by Ian Irvine
Poor Jevi. He loves Lilis more than his own life. He’ll never find her. Now the light was moving up again, very slowly and wearily. After an eternity he came in sight, alone.
Nadiril helped him over the edge. Jevi had tears frozen on his face. “Where was Lilis standing?” he asked hoarsely.
“Just there!” Nadiril pointed to the edge of the steps. Jevi hobbled to the spot. “Exactly here?”
“A little bit to the left. You must give her up, Jevi,” Nadiril said gently. “She can’t have survived.”
“I won’t!” he shouted. “Not for anything! What happened after she stood here?”
“I didn’t see! She just disappeared.”
Jevi dashed the frozen tears away. Tallia knew he was going to do something foolish. “Don’t go down again!” she begged.
“I have to,” said Jevi, and quite deliberately stepped backward over the edge.
Tallia let out a wail of anguish. Nadiril cursed dismally. “I’ll go for help. I expect the Aachim have some rope. Stay here. Don’t go down.”
She laughed hysterically. “I won’t.” She felt as if she was frozen to the stone. The two people she cared about most in the world were down there, probably dead.
Tallia sat on the edge, and with the pain in her head and her heart she quite lost track of time. Yellow lights flashed and flared inside Carcharon. Nadiril reappeared with several Aachim, including Basitor, and Yggur. Everything happened in a kind of waking nightmare.
Basitor knotted another length to Jevi’s rope and tied one end into a harness around his own chest. The other Aachim braced themselves and lowered him slowly, right where Lilis and Jevi had fallen. The rope moved across and back, many times. Basitor signaled with tugs, they added a third length and the search continued.
Tallia heard an urgent whisper behind her. She looked around.
“There’s someone at the gates!” hissed Nadiril. “What are we going to do now?”
Tallia’s headache felt worse than ever. “We’ll have to defend the path.” She pushed herself up with the point of her sword, sure they were all going to die.
“Signal to Basitor,” said Yggur. “He’s got to come up now!”
Tallia, Yggur and Old Darlish went down to the lowest point of the path. There they drew their weapons and waited in the shadows. A light grew in the doorway but disappeared again. A shadow ghosted down the steps. As it reached the dip in the path, Yggur stepped into view. “Go no further, Ghâshâd!” he said.
The guard stopped still, inspecting them. It peered past Tallia at the scene up by the steps. She wondered how well it could see in the dark.
Better than she could, evidently, for it gave a grim chuckle. “You’d better be gone before we come back,” it rasped, then headed back to Carcharon.
They returned to the steps. “Come on!” snapped Yggur. “What’s the matter?”
“He’s found something,” said the Aachim holding the rope.
“Well, signal him to hurry or we’ll leave him behind.”
The man gave three jerks on the rope, three jerks came back and they began to haul it up.
“Faster!” snapped Yggur, watching the tower. “I think someone’s coming.”
Basitor appeared. A body was bound over his shoulders. It was Jevi, his long hair hanging down. Tallia felt speared through the heart. Taking hold of the rope she hauled them up. Basitor wearily unfastened the bundle and lay Jevi on the path.
“Jevi!” she sang out, and threw herself at him. He was battered blue and black, and very cold.
“Careful,” panted Basitor. “He’s alive, but he’s broken some bones.”
“What about Lilis?” she asked in a frozen voice.
The rest of the rope still hung over the edge. Basitor began to pull it in. Suddenly the rope went slack as the load came off it. Tallia cried out.
“They were close together,” said Basitor.
“Tallia,” came a scream from below, and the miracle had occurred. Lilis was on the end, scrambling up the last little distance.
“Well done, Basitor!” said Nadiril.
Lilis’s face was scraped raw down one side and the knee of her trousers was bloody, but she was alive! Tallia pulled her up and folded Lilis in her long arms.
“They were an awful long way down,” said Basitor. “In a little gully full of snow, just before the precipice. I thought they’d gone over. I would never have found her but Jevi had landed close by, and I heard her squeaking.” He ruffled Lilis’s hair.
“I heard you calling, Tallia,” Lilis said hoarsely. “I shouted until I had no voice left. But I knew you would find me,” she said with childlike certainty.
Tallia bent over Jevi, who groaned and opened his eyes. He smiled up at her and Lilis.
“That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” Tallia said.
“I found her though, didn’t I?”
She embraced him and he groaned. His right arm was broken, and three fingers, and a good number of ribs.
“What if she’d gone over the cliff?” Tallia said.
“I’d still want to be with her,” Jevi replied, and that was the end of the matter.
7
Operating Theater
“Where’s Llian?” Lilis said sharply, after they rejoined the others above the amphitheater.
“He was below me when the thranx attacked,” said Tensor.
“Poor Llian!” exclaimed Lilis. “I forgot all about him.”
“There’s been no sign of him,” said Nadiril. “I’d say he’s… not made it.”
“He must be still up there!” cried Lilis.
“We can’t go back,” Mendark said roughly.
Lilis glared at him. “Llian is my friend! I’ll go by myself, if none of you are game!”
“I’ll have a look,” Shand sighed. “Come on then, Lilis.”
There were still lights showing in Carcharon, and the stick-figures of the guards occasionally flashed in front of them. The group crept along the path, more than a little afraid, and up the broad steps to the front door. There was no sign of Llian. Lilis searched, very gingerly, behind the statues. As she did so, something banged inside the tower, so loud that the door shook. Letting out a little moan, she leapt out of the way.
“Come on,” said Shand, catching her hand. “He’s gone. We can’t do any more.”
They hurried down the steps. In the darkness near the bottom Lilis trod on something yielding. She cleared the snow away to uncover a body. Llian lay quite motionless.
“He’s dead,” sobbed Lilis, touching his cold cheek.
“No, but near it,” Shand muttered. “And I’m to blame.”
He hefted Llian and staggered down the perilous track. Halfway along Tallia appeared. “I thought I saw something move down the side of the ridge,” she said.
“The lorrsk,” said Shand, rolling his r’s.
“Feet hurt,” Llian mumbled. He looked ghastly.
Shand pulled up the bottom of Llian’s trousers and gasped. His calves were raw, the flesh rasped off by the hobbles. A gum of blood, ice and grated meat had frozen in a ring around each ankle.
Llian shuddered. “How did you know its name?” He was delirious.
“Never mind! If we don’t get him to shelter he’ll die,” Shand said to Tallia. “He might lose his feet anyway. How could I have been so stupid?”
He turned away, swearing at the night, and himself, then carried Llian to the fires in the amphitheater and banked them with the remaining wood. “Keep watch, Tallia! Run up for help, Lilis!”
Cutting off Llian’s boots, he wrapped his half-frozen feet in blankets and put him in a sleeping pouch with warm stones at the bottom. He was dribbling a mug of soup down his throat when Basitor came running back.
“There’s someone at the gates again!” Tallia shouted “We’ve got to go, Shand.”
“Can I trust you to bear Llian down, Basitor?” asked Shand. “I’m spent.”
Basitor’s eyes glittered dangerously.
“I’ll carry him,” he said harshly.
“And not drop him over?”
“No!” whispered Lilis. A bond had grown between her and Basitor after the rescue, yet she knew how he hated Llian. “You carry him, Shand.”
Basitor bent down and thrust his fierce face at Lilis’s. She did not flinch. “Your loyalty is a fine and noble gift, child. My word means as much to me. I won’t harm your friend, though I want to!”
They departed hastily. By the time they reached the rest of the company Llian was thrashing in a fever wherein the void and the thranx, and Karan and Rulke, roiled in a blood-red, pain-driven subconscious.
Malien and Asper inspected the injuries. “We’ve got to have fire and hot water or we won’t save him, or Xarah either,” said Malien.
They hurried down, terrified that the thranx would suddenly reappear, or the Ghâshâd come hunting. Dawn broke before they reached the forest, a bleak winter’s morn, and it began snowing again, tiny flakes that fluttered in the wind. They took refuge in the stone pavilion at the edge of Black Lake, which was frozen over now. The Aachim rigged up windbreaks from tents while Yggur’s guards built three huge fires in the pavilion. The healers set up a surgery in the center to work on Xarah and Llian, and Jevi’s broken bones. Guards patrolled in pairs out in the forest.
Lilis was too tired to sleep. She went down to the lake where Osseion, the captain of Mendark’s guard, was hacking a hole through the ice with his axe. She stood beside him, marvelling at his deft strokes.
“Ow!” she said, rubbing her nose where a chip of ice had just stung her.
“Stand back,” said Osseion, turning so that she was shielded by his massive body. He struck the last blows and levered out a rectangular plug of ice. Lilis began to fill leather buckets with a dipper.
“This takes me back to our first adventure together, fetching the water,” said Osseion.
“You were kind to me.” Lilis smiled at the memory. “Even after I helped to chop your finger off.”
Osseion held up his hand. There was a gap where the gangrenous middle finger had been. “Had to be done,” he said, “though I didn’t care for it at the time.” He hefted a bucket in each hand and they headed back to the fires, chatting about past journeys.
The company was subdued. The thranx had cast a shadow over them. “A hundred such creatures could overrun the whole of Meldorin,” said Shand, honing his knife.
“And a thousand, perhaps all Santhenar,” Mendark agreed gloomily. “My life’s work is coming undone.”
“How is he?” Tallia asked, when they had cut the bloody rags of Llian’s trousers off to reveal his eroded calves. The bone was exposed on both shins. Lilis looked quite ill at the sight.
“Sick and sore, but I expect he’ll live.”
Malien went on with the delicate operation, picking dirt out of the collar of abraded flesh around Llian’s calves and shins while Shand and Asper sewed up Xarah’s wounds with a large needle. Xarah watched her surgeons with never a complaint.
“She’s a tough one!” said Shand admiringly, as they completed the stitches across her belly.
Llian woke when Malien was nearly done. He moaned. His legs and feet were a mess of pain.
“He’s coming round,” he heard Shand say. “Hold him down.”
Llian opened his eyes. Malien wiped sweat from his brow. “I seem to have spent half my life patching you up, chronicler,” she said with a pretense at cheerfulness.
“Is it bad?” Llian asked, gritting his teeth as he tried to sit up.
“I think we can save your feet.”
He fell back. The self-destructive fever that had possessed him last night was gone, frozen out of him. His helplessness had been proven all too vividly. What could he do without feet?
“You’ll hurt for a bit, but then I know what a philosophical attitude you have.” She chuckled. The Aachim had a high tolerance for pain and thought Llian to be rather feeble.
“But I will be able to walk?”
“It’s a long time since I heard such heart-rending moans. I expect so, chronicler, though you’ll be limping for months.”
“I’m freezing!” His teeth chattered.
“Soup’s nearly ready,” said Lilis, stirring a cauldron on the smoky fire. Her eyes were red raw.
They fed Llian soup and wrapped him up again. He lapsed back into a semi-comatose state, hearing snatches of talk. Once or twice, tormented by helplessness and failure, he groaned Karan’s name.
“We can’t stay here,” he heard Yggur say. “The Ghâshâd are out on the mountain.”
“What about the thranx?” croaked Tensor.
“No sign of it, nor the other creature.”
“We’ve got to help Karan,” Llian mumbled, tossing on his stretcher.
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Malien. “Try to sleep now.”
One of the patrols hurried in to report a band of Ghâshâd gathered on the slope above the forest.
“We’d better get down,” said Yggur. “I don’t like this place—we’re too vulnerable.”
“It’ll be dark in a few hours. Call the guards in closer.”
They spent a miserable night in the pavilion, prey to all kinds of fears, though the Ghâshâd seemed content to guard the track up to Carcharon. At the first glimmer of dawn the bearers took up their stretchers and they all retreated through the forest to the granite cliff.
Shand had equipped himself with a stave made of a hard wood almost as black as charcoal. One end was knobbly and fitted neatly into his hand. The making of this staff, or perhaps the possession of it, seemed to give him particular pleasure. “This reminds me of my wandering days. I feel that I could defend myself against anything, with it.” He stroked his beard with his free hand.
“You delude yourself,” said Mendark coldly.
“It’s a very comforting delusion,” Shand grinned. He liked to provoke Mendark.
They reached the edge of the plateau. Here the path came out of forest to snake across a strip of wind-twisted scrub, no more than head-high, then between massive outcrops of pink granite, crusted with lichens and capped with snow, that marked the edge of the escarpment.
“We’re too exposed,” Shand muttered.
Tensor lifted his head from the stretcher to sniff the air. He shivered.
“Let’s move!” said Mendark. His voice cracked.
They skidded their way between the boulders with their stretchers and onto the narrow path at the top of the cliff. It was icy, and an updraught sent flurries of snow whirling and tumbling in their faces. They turned down the track, treading carefully.
“Gothryme will seem like paradise after this,” said Tallia to Shand. They were at the rear.
“And Tullin, heaven. I wish I’d never left,” said Shand.
Tallia and Jevi were immediately behind Llian, not speaking, but walking so close together that their arms touched. Jevi’s broken arm was in a sling and the three fingers had been strapped together. At that moment the leader, Basitor, recognizable among the tall Aachim by his bandaged head, stopped so abruptly that Yggur bumped into him.
“Watch—” Yggur broke off.
Standing before them on the path, looking like a devil from the deepest pits of the void, with its wings forming a hood high above it, was the thranx. Its skin was a threatening blood-purple color, like a bruise, its belly swollen from feeding. Massive thigh muscles rippled. Claws as long as knives tightened on the path, crushing the ice and rotten rock beneath its feet. One thigh bore a red wound, like a burn.
Yggur stood paralyzed, as he had when Rulke’s construct had appeared. One hand groped for his sword hilt but did not recognize it. His mouth hung open.
Basitor whipped out his long sword and held it out before him. “Stay behind me, blind man!” he said contemptuously. He swung the weapon in the air. It made a humming sound.
The thranx bared its teeth. Its mouth seemed to contain a hundred of them and they were shiny brown. It could have bitten his
arm off at the shoulder. “Skunngg!” it said, purring.
“I think that means ‘breakfast!’” Nadiril coughed.
To Llian, sitting up on his stretcher, the events seemed unreal: the thranx smiling, Basitor waving his sword in circles as if winding himself up. “He’s going berserker,” Llian said softly, “just like he did in Katazza.” Lilis gripped his hand.
Basitor humped his great shoulders, roared mad defiance and leapt at the thranx. It continued to grin at him, then at the last possible moment its left arm flashed. It held a flail tipped with little spiked balls, like the statue outside the gate of Carcharon.
The lashes whipped around Basitor’s chest, the balls embedding themselves in his flesh with thuds like a butcher’s meat mallet. Basitor screamed. The sword fell from his hand. With a backhanded flick of the flail, he was lifted off his feet and sent whirling through the air like a spinning top, to disappear over the edge of the cliff in the falling snow.
The thranx, still grinning, snapped the bloody flail at Yggur. Llian, who was directly behind him, saw Yggur’s weak knee wobble. His fingers clutched at the sword hilt but Yggur did not seem to have the strength to draw it. Surely this time he was going mad, and they were all going to die.
8
A Transformation
Behind Llian someone was screaming. It took a long time to work out that it was Lilis.
“You can do it, Yggur!” said Nadiril.
“Move aside!” said Yggur to the thranx, struggling to control his fear but failing miserably. He wrenched out his sword. His knee wobbled again and he sagged on that side. “Fall back!” he gasped over his shoulder.
The thranx swung its flail at Yggur’s head. He did not move, though the whizzing balls went so close that they ruffled his hair. The thranx took another step forward, and only then did Llian realize how huge it was. Yggur was a tall man but it was shoulders and head above him and the arch of its spiked wings as high again. It raised the flail. Yggur did not move. How can he just stand there? Llian thought. It’ll turn him into mince. He must be paralyzed with terror.