Ashurek ignored him. Atop the Staff, the silver figure of Miril began to move stiffly, like an exquisitely crafted mechanical toy. She turned her head from side to side, her wings creaking as she stretched them out. Gradually her carved feathers became soft and silken, but at the same time they darkened. Presently she was not silver-white but soot-black. She sprang from the Staff and hovered in the air between Ashurek and Arlenmia, who backed away looking mildly surprised, more irritated than afraid.
At the sight of Miril, the deadly light faded from Ashurek’s eyes and he handed the Staff back to Estarinel without a word. The Forluinishman sheathed it with relief. But the Serpent had seen it, and the air began to throb with its anxiety.
Medrian uttered a terrible, deep cry, an echo of M’gulfn’s terror as it understood what the Staff was, and saw Miril before it. She writhed in Silvren’s arms, fighting M’gulfn’s dread and rage, trying desperately to speak to it and soothe it. But she could not make it listen; she could only hang on to it grimly, just as Silvren was hanging on to her in an attempt to quiet her.
‘What is this – this starling supposed to be?’ Arlenmia exclaimed scornfully. ‘Should I be afraid of it?’
‘I am Miril,’ the bird sang. ‘And you do not know me, Arlenmia, but the Worm knows me. You must give the Egg-Stone to me, not to the Worm.’
‘Whoever taught it to talk was wasting their time,’ Arlenmia remarked, and turned away to resume her pilgrimage. Miril flitted after her and landed in her hair, causing Arlenmia to swat her away with a cry of rage.
‘I must be reunited with the Egg-Stone,’ Miril chirped again. Arlenmia turned to glare at Ashurek and Estarinel, one hand gripping the pouch that contained the Stone.
‘Will you call off this ridiculous bird!’ she exclaimed. She called the Egg-Stone’s power to drive Miril away, but it had no effect against Miril, who had been its guardian. The enchantress went pale with shock and frustration, and in that moment, while her attention was on the blackbird, her control over Estarinel and Ashurek was lost. They felt the release and began to converge on her. She turned to confront them, preparing to flick them away with a lash of the Stone’s energy. But the leaden power was melting and sliding through her hands like ice… and nothing happened.
Ashurek saw the expression of alarm on her face and realised what this meant. Miril’s presence had somehow neutralised the Egg-Stone. At once he and Estarinel seized Arlenmia and pinioned her arms, and so stunned was she by her loss of power that she made no attempt to resist. As she stood stiffly in their grasp, Miril swooped and danced infuriatingly around her head. At this her face became livid, and she found her voice.
‘M’gulfn, aid your servant!’ she shrieked. But the Serpent, towering above them in swathes of white and sapphire and emerald light, showed no sign of having heard her. Then she began to struggle in earnest, and they discovered with dismay that her physical strength had not deserted her. With a lightning movement she evaded their grasp, and in the split second before they could lay hold of her again, she had slipped the Egg-Stone from its pouch and flung it in a wide arc at Skord.
‘Skord!’ she yelled. ‘Take it and run! Quickly now, straight to M’gulfn!’
Skord would not have dreamt of disobeying her. He bent to retrieve the Stone from the snow and began to hurry towards the Serpent. Immediately Ashurek was after him. Estarinel managed to hold Arlenmia back for a couple of seconds before she broke free and dashed in pursuit, but Ashurek had already reached Skord. He grabbed the boy’s arm, seized the Egg-Stone from his hand without difficulty, and Skord collapsed into the snow, moaning.
The Egg-Stone lay in Ashurek’s palm, just as it had when he had first stolen it from Miril, a small thing like a sparrow’s egg, blue with silver flecks. It was lead-heavy and gelatinous to the touch. It called to him, filling him with a terrible dark light that drove back the pain he had suffered since losing it, assuaged all his guilt and anguish, soothed him with the sweet promise of power…. Power to avenge Meshurek, to fulfil their father’s hopes… And yet, it was only a fleck of the far greater power that towered above him, just a tiny stream leading to an ocean of pale fire.
Ashurek turned and began to walk towards the Serpent.
Somewhere behind him, he heard Arlenmia laugh.
Then a streak of black crossed his vision and Miril was on the snow in front of him. Faint silver and gold lights shimmered on her darkened feathers and she gazed at him, just as she had when he’d first taken the Egg-Stone from her and seen his guilt in her eyes. Those shining black orbs transfixed him now, dazzling in their simplicity and honesty, speaking the forgiveness he did not deserve.
Memories impaled him like arrows. You have found me – but have you found me? He did not want to hear her say those words again.
But Miril said only, ‘I will not prevent you. It is your choice.’
By the gods, no! he screamed inwardly. The Egg-Stone, the Serpent, allowed only one decision. Their imperative will was drawing his muscles taut, compelling him to fulfil their need to be reunited. And Miril offered him choice? She should have seized the Stone from him, relieved him of that responsibility–
You must let go of your guilt. The last step is to take responsibility.
Ashurek took two more compulsive steps towards M’gulfn, willing the Stone’s fell energy to obliterate Miril from his mind, but she was still in front of him and he could not escape her eyes. And he thought, she looks on me with pity. M’gulfn’s wretched puppet. Yet it should be me who pities her.
I have waited for you, Ashurek, waited to be reunited with the Egg-Stone so that my pain may end.
‘For your sake, Miril,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘this is my choice.’ He stretched out his hand and the Egg-Stone slid through his limp fingers and thudded into the snow at Miril’s feet.
At once she seized it and was on the wing, flying away from him with the eye in her beak. And, as he had known it would, a familiar agony flooded him. He could not bear to part with it a second time – drowning in fiery pain, he stumbled after her.
Arlenmia and Estarinel were pursuing the blackbird as well, but she easily outflew all of them and landed in the snow near Silvren and Medrian. As the others reached her, she put back her head and swallowed the Egg-Stone.
Arlenmia cried out. Ashurek would have done so too, but he mastered himself. He had been its slave for long enough. Miril leaped into the air, chirping stridently as if in anguish. For seconds she fluttered there; then she looked round at all of them with her sad, black eyes. ‘My child is back with me,’ she sang. ‘I have fulfilled my task as world-protector. Only remember me, and you need have no fear.’
Then she folded her wings and dropped like a stone into the snow. Ashurek knelt down and scooped her up in his hands, but her body was limp, tattered and lifeless. Miril was dead. She and the Egg-Stone had destroyed each other. Weeping, Ashurek laid her in the snow where she had fallen.
At Miril’s death, Medrian felt the Serpent’s fear subside abruptly. Gasping with relief, she drew herself upright, pushing her hair from her face and trying to orientate herself. She found herself facing the huge statue-like figure of the Serpent, but now that M’gulfn’s thoughts were less muddled, she suddenly discerned the truth about it. And as she realised, she saw that it was changing.
‘Look,’ she gasped, and the others also stared in astonishment, except for Arlenmia, who witnessed the transformation with tears streaming down her cheeks.
As they watched, the brilliant fires burning around it flickered and faded. Dull mustard-coloured flames sprang up in the ice chasms and a deep rumbling filled the air as they began to tremble and fall. The towering form of the Serpent was swaying as shimmering rivulets of molten sapphire poured down its scaled, shining sides. Cracks were branching through its ultramarine depths. It began to disintegrate, its glassy surface sloughing away first in fragments, then in great chunks, until it became a mass of crumbling ice layers, molten glass and foam. Slowly, with the roar of an earthqu
ake, it collapsed into itself, and the collapse seemed to take a century.
The wide valley with its flaring lights, vast chasms, and the awesome shining effigy of M’gulfn, was gone. It was as if night had fallen. All daylight was obliterated by dense, tarry clouds. They found themselves facing a flat, rough snowscape under a pitch-dark sky.
And before them was the Serpent in its true form.
It was not thousands of feet high, but some fifty feet long. M’gulfn was a thick, tapering tube of foul-coloured flesh wrapped in a loose membrane. Rudimentary claws and small, leathery wings protruded from its sides. Its head was huge and misshapen, with two tiny pale blue eyes and grinning jaws. It lay on its belly in the snow, staring at them. Its stench was overwhelming. Dull green fires spat around it, and from it there emanated a sense-numbing aura of evil.
And Skord was a bare few yards from its head. None of them had given him a thought; only now did they realise that he had not followed them when they chased Miril. Fear had overcome him, and he now lay huddled on the snow, a tiny abject figure beyond their help.
It was Arlenmia who started out towards him, shouting, ‘Skord! Come here!’
They saw him lever himself up on his hands, instinctively trying to obey her call. But it was too late. In the same instant, the Serpent launched itself into the air.
Panic gripped them. No one could move or make a sound. It was just as Estarinel remembered from the attack on Forluin, its swift, impossible movements, its loathsome shape, its aura of diabolic malevolence. They could hear Skord’s terrified sobbing as the Serpent lurched into the air and swooped towards him. Paralysed with horror, they saw it swing its head and seize the boy in its maw like a rag doll. The jaws moved, a froth of blood and foam ran from the Worm’s lips and Skord was gone.
‘No,’ Arlenmia breathed. She turned to the others, and they saw her expression of horror and disbelief. ‘It has slain my messenger. This cannot be.’ And she cried out and sank to her knees in the snow and tangled her hands in her hair, mourning her shattered dream with infinite bitterness.
#
Later, they came to understand the meaning of what had happened more clearly. So total had been Arlenmia’s devotion to M’gulfn, so compelling her belief that it was a kind of god, that the very strength of her conviction, linked to the Egg-Stone’s power, had created the illusion that the Serpent was vast, magnificent and beautiful. It was like the illusion she had created around the Glass City, but on a far greater scale.
The Serpent itself knew almost nothing of it, except that something strange and confusing was happening. The vision had been solely the product of Arlenmia’s ambitious imagination. She knew that the Serpent had attacked Forluin; she knew what it really looked like. But these had been abstract ideas, glimpses in mirrors which, because they did not accord with her vision, she could not accept as reality. To her, what she believed was real, and if it was not so to start with, she could make it so.
Deprived of the Egg-Stone, her manufactured reality had collapsed, and she was faced at last with the truth of the Serpent’s ghastly appearance and evil nature. She had not even been lying when she’d claimed to abhor violence, but she had always found ways to disregard it, or excuse her own use of it, by convincing herself that the end justified the means.
But confronted with the murder of Skord, she could not turn away, could not deny the horror, nor excuse the evil of it. Disgust shook her to the core, and her dream was demolished.
Only the Serpent itself could ever have convinced her that her vision was wrong. Here before her was incontrovertible proof of M’gulfn’s nature. It did not care about those who served it. By ravaging her messenger, it rejected her. It was not god-like; it was loathsome, mean-spirited and vile. As Arlenmia was finally forced to accept the truth, the enormity of its deeds and of her own came crowding upon her. Crushed by their weight she fell into the snow, powerless and grief-stricken. And as complete as her devotion had been, so absolute was her disillusionment.
#
The others realised that she presented no more danger, but they could spare her no attention. The Worm was watching them, its head swaying from side to side, blood hissing into the snow from its cruel jaws. Ashurek had gone so far beyond terror that he now felt icily calm. Silvren was trembling, but fiercely keeping herself under control. Estarinel, however, was less fortunate. The panic that had been gnawing at him ever since they first glimpsed the Worm’s aura swamped him at last. He no longer knew where he was. He almost thought himself back in Forluin, running and running through a grey fog to find M’gulfn in front of him, grinning like a ghoul as it lay on Falin’s ruined house… And now here it was again, and he knew only that he must escape at all costs. He turned and fled blindly across the snow, unaware of anything except his need to flee.
Medrian was after him at once. She seized his arm – as she had once before, in a valley in Forluin – and dragged him to a halt.
‘Stop – Estarinel, it’s all right, don’t be afraid,’ she heard herself saying, ridiculously. ‘The Egg-Stone is destroyed. M’gulfn won’t attack us, because it knows we have the Silver Staff. It is afraid of us, too. And you were right: its appearance before was an illusion, just Arlenmia’s distorted vision. Estarinel?’
As she spoke to him, his breathing slowed and she saw the panic fade from his eyes – only to be replaced by despair. He stared at her for a moment and then half turned away, although he did not make to run off again. He stood there with his back to the Serpent, seeming remote from her.
‘Come back with me,’ she said.
‘I can’t,’ he said stiffly. ‘Medrian, I’m sorry, I can’t face it.’
‘You must,’ she whispered. He only shook his head, and then she felt a kind of panic herself, a cold viscid realisation that it was beyond her power to restore his resolve. She reached out to touch his arm, yet he seemed to be slipping away from her.
‘Estarinel, there’s something I haven’t told you…’ her words were urgent, yet lost as soon as they were spoken, like a whisper swept away on a blizzard. ‘Something you should know.’ But it seemed to her that her own hand was an elusive thing sculpted out of ice, melting and sliding from his arm so that she could not keep hold of him; and that she was herself only a figure made of frost, insubstantial and transient. This is just a moment of my life, she thought, then I will be gone. I must make him understand before it’s too late… But he was staring straight through her as if she had no more substance than ice vapour.
‘It’s no good,’ he said.
‘In Forluin,’ she persisted desperately, ‘you remember when we went into the wheelwright’s barn, where they had laid your family?’ Oh, this is hard, she thought. ‘I had resolved not to tell you this, because it would only have caused you pain. But now I know no other way to make you see the Quest through.’
‘Medrian, what are you saying?’ He gripped her shoulders and a wild look came into his eyes. At least he was listening to her.
‘Their bodies were perfect. There was a reason for that. You see, even without the Egg-Stone, the world will still fall into M’gulfn’s power. Not at once, but within half a year, if you recall Setrel’s prediction, and then its venom will reduce the rest of Forluin to ash. And it will reanimate those that it killed in order to torment and enslave them. Do you understand me? Your family is not truly dead. M’gulfn holds them in suspension until its power is total. You remember what Silvren told you, about the world becoming a poisoned sac? You know that its rule would be hell on Earth. Without the Egg-Stone the Serpent is vulnerable, we have a chance to kill it. But if we don’t – if you turn aside – you are condemning your family and the whole of Forluin to something infinitely worse than death.’
‘You knew this, and didn’t tell me?’ he exclaimed.
‘It would only have hurt you.’
‘Or you kept it back so that you might use it if I lost my nerve?’
The accusation shocked her; mainly because it was half-true. ‘Yes, in a w
ay. Not deliberately,’ she whispered. And he continued to stare at her until she felt more than ever that she had become a ghost.
Then the moment was over. He was embracing her, and she was real again, living flesh and blood. ‘Oh, Medrian, what am I saying to you?’ he cried. ‘Forgive me. You should not have to persuade me to go on. I feel ashamed. I gave you my word that I would not let you down, and I will not. I’m all right.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ he said, taking her hand and walking determinedly back to Ashurek and Silvren. ‘I am ready. Let us finish it.’
‘I love you,’ she said faintly.
They stood together on the snow, a group of five figures: one apart, bowed down by her private wretchedness, the other four close together, gazing grim-faced upon the evil creature that they must somehow destroy.
‘I am glad that I’m able to be with you at the end after all,’ Silvren murmured to Ashurek. ‘I wish only that I could summon my power to your aid.’
The Serpent was edging slowly towards them, smearing the snow with blood and grey venom as it came. Its insatiable malevolence thrummed in the air, making it almost intolerable for them to stand their ground against it, let alone launch an attack on it. Silvren would not say it, but Ashurek knew she felt, as he did, that the Worm had proved to be indomitable after all. It was laughing at them, gloating.
‘Why does it not attack us?’ Ashurek asked. He had one hand in a reassuring clasp on Estarinel’s shoulder. Far from despising the Forluinishman’s near-surrender to fear, he could only admire him for overcoming it. ‘Is it because of the Silver Staff?’
‘Yes,’ Medrian replied. ‘It knows what the weapon is now, and is not so stupid that it doesn’t fear it.’
Estarinel had held the end of the Silver Staff to Miril’s breast as he had on Hrunnesh, but nothing had happened. The bird had remained lifeless.
‘We seem to be in stalemate,’ said Ashurek. ‘Always I had faith that once we had come this far, it would be obvious how to end it. It is not obvious. We must have gone wrong somewhere, or Miril would not be dead.’
A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) Page 43