Crusader (54 page)

Every Hawkchild had been trapped in the net of branches that had extended into impossible heights into the sky. As he watched, the trees pulled their branches back down to earth, dashing each Hawkchild into bloody fragments on rocks and into their own clutching roots.

Again and again the trees raised the corpses of the Hawkchilds into the air, and again and again thundered them earthwards.

When it was all finished the trees retreated, and Axis was left to stare at the now deserted, bloody field of death.

It was only then that he again saw the white wing, splotched with blood and, finally, new horror hit him.

“StarDrifter!”
he screamed, and fell to the earth. He scrabbled over to the wing, and grabbed at it, burying his fingers amid the feathers as if by that action alone he could bring his father back.
“No! No! No!”

Far away Qeteb leaned over the snowy tablecloth and squeezed DragonStar’s arm. “You mustn’t let your sister’s and grandfather’s deaths distract you. Life must go on after all.”

He received no reply, save for a look of implacable hatred.

Qeteb laughed. “Fernbrake next. Fancy a wager on the outcome?”

Again, no reply.

Qeteb was not discouraged. “I must tell you, DragonStar my Enemy, that I have been thinking about this little girl you seem so determined to protect. What was her name? Ah, yes, Katie.”

He dragged out Katie’s name so wetly it slobbered on the table between them.

“I was thinking, my dear boy, that should one of my companions triumph over of one yours, I might send them after her. To fetch her for me.”

Qeteb sat back and rested a forefinger against a cheek, rolling his eyes in a parody of indecision. “Ah, dear me. Which one to go for? Katie…or Faraday? You
do
understand that we are caught in the same fight your father engaged in against Gorgrael, don’t you? I am caught in Gorgrael’s dilemma. Of two females, I know that one of them will destroy you. But which? Which?”

And Qeteb grinned, for he
knew
which one it was.

A
xis buried his grief in action. He was unable to go near Zenith’s torn body, and so Urbeth and Ur took what remained of Zenith and StarDrifter (they could only find a few remnants of his wings), and interred them in a gully to the east of Sigholt’s ruins.

In death, perhaps, the lovers could be together.

Then both women, backed by the trees, sang a dirge of such beauty that Axis finally bowed his head and sobbed as he leaned against Zared.

“South,” Axis said, when it was finally over. “South, for I cannot bear to stand here an instant longer and look at the destruction of my life.”

“You still have Azhure,” Zared said. “You still have DragonStar.”

Axis nodded. “But I have also lost, and that loss will never be regained.”

“Until the Field—” Zared began, but Axis had already turned and walked away.

South. South to Fernbrake Lake.

There lay Leagh, about to give birth, and about to do her own battle with the Demon Roxiah. Zared was desperate to get to her, to be there for her, but he was not the only one. Ur also niggled at Axis whenever she got the chance, slipping up
behind him when he dismounted after a day ranging ahead with his war band, whispering into his ear as he lay down to sleep at night.

Eventually, she annoyed Axis so much he sent her to the very rear of the column, and set a guard of some twenty-seven Lake Guardsmen over her with strict instructions not to let her near him.

It was not so much Ur’s persistence that annoyed Axis, although desperate to be left alone in his grief, but the fact was, he was moving south as fast as he could anyway, and didn’t need Ur muttering uselessly every moment she got the chance.

Every day Sal slid faster and faster, and the landscape strode impossibly past, an unnoticed blur. Axis spent his waking hours fighting—swiping the heads from demented cows, slicing the hearts out of sly boars—and his nights tossing in half-sleep, dreaming of Zenith as a child, and dreaming of that day long, long ago, when he had first met StarDrifter in the snow at the foot of the Icescarp Alps.

His daughter and his father, both, impossibly, gone, and he, uselessly, still remaining.

They drew close to the Minaret Peaks.

Leagh had prepared her circular lying-in chamber with the greatest care. It was pristine and white: the gently drifting curtains, the bed, the tables covered with linens, the porcelain bowls and buckets.

The knives and hooks, of course, were of gleaming steel.

Leagh turned slowly about, inspecting her trap.

But who would it trap? Roxiah…or her?

Her hand tightened momentarily over her belly. She was huge now, the child squirming, desperate to make its own way in the world.

Not long. Not long.

Beyond the door of the round chamber stood the ranks of the Lake Guard in double file, forming an avenue of ivory and determination.

Beyond them squealed and roared ten thousand crazed creatures from millipedes to humped bulls. They made no attempt to storm either the Lake Guard or the round chamber hung with diaphanous curtains.

Another would storm the chamber for them.

It lingered on the ridge of the crater, staring down, its hand on its own horribly distended belly.

Roxiah: body of Niah, soul of Rox, and receptacle for…for whatever waited to squirm its way out.

Soon. Soon. The birth was imminent.

Roxiah turned its head and looked to where Qeteb and DragonStar sat at the luncheon table.

Qeteb nodded, and Roxiah grinned. It turned, and took a step downwards.

In her chamber, Leagh suddenly screamed and doubled over in agony as the first of her birth pangs stabbed home.

A
ll Qeteb’s genteel bonhomie was gone. He leaned forward over the table, a glass gripped tight in his hand, his eyes intent on the billowing curtains of the circular chamber in the hollow beneath him. On the other side of the table, DragonStar was no less tense. Although he sat back, apparently comfortable on his chair, the muscles of his face were tight, and his eyes narrowed.

A very slight movement in the far distance caught DragonStar’s attention, and he shifted his eyes slightly so he could see.

Startlement—almost gladness—momentarily transformed his face. The massive column of trees, peoples and animals had reached the lower Minaret Peaks and was slowly wending its way into the passes that would bring them to Fernbrake.

Axis rode ahead on his sweet brown mare, and not far behind him came Zared on his draughthorse—even at this distance DragonStar’s eyes could pick out the desperation in Zared’s face. Behind Zared, Gwendylyr riding close at his side, and behind them…behind them loped the great ice bear, Urbeth.

DragonStar’s face went slack in amazement. For once the proud Urbeth had allowed someone to ride her back. Ur, still clutching her precious terracotta pot.

Well, at that DragonStar was not surprised. If Leagh won out against Roxiah, then Ur would be
desperate
to get to Leagh before she gave birth.

DragonStar almost smiled. No doubt Ur had been niggling and irritating Axis for days upon days to get here as fast as he could.

And then DragonStar’s face emptied of all emotion, for he remembered what it was that Axis had ridden from. Zenith. Dead. Lost, finally, for WolfStar’s sins.

DragonStar turned his eyes back to the birthing chamber far below.

Roxiah had gained the flat of the crater, and was now waddling its bulky figure through the ranks of the impassive Lake Guard towards the birthing chamber.

Leagh walked slowly, painfully, about the chamber, pausing every time a new pain gripped her.

Her face appeared impassive, but Leagh’s mind was running wild with what might, or might not, occur in this chamber.

She was comforted by the sweet voice of her child, reaching up through blood and bone and sinew to her heart to reassure her mother.

Do you not realise how close we are to the Infinite Field of Flowers?
the child asked, using her words more as a consolation than as a question that needed to be answered.

Close enough to lose it forever
, Leagh said.

The child shifted, unperturbed at the thought of the travail ahead.
Have more faith, mother
, she said,
and think only of the lilies ahead.

Leagh smiled, a hand on her belly, and then she stilled and looked up.

There was a shadow behind one of the fluttering curtains: dark, oppressive, horribly gleeful.

“Roxiah is here,” she whispered.

And one more besides it
, said the child, but Leagh did not know what she meant, and so she ignored it.

Roxiah proceeded into the birthing chamber in grand style, its belly breaking through the curtains first, long before Roxiah’s grinning face was revealed.

Leagh winced, for the woman’s face—Niah’s—was nevertheless so much like Zenith’s that Leagh found it difficult to concentrate.

Poor Zenith. Dead in the dust of some desolate gorge in the Urqhart Hills. Leagh had been well aware of the manner of death visited on Zenith and StarDrifter.

But this entity was not Zenith. This was the Demon Rox, writhing in Niah’s womb, awaiting birth, and the combination of Niah’s soulless body and Rox’s demonic spirit (and infant flesh) was loathsome to behold.

Roxiah’s face was a frightful combination of outward blankness with corruption that writhed only just beneath the skin. It was twisted, bland, malevolent, torpid. It combined soullessness with the depravity of evil. It combined vacancy with a sinister and perverted tenancy that waited to explode forth in fiery and death-dealing birth.

“A joust!” Roxiah crowed, “between you and me! The battle of the bellies, I think! What is the challenge, milksop? What ‘choice’,” and Roxiah made that word a foulness, “do you have for me?”

Leagh straightened, despite the pain and discomfort that gripped her. “The choice is obvious,” she said. “Only one child can be born. Yours, or mine. Bleakness or hope. Your choice. Yours. Which child is to be born, Roxiah? Which?”

“Mine! Mine! Mine!” Roxiah shouted, jumping up and down in a display of ungainly joy.
“Mine!”

Niah’s Demon-controlled body dropped to the floor, writhing and contorting as if gripped in the final pangs of birth. It lifted and spread its legs, as if determined to force out the infant Rox here and now.

“Mine!” Roxiah crowed yet once more.

Far above, Qeteb turned to DragonStar and grinned. “A stupid choice to give Roxiah,” he said, grinning his joy. “How could Leagh have possibly thought that—”

“The choice must still be born,” DragonStar said calmly, although inside his emotions roiled. Leagh had lost, it seemed.

Hello Niah
, said Leagh’s baby, and Leagh’s face dropped in shock at the strength of her child’s mind voice as it sped from the womb.

“Niah doesn’t live here any more,” Roxiah chortled. “Someone else does. Me, me,
me
!”

Roxiah rolled about and finally managed to get to its feet. It spied the table with its birthing implements spread about, and it seized a large hook, raising it threateningly as it advanced on Leagh. “Time to go, my dear.”

Niah?
said Leagh’s baby.
Niah? Come home, Niah. Come home.

The wasteland was far distant, a place with no paths leading to any bridge of escape, a place devoid of hope.

She stood, her head hanging, her eyes closed to the soullessness surrounding her, knowing she was beyond redemption.

When she had been in the joy and hope of her youth, this was not where she had thought to have ended.

Why, when all she had done was love? Why, when all she had done was fight for the right to love?

Niah, Niah, come home!

Leagh did not move, nor attempt to protect herself. “Your choice, Rox,” she said. “Which baby is to be born? Whose?”

Niah come home…

Roxiah laughed until spittle flew about the chamber in a mad rain of glee. “Time to go, Leagh!”

It threw the hook, and Leagh had to twist violently to avoid it. She staggered, and then fell.

Niah come home…

Come home? Come home? Where was home?

She remembered the place where she had been raised into womanhood: the peaceful enchantment of the Island of Mist and Memory, the companionship of her fellow priestesses, the comforting roar of the waves a thousand feet below her feet.

Was this home?

Roxiah scuttled over the distance between them, another hook in its hands. “Time to leave, depart, and farewell the scene, Leagh,” it said, and, placing one foot on Leagh’s chest, raised the hook to drive it home.

Niah come home…

No, that place had not been home, for she had left it.

There had been another home, the house of Hagen in the horror of Smyrton.

There she had birthed her child, her beautiful daughter, Azhure.

And there she had died, burned alive as Hagen poked her further and further into the fire…

…further and further into the fire…

…further and further…

“No!” she screamed. “No! I won’t come home! I won’t!”

That is not your home, Niah. Come home. Now, please, you are needed NOW! Come home, Niah, come home.

“I make the choice!” Roxiah screamed.
“My
baby, not yours!”

Leagh raised her arms, crying out, and trying to twist away, her belly left vulnerable as her arms tightened about her face.

Roxiah chortled with joy, twitching and twittering in its demonic labour pangs.

It had won. Rox would be reborn.

Niah, please, please, come home now.

She lifted her head, staring at the vision that had suddenly appeared in the wasteland before her.