by Paul Stewart
Solomon looked up. There were three figures in the scree beyond the flickering light of the campfire.
‘One step closer,’ Solomon snarled, his blade pressing into Thrace’s neck, ‘and I’ll kill the girl.’
Eli stopped. He motioned to Ichabod and Micah to do the same.
‘Now how about one of you trail-tramps telling me what the hell this is all about? Here I am, minding my own business, resting up by my campfire, when this filthy wyrmehag comes at me from out of the shadows, screeching and hollering and ready to skewer me with that spike of hers for no reason I can rightly discern …’
‘She had every reason, as you well know,’ said Eli quietly. ‘And so do I. You and your gang killed a dear friend of mine. They have paid with their lives. Now it’s your turn, Tallow. Killing the girl won’t make no difference to what you’ve got coming to you.’
‘You’re bluffing,’ said Solomon. He jerked Thrace roughly round and backed away from the campfire, across the scree towards the edge of the escarpment, taking care to keep her between himself and Eli’s crossbow. ‘Back off,’ he growled through gritted teeth, ‘and I might just let her live.’
Holding the knife to Thrace’s neck, he inched back onto the path that led down the steep cliffside. Micah leaped forward, his gangly body slight and callow in comparison with Solomon’s heft. He gripped his hackdagger in his hand.
‘I can’t let you take her, Tallow,’ he said quietly.
‘You,’ Solomon sneered. ‘The greenhorn from the scrimshaw den.’ He spat the words out with scorn.
Thrace felt the muscles in Tallow’s arm flex as he raised the sidewinder and pulled the trigger. With a guttural cry, she twisted and clawed at Tallow’s face, knocking the sidewinder with her elbow as it spat its bolt. Solomon recoiled with a snarl of rage, and Thrace’s nails snagged on a cord at his neck.
She yanked it hard.
A pouch appeared from inside his jacket. The cord snapped, ripping the pouch and scattering its contents, a shower of glittering gemstones that shot out into the dark air.
Solomon flung Thrace aside and threw himself after the gemstones as they chinked and clattered on the scree at his feet and bounced over the cliff edge. But he was not fast enough. His hands grasped and snatched and closed round nothing as the precious stones fell into the blackness below.
And, off-balance and toppling in his desperation, Solomon Tallow fell after them. His anguished cry was abruptly cut short, replaced by the muffled clatter of tumbling scree that died away to silence. Eli crossed to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the darkness.
‘If the fall hasn’t killed him, the carrionwyrmes soon will,’ he said. ‘Either way, he won’t be killing no more wyrmekin.’
Thrace paid him no heed. She was scrambling on all fours to where Micah lay in a crumpled heap on the edge of the escarpment. She fell to her knees beside him and tore at his jacket, her hands shaking as she searched for the bolt wound.
‘He missed,’ Micah said, his voice weak and dazed-sounding. ‘You jolted his aim, Thrace. You—’
But his words were smothered by the kingirl’s urgent kisses.
Fifty-Four
‘I’m going down there with you, Thrace,’ said Micah.
They were seated upon a flat rock at the edge of the escarpment, the four of them clustered round a small fire that had blazed as it boiled their icemelt and charred their meat, but that had now dwindled to glowing embers. Night was all but upon them, and the cold was intense.
‘I don’t ask it of you, Micah,’ the kingirl replied. She had set aside her lance and now held two of Eli’s razor-sharp rockspikes in her hands. ‘The wyrmeling is down there, and I must find it.’
‘If you go, Micah, lad,’ said Eli gruffly, ‘then I go too.’
Ichabod the stone prophet climbed to his feet.
Eli looked up. ‘You taking your leave, preacherman?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Ichabod quietly. ‘I have a score to settle with them keld myself,’ he said, eyeing each of them levelly. ‘And with three such as you, I figure I can settle it. At last.’
‘A score?’
‘Revenge,’ said Ichabod, pulling a skinning knife from the ragged folds of his jacket. ‘For what was robbed from me, and sold to them … Live goods.’
Ichabod kicked at the embers of the fire.
‘Well?’ he said, wild-eyed. ‘What are we waiting for?’
Thrace looked round, the expression on her face impossible to read. Then she nodded.
They stepped through the cavern entrance, Thrace up front. The sound of trickles and drips and eerie windhowls made the rock tunnels seem like the innards of some mighty creature. The reek of the dark air was meatfoul and sour.
They travelled through a labyrinth of tunnels, Thrace moving stealthily and silently, and the others endeavouring to do the same. Micah stumbled and tripped, and failed in his efforts to remember the twists and turns of their route. Ahead of him he could hear Eli start to pant. Behind him Ichabod fell heavily and cried out.
Thrace turned, her eyes blazing. ‘Hush,’ she hissed.
At the end of the tunnel, Micah saw a flash of light. Flames. Wyrmebreath.
They froze.
There was a hissing and the skitter of claws. Micah gripped his hackdagger tight. The jet of fire got closer, then was abruptly extinguished, and Micah heard a snuffling and wheezing, and the sound of the claws fade – that, and the sound of his own thudding heart.
Thrace took a side tunnel, and continued as silently as before. At every fork and turn they came to, she paused and sniffed the air, before continuing, following a scent that only she could detect. They passed the burned-out nub of a five-day torch. They passed piles of wyrme-droppings, acrid with the stench of the darkness itself. The tunnel tightened its grip, till they had to dip their heads and hunch their shoulders. Eli, Micah and Ichabod moved increasingly slow and awkward, knocking elbows on the unforgiving rock, grazing their scalps. Thrace, agile and determined, drew ahead of them, a rockspike grasped in each hand as she charted a course deeper and deeper into the foul blackness.
And all the while, Micah grew more fearful. He couldn’t help it. The rocks oozed foulness. The air whispered of death. At last, after what seemed to Micah like an eternity of stooping, shuffling and blindly reaching out, they came to the end of a tortuous scritch-scratch tunnel.
Thrace turned, a finger to her lips, then beckoned. They stepped out into icy coldness.
Micah heard the trickling of water …
He froze and stared up at the high vaulted ceiling, where a faint chink of light penetrated the gloom and fell upon a glistening white stalactite that hung down above the centre of a fetid black pool. A thin thread of water spiralled down from its tip.
‘I’ve been here before,’ he breathed.
Beside him, Thrace tensed as she sniffed the air, her rock-spikes raised. Ichabod gripped his skinning knife as Eli took the pitchdip torch from his belt and lit it.
‘Over there,’ he whispered, pointing to the far side of the pool.
In the shadows was another cavern opening, black and ominous. The four of them walked round the pool and approached the entrance. Holding the flaming torch above his head, Eli stepped inside. Micah and the others followed.
The cavern was smaller than the one with the stalactite, high-ceilinged and narrow, and the walls were pocked with shadows. The torch cast the chamber in an eerie flickering light.
A broad slab of rock stood on stone supports at the centre of the floor, its surface cluttered and stained.
There were cleavers, dark with smeared blood. Hatchets and bone-shears. A glinting jag-toothed saw. And wooden bowls of different sizes filled with chopped meat, and diced offal, and curved ribs, fringed with flesh and hacked to short lengths – the makings of a feast from something freshly butchered.
; Micah had the intense feeling of being watched by many eyes, and turned slowly. His gaze fell upon the cavern walls. They were pockmarked with crude rock shelves, all of them crowded with staring human skulls.
Some were old and brown; some were pearly white beneath tattered skin, and with strands of long hair still clinging to the scalp. Some had good teeth, some had none; some had milk teeth set in tiny jaws …
‘What is this,’ said Micah breathlessly, his stomach churning.
‘Live goods,’ said Ichabod, his voice tight and constricted.
And when Micah looked round, he saw the stone prophet and Eli, their backs turned, staring down at the table. Micah crossed the dim-lit cavern to join them.
There, on the stone surface, was the severed head of a young woman. It had sun-flecked brown hair, sallow skin and high jutting cheekbones. The full lips were drawn back over even teeth in a horrified scream. The eyes were almondshape and lake-green and stared back imploringly, their gaze shot with pain and fear and betrayal …
‘Solomon Tallow’s woman,’ said Eli bitterly. ‘Of all the wicked ways to eke out an existence in the weald, this keld has chosen the most wicked …’
All at once, out from under the table the stunted wyrme reared up, its jaws snapping and rapier-like talons slashing at Eli’s throat. Micah lunged forward and plunged the blade of his hackdagger into one of the loathsome milk-white eyes, withdrew it, then thrust it deep into the creature’s neck. With a curdled screech, the wyrme collapsed at his feet, where it writhed and twitched at the end of a golden chain as blood pumped from its severed throat …
‘Sssssss …’ The loud hiss came from somewhere above.
There was a whirring sound and a blur of light, followed by a fleshy thud. Ichabod staggered back from the table, a hatchet embedded in his chest.
The next moment, a cleaver whistled past Micah’s head and a broadblade knife flashed down at Eli. The cragclimber threw himself to the floor, and the knife clattered on the rock at his feet.
‘Up there!’ he shouted, grasping the knife and throwing it.
Micah followed its flight. It flickered as it turned, then melted into shadow. There was a loud crack, and the knife abruptly flew back across the cavern. Micah didn’t see where it landed. His startled gaze was fixed upon the ragged figure that clung upside down to the rock in the shadows of the vaulted ceiling.
It was back-stooped and shoulder-hunched, with thin stick-like legs, supplemented by two crutches clasped in the pit of each arm. Beadyeyed, beaknosed and with a mess of matted hair that was grey and red, like rusting ironwool. A heavy robe hung loose at the shoulders; layers of skirts and aprons billowed from the waist, threadbare and patchwork – squares of wyrmeskin, homespun, stiff striped canvas and grubby silk, edged with thin strips of lace, yellowed and limp.
A scrawny arm darted out and flexed, and another hatchet came spinning out of the shadows, sending Micah sprawling to the floor beside the stone table and the horrifying fare laid out upon it. Eli was hunkered down on the other side.
Redmyrtle scuttled over the ceiling, the hooks at her ankles and elbows and the spiked crutches a blur of movement as they propelled her silently across the pitted rock. She paused on the other side of the cavern, upside down and dangling backwards. Her grey-red hair quivered as she drew a murderous-looking butcher’s knife from the folds of her rags.
‘I slaughter each and all of you,’ she rasped. ‘I hack you to pieces. Then I feast.’
She scurried down the cavern wall towards the stone table. Micah looked up and saw Thrace uncoil herself from the rock shelf she’d been crouching upon, rock-spike in each hand.
He saw the savage rage in her face. Her mouth taut. Her dark eyes, cold and intense.
Scattering skulls and sending them clattering to the floor like ghastly hailstones, Thrace arched her body and hurled first one, then the other rock-spike at the cavern hag above her.
Redmyrtle used a crutch to deflect the first spike, but the second hit home and buried itself in the top of her leg. She let out a screech of pain and indignation.
Thrace shot out a leg and kicked away a crutch, and the hag fell, a flapping ball of rags tumbling from the wall and landing heavily face down on the floor. The kingirl was upon her in an instant. Her lithe muscular body pressed down on the hag’s shoulders as she seized the creature’s tangled hair and pulled her head sharply back.
‘Where’s the wyrmeling?’ she hissed.
The hag snorted and struggled, and Thrace tugged back all the harder.
‘Where is the wyrmeling?’
‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’ the cavern hag screamed.
‘You killed it?’
‘You kill my baby,’ the hag snarled.
‘You … you …’ Thrace hesitated. She brought her head down, so that her mouth was pressed to the hag’s ear, and she sniffed deep, and when she spoke again, her voice was ice-cold and incredulous. ‘You were once kin.’
‘Kin?’ she rasped. ‘Once, maybe …’
‘And now you are keld.’
‘I had no wyrme,’ Redmyrtle spat. ‘Never once. So I bought my beautiful baby …’
‘That you stunted,’ Thrace said, viciously twisting and yanking her hair.
‘That I swaddled and bound,’ the hag yelped, ‘to keep him small. To make him fierce. To stop him from ever leaving me …’
‘You dishonour the kin,’ Thrace hissed, spitting out the words as her fingers slipped into the tangle of matted hair and her taloned grip tightened round the hag’s head. ‘You are worse than the worst kith.’
A sharp crack echoed round the cavern as Thrace wrenched the hag’s head to one side and snapped her neck. Redmyrtle fell still.
Thrace arched her back, her head raised and eyes shut. Tears streamed silently down her face.
‘Let that be an end to the killing,’ she said.
Out of the shocked stillness of the cavern came another sound.
‘I will sing you off to sleep, I will rock your cradle deep …’ A girl was singing.
Micah held out his hand to Thrace, who wiped her face on her sleeve and climbed to her feet. Spatters of blood trailed across the stone floor and through a low arched entrance on the far side of the cavern. They followed it. The song grew louder.
They ducked down and entered a small dome-shaped cave.
The wyrmeling, now half-grown and near to fledging, sat on its haunches, chained to the wall by its long sinuous neck. Beside it, a rope at her ankle, sat a girl of no more than eight years of age. She cradled Ichabod’s head in her lap.
He was dead.
The girl stopped singing and looked up. ‘He found me. Papa found me …’ She stroked Ichabod’s hair tenderly. ‘I was stole. A man came to the rock barrow while Papa was sleeping. He was kind. He was friendly. He wore beautiful boots … He gave me a present, a pretty comb for my hair. He said that if I went with him, he’d show me more pretty things …’
Tears ran down her cheeks.
‘I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I was here. And there was no man. And there were no pretty things. And there was no papa.
‘But now … now, he has found me. I will rock your cradle fine,’ she sang, as she held Ichabod the stone prophet in her arms, and wept. ‘For I am yours and you are mine …’
Fifty-Five
High on the ledge, Hepzibar turned, her breath coming in clouds of mist. Beside her, Asa exhaled. Coiling wreaths of thick grey smoke encircled them both for a moment, before thinning and rising and drifting away.
The wyrme’s new scales gleamed bright in the sunlight, while the skin he had sloughed – sheer and unblemished – now clung tightly to the girl’s small frame, as white and gleaming as his own. As Hepzibar climbed onto Asa’s back, it was difficult to tell where one stopped and the other began.
Deep down in the cavern, the whitewyrme had grown
fast, and the previous night had shed his first skin. Thrace had helped the girl wrap it around herself and the wyrme had breathed his hot aromatic smoke upon her, until the wyrmeslough had tightened about her body and clad her like a second skin.
Soulskin.
Asa stepped back along the ledge, stopped at a rock that jutted proud of the cliff, and climbed upon it. The muscles at his shoulders bunched and flexed, and he raised his wings. As they flapped up and down, slowly at first, then growing faster, so the veins that coursed through them filled with blood; then they caught the air. His talonspurs quivered. His scalloped skin tensed and was opalescent in the sunlight. Up and down, the wings beat, up and down, gathering strength and stirring the air as Hepzibar leaned forward and wrapped her arms round his sinuous neck.
Far below, the steep slope dropped away to the shimmering white plateau. Thick snow had rendered it featureless, covering the cracks and crevices, the boulders and scree, and the flat desolation continued white and unbroken to high distant crags, dark against the sun, where twists of smoke rose up from the highstacks and festercrags. The sky was blue there, but there were clouds sweeping in from behind, yellow grey and roiling and laden with fresh snow.
The first snowflakes began to fall. They fluttered down like white feathers, landing on the rock, where they settled; and on the wyrme’s back and the girl’s shoulders, where they did not.
Hepzibar gripped tight with her legs. Asa gave a shudder and craned his serpentine neck forward. His wingbeats grew faster, powerful and rhythmic, rising and falling on either side of the girl. They thrummed to an ever-quickening pace; they made the snow flurries swirl. Then, bracing his legs, he brought his wings powerfully down and leaped from the mountainside into the snow-flecked air.