A Blackbird In Silver (Book 1) (24 page)

He looked at her, startled. They had arrived at her house, but he was hardly aware of dismounting, or of the groom leading the horses away and out of sight. Arlenmia was glaring at him, her face full of cold rage.

‘It may surprise you to learn that I had nothing to do with events in Drish either. I healed Skord. He loved me. But Drish, and Forluin, and Belhadra, at whose names your face becomes grim with outraged horror, don’t matter! They don’t matter at all!’

She took his elbow in a powerful grip, propelling him inside the house and into the long dining hall. Her face was cold as a winter moon and her eyes two viridian flames of rage. Releasing him, she went to the fire and set a little table between the two chairs. On it she placed a decanter of wine and two crystal goblets, the blue and purple satin of her dress rustling as she moved.

‘Please, come and sit down,’ she said, her face calm again. She poured two goblets of wine and handed one to him. ‘Forgive my temper, Estarinel. I am not really angry at you. It is anger at the Belhadrians, and your companions, and even Skord – all those who will not listen and see the rightness of what I am doing.’ The warm and fervent passion began to enter her voice again. Estarinel noticed the unnatural luminosity of her eyes as she continued. ‘But perhaps I expect too much. I have not been here long, and this is only the beginning. It is true that the Belhadrians are becoming witless, apathetic and forgetful. It seems a shame, but understand this: in order to replace a dull, poor painting with a glorious work of art, you must first paint the canvas white. This is what I am doing. I send reflected dreams to them; only when their minds are quite clean will they begin to absorb and comprehend new, glorious colours.’

Her words made Estarinel shudder. He swallowed some wine. ‘What of the plague – what use is that?’

‘Again, unfortunate – a simple instrument of fear, to make them aware of my power. But, Estarinel, victims of the plague do not die. Their souls merely wait in limbo until such time as my dream is achieved. So it is not as cruel as it seems.’

‘Not cruel? It sounds monstrous,’ he whispered, his throat hoarse. He drained the rest of the wine, wishing that he felt able to move, to escape her insane words.

‘Does it?’ She considered. ‘Yes, I suppose it does, from a human point of view.’ She put down her untouched goblet and came forward, kneeling with her arms resting on his knees, looking up at him. His instinct was to recoil from her, but her presence held him motionless.

‘You think I’m insane, don’t you? But, Estarinel, haven’t you considered how imperfect human life is? Everything decays and dies and is messy and purposeless. I am seeking a way to eternal life – not just for me but for the whole Earth and everyone on it. Everything will be crystallised into a perfect, ecstatic state. There will be no illness, no death or suffering, no petty human woes and pathetic fleeting joys – only a supreme happiness: that of worshipping perfection, for all time. Naturally the world has to be broken and remade – that’s what is happening in Forluin and everywhere else. But it is only a passing human sorrow – can’t you see it doesn’t matter?’

Her words, in their passion and sincerity, were terribly persuasive. Estarinel bent towards her, beginning to believe that he had misjudged her, that she did have an answer to the world’s sorrows. A smile lit her lovely jade-carved face. ‘What makes you think humans are of any importance in the great designs of the universe? We are nothing! But I can make us important – make us part of it, for ever!’ She grasped his hand. ‘Now do you begin to see?’

‘A little,’ he said.

‘Good. You are going to share it with me.’ Estarinel felt slightly dizzy, as if his chair was tipping backwards, and he noticed strange whorls of colour creeping across the ceiling.

‘Arlenmia, was there something in the wine?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Don’t be alarmed. It’s so that I can show you my dream in full.’

‘Why have you drugged me?’ he persisted, as he lost control of his consciousness to the pervading substance.

‘Open your mind to me,’ she said softly, sitting back on her heels. Just as his contact with reality was lost completely, he stood up and walked past her towards the door. Every step was like walking against some thick, molten substance; he could see nothing but a soft yellowness, translucent and fluid, in which odd shapes were veiled into greyish silhouettes. He breathed the liquid. It permeated his brain until at last there were only two impressions left in his mind. One was that this was the normal state of the world; the other was that he was not walking at all, that he was still sitting in Arlenmia’s hall.

Then the fluid vanished without him noticing and the air was very thin and bright. The street on which he stood was broad and the buildings were tall, round towers piercing the sky. They were made of glass: deep reds, violets, greens and ultramarines. Within each one a hundred faces were pressed to the glass, hanging, pleading, distorted where the flesh was pulled and flattened against the prison wall. Hands clawed and mouths gaped soundlessly and the faces of the prisoners stared at Estarinel as they tried to scratch their way from their glass prisons.

Beneath his feet there were slabs of glass and he felt that they were many hundreds of feet thick, even bottomless. This gave him the sickening feeling of being poised over a chasm. Then he found he could see for miles through the glass, and he saw many strange fish encased in the stuff, scaled with greenish rainbows, mouths and eyes wide, as if a moment in the depths of the sea had been frozen.

He felt that all the creatures of the sea were crying out for help; fish, reptiles, birds, mammals – for we are all creatures of the sea, he thought. And the vision of all life imprisoned in glass seemed horribly symbolic of something he did not understand, but which Arlenmia would soon explain and instill into his mind.

Afraid, he turned to run, but as he did so, he saw a figure in front of him. In that moment he felt that this place was not a drug-induced vision, but real; that he had stepped into another dimension.

The figure was a young woman, small and slender, with long hair of deep gold, golden skin and eyes. She was in a simple pale robe, and he could see through her to the shining towers beyond, as if she were herself made of glass.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, her voice like crystal in the bright air. ‘Are you a friend of Ashurek?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I am Estarinel of Forluin. And you are Silvren.’ She nodded with a smile of relief lighting her face, and she stretched out her arms to embrace him. She was real also, but her flesh felt strangely viscid and insubstantial to his touch. He did not feel surprised to see her, only pleased, as if she were an old friend of his.

‘I thought you were–’

‘In the Dark Regions? I am. What you see is an astral presence, which I cannot maintain for long. My body is in the Dark Regions and the longer I stay here, the worse it will be when I return. It takes so much energy. I am using what little is left of my sorcery to watch over Ashurek, and warn him about Arlenmia. But when I came here, it was all deserted, as I should have realised.’

‘But where are we? I was drugged – I thought this place was an hallucination.’ Estarinel held her hands, which seemed to flow through his like liquid.

‘No, it is real. This is the old Glass City in its true guise. The city of metal is an illusion created by Arlenmia. But her drug has brought you here in astral form also, thank goodness.’ She did not say, though she must have thought it, that she wished Ashurek had been brought here instead. ‘You must tell me all that has happened, though quickly – we haven’t much time.’

He recounted their adventures, in as few words as possible. When he told her of Forluin, tears filled her translucent eyes.

‘Oh, curse the damned Worm!’ she exclaimed as he finished. ‘Nothing is spared – I wonder if it’s all worth fighting for. If only I was not bound and powerless, I would be on this horrible Quest with you.’

‘I know – I know that you began it.’

‘Yes, and now it may not end, because Arlenmia works for the Serpent.’

At these words, Estarinel felt all hope emptying from him.

‘I suspected it… but how do you know?’

‘I know her – she brought another world to ruin before this. She used to be my friend, and it is my fault she came here, though that is another tale.

‘The Gorethrian Empire, the Shana, the Egg-Stone – all are the works of the Serpent. The world is falling slowly into its power, and now Arlenmia is continuing its work in the heart of Tearn. The Glass City is beautiful and ancient, a place of power that maintains the tenuous contact with the three Planes; but she has cast an illusion about it so that it seems to be something that reflects rather than something transparent, and its people have fled.’

‘And these people?’ said Estarinel, indicating the miserable faces staring through the glass walls of their prisons.

‘Only an illusion... but it is true that the souls of the Belhadrians are imprisoned while their bodies and minds wander hopelessly about their daily lives.

‘This is only the start. Her idea and dream is a world that exists in eternal worship of the Worm; and that would mean not only horrors far in excess of those created by any evil agent of Earth. It would mean the destruction of all joy and freedom, the loss of all will to live, but the escape route of death would be closed. No will of your own, but only the eternal singing of the Worm’s praises; and the horror of it would be worse than that of the Dark Regions, more terrible than hell itself.

‘The world would become immune to external forces, immune to reality. It would become as a – a bloated sac that can never expel its poison. Estarinel, that is the end the world is coming to; that is what we are fighting against.’

‘Oh, gods,’ he said, horror enfolding him. ‘I never realised it was so…’

‘Eldor didn’t tell you? Perhaps he thought it wouldn’t help. Arlenmia can control Tearn, for she has mastered the Glass City, and Gastada is helping her. She will try to get Ashurek in her power, return him to Gorethria and so destroy the Empire. Medrian, I don’t know; but she will use her for something.

‘The Worm could not gain a hold in Forluin except by attacking it physically,’ Silvren continued. ‘But Arlenmia knows that if she can control you, she can send you back there to instill all the people with the submissive misery that afflicts the Belhadrians. Can you now see why the Worm came to Forluin? It was not a random attack, but part of its plan.

‘The House of Rede will be the last to fall, though that will not be safe forever.’ Estarinel listened, speechless with despair and horror, as the sorceress Silvren went on. ‘She has no notion that the Worm is good or evil; she only loves it, worships it. Such people are more dangerous than the consciously evil or cruel, such as the Shana or Gastada.’

Her form shivered, and the glass towers behind her rippled as if seen through warm, rising air. She uttered a sigh. ‘She may convince you that what she is doing is good and essential, because she believes it herself. She must have given you the drug to open your mind to her, so whether she can see us together or not, I’ve no idea. When the drug wears off she will try to entrance you. Fight! If you and Ashurek and Medrian use all your intelligence, you may escape. Destroying her is another matter. There is something that her life and vitality depend on... I can’t discover what it is... if you can, you’ll have a chance…’

She sighed again, and this time it was almost a groan, that of a hell-tormented creature. ‘I can’t tell you how important it is that you reach the Blue Plane immediately…’

‘I know,’ he sighed. He reached out to her, but his hands passed through her now. ‘Silvren!’

‘E’rinel, I am glad that Ashurek has such a good and gentle companion. Perhaps you can talk some sense into him. I never could.’

Her voice was growing fainter. ‘Tell him all I have told you, and that I will watch him whenever I can find strength. Oh, and one last thing, the most awful thing of all.’ She fixed him with bottomless eyes of deep gold, like beautiful lakes in which terrible things were reflected. He loved her and pitied her in that moment, and he knew he was watching the soul of a sorceress being dragged back down to hell. ‘E’rinel, you must know that the Worm also takes a human form.’

‘Yes,’ he replied voicelessly.

‘I know Arlenmia,’ Silvren’s voice became half-choked with tears, ‘and when she becomes devoted to something, her devotion is total – no half-measures for her. She serves the Serpent with such fanaticism that I believe it wouldn’t be beyond her to find a way to become the Serpent’s host.’

‘Do you believe–?’

‘I don’t know. I hope I’m wrong. I loved her… oh, my soul is so weary, sick, I must go back… tell Ashurek I love him.’ Silvren was gone, like a cat fading into moonlight, although her after-image danced before his eyes. There must be some way to follow and rescue her – but as she disappeared, reality vanished with her.

Estarinel closed his eyes and his mind, and let the drug take him. It carried him, like spore on a wind, across fantastic landscapes, through blazing lights and infinite snow-tunnels, and it was many nightmarish hours before it left him.

He was still sitting by Arlenmia’s heatless fireside when he awoke. It was daylight, well into the following morning. The ceiling had turned to metal once more. He glanced over the marble floor of the hall with its rich animal skins, the silver-and-glass table, the crystal globe of the Earth without really noticing them. His head ached and his mind seemed to have turned in upon itself so that he found it hard to adjust back to the physical world. He was alone. He felt fear pressing on him from all sides and wanted to run, run. Instead, he stood up and walked very slowly towards his room, where he thought to find some security. Then, he thought, I must find Medrian, must find Ashurek.