The Wraeththu Chronicles (53 page)

I looked around nervously but the others had gone inside and no-one was listening. I couldn't think of anything to say to him and yet I wanted to; it was very strange.

"Have you still got those humans here?" he asked, and I nodded.

"Yes, I can't understand it, they seem quite happy."

Leef laughed in a not altogether pleasant way. "Wait until you see the world outside, son of Terzian. Maybe then you'll understand only too well!"

I wished it was not always so obvious that I knew so little about the world. If I felt strong, it always happened that I was made to look foolish and it kept me in a childlike state. I wanted experience. I wanted to stand up and say to someone, "Oh, one day you will understand," complete and smug with my own special knowledge. I was the only person I knew that never did that. Leef put his shirt back on, but left it open. Now, most of Ithiel's guard affected the fashion of wearing their hair long at the back while still kept short over the crown. Leef tore the band from his hair with a grimace and scratched it loose. Was it a sign of growing up, I wondered, that he fascinated me? Yet if I dared to nurture any fantasies about him, I was too young to realize them, and by the time I was old enough, perhaps he wouldn't be around any more or would still see me as a spindly harling. Uncomfortable thoughts like that seemed to be springing into my head with uncontrollable regularity nowadays. Leef was no longer paying me any attention. I said, "One of the humans told me that up north Wraeththu are fighting Wraeththu. Is that true?"

"Why don't you ask your father?" he replied, and stung by a shame so deep I could not understand it, I turned away and ran back to the house.

That evening, Cal did not come to eat with us. After the meal, I went to his room and found him lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Don't you want anything to eat?" He turned his head in his lazy, Cal way and looked at me with his lazy, Cal eyes.

"Maybe I don't feel too well," he admitted. I sat next to him on the bed and put my hand on his face. He flinched so slightly, I barely noticed it.

"Do you hurt?"

"My head's black inside," he said.

"I could read to you," I offered cautiously.

He sighed. "No . . ."

I didn't want to leave him. To me he was like an injured wild animal that had been brought into the house. I couldn't understand him, it seemed unlikely we could heal him properly, he didn't really belong here, yet still I did not want to open the door and let him out. Half of me thought, Only what's outside can heal him. I was not exactly right about that.

Inspired by a memory of infant sickness, I said, "Turn over."

"Why?"

"You'll see. Something Cobweb used to do when I felt ill."

Sighing, reluctantly, he turned onto his stomach and I lifted his shirt and pushed it up above his shoulders.

He laughed and said, "Swift?"

"Hush, now listen. I will draw you a story." His skin was hot beneath my fingers as I began a tale of creatures living in the dark and eating only sticks and mud.

"Do they hate the light?" Cal asked sleepily.

"But of course!" I answered. "Here is the big stone they use to block the entrance to their tunnel."

"It is my story you're telling then!"

"No, they are ugly creatures. They have little sense of humor and they don't know how to write."

"How do you judge ugliness?" Cal asked suddenly, half turning over and looking at me.

I shrugged. "I don't know. When you can't bear to look at something, I suppose, or worse ..."

Cal shook his head. "No! You can't see true ugliness," he murmured and his eyes looked past me. "It is on the inside. It is always hidden . . ." Our eyes locked. "Always!"

"Cal..." I said softly and he replied, "No, no," just as softly. What was he denying? He looked dazed, almost delirious, turning his head this way and that on the pillow.

"What can I do?"

"I'm being attacked."

"But there's no-one here!"

"There's no-one here. Look! Look!"

It was on my mind to fetch Swithe or even Gahrazel. I was afraid.

"What is it, Cal? What is it?" I shook him, and his hand crept beneath his pillow.

"I'm being attacked," he said and pulled something out to show me. A card. On the card someone lies prone in the mud pierced by ten swords. A divining card and one of evil omen. Only one person would put that there. I took it from him and tore it to pieces. He watched impassively. We said nothing. His face twitched and he pressed himself into the pillows. His voice was muffled. "Draw me another story until I fall asleep," he said.

The next day, as it was the end of the week, we had no lessons, and Gahrazel and I went out into the garden to talk. I had eventually come to forgive him for the incident in Galhea although I still harbored a prudish

disapproval of his behavior. We never talked about it. It was a strange day, hot and close. The kind of day that makes you nervous and I could taste it clearly. It tasted salty and sour. "There will be a storm later," I said.

Gahrazel rolled onto his back on the grass, looking lovely and wild and secretive. Sometimes I could not control my jealousy of him, although our relationship did not appear to have changed that much since his Feybraiha. "I want to stretch and stretch and stretch!" Gahrazel cried.

"You!" I snorted. "All the secrets of the world are yours!"

He laughed and sat up. "You are growing up to be another Cobweb," he said.

"What? Because I shall be a dark and wondrous beauty, or because I shall be slightly mad?"

"Oh, both, I think. Definitely!"

We saw Peter come into the garden and start digging around in the flowerbeds. Gahrazel called to him and demanded that he bring us refreshment because it was so hot. I knew Peter disliked talking to hara or even being near them. Gahrazel enjoyed making him uncomfortable.

"Peter could be har," Gahrazel said.

"Could he? How?" I hoped Gahrazel was not making fun of me.

"Like our fathers, like Cobweb, like everyone," Gahrazel replied, in a reasonable voice that was not the slightest bit mocking. "Do you think Wraeththu came from nowhere? Most of them were human once."

"Oh, I know that!" I said scornfully. "How, though? How do they do it?"

"It's our blood," Gahrazel explained, stroking the blue vein just visible on the inside of his arm. "It makes humans become like us. Male humans develop female parts as well. It can't work the other way. I saw it once at home."

"But how do they change? Is it really possible?"

Gahrazel laughed. "Give Peter a cup of your blood. Let's see!"

I shuddered. "Ugh, no. Gahrazel, you're disgusting!"

When Peter brought our drinks out, Gahrazel laughed because he would not look at us. I felt embarrassed. I did not want the humans to hate us.

"There may be thunder," I said, squinting at the deceptive sky. "And great tearing gouts of lightning!" Gahrazel added enthusiastically. By lunchtime, the sky had become green and boiling.

Looking back, I can't decide whether it was the tension of the approaching storm or some kind of presentiment that made me so jumpy. I could barely eat my lunch. My head was full of strange, high-pitched sounds that I could not hear properly. Sometimes, ghostlike zigzags of light would flit across my vision. Cobweb ate daintily as usual, but I could feel the power in him and he scared me. I kept thinking of the Ten of Swords. A black sky, blood and despair. Gahrazel chatted with our tutors, sensing nothing.

After lunch, I went to my room and sat on the window seat. Vague growling echoed deeply in the sky from the east and the air was very still, as if holding its breath. The eerie green light outside made the garden darker, untamed and sentient. I pressed my face against the cool glass, feeling my heart flutter in my throat, the sound of blood in my ears and the dull pain that echoed it. Something is going to happen, I thought, and with that acknowledgment, another thing, shapeless and wild, released its terrifying grip on me. I opened up and let it flow into me; the power of the storm and something else, something more controlled and yet less understandable. My body shook, my throat was dry.

Outside, a white shape flickered through the gloom, passing beneath the mantle of the evergreens, into the darkness that lay beyond, toward the lake, toward the summerhouse, out in the living air. My skin prickled. Was it someone? Was it? While my mind still seemed to hover at the window, my body launched itself across the room, out of the door, down the corridor, dark and silent, down the stairs, toward the outside. Beyond the door, in the garden, the air was still hot, yet moist and scented. I ran into the trees, not looking back, sure-footed. I could see the white shape ahead of me. It was not running or even hurrying. By the time it reached the summerhouse, I had slowed to match its pace, and I could see that it was Cal. A crooked finger of light snaked across the sky, flashing off panes of glass, off Cal's hair, off the water through the trees. The ground beneath my feet was moss. I crept toward the summerhouse and Cal opened the door. Was I so totally silent that he did not hear me? Inside, the summerhouso was strangely dark. There was a shallow stone basin in there, full of water, where orange fish lived among the lilies. It was in the center of the summer-house. A stone animal curved uncomfortably out of the water. It was a fountain, but it was not turned on. Seated on the edge of the basin, holding something in his hands, on his lap, looking more lovely, more pale, more smoky, more deadly than I had ever seen him, was Cobweb.

I stood in the doorway and watched Cal walk toward him, his feet barely lifting, his head hanging. Cobweb looked only at him. If he knew I was there, I was of no importance and no hindrance. Cal stopped moving. Cobweb stood up. Cal looked around him, as if suddenly unsure of where he was or how he had got there. My sorcerer hostling smiled. "I am pleased you came," he said.

Cal looked confused; he said nothing.

"I knew you would come back one day," Cobweb continued in a conversational tone and he began to walk, around and around the basin pool. "I knew this, as I know many things. I know you, Cal, perhaps better than you know yourself. I have never liked what I have seen." He stopped and hugged closer to him the secret he held in his hands. "Sometimes when I look at you, Cal, when you sit at my table, drinking from my crystal goblets, using my silver knives and forks, with my Terzian's heart on your plate, I think to myself, 'There is blood on his hands,' and I can even see it. It is thick, dark blood. Blood from somewhere deep; lifeblood. And I can't help wondering how it came to be there. Can you tell me perhaps?"

I looked at Cal. His face was gray, his body strained and tense as wire, shaking as if it would break. Cobweb would wind him tighter and tighter, and then ... a single touch would ... I think Cal tried to speak. He made n noise. Cobweb laughed.

"It seems to me that you are no longer beautiful, Cal. Look into the water. See how I have brought all the foul ugliness that is within you to the surface. Look . . ." His slim, pale arm gestured toward the pool. His hair, unbound, was like creepers of ivy. I thought, I should stop this, shouldn't I? Hut how? I could no longer feel my hand where it gripped the doorpost.

Cobweb spoke again, so low, I could barely hear it. It was a lover's voice, caressing, reassuring. "I will make you remember, Cal," he said. "Will you thank me for it, I wonder?" He paused and tapped his lips thoughtfully. "The past, the webs, the fragments, all there. Like a locked chest full of treasures."

Cal tried to shake his head. "No," he croaked, but he could not move.

Cobweb revealed what he held to his breast. He held it up and in the green light I could see liquid in glass, moving slowly, like thick waves on a tiny sea. There was a mark on my hostling's arm, a thin smear of dried blood. Cobweb's eyes flashed. Lightning outside; lightning within. From his lips came words that hurt my ears, that I could hear and that were without sound. He raised his arm, higher. The mark on his skin cracked as if a great force from within had burst its seal. A single drop of red peered from the whiteness and began slowly to investigate the length of his arm. I tried to run forward, but it was too slow, as if all the world had become too slow. A hundred visions of my hostling's arm flickered down to the lip of the stone basin, a sound like a soul in torment, splintering, laughter; shards of light spinning outwards. My slow hand had closed on Cal's arm and it was cold and shuddering. Cobweb saw me and in an infinite space of time, recognition stripped the triumph from his face and made it anger. He screeched. He raised his arm. I tried to pull Cal away, but it was too late,
 
lightning arced across the room, splashing down on Cal's face, his the floor behind him.

For a second, for an hour, there was only stillness and the phantom of a booming sound in the sky outside. Then the infant patter of raindrops. I think I said, "Cal . . ." or I thought it. Cobweb stared at him, his dark eyes immense, the whites of them showing all around.

Cal raised his hand. He looked at it almost inquisitively. He touched the redness on the front of his shirt, rubbed it between finger and thumb, sniffed it, tasted it. He looked at Cobweb, puzzled ... for a moment. Then he looked at his hand again, it was wet and scarlet, and it started to shake. Cobweb and I were held in stasis while the terrible thing happened, while the thunder crashed in Cal's head and the lightning spurted out of his eyes. He threw back his head and the howling raised the hair on my head. His hands flew to his face. They clawed.