‘Brave Kate. Girl-thing not coward. See!’
Kate opened her eyes. Tears of exhaustion, mixed with relief, flowed down her cheeks, as she saw the spate of water in which there was no trace of the wolves left. But then she also saw the Witch’s tentacles. They were swarming over the stormy waters and invading the island at extraordinary speed. Then the voice, thunderous through the oraculum, found her.
Foolish Earth-spawn. With such feeble power would it challenge us?
‘Driftwood!’ she moaned, collapsing to her knees.
The Witch’s laugh resonated within the vaults of her skull.
Its usefulness is done. The violator of our sanctuary no longer threatens the great purpose. Fangorath will rise and the portal will be ours. So there is naught to be served in keeping such meat alive. We shall punish it first – punish it mercilessly and long – and then take what is left to feed the Beast.
‘Witch lies,’ the dragon whispered.
Kate shook her head, mute with horror.
‘Witch searches – but will not find. Brave Kate – girlthing – has won battle. Witch is blind.’
What did it matter any more whether the Witch could see her or not? The tentacles were everywhere. Soon they would sniff them out, where they were sitting around not even trying to run.
The dragon stretched his wings until they became taut as bowstrings, in great shimmering arcs above Kate’s head.
‘On Driftwood’s back – now is time.’
‘I don’t think I have the strength.’
He lowered his hindquarters so his tail trailed on the ground. ‘Climb! Let victory give Kate strength!’
Somehow, though every muscle in her body was trembling, Kate climbed the long body as it were a staircase. She discovered a place to straddle amid the brightly coloured ruff, her chin resting on his crest, her arms around his neck.
‘Hold tight!’
With a spring the dragon cleared the cliff edge and swooped riverwards, but then, as his wings caught the breeze, he soared aloft in a great careening arc, while Kate clung on desperately, her hair streaming about her face, her eyes narrowed against the rushing wind.
‘Kate Shaunessy – girl-thing!’
She slapped his crest with outrage. ‘You … You could have done this all along. You had me wetting myself.’
It took several minutes for the fact to sink in – she was free. Free! It was so unbelievable, so exhilarating! Kate shrieked with joy as the great wings beat slowly, the passing desert landscape of hills and dunes giving way to a great coastal estuary. A scattering of small islands dotted the estuary as it widened out into a massive delta, its water streaming out into the ocean.
‘Kate hold breath!’
‘What?’
All of a sudden they were falling out of the sunlit sky. Kate’s joy turned to panic as they plummeted towards the meeting of coast and ocean, her breath ripped out of her lungs, her arms locked around the scaly neck.
Preparations
Alan and Mo stood together on the highest point of one of the craggy bluffs above a desolate bay of black volcanic rock, gazing out to sea where the Temple Ship had laid anchor, perhaps a hundred yards from the rocky shore. A brisk shore breeze ruffled their hair. Alan noticed how Mo suddenly tensed up. He felt the sorrow rise in her and he understood the reason for it.
‘Mark really is taking the Ship away?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
It was the evening of their second day in the Wastelands and the setting sun was igniting flames of red and gold over the deepening blue of the distant ocean. Below them, extending from the shore, the build-up of supplies was coming to an end, most of the goods and weapons already ferried from fleet to shore in smaller craft then transferred to makeshift sleds before being dragged further inland. The powdery green film that coated the pebbly beach was already heavily scored with ruts from the sleds, the underlying black of the lava exposed like a series of wounds. So arid was the landscape that it could have been a piece of Earth’s moon. The small bay was encircled by volcanic calderas, the setting sun reflected on the crescents of their sharply delineated rims. Higher up the bay, stretching between the stony headlands, a palisade was being constructed from larger blocks of lava by sweating teams of Shee and Olhyiu, the first step towards a makeshift fort that would become their bridgehead. Here and there Alan could make out the distant, much smaller figures of the Aides, dutifully supervising the construction.
As one, they sensed it again: a wave of change rippling through the structure and fabric of the Temple Ship. Alan put his arm around Mo’s shoulders, holding her close for several moments in silence.
It had upset Mo deeply to leave the Ship, knowing Mark was on board. ‘Mark is planning to return to Earth.’
‘But how …?’
‘I don’t know how he’s planning to do it.’
‘He can’t be sure of anything.’
‘None of us is sure of anything any more, Mo. He’s afraid he will never be flesh and blood again.’
‘But how will this help?’
‘I’ve been trying to figure out what he might be thinking. When he came for me – when I was trapped in Dromenon – Mark was one with the Ship. Somehow, he and the Ship combined minds. They became one in that raptor transformation.’
‘They became a single mind?’
‘I can’t think of any better way of explaining it. Don’t you see what it means, Mo? By combining minds they entered Dromenon.’
‘I don’t even pretend to understand.’
‘I don’t fully understand myself. The way I figure it, Mark has found a way of tapping into the Ship’s memories, the Ship’s ancient knowledge. Dromenon, if I understand it right, is some kind of halfway place between worlds. If the Ship can travel halfway, then it might be capable of travelling the whole way.’
Mo’s brow wrinkled. ‘I know he’s desperate enough to try.’
Alan shrugged.
‘And if he does it – if he manages to get back to Earth – what then?’
‘Who knows, Mo?’
‘Alan!’ Mo’s hand reached up to touch his where it still rested on her shoulder. ‘He’ll take on Grimstone. I’m really frightened for him.’
Alan hesitated, considering Mo’s words. ‘Mark’s pretty smart. I’ve been thinking about things. Like how he saved us all at Ossierel. We saw how he’d been cast into stone. And yet he got out of there, within the fabric and spirit of the Temple Ship. You talked to him. He’s an oraculum-bearer now. We spoke, oraculum-to-oraculum, before I left the Ship. He’ll be figuring out what he can do with that kind of power.’
Mo stared out at the Ship.
Alan was still deeply worried at the idea of Mark taking the Ship. It looked fully restored from the wreck that had resulted from the gyre. That was a credit to Mark. Mark and the Ship – they had always been close. But now Alan guessed that they must be more than just close. They had really become one in spirit. In fact everything that had happened in the course of the last week or so – the red star, the gyre, the whole bizarre sequence of events – still puzzled Alan. The cook, Larrh, must have brought the amulet aboard at Carfon. How worrying, given that he was carrying such a power, that they had failed to detect it before embarkation and, even more so, in the confined circumstance of the Ship over many days’ voyage!
Mo interrupted his thoughts: ‘Where are the Gargs?’
Alan rubbed his hands over his face as if sluicing it with a splash of ice-cold water. ‘They’re everywhere.’
‘Watching us?’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘But they did nothing to stop us landing. And they haven’t even tried to attack us since we landed.’
‘I know.’
‘Surely it must mean something.’
‘Yeah.’
There were things going on that he didn’t understand.
It wasn’t just Mark and the Ship. Mo was changing. She was growing rapidly, her body maturing. Even her face was maturi
ng. She bore less and less resemblance to the girl he had first met at his grandfather’s sawmill. He was coming to realise that there was a good deal more to Mo than he would ever have thought possible, back in those early days of getting to know one another. He recalled that extraordinary moment when his own life was endangered with the Legun incarnate at the battle of Ossierel, and Mo had put herself between him and the Legun. How brave her small figure had stood there, unprotected by any oraculum, by anything at all, and how certain her girlish voice had sounded:
I am Mira, Léanov Fashakk – the Heralded One.
Her stance had appeared insanely brave in the circumstances. The Legun had switched all of its malice to her. Alan recalled how Mo’s face had glowed, spectral with light. That foolhardy behaviour had almost cost her her life. It had taken the healing power of the goddess Mab to save her. What had that meant? What might Mo know now that she wasn’t telling him?
Alan exhaled. He probed the Wastelands north of them, sweeping far and wide with his oraculum.
‘You’re looking for Kate?’
‘Looking, but never finding.’
‘Can you detect nothing of her?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘It doesn’t mean—?’
‘That she’s dead? I don’t think so. I’m sure I’d sense that, even from the other side of the world.’
Mo changed the subject. ‘The Gargs – do you think they’re holding back because this place is a trap?’
Alan shrugged. ‘The Kyra chose it because it would be easy to defend. We’re surrounded by mountains.’ He looked to landwards, regarded the surrounding landscape again. To put it more accurately, they were enclosed within a bowl of volcanic calderas. The bay itself was probably the result of some huge past volcanic explosion, the headlands and the bay in between all that was left. The only way inland was through marsh and bog. When the wind was blowing from that direction you could smell it.
‘But you don’t seem so sure.’
‘I’m far from certain about anything.’
The arrival of the fleet had hardly been secret. They had coasted for a full day looking for a suitable vantage along cliff faces and hill-studded bays dense with Gargs. They had inspected their settlements, some in cliffs pockmarked with caves, others in strange conglomerations atop cliffs with jagged, stony projections.
A loud noise, like the screeching of tormented metal, sounded from the Temple Ship, a shockwave so powerful it swept out in a ripple through the surrounding ocean and buffeted Alan’s and Mo’s faces as it swept outwards through the air. Alan hugged Mo, strongly, protectively, as they stared at the Ship with a shared alarm.
‘What are you going to do, Alan?’
‘I’m going to find Kate.’
‘When?’
‘We set out tomorrow. At first light.’
‘Whoaaaahhh!’
Snakoil Kawkaw barely had time to yank himself out of the hidey hole before the hole itself began to disappear. He watched it melt out of existence with utter disbelief, its walls and floor lapping and whirling, as if a few liquids were being stirred into the soup of a boiling pot. He was forced to leap out of the ferment, heedless of where he might land, before it consumed him.
‘Hellfire and abomination!’
He landed in a great tumble of rope at the base of what had, until seconds earlier, been the middle mast, but which was already well on its way to becoming another pool of soup. His left foot was caught up in the change. ‘Heeeaggghhh!’ he wailed as he saw his great toenail disappear. With a shriek he snatched away the toe itself, which had barely escaped, hoisting his entire leg into the air, where he rubbed at the toe now swollen as a ripe plum, and throbbing like a boil.
What in the darkest bogs of reason was going on?
He felt as if he had spent half his life in that cramped hell-hole. What meagre rations he had managed to wheedle from Porky Lard had run out by the second day and he had suffered such hunger he had sucked on rope for the rank residue of its oil. And for what? For every goat of a sailor to abandon ship as soon as it laid anchor in this miserable cove, surrounded by black rocks in the shape of shark’s teeth, a reef-baited shallows mean enough to rip your guts out now you were forced to swim for your life. It was the last thing anyone would have expected, a contemptible dereliction of all that was supposedly held dear by the fish-gutters and witch warriors – indeed, judging from the slithering and squeaking companions that were abandoning ship with him, right down to the last bilge rat.
And the most embarrassing admission was that he had watched it happen – watched and done nothing about it for almost an entire day. When he should have been over the rail in the previous night. And now, while dodging the madness of the changes, he was seeing spectres – at least one for certain. He had seen clear through it, like pipe-smoke, hanging around the wheel. Though consumed by dread he had skulked nearby so as to hear the monstrous chattering of this demon, at a time when the last of the fish-gutters and Shee-witches had taken to the boats, leaving just Duval behind, the huloima scum who had waited for all others to depart the Ship so he could hold a lengthy conversation with the very demon.
What Kawkaw overheard had heightened his panic.
The fish-gutters were planning to hand over the Ship to this demon, who intended to change its form back to the raptor shape it had taken over Carfon harbour. Why the demon would want to do that, other than for devilment, was a mystery to Kawkaw. But there was no mystery as to the implications. Every chip of wood, every fibre of rope or sail, would be melted into that same infernal soup. If he continued to hide on board he would be subsumed, to be reconstituted in some twirl of feather, or some sausage of gut, or a piece of tailbone.
Why, in the way of things, should happenstance so threaten him? Poor old Snakoil Kawkaw, who, if he had been allowed to take his due place in society would, no doubt, have been the very pillar of rectitude! Anyone could be virtuous if the world rewarded you as you so righteously deserved. Yet through no fault of his own he had been robbed of every aspiration and fortune at every twist and turn.
Is it my fault, then, that the blessed gods of chance had turned out to be the most mischievous of devils?
A hundred yards away, in a world enviably tranquil to his present eyes, the huloimas, Duval and the girl, were making their way down from the black escarpment. He’d watched them preen at the top, glorying in the sunset. That excremental youth and that imp of a girl who had proved so bewitched you couldn’t even land a good kick on her arse but she floated away from it like a leaf on the breeze. How had she escaped the warlock in Isscan? Ratspelts! Every last one of them! For a moment rage so possessed him that Snakoil Kawkaw forgot his predicament until, with an almighty groan, the spell-bewitched deck under his feet began to waver and soften.
‘Hell’s bleeding entrails!’
He had no option but to hurl himself bodily over the rail without the opportunity to check whether it might be jagged rocks or freezing water he would encounter at the end of his tumble.
By early night, sheltered from the shore winds behind a stony horseshoe of the same black rocks, Alan and Mo joined Ainé, Milish, Siam and senior figures from the Shee and Olhyiu in dining on conserved provisions from the stores and huddling around a fire of driftwood. All were aware of Alan’s intention of setting out for the Tower of Bones at first light. This first exploration couldn’t possibly involve the entire army of Shee. It would have to be a much smaller expeditionary force. But just how far should they go before waiting for reinforcements?
Many thought the plan decidedly risky. Success or failure might be determined by whatever contingency they discovered on the ground. Neither would relent and so there was no agreement.
‘I will head out tomorrow,’ Alan insisted, ‘even if I have to do it on my own.’
‘There is no question of that,’ the Kyra countered. ‘Though it contradicts every grain of common sense, you will be protected. But I must insist that the bulk of Shee stand by at the ready to f
ollow on at any time I deem it necessary, and certainly before there is any attempt at an attack on the Tower.’
‘And what,’ asked Qwenqwo, ‘if we find this plan to be impractical?’
‘If such proves to be the case, then our entire purpose here will be put at risk.’
Alan nodded, looking the Kyra in the eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Ainé. I know that everything you say makes perfect sense. But I know – I sense it so strongly that I haven’t any doubt about it – that Kate’s life is at stake.’
‘Our mission in these lands is not merely to defeat the Witch, but also to destroy the Tyrant of the Wastelands. What will become of that mission if the Mage Lord is lost on a fool’s errand even before we begin?’
‘Can we compromise on this? Have the army of Shee make ready to follow on, by all means. In fact it would make sense to make it obvious. We know that while they don’t make any move to attack us the Gargs are watching every move we make. If they realise the expeditionary force is small, they might decide to attack us long before we reach the Tower.’
The Kyra sighed, clearly unhappy. ‘I have the feeling,’ she declared, ‘that the Gargs refrain from attacking us because they know something that we do not. Let us hope we don’t pay a heavy price for an ill-prepared adventure.’ She climbed to her feet and, accompanied by an apprehensive looking Milish, departed the gathering.
Alan gazed over at Qwenqwo, catching the reflection of the flames in the eyes of his friend as the dwarf mage met his gaze, then shrugged his shoulders and settled down to a drink with the elders, sharing their pipe tobacco and content to wait and see what the morning brought. There would be neither criticism nor hesitation from that indomitable quarter.
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