World's End (10 page)

‘BUT WHEN THEY'RE
HERE
, THOSE DRAGONS?' said Faul. ‘BAH! NO TELLING WHAT WILL HAPPEN. WILL THEY EVEN BOTHER WITH US? I WOULDN'T IF I WERE THEM, LEST IT WERE SERVED FOR MY DINNER! BUT MARK THIS: THEY'VE A MIND TO COME DOWN VERY SOON, AND THEY SHALL. ANOTHER YEAR? OR MERE DAYS? SOON! BELIEVE IT, LOUP. I HEAR THE BIRDS WHEN THEY SPEAK TO EACH OTHER. SILLY BIRDS THINKING LIKE GROUNDMEN THAT OTHERS CAN'T FATHOM THEIR CHAT. THE DRAGONS COME! AND YOUR SILLY HUMAN WIZARDRY SHAN'T ACCOUNT FOR MUCH THEN.'

Loup smiled – she meant human wizardry in general, he supposed, rather than his own humble craft.
He'd
never had ambition to ‘change the natural rank of powers', whatever she'd meant by that. He held aloft a little red berry whose kind he'd not before seen. Faul indicated with her posture that the courtesies
were no longer needed. He popped it in his mouth and massaged it with his gums till it spat juice over them.

He didn't know whether Faul was right or not. Levaal's guardian, the Dragon-god asleep far beneath the castle, supposedly had laws against the brood returning to the world below. No wonder Dyan had slunk about like that, mostly hiding himself within a woman whom he'd convinced he loved her. Loup pondered all this, unaware he was murmuring wordless sounds through his gums.

‘I'VE EATEN ENOUGH,' Faul told Lut. ‘PACK IT UP. SOME OF THIS WILL GET US STARTED FOR BREAKFAST.' She belched loud and long, rattling the windows. It was then – as though in response – that the birdsong came a third time. This time it seemed to surround the house.

Lut, ever calm, went about clearing up the plates and cups with the merest glance out the window. Faul stomped out to the porch, seeming at once wonderstruck and nervous. Visible now, some of the singing birds flew in a circle, others sat facing the house. ‘STRANGE BEAUTY,' said Faul, listening awhile. ‘IT GLADDENS ME. THOSE
BIRDS
ARE GLAD. THERE'S LITTLE MEANING TO IT OTHER THAN: GLADNESS! THOSE ARE THEIR TRUE VOICES, LOUP, BUT THEY NEVER SING THIS WAY. THE SONG IS PRETTY, SO I'LL ABIDE IT, IF WHATEVER CAUSES THIS MINDS ITS OWN—'

Then the song played within the house. The caged birds – dozens of them, in the adjoining room – took up the same voice, adding their own spirals of harmonious notes and clicking percussion. ‘NO MORE OF IT!' Faul boomed, no longer glad at all. ‘NOT UNDER MY ROOF. NO MAGIC COMES HERE WITHOUT MY KNOWING WHO MAKES IT. I DON'T CARE IF IT'S A DRAGON THE CAUSE OF IT! A PINCH AND STING HE'LL GET, SQUASH ME
OR NOT.' She yanked on the same wooden boots Loup recalled her wearing when she'd chased Anfen's group from her yard. In one hand she grabbed a mallet no man would've been able to lift with two. ‘COME!' she boomed, setting off towards the trees.

‘Easy, Faul,' said Loup, hurrying after her with Case in tow. ‘None of us knows what done all that. Could be things we never heard of. Or you may be right and it's a dragon. Best leave it.' He and Lut hurried in pursuit of her across the brittle yard. The birds near the house scattered and went back to the trees. More of their song came from there, the same place Loup had heard it earlier. Faul headed that way, but before leaving her yard she came over a rise in the ground and paused. The other two caught her up. All three of them stared at some kind of mirage which had sprung up between where they stood and the trees.

There was a fountain, fashioned like a bird with a long neck, made of polished white stuff which gently glowed. Water trickled from its beak to a bowl at its base. Lut went closer to run his hand down its curved neck. He dipped one hand in the pool of liquid, flung water from it off to the side. Where each drop landed, things sprang into being as if the drops had given them life: a winding bunch of flowers, growing from an upwards-thrusting ivy-green vine, its stem catching light as would stained glass. Where another flung drop fell, there appeared part of a garden. A footpath made of polished gold wound through a riot of colours and shades. The way these things appeared was as if shreds of a veil had been pulled from the rough, stony yard to reveal the true beauty hidden beneath it all the while.

More such sights sprang wherever the drops landed. Lut,
wonderingly, dipped his hand back into the bird-fountain's liquid, and splashed the waters in the other direction. More wondrous beautiful things came into being: flowers whose long petals were like carved amethyst curls; leaves and vines which glimmered into a vast new set of shades when viewed from the slightest change of angle. Each colourful thing was spellbinding in its own right. As a chorus, it was irresistible, a riot of beauty. Into the air trickled the sound of a brook – though they could not see it – splashing its gentle waters over stones. The birdsong came again, more quiet and soothing this time, gentle lullabies promising dreams, promising all would be well.

‘NO MORE!' Faul boomed as Lut's hand reached to dip back into the fountain's waters. She gazed suspiciously around at it all. ‘PRETTY, I'LL GRANT IT,' she said. ‘BUT I NEVER MINDED THE OLD YARD, COARSE AND HONEST AS SHE IS. HERE ARE GIFTS GIVEN BY ONE WE CANNOT SEE. WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF IT?' She looked at Loup for explanation.

He shrugged, flashed his gums, longing for a chance to fling some of the bird-fountain's water on the brittle turf and see what it might create. Loup's only thought was that a Spirit must be behind it, but which? Deeds like this were in no tales of the gods he'd heard before.

A human voice gently worked its way in among the chorus of birdsong. Faul shook herself, grunted, as if to resist being calmed. Then they saw him, dancing through the garden, barefoot, one flank exposed, a slender white hand flinging drops from a bowl held under the other arm. It was Vous. Loup recalled in a flash the glimpse, as he'd flown over the woods, of this very figure standing by a stream.

Vous appeared then vanished with progressive steps of his dance, in and out of the garden of which they could see only
part. Loup found his movements hypnotic, simply because of how much pleasure they gave to behold: he was sure the human form had never held itself nor moved with such grace as this. The furious look all of them knew from books and artworks that filled Aligned country was not only absent, the familiar glare seemed quite impossible on this being's face.

Where the drops he gaily flung fell, more of the half-hidden garden sprang into being. The trickling brook at last appeared, spilling thin threads into a small pool which Loup wanted more than anything else to dive into, whatever may result from it.

Vous hadn't seemed aware of them until he twirled quite close, his glance sweeping like a light over them all. A soft rustle of echoing laughter played about them, perfectly in place with the gentle birdsong. With a playful sweep of his arm, he invited them to join him, to take up some water from the little fountain, fling it where they would. Loup rushed forwards, but Faul's fist closed around his arm and yanked him back. It was like being dragged from pleasant sleep. Her other hand, Loup saw, had done the same with Lut.

Vous saw this too, and laughed, joyous bells pealing. His dance grew faster, faster, a few more drops flung here or there, while he himself flashed in and out of visibility. Then with no warning the birdsong ceased, Vous disappeared altogether and did not return. The partly revealed garden remained, with streaks of normalcy left through it: streaks of brittle scrub, rocks and weeds, splashed over a beautiful painting only partly completed. The stream's trickle was the only sound in the sudden quiet.

Loup, Lut and Faul looked at each other. The air whooshed behind them, something heavy landed, and all three turned,
startled, to find Case the drake gazing serenely at what Vous had left here. ‘HE'S GONE!' said Faul. Then she began striding purposefully into the woods.

‘If he's gone, what's the rush?' Loup called after her. ‘Where you headed?'

‘THE CASTLE,' she replied. ‘HE'S GONE FROM THE CASTLE, THAT'S WHAT I MEANT. THE CASTLE IS SITTING THERE, LOUP, RIPE NOW FOR THE TAKING. IT'S A MATTER OF TIME TILL SOME FOOL MAYOR LEARNS OF IT, CLAIMS IT, THEN WE'VE A NEW WAR-LOVING LORD TO CONTEND WITH. NOT WHILE I'VE GOT STRENGTH IN ME TO WRING A NECK OR TWO. IF THAT FOOL ARCH MAGE IS ABOUT, HIS IS FIRST FOR WRINGING, AND WITH ALL HE'S DONE TO DESERVE FAR WORSE, CALL HIM LUCKY IF I SHOULD FIND HIM. HE'S GONE AND MADE HIS GOD, LOUP! I NEVER THOUGHT HE'D DO IT. HOW LONG DO YOU THINK TILL HE BEGINS HIS NEXT? AND THE NEXT WILL BE HIMSELF, IF HE'S NOT STOPPED.'

Lut crouched by the pool of water. Gold light radiated around it. He stuck a finger in just as Faul turned to tell him not to. ‘Warm,' he called. He cupped a palmful of it to his lips, sipped it. ‘Only water,' he said, shrugging. ‘Tastes clean. Real clean.'

‘BE WARY!' Faul cried.

Loup pondered that, but he was suddenly tired of being wary. How many more years of life did he really need? He dived head-first into the golden pool. ‘Water's warm,' he called when his head emerged, gums bared in a wide grin. ‘Ease up, Faul. I'll be out soon, then I'll come along with you. Back to the castle, fine. But what's the point in anything, if you can't stop and admire something pretty, now and then?' He splashed water at old Case, who'd lowered himself by the stream to cautiously lap at it with his tongue.

‘OH, GO ON THEN,' Faul boomed at Lut, who looked at her plaintively. ‘TEN MINUTES.'

He smiled through his beard, ran to the pool and jumped in.

Siel dreamed. It was a sleep sliding her gently and patiently into death. The deep dreaming part of her which knew of her coming death went along gladly with the slide's easy, gentle momentum. It put up no fight, for now she did not have to deal with the pain of the wounds Shadow had inflicted when he'd bounced her off the stone. Nor had she to bother with the trouble of long slow healing, all to go back to a thankless world which would only open its arms to her again like a cruel mother.

About her limp body in the glen was the hissing slide of swords from their sheaths. There were panicked shouts of the mayor's men, a fight beginning. But those sounds were just jarring notes against a song which had begun around her. Strange music reached to Siel in her dream. It sought her out from the place she was sliding to; assured her she need not leave this body yet, that her healing need not be painful. There was more to learn here, the music said, more to experience. Worthwhile things – that was a promise. The music played about her as would a stream of warm water; it poured over her as if gushing from the holes of a flute, fat raindrops beating down on drum skins, interspersed with cries like bird calls, full of joy.

She did not hear the fight breaking out, the men shouting,
a body falling into the soft undergrowth nearby. She knew only the music a friend played for her, only the strange and powerful music which coaxed her tenderly back from the brink of death, knitting together where the skin had split and where the bone had cracked.

Far Gaze had heard Siel crack against the slab of rock, and he'd thought right away that was that. No stranger to violence in a vast number of forms (victim, witness and inflictor), he was nonetheless ill to see her slender body bounce on impact, to actually
bounce.
He knew at once her back was probably broken, maybe her neck too by the way she landed and the tilt of her head.

Nor was Far Gaze especially prone to sentiment – those who were had picked the wrong world to try and survive in. But as companions went, Siel had not once pestered him to frivolously cast magic, and one could be fairly sure she'd not be the first to flee if a fight went bad. The sight of her lying limp, dead soon if not already, did not please him at all.

A blur tore across the ground away from her. The trail of heat left behind it was intense enough to be felt for a second or two even from where he stood, at the mouth of the cave. A flash of fire shot up along the trail but on the mossy damp turf it did not last long.

Far Gaze knew immediately it was Shadow. Shadow too had made those screaming sounds which had brought him and Gorb to the cave mouth in the first place, and had brought the mayor and his men running up the tunnel back towards them (their scuffing feet echoing on the cave walls so it sounded like a hundred or more of them came, rather than a half-dozen).

Far Gaze ran the short distance down to Siel's body and saw
his concerns were founded. He contemplated finishing her off in mercy, but true warriors never wanted to die that way – true warriors viewed their whole lives as preparation for their death, and would sometimes curse those who ruined the moment. But he could certainly not heal her. Very few natural illnesses could outwit him, especially in the young and strong, but he knew not enough of healing to instantly mend someone's spine in two places and patch together a skull. He doubted any mages did. He called to Gorb, ‘Can you heal, giant?'

Gorb came over, crouched down and ran a thick thumb across her arm. Tears crept down his cheeks' fat slabs. ‘I'm no wizard. Couldn't heal my dogs; can't heal this.'

‘What have you done?' came the Tantonese mayor's accusing voice from the cave mouth. Tauk the Strong strode over with his six men in tow, two unsheathing their swords, boots slamming down through knee-high ferns.

Far Gaze shivered with sour distaste. Mayor of the entire world, he thought. Now was not the time to approach a half-giant with weapons drawn. Quietly he said, ‘Gorb, remain calm, whatever they say or do. These men have been through a lot and are not thinking properly. That mayor owes me massive debts and I mean to claim them. You'll have a share. He's worth little to us dead.'

Gorb did not seem to have even noticed the men. He still traced a finger gently over Siel's arm and spilled tears on the mossy stones he kneeled on. Siel's eyelids fluttered, her face at peace and looking younger than it had before.

‘Answer the mayor,' demanded one of Tauk's men.

‘What for? Don't you trust your eyes?' said Far Gaze. ‘Clearly the giant and I have committed murder.'

The mayor raised an arm to calm and restrain his men but
anger blazed in his own eyes too. ‘We have suffered enough fear and loss on this journey, and I have had enough cheek from you, mage.'

There was not time to shape-shift into his wolf form, which would make either fight or flight an easy enough business. But even in human form there were things Far Gaze could do. He breathed deep through his nose the green glen's troubled airs. The glen's magic sat within his body and spirit as a fluttering moth would sit in his cupped hands. The little glen itself seemed to flow into him, all its long lazy days. He knew it intimately, as if he'd spent a hundred or more years among its mossy stones and burbling water. He knew now its morning bird calls, and what things prowled through it at night. He knew which ways he could run, ways where the men – if they chased – would fall, twist their ankles. He knew where to lead them into creatures that would prey on them, if they pursued far enough, knew a dozen nearby places where he could hide himself completely. His normally grey eyes and greying hair tinged with the green of its ferns.

Gorb seemed to notice the approaching men for the first time. He slowly turned, stood, frowned at their drawn weapons. Immediately a small black shape flew at him, stuck on the hand he used to bat it away. A dart. There was time only for the half-giant's face to cloud with anger before he slumped forwards to his knees and joined Siel in unconsciousness.

Far Gaze's mouth hung open in disbelief. ‘And what was gained by this?' he said.

‘A precaution,' explained the man who'd blown the dart, putting the flute-like instrument away. The man's eyes were lowered with shame.

‘You had better not be here when he wakes,' said Far Gaze.

‘He's right. You will go back to our city,' said Tauk quietly to the man. ‘Above ground, by road. Say nothing of us, nor where you have been.'

The man looked stricken. ‘He won't go,' said Far Gaze matter-of-factly. ‘He'll abandon you, sell information about you and live as a free man.' He did not know whether or not this prediction was accurate – it was a guess, no more. The trust people put in magicians' predictions, promises and threats was a constant source of amusement, and some compensation for being pestered to cast. Far Gaze watched the ensuing argument among the men with pleasure.

Although it was now clear Tauk's men would not fight him, the spell of kinship was still active in him. The glen whispered something to him he did not understand. His confusion must have shown. One of the men paused his shouting to look at Far Gaze and say, ‘Now what stirs you, mage?'

‘Something else is here,' he replied, turning full circle and staring about the glen's walls of trees and vines. The glen itself seemed watchful, anxious; it seemed to flex and brace itself in resistance to something unknown, as it would to a sudden shift in weather, an unexpected storm. ‘What is it?' demanded the mayor, sensing more games. ‘You said the Tormentors had all fled north!'

‘It is not those creatures. It is something unknown. The glen itself is nervous …' But then there they were, as suddenly as if having sprung from the ground. Not Tormentors – they were five, then six beings of slender build. People, it seemed at first glance, each wearing full-length hooded robes of varying green and brown shades. Two of them pulled back their hoods. Their heads and faces bore no hair at all. Their eyes were oval-shaped and larger than human eyes, their ears flat to their heads, their
mouths almost lipless. They looked frail, neither feminine nor masculine. They gazed up at the mayor's men, something discernible only by the backwards tilt of their heads, for those oval-shaped eyes – from a distance, at least – looked blank, the same colour as their skin.

The men stared down at them in turn. Everything was very still. The spell within Far Gaze commanded him to flee, for nature seldom trusts what it doesn't know, and these things had never in history set foot in these woods, nor (Far Gaze assumed) had they set foot beyond World's End at all.

Far Gaze did not run. He knew, long before Tauk's men would consider it, that these beings had not shown themselves for a battle. But he also knew the men's mood and was not at all surprised, looking back later, that a battle unfolded.

Two of the newcomers reached inside pockets of their gowns, producing instruments. One was a spherical black ball; the other appeared to be a baton, long as a man's forearm, with twisted knots on its ends. When those two beings crouched beside Siel's body, the mayor's men screamed and charged. They were led by the one the mayor had banished and whom Far Gaze had lied about, for that man was now all too eager to prove his loyalty by spilling enemy blood.

The beings did not move until Tauk's men had almost charged upon them. The one with the baton stood up, away from Siel's body, and swung his instrument quickly, making it a wheel-shaped blur. This was the point, looking back, that Far Gaze's memory went from a clear chronology to a jumbled mess of images and sounds, as if the events were all a deck of picture cards spilled across a table then scooped up again. He remembered the newcomers standing motionless right up until the swords swung down on them; recalled them cringing away,
crying out with high voices, perhaps not comprehending until that very moment that they were under attack. He recalled one of them falling back, surely dead with a slashed wound from shoulder to hip, two shades of blood gushing out, one much lighter than human, the other almost black. And the men lunging furiously at the others, till they were repelled by something invisible that seemed to shove them hard every time they came near, till they were all pulled around like boats in a whirlpool, unable to break out of it. One man gored another by accident in the confusion.

Far Gaze recalled music of a kind he'd never heard, a fast little crescendo which only hurt his ears, but killed the man nearest to the newcomers. Killed him neatly, without mess or fuss: just like that, he dropped down, dead.

The remaining men fled while the mayor himself stood grimly watching it all. One of the fleeing men brayed that Tauk had not fought, that he'd mistaken him for a warrior, once. Tauk yelled back he'd given
them
no order to fight and could not govern the wits of a determined fool.

Far Gaze fled the glen. The mayor's men found him later, the group of them panting, wounded and frightened, almost having forgotten the possibility of Tormentors in the area.

All these things happened in a different order each time Far Gaze (and the other men) tried to remember them. Chronology resumed again from that point on: the mayor and the man who'd yelled at him, off having quiet words away from the group. Which was to say the mayor himself doing the talking, and offering the man the chance to reappraise whether Tauk was a warrior or not, with sword in hand, right now, one of Tauk's arms injured or not. The chastised man hung his head, bent to one knee, offered his neck, a gesture Far Gaze had not
witnessed before but which made sense to him, with what else he knew of Tanton's warrior culture. After that, it appeared all was forgiven between them.

The group of them went back to the glen, having vowed to slay the strange people, despite whatever magic they wielded. ‘Are you with us?' Tauk demanded of Far Gaze, his remaining men pressing in around him with weapons at hand.

Far Gaze met the mayor's eye, solemnly agreed he was with them, meaning only to follow at a safe distance then take the valuables from their foolish corpses. Perhaps he'd take Tauk's head too, with spells of preservation upon it in the same way one preserved meat on journeys. He envisioned going to High Cliffs or maybe Yinfel, burying the head nearby, asking a price for the mayor of Tanton's head, receiving scoffs and astronomical offers. Then after a day or two's rest, he'd return with the head and collect. A debt was a debt.

But in the glen there was no second battle, for there was no sign of the other peoples. Except for the one slain, who lay with arms arranged in a way clearly deliberate: one flat by his side, palm down, the other across his chest. Five strangely coloured flowers had grown about his head of a kind Far Gaze had not before seen.

More surprisingly, Siel lay nearby, but not as she'd lain before. Her hair was dirty with dried blood, but she was quite alive. She peered groggily at the men as would a drunkard. She tried to speak but, like a drunkard, threw up instead down the front of her shirt then fell back again, sleeping. Gorb had not yet woken from his poisoned slumber and lay exactly as everyone had left him, none the wiser.

Upon seeing Siel, Far Gaze was surprised by the quick bloom of joy that went through him – surprised, that is, by its intensity,
which easily countered the disappointment he'd felt to learn that there'd be no trip north or east with the head of Tauk the Strong. (At least not without bringing the rest of him too, alive and well.)