Alan shook his head in bafflement. He felt a prickling dread that erupted over his skin. If only he could fight back against the eye – but still no matter how hard he probed it with the oraculum, he could discover no substance there to attack.
Siam raised his face, as if sniffing at the star. ‘Is it not plain to see? The Witch’s malice has invaded the blessed night.’
As the hours passed the red star remained luridly brilliant, even through the falling snow, and the sense of its menace grew in his mind so that Alan could barely look at it. No other star or moon was visible. Even the ocean, heaving and breaking about the bows, was aglitter with lurid reflections as if the pounding waves were flecked with blood. High above them a spar snapped in the force of the driving wind, tearing free of the rigging. They stared up as it flapped and splintered, then came crashing down onto the decks amidships.
Siam cursed. ‘Nature raises its hand against us?’
‘Get a hold of yourself, man. The last thing we want to do is panic.’ Alan was about to argue it out with the Olhyiu chief when he felt Ainé’s hand grip his shoulder, heard her voice whisper closely, urgently into his ear.
‘Tell me more – of when the ancient sister was dying?’
Alan thought back to those terrible moments when he had turned the power of his oraculum inwards to protect himself, yet still he had clasped the hand of Sister Hocht as she was consumed by the deathmaw. He attempted to recall her exact words:
‘She talked about the Witch. How she was resurrecting the soul spirit of the titan, Fangorath.’
Ainé’s eyes bored into his own. ‘What else?’
‘There were things I didn’t understand. You have to realise how hurt she was … She became confused.’
‘Recount her words to me – exactly.’
Alan returned in his mind to Hocht’s faint whisper, her voice so low he had to move his ear over her mouth to catch her dying breath. His hand reached up to his cheek, where Hocht’s dying fingers had risen to touch him as she whispered her final counsel. ‘She said Fangorath was half divine, “a being of darkness”.’
‘A being of darkness!’ Ainé’s tawny head lifted to stare up into the red eye, as if assessing it anew.
‘She also called him “Dragonbane”.’
‘Ah!’
‘This means something to you?’
‘In legend, Dragonbane was the King of the titans. He is said to have led them in a terrible war against the Dragons, in which there was no quarter given.’
‘She talked about that. She said that Fangorath ended the Age of Dragons.’
The Kyra looked worried. ‘Did she say what the Witch might want of such a resurrection?’
Alan hesitated. ‘She talked about a Third Portal.’
‘Are you sure of this? You said she was confused.’
Alan stared up into Kyra’s eyes. ‘Ussha De Danaan spoke to us of three portals to the Fáil. We know that the Tyrant has control of one – and a second is located in Carfon. I wondered if the Tower of Bones marks the position of the Third Portal.’
The Kyra stared at him, evidently stunned.
‘You think this is what Olc is really after?’ he asked.
‘If so, our mission has grown a good deal more dangerous.’
The Oraculum of Bree flared in the Kyra’s brow and she lifted her head in a way that suggested she was communicating urgently with the Shee throughout the fleet.
‘What is it?’
‘I believe that we face an impending attack. The fleet is mostly merchantmen, burdened ships that have little protection. We cannot tell, as yet, what form the attack will take. But I presume that it will focus on the Temple Ship. The remainder of the fleet must pull away – find a safe distance from the attack.’
Squinting through the freezing snowfall Snakoil Kawkaw, with just his head and shoulders emerging from his hidey hole, rubbed at his ears, which were already raw from the excoriating wind.
‘Scheming hog’s entrails!’ He slid a tentative leg out of the pit that had concealed his presence from the fish-gutters – a hidey hole he had discovered just before the Ship set sail. He had discovered many such hidden places long ago as a boy, when the derelict hulk had been the children’s playground. Kawkaw hadn’t been able to believe his luck when the Ship had turned back to its old galleon shape. Who better than he knew every nook and cranny? Had he not played hide and seek here with Siam the stupid and the lovely Kehloke, whom he had already planned to be his future bride? Even then he had kept a sharp eye for advantages, such as this pit, where he could hide the trinkets he stole. But now his hidey hole had enabled him to conceal a present for his enemies. Emerging onto the heaving decks he exulted with a power for mischief undreamed of by the fish-gutters and the huloima brat with the bauble embedded in his head.
‘Aarrgh!’ He rubbed at his aching back, struggling to stretch it without fainting from the agony it brought.
The Ship that had been a secret pleasure for the boy had proved a bucket out of hell for the grown man, forcing his body into an unnatural crouch that could be pounded and shaken with every roll of the sea. His occasional emergences, to relieve himself or to trawl for scraps of food, had offered little respite. Confound the fish-gutters who had reduced him to this! And even if the anticipated success of his mischief was to be savoured, his guts had been drained of puke, in common with the fish-gutters, whose stench befouled the air he was emerging into. It was almost worth the torment to revel in the fact they too were suffering.
And how much worse a fate can I promise you, and soon!
When he was only half emerged from his bolthole, his guts rose again, and despite the fact there wasn’t a drop of bile or spit left in them, he retched again, before falling in a moaning crouch on the snow-covered planks.
‘Suffering hogspiss!’
It had proved so miserably cramped that both his legs had gone dead below the knees and he hobbled across the mist-laden deck, stamping the life back into his feet, then hopping from one to another, cursing the pins and needles that came with the return of circulation.
Peering right and left to ensure his presence had not been noticed, he took a breather, turning his head to the sky and squinting at the bloody orb that shed its baleful light down on the Ship even through the storm.
How sweet, even in adversity, is revenge!
He savoured the thought, scratching contentedly at his chin with the hook that had replaced his left arm, and hopping awkwardly from foot to foot. His narrow face split into a toothy grin. Is not such an opportunity worth a little discomfort? Amid the storm, and the confusion it brought aboard the Ship, the timing was perfect for a cunning strategy – one that would put an end to Siam the stupid and his huloima friends. At the same time it would bring rewards beyond dreaming to him, Snakoil Kawkaw – power to take whatever he desired, in gold or women – including the lovely Kehloke – as well as extracting his revenge on whoever he wanted.
He almost howled with glee at the thought. And I, the outcast, the accursed one, will have returned in triumph!
With a stumbling but determined progress he found the stairs that led down onto the centre deck. He descended stiff-leggedly step by step, hugging the rail with his one functioning hand. Yet still he tumbled, cursing aloud, onto the slippery rubble-strewn boards. The hook scrabbled for purchase as, with his functioning arm, he hauled himself back onto his feet.
Rats’ guts for garters!
The present – the object of desire – hung from his throat on a thong of leather. Through the week he had been cooped up like a starving rat it had gnawed a hole into his breastbone. He winced anew at the burning reminder of its presence, panting through wide-flared nostrils, then grasped the thong that suspended it in his fist, holding it away from his flesh. That traitorous turd, Feltzvan – who preened like a woman but who smelt of the charnel-house – hadn’t warned him of the personal price to be paid when he had placed the amulet around Kawkaw’s throat back in Carfon. Kawkaw knew he ha
d to get rid of it soon – before it got rid of him.
He peered about himself, welcoming the gloom. Nobody had spotted his emergence from the hidey hole. The decks were exactly as he remembered them from so many boyish excursions, cluttered with bollards and rigging, with myriad crevices and shadows. Pulling his face down into his coat he hobbled forward grasping rail and rigging for support until he found the door; then, wrenching it ajar, he descended the curl of stairs that would take him deep into the bowels of the Ship, cursing the legs that were still bent at the knees from cramp. And there in the galley, laid out fast asleep on the great slab of the chopping board, was the answer to the devil’s own needs. Kawkaw plucked down the oil lamp dangling from a ceiling hook so he could inspect the figure that slept on the chopping board, fully a foot and a half thick in cleaver-scarred beech. The snoring face was so enormous with fat it enfolded the ears, and the great head was juddering with the thunderous snores that marked every exhalation of breath, followed by the slobbering sighs of every inhalation.
‘Porky Larrh! As I live and breathe!’
Deep as he slumbered through the tossing and rocking of the disturbed ocean, the cook jerked awake in an instant. Two eyes sprang ajar within their buttery-yellow folds of flesh at this intrusion into his galley.
‘Porky, me old pal! How in a hog’s testicles did you contrive your own heaven? Lord of the kitchens!’ Snakoil sneered.
‘Snakoil Kawkaw – is it you? Have you come back to haunt me, like the foul breath of a thousand wasted lives?’
Kawkaw stood back as the cook heaved himself to a sitting position. Larrh’s head was bent against the black oak ceiling and his two enormous thighs had fallen over the edge of the board. But Kawkaw held his ground, his teeth bared in a wary grin. ‘We have much to reminisce about, you and me. But first a man must eat. I have spent what feels like a year in a vomit-filled rat hole, where all to be had were the stinking flecks of leftovers stuck between my teeth.’
‘We have nothing to talk about.’ Larrh swung his body off the board and onto the floor on the opposite side to Kawkaw, who would have sworn the movement brought its own additional heave and roll of the decks above. A cleaver appeared in the cook’s right hand, as he confronted Kawkaw across the board.
‘Tsk, tsk! You can put down the cook’s saviour. You know you are no match for me. Are we not friends? Pah – I could tell you such stories of where I have been and what I have seen on my travels. Tales my old chum would give his right leg to hear.’
‘I never shared your taste for debauchery.’
‘Only one love for you, Porky, and it fair surrounds you here.’ Kawkaw’s eyes took in the great mountains of food. ‘Methinks that for every morsel sent above, two have found their way between those overfed chops!’
The cook raised the cleaver above his head, as high as he was able within the low confines of the ceiling. ‘Get out of my galley, you scheming piece of dogshit! Or … or …’
‘Or what?’ Kawkaw drew a wicked-looking knife from within his greatcoat. ‘Are we to play king-of-the-castle again, skittering around the board, waiting to see which of us manages to stick the other before he is stuck?’
Kawkaw made a feint with the blade, causing the cook to back away. ‘Old friends – old pals – why do we sport?’
‘You are no friend of mine.’
Kawkaw heaved his narrow shoulders into a shrug, and rammed the blade into the fissured surface of the chopping board, where it hummed with a low vibration.
The cook’s eyes stayed on Kawkaw’s.
‘Ach!’ The hook rose to scratch at Kawkaw’s chin, beneath his grin. ‘Such have been my tribulations of late that I am beyond caring. I truly have not eaten for a week. Can you, my old friend, even imagine my exhaustion?’
‘Why are you really here? What devilry are you up to?’
‘A morsel of food – a place to lay my head. Somewhere my poor old legs are not dead from cramp.’
‘I won’t feed you – nor give you so much as the floor for your head.’
‘Such unkind sentiments! From the friend I took care of! Have you forgotten how I defended you from their taunts in childhood?’
Larrh smashed the cleaver down on the board with such vehemence it buried itself an inch deep in the wood. ‘And who was my main persecutor? Who declared that if I were roasted on a spit he would be the first to taste the crackling?’
‘Ah, my old friend – I look back on it all now with such nostalgia. You might laugh – I see it in your face and eyes that indeed you relish my discomfort, having landed so wonderfully on your feet. Meanwhile I, the outcast, am condemned to beg for a morsel of food.’
‘Always the sly one – the easy lie on your lips!’
‘But we are children no longer. We are men of the world, you and I. You would not be deceived by promises. Not even if I were to offer in exchange the only possession I retain. An amulet so precious it is all I have left of my wanderings.’
‘Another of your stolen trinkets?’
‘No trinket – not this!’ Kawkaw lifted the thong that had tethered the amulet from around his neck. He dropped it, with a careless toss, into the hand of the cook. ‘Yet so exquisite, only desperation would persuade me to part with it.’
Larrh froze, gazing at the blood-red prism within his palm, a multifaceted jewel the size of his thumb. ‘All you ever offered me were lies.’
‘Such power would this treasure confer on its owner.’
Larrh threw it back across the board. ‘Another of your tricks!’
Kawkaw lifted it up again by the thong. He held it aloft against the light. The blood crystal began to spin about its vertical axis. A black vapour materialised over the board. It solidified as a perfect pentagon, smoother than still water with a silvery triple infinity at the heart of it.
‘Still think that what I offer is a trinket?’
The cook stared at the spinning amulet, dumbstruck.
Kawkaw came around the board and he hung the crystal around the cook’s throat. As he did so, his voice softened to a whisper. ‘Judge its potential for yourself. What do you have to lose? I would gladly have it back.’
The cook’s left hand reached up to grasp the amulet. Larrh’s voice trembled. ‘I know that sign. That’s the Tyrant’s sigil.’
‘And his bounty for the wearer!’
‘What bounty is that?’
‘You were ever the decent man, the generous and honest man, who did his job and harmed no one. But who, among the fish-gutters, responded with respect? Wear this and see how the worm has turned. And then – what further rewards!’
‘Rewards?’
‘All the heart might desire. Of riches – of the needs of the flesh.’ Kawkaw’s eyelids fell, as if embarrassed at where the very thought was taking him. ‘Imagine it! All you have ever wanted, secretly coveted, in your wildest dreams …’
The Sacrifice of the Dragons
In Kate’s dream the dragon was beside her in a night bright with moon and stars. They were accompanied by beings that appeared semi-transparent, like wisps of smoke. These diaphanous beings carried her down to the riverbank where they removed her tattered remnants of cobwebs and re-dressed her in silken underwear and a dress of emerald, as fine as gossamer. Then they melted into thin air, leaving her cocooned in the long grass and wild flowers. She was aware of time flowing about her like the steady current of a clear bright stream, and she was aware that dawn had broken, and still she lay on the riverbank, reluctant to wake from the lovely dream.
A crooning voice castigated her: ‘Girl-thing must hold head still.’
In her curiously lucid dream she conversed with the dragon, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:
‘I really am sorry about your lost hoard. I’m good at making a mess of things.’
‘Is no matter – keep head still.’
‘My food purse is gone altogether. I know it was half empty, but I blew that away too – all that was left of it.’
‘Driftwood has plan.’
‘What are you up to?’
The dragon was getting annoyed with her because she couldn’t stop fidgeting. ‘Girl-thing – must keep still!’
She opened her eyes – sat upright with a start. ‘No – it’s just a dream!’
The astonishing thing was that she really was on the bank by the river. And her spidersweb rags really were gone. Her hands darted all over to feel the same fine-spun emerald dress she had dreamed about. Underneath – she confirmed it with a wriggle of her body – she was wearing the softest, most comfortable, underwear.
‘How could it possibly …?’
‘Mmmmm! Hold still!’
‘Stop that – whatever you’re doing with my hair!’
‘Girl-thing – sad. Sad Kate Shaunessy – cries and cries in her sleep. Driftwood listens to cries of woe. Driftwood makes better.’
‘What?’
‘Girl-thing not cry.’
Kate tried to turn her head to look behind her, but it was clasped between his front paws in a grip of iron.
‘What are you doing to me?’
‘Grooming.’
She upbraided herself: ‘Kate Shaunessy – wake up! You’re losing it!’
‘Driftwood grooming girl-thing, Kate Shaunessy – her hair.’
‘Whaaaaat!’
In a high-pitched mewling voice, the dragon whined: ‘I’m Kate Shaunessy – from Clonmel town.’
Kate reached up with her hands and, tentatively, she brought some strands of her hair around to the front of her face. The auburn strands felt sleek. They ran through her fingers wonderfully glossy, lubricated with some fine oil and scented with something she had never smelled in her life before – but not unpleasant.
‘What in the world … ?’
‘Girl-thing not cry! Nooooo!’
‘I must be dreaming – what else could it be?’
‘Momu – her gift.’
‘Momu?’
‘Momu come.’
Kate reached up and she removed his paws from her hair. ‘Enough. You’ve groomed me enough. Who is this Momu?’
‘Sad girl-thing. Momu comes to see. Girl secrets – magic! Yeeeeessss!’
The Tower of Bones Page 17