by Darius Hinks
‘It’s for that reason that we wanted your help,’ said Finavar.
Mälloch looked at the doorway. It was straining and groaning under a great weight. ‘I can hold them off for a while, but I must return to my kin.’ A shadow passed across his face. ‘We are sorely pressed.’
‘It’s not the door that we need help with,’ said Finavar, his eyes sparkling. ‘I have a plan to end this battle.’ He glanced at Caorann and the pouch at his belt. ‘We just need to make our way downriver.’
Mälloch noticed the direction of Finavar’s gaze. ‘What have you taken from–’ he cut himself off abruptly. ‘What do you mean make your way downriver?’
Alhena strode forwards with her chin raised and a defiant look on her face. ‘We mean to jump into the falls, sail down the River Saros and destroy that monster.’
Even Mälloch could not hide his surprise. ‘Jump into the falls?’ He glanced at the torrent thundering past them. ‘Jump?’
Caorann laughed. ‘I thought you had met Fin before. He is prone to this kind of thinking.’
Mälloch ignored him and kept his gaze locked on Finavar. ‘And you think I can help?’
Finavar nodded at the other spellweavers, just visible through the falls. ‘You have been hurling things into the falls already. I saw from down in the valley. You were making cages of roots and vines.’ He stepped closer to the ancient noble. ‘You could do the same with us. You could encase us in a cage that is bound by the power of the forest. You could guard us against the fall. You could shield our bodies by–’
Mälloch held up a hand. ‘Perhaps we could.’ He frowned in disbelief. ‘Perhaps. But, even if you survived, what hope would you have against that creature? Have you seen what the Plague God has sent against us? It’s a living mountain, filled with disease and magic. It would crush you.’
Finavar pointed to the pouch at Caorann’s belt. ‘We have borrowed a gem called the Cythral Star. It is one of the seeds sown by the gods at the–’
‘I know of the Cythral Star,’ interrupted Mälloch. He looked furious again. ‘It is not a toy. And it is not something to be wasted. What use would there be in reforesting this valley when it is full of the enemy? They would simply corrupt every shoot that springs forth. We would do better to save such a treasure until we are sure of victory and then use it to recreate our home.’
‘I mean to sow it inside the beast.’ Finavar was unable to hide his excitement. ‘I mean to plant life inside the monster.’
Mälloch looked away, pondering Finavar’s words. ‘Inside the monster.’ He nodded, slowly. ‘I see. You would unleash all the force of creation. Within its flesh.’
Finavar grinned.
‘But then its power will be spent,’ continued Mälloch. ‘We will have nothing to use once this war is over.’
Finavar shook his head. ‘Can’t you see what’s happening down there? If we don’t act now, our only army will be destroyed – drowned while we stand here debating a victory that will never come.’
Mälloch studied Finavar for a moment, then nodded. ‘I knew, from the first moment I met you, that you had some great doom hanging over you. Whether it is for good or ill, I still can’t be sure.’ He stepped to the edge of the precipice and looked down through the thrashing spray. Finavar had the impression that his old eyes could see further and more clearly than his own.
‘I cannot place you, Finavar,’ continued Mälloch, ‘but I have not forgotten that you once saved my life – and that I almost cost you yours.’ He looked around at the others. ‘I cannot guarantee that you will survive.’ His gaze came to rest on Sibaris. ‘Are you all sure that you wish to join him in this lunacy?’
One by one they all said yes and Mälloch nodded, obviously unsurprised. ‘May the gods watch over you.’
Chapter Nine
Chants and invocations broke through the din. The roar of the falls, this close, was ear-splitting, so Finavar could only catch the odd word, but the voices of the spellweavers were power-laden and full of menace. The others wardancers were with him and Mälloch had done as he promised – binding them all into a cage-like pod of living branches and roots. Finavar could feel tendrils snaking around his limbs and fastening him to the centre of the brittle mesh. He could see nothing but light. There was sunlight reflected off the face of the falls and magic blazing from the bark that held him in place. He could feel Caorann and the others pressed against him, but he could not see their faces.
The pod shifted, jolting forwards in time to a change in the song.
Then they were gone – launched into the falls with the force of a comet.
Water crashed through the branches, pummelling Finavar and the others as they fell. His stomach lurched as they were hurled towards the valley below and he thought for a moment that he was drowning. Water filled his eyes and his mouth and he tumbled so fast that he had no sense of direction.
Mälloch has failed, he thought as the water poured into his lungs. The idea seemed abstract and remote – Finavar felt vague surprise rather than any fear. The ancient noble had always seemed so infallible.
Then his ears filled with a dry, brittle, crunching sound – like acorns crushed underfoot. He could hear nothing else for a while, but he felt the walls of the wooden cage being torn away from him. The sound became white noise and then a thin whistle, like a child’s toy.
The screeching sound knifed into his mind and the world turned dark.
Finavar’s lungs dragged him back to consciousness – filling his chest with screaming, desperate pain. He kicked his legs wildly in the darkness, fighting for life. As he moved, sensations returned to him. He felt cold, biting into his bones. Then he realised that he could feel other limbs than his own. Feet and fists were pounding against him in a desperate bid for life.
Finavar strained against his bonds, screaming silently into the black depths. It was no use. Mälloch had bound them tightly to the cage and now they were drowning in it. As he thrashed and kicked uselessly against his bonds Finavar sensed that they were sinking – dropping further towards the riverbed. His mind began to slip away, starved of oxygen. He saw shapes up ahead – weeds, he guessed, drifting across the riverbed, but as he studied them they became scenes from his youth. He saw Caorann as a child, chasing him through the forest, laughing with innocent pleasure.
The pain in Finavar’s lungs began to fade too and he realised that his death was perhaps not so awful after all. He raced after Caorann, passing through the forgotten glades of his childhood, sprinting lightly along branches and paths.
Then he saw another face – Ordaana, lying calmly and easily to Elatior’s courtiers – slandering him so that he would die in her stead. She has to be stopped, he thought. I have to stop her. Panic gripped him and he kicked his legs again. Perhaps he could break the cage on the riverbed? He pushed his legs through the wall of the cage and kicked furiously, using his final reserves of strength.
The cage reached the riverbed but, rather than smashing against it, it broke through it. Finavar realised with delight that he had been disorientated and the cage had actually been racing up, towards the surface of the water. The shapes he had mistaken for weeds were clouds, drifting across the sky. He coughed and spluttered as the cage burst from the depths in an explosion of foam.
He heard wild cries of relief from the others as the cage was caught by the current and thrown downriver. Then he was deafened by the water again. Mälloch’s cage was lifted up by the River Saros and hurled like an unwanted gift, tumbling and spinning across the surface of the water.
Finavar rolled and fell in a confused jumble of limbs, cracking his face repeatedly against the branches that held him safe. As they flew downriver he glimpsed terrible scenes on either side. They had already been washed far away from the Crowfoot Falls and deep into the heart of the daemon army. The riverbanks were teeming with flies, crows and lurching, one-eyed monsters. Finavar felt bile rise into his throat as he saw the beings that had destroyed his home. They were the same po
t-bellied oafs he had seen at the Chains of Vaul, but now they were moving in their thousands. His mind reeled at the scale of the invasion and he wondered where they could have all come from. Had they sprung from the earth, like a fungus? Then he noticed that many of them still had scraps of asrai robes dangling from their atrophied limbs and he had his answer. These wretched legions were the infected, animated corpses of his own kin.
The cage rolled again and Finavar was plunged back beneath the water. When he next emerged, breaking from the surface with another choking gasp, he cursed in shock. Up ahead of him, blocking out the whole horizon, was a vast mountain of grey, puckered flesh. The cage was racing straight towards the giant daemon that was damming the valley. In a few more minutes they would smash into its rolls of blighted, discoloured flesh.
‘Kick!’ he cried, looking back into the cage.
The other three were still there, looking back at him with dazed, bloodstained faces.
‘We must reach the riverbank!’
They stared at him with incomprehension for a moment, then leapt to obey, kicking furiously through the side of the cage, driving it from the centre of the river to the calmer currents.
To Finavar’s relief, they were successful. Some subtlety of Mälloch’s art had made the pod unnaturally buoyant and, a few minutes later, it came aground on a patch of gravel, beneath an overhanging lip of turf.
As soon as the pod rolled from the water it unfurled, spewing its dazed passengers into the shallows.
They floundered for a moment, splashing, coughing and cursing. Then Caorann looked around in disbelief and began laughing.
Finavar followed his gaze to see what had amused him. He could not see up around the overhanging lip of turf, but he could see the far side of the river with horrible clarity. The army of daemons looked like another river, but one made of tusks, worm-eaten blubber and rusty iron swords.
‘How boring life was without you around, Finavar,’ Caorann said, wiping blood from his face and swaying unsteadily in the water.
‘Keep your voice down!’ hissed Alhena, nodding at the ledge of soil hanging over their heads. ‘We may not have been seen.’
Finavar saw that she could be right. The daemons wading through the flooded valley were fixated on their strange work. As they headed towards the falls, they were writing in sodden ledgers, recording the details of each diseased corpse that drifted past them or picking objects from the ground and stashing them in jars and mouldering pouches. None of them had looked in their direction or, if they had, they did not show any interest in them.
Finavar backed into the shadows beneath the ledge, climbed up onto a rock and summoned the others to his side. The outcrop extended for forty feet or so in each direction and he decided that they were hidden for the moment. He could hear daemons wading past nearby, speaking garbled gibberish and occasionally pausing to clang a broken bell.
The other three waded through the water and climbed up beside him on the rock. Caorann had stopped laughing and for a moment they were all busy examining their new set of bruises. Once they had all realised, to their amazement, that they had not broken anything, they turned expectantly to Finavar.
For a moment he was unsure why they were staring at him, then he realised that they were waiting to hear the next part of his plan. He looked out across the river, in the direction of the huge monster they had come to destroy.
This close up, it was impossible to look at the thing in its entirety. His eyes skipped over its sagging, honeycombed flesh, refusing to pause on any one detail for too long. However hard he tried, he simply could not bear to look at it, but even half-glimpsed, the size of it was terrifying. The others were still watching him, waiting for his response. What was he going to say? He had been so fixed on the idea that they could reach the daemon by sailing down the centre of the river; he had not actually considered what they would do then. He ran over the situation in his head – they had the seed of a forest and needed to implant it inside the daemon, but there was no way they could risk getting close. Of course! The answer hit him. He tried to look calm as he explained it, so that it might seem as though it had been his plan all along.
‘We need a bow and a high vantage point,’ he said, nodding at the pouch containing the Cythral Star. ‘That daemon has a mouth even bigger than Caorann’s. It will be an easy enough target. All I have to do is uncover the emerald as I shoot the arrow. By the time it hits home, it will already be reacting to the sunlight.’
Caorann nodded sagely. ‘And of course, you remembered to bring a bow.’
Finavar clenched his jaw.
Alhena shook her head impatiently. ‘What does it matter? Can we not fletch an arrow? Do we lack the skill to make a simple bow?’ She looked around at the crumbling riverbank. ‘We’ll only need one good shot.’ She was still manic with loss and desperation and, as the others looked on in surprise, she began clawing furiously at the mud.
Sibaris looked pained as he watched her, his eyes full of sympathy and love, and Finavar saw that his suspicions had been correct – they were either lovers already or they soon would be. If he could keep them both alive.
He looked at Caorann and saw that he was watching Alhena with a wary expression, as though she were demented.
Finavar found her rabid movements just as unnerving and he was about to demand she stop when she hissed with pleasure and wrenched a broken stick from the mud.
‘This will do it,’ she said, holding the stick up into the light. ‘This will do it!’
Finavar saw to his surprise that she was right. It would not make the long, recurved bow he was used to, but it was the right shape to make a small bow – like something made for a child.
‘It will,’ he replied, and she gave him a wild, trembling grin.
‘A knife,’ she muttered, reaching beneath the water to search her belt and loincloth.
‘Here,’ said Sibaris, still looking concerned for her as he handed her a short blade.
She set to work and Caorann raised his eyebrows. ‘It looks like you’ll need an arrow then.’
As Alhena worked at the bow, the others scoured the mud for more sticks, looking for anything straight enough to make an arrow. They unearthed a pitiful-looking collection, but Finavar chose the best of a bad bunch and handed three of them to Alhena.
She finished her bow with some thread from her clothes and then turned her attention to the arrows. She used some pieces of flint for the heads and finished them off by snatching some feathers from Caorann’s sodden blue locks and using them as the flights. Finally, she closed her eyes, pressed the pieces of wood to her lips and prayed to the trickster god for luck.
Then she handed them to Finavar.
The whole thing had taken a few minutes and they all looked at Alhena in shock, taken aback by her furious industriousness.
Finavar smiled at her. ‘Not all the riches of this forest can be found in silver trees.’
To his amazement, Alhena blushed. Then she regained her usual, unhinged glare and stepped closer to him. ‘When this is done, you will tell me everything you know.’
Finavar nodded, almost as scared of her as he was of the grotesque mound behind him.
‘Right,’ he said, looking up at the outcrop. ‘I will need a clear shot and a few seconds to take it.’ He turned to Caorann. ‘Hand me the pouch. Carefully.’
Caorann unclasped the pouch, tested its weight in his hand, to see if it still held the emerald, then handed it to Finavar.
Finavar carefully removed the outer layers and knotted the remaining piece of cloth to the shaft of an arrow, just below the flint. Then he asked Sibaris for his knife. ‘I’ll cut the knot as I shoot. The pouch will fall away as the arrow flies, but hopefully the stone won’t react until after it reaches its target.’
He looked up at the slope. It was about seven feet high and they would be able to climb it in a few bounds. ‘We climb up, break cover at the same moment and, as I prepare to shoot, you fend off whatever comes my way.�
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‘And then?’ asked Sibaris, looking doubtful.
Finavar shrugged. ‘And then we dive into the river and swim as fast as we can.’
‘Which way?’ asked Sibaris.
Caorann laughed. ‘He doesn’t know! He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, even if this works.’ He patted Sibaris on the shoulder. ‘Just swim. And maybe pray. Don’t worry about anything else.’
Sibaris nodded, looking even more concerned than before, but Alhena rounded on him with blazing eyes and gripped his shoulders. ‘It will work. We will live. The forest will live.’
Sibaris drew back his shoulders and lifted his chin, looking more convinced. ‘The forest will live,’ he repeated.
Finavar waited until they were all looking his way again, and then said: ‘On the count of three…’
The muddy bank was slippery and uneven, but the wardancers moved with all their usual grace – bounding easily up onto the ledge. After that, everything happened very fast.
Finavar sensed a great deluge of figures rushing towards them, but he did not look at them – knowing that his only hope was in the bravery of his friends and the accuracy of Alhena’s little bow.
There was an explosion of belching cries from somewhere to his right and he heard blades cutting through flesh, but he kept his eyes locked on the mountain-sized daemon.
He nocked the arrow, whispered a prayer and stared into the monster’s mouth.
As he took in the full horror of it, his mind threatened to collapse.
He hesitated, unable to shoot.
‘Fin!’
Caorann’s voice seemed to come from a thousand miles away, but the fear in it jolted Finavar into action.
He loosed the arrow and, as he saw it fly, he let out a gasp of relief.
It was only then that he realised he had forgotten to slice open the pouch.
As the arrow arced over the river towards its target, the Cythral Star was still wrapped tightly in cloth, untouched by the sun.
For a moment, Finavar was too stunned to act.