A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) (30 page)

It was over sixty days since they had first met and set out from the House of Rede – although they had been through so much that it seemed much longer. At the South Pole it had been the beginning of the dark season; by now Dritha would be experiencing the depths of lightless winter. But here, in the north, it was late summer. The further they went, the longer the sun would hang above the horizon like a basket of fire, eventually not setting at all. One thing Ashurek dreaded was that if anything should delay them – which, knowing M’gulfn’s wiles, seemed inevitable – the light season would slip by and they would have to confront the Serpent in darkness.

The pockets of trees became more frequent, eventually running together, like tributaries flowing into a lake, to form a great forest within a valley. The trees were widely spaced and lofty, their straight red-brown trunks soaring for hundreds of feet up to a remote ceiling of smoky-grey foliage. The sky gleamed though like a mosaic. The floor was carpeted with tawny needles from which a sharp fragrance broke at every footfall. And in the distant treetops they could hear unseen birds calling to each other, their peculiar, keening, ponderous squawks echoing like the cries of the bereaved.

Estarinel, Medrian and Ashurek traversed the forest for several days. The going was easy and there was plenty of timber to make a fire each night. They always kept a watch rota. Although they no longer had Setrel’s sorcerous powder, they were well armed now – but nothing worse than a white fox and a few squirrels came to trouble them. Only the haunting bird-cries made them wish they were out of the otherwise benign forest. At first merely weird, presently the desolate calls began to scour their nerves, until they were always waiting with apprehension for the next. Each sounded more like a wail of pain than the last, harsh and dissonant with a heart-chilling falling note at the end...

When at last they saw the boundary of the forest ahead, they lost their forbearance and completed the last half-mile at a run. With relief they burst out of the trees and gained the clear country ahead. Ashurek, ever cautious, drew his sword at once and said, ‘If the Serpent meant to hound us out of that forest, it has succeeded; we’d better be alert for any trap it may have set us out here.’

‘Or perhaps we are all suffering from over-active imaginations,’ Medrian said tersely. ‘Not all dubious creatures, birds or otherwise, are the Serpent’s personal property.’

‘Yet,’ said Ashurek.

Nothing sinister awaited them, only more of the undulating wolds, clad in crisp bracken and pale green grass. They walked on, the days differentiated by the changing aspects of the country around them, by the rise and fall of hills and the ever-metamorphosing sky.

The weather was changeable: at times the sky was a thin, pale blue, while the sun radiated enough summery heat to make travelling uncomfortable. At others a wild, rainy wind blew from the north, carrying the distant taste of winter.

Sometimes Estarinel felt caught up by the sky, as if he were hypnotised, oblivious to his companions and even to the rhythm of his own feet on the ground. The clouds drifted in an endless dance across the heavens, now moving as softly as docile white mares, now racing along on the wind like taut, blue-black sails – like ships in another, unimaginably vast dimension. Then, again, they would be oyster-grey, dense and utterly still, until a stormy silver-gold light began to infiltrate them, like branching veins in negative. Then the clouds would soften, like clotted cream, to let diaphanous nets of light fall onto the horizon. And as the sun set the strata would scatter and stream in all directions, gold-edged purple against a rose and amethyst sky. And Estarinel had the illusion that the clouds were about to bear him with them to some wild, mysterious other-world, where nothing else mattered or even existed – that he was seeing the far side of the Blue Plane.

He would have to drag himself back to Earth at these times and force himself to concentrate on the mundane reality of the journey.

Gradually the highlands became more rugged. Tall conifers were everywhere and the grass grew sparse and wiry. Jagged layers of dull, brownish rock thrust out of hillsides. Ahead they could see a line of crags silhouetted against the sky. Often now they had to climb rather than walk. Ashurek had given up on the map, which lacked enough detail to guide them round natural obstacles and dangers.

They crossed a flat, stony gorge with trees leaning like gnarled goblins out of the ragged walls on either side. They paused to drink and fill their leather flasks from the ice-cold, foaming stream, jumped it at its narrowest point, and climbed up the far side. Now the line of crags confronted them like a wall stretching from west to east. To proceed north they faced a hard climb.

It took them two days to ascend the worst of the scar. Nowhere was it utterly sheer or impassable, but it was an exhausting climb, dangerous at times. They felt they had been a lifetime on the mottled, damp rock, scrambling for footholds with shale sliding away beneath their feet, the unforgiving ridges of rock cold and gritty under their aching fingers. They spent one night sheltered in a cleft while the wind screamed through the crags like a banshee. On the second night they hauled themselves onto the top of the scar, bruised, sore and gasping for breath.

Before them, shining coldly under the light of two opalescent moons, lay an unwelcoming vista of diorite. They camped under a tor, with some ill-nourished conifers providing enough fuel for a small fire. They sat around it, willing its meagre heat to ease the aching of their limbs. If any of them spoke, it was only to discuss the practicalities of the journey. It seemed that no amount of travelling could lessen the distance between them.

Noting the grim faces of his companions, Estarinel wondered, If we each have so little hope, why are we carrying on? But he did not care to answer the question. He made himself as comfortable as he could on the rock and went to sleep. Analysis only caused him pain, and there was a limit to how much anyone could suffer before the mind began to defend itself. At present he felt numb. There was a lump of granite lodged somewhere between his throat and his heart. He had experienced this numbness before, after the Serpent’s initial attack on Forluin. It had stayed with him throughout much of the voyage from Forluin to the House of Rede. He dreamed about that voyage now: he was on a ship with Falin, Arlena, Edrien and Luatha, seeing their faces before him as clear as life. In the dream they were laughing and merry, as if the attack had never happened; their being in mid-ocean seemed without logic. But Estarinel felt that they had lost Medrian somewhere along the way, and was pleading with them to turn the ship and look for her, while the others only continued to smile as if they had not heard him. Frantic, he tried to say, ‘We must go back and find her; if I don’t find her, you will all die.’ But in the way of nightmares, he could not speak.

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Ashurek, meanwhile, kept the first watch. He studied the vista before him, an expanse of pale rock flecked with mica and quartz, glistening in the moonlight. The rock was scored and seamed by the weather, stepped into many different levels, and littered with tumbled stones. Here and there tors rose in improbable shapes, giving a ghostly voice to every breath of wind. In the distance he could see the glitter of crystal.

He looked up at the two milk-white moons cruising impassively through swift-moving wisps of cloud. Shapes were moving across them: first in ones and twos, then in whole flocks. Flying creatures were streaming northwards across the sky. They were tiny silhouettes, oddly primeval in shape, so he had no way of judging their size. They went by in silence, eventually trailing off to a few stragglers. Ashurek found his hand resting on his sword hilt as his eyes followed the last of them towards the skyline.

A chill, rainy morning came and they went on. Medrian walked ahead of the others, her face set against the north wind, as intransigent as the face of a statue chiselled from quartz. She trod surefootedly over the rough surface, leaping cracks or scaling great blocks of greenish diorite as lightly as if she were on another plane. It was as if she were running away from something and towards it at the same time.

Great nodules of white and purple crystal became more frequent along their way, while the rockscape changed from green-grey to shining black. Another day’s travel brought them to a river. Long before they reached it, they could hear it rushing along its course. The sun came out as they slithered over the black basalt and came in sight of a torrent some thirty yards wide, scintillating like liquid aquamarine as it raced down a series of rapids. The far bank gleamed like jet and was clad in ebony trees, against which the blue-green water and diamond-white foam were the more startling.

‘We could waste days trying to find a detour around this,’ said Ashurek, raising his voice to be heard. ‘I suggest we find a way across.’

The thunderous current looked forbidding and impassable. They scouted along the bank and came to a great step where the torrent – running from east to west – leapt the edge in spirals of liquid glass to crash into a haze of vapour some twenty feet below them. Just before the lip of the waterfall the water pooled and slowed a little, and there were rocks shining just below the surface.

‘We can wade across here,’ Ashurek said, sounding so adamant that Estarinel decided not to voice his doubts. They each removed their boots and cloaks to give them more freedom of movement, rolling them and strapping them onto their packs.

Estarinel went first, lowering himself down the slippery bank into the water. It surged around his knees, ice-cold, its muscular force almost overbalancing him. Cautiously, he edged out onto the lip of the fall. Once he had got used to the current and learned to lean into it, it was not so bad. He glanced down at the water flowing glassily over his feet as he felt his way from one rock to the next. He was conscious of the cloud of spray on his left, could feel the moisture on his face, but he resisted the urge to look over the edge.

Behind him came Medrian, wading with steady, resolute strides, and then Ashurek.

Ashurek was halfway across when he saw Estarinel clamber out on the far bank, dripping and visibly exhausted. The first half was not so hard, but after that, the freezing water and the exertion of keeping a foothold against the current began to take their toll. Battling against the tremor in his limbs, Ashurek went determinedly on.

Suddenly Medrian came to a standstill in front of him. He caught her up and shouted, ‘In the name of all the demons don’t stop! Take my arm if you must, but keep going.’

She did not reply, but turned slowly, with the ease of a joint being wrenched from its socket, to confront him.

‘What–’ Ashurek began, but shock left the words in his throat.

Her face. He had seen her look ill before, but now her face was that of a corpse. The skin was discoloured ivory, glowing with a faint acid light, and her eyes had a cyan glaze. Her mouth hung open in a silent groan, and now her hands were coming at him, long and white and gnarled, like a bird’s talons.

She was trying to push him over the edge of the waterfall.

His feet slid on the rock as he fought desperately to retain his balance, conscious of the drop behind him, the strong yearning of the current to bear him over and fling him onto the rocks below. He seized Medrian’s arms above her elbows and grappled with her, as much to save her as himself.

Estarinel saw what was happening from the bank. Concerned and puzzled, he forged out into the water again.

There was something un-human in the strength with which Medrian doggedly resisted Ashurek, edging him towards the drop. The Gorethrian felt himself weakened by the kind of revulsion with which the Shana filled him. He was gasping for breath, braced for the plunge that now seemed inevitable.

When she suddenly released him, he nearly fell anyway, from surprise. Her face lost the sick light, her eyes closed, and her hands fell limply to her sides. Ashurek thought she was about to faint – and afterwards wondered if he would have bothered to save her if she had – but she did not. She turned and marched, like a clockwork figure, along the lip. Estarinel came out to meet her and guide her to the bank, although she hardly seemed to need or even notice his help.

By the time Ashurek had dragged himself onto the dark, faceted basalt, shivering and cursing, Estarinel was there alone.

‘Where is she?’ Ashurek demanded. Estarinel thought he had seen him look angry before, and now realised he had not.

‘She ran past me into the trees, I couldn’t stop her.’

Ashurek dragged his boots onto his wet feet and strode off into the carbon-black forest. Estarinel hurried to catch up with him.

‘Ashurek, I couldn’t make out what was happening,’ he said. ‘I thought at first she’d got into difficulties and you were trying to help her, but...’

‘It did not look quite so innocent, I suppose,’ said Ashurek, glancing right and left through the trees as he walked purposefully on. ‘She was trying to kill me.’

‘What?’

‘I repeat, her intention was to push me over the waterfall and so kill me. She nearly succeeded.’

‘But you must be mistaken!’ Estarinel exclaimed.

Ashurek stopped and faced him, his verdant eyes blazing, his tone as controlled and menacing as a surgical instrument. ‘That is one mistake no one, not even you, could have made. If you had seen her face – it was not her own. It was demonic.’

‘But why should she want to kill you?’

‘Why has she waited so long to try, is a more pertinent question,’ said Ashurek, striding on again. ‘I should have known.’