The Riddler's Gift: First Tale of the Lifesong (The Tale of the Lifesong)

by Greg Hamerton

  The strength drained from her body as if the Shadowcaster had renewed his touch on her. Fatigue and despair gripped her spirit. If she crossed the bridge, she would truly be abandoning her parents. She stumbled over a gap in the planking, veered towards the edge of the bridge. Her shoulder caught the slender rail, and she was repelled. Her breath rasped in her throat. Her head throbbed. She slipped hard to her knees.

  Tabitha clung onto the bridge rail. She couldn’t go on at this delirious pace.

  The Dark essence had already claimed her strength.

  Her mother’s brief warming touch had loosened the Shadowcaster’s grip, but she knew that not all of the motes had been driven from her body. Now that she had stopped, she could feel the cold worming its way deeper inside. There was nothing she could do to repel it.

  The pounding in her head threatened to drown out the roar underneath the bridge. She sank back from her knees, pushed her body against the railing. Hail pelted her. The wide river poured between the piled rocks below. It ran a short way downstream before disappearing into a roaring mist of white spray.

  She stared blindly in the direction of Phantom Acres. Her tears fell to the river, far below the bridge.

  Take this. Run.

  How far can I run, Mother, knowing you face the Dark?

  The Shadowcaster’s threat was not so immediate any more; it was dimmed by the distance and Tabitha could almost imagine that her mother had a chance, after all. She gazed into the dark mystery of the night beyond the falls, trying to sense what was happening on the farm.

  * * *

  Kirjath Arkell was relishing his game. The Lightgifter’s challenges were quick, but she was no match for his power. She was good at defence and healing, but useless with attack. He had hoped for more of a contest. He had allowed the young one to flee, because he knew he could catch her later. He wanted the talisman first. He could have it now, he could take the Lightgifter down, but it was better to give her time. It was always better for hopelessness to really sink in.

  Lightgifters were easily bested. They should have been crushed long ago. The Darkmaster was too cautious.

  The blonde woman had a diminishing supply of sprites, yet she kept wasting her essence to heal her husband. Pathetic.

  Let the man lie, you stupid crone. He’s to die anyway.

  Every time the farmer rose, Kirjath dropped him to the floor again, with the briefest of spells. The man was a simpleton. Can’t he see how much Dark essence I command? Any sensible man would abase himself before such a mighty adversary as Kirjath Arkell. The farmer shouldn’t fight a Shadowcaster with his fists. I should break his mind, freeze him to keep him still.

  But there was a good reason to keep them alive. Both of them.

  Kirjath deflected a wash of Light with a simple curtain-shield, confusing the sprites amongst the ripples and folds in his cloak of Dark essence.

  He shaped a Morrigán, and whispered a command to the raven, before sending it swooping over the Lightgifter’s head. The bird would rub her nerves raw, hiding behind her at the limit of her vision. She would be aware of it, but would never move fast enough to meet the source of her distraction. When he needed it, Kirjath would strike her from that store of Dark. He cast an illusionary body to the left, and moved to the right.

  Tonight was more than just a reclaiming of the Master’s talisman. It was a test of his own special art, the private lore which the Darkmaster had revealed by trying so hard to conceal it. The lore that went beyond the simple push and pull of Dark and Light, a power far more ancient and wild than the impotent essence.

  Kirjath had found the hidden scrolls of the Morgloth lore.

  The Gifter was confused by his trickery, and threw her attack at his illusionary body. He took the opportunity to cast a spell of Breaking. At the base of the farmer’s spine, before he rose again. He released his motes, and they found their mark.

  The scrolls, sealed in the deepest cavern of Ravenscroft, had revealed the pattern of the Gateway, the access to the powers Kirjath had believed only existed in legend. The Darkmaster had feared the knowledge, he had feared to use it himself for what it would summon.

  Old fool. He shall not rule me for much longer.

  Kirjath Arkell had no qualms about seizing the feared knowledge. He was the master of whatever he summoned. The Gateway had been drawn, and opened on the darkened earth.

  His beast was coming.

  He could track its footsteps, feel its raw hunger. Its mind was within his mind, contained by his superior intellect. He commanded the Morgloth. It came to do his bidding.

  To let the woman fight for life, while he knew that her death was sealed, gave him a heady thrill. But he couldn’t draw it out any longer. The Gifter was getting more aggressive in her spells, and was learning to discern the flows within the Dark essence. She disrupted the Morrigán spell, and scattered the motes.

  Kirjath cast three illusionary bodies within the Dark, and sent them outwards from where he stood. It would divert the woman’s attention for a moment.

  He guided the beast to the homestead, and lured it through the window with a single thought.

  Food.

  The Morgloth’s terrible screech was carried on the wind of its arrival. It burst through the few jagged remains of glass when it shot through the window. It spread giant wings wide to land, heavily, on the floor beside Kirjath. It crooned, a strange, wet sound, and looked down at him with a baleful red glare.

  The Lightgifter was making the mewling sounds of a strangled kitten.

  Kirjath marvelled at the big creature. The legends never did them justice. Morgloth were more deadly than the worst tale he’d heard told, more blood-thirsty than an enraged bear. It was not a beast that could be adequately described in words. Its presence had to be experienced, and none experienced a Morgloth so vividly as its Lord. He knew everything the Morgloth sensed, and was awed for a moment by its ruthless appetite for the souls of the living.

  [Lord?] came the Morgloth’s alien question. Kirjath still found it unsettling, the way he could understand the beast, though it didn’t speak. The Morgloth inhabited his mind, and they communicated in images.

  The man, he ordered, regaining his self-control.

  The Gifter was backing to the far wall with a horrified, doomed expression. She cast a pitiful spell of Light at the beast. The sprites were absorbed into the Morgloth’s skin with no effect.

  The Morgloth leapt onto the farmer’s back. The farmer was conscious, Kirjath knew, but the Breaking had left him paralysed. The Morgloth struck like a snake, its elongated head a deadly hammer. The farmer’s skull cracked, and the demon feasted on his life.

  The sensation was one of overwhelming bliss. Kirjath was unprepared for the ecstasy. His beast had never killed before, at least not while he was its Lord. Always the summoning, and the returning, he had practised it many a time. But never the hunt. Now he understood why the beast hungered so. To take a life was sating a hunger he had never fully understood. He raised his unseeing eyes to the roof as the convulsions of pleasure passed through his body.

  The farmer’s life poured away into the Morgloth. The beast didn’t seem to consume any flesh, or at least Kirjath couldn’t taste any through the awareness he shared. Only the force of spirit, the living energy, it roared over the falls into the blackness. Then it was gone.

  Before Kirjath could return to the present, a body slammed into his, lifted him from the floor.

  The Lightgifter. Damn and blast her! He scrabbled for balance, but the woman drove him too fast. His heels struck the hearth, yet still she drove him, her strength extreme, her eyes insane. They fell into the coals, and sparks exploded around them.

  Pain.

  He tried to cool the flames with Dark, to wrap himself in protective cold. He would defend, this time. She would need the Light she summoned for her own healing. He could smell the burning of flesh, and knew it wasn’t only his own. The bite of the coals lessened, yet the pain did not cease. He tried to thro
w her, but she sat on his chest, deep in the agony of the swirling heat. Flame caught her hair, and she burned bright.

  But she didn’t use the last sprites she summoned for healing, or warding, or any of her gentle Gifter spells.

  “Burst, flame, burst for me!” she cried, her arms spread wide.

  The Light essence became fire. The hearth became the centre of the sun. Heat scoured his body, took the air from his lungs. More essence than he had seen all night. More pain than he had ever felt in his life. The Dark was blasted from his command, fire filled him. Coals were flung outwards, and the ceiling caught fire. The room became a swirling inferno.

  She had released the essence that could save her life, to kill him. The Lightgifter had sacrificed herself. She burned like a torch, and he, beneath her.

  Take her, he commanded his Morgloth.

  The charred stench of his own body was choking him.

  The Gifter was wrenched from his chest. Pain raged through him, nerves burnt within his ravaged flesh. Somehow he managed to flick himself from the bed of coals, onto the floor below.

  [No life], the Morgloth objected. [No food.]

  He didn’t care for the beast’s disappointment. Agony filled his senses, commanded his mind. The Morgloth tossed the woman into the fire again. The Gifter crumpled, burning like a dry stick.

  Kirjath rolled away from the scattered coals, but wherever he moved, he burned. He was mad with torment.

  Acrid smoke swirled, blinding him, stealing his breath. What Dark essence he could summon, he wrapped tightly around his body, a thin skin of magic against the overwhelming assault. But the Dark essence couldn’t give him air to breath, nor could it heal the pain. Panic and desperation soiled his mind, breaking the discipline. He felt his command of the Morgloth waver. His attention was absorbed as its animal presence grew. In a horrible moment, he saw exclusively through its eyes. It stood, watching its Lord, the one who bound it to service, the one who allowed it to exist beyond the underworld.

  The walls were sheets of fire, panelling alight, flames gnawing at the beams overhead. Wood whistled and wheezed the dirge of its own immolation. Yet the great Morgloth was untouched by the flames. It peered around the room, looking for life.

  A charred form lay before it, in the middle of the floor—a heap of black rags, like filthy laundry tossed into a hasty pile. The heap bulged. The Morgloth took a step backward, and watched. The lump twitched, and a charred piece of meat ventured out from the heap of smoking black rags. The meat became a stump, the stump a fist. The fist opened into four fingers and a thumb, blackened and spider-like. The Morgloth tilted its head, trying to decide.

  [Food?]

  The hand pressed itself down into the floor, and the heap of rags was drawn along behind it, sliding over the floor. Slowly, slowly, the body moved itself away, across the floor, toward the window. The Morgloth wanted to eat it, but something gritted against that desire. Something growing, something returning.

  [Lord?]

  Kirjath crushed the beast’s mind within his own, snatched the reins of mental power back from disaster. That had been too close. It must be banished, now. It had almost dominated him, and broken the raising spell of command.

  “Go to hell. Through your Gateway, be gone!” he screamed hoarsely. He had to concentrate intensely to drive his order against the rebellious mind. Then the pressure was gone. He was wracked with a spasm of coughs, but he saw the Morgloth leap through the window, and flap away. Gone with the wrenching wind and suffocating smoke, into the night.

  A beam tore from the ceiling. He wasn’t quick enough to avoid its fall. It caught him on the back, slamming him to the floor. His cowl caught alight, blazing around his head like a halo.

  He cast a Freeze spell, using the motes that had protected the rest of his body to extinguish the flames, for they were the only essence near. The agony of roasting returned with immediate intensity.

  He tried to summon more motes to his aid, but couldn’t pronounce the words he whispered. His coughs would not cease.

  Damn the Gifter!

  He would survive. He heaved himself from beneath the beam, and made a last gambit for the window, where the smoke billowed out into the night, sucked out ahead of him through the burning frame.

  He wished the Gifter was alive, so that he could beat her to death himself. The talisman would be lost in the fire, hidden in layers of ash and debris. Out of all the defences she could have chosen, the Lightgifter had taken the only one which could foil his plans.

  He dragged himself up and over the burning windowsill, then fell to the ground outside. He slammed into the earth, and the breath was driven from him. He cursed, in silence.

  The house collapsed in on itself.

  He rolled away across the wet earth, teeth bared against the torture. A thousand needles drove into him from the sky. No matter how far he rolled, the assault continued. Some kind of storm. Wracking coughs kept his face to the dirt, and his strength ebbed with every breath; he couldn’t fill his lungs. He drew inwards like a trodden spider, a small black heap, curled up in the dark beneath the pounding of the storm.

  * * *

  Inside her woollen jacket, Tabitha shivered. The hail had lessened, and the trees sheltered her from the worst of the wind, but the River of Falls issued a breeze of its own making, chill and insidious, able to find every gap in her clothing. Her breathing had calmed while she clung to the railing of the bridge, but not her thoughts.

  Mother, should I return? Have you defeated him? Did Father strike him down?

  And the darker, more terrifying fears; the other outcome which could not be. She searched the dim and starless night for answers, but her truth-sense was muddled. Too much fear, shock, desperation.

  “They have won,” she whispered to herself. Then, with an ache in her heart, she tried the alternative. “They have lost.”

  She didn’t know. The truth eluded her grasp, and despair gnawed like a rat feeding on the last few rinds of her strength. She tried to stand up, but then discovered how deeply she had been weakened. The cold remains of the Dark spell lingered in her blood. She collapsed again. She couldn’t go on like this. There had to be a way, to know, to end the nightmare.

  Or to confirm it.

  She found herself staring at her lap, where the folded kerchief lay, unopened.

  Throw it into the river. The Shadowcaster will never find it.

  Her mother had wanted to destroy the Ring, take it beyond the reach of the Darkmaster. Here in the River of Falls was not far enough from his reach.

  The Ring had cleared her thoughts before, allowed her to see things she had missed, the hidden words of the Lifesong. Maybe it could help her.

  The kerchief opened. With the shivering of her hands, she almost tipped the Ring off her lap, but she caught it as it slipped. It was awkward in her numbed fingers.

  It glistened in a pale moment of moonlight. A perfect circle. Strangely beautiful.

  “Will you show me anything of Phantom Acres?” she asked the Ring.

  Silence. Only the faint patterns and arcane letters danced within the glossy sphere.

  She had to know.

  She slipped the Ring onto her finger.

  It surprised her with its sudden warmth. She took a moment to adjust to the heightened sensations, all the faint night sounds, the sharpness of the railing, the smell of the wet rocks, the dark outline of the trees, visible upon the darker background of the night.

  With the Ring came clarity, and with clarity, she knew the truth. Her deep intuition screamed the truth at her. Death howled in her ears. Death tore her breath away. Death ripped the last spark of hope from her breast.

  Dead. Her parents were dead. She knew, with the clear certainty of a Truthsayer, amplified a thousand times by the clarity of the Ring. The Shadowcaster had killed them.

  He had come for the talisman, he had come for the Ring. He would come for her.

  She staggered to her feet, gulping for air. The bridge tilted sudden
ly in the dark, and she stumbled down the apparent decline, onwards and away.

  The truth was like a hound at her heels—no matter how fast she ran, she could not escape its awful bite. The Ring had seemed to be a blessing, but it was truly a curse. It rode on her finger, gripping too tightly to loosen, too perfectly-shaped to remove with her cold fingers, plaguing her with lucidity. Her mind flooded with tragic alternatives, she couldn’t avoid considering every possible bloody way in which the fight on the farm could have ended. No matter which way she came to it, the truth was the same.

  Her parents were dead.

  Pine, spruce, alder, and silken trees flicked by, she noticed each kind and remembered every detail, the shape each branch formed. A fox ran deeper into the woods. An owl hooted far away. All this came to her because of the clarity of the Ring. The night was full of things she didn’t wish to see, loaded with sensations she didn’t wish to sense. She could see so much, yet she didn’t want to see any of it. Overhead, the clouds were heavy with imminent snow.

  She ran on, wishing she could escape what she knew.

  The road was dark. The wind had begun to howl in the trees. Blue lightning lit the night, then thunder rolled as the clouds cracked. Snow began to swirl down, cold and cheerless in the dark. Snowflakes caught in her hair, brushed the tears on her cheeks.

  She wouldn’t ever see them again.

  It felt like forever until Tabitha tripped and sprawled on her face in the pathway. Her breath rasped in her throat. She considered just lying there, where she had fallen, but a glimmer of strength remained in her body. With strength, she might survive the night. She had to be exhausted first, or she might not die.

  She would run and run, until she fell and couldn’t get up again. Then it would all end, and she could escape her misery.

  She pushed unsteadily against the snow, and found her feet again. Onwards she ran, along the High Way, on its course through the forest. The road should have been difficult to follow in the darkness, yet when she searched for it, she could sense where it was, even though it lay hidden beneath the thickening snow.