* * * *
Garance dreamed.
The night was bitterly cold and the few stars left in the sky gave no warmth. A pale moon hung ghost-like on the rim of the mountains and the forest quivered with the presence of evil. She left her mat in the room before the great hearth, left the fidgeting, muttering bundles of men, women and children asleep or silently watching and listening. She floated up through the oak-beamed roof, past the charms and incantations and out into the night sky. When she first began to dream, the air had been electric with the crisscrossing dreams of unknown, unseen dreamers, but as the years had gone by, the dreams grew rarer, as the dreamers were one after another swallowed up by the darkness. Now, Garance skimmed the high air alone, searching for a familiar voice. She had heard it once, and she was certain it was real and not a figment of her imagination. She searched for it now, knowing that the end was upon them all, and this was the only way out.
She soared high above the forest of pines and junipers, their perfume lost in the glacial air, and she listened with all her senses. She had lost touch with every carnal sensation except the sense that would pick up the vibrations of another dream. Her fingers and toes were numb with the cold that was sinking needle claws into her ears and nose. She could feel the darkness below her, hear the terrified howling of the great, prehistoric dogs and sense the emptiness where warm-blooded creatures should have been.
Suddenly she felt the tingling shock wave of a dream and the sensation of recognition. After so many years, she scarcely dared hope, but all her maternal instincts told her that Carla’s dreamself was finally within reach. Garance shot higher into the sky, aiming for the pale, solitary stars, searching among the rarified lights and the empty paths between them, for a sign of her daughter.
A roar of rage and frustration rose from the dark, dead forest below, a surge of the deeper darkness as it slopped like an oozing tide of putrefaction over the walls of the Dzong.
Garance woke—or perhaps only ever half woke—with the shock. A bond, stronger than she had realized until that last, hopeless instant, was pulling her back to be with Tenzin.
Her eyes still full of the last valiant stars, Garance struggled to understand the chaotic scene before her eyes. Tenzin and the last of his fellow monks, their staffs held before them, formed a barrier between the terrified huddle of families and the gray-faced refugees. Someone threw more logs into the fireplace, and the flames blazed brighter, pushing back the shadows. But the dead eyes of the sinister newcomers reflected no light. They crouched, grinning with mad eyes, and as Tenzin turned to bark an order to the peasants to push their children to the back, the gray-faced strangers sprang. A woman screamed as her child was torn from her arms, the child, frozen with fear, made no sound as the gray man dashed its head against the wall. Old Prakash lashed at the gray no-longer-man with his staff before he was overwhelmed by three more.
Struggling to distinguish between the horrors of two worlds, Garance groped about for a weapon to try to beat off the old monk’s aggressors. But she was still half in her dream, unable to tear her attention away from the howling and screaming of the darkness that was rolling over the walls of the fortress like a rogue wave. Shadows danced on the walls, muddling her vision, and the screams of the refugees were a pale echo of the anguish of the dying world that filled her ears.
Although Garance was only half in the dying world of the Dzong, Wormwood’s creatures felt her presence, and their cold blood boiled with hatred. When his assailants had finished with Prakash, they turned to her in triumph, blood-spattered and insane. Garance barely saw them, her eyes struggling to focus on the bloody heap that had been the beating heart of the Dzong for so many years. But Tenzin read the murder in their dead eyes, and he leaped toward them, swinging his staff. A skull cracked, ribs snapped, but the ragged, half-starved creatures would not lie still.
“Go,” Tenzin told her. “Go, while you still can, while there are still stars to see by!”
His voice dragged Garance back to the temple in the citadel and its horror, but her eyes were so full of tears, the face of the monk was just a moving blur as he laid about him with his staff, dark red robes whirling in the firelight. Tenzin knew! He knew about the star paths. Perhaps he too could walk there!
“Tenzin, come with me!”
Garance could not make out his features, just the dark pits of his eyes that she knew, without being able to see them, were full of love and compassion—not just for her, but for his people, the peasant men and women, their children and babies. She saw his head shake, and she knew he would not leave.
“Go,” he shouted again and dragged her to her feet. “Fly! Live!”
Tenzin let go her arm but the upward movement continued, and through her tears Garance could make out the blinking of stars.
The roof had gone, and the dream reclaimed her, closed back around her as she rose through the temple, through the echoing walls of the citadel and high above the stricken Dzong. She tried to resist—to turn back—but something stronger than instinct, stronger even than friendship drew her into a dream, drew her higher toward the stars.
The foul voices in the darkness reached her even where she sped along the path of the stars—triumphant, cruel, merciless voices. Garance stopped her ears but still she heard the brief, helpless screaming of the last refugees.
Tenzin!
Garance thought her heart had stopped with grief and terror, but the dream held her, drew her higher, until a song thrust itself upon her, and she unstopped her ears. Then she saw the brightness above, like a falling star, and the blackness about it, smothering it and the song. Her dreamself heard a scream—“Mamma!” And a farther pinpoint of light that was her daughter quivered and trembled with distress. Garance plunged upwards, into the blackness that threatened to engulf the singer and his song, tearing through the clinging shrouds of slime that hissed and liquefied at her touch, until she reached the struggling brightness, touched a hand then drew it after herself and into somebody else’s dream.
Garance, the double star, hurtled toward the streak of light that was Carla’s outstretched hand. Behind her, a second wave of darkness rose out of the threshing black sea below and tried to engulf her stream of brightness. The slime fell back with a hiss of disappointment and the clamor of the drax rose to a paroxysm of terror as the wave crashed over them. Carla’s hand wrapped around hers, and she hung on tightly as Carla swung her high into the sky, the singer’s star that she had plucked from the night safe in her orbit. Garance let herself be led back across the star path to the safe place where Carla’s starlit murmurings told her she and Tully lay sleeping.
Garance turned and stared back along the star path, and heard more than she saw, the end of the monastery on the hilltop. Tenzin’s last words echoed in her head and through her grief she struggled to obey. She would live, she would gather up the souls of all the dead and carry them with her. She would not let their souls die. Bright lights continued to dart skywards and fall back like spent rockets, and Garance gathered them all up, until the sad song of the dying Earth faded into silence.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kat and Tancred
Across the deeply sleeping shapes of Carla and Tully, Kat caught Tancred looking at her. She felt her face burning, but she held his gaze.
“Is there still no change?” he murmured.
Kat shook her head. “Wherever they are, it’s no picnic. But they’re alive, and their pulses are steady.”
Tancred nodded. “Where’s Jeff?”
“He said he was taking the beast hunting. Just got tired of waiting about, I think.”
Tancred nodded again, then glanced about quickly, as if checking that they really were alone. He settled down next to Kat. “I’m sorry,” he began.
“For what?” The words came out sharper than she had intended.
“For being a source of discord between you and Jack.”
Kat took a deep breath. “Jack has no right to get so…possessive. It isn’t
as if he owns me. We hardly know one another, after all.”
“No, but there is something between you, isn’t there?”
Kat raised her eyes from her lap and looked into Tancred’s. They were deep brown in the pale light from the campfire, and earnest. Kat saw dependability in them, and strength. She felt a warmth emanating from him and a sensitivity that made him hold back his own feelings rather than cause hurt. Jack was wrong, she thought. There was nothing soft about Tancred, nothing cringing and unmanly. He simply didn’t want anyone to get hurt. She settled back against the tree trunk and held out her cold hands to the flames.
“I was a student when the Abomination struck. I had somebody, you know, the way lots of students do. Neither of us knew if it was the real thing. I can’t remember now if I even hoped it was. It was just fun while it lasted. I don’t know what happened to him. Dead probably, like everybody else.”
Tancred reached out a hesitant hand, slid it over Kat’s shoulder and let it rest gently at the nape of her neck. She shot him a quick, grateful smile.
“Anyway, I lived for five years in a sort of Purgatory. It was hellish, but it wasn’t Hell. I knew that. Hell was what was on the way. The Burnt Man was bringing it. For five years I half-lived, survived, with no clear idea why. The men used us like prostitutes, and in exchange, we were allowed to live.”
Tancred winced and his fingers massaged the tense muscles of her neck as if he would like to soothe all the hurt away. He shook his head. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes I do,” Kat said quietly, and she went on with her story. “I’d looked after Jeff since he was a little kid, and I could see how he was changing, getting as brutish as the others. And I wondered how long it would be before he…before he was treating the girls the same way as Ace and the rest of them. When it was obvious that we were all sterile, that no children were ever going to be born or even conceived, I didn’t know whether to feel relief or despair. Can you imagine that? Of course, it was a relief to know that at least no babies would have to suffer the horror of what passed for our daily lives, but it also meant that we were finished. Humanity was as good as extinct.”
Tancred hung his head, as if bowed down by guilt. Tenderness overwhelmed Kat, understanding that he was feeling guilt that he had not suffered like she had, guilt that there was still a chance his world would not die too.
“When Carla and Tully arrived, they woke us up—me and the other girls—and made us cast off our protective shells. It was painful at first, to feel the insults and humiliations just like in the early days, but at least I began to feel like a human being again. Then they got Jack out of his cell.” She grinned, and her face lit up. “It was like he didn’t know it was the end of the world. He just sat there, cracking jokes and singing, with the Burnt Man breathing down our necks and the hounds of Hell baying at our heels. Of course I was drawn to him! He was the prince who woke me from an enchanted thousand-year sleep with the story about his Uncle Dinny and the blind dog in Dooley’s bar.”
Tancred gave a wry smile. “So, there is something between you.”
Kat took Tancred’s hand in both of hers, and she looked into his eyes. “I am twenty-seven years old, more or less, and back there I felt like a hag of a hundred, used and broken by what I’d suffered. It was wonderful to think that somebody saw me as something more desirable. But since I’ve been here, I’ve felt more like an ignorant adolescent who has no experience of life at all. I don’t know what I feel anymore.” She hung her head hoping to hide her confusion behind her thick auburn hair.
Tancred raised a hand and gently smoothed the hair from her cheek. “You have no experience of life. Not real life, what it means to respect and trust and…love. You have it all to learn. Perhaps, here…” The hand rested against her cheek, waiting for Kat to meet his eyes. At last, she raised her head, and as she looked at him, the fine, tanned face, brown hair and eyes, the earnest, open expression, offering her anything she cared to ask for, she started to fall. Tancred’s lips parted in a smile, and Kat raised her hand to touch his cheek.
“Perhaps.”
A green branch exploded in the fire, sending out a shower of sparks, and they both started. Kat sighed. “Fine pair of sentries we make. I haven’t paid any attention to the forest for hours.”
Tancred sat up straighter as he let go of the moment of tenderness. “Tomorrow, as long as Yvain received our message, we will meet up with the others at the World Tree. If all goes well”—he cast a troubled glance at Carla and Tully—“there is a chance that the plan will succeed. If not, we have only a few hours left.”
“Before we meet Jack?”
“Before the Apocalypse. Before the end. Kat…?” Tancred’s arm dropped around her shoulders and pulled her closer. For an answer, Kat raised her face and offered her lips. Tancred’s kiss was soft and full of tenderness, though Kat knew that they were both straining against the desire to melt into an embrace that would carry them across the agonizing brink of impending disaster. Only their responsibility for the sleeping shapes beneath the trees kept them apart.
Jeff burst through the scrubby hazel thicket at the edge of the campsite, Dusty bounding joyously ahead, and Kat and Tancred separated reluctantly. Jeff’s eyes went straight to the sleeping couple, but before he could ask, Tully stirred and muttered, and the scattering of dry leaves next to Carla fluttered and rustled as if caught in a strong wind. Kat squeezed Tancred’s hand in excitement as Tully opened a hand and, stretching his fingers wide, turned, still sleeping, to face Carla. Kat’s gaze was fixed on the space next to Carla, where a strange breeze blew away all the dead leaves. Then the dry grass beneath bent and flattened and a depression formed, as if somebody had been lying there. She turned to Tancred in awe as the depression clouded and filled and became a human shape—a sleeping woman.
* * * *
Erelah half turned her head from her contemplation of the dark, humming hole in space, and she raised her hand.
“Listen.”
Rajeev dragged himself out of his dreams of what might lie at the end of the tunnel, if it even was a tunnel and not just some infernal shredding machine. His lids were heavy with weariness, and his ears rang with the howling of the wind and the creatures outside, the cracking of rocks and the terrifying slopping, slithering sound of the slime.
“Listen!”
He struggled to pay attention, and with a jolt, he realized that his ears were empty. The noises in his head were memories, echoes. He could hear nothing—just silence. A silence deeper than any non-sound he had ever heard. The world was truly empty, then. And even the creatures from Hell were silent.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
Erelah turned her eyes toward him, eyes that were as deep as the humming tunnel but blue as the world that was lost.
“It’s over,” she said and licked her dry lips. “The dreamers have all gone. I am the only one left.”
Rajeev felt cold. His teeth began to chatter. He looked across at the bundle of blankets where his brother muttered in a feverish sleep. He could see nothing ahead. Time had ceased to exist because there was no future, just a cold emptiness. He looked helplessly at Erelah, clinging to the fragile hope that she would have the words to fill it.
“There was a place where there was still hope. Somewhere far away. A secret place.” Erelah’s eyes misted over, and Rajeev longed to be able to see what she saw. Then maybe he would believe.
“But it’s gone?” he whispered.
Tears glittered in the blue of Erelah’s eyes, and she nodded.
“The Earth belongs to the souleaters now.”
“We’re the last of all.” It wasn’t a question. Rajeev only had Erelah to answer his questions, and he knew her answer to most of them. They were alone.
“It’s soon now,” Erelah said.
For Erelah, somewhere time marched on. She had seen it, the place. And she really believed it existed. Rajeev strained with all the hope he had left to believe in it too.
“Next, it’s the stars. When the last star falls, it will take us with it. The way will open, and it will be our turn.”
Her eyes glittered with excitement, but Rajeev gazed, with eyes too tired now for the lids to close, at the silent, still form that was his little brother Sanjay.
Chapter Thirty
Stars Fallen Back to Earth
When Garance woke, her face was wet with tears. Someone was holding her hand and her heart surged with relief. But even before she opened her eyes, the smell of cold, outdoor woodland, horses, campfire and stale sweat, told her she was not in the Dzong. The hand holding hers was not the one that had comforted her through the years of darkness. Part of her yearned to be back there, in the familiar warmth, with the quiet murmuring voices and the smell of animal wax candles, incense and chilies. But she knew there was no going back, and the knowledge was almost a physical pain. She could feel the emptiness that said the Dzong was dead.
She opened her eyes and gazed at her daughter, fighting with the conflicting sentiments that again brought tears to her eyes. She had found her Carla, at last! But did the overwhelming joy cancel out the agony of loss? She knew the answer. Nothing could ever totally heal the wound, nor would she want that. Healing meant in part forgetting, and she never wanted to forget Tenzin and what he had meant to her.
“Mamma?” Carla’s voice was anxious. “Mamma? Are you hurt?”
Garance shook her head and let the tears run unchecked from beneath her closed lids until there were none left. When it was over, she opened her eyes. Carla was looking at her, tears in her beautiful hazel eyes.
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