her about. She forced herself to move a little faster, though she could not rise from a crawl. And there, there it was, the dusty ledge, the dark craggy opening in the cliff. The walls and ground of the cave were fleshy and lightly furred.

She tried to speak and found she had no voice, so she pointed into the cave. Ander carried Charlie inside. Nell looked at him as he passed – his mottled grey flesh hung soft and boneless, and still the dark strands bled from the corners of his mouth and eyes – and quickly looked away again. As the rock face ground closed over Charlie, Nell’s mind, too, shut tight. She curled into a ball right there on the stony ledge. Later she did not remember Ander carrying her back up the trail to the helicopter. He had learned long ago how to close his mind to pain and keep moving. There was a tent and various emergency supplies in the back of the helicopter. He pitched the tent in the small amount of shade the chopper offered, dragged Nell inside it, and then he too lay down at last and let this strange new world close around him.

~~~

When Nell opened her eyes, it was very dark in the tent. Her head was pounding and she was sore all over, as if she had been badly beaten. She sat up with a groan. Ander was still sleeping but she woke him to give him some water. The water refreshed them both and they crawled out of the tent. It was night. Bright comets slashed across the sky and three moons performed a slow circling dance together. To the south, the hanging gardens of the Sparkling Deluder twinkled and shone, changing shape, offering up wheels of glowing blossoms, cities of stars, leaping figures and spangled forests swaying in a gleaming breeze.

“Will you look at that,” said Ander, his voice hoarse.

“It’s beautiful,” said Nell.

“You think so?” Ander looked around them and shuddered. “Looks a lonely, unfriendly sort of place, to me.”

He made sandwiches with the supplies Nell had brought but she could only manage a few bites before her head began to spin and her stomach recoil. They slept again and it was day when they woke. This time they were both hungry. Ander prepared some packaged soup over a little camping stove.

“Lah, did you know it would be that bad?” he asked, handing her a bowl once it was ready.

Nell nodded. “But I passed out last time. I spec it’s worse if you dinnay pass out.”

“You should’ve told me, aye” said Ander.

“Sorry,” said Nell. “It didnay seem like the most important thing at the time.”

Ander gave a short laugh that was more of a snort. “That thing is lucky to have a friend like you.”

“He’s nay a thing,” said Nell.

“Lah, what is he, then?”

Nell looked up at the sky. “It’s complicated,” she said.

“Lah, I’ve no doubt about that,” said Ander. “But you’ve got me here, so why dinnay you try doing a little bit of explaining.”

Camped on this deserted plain, with the Ravening Forest on one side and the ruined Temples on the other, Nell was more frightened and unsure than she had expected to be. To comfort herself as much as to fill him in, she told Ander the whole story of her forgotten journey with Charlie and Eliza. She felt better and better as she spoke. She sounded to herself like a hero in a storybook.

“So now what?” asked Ander when she was done. “I hate to say it, but I spec...look, Nell, your friend wasnay showing much sign of life when we put him in there. We cannay wait here for him to pop out again when he may nary do so.”

“He’ll be fine,” Nell insisted.

“Praps so,” said Ander doubtfully. “But then he can take care of himself, nay?”

“I spec so,” Nell agreed. “Lah, you’re right, we cannay just wait here. We’ve got to find Swarn.”

“That witch you were talking about?”

“Eliza might be with her already, aye, but if she’s nay there she’ll definitely need Swarn’s help. We should warn her.”

Ander shook his head. “I dinnay think flying a chopper around a strange world full of beasties who can do Magic is a good plan at all, Nell. We’ve done what you came here to do, aye. Now it’s time to go back.”

“We have nothing left to pay for the way back,” pointed out Nell. Ander stared at her in horror. Nell said nothing for a moment, rather enjoying the effect this had had. Then she said, “Swarn and other great beings can command the Boatman. So if we want to go back, aye, we’ll need her help.”

Ander gave her a look that was already becoming familiar.

“I couldnay tell you
everything
before we came,” she protested. “There wasnay time!”

“Fine.” Ander got to his feet and began to take the tent down. “Let’s go find this witch.”

~~~

As they passed over the Ravening Forest in the helicopter, Nell warned Ander that they might encounter dragons in the Dead Marsh. He gave her that look again and said, “What am I supposed to do if that happens?”

“Land,” suggested Nell. “They’ll probably just take us to Swarn. That’s what happened last time.”

This was very naïve of her. Dragons had a kind of Knowing beyond that of most other creatures. When they had found Eliza in the marsh more than two years ago, they knew enough to be curious, enough to know Swarn should be curious too. But Ander and Nell would be no more than a snack. Had they ventured into a marsh full of dragons in a helicopter they would have quickly met a fiery end.

Instead, what they found in the marsh was a slaughter. It was strewn with the broken bodies of dragons. Hundreds of them lay sinking in the muck, heads severed, hearts torn out. In the distance, a green light was burning.

“By the Ancients!” whispered Ander.

“There,” said Nell, pointing at the green light. “Land over there.”

Something around her heart was crumpling and cracking like egg shells but she wouldn’t let herself think it yet, she wouldn’t wonder about Eliza. The helicopter hummed over the final battlefield of the cliff dragons and Ander set it down on a large protruding hump of moss, a safe distance from what they could now see was a heap of leaping green flames. Nell knew perfectly well what this must be. Eliza had told her about Swarn’s green fire that never went out. Her house was burning. Nell slid open the door of the helicopter and leaped out, sinking knee deep in the marsh.

“Hang on,” Ander called after her. “Stick close to me!”

But Nell was already scrambling straight towards the burning house with one of the blankets from the helicopter wrapped around her.

The green fire gave off no smoke but it devoured the oxygen. As she approached, Nell found herself gasping for breath. The fire did not crackle; it burned in eerie silence, leaping hungrily over the ruins of the house. The roof had collapsed and was just a burning mass of bone and mud and scales now. Over her thundering heartbeat she heard a sound like a long hiss and then a spurt of pale green flame struck her.

The blanket caught fire and she dropped it in the mud, wheeling about, looking for her attacker. It was half-buried by the house, its long neck and head pinned to the earth, its bright eyes flitting about fearfully. It was a very small dragon, no bigger than the helicopter, and it had inexplicably tried to crawl into Swarn’s house, perhaps deeming it a safe place from the slaughter of its elders. The heat of the green fire and the airlessness was more than Nell could bear for long but she quickly took in the main beams of the house, huge dragon bones that now pinned this smaller dragon.

The dragon spat feebly at her again. There were pools of green fire burning in wounds in its neck. She wetted the charred blanket in a muddy puddle and approached the dragon, steering clear of its great snapping jaws. The thing thrashed, terrified, as she tried to douse the green flames, but the marsh water and the blanket had no effect at all. She made her way back to the helicopter and Ander, who was looking around at the devastation in the marsh, dazed.