Advent (58 page)

 
Holly’s voice rang out at her back.

 
‘As will you, man-woman, as will you. The unsuckled breasts. The blood in the bed. The itch in the loins, the itch! Do you feel it, man-woman? Does the tender flesh there flame with it?’

 
Fury exploded within her, so hot it almost made her blind. She spun round, but her clumsiness betrayed her, and she slipped and fell face down in the snow, landing at Corbo’s feet. Panting, she pushed herself to her knees, trying to shake the long hair away from her face. Wet snow plastered it to her cheeks and eyes. It clogged her mouth; she spat and coughed. Intolerable humiliation thickened her tongue. She couldn’t speak the command to silence Holly’s mockery. It sang on as she struggled to her feet.

 
‘Woman unknit all your wards. Woman woke your talisman. Woman found the mirror of your vanity, where your old soul hid. Woman welcomed it, warlock. Are you not grateful?’

 
She managed at last to paw the stringy hair off her lips. ‘Silence!’ she tried to shout, but it came out as a choked squeal. She felt her temples throbbing as she limped towards it, leaning heavily on her staff. She wet her lips, reached her free hand out and held it in front of the green face, spreading her fingers.

 
‘It is,’ she began, deliberately slowly to prevent herself screaming like a harridan, ‘a woman’s hand.’ She drew in a long breath. ‘It did not understand what it did, when it unsealed the great enchantment by which I overcame death. It was ignorant. Weak, reckless. This whole world has fallen into ignorance and decrepitude.’ She leaned closer, her breath hissing between clenched teeth. She knew she ought not to waste words on the dryad, but fury boiled inside her and spilled out.

 
‘Since I woke in it I have heard the sky roar with a noise like a thousand furnaces. I have seen the near horizon lit at night as though hellmouth were open beneath it. I have seen comets riding the lower sky. They pulse like hearts. Monstrous leviathans rear misshapen backs above the waves. The air itself is tainted. This world is a stinking marsh. Its woods and fields are shorn of life as if the plague had visited them. I thought only the wisest and worthiest master of the latter days would be able to find what I safeguarded. Yes, it was this woman instead.’ She waved her hand in front of the green face. ‘A mere woman. Mock me for it, then.’ She could not stop her voice rising. ‘Mock this hand, but it still masters you.’ She clenched her open palm into a fist. ‘Taunt and rail as you will, you will never stir an inch from this place, and the spirit that you are will rant and weep in its wooden prison until the world itself is gathered for the last judgement. You will have time enough to remember my power. The world may have forgotten it, but my art endures.’ She lowered her fist, her rage cooling. ‘I am its master, and yours.’

 
The dryad had not moved. Pleased at having quelled its insubordination, she was beginning to regain her proper magisterial calm when Holly spoke again and shattered it.

 
‘Not so.’

 
Raw with cold, her hands began to shake. She thought she must have misheard, and before she could control herself, she grunted out, ‘What?’ like the dullest apprentice.

 
‘Not so. It is not so.’

 
The world was mad. She must not have awoken in the true world at all; that was the only explanation. She was in some degraded copy of it, blemished by incomprehensible sounds and sights and lifeless simulacra of living things, a purgatory of lost virtues and decayed powers. A place where lesser spirits contradicted their master. That it had been capable of disobedience at all was startling enough, but she put that down to her own pardonable carelessness. She had known nothing of what was around her, barely even known herself, when she had bound it and the puka to serve her, to protect her from her ignorance of the place and time to which she had come. But to hear it speak against her from its own mouth . . . She was so astounded that she almost forgot to be enraged.

 
There was another thing, a thing she could not forget; but she refused to remember it, she would not even entertain the thought.
The spirits cannot lie.
She would not think of that. She would not.

 
‘Not your master?’ Her voice quaked with the effort of not shrieking. ‘Move, then, if you can. Strike me. Drag yourself out of the earth I have fixed you in. Let us see whether I command you or not.’

 
‘You mistook your mastery. It is not yours.’

 
Tchok-tchok
, muttered Corbo, behind. The magus was frozen with sudden doubt.
It cannot lie, it cannot lie.

 
‘What do you mean?’ She was horrified to hear her mouth say the words. What was this spirit, to be interrogated by such as her? ‘Answer me!’

 
‘Mistaken, mistaken,’ it sang, sounding gleeful. ‘It flees you, Master.’

 
‘The ring?’ She blurted it out like a threatened child. ‘Answer! Do you speak of the ring?’

 
The silhouette moved at last, limbs twisting and waving like a pair of giant serpents coiling over her. ‘Holly sings the beggar’s ring, the living gift, the stolen thing.’ And it was indeed a kind of song, a threnody of sweet despair. ‘Holly saw it come to light, but stolen still, still unrequite.’ It swayed towards her and she shrank back, fearing that it would topple, but its roots were deep. ‘Another owns it now, by right.’

 
The chill had eaten inside her.
It cannot lie.
Now it touched her heart. She felt as if her soul had withered again to a hand’s breadth of cold metal.

 
‘It is mine,’ she said in a halting whisper. ‘No other is worthy of such a talisman. It was offered to me and I accepted it.’

 
‘Not! So!’ Holly’s voice pealed with triumph.

 
To be interrupted was more than she could bear. Her scream of inarticulate fury silenced the dryad. Meeting its vermilion eyes, she began to croak the spell that would send her fiery minions like an insatiable flame inside the living heartwood and make the dryad suffer the torment of damned souls. But her borrowed mouth betrayed her. Gagging on her own words, she choked like a slaughtered animal, struggling for breath, bending double, clutching her staff for support. As she tottered in the snow, the picture of her utter humiliation suddenly shone clear to her. She saw herself, a stumbling, gaping, bedraggled, female wreck, an object of scorn to her own servants. The rage shrivelled into despair.

 
Miserably, she thought: I must learn what it knows. I must endure its taunting. So begins my penitence for what I had to do.

 
She was spared the shame of having to ask the dryad to explain itself. While she hauled herself straight, wiping the dirty hair away from her face, Holly spoke again, now in a gentle murmur.

 
‘The gift passed to another, Master. Today, as the bells struck twelve. A new day begins. You it was, Master, who made the old day dark. You broke your word and you broke your world. But now the stolen gift belongs to a boy-child. Kin of the flesh you bear. Did you not know him when you saw him?’

 
‘Stupid boy,’ Corbo added.

 
Defeated, unable to muster any answer at all, the magus stared at the mocking green face.

 
In her mind’s eye she was seeing again the body in the snow. Had she ended the prophetess’s inconceivably ancient existence for nothing? She remembered how she had loved her with a man’s body, a man’s love: the splendour of it, the marvel. The magus had never shrunk from the endless pursuit of knowledge, nor ever feared to take any step that led higher into the regions of hidden wisdom, no matter what the cost; but surely she had never done a greater and more awful thing than casting down her once-beloved. Could it really be possible that she had been somehow thwarted?

 
And yet, she thought with a shudder, the spirit cannot lie.

 
‘The ward,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘You mean the ward, the ward of . . .’

 
‘The ward of her your hunter slew. The boy, a sister’s son, a simpleton.’

 
Her anger and her humiliation had spent themselves together. Something worse was taking hold now. A cold, dull feeling, murderous as a blade.

 
‘Where is this boy now?’ The abomination appeared to hesitate. ‘Answer!’

 
‘Can’t say,’ croaked the dark voice behind. ‘Don’t know.’

 
She turned carefully. Corbo looked back at her sidelong.

 
‘The boy you allowed to go from the well,’ she said. Slowly she was beginning to grasp the depth of the disobedience these vile miscreations had practised. ‘Though you knew I wished him kept there.’ She turned back to Holly and pointed her staff. ‘The boy I commanded you to watch for and bring to me, though you brought another child instead, the Cathay brat whom I left for dead.’ Thwarted, thwarted by children and monsters. Oh, how they would all suffer. ‘The brat who stole the ring and fled from here, with your help.’ The chill inside her hardened into determination. ‘This is the boy you mean?’

 
Neither of them answered.

 
‘Speak. Is that the boy to whom you say the talisman’s power has passed?’

 
‘No power,’ Corbo said, and at the same time Holly began reproachfully, ‘Only truth lives in the tree-tongue. Holly—’

 
‘Answer, slave! Is that the boy you spoke of? Yes or no?’

 
‘Yes.’

 
‘Yes yes,’ Corbo echoed, fluffing its folded wings.

 
She gazed at the hideous things she had made until the cold made her eyes water. Deep inside, she was wondering where exactly everything had gone wrong, and how it had come to this, but those thoughts were buried like leaves at the bottom of a frozen pond.

 
‘Then,’ she said at last, ‘I will destroy him too.’

 
Snow fell placidly around them.

 
‘More necks,’ Corbo muttered.

 
‘Yes.’ She rounded on it. ‘Yes, puka. More necks will be broken. Man or woman or child. They will die in the snow and be left for carrion like the witch. Perhaps you will tear their flesh yourself, if I permit you to eat. Or perhaps I will starve you until this loathsome flesh you wear withers and rots. You and all others who obstruct me will learn what it is to oppose me. Do you understand?’

 
‘No no,’ muttered the puka.

 
‘No,’ hummed the dryad.

 
She rode over their soft answers as if they had not spoken. ‘I alone can bring life back to the world. I alone. I will not be denied. I will not.’

 
The black dog had made its way to the entrance of the lodge, among the splintered remains of Guinivere Clifton’s front door. It broke the silence that followed the once-woman’s speech, raising its head and spitting out a bark.

 
She turned to it with relief. She still did not know how the fiery spirit had found this dire form to wear. There was a magic in it she did not recognise, something ancient, earthbound and godless, dark as the northern forests, reeking of death. But she saw that the familiar obeyed her in its new flesh. Without prevarication or hesitation, it followed her will. That was her only concern now. That, she saw, was the essence of magic: mastery. Nothing mattered in the end but command and submission.

 
The dog was nosing around the wreckage inside the house. There was something there, a black satchel strangely marked. Growling, the dog lunged as though it had spotted a rat. It came up with a piece of fabric in its jaws. Foggy with the aftermath of her fury, the once-woman took a while to understand what it had found.

 
‘Puka.’

 
‘Yes yes.’

 
She gestured towards the dog. ‘Is that a garment?’

 
‘Blue thing.’

 
‘Yes! Is it a garment?’

 
‘Yes yes.’

 
The dog dropped the shirt it had snatched from Gav’s bag, which was still right where he’d dropped it the first time he’d entered the house, just inside the doorway. It sniffed at it, then stepped over the bag and leaned out of the house, swaying, tasting the air.