The Outcast

by Louise Cooper

  Cyllan’s sense of justice protested at the sweeping condemnation, but she bit her tongue. ‘What, then, do you think is the truth?’ she asked.

  Drachea shook his head. ‘Aeoris alone knows the answer to that!’ Reflexively he made the White God’s sign as a mark of respect, then continued, ‘You remember my telling you of the rumours rife in Shu? No word from the Castle, and a garbled tale of some trouble or danger in West High Land. This is the root of those rumours; it must be! There’s something evil afoot - I feel it - and I feel, too, that it’s of Tarod’s making.’

  Although deep down a part of her rebelled, Cyllan couldn’t in all conscience argue with him. Too much of what he said rang uncomfortably true - and she, too, sensed the pervading threat of something dark and unholy that haunted the Castle. But if some black purpose lay behind Tarod’s actions, she couldn’t begin to imagine what that purpose might be.

  Involuntarily, her gaze roamed to where old, discarded clothes lay on the window-ledge. The pouch containing her precious pebbles was among them; and it was possible, even here, that the old skills might work and allow her to uncover some clue to the mystery. But immediately, an inner voice said vehemently, no! She couldn’t do it - a primal and irresistible fear stood in her path. She didn’t have the courage, for fear of what she might see …

  Drachea, unaware of her dilemma, was staring moodily out of the window, and suddenly he said, ‘He spoke of a jewel … ‘

  Cyllan looked up. ‘A jewel? Yes, I recall it.’

  ‘A focus for the power that halted Time, he said. And it’s lost - or at least, wherever it is, he can’t reach it. And he needs it.’

  She laughed mirthlessly. ‘We need it too, Drachea, if we’re ever to leave this place!’

  ‘Do we?’ He hunched his shoulders like some bird of ill omen. ‘Or is that, too, a lie? We don’t know what that stone is or what it can do. If he retrieves it, with or without our aid, who’s to say what the consequences might be? The return of Time, and with it freedom - or something else; something too hideous to imagine?’ He faced her, eyes ablaze. ‘Are you willing to take that risk?

  Because I, for one, am not!’

  She didn’t answer him, and he crossed the room, brushing her out of his path. ‘Damn him!’ he said explosively. ‘If he thinks that I’ll sit meekly by, awaiting my fate at his hands, he’s wrong! The Castle might be abandoned, but its occupants haven’t disappeared entirely without trace.’ He indicated his own borrowed clothing. ‘There must be clues-documents, records, the gods alone know what else. And I’ll find them - Aeoris help me, I’ll find the answers to this mystery, and I’ll thwart him!’ He whirled. ‘Well? Are you coming with me, or d’you prefer to skulk here?’

  His stare reflected the half-pitying, half-contemptuous attitude of a high-ranking citizen towards the gutter-born, and Cyllan’s pride rebelled against his arrogance. ‘No,’ she replied with an icy edge to her voice. ‘I’d prefer to skulk here, as you term it!’

  ‘Do as you please.’ Drachea strode to the door and pulled it open. On the threshold he looked back, but she had turned her head away, and he went out into the corridor, leaving the door to slam ferociously behind him.

  When Drachea had gone, Cyllan shut her eyes tightly against the wave of bitter resentment that threatened to overtake every other thought. Drachea’s manner towards her was an insult - and she had to admit that it also hurt. The comradeship, the sense of fighting on the same side, that she might have hoped for in these straits was absent - instead, they seemed to be constantly at loggerheads. Drachea’s attitude had stung her pride to the core, and the same pride made her want to retaliate in some way; show him that she was more than an ignorant and worthless nonentity.

  She opened her eyes, and looked at the pouch of stones. The clues Drachea was so confident of finding were more likely to be found through a seer’s craft than through any haphazard physical exploration … if she could summon the courage to try.

  Obscure fears crowded her brain, arguing violently against the idea; this time, Cyllan forced them firmly into submission. She had never been a coward; she wasn’t hampered by the superstitious terrors of ordinary folk. What had she to be afraid of? Clenching her hands into determined fists, she moved towards the window-ledge.

  Her old clothes were sticky with dried salt, the leather pouch stiff and cracking. Cyllan shook the stones out into her palm and sat cross-legged on the floor. A familiar tingling sensation assailed the nape of her neck, a sure sign that her psychic senses were awakening; and the suddenness of it took her aback. It was almost as though some outside power were pulling at her, like a strung marionette. She closed her eyes, and instantly a darkness clouded her inner vision, a dense blackness which told her that her consciousness was giving way to something far deeper. The pebbles burned like ice crystals in her cupped hands; she focused the darkness, concentrated, pushing back the wave of sick fear …

  A tattoo of small, harsh sounds broke the silence as the stones scattered from her hands on to the floor, and Cyllan rocked back with a gasp. The psychic surge had come quickly, and its sheer strength astounded her. The room seemed to dip and recede momentarily as she opened her eyes, then her vision righted, and she looked down at the pattern the stones had formed.

  The largest pebble of all lay in the pattern’s exact centre. Around it, the others spiralled outwards to form seven uneven arms. The design was familiar - horribly familiar— and yet she couldn’t place it, couldn’t remember ‘Cyllan.’

  She cried out with shock and almost bit through her tongue as the strange, silver-edged voice spoke her name from empty air. And at the same instant she felt a terrible premonition; the grim certainty that something stood behind her, in the room, watching …

  Her throat was so constricted that she could barely breathe. And the room’s contours were changing, losing their solidity, growing alien and fearsome … Odd colours flickered at the borders of her perception, and she felt a chill which pervaded the air, sank into her bones … Savagely, struggling against the threat of blind terror, Cyllan forced her muscles to obey her and turned her head.

  The room was empty. Too empty … as though the real world had winked out of existence, stranding her in a half dimension of trickery and phantasm. And despite what her eyes told her, she could still sense the presence of another intelligence in the chamber. It watched her; she felt that it laughed at her inability to see … and she sensed a cold, sharp knife-edge of evil …

  A single clap of sound, so loud that it went beyond the threshold of hearing, smashed into her head. Through a daze of pain she saw the door to her room begin to undulate, warping into impossible shapes. An aura appeared around it like some nightmarish halo, wild colours agitating furiously and all but blinding her.

  Something was approaching; she felt it - something that could crush her out of existence as a careless child might crush an insect underfoot.

  With no warning the door disintegrated, and in its place was black light. Cyllan fought desperately against the terror of what she knew must be an appallingly powerful hallucination, but no amount of reason could combat the image of the not-quite-human figure which was slowly forming in the heart of the light, or the long, thin hand which reached out slowly, compellingly towards her.

  Cyllan screamed, and knew that no sound escaped her lips. Every muscle in her body locked into a rictus, and a single, vast spasm racked her from head to foot before she fell helplessly, unconscious, to sprawl among her scattered stones on the floor.

  Drachea’s heart was beating uncomfortably fast as he made his way down the wide sweep of the Castle’s main staircase. He was excited at the prospect before him, pleased with his decision to take positive action rather than passively awaiting developments; and yet the pleasure was heavily laced with apprehension which grew as he ventured further from the sanctuary of Cyllan’s room.

  Reaching the foot of the stairs he hesitated, looking carefully about to make sure there was no sign of Tarod.

  B
eyond the half-open doors the courtyard showed dim and uninviting, the blood-red glow intensified by the contrasting blackness of walls and flagstones, and Drachea’s courage began to slip. He wished - though nothing would have induced him to admit it to her - that Cyllan had accompanied him. He had dismissed her refusal carelessly, telling himself he had no need of help, but here alone in the gloomy silence the Castle felt threatening, an enemy only waiting for the right moment to strike at him.

  He was also anxious above all to avoid another encounter with Tarod. No amount of bravado could eclipse his fundamental fear of the Adept, and he imagined that Tarod wouldn’t look kindly on his attempt to unravel the Castle’s secrets. Memory of what had happened in the courtyard turned his stomach momentarily to water; with it came a resurgence of hatred, and when the sweating terror passed Drachea felt better, buoyed up by the anger which was beginning to germinate into a desire for revenge. Damn Cyllan - if she chose to skulk in that musty room, so be it! He’d find the answers he needed, and show her that a Margrave’s son had no need of a peasant-drover to champion him.

  He stepped outside, and glanced up at the Northern spire, jagged against the featureless pewter sky. The light in the topmost slit of a window was no longer visible, but Drachea suspected that Tarod was up in that room. All well and good - his own destination lay elsewhere, and the thought that he was unlikely to cross the Adept’s path bolstered his confidence.

  To the right of the steps which led down into the courtyard was a colonnaded walk, with a door at the far end. Odd, Drachea thought, that another way in to the Castle should exist so close to the main entry … it suggested some ulterior purpose.

  With a further, quick glance towards the spire he ran down the steps and along the walkway to the door. It opened easily when he lifted the latch, and he felt disappointed - surely, if it led somewhere significant, greater care would have been taken to protect it?

  Expecting perhaps nothing more than a storeroom, Drachea peered through - and saw a long, narrow corridor that led away, on a downward slope, seemingly into the bowels of the Castle. For the first twenty paces or so the crimson glow permeated, illuminating ancient stains of damp … then the passage was swallowed by darkness.

  The thought of venturing into the black unknown beyond the door was enough, at first, to sap Drachea’s resolve. If Cyllan had been with him -

  No, he told himself. He had no need of her. His eyes would grow accustomed to the darkness soon enough, and if, as he suspected, this passage led him closer to some of the Castle’s secrets, he might soon have a story to tell her that would open her eyes to the truth!

  Taking a deep breath - and disliking the old, musty smell that hung in the air-he stepped through the door, being careful to leave it wide open at his back. The floor of the passage was even enough, and as he advanced, his vision began gradually to adjust to the dark until he could just make out the dim contours of the walls ahead.

  They seemed to go on forever, and always downward … he hesitated, then pressed on, fighting down his unease.

  The soft sound of his padding footsteps became almost mesmeric as he made his way further along the corridor. Now and again some trick of acoustics almost convinced him that he heard another footfall at his back, fractionally out of synchronisation with his own. Once he stopped, quickly; thought he heard the illusory steps shuffle to a halt behind him, and sweat broke out on his forehead and neck. But when he turned, there was nothing to be seen …

  Imagination. The mind played all manner of tricks under such circumstances as these. There could be no ghosts here … Drachea continued on, resisting the temptation to whistle aloud as a boost to his courage - and suddenly the passage ended at the top of a flight of steps. He paused, feeling his way cautiously on to the first tread, and again looked over his shoulder. Nothing untoward …

  The stairs wound steeply down, and Drachea sensed that he was nearing his goal. Then he felt a surge of excitement as he saw that, ahead of him, the stairs terminated at another door.

  It stood open, as though someone had walked carelessly through it only moments before, and beyond it a trace of light faintly illuminated a large, vaulted room.

  Eagerly Drachea hastened through, and as he entered the vault he tripped over something lying on the floor, and went sprawling. He swore aloud - his voice echoed loudly, compounding the shock, and as he sat dazedly on the hard stone he realised what had brought him down.

  Books. Hundreds of them, scattered all over the flagstones. Wherever he looked, wherever he put his hands, there were tomes and manuscripts and rolled parchments, some whole, others split and separated.

  And in the faint glow that pervaded the room he could see shelves lining the walls, many of them broken, but a few still containing precariously balanced volumes which looked as though they might slip and crash down at the slightest provocation. It was as though some mad scholar had run riot in his own library …

  Of course - this was the Castle’s library! As the revelation struck him, Drachea immediately forgot his original intention, stunned by the awesome fact that, by sheer fortuitous accident, he had literally stumbled on the greatest storehouse of arcane knowledge in the world. He reached out and picked up the nearest of the fallen books, wincing as several damaged leaves came loose and fluttered to the floor. All the Circle’s secrets, its lore, its practices, revealed to his gaze with no one to forbid him … It was more than he could ever have dared to dream of!

  Drachea opened the book at random and pored over it. The script was closely written and hard to make out in the poor light, but he deciphered enough to set his pulse racing. Initiation rites - the formulae were all here; the prayers, the incantations - he snatched up another volume at random, turned the pages feverishly. This one was older, harder still to read … he put it aside, reached for one of the scrolls. Parchment, this: the ink so faded that he judged it had been written centuries ago, before the process of pulping wood to make a finer medium had been invented and had replaced the use of animal skin … almost reverently, Drachea placed it with the first tome, then stood up, looking wildly about him.

  He could spend a lifetime here. He could study year after year, until he was grey with age, and still never slake his thirst for occult knowledge. Envy of the Initiates who had free run of this unbelievable place filled him - and then he checked himself, almost laughing at his own absurdity. He had the run of the library now there was no Circle to stand in his way! Only one man, and however high an Adept he might be, there were ways and means to outwit him. Even if Tarod used the library for his own purposes, he wouldn’t miss a few volumes from among the chaos. And in the sanctuary of one of the Castle’s upper rooms, Drachea could absorb this fabulous knowledge at his leisure.

  Cyllan was forgotten; their predicament was forgotten. Drachea began to search through the books, gathering up those which seemed to hold the most promise, until he had as many as he could carry. He straightened, face flushed with exertion and excitement - and froze as he heard the sound of footsteps from beyond the vault.

  Several books fell from his arms to the floor, and the noise they made brought him out in a cold sweat. The footfalls were coming from the stairway beyond, slow, measured, echoing faintly. Tarod - it had to be!

  Drachea’s triumph crumbled before the thought of what the Adept might do to him if he discovered his presence here, and frantically he looked around for a hiding place. At first the library seemed to hold no hope - then he saw a door, low and insignificant, half hidden in an alcove between two rows of shelves. The books forgotten, he ran towards it… and as he reached it the footsteps faded away into silence.

  Drachea stopped, feeling the icy crawl of gooseflesh on his skin. Human footfalls didn’t simply die away like that. Someone had been approaching, had almost reached the bottom of the stairs - they couldn’t just vanish!

  Eyes wide, he looked towards the stairs, dimly visible beyond the vault entrance. No shadow moved, and the silence was absolute. Fear began to flowe
r into panic, and he found himself involuntarily backing away, until he collided with the small door. It sprang open, making him yell with shock, and he stumbled through.

  He was in a long, narrow passage which sloped steeply down before him. The faint light that filtered throughout the vault was stronger, as if its source lay somewhere in that corridor, and a violent shudder racked Drachea, a twisting terror that he couldn’t name, but which eclipsed all other sensation.

  Something lurked at the invisible end of the passage.

  He felt it, a palpable presence … and it was slowly moving towards him. A soft sound, like an echo of not quite human laughter, seemed to reverberate in his head and he backed away, aware of bile rising in his throat and striving to force it back. He could see nothing, but he knew it was there … a presence, a monstrously evil presence …

  The faintest of breaths brushed past his face, and Drachea’s self-control snapped. Whatever might await him on the stairs, it was as nothing compared to the unknown horror beyond this door - and he ran like a hunted animal, hurling himself across the vault and through the arched doorway. On the stairs he fell, scrambled to his feet, raced on and upward, while blind panic overcame all else. Nothing stood in his way, no one appeared suddenly from the shadows to confront him, and at last he burst out into the comparative brilliance of the courtyard, collapsing with a bone-jarring momentum that scraped the skin from his knees and hands.

  Drachea rolled over and staggered to his feet, leaning against one of the pillars of the colonnade for support while he fought to get his breath back. The empty courtyard felt bleaker and more menacing than ever; shadows beyond the reach of the blood-red glow seemed to his overworked imagination to form lurking, threatening shapes. He shuddered, shutting his eyes against unwanted images, and forced himself to gulp stale air into his lungs. His pulse began to slow, and eventually he opened his eyes again, feeling in better control.