A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) (33 page)

Estarinel tested for himself. Ashurek was not exaggerating. ‘A volcanic spring,’ he said. ‘Look – it’s bubbling in places. That’s not mist, it’s steam.’

‘Well, we can’t wade, then. We’ll have to seek a way round. I suggest we rest until morning now. At least the shore is free of decomposing vegetation.’

So they rested by the lake, although none of them slept well. The rock-cushions in the lake glowed with eerie phosphorescence, and the night seemed filled with the sighing and groaning of spectres.

#

Ashurek woke violently from a restless doze and sat up with the knowledge that something was wrong. Overnight, a dozen fleshy mermaid-hair obelisks had sprung up in a half-circle around them, enclosing them at the lake’s edge. The sound that had disturbed them all night was the creaking of their rapid growth. Even as he watched, silver-blue streamers were peeling away from the plump stems, and fluttering on the wind, fragile and moist like the antennae of newly-emerged butterflies.

Ashurek woke Estarinel and Medrian, who took in the fresh danger with alarm. They were trapped. Their only escape route lay across the boiling lake.

‘Unless we can hack a way through them,’ said Ashurek. They all stood up and strapped on their packs, but as Medrian was fastening her cloak, a streamer whipped out and clung to her hand. She did not make a sound. Worse, it seemed to have paralysed her.

Ashurek drew his knife and severed the tendril, then prised the remaining piece off her hand. It peeled off reluctantly, leaving a rash of stings in the reddened flesh.

Estarinel inspected her hand and felt her forehead. An icy sweat broke out on her skin. He could feel her trembling.

‘Don’t let those streamers touch you,’ she managed to say through chattering teeth. ‘I think they are lethal, worse than a snake bite.’

‘We must get these stings out of your hand,’ Estarinel said.

‘Not now, there isn’t time. I’ll survive. But all we need is for the wind to change, and they will all blow this way and snare us – do you see?’

‘She’s right. And the wind is changing,’ said Ashurek. He held up the knife to show the cutting edge had been eroded by the plant’s acid. ‘We are being driven,’ he added grimly. ‘So the Serpent commands plants, as much as animals.’

They were on the very edge of the shore, and it would take only one gust from the south to sweep the venomous, stinging ribbons all around them. Ashurek said quickly, ‘Our boots should give some protection from the heat. Follow me.’

One stride took him into the scalding water, and the next to the nearest of the stone formations in the lake. He balanced there precariously for a moment, then took two splashing steps to the next. He gritted his teeth as the scalding heat began to penetrate his boots. Medrian and Estarinel followed.

In daylight, the stones gleamed with brilliant patterns of green and purple, magenta and blue. They protruded from the water in rounded lobes, broader at the top than the base. When Ashurek felt their springy resilience under his boots he realised they were not stones at all, but living things.

He hoped they were not malevolent cousins of those on land.

In the middle of the lake the water became cloudy, swirling and bubbling like a cauldron, thick with crusts of bacteria. A sulphurous miasma hung over the surface, and the lake bed slipped and sank where they trod on it. The cushiony pads grew densely here, helping them to keep clear of the seething water. Ashurek felt his feet skid on the silky, marbled surfaces. They could not afford to fall. Even Medrian, faint from her poisoned hand, found the energy to run and leap across the precarious path without faltering.

The growths began to thin, and the far shore was within reach at last. But there was a gap between the last of the pads and the shore, so they splashed through scalding water for several strides before gaining solid ground at last. Once safe on the bank, pain began to throb through their feet and legs like hot knives. Medrian collapsed, trembling convulsively.

They were on another stretch of coral-red rock, but no carnivorous succulents grew on this side. Ashurek hoped there were no more volcanic springs to negotiate. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the spongey growths in the lake appeared to be moving and regrouping.

He said, ‘Let’s not delay here.’

Estarinel was attending Medrian’s hand, drawing out each tiny sting. He dressed the wound with herbal cream he’d brought from the Blue Plane, then made her drink some H’tebhmellian wine.

‘I feel better. Can we go on?’ she said, although she was still shaking and her hands felt icy.

‘It will take a while for the venom to leave your system, and you’ll feel worse if you move about,’ said Estarinel. But Medrian rose unsteadily to her feet.

‘Ashurek is right, we should distance ourselves from the lake,’ she said. ‘I usually look worse than I feel.’

Arguing was pointless. It would be good to escape the hot stench of sulphur. Estarinel repacked his herbs and the three resumed their walk across the rockscape.

There seemed no immediate menace on this side. Nothing followed them from the lake. Soon they found themselves on the beginning of the tundra; there was grass beneath their feet and the roseate rock showed itself only in ridges breaking through the ground here and there. The country all around them was flat and featureless, bland. Ominous.

#

Medrian omitted to tell them that the plant’s poison should have been enough to kill her, but the Serpent would not let her die. At present its will alone was keeping her alive, as it had done on previous occasions. However, it did not protect her from enduring the discomfort of the venom working its slow way through her body; that was another weapon M’gulfn could use to break down her resistance. There was still the paradox that made physical pain a two-edged sword: the Serpent liked her to suffer, but her suffering distanced it, so that she was better able to resist. Sometimes she wondered if M’gulfn actually feared her pain.

While her mental fight eased, her body was racked by intolerable discomfort. The burning of her head and the cold heaviness in her back and limbs were not eased by resting, so she might as well walk, pretending as best she could that she was well.

Before long the poison clouded her mind, and walking became a mechanical reflex, impossible to cease.

She occasionally heard Estarinel, at her side, ask if she was all right or suggest that it was time they rested, but through the vague haze of her delirium he seemed unreal, a white shadow. By rights she should be dead, or at least unable to move, and yet she trudged on like one of Gastada’s re-animated corpses. She wondered if this was how it felt to die. How weird; to watch herself die and yet still be alive at the end of it, as if nothing had happened. M’gulfn’s sadism was infinitely inventive, but she could not find the strength to hate it. A strange delusion took her then; the memories of other hosts came thronging back, and she became convinced that she was the Morrenish woman whom the Serpent had forced to walk, with broken limbs and a mortal wound in her guts, thousands of miles from the Arctic to Morrenland. That woman’s agony and humiliation were joined to her own, and somewhere she could feel the Serpent laughing at her anguish. Around her, the tundra lay like her own desolation made physical, the whole of the terrible dark future under the Worm’s power reduced to a single flake of bone on which she was doomed to crawl for ever.

Come to me then, all of you. I do not fear you. If you want to come to me, do so. It will please me to observe your shame when I have stripped your arrogance from you. Don’t you know I can crush you on a whim? Ah, your pride amuses me...

‘For the Lady’s sake, Medrian, will you stop?’ It was Ashurek’s voice. He was in front of her, physically restraining her. ‘It’s nearly dark. What is the matter with you?’

She looked dazed, as if she did not know where she was. She allowed herself to be seated by a fire that they made from scrubby furze bushes, but she did not speak and, to Estarinel’s increasing concern, refused to eat anything.

‘The poison is doing this to her,’ he said to Ashurek. ‘She will burn herself out. She must be made to rest.’

‘I think it’s more than the poison,’ said Ashurek.

That night Estarinel slept badly, and he was certain that Medrian had not slept at all. Before dawn he dropped off, only to wake with a sudden jolt. He sat up to find that Medrian was nowhere in sight. He woke Ashurek.

‘I only hope she has gone north,’ the Gorethrian said drily. ‘If not, we have no chance of finding her. I for one have no intention of scanning all the points of the compass for her.’

They were on the tundra proper now. It stretched around them in all directions, unrelieved by hills or trees, yet with a stark beauty of its own. The ground was carpeted with tough, dark grass and emerald green moss, starred with tiny flowers. As Estarinel and Ashurek walked, the mild wind from the south swung round to the north again, and they could taste snow on the air. They wrapped their cloaks round them and pulled on the thick gloves the H’tebhmellians had provided.

All day they walked, and were forced to stop when night fell. Estarinel was so distressed by their failure to find Medrian that he barely noticed Ashurek’s own morose mood. They roasted a hare over their furze fire and then slept as best they could, waking and walking on long before dawn.

‘Perhaps we have passed her in the dark,’ Estarinel said.

Ashurek was intent upon the compass, a flake of clear rock crystal beneath which a shining needle floated on a silvery liquid, enclosed in gold. ‘It’s possible,’ he said.

‘Don’t you care?’ Estarinel exclaimed.

‘Whether I care or not is not going to help us find her,’ Ashurek replied. ‘We cannot risk turning aside or back, it would be pointless. The important thing is that we have the Silver Staff. We must continue the Quest.’

As they went on, the sky became clotted with dense iron-grey clouds and snow swirled around them. They could see barely a few yards ahead in the gloom. Within Estarinel rose the awful knowledge that their search for Medrian could easily prove futile. Perhaps desperation tricked his eyes into seeing what he wanted. For a moment, it seemed that the horizon was illuminated by a ghastly, stormy light against which a small figure was staggering along in silhouette.

He broke into a run, leaving Ashurek behind, calling Medrian’s name. There was no reply, no sound except the mournful sighing of the wind. He felt eerily alone in the snow-filled twilight, oppressed and dwarfed by the freezing wastes that lay ahead. A horrible moment of disorientation came upon him in which he didn’t know where or who he was. There was a bird fluttering and falling on a cold wind that seemed to blow right through his soul, and he was falling too, a fleck of ash. A voice near him, yet very far away, murmured, ‘You must find me. Without me you are incomplete. While I am lost, you are lost. Remember…’ and such a profound sense of emptiness clawed at his throat that he cried out and grasped the top of the Silver Staff.

Immediately he was on firm ground again. Preternatural calmness filled him like a silver light that also flickered and played over the tundra and the clouds, leading him on with gentle sureness, as if the Lady of H’tebhmella herself was at his side. He was drifting over the snow-crusted turf like a mote of light, not needing to look, simply knowing exactly where–

All at once he came back to himself and nearly fell over a small, cloaked form, ice-frosted darkness like the tundra itself.

‘Ashurek! Ashurek, I’ve found her!’ Estarinel yelled.

Medrian was lying on a bed of heather, evidently having walked until she had collapsed from exhaustion. She was unconscious, her heartbeat and breathing erratic. Her white skin had taken on a morbid blue-grey cast and, to Estarinel’s consternation, she seemed close to death.

‘How fortunate,’ said Ashurek without inflexion.

Estarinel made her as comfortable as he could while Ashurek gathered enough scrub for a decent fire. Medrian’s breathing became steadier, but she remained unconscious. Even the breaking of certain aromatic herbs under her nose did not revive her. Estarinel took off his cloak and wrapped it over her own, holding her curled up against him so that she would take some heat from his body.

‘I don’t know what more to do for her,’ he said, distressed. ‘If only I had Lilithea’s skill. I fear that even rest won’t be enough to heal her.’

‘Estarinel,’ came Ashurek’s voice from the other side of the fire, thin and distant, ‘we do not have time for her to rest.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We cannot afford to delay waiting for her to recover. Every day we lose jeopardises the Quest. There’s nothing you or I can do for her; she will have to help herself.’

Estarinel was stunned by these words, by Ashurek’s stony, matter-of-fact tone. He looked up and exclaimed, ‘How can you be so callous! After we’ve travelled all this way together – been more than companions to each other. I even thought you understood her in a way I did not. And now you are unmoved by her suffering – you can sit there and say, “Let her help herself.”?’

‘I am not being callous,’ Ashurek replied with a touch of anger. ‘It’s obvious to me that only she can help herself. I’ve come to understand that much about her.’

‘Once, perhaps – but not now. She’s too ill! Ashurek, she hasn’t got the strength. It’s up to us to help her.’

‘I repeat, there is nothing we can do. If she does not recover, we must leave her behind.’