Orion: The Tears of Isha

by Darius Hinks

  ‘Yes!’ gasped Clara, reaching out to grab the glittering shape. Her fingers clutched air and she saw that the spirit was back beneath the canopy of the trees.

  ‘What did you see?’ asked the youth, with the same scheming expression on his face. He held his hands over his head and spread out his fingers. ‘Was it, by any chance, a great, white stag?’

  For a moment, Clara was too shocked to speak. Then she nodded. ‘How do you know? Was that you? Did you come to me in another guise? Are you the spirit of the forest?’

  The golden youth looked suddenly demure, looking away with a coy expression. ‘In a sense.’

  Clara grabbed her crook and raced back towards the forest. ‘Then you could make me human again!’

  The spirit slipped away into the trees, with Clara staggering after.

  ‘There might be a way,’ said the voice, becoming a tumble of leaves again.

  ‘Wait! Show me!’ cried Clara as her frail shape was swallowed by the gloom of the forest.

  Chapter Ten

  Something was wrong. Drycha cursed as she waded through the mire, flexing her crooked claws; itching to lay them on the root of her pain. Flies gathered around her like mist, pluming in hollows and rolling over sunken paths. They looked like natural insects but Drycha was not so easily fooled. She knew the seasons too well. Autumn was turning to winter. Swarms of flies should not be whirring through the trees. As she squelched and popped through the mud, more of them erupted from the reeds, filling her eyes and gathering in her wooden mouth.

  There was a loathsome stink on the breeze but she waded on, undeterred, struggling through another waste-deep bog and climbing a small knoll for a better view. The plague of flies continued for as far as she could see, hazing the air and giving the vale an odd, ghostly pallor.

  ‘What is it? What do you see?’ Liris creaked and groaned as she followed, dragging her knotted bark up the slope, moving with a series of spasmodic jerks and bounds. ‘Fawn? Calf?’

  Drycha reached out, extending her wooden talons into the cloud of flies. She sent her mind coursing through roots and branches, feeling pain and confusion in every tendril she entered. ‘No.’ As she lowered her claw, her features cracked and folded into a grimace. ‘It is a bear.’

  Liris looked appalled as she reached her side.

  They both paused for a moment at the crest of the knoll, listening to the awful keening sound. It was a high-pitched, repetitive shriek, so loud that it sliced through even the din of the flies.

  Liris folded and unfolded her brittle limbs as she circled Drycha, making a clicking clacking sound. ‘What could have dragged such a sound from her? What could hurt her so?’

  Drycha shook her head. ‘The whole vale has become strange to me.’ Her voice was almost a whisper. ‘I can barely recognise it. There is growth where there should be decay and life where there should be death.’

  Liris snapped and cracked her limbs again, clearly distressed. ‘How can the forest be strange to you?’

  ‘He has done this.’ Drycha’s voice was full of venom. She hurried down the far side of the knoll and re-entered the bog with a splash.

  The sun was directly overhead by the time they found the bear and there were no shadows to spare them the horror of its plight.

  The animal was sprawled at the basin of a small gulley, half submerged in the mud and screaming like a hungry infant.

  Drycha and Liris paused a few feet away, too horrified to speak.

  The creature’s left side was intact, although partly hidden in the mud, but the other side of the animal was hideously transformed. Its fur had fallen away to reveal a mound of buboes and pustules. The bear’s flank had swollen into a bloated, angry-looking sack and beneath its skin Drycha and Liris saw shapes, swimming through the pus.

  The bear tried to rise as they approached, sensing danger, but it was too weak to move. The most it could do was glare at them and continue screaming.

  Tears tumbled down the ridges of Drycha’s face. She clawed at her own features, scraping bark from her cheeks and whispering a curse.

  Then she climbed down into the gulley and rushed to the bear’s side.

  It made a pathetic attempt to lash out as she approached but she easily dodged the blow, placing her knotted claws on its chest.

  As the animal struggled to raise its paw and lash out again, Drycha began to sing. Her voice was a dry, whispered drone, but the melody was gentle – a wordless lullaby, dragged from the nearby trees. The tune rustled from the copper-coloured leaves and caused the bear to slump back into the mud, finally ceasing its terrible screech.

  The bear lowered its paw and as its body relaxed it turned towards Drycha.

  She leant close to the creature’s ruined head and brushed her claws against the ragged wound. ‘Sleep, great spirit. Suffer no more.’

  The bear’s breathing began to slow.

  Liris was sobbing too, but she joined her voice to the rustling chorus and climbed down into the gulley.

  Drycha extended one of her arms with a series of cracking pops and cradled the animal’s head. Then she raised her other arm and placed it against the bear’s skull.

  ‘Sleep, old friend,’ she whispered. ‘Your rest is well-earned.’ As the words left her mouth, the arm she had placed against the bear’s skull formed into a sharpened thorn and shot forwards. There was a crunch of breaking bone and the animal stiffened, then its head dropped back into Drycha’s arm.

  The bear took one last, rattling breath and lay still.

  Drycha stared at the lifeless creature for a few seconds in silence, watching its blood pool around her knees. Then she leant back and screamed. She screamed with such ferocity that her neck splintered and vines fell from her trembling lips.

  Liris dropped to her knees to join her in her grief, and for a long time neither of them could do anything but weep.

  Finally, as the sun drifted across the sky and shadows began to stretch across the waterlogged glade, Drycha ceased her cries and lowered the bear’s head to the ground.

  ‘Not even in my darkest visions…’ Drycha’s words faltered as she tried to comprehend what she had just seen. She clutched her head in her hands. ‘Look at what they’ve done to us.’ Her voice cracked as she rose to he feet. ‘Look at what he has done to us.’

  Liris could not remove her eyes from the bear. ‘You think this is the work of Orion?’

  Drycha’s voice was as brittle as her twitching claws. ‘Who else? The trespasser king is more of a halfwit than we ever dreamt.’ She pointed at the infected corpse. ‘This is what we have kept buried for all those centuries. This is what he has unleashed on us. This is the result of his arrogance.’ She clawed at her own face again and her words became a jumble of incoherent curses. Then she closed her eyes and spoke with quiet passion. ‘The pain of our sister will be nothing to the agonies I will inflict on him.’

  She nodded at the bear’s corpse and raised her claws. With a thought, she formed them into razor-sharp blades. ‘We must remove this loathsome blight from her flesh. Her spirit is old and strong, and it will not rest for long. We must make sure she returns to us whole; free of this taint.’

  Liris nodded. There was a creaking sound as she transformed her own limbs into the same shape. Then there was a wet tearing sound as they began their work.

  They emerged from the gulley nearly an hour later, slick with blood and the remnants of burst pupae. Drycha pointed through the trees, to where the clouds of flies were at their most impenetrable. ‘The taint is strongest at the centre of the vale.’ She ran her tongue over her ridged lips, as though she could already taste violence. ‘It is one of the interlopers’ hovels. If the blight can overtake a spirit as noble as Ursa, think what it could do to the feeble souls of the outlanders.’

  Liris was about to reply, but Drycha was already moving, filled with righteous indignation, wading
through the mud and flies, her back stooped as she powered through the bog.

  As they reached the centre of the glade the extent of the corruption became apparent. The trees were coated with yellow spores and several of them had buckled under the weight of enormous fungal growths – bloated, pungent discs jutting through branches and trunks. Drycha paused before a hunched sycamore tree. Its bark was rippling like the surface of a wind-lashed pool. She stepped closer, shaking her head in disbelief, gently scraping the bark with one of her claws. The tree burst open at her touch like a piece of overripe fruit.

  Drycha flinched as slithering, slippery shapes tumbled from the hole. Hundreds of grubs tumbled into the mud and the tree began to convulse and shake.

  Drycha had to shield her face as the trunk fell sideways and tore apart, spraying larvae and rotten pulp against her.

  The clouds of flies thickened, making it almost impossible to see.

  Drycha turned and fled, heading off down another path with Liris close behind.

  They raced through the mire, splashing through puddles and the remains of decayed trees.

  As she ran, Drycha sensed currents of magic zipping through the boughs. She immediately recognised the feeble sorcery of Ariel’s witches, intended to disguise the entrance to their grubby little den. She laughed at the clumsiness of their efforts. Only the blindest of travellers could fail to notice the canopied avenue and the well-worn seats of its guardians.

  She nodded to Liris and they slipped into the cover of the trees, delighting in how much more effective their own disguises were. They became shadow and thorn, ghostlike and silent as they neared the sentries.

  Drycha was bound by her master not to hunt the asrai, but she could not prevent her limbs bristling as she crept towards the first sentry’s perch. She had promised not to openly attack the halls of the asrai, but after her encounter with the bear it took all of her effort not to pounce on the watcher as she slipped through the lengthening shadows.

  She had almost moved past the guard when Liris grabbed her wrist and halted her in her tracks.

  Drycha glared at her.

  Liris frowned and nodded to the fork of the tree that the sentry used as a perch.

  The cloud of flies was particularly thick there, but as Drycha peered through the haze, she realised why Liris had paused.

  The sentry was completely visible, even through the miasma of insects.

  Drycha mirrored Liris’s frown. Ariel’s runts were fools but this was clumsy even by their standards. The sentry’s legs were hanging from the branch in full view of the path below.

  She turned and crept back towards the tree, her body bristling with sharpened wood.

  The smell grew worse as she approached. It was the same stink of putrefaction that had surrounded the bear. She knew, before she was anywhere near the tree, that the sentry was dead.

  They emerged from the bracken and scoured the path for any living guards.

  There were none, so Drycha climbed lightly up through the branches and lifted herself up beside the dangling sentry.

  She hissed in disgust.

  The guard was as bloated and pustulent as the bear. His limbs were swollen sacks of liquid and, like the bear, there were grubs swarming beneath his skin. His chest had collapsed into a wet mush and, where his lungs should have been, there was a mound of pale, wriggling shapes, rummaging blindly through his rotting skin. His face was grey, his cheeks were sunken and his eyes had been replaced with two ragged sockets.

  There was a raven in the tree, cawing angrily at Drycha, and she had no doubt where the eyes had gone.

  The smell was overpowering and Drycha dropped to the ground.

  ‘It is as we always thought,’ she said, turning to Liris. Her eyes were dead and her voice was flat. ‘Orion released no simple spirit. He has unleashed a fragment of the Plague God. He has unleashed the Old Blight.’

  Liris shook her head, but before she could reply, Drycha raced down the path, making no effort to disguise her passing.

  Liris rushed after her and they soon found more bodies sprawled in the undergrowth.

  The scale of the disaster was obvious to Drycha. Ariel’s runts were obsessive about their funerary rites. They would never leave bodies to the elements like this, for all to see.

  She pressed on without stopping to examine any more bodies. It was obvious from even a cursory glance that they had all died the same pitiful death. The path became a crevasse and eventually led to a seemingly featureless hillside.

  Again, Drycha laughed at their pathetic illusion, but this time the sound was hollow and short-lived. She slipped through the hidden entrance to their home and found herself in a vast tunnel of roots. She rarely entered such places and her breath quickened as she saw the atrocity they had created. The roots of countless living trees had been plaited into a mile-long hall, lined with shimmering, fireless torches. It would have been a repulsive sight at the best of times, but now, filled with clouds of buzzing flies, it made her head spin. Many of the lights had failed, making it hard to see and as she made her way down the hall she slipped and realised that the ground was slick with blood. She continued, a little slower, and after a few minutes she began to make out corpses in the gloom – all of them mangled and bloated into bizarre, misshapen lumps of meat.

  Drycha paused and crouched low to the ground. She had heard a sound, coming from somewhere up ahead. She signalled for Liris to hold still and then she strained to hear beyond the buzzing of the flies. The sound came again and she recognised asrai voices, screaming in pain and rage.

  Liris rushed towards her, but she waved for her to stop again and continued listening. The cries rang out again, accompanied this time by the sound of blades clattering against stone.

  It sounded like there were a few survivors somewhere up ahead, but who were they fighting?

  Drycha pressed on through the gloom, peering down every archway she passed. The doorways were constructed of the same knotted root as the main passage and were lined with the same torches, but they had all been plunged into darkness. All of them bore some sign of the plague, but Drycha was sure that the survivors were still up ahead.

  Finally, the hallway narrowed to a point, ending in a tall, thin doorway. It looked as though there had once been a door, but now there was just a mound of damp, shredded wood, teeming with grubs and beetles.

  Drycha paused at the threshold, staring into the darkness beyond. Lights flickered on the far side of a vast chamber. It looked like blades, swinging through the gloom and catching the faint light of the few remaining torches.

  Fury overwhelmed Drycha as she considered the ruin Ariel and Orion had wrought on her home. She turned to Liris and saw that they had shared the same idea. They nodded at each other and entered the room. A few lonely survivors would never be missed. Oaths could be forgotten.

  The bodies were heaped in mounds. It was too dark to see the flies clearly but they were like a living wall, thick and unyielding as Drycha fought through the seething, humming air.

  The survivors had been backed into a corner and they were loosing arrows and knives with wild abandon, howling and screaming as they tried to defend themselves. There were less than a dozen of them left and they were all horribly diseased. It was obvious that none of them would survive, even if they defeated their attackers.

  Drycha became one of them as she reached the skirmish, dressing herself in soft skin and stiff, leather armour. There was a faint light from the passageway outside and she struggled at first to see exactly what they were fighting, but as she reached the fighting she stumbled to a halt, amazed by what she saw.

  They were fighting themselves.

  The asrai were so maddened and blinded by rot that they had turned on each other, hacking chunks out of their own kind and loosing arrows at their dying kin.

  The scene was so pitiful that Drycha’s fury left her.
One of the asrai spotted her in the gloom and called out for help, but he was immediately cut down by his brothers.

  Drycha had arrived just in time to witness the end. Within a few more minutes, most of the combatants had collapsed, clutching at pulsing growths and open wounds.

  As the last couple lunged and hacked each other to the ground, she abandoned her disguise and left the chamber, waving for Liris to follow.

  They raced from the fly-filled charnel house, moving as quickly as they could. When they stumbled back out into the forest, Drycha was trembling with barely contained rage. ‘Orion’s blunder was at the start of the summer,’ she said, looking at the slumped, rotten groves that surrounded them. ‘It’s barely autumn.’ She shook her head. ‘What use are Ariel’s promises now? All those proud claims of guardianship! What will they guard as they butcher their own diseased brothers? Finally, they have abandoned their ridiculous pretence at servitude. They will spend the winter dying – murdered by their own king.’ She waved at the rotten trees. ‘And by spring there will be nothing left.’

  Liris shook her head. ‘The forest is eternal.’

  Drycha snarled. ‘We have been betrayed. When the new year comes we will be strangers in our own home. The false king has given us away. We are gifts to the Lord of Flies. We are his plaything.’ She closed her eyes, trying to see beyond the spores and diseased wood. ‘There must be some way we can make him pay for this. I will not die so easily, Liris.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘He will know what to do.’

  There was fear and excitement in Liris’s voice. ‘The Ancient One?’

  Drycha nodded, flexing her claws.

  ‘His mind is elsewhere,’ said Liris, clutching her own limbs again. ‘His thoughts wander paths we cannot follow.’

  ‘He will know me.’ Drycha felt her mood lift even at the idea of her master. ‘His dreams are long and full of import. He will have seen this day. He will know what to do.’

  Liris looked doubtful, but Drycha grabbed her by the arm and hauled her off down the path, jumping lightly over the corpses. ‘I will see the false king die before me,’ whispered Drycha as she ran. ‘I will see him die.’