Sinner

by Sara Douglass

  “I want you to stay here with the cart and donkeys,” she said.

  Zenith blinked. “But I thought…at the Star Gate…you’d need me.”

  She stopped, thought, and then smiled sadly. “But I am somewhat useless, am I not?”

  Faraday took her hand between both of hers. “You are not useless, but you would be dead there, Zenith.”

  “And you?”

  Faraday paused before answering. “What I have has not been affected by the cessation of the Star Dance, Zenith. I have enough to protect me.”

  “I hope so, Faraday. How can you know what you will face when the Demons break through?”

  Faraday smiled suddenly, brilliantly. “Zenith! I have been through so much. I have been rent and torn and reborn too many times to fear death again. I doubt the Demons will worry me over much. And Drago will need me.”

  “Drago…who knows if he is even still alive?”

  Faraday’s smile died and she dropped Zenith’s hand. “Given where he has gone, and what uses him, I doubt very much that Drago will come back through the Star Gate ‘alive’. But however he comes back, it is all we will have to work with. Now, rest here, Zenith. I shall come back. I promise.”

  And then she was gone.

  Faraday walked quietly but briskly towards the Ancient Barrows. About her the forest was still. Waiting. The birds had roosted; she could see rows of them lining the branches of the trees, all looking southeast towards the Barrows.

  They knew what was coming.

  As did the other creatures of the forest. They lay or crouched unmoving amid the undergrowth, humped shapes in dark shadows. All, as the birds, aligned south-east. Waiting.

  The trees’ Song, normally such a beautiful undertone to the forest, now hummed and buzzed with agitation. Beneath the murmuring of the individual trees, Faraday could hear the angry hum of the Earth Tree herself, far to the north in the Avarinheim.

  What would happen, she wondered, when the Demons broke through? Would the trees attack? Or would they just watch?

  It depended, Faraday supposed, on how the Earth Tree herself perceived the Demons. Would she see them as a threat to the land, or just to the people – and the plains people in particular? If so, then the Earth Tree and the forests might leave well enough alone.

  Perhaps she might even be glad that the Plains Dwellers, as the Avar still tended to refer to the Acharites, were being decimated.

  But the Icarii were affected, too. Deeply so, since they had lost the Star Dance.

  Faraday shook her head. There was no point in trying to second guess the trees’ reaction.

  There was a step to one side, and Faraday halted.

  Goodwife Renkin stepped out from the trees. Still dressed as ever in the country worsted draped inelegantly about her coarse frame, she nevertheless exuded the power of the Mother.

  “I do not like this, Daughter,” she said without preamble.

  “What can you do, Mother?”

  “Watch.”

  “But –”

  “I cannot know what assails us, nor what I or the trees can do about it until it moves among us, Daughter. Tell me, is Axis’ son Drago responsible for this?”

  “Is he responsible for the fact the sun sets each night? Is he responsible for the rain that batters your trees?” Faraday took a deep, angry breath. “Drago is a pawn. He is being used by the Demons to enter this world, but the Demons would have come eventually anyway, with or without him.” Better with him, she thought, better by many, many lives.

  The Mother eyed Faraday curiously. “And what will you do, Faraday? You move through these trees with purposeful step.”

  “I will help,” Faraday said. “I am discontent with just watching.”

  She approached the spaces about the Barrows cautiously. There was no sign of activity, and they would have appeared abandoned were it not for the heavy air of tainted expectation that lay over them. She shuddered, wrapping her arms about herself.

  The blue flame above the bronze obelisk stuttered and flickered, sickened nigh unto extinction.

  “Drago,” Faraday muttered, reminding herself that it was, indeed, necessary to go down the tunnel.

  She flicked a glance at the sun. Gods, but it was sinking towards mid-afternoon!

  Fighting the nervous impulse to retch, Faraday lifted her skirts and ran towards the tunnel entrance leading to the Star Gate. It was too late to rely only on her legs now, and so as she fled inside the black mouth of the tunnel, Faraday wrapped herself in Noah’s strange, ancient power.

  Sheol tipped back her head and howled.

  All the Questors, as well as StarLaughter and the now beaked children who huddled close, were wrapped in consuming darkness. There was no sense of any world about them now, they were suspended in time and space just below the Star Gate.

  Sheol abruptly swallowed her howl and looked about her at the others. Her sapphire eyes glittered with power and hunger, momentarily lighting up her companions.

  “It is time,” she hissed.

  The other Questors murmured, while the children shuffled in excitement, but StarLaughter gave an incoherent cry and jiggled the child agitatedly in her arms.

  Raspu reached out to her and laid his hand on her shoulder. “Quiet, Queen of Heaven. Our time is nigh. Soon your child shall live and breathe again.”

  StarLaughter stared at him with wild eyes. “Soon?” she whispered.

  “Soon,” he murmured, kissing her brow. “Very soon.”

  “Now,” said Sheol and, lifting her arms, called to bear all the residual power the Questors had drained from Drago.

  About her the children shrieked and wailed.

  As one, every statue in the chamber of the Star Gate cracked. Fissures ran from feet through the bodies, then splintered to run to the tips of each outstretched wing.

  There was a sound, as if of a sigh, and then small chips of marble began to fall to the floor.

  Faraday, huddled in the gloom behind one of the archways, put her hands to her mouth in horror.

  They would destroy the chamber? She had not thought this.

  And then another thought, more frightful than the last. Would they then destroy the Star Gate itself?

  “No!” she wailed between her fingers, and rocked back and forth in agony. No!

  The Star Gate began to boil. Faraday could not see it from her hiding place, but she could feel it. The blackness within the Star Gate was boiling as surely as a fetid soup over the fiery pits of the AfterLife.

  Within the chamber the atmosphere thickened and warmed.

  Faraday crept one or two steps closer, the limit of her courage. Everything within her screamed to flee before it was too late – but she could not. Drago would be lost without her, and Tencendor would be lost without Drago.

  Then humps, lumps, shapes – she did not know how else to describe them – rose through the Star Gate. Scores of them, rising as if through swamp of thick black mud, their true nature cloaked by the as yet enveloping blackness.

  “Gods, gods, gods,” Faraday whispered, unable to help herself. She sobbed, choking on words, and she had to drop her eyes to gather her courage.

  When she raised them she was numbed with horror. Through the Star Gate, she did not know how, were emerging black, winged shapes. There were many scores of them. Hundreds of them.

  Faraday flattened herself against the tunnel wall, hiding from the strange black orbs that had replaced their eyes.

  She knew they had to be the children, but they no longer looked like children, and only their wings connected them with their Icarii heritage.

  In every other respect they appeared gigantic black hawks. Only…only that at the tip of each wing groped a scrawny, clawed hand, and the beaks were more mouths than horn. Mouths with enlarged, protruding upper lips that had hardened into a sharpened beak at their centre.

  They might be more bird than Icarii, but they had retained their mouths with which to cry WolfStar’s name, and hands with which to grasp
their prey.

  Now they had emerged fully from the Star Gate, and shucked off what remained of the gloom that had been their birthing membrane. They fluttered, ran, hopped, and flew about the chamber in disordered horror. They clutched, clawed and pecked at their companions in anger and frustration as they collided and careened about in their mad chase about the too-small chamber.

  There was a whisper, and the children – hawks – halted.

  “Hunt.”

  And again. “Hunt.”

  Faraday pressed her hands against her ears now, for she could not bear to hear that voice again.

  The hawks exploded into purpose. They turned for the archways that led upwards to the twenty-six Barrows and rushed through. There was a noise, a strange wailing, and Faraday realised it was the sound of the Hawkchilds surging through the tunnels and apertures leading up from the chamber into the Barrows themselves.

  The Barrows exploded. They burst apart in a shower of earth and gorse and rock, sending gouts of material several hundred paces into the air.

  And from the wreckage of each Barrow erupted the black shapes of the Hawkchilds, higher yet than the rocks and earth, straight up.

  Zared’s men, the accompanying Strike Force throwing fluid shadows from overhead, had fled through the morning and into the afternoon. By the time the northern border of the Silent Woman Woods loomed before them, men were clinging in weariness to saddles, and horses had blood dribbling down their legs from scrapes where they’d stumbled to their knees in exhaustion.

  Behind them, at a distance of perhaps a hundred paces, rode Zared himself, and behind him at another half a league came Caelum and his force.

  The Strike Force, as all Zared’s men, were safely within the Woods when Zared pulled his horse to a halt some forty paces before the first of the trees.

  He dismounted, patted the beast, and slapped its rump, sending it trotting towards the forest. Then he turned and watched Caelum riding towards him.

  As he waited, Zared felt an oppressiveness settle over his shoulders. He shuddered, and looked about, but did not know to what to attribute it.

  Then his eye caught the sun. Mid-afternoon.

  He dropped his gaze and beckoned urgently at Caelum. “Faster!” he screamed.

  Caelum, as every man behind him, dug boots into exhausted mounts and gained a last spurt of speed. A few of the riders outpaced Caelum, but Zared stood his ground as they thundered past him and into the trees.

  “Thank the gods,” Zared said as Caelum pulled up beside him. “I thought you would not –”

  There was an earth-shattering roar to the south-east, and Caelum’s horse had to fight to keep its feet.

  “What…?” Zared said, and Caelum half stood in his stirrups and shaded his eyes so he could peer towards the Ancient Barrows.

  “Merciful Heavens,” he said, then slumped down into the saddle.

  “What is it?”

  “The Barrows have exploded.”

  “Then they are coming –”

  “My parents are there,” Caelum said in a curiously toneless voice.

  “You cannot help them now!” Zared yelled. About them horses and men ran for the trees with forgotten reserves of strength. “Quick!”

  Zared grabbed at the reins of Caelum’s horse, but Caelum shook himself and reached down a hand.

  “It will be faster if you ride behind me, Zared,” he said quietly.

  Zared stared at him, then grabbed his hand and swung up behind his nephew.

  Faraday slowly raised her face from her arms and looked back into the crumbling Star Gate chamber. The black forms of the Hawkchilds had gone, but they had been only a prelude to the true horror about to step through.

  Faraday didn’t so much see the Demons, as she was aware of them.

  A man with bones that stuck almost through his skin stepped through first. He paused, looked about, and burped through his gluttonous smile. Mot.

  Faraday was almost overcome with an overwhelming sense of hunger, a hunger so deep she knew she would hack off her own foot to assuage it. She fought it with whatever power she could bring to bear, and it slowly faded into a persistent ache in the pit of her stomach.

  The man leaned back into the swirling, nauseous mess within the Star Gate and aided another of his companions into Tencendor.

  Faraday began to itch, her eyesight blurred and she felt her blood slither towards every orifice of her body. Her skin twitched, and pustules simmered eagerly beneath its surface.

  Raspu, Demon of Pestilence, hugged his companion, and together they aided Barzula, Tempest, through the Star Gate.

  Faraday felt something rush through the tunnel towards her. Air, fire, water, ice-stones the size of her fist – where had they all come from? Instinctively she fought back, and the storm dwindled and died.

  Mot, Raspu and Barzula turned towards the shadows where Faraday lay huddled.

  “What was that?” Raspu said.

  “I felt power,” Mot said.

  Barzula took a step towards the archway. “Unusual – is not the Star Dance dead?”

  Mot caught at his arm. “No time. It does not seek to harm us. And look, Rox emerges!”

  Faraday was crushed by a sense of terror so extreme she almost voided her bowels. Surely she could not survive in the face of this! She slid to her belly on the dusty floor of the tunnel and whimpered, her hands clutching at the detritus about her.

  Somehow she held on to her reason.

  After long minutes she looked up. Four figures stood about the rim of Star Gate, gazing into it. Then one, the thin man with the loathsome face, suddenly reached down and grabbed a hand.

  Faraday slowly sat up in astonishment as a lovely Icarii woman emerged, a strangely sluggish baby in her hands.

  Who?

  Barzula leaned forward, and kissed the woman on her lips. “Welcome home, Queen of Heaven.”

  Faraday frowned. Queen of Heaven? Could this be StarLaughter? And the child? WolfStar’s son?

  Then another woman stepped through, throwing something into a darkened corner of the chamber as she did so, and this time Faraday could hardly control the despair that swept over her.

  No-one would survive. It had all been useless. Axis and Azhure would die arthritic middle-aged fools in the desert wasteland that had once been Tencendor. StarDrifter would suicide into bloody oblivion, Caelum would be torn apart by dogs, and Zenith would be used by bandits until they tired of her, tore off her wings, and threw her over a cliff. Within a generation, it would all be lost. No-one would –

  “Stop it!” Faraday hissed to herself. “Stop it!”

  She battled the vision, appalled by its severity. If she, who still retained power after the loss of the Star Dance, could hardly repel this despair, then what chance did the ordinary folk of Tencendor have?

  Gods, but she had to do something to help this land before all was lost!

  “There, again!” Mot swirled about, his bones seeming almost to clank with the abruptness of his movement.

  “Power,” said Barzula.

  Sheol frowned, irritated at this distraction. “StarLaughter? Can you recognise the power being wielded?”

  StarLaughter concentrated, rocking the child absent-mindedly in her arms as she did so. “No,” she said slowly after a moment or two. “No, I cannot. It is not Icarii power, nor what I know of the Avar, or even the Charonites.”

  She shrugged. “It is negligible, in any case. Perhaps it was originally left by the Enemy when they crashed through.”

  “Can we use it?” asked Rox.

  StarLaughter shook her head. “It is almost…directional power. I can find no other way to describe it. Ignore it. It is no threat to us, and we cannot use it. Sheol, what do we do now?”

  “We use the final reserves of Drago,” Sheol gestured impatiently to what she had discarded on stepping through the Star Gate, “to move to a more congenial site. Come!”

  She clapped her hands, and the Demons, with StarLaughter and her ch
ild, vanished.

  But if Sheol had vanished, then the sound of her hands continued to reverberate about the chamber.

  Statues crumbled into piles of useless rubble. Archways groaned, and almost a third of them collapsed while the others wavered and creaked. The Dome split into five sections with one almighty crack.

  Faraday, terrified but knowing she had only one chance, rushed from her hiding place. She looked about frantically, shielding her head with arms and hands.

  There!

  The object Sheol had discarded as she stepped through the Star Gate.

  Faraday hurried over, tripping and almost falling over a tumbled statue. Whatever the nature of the object, it was now shrouded in grey dust and small rocks. Faraday worked with her hands, dusting and pushing aside the rubble.

  When she had uncovered it, she sat back on her heels, unmindful of the chamber shattering about her, her face expressionless.

  Before her lay a sack of bones, wrapped about with skin.

  Faraday reached out a trembling hand and touched the disgusting thing fleetingly.

  She drew her hand back, grimacing. The skin felt cold and clammy.

  Poor Drago to have come to this. Digested and spat out as this pitiful clump of skin and bone.

  She reached out her hand once more. This time she did not pull her fingers back as she touched the skin. This time she softly stroked the remains, running her hand over as much of it as she could.

  “Poor Drago,” she whispered, ignoring the great rock that crashed not half a pace away from her. “Poor, sweet, lost Drago. Where are you now? Come home, Drago. Come home.”

  She fancied that the skin grew warm under her hand, and firmer to the touch.

  But the bones still shifted and scraped each against the other in their sack.

  Faraday remembered the sack that Drago had clutched so desperately when he’d entered this chamber weeks (months?) previously. Now he was the sack, but now he possessed the power that the original hessian sack had contained. Faraday understood that very clearly, and she hoped Drago would be able to come to terms with it also.