Crusader

by Sara Douglass

  StarLaughter made herself beautiful. She sparkled, and all for WolfStar.

  “He won’t be able to resist me!” she said, preening before the mirror, and tugging at the heavy silk fabric she’d chosen to don.

  The fact that StarLaughter had a reasonable hike before her did not deter her from donning such finery. She would manage. She had to.

  StarLaughter picked up her bag, lifted her skirts, and set out on her conquest.

  She had a quest, one that was right and true and good, and she was happy. WolfStar would realise his true love for her, and then, united, they could rescue their son.

  DragonStar had been right, StarLaughter had finally, reluctantly, decided, when he’d said that WolfStar and those he was with (who could surely be discarded once their purpose was done) would head south rather than swing west along the Icebear Coast. WolfStar’s companions would want the south’s relative warmth—and StarLaughter’s mouth smiled sarcastically whenever she thought about what they’d find there—rather than a continuance of the northern icy wastes.

  Stars knew how they’d cope with the Skraelings in the tundra, StarLaughter thought. But they had WolfStar to aid them, and he would surely protect them.

  StarLaughter’s mouth relaxed into warmth as she contemplated how her magnificent lover had undoubtedly driven back the Skraelings with his powerful enchantments.

  Somehow StarLaughter had managed to forget that WolfStar’s power had been lost along with that of the Star Dance. In her mind, he was as powerful as he had always been, and in her mind, he was as anxious to resume their love affair as she was. Undoubtedly he was already dreaming of the new son they would make between them.

  “Ah!” StarLaughter murmured as she carried her pack up the stairwells and corridors towards the surface. “What a life we have before us! WolfStar, me, and our son. What a happy, happy family we shall make!”

  StarLaughter could no more contemplate the fact that WolfStar might not be particularly pleased to see her again, nor want to resume their relationship, than she could contemplate a future world without herself in it.

  She was immortal, and her and WolfStar’s love would last for all time.

  Hadn’t it thus far?

  By dawn StarLaughter was picking her way over the debris of the glacier that had run between Star Finger and the Icebear coast. Despite the relative difficulty of the terrain, and the freezing wind that was hurrying south over the icebergs of the Iskruel Ocean, StarLaughter was humming happily. She did not appear to mind, or perhaps even notice, that the wind tore the fabric of her robe, or that the fine needles of ice it contained ruined her makeup. She was not apparently aware that her hair had been torn loose from its carefully contrived moorings, or that the wind had ruffled her wing feathers into chaos.

  She was on her way to WolfStar, and she was contented. Nothing could go wrong.

  By mid-morning, StarLaughter had reached the clearer ground of the beach itself, and she turned due east. As she strode along the grit, unmindful of the crashing waves that sent dampening spray all over her, StarLaughter used the kernel of power that the Demons had given her to speed her progress. For every step she took, five paces of ground flew by underneath her sandalled feet.

  StarLaughter did not fly, for every instinct told her that the sky was a very, very dangerous place this day.

  But there were a few who were brave enough to dare the air, and StarGrace was one of them. She’d watched over Leagh all night (wondering, puzzling, frowning) as the woman had curled up against a tree stump, and she had then spent the dawn hour thinking.

  Once the sun crested the ridge above the Fernbrake crater, StarGrace had lifted into the air.

  She needed to talk a while with StarLaughter.

  It took StarGrace several hours to find her quarry, and when she did, StarGrace had to circle a few minutes, trying to come to terms with what she saw below her.

  StarLaughter, striding along the beach of the Icebear coast.

  That, in itself, was not enough to pique StarGrace’s curiosity. It was what StarLaughter looked like that had, for the moment, stunned the Hawkchild.

  She was hideously made up with face paint (smudged and streaked since the elements played with her), as she was also hideously garbed: for whatever reason, StarLaughter had chosen a vivid yellow gown draped over with lurid pink and silver brocade. She had dyed her wings orange and red.

  She looked ghastly.

  StarGrace was self-aware enough to understand that her own mind spent too much of its time twisting in maddened circles and frustrating dead ends. StarGrace was also sane enough (just) to realise that StarLaughter’s mind had tipped over the crumbling edge of whatever cliff it was they had all clung to these past few thousand years.

  StarGrace circled lower, her face now creased in speculation.

  StarLaughter heard the slight noise behind her and spun about.

  “Oh!” she cried, and then laughed.

  StarGrace was hobbling towards her, half-Icarii, half-Hawkchild. Her face was that of the golden girl, StarGrace, as was her left arm and leg. But the rest of her was still black Hawkchild, and she hobbled and stumbled alarmingly as she walked from foot to claw, and back again.

  Twisted wings dragged on the ground behind her, useless in her current state of mal-transformation.

  “Why, StarGrace!” StarLaughter cried brightly, and set a welcoming expression on her face. “What do you here?”

  “Come to speak with you,” StarGrace said, and made a stupendous effort to manage the final transformation from Hawkchild to young Icarii woman.

  Her features ran, blurred, and then set themselves into that of the beautiful woman.

  “Oh?” StarLaughter said, and clutched her hands before her, managing to look extremely guilty and extremely irritated at the same time.

  “Mmmm,” StarGrace said. “And what do you do here? Why hurrying east? Is east where WolfStar lies?”

  “Well…” StarLaughter said, looking over her shoulder as if there might be a salvation hurrying over to meet her. “Well…”

  StarGrace’s mind twisted with distrust. StarLaughter did know where WolfStar was. Then why had she not called the Hawkchilds? What was StarLaughter up to?

  “I’m up to living my own life,” StarLaughter snapped, and strangely that display of ill-temper eased StarGrace’s mind a little.

  “Is WolfStar east?” she asked again.

  “Yes,” StarLaughter admitted. “There is a convoy east, escapees from this Sanctuary that DragonStar has muttered so much about.”

  “And WolfStar is among them!”

  “Wait!” StarLaughter cried as StarGrace’s features blurred once again and she made as if to lift into the air.

  “Wait for what?” StarGrace said. Her features were still twisting and turning, and her voice was horribly muffled and thick.

  “Well, the convoy is heavily protected! Thick enchantments!” StarLaughter had no idea of the truth she actually spoke. It was simply the first thing that sprang to mind.

  “And?” StarGrace had completed her transformation back into Hawkchild, and now she hopped a pace closer to StarLaughter, her head tilted suspiciously.

  “And the enchantments are too thick for us to break through. Dangerous. I,” and now StarLaughter had grown enough in confidence to square her shoulders, and shake her hair out, “am endeavouring to tempt WolfStar out from his bolthole. Once he is out from under his protective enchantments, then we can do what we will.”

  StarGrace looked StarLaughter over once again. “And you are going to tempt WolfStar out dressed like that?”

  “I shall need to recomb my hair and wing feathers,” StarLaughter said, and then she smiled indulgently, “but he will not be able to resist me.”

  StarGrace thought that WolfStar would manage a resistance very easily, but she said nothing. In truth, StarGrace did not quite know what to make of the situation. Once, she and her companion Hawkchilds had felt such a oneness of purpose with StarLaughter tha
t StarGrace could have trusted her through death and beyond. Indeed, she had done so.

  Now?

  Now StarGrace suspected StarLaughter’s mind had gone completely insane, and StarGrace did not know what twists and conundrums it had decided to present to StarLaughter as utter reality.

  StarGrace shifted uncertainly.

  “When I get within a day’s march of WolfStar, I shall let you know,” StarLaughter said.

  Still StarGrace said nothing.

  “Truly,” StarLaughter said, and StarGrace finally nodded.

  “Make sure that you do,” she said, and lifted into the air. StarGrace had trusted StarLaughter through four thousand years, and the woman had not let her down once during this time. StarGrace could surely trust her for a few more days.

  StarLaughter smiled and waved as the Hawkchild soared high into the sky, circled twice, then flew south again.

  She did not realise that StarGrace did not believe a word of what she’d said.

  Chapter 44

  The Heart Incarnate

  At dawn, Urbeth and her daughters reappeared. They were patently exhausted, and Axis and Azhure wondered at the exertions, both physical and magical, they must have undergone in order to draw the Demons away from the fleeing convoy, and then to escape the Demons’ wrath themselves. Urbeth and her daughters looked at the avenue of trees, looked at Ur, dozing underneath a cart, the pot still wrapped in her arms, and nodded to themselves.

  The three reappeared in their womanly forms, not as icebears. All three had dark circles of exhaustion under their eyes, and their skin was pallid, not with the reflection of the ice and snow, but with the strain they’d undergone.

  “You need food and rest,” Axis said, sharing a concerned glance with Azhure, and then offering Urbeth his arm.

  For a moment it appeared Urbeth might actually accept his support, then she shook her head tiredly.

  “Rest,” she said. “Food can wait.”

  “What happened?” Azhure asked, knowing they were probably too tired to tell, but needing to know anyway.

  Urbeth was too exhausted even to snap. “We drew the Demons off,” she said, “and handed them into the care of the Chitter Chatters.”

  Axis smiled. He remembered how the box Ho’Demi had brought out of the Murkle mines had whispered disconcertingly to itself for months until the Ravensbund Chief had turned the Chitter Chatters loose in the northern icepack.

  “Where are the Demons now?” said Azhure.

  “I don’t know,” Urbeth said, and Axis and Azhure realised she was so strained she was close to tears. “I just don’t know.”

  “Rest,” Azhure said, “please.”

  Urbeth nodded, then turned slightly to address her two daughters. “Take the rear of the avenue.”

  Without a reply the two ice women turned, and melted away into the snow.

  “Why send them back there?” Axis said.

  “To protect it,” Urbeth said. “The trees will protect the length of the avenue, but for the moment its two entrances are vulnerable. I will stand here.”

  Without further ado Urbeth took several steps back until she was at the border where snow turned to shaded walk, and began very slowly to turn about.

  Within heartbeats she sped up until her form was spinning so fast Axis and Azhure could not discern her features, and then, in the next breath, Urbeth turned into a pillar of opaque green and grey ice that stood immobile and solid, guarding the entrance to the avenue.

  Qeteb and his companions had escaped the Murkle mines only through the most extreme of efforts. The dark and damp mines had contained enchantment—did the very cursed soil still reek with enchantment?—and the Demons had found it very difficult to negate its holding effects.

  Eventually, after hours of temper, they had burst through the boarded-up entrances of several of the ancient shafts, sending showers of sharp-edged rock cascading through the air, and causing a massive avalanche down three sides of the mountain from which they’d emerged.

  Qeteb was furious, but calm. He had finally understood that the forces ranged against him consisted not only of DragonStar and his five companions, but of the land itself.

  The total and catastrophic destruction of Tencendor must wait until every creature, rock and speck of soil ranged against him and his had been destroyed.

  And for this, Qeteb knew he needed a cool and calculating head, not a fount of fury erupting at every setback.

  Thus, he held back his Demons for an hour or two of planning. They crouched on the desolate side of the mountain they’d escaped from, clinging to rocks like bunch-backed toads, letting the snow settle about their shoulders and lumpy spines. They crouched, and they whispered. They let their rage feed their whispers, but not control them. They spent some time in utter quiet, sending their senses scrying about the land; not only to verify the whereabouts of DragonStar and his five, but also to truly sense the land itself, feel its purpose, know its motives.

  Qeteb, his senses soaring and penetrating deeper than those of his companions, felt something else.

  A thing or a purpose as intimately connected to DragonStar as his five witches. No! Even more intimately connected! Who or what was this thing? And where? Where?

  Qeteb knew where the five witches were—indeed, their positions was as preordained as their forthcoming battles with the Demons—but where, where the sixth mysterious and powerful presence?

  Ah! A smile crawled through Qeteb’s mind as his senses showed him the icy northern tundra.

  And the long, snaking convoy within which was the sixth…and perhaps the most vital.

  “There is a heart yet beating within this land,” Qeteb eventually said.

  He had thought he’d completely ravaged Tencendor when he’d been resurrected, but now he understood the untruth of that belief. He’d devastated its skin, but no more. Somewhere lay a great heart thumping, still pounding power through the land, frustrating the Demons at every turn.

  “We must find that heart,” said Qeteb, “and destroy it.”

  “Do you mean the four hearts of the four lakes?” said Mot.

  “No.”

  “Then the heart of the Maze—” Barzula began.

  “No! Another heart. An unknown heart. A powerful heart. A despicable heart!”

  “Where?” asked Sheol.

  Qeteb sat silent a moment, his black armoured form hunched against the weight of snow on his wings and back. The metal of his visor rippled, as if the thoughts contained within were too virulent to be contained much longer.

  “The long line of hopelessness,” Qeteb finally said, “that escaped from Sanctuary and currently wallows in icy misery to the north.

  “In there lies the heart incarnate.”

  Sometime after StarLaughter had resumed her trek east, six loathsome shadows swept over the landscape.

  StarLaughter reflexively crouched close to some rocks, but the Demons, flying high overhead, did not notice her—or perhaps were too preoccupied to notice her.

  “There’s trouble ahead,” StarLaughter said, and then silently mouthed a prayer for WolfStar’s safe-keeping.

  DragonStar also saw the Demons soar overhead, so single-minded in their quest for destruction they did not even heed him.

  He, too, crouched, then stared, and then leaped lightly down from his rocks atop the rubble of Star Finger to where his Star Stallion waited in a ravine below.

  The Alaunt milled about the stallion’s legs, whining with their eagerness for the hunt.

  As DragonStar walked up to the horse and hounds, his garb slipped away, and he strode once more in the linen loincloth with the lily sword swinging from the jewelled belt.

  “There’s trouble ahead,” he said, and vaulted on the Star Stallion’s back.

  Within the instant both horse and Alaunt were running north-east.

  Chapter 45

  Trouble

  Beyond the trees and the still ice forms of Urbeth and her daughters in their respective positions at
either end of the avenue, the northern tundra was wrapped in an ice-gale so vicious that even the odd Skraeling, escaped from Ur’s trap preferred to huddle in their burrows than drift out to search for prey.

  Axis spent most of the morning making sure that people and animals were settled comfortably—perhaps on the morrow they might begin their move south—and trying to avoid StarDrifter, who sat like a brooding storm on one of the carts near the head of the convoy.

  Neither StarDrifter, nor Axis or Azhure, could quite come to terms with, let alone believe, the choice Zenith had made.

  Axis blamed Fate, Azhure blamed herself and StarDrifter blamed WolfStar.

  Axis had sent word to WingRidge to move WolfStar to the very rear of the convoy, far enough that he and StarDrifter might not meet accidentally.

  Axis was also truthful enough with himself to understand that he did not want to see WolfStar either, nor Zenith with WolfStar.

  Perhaps he could speak to her later…but for the meantime there was far too much to do.

  Urbeth’s twin daughters dreamed the morning away in their pillars of ice, recovering strength after their efforts at leading the Demons into the souls of the Chitter Chatters. As had Urbeth at the front of the convoy, they’d placed themselves at its very rear, standing in the open space between the last trees on either side of the avenue, at the border between the rage of the snowstorm and the peaceful warmth of the avenue.

  They seemed completely inviolate, twin pillars of unapproachable ice, but they were not quite alone.

  Protected by the warmth of the trees, SpikeFeather TrueSong sat some paces away from them, cross-legged and winged, his head resting in one hand, red hair and feathers flaming incongruously before the ice, his eyes resting curiously on Urbeth’s daughters.

  Truth to tell, SpikeFeather had been feeling more than slightly obsolete in the past few weeks. He’d been the one to correctly guess the location of Sanctuary, but it had been others who’d opened it, and then led Tencendor’s populations through its doors. DragonStar and his five witches had garnered all the attention and glory in their quest to destroy the Demons. SpikeFeather was not feeling jealous, merely horribly useless. He’d always hovered about the edges of the action, through the wars with Gorgrael, and now with these Demons, bursting with potential but never quite achieving it. Why had Orr taken charge of his life and why spend so many years talking to him and showing him the Underworld?