“I think the bare rock is safe,” Tabitha said in a whisper.
Garyll had only one saddlebag. He fell down beside her and lay on his back. Mulrano tumbled down and didn’t move.
“They’re gone,” Garyll said at length, to the darkening sky.
Thunder rolled in the distance, once, twice. Again.
“I know.”
Tabitha stared along the flat-bottomed mass of cloud. Far away, lightning seared the horizon, a short stab of silver light. Lightning, or wildfire? She couldn’t tell. She wondered if they were really there, or if she had fallen into a nightmare. All of it was so strange—the wastelands, the altered horses, the giant pursuer, the wildfire. And Ashley, poor Ashley, borne away into the sky. Could it get any worse? This ruined realm, this altered land, this Oldenworld, so disordered: ruled by Chaos.
Apart from the thundercloud, the sky was empty.
“Oh Ashley,” she whispered. “You didn’t deserve this.”
None of them did. She couldn’t see how they would survive in this cruel land.
“Maybe his beast carried him to the forest,” Garyll suggested quietly.
She knew he didn’t believe it, he was just saying it to ease her pain. She laid a kiss upon her fingers and pressed it against his cheek. At least she still had Garyll.
_____
Just don’t fall off, Ashley told himself. Hold on, hold on, hold on!
His eyes were shut so tightly his cheeks were sore. He knew the ground was so awfully far away. He wished he had jumped from the horse’s back when it was changing, on the ground, but that would have put him in the silver dust, and he’d had no desire to test his resistance to it. So he had kept himself firmly in the saddle through the mare’s wild bucking and rearing. He had watched with horror as the strange growths had become wings in front of his knees. He had never suspected they would actually work.
Then, after the first lurching flaps, he had believed Sugarlump would only flutter a short way and he would be able to slip off. But the wings had lifted them higher. The horse had flown on, until his friends were far behind, until his friends were gone.
Empty air yawned below him. It was a long, long way to fall.
Ashley kept his eyes closed and gritted his teeth. Think, lummox, think! It can’t be the end.
Sugarlump was just as terrified as he was. He had been linked with the animal’s mind all day, keeping her calm through all the terrors. Her thoughts were clear to him. She still knew she was a horse—nothing had changed within—but she had sprouted wings; she was a thousand foot up in the air! She was frightened, and so she ran, but running only agitated the great wings. And so they rose, higher and higher, as Sugarlump’s hooves lashed the air and her eyes rolled wildly.
Ashley didn’t want to die. He soaked the mare’s mind with soothing thoughts, crooning and whispering to her as he clung onto her neck. After a terribly long time, he felt the wingbeats become slower then they stopped altogether. He forced himself to open one eye. He expected to see the horizon tumbling, the ground rushing up at them, but they weren’t falling, at least not yet—Sugarlump had discovered that flying felt better if she splayed her legs, which caused the wings to be held rigid and outstretched. They glided.
Ashley breathed out.
They were spectacularly high. The land below them was vast, bigger than anything he had imagined possible. It stretched to such a distant horizon it made him gasp. Behind and below him was the great mottled wasteland. He searched in vain for Tabitha and the others, but they were lost in the vast expanse. He didn’t know where to look. Toward the sun lay a small ridge of mountains, made insignificant by the altitude, but he recognised the proud spire of Fynn’s Tooth—the unmistakable curve of ice, the skirt of snow before the stepped ridge. Beyond the ridge he should have seen the realm of Eyri, but the shimmering air only held the image of ranks of greater mountains. A circle of devastation surrounded the shielded realm.
Four rivers threaded through the hills, heading north, away from a rugged escarpment. Beyond this, to the south, were pale golden sands of another kind of desert. To the north and west of Ashley, a green carpet of vegetation rolled on and on, dense growth pocked-marked with random silver and grey craters. It might be a forest. From so far up it was difficult to tell. A great mountain range cut through the lands with its white peaks in the distance.
Sugarlump faltered in her flight, and Ashley clutched at her neck to steady himself. She wobbled and veered, flapped for a while, then settled into a glide once more, heading toward the white peaks in the distance. He whispered reassuring words to the mare, and watched her feathers flutter in the wind. Feathers. That still terrified him, that she could have been altered so much. He wondered if she would change again. If she lost her wings, they were doomed.
He knew she would grow tired, anyway. Those wings would fail. He rubbed her coat. It seemed unfair to call her Sugarlump now they were traversing the sky. He decided he would call her Princess. She deserved to have a good name, in her last moments.
“Just keep your wings spread out, Princess,” he whispered to her, combining the words with a simple mental image. She was instantly confused. She gave an unsteady pace in the air, which tilted her wings awry.
“Legs!” he corrected, “keep your legs splayed out!” He gritted his teeth against their sickening yaw and roll. She didn’t understand how she had changed. Princess was still a horse.
The glide steadied again. Ashley guessed that because they weren’t flapping, they would slowly lose altitude, but it was difficult to tell anything from this high up. They seemed suspended over an unmoving landscape in an endless moment of breathless perspective.
They flew a long way. By the time the forest was beginning to expand and Ashley could make out individual trees, he was shivering from the wind and the fear. A tree shot by underneath them. Ashley gripped Princess tight. From high up it had seemed they could land anywhere in the soft forest canopy, but down here the trees were huge and they thrust up like spears planted in readiness. They were going to die. After all that flying, they were going to crash against one of these colossal trees and die. Princess knew his terror. She whinnied in fright, tried to rear, and everything went topsy-turvy. The glide became a sudden upward swoop that left Ashley’s stomach behind. Then the wind stopped in his ears, and there was a terrible moment of weightlessness. He should have been happy they had slowed, but it didn’t feel right, not right at all. Just as suddenly, they fell, straight down toward a great spreading tree.
The first branch cracked and tore away under their weight. Princess squealed, and kicked at the air with her hooves, which caused her wings to flutter wildly against the desperate fall.
“Gallop! Gallop!” Ashley shouted at her, as they tipped off another branch and burst through a thick spray of leaves. Somewhere below them was the ground, and it was coming up too fast. Princess ran upon nothing. As she did so, her great wings beat the air, but she failed to right herself. They rolled nose over tail, and the branches beat them as they passed. They came down in a tumble of hooves and wings and flailing arms. There was a matted cluster of great ferns. Strange, he thought, the way everything seemed to spread out suddenly in his vision as he fell at the ground.
19. CROOKED COVEN
“When you double-cross a double cross
You get a sixteen-pointed star.”—Zarost
The wizard led them away from Bradach Hide, onward into the surrounding forest, through belts of stringy-barked trees which were so tall they leant on each other for support, past giant baskets of roots where the late afternoon shadows clustered as if waiting impatiently for nightfall, when they would escape. Black Saladon stormed on, his cruel battleaxe slung over his shoulder, drawing Bevn and Gabrielle in his wake over patches of open ground where hard shells of earth cracked underfoot, over a rough plank bridge that arched above a creek choked with sharp-edged grasses, across mushroom-littered swathes of loamy earth. Where was the wizard taking them? He dared not ask. If his p
ace was any measure of his mood, he was very, very angry.
At last the wizard stopped on a ridge where the searching branches of the surrounding trees cut the sunlight into thin shreds. He turned. His eyes were burning. The walk had done nothing to cool his anger. If anything, it had become more intense. Bevn didn’t want to cower, but Saladon had an overwhelming kind of presence that got inside his body and pressed on his heart. Even Gabrielle looked nervous.
“You idiots! You empty-headed imbeciles!” Saladon clawed the air in front of Bevn’s face. “I laid a route through the six-sided land! All the way to Slipper! And you have ruined it! Ruined it! What in the Destroyer’s name were you thinking? You killed two of the windrunners! The men I hired to see you safely through the wastes! That story will get out despite their code. Soon nowhere in the Land of Lûk will be easy for strangers to travel through!”
He stamped the blackened heel of his bladed staff down, and the ground heaved.
Bevn felt suddenly hot in his cheeks.
“We ... I ... It wasn’t my fault,” he stammered.
“You pushed one into the wildfire, and killed another before fleeing, and it wasn’t your fault? Do you take me for a fool? Do you?”
Bevn wished he could become small and vanish into his own boots. The angry wizard was close, so terribly close, and he had gathered that bladed staff to him in that knuckled hand as if the solid shaft and heavy metalwork weighed nothing at all. The wizard could probably scythe through him in one blow, let alone what he could probably do with his magic.
Please don’t let him hurt me! prayed Bevn. Don’t let him hurt me, don’t let him hurt me!
“And then you call to the Sorcerer, you cross-eyed cussing kont! The one word you have to keep silent on, the one word that shouts your ignorance to the skies, and you have to let it out!”
How did Saladon know what he had said? He had only arrived afterward.
“That name disturbs the threads of Chaos. It aggravates the web. You almost triggered the junction above their settlement, you fool. You would have burnt them all out! If you’d called any louder, the wildfire would have struck like lightning. Don’t ever do that again! His name is forbidden!”
Then why did you tell it to me? Bevn thought bitterly. He hadn’t known it was dangerous. It wasn’t his fault. He blinked away a hot tear. Right there in front of Gabrielle, the wizard was making him look like a baby. It wasn’t fair.
“Oh, for shame! You have no strength to hang power upon! That crown should have stayed on your father’s head.”
Bevn wanted to object, he wanted to say something to explain what he’d done, but he was scared his lips would just quiver and his words would come out all garbled and he’d begin to blubber. The wizard was just too strong and angry; he was overwhelming, dominating, as if he was a beast standing over Bevn, considering how to kill him. Bevn couldn’t face his raw power. Saladon drenched him with fear. Yes, that was what Saladon was like, a big black wolf, with great big teeth, and he made Bevn feel weaker than a naked little lamb. It was far worse than the coercion the Darkmaster had exerted through his Darkstones. It wasn’t persuasive, cajoling and irresistible, it was a brutal irrefutable order. The wizard wielded a more fundamental power, and it upset Bevn to his core. He began to shake in his boots again.
“You aren’t so spotless yourself,” Gabrielle said tartly, addressing her challenge to the wizard.
“What!”
“You could have saved us a lot of pain at the Shield if you’d mentioned he was supposed to wear the crown. And you gave us no warning about wildfire! You didn’t tell us what could happen when it touched people. I could have been killed. Bevn could have stepped into it without protection. How was Bevn supposed to know?”
Bevn looked to Gabrielle in amazement. She was standing up for him!
“You, you ... Incompetent harlot! I charged you to escort him. Instead of being safely in the Lûk tunnels, halfway to Koom, you have him in the cursed Hunter’s hall, a blade at his throat, about to be dispatched for stupidity. What kind of ingenuity does this display, I ask you? What half-brained plan would you have used if I hadn’t arrived?”
“You didn’t tell us about the danger! You didn’t explain the wildfire, or the web above us. You didn’t tell us anything! You are at fault, not us!”
Bevn’s heart swelled. Gabrielle was fighting at his side.
She would show the wizard!
Black Saladon brushed her off with a snort. “Do not be surprised, princeling, she is compelled to defend you by the Order-field of the crown. I would not pay her words any heed. She is a woman and will always take the bait of scorn. She remembers her old ways and believes she still has some importance, but she is sadly mistaken.”
Gabrielle had a knife in her hand, held by the blade, tilted and ready for throwing. “Don’t you dare talk of me as if I am not here!” Gabrielle’s voice cracked like a whip. “I am compelled by neither of you. Respect me, rude wizard, or I’ll give you a reason to regret it.”
Saladon turned his formidable attention upon Gabrielle; his eyes dropped to consider her whole body. “Do not overestimate your worth, woman. You may have some outstanding features, but you are not that desirable if you act like a brainless, bitter slut.”
Gabrielle tensed to throw. “Correct those words or I’ll pierce your heart, you bastard!”
Saladon held up his free hand, as steady as stone. The more he watched that hand the more he felt it collected steadiness to itself, until it seemed steadier than the world itself, and everything around them had some movement except for that point. The air tightened around that hand, as if unseen patterns of control emanated from it.
“That is a very stupid thing to do, Gabrielle Aramonde. Put your butter-knife away. If you try to use it on me I shall be forced to cast my magic outward to protect myself, and that will call the wildfire down, enough to lay waste to this place. A simple Transference will see me far away. I won’t be here anymore, but you will.”
Gabrielle hesitated. She was probably watching the wizard’s hand as well, but Bevn couldn’t tear his eyes away to check.
“I am stronger than you,” Black Saladon said.
“I know that, but I can still fight you!” she snapped.
A faint expression flickered across Saladon’s face. “Don’t expect mercy, just because you are a woman. You have jeopardised my plans. You have compromised my secrecy and you have caused me much risk and delay! I cannot afford for the Kingsrim to fall into the wrong hands. After the mess you’ve made of the first leg of the journey, I have to guide you directly.”
“You caused the mess, by leaving out the details.”
“I told you enough to work from, but you failed the test of wit. I must have overestimated you.”
“No, that is unfair! I accepted your charge in good faith, but you did not tell us what was expected of us.”
That wry brief twist to his lips came again, as if he knew something she did not. “Fairness and faith? A strange foundation for a Dark mage.”
“We were not prepared for this place!”
“Well this is life. Get used to it.”
He stamped the heel of his battleaxe into the ground and turned upon it. As he spun Bevn caught a glimpse of mirth on his face. Then Black Saladon strode off, his shoulders shaking, leaving Bevn and Gabrielle to decide what they would do.
Bevn tried to catch Gabrielle’s eye, but she followed Saladon without a backward glance. He had to trail along behind like an abandoned pup, and he hated it at once. One minute she was fighting for him, the next she pretended he didn’t matter. The hope and hurt was driving him mad. He lagged behind, sulking, and watched as he walked.
She was impressed with the black wizard, Bevn could tell. She soon tried to walk ahead of Saladon, even though he was leading, as if to prove how independent she was, but never so far that she couldn’t listen to him when he talked to her. She even laughed at some comment he passed.
Curse him! He was so self-satisfi
ed, so…powerful. Bevn wished he had that sort of power.
Bevn limped along for what felt like hours. He was sure the wizard could have healed his feet in an instant, and every painful step just made him hate Black Saladon more. As night fell unevenly upon the forest, Bevn reluctantly decided to stay closer to the others. The shadows had a way of looking at him that he didn’t trust. Gabrielle must have grown tired of the wizard by now, although they were still talking.
“Hunters live ever more scattered, in ever-weakening tribes. Their culture has tended toward Chaos for some time. That’s why they fear it so much.”
“Why do they speak so strangely?” Gabrielle asked.
“One of the Sorcerer’s many delights is to tamper with the fundamental patterns of language. The more wildfire and Chaos a culture suffers, the more the pattern of their language is dismantled and its development regresses toward earlier and more basic forms. There are tribes in the lowlands who can only communicate in gestures and others who just hit, sneer and bark at each other to get what they want.”
“Yet you speak as we do.”
“Eyri inherited its language from the exiles of the Three Kingdoms. So did the Hunters. That language is called the Old Tongue now. It is what I learnt when I came to study at the college in Kingsmeet. Apart from you sheltered Eyrians, only the Korinese and the seafarers of Kaskanzr speak the Old Tongue properly. And the wizards. Each Hunter tribe loses something of the sense and integrity of the language with every generation, each tribe in a different way. You cannot teach them the original—they are losing the sense of it from their blood.”
“And the Lûk? They speak an understandable version of it.”
“The Lûk have retained the most order of any nation. They have been altered. They have their grey skins, and they are hot-headed and prone to fight, but they have an obsession with keeping relics and traditions, which has served them well in some ways. They keep records of the spoken languages and they learn every tongue of the upper lands before they are ten years old. It is sad that such effort will go to waste, but sadness comes with the bitter wisdom of seeing so much lost and knowing where it will end.”
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 30