‘What is it you want of me?’
‘I have already agreed to serve you.’
Penny didn’t like the idea of serving him. The very thought of it sickened her. But how could she avoid it? She had promised to serve him to save Gully. ‘I . . . I need to see you, to hear you.’
He appeared then, exactly as she remembered him: an elderly man, small and neat with a white beard wearing a navy cloak with curiously roomy sleeves. But his eyes were not the kindly eyes she recalled from the rain-swept night in the back streets of London. His eyes were devoid of iris or white. They were a glistening black.
She turned away from him, spoke as if to her reflection: ‘I can’t stand the thought that I must lose my will.’
‘On the contrary, you have made a bargain of your will to me.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘There are two sides to a bargain.’
‘I fear what you will expect of me.’
‘Your fear is understandable, given the circumstances.’
‘Am I your slave?’
‘That would make you imperfect in my eyes.’
Penny shook her head. ‘Are you real? Or am I imagining this conversation within my own mind?’
‘My presence is real.’
‘Where is this place?’
‘It is a projection from within a domain known as Dromenon.’
‘A projection?’
‘It is both within and without the city of London.’
‘Within the Black Rose?’
‘Observe!’
Penny’s eyes widened as she saw the landscape draw apart to form a lucid oval, as if a giant eye had sprung open to reveal a ruin of broken masonry, engulfed in ashes.
‘Oh, my god! This is London?’
‘Yes.’
Tears sprang into her eyes. ‘You promised me—’
‘I promised to preserve the landmarks you so admired – and of course your street urchin friend.’
‘Why must you do these things? Why do you so hate us?’
‘There are major considerations at stake. I have many enemies far more formidable than humans. Your world, as indeed my own, has become increasingly perilous for me and my purpose.’
Penny could not keep the exasperation out of her voice. ‘Will you not explain where I really am? What is really expected of me? What do you really want from me?’
His image softened, so he appeared almost as friendly as the Jeremiah she remembered from the rainy night street. ‘I can reveal some things, but not all that you would ask.’
‘Please don’t confuse me further. Am I entirely lost? Have I abandoned everything?’
‘Being human, you were never really free. Absolute freedom is an illusion for a finite being.’
Penny felt so frustrated, so afraid, she could explode. ‘You said there were two sides to a bargain?’
‘I will reciprocate your serving me.’
‘What does that mean? How do I know I can trust you?’
‘You can never entirely trust another. But there are degrees of trust. That is an important consideration.’
‘How then can I judge these . . . these degrees of trust?’
‘Who, in your life, have you ever trusted?’
She hesitated. There had been very few people she had ever trusted: her parents, her father in particular. But even then her trust in Father had been limited. Perhaps Gully was the only one she had even come close to really trusting? In her imagination she saw his face. She heard him say, ‘Penny – Penny, gel! Where ya hidin’?’ She and Gully had had no option but to trust one another, to rely upon one another, because it was the only way they could survive in the chaos that had become London. Gully had warned her against exploring the Tube tunnels. He’d been right. How she wished now that she had taken his advice. She was still thinking about Gully, with her eyes clenched shut, when Jeremiah’s voice interrupted her thoughts:
‘Your trust is about to be tested.’
Penny discovered that she was surrounded by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of figures, each covered with gauzy veils. Not wraiths as before, but real living creatures. The tallest of those standing erect were no higher than her shoulders, and many were much shorter, so she felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. She put her hands to her face, probing through the beaded lattice to confirm that her skin felt real, that it wasn’t just a complex dream. The figures were covered by shrouds that completely blanketed them, tent-like; the material finer than any gauze or lace she had ever seen, as delicate as a creamy white smoke.
‘What’s happening?’
‘They have come here to celebrate your epiphany.’
Here? How had they entered the Black Rose? Penny’s eyes darted around to discover an alien landscape. Had Jeremiah taken her out of the Rose to some other destination? If so, how had he done so in the blink of an eye? And what did Jeremiah mean by an epiphany? Penny was still attempting to figure out if this was just a dream – or another frightening reality.
‘They’re humming,’ she said.
‘Incanting!’
‘What are they incanting?’
‘A hymn to the glory of their coming sacrifice.’
‘What sacrifice?’
‘Why – of the most important thing they have to give: their lives.’
When Penny examined the nearby figures more carefully, she saw that every one of them held a sharp-looking dagger to her breast.
‘They’re sacrificing themselves?’
‘Of course.’
‘To what – to whom?’
‘To you.’
He spoke the words in a quiet voice, devoid of emotion. A shocked Penny fell silent for several moments. ‘Why me?’
‘You are their Lady of Sorrows.’
‘I don’t understand. Why would they do this?’
‘It’s an ancient rite. They have devoted their entire lives to this sacred moment. In the act of self-sacrifice they will become one with you.’
Penny looked at the sea of faces, trying to make out what she could hear of the incantation. How could the rite be ancient if it was dedicated to her? Jeremiah had to be lying to her. Nothing of what he said made sense. But then her mind froze. She remembered his words when she gave herself up to him.
‘Who are they?’
‘You would regard them as religious devotees – idolators. All of their conscious lives have been spent in worship of you. The ceremony will be their reward for unlimited homage.’
‘Their reward?’
‘They will experience the Rapture.’
Penny felt a shiver of fright run through her. ‘Oh, please, you must put a stop to this! You have to if you want my cooperation!’
‘Would you deny them what means everything to them?’
Wisps of a carmine-coloured vapour were condensing among them. Penny began to move; she shook their shoulders and she tried to rip away the strange gauzy material that enshrouded them. It tore in her fingers, like the finest, silkiest spider’s web.
She shouted at them: ‘Wake up!’
They ignored her. It was as if both she and Jeremiah were invisible to them. With every head bowed, they continued with their incantations.
He said: ‘You still do not understand. Take the Rapture from them and they will not survive anyway. In their grief, th
ey will kill themselves. Their final experience will be despair.’
Penny heard the first ecstatic moan.
The Unbroken Circle
The cold greys and warm pinks of early evening fought one another in the cloud-wracked heavens. Alan stood on a surviving section of the Tyrant’s fortress wall, leaning his weight on the shaft of the Spear of Lug, and gazing through the drifting black smoke at the scene several hundred feet below him. His friend, Mo, together with Qwenqwo Cuatzel and the orang-utan form of Magtokk, stood in companionable silence beside him. After two cruel days and nights of fierce and bloody battle, the fortress had fallen and now, below them, the Shee made preparations for the ceremony of their dead. High overhead, wheeling Gargs performed their own respectful spirals for the lost. Garg and Shee together – a remarkable act from two peoples who had, until recently, been mortal enemies. At least half the dead had perished in the initial assault, ripped apart by the cannonade from those fearsome curtain walls before Alan’s First Power had had time to strike. And the assault itself had been the grimmest battle yet, fought in the close quarters of the vast labyrinth of passageways and tunnels that riddled the fortress and the divergent curtain walls.
The Tyrant’s legionaries had been hard, brave soldiers who fought to the last drop of blood. The defenders in the fortress might have been routed by Alan’s use of the First Power, but the tens of thousands within the walls and buttresses had refused to surrender. They had employed well-drilled strategies: appearing to give ground only to lead their adversaries into rooms where the floors would suddenly give way into the moiling furnace of the volcano beneath them. They were heedless of the fact that the traps sometimes caught their own, displaying remarkable bravery. But a greater bravery had been demanded of the Shee. The ceaseless carnage had exhausted all of them.
Alan’s eyes lifted from the haunting scene in the river of solidified lava below, to the vista to the north of the craggy promontory on which the fortress had been built. Sharp ridges and crags flowed in wave after wave into an azure-tinted smoky distance that marked the location of the Tyrant’s citadel. What premonition was this – supposedly a preliminary skirmish – of the onslaught that would be required to take Ghork Mega, and finally end the Tyrant’s reign of terror on Tír?
A sudden trumpeting from far below warned them that the Shee ceremony was about to begin. It forced Alan’s vision back onto the lava below, still cooling from when the Shee had blocked the flow. They couldn’t hang around this place for very much longer; the loosening of the magma and his own use of the First Power had weakened the headland on which the fortress stood. There were rumblings in the rocks, tremors he could feel through his feet. Thick black smoke erupted from the widening cracks and fissures filling the sky with gloom. The main army of Shee had moved several miles northwards to settle a new camp at a safe distance. Alan and his companions had watched throughout the afternoon and early evening as Shee and aides had carried the bodies out onto the still cooling river of rock. And now a raft of dead, fully fifty yards long and a third as wide, formed the outline of a Shee galleon, its prow directed towards the west and the setting sun. They had cushioned and overlain the bodies with what little dry scrub they could gather, held down with rocks. Already the pyre smouldered and smoked, the air filled with the unpleasant aroma of singed hair and baking flesh. Lightning balls, which announced that the gates barring the magma were about to be re-opened, roiled and scattered upriver. The last of the Shee climbed up higher, coming towards Alan. There was a thunderous crackling of disintegrating rock as the superheated magma burst out into the valley for a final time to hiss and splutter out over the landscape, rushing towards the giant pyre of bodies.
Eight hundred and seventy two Shee: that had been the cost of taking the fortress. Alan watched the crawling river of fire come closer to the smouldering cremation pyre. He couldn’t help but shiver as the flames erupted at the prow of the formation.
At the same time, the formal ceremony commenced. The voice of Bétaald carried on the wind: her hymnal cadences an orison that echoed with feeling in his mind.
‘For those of our sisters who feared not to die . . .’
Alan had noticed before how the Shee always died in their human form. There was something cruel about leaving those tall, elegant bodies to be melted and absorbed into the molten stone. But the Shee had a different attitude to the dead. The dead were duly honoured with the ceremony, but in another sense they lived on in their astonishing cycle of life: the mother-sister making way for the daughter-sister. There would be deep veneration of the bones of the lost, but at the same time there would be no maudlin despair, merely a determination to learn the lessons taught by it. The new would replace the old and the old would live on in memories, contributing their experience to the fighting prowess of the new generations. It was a strange cycle of reproduction, yet one that carried the gift of immortality. Such was the reality of normal life for the Shee.
*
‘Eight hundred and seventy two dead,’ Qwenqwo muttered, ‘and three times as many left seriously wounded.’
‘I know,’ Alan nodded.
Regardless of the daughter-sister standing by to replace each individual dead, the injured required that their wounds be treated, their broken limbs splinted, their pain nursed by the comfort of healwell. At the new camp three miles further north, a small army of aides was busy with such duties.
‘Oh, Alan!’
Mo was dabbing at her cheeks, her eyes moist. The rising smoke didn’t help to quench her tears. Clutching at his left arm, she slid her head beneath it so he was embracing her slim shoulders.
‘Yes, I know.’ He understood what Mo was thinking. He wished that Kate was in the embrace of his other arm.
The entire Shee army could not be spared for the ceremony. It was too vast, and the forward limit of their march must now be defended against potential counter attack. But many thousands had formed an honour guard on the surrounding slopes. They went down onto one knee now and the funeral chant began, a mournful choir, in perfect unison. He squeezed Mo to him as the scurrying Shee ignited the flame arrows of the bows of a hundred archers, who fired into the still-smouldering pyre that had not yet been consumed by the laval heat. And now, bearing a respectful witness on the promontory, Alan was reminded of a similar feeling of wretchedness and desolation that he had felt on the banks of the Snowmelt River, when he had witnessed another funeral, this time of a single Shee noviciate warrior called Valéra, who had saved Alan’s life. He recalled how he had been pressed, against the resentment of an older Kyra, to examine the wound that the Preceptor’s spiral blade had inflicted. So dreadful was the memory that even now, half kneeling on the promontory, Alan clenched his eyes shut and gritted his teeth against the remembered agony that had resulted from his poisoned fingers. And in examining the venom-blackened wound, he had discovered the new life growing in the warrior’s womb, the daughter-sister, as yet unborn, who would replace, and in her way fulfil, the life of Valéra.
Another clarion call of trumpets signalled the movement of the venerating Shee, in a slow, great clock-wise circle, holding hands.
‘They call it Neavrashvahar,’ Alan said softly.
Mo asked: ‘What does it mean?’
Alan peered down at the thickening pall of smoke, scented by something, perhaps some kind of incense that had been sprinkled over the bodies. ‘I think it’s something like their vision of heaven. The passing on of the wonder of life from mother to daughter – the word means “the unbroken circle”.’
He recalled how, with the realisation of what was at stake as Valéra died, he had blundered out of the bower and run blindly into the icy snow. Never in his life had he felt so useless. He had fallen to his knees, his head bowed, his arms adrift by his side, his fists clenched. He had poured his anguish into the oraculum, finding himself in a flat wilderness that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Now, with greater exper
ience, he realised that he had entered Dromenon. A strange presence had hovered before him. He knew what that presence was, now: A True Believer . . . It had spoken to him in riddles, provoking anger because he had needed clear explanation.
Alan’s memories were cut short by a powerful hand squeezing his shoulder. He blinked, gazing down once more at the great funeral pyre.
Qwenqwo Cuatzel said: ‘My friend, the blessing of the flagon?’
‘Not just now, Qwenqwo. The Shee – Bétaald and the Kyra – might think it disrespectful.’
‘What they cannot see cannot hurt them.’
Alan felt, rather than saw, his friend, the dwarf mage, take an almighty swig from his flagon. Qwenqwo deserved the drink. None had fought more bravely through the smoke and flame-filled chambers and corridors of the fortress. Alan felt the supporting hand tighten on his shoulder. The entire boat-shaped mound was now ablaze, flames crackling in the evening air. As the conflagration intensified to a bright orange, Alan felt a sudden flash of power, a signal – or perhaps a window opening mind-to-mind – from the Oraculum of Bree in the Kyra’s brow. The signal was not directed at him, but westwards, to the Guhttan mountains thousands of miles away and across the Eastern Ocean, to where the new generation of daughter-sisters would inherit the sacred warrior mantle of the mother-sisters, whose bodies needed to be consumed by the cleansing action of the flames for the circle to be made whole again.
It comforted Alan that the daughter-sister of Valéra would be among them. That the Shee who had saved his life now lived again.
‘Blow it!’ He accepted the press of the flagon, took a swig. He spoke, in little above a whisper, to Qwenqwo: ‘The Shee have a beautiful expression for the portal they cross after death, they call it “The Harbour of Souls”.’
He had learned this in that same conversation with the True Believer on the banks of the great river.
The first stars were twinkling in the evening sky as Alan, Mo and Qwenqwo made their way to the new camp. None of them fancied the jolting ride that would result from being carried by an onkkh. They were content with making their way on foot; the dwarf mage lurching somewhat from his consumption of liquor, while Alan and Mo trudged through a weariness that leached into their bones. Shee guards were everywhere, even if not always apparent, because of the camouflage effect of their cloaks. Even as they arrived into camp, some miles north of the funeral, the air still reeked of burning flesh and the more sulphurous smell of the lava. Alan would never forget the sight, his mind still echoing the final lament of the Shee as the pyre of the fallen was consumed:
The Return of the Arinn Page 4