Mirror 04 The Way Between the Worlds (13 page)

knowledge that it surely would eat him in the end, despite knowing the fate of
those up on the mountain, Llian was moved by the creature's agony.
He pulled himself to his feet but its head whipped round, baring those shiny
brown teeth at him. He went still, then took another step. One arm moved
sluggishly. The baton pointed directly at his heart. Llian sat down again.
Something thumped the outside of the front door. Just a testing thump,
followed by silence into which came the muffled sound of many voices. It
seemed that Mendark and Yggur, and the whole force that had gone down to
Tolryme, were back.
The thranx gave a convulsive groan, a mighty push and suddenly the obstruction
moved. The baby slid free and hit the floor with a wet slap. The mother
screwed up her face in agony. Again blood gushed from her. In the growing
light Llian saw it was dark purple. Once more she used the black light to
cauterise the injury. Cutting the baby's cord, she took it in her arms.
The baby had a huge head, crested like the mother, though on it the crest was
as soft as rubber. The arms and legs hung limp. The mother gave the child a
thump in the chest, whereupon the limbs moved feebly. The child gave forth a
little mewling whimper.
The mother brought her bent arms up to her chest then snapped them apart,
throwing back her shoulders at the same time. The armoured skin separated
along seams to reveal a pair of breasts the colour of pink milk. Immediately
the baby squirmed in her arms and began to sniff the air. The thranx put the
baby to the breast.
The crisis seemed to be over. The baby suckled noisily. The mother cradled it
in her arms. Llian stared at the pair. Her eyes seemed to be closed, but if he
so much as twitched he caught her smouldering glare on him.
The baby began on the second breast. Already it looked much stronger. The
muscular legs kicked and one arm moved lazily. It lifted its head, sniffed the
air again and looked right at Llian. The mother gave a hiss of approval.
Llian imagined her using him as a plaything, an anatomy lesson. Imagined her
carefully tearing his belly open, showing the child the best bits - liver and
kidneys, still-beating heart. He dwelt on the agony of being eaten alive. How
long would it take to die?
Practically a cripple, the best he could manage was the most painful hobble.
Probably not enough to get away from this newborn, already looking so alert
and deadly. Infants have to be, to survive in the void. And there was nowhere
in the keep that he could hide from the mother.
Suddenly she leapt up, tearing the child from her breast. It wailed and
scratched at her. With an oscillation of her shoulders, the breasts
disappeared beneath armoured skin-plates. Swiftly she lashed the baby into a
sling, which she threw over her shoulders. The great wings flexed, and settled
back over the infant.
Llian shrank back against the wall but the thranx went
past him to the door, checking the barricade. She moved painfully, as if torn
by the birth, and Llian noticed that she was bleeding again.
As she reached the door something crashed against it. The lock broke, the bolt
tearing right off, but the bar held. The thranx pressed her shoulder against
the door. The ram struck again, splintering the timbers. She was tossed onto
her side. She got up slowly, looking ill. Abandoning the door she turned
towards Llian.
He reeled backwards, tripped over the mattress and fell flat on his back.
Rolling over, Llian found that he could not stand up. He tried to scuttle away
on hands and knees. Suddenly the flail lashed out, one of the thongs coiled
around his leg and the spiked ball caught in the seam of his trousers. The
thranx hauled him in like a fish.
As he was dragged across the floor, the baby let out a series of little
squeaks and thrust its head over its mother's shoulder. The thranx picked
Llian up, holding him out in the air. Mother and child bared their teeth.
Llian closed his eyes.
At that moment the ram struck again, bursting the door in. The crew of the ram

were carried halfway across the keep before managing to stop. The thranx let
Llian go and reared up before them like an avenging devil. Dropping the ram
they scattered for their lives.
The thranx whirled, grabbed Llian, sprang in the air and the wings drove it
upward. It beat its way up the stairs, labouring under the load. Llian,
hanging upside down, saw Mendark and Yggur appear in the doorway.
One of Yggur's soldiers hurled a spear, which whistled between Llian's legs.
Shocked, he curled himself up into a ball. Mendark or Yggur, Llian could not
tell who, sent a blast of red fire up the stairs that singed the end of one
leathery wingtip. The thranx was unaffected, though Llian could feel it
struggling to carry him now. The birth injury must have weakened it.
It flapped harder, hung motionless for a moment then began to spiral up into
the broken turret of the roof. The moon shone down through a jagged tangle of
beams. Below, Llian saw Malien, Yggur and Mendark race up around the curve of
the stair. Mendark set off another blast, which the thranx avoided; it made
one of the rafters smoulder.
Knocking Mendark's arm aside, Malien released another of those shining bubbles
through her fingertips. It followed the spiralling path of the thranx,
swelling as it rose. On touching Llian's foot, it enveloped his body and
swelled again to become a globe a couple of spans across.
With one whispered word from Malien, frost needles expanded across the globe
and it set hard. Llian felt the sphere come up against the broken roof opening
and jam there.
The thranx, now out through the roof, screamed in frustration. Llian felt its
mighty wings beating the air. It sent blast after blast from its baton. The
baby screamed too but the bubble was impervious.
Finally the thranx simply let go, rose sluggishly into the sky, crossed before
the dark moon and was gone. The shiny bubble drifted down, bursting into
fragments that turned to smoke in the air. Llian lay on the floor, his legs
bleeding again.
'I didn't know you could use the Secret Art,' he said huskily.
'I was a master once, but Tensor cured me of it.' Malien bent down over his
wounds. 'I don't like the look of this. Are you up to another operation,
chronicler?'
'No!' he said weakly.
She lifted him to his feet and, to his surprise, embraced him. 'You've had a
bit of a night, Llian.'
The pressure caused a sharp pain in his shoulder. Only then did he remember
the intruder in the night and understand who it had been. The hand had given
her away. 'Faelamor!' he gasped.
'What?' Malien said sharply, letting him go. She caught him as he fell.
'There was a spy in here, not long before the thranx came.' He bared his
shoulder, revealing nail gouges in the pale skin that were bruised black and
blue. 'She wanted to know where Karan was. I think it was Faelamor.'
Malien inspected the marks. 'Could be! It's the size of her hand. A
complication we could do without.'
'She's after the construct!' said Mendark. 'We've got to get it first.'
Pale Ghosts
It was a glorious winter's morning when Tallia and Shand set out from
Gothryme. The air was still and the sun shining; as fine a day as the previous
ones had been ill. Nonetheless the travelling was slow in new snow, and the
cliff path very icy.
'Careful, there may be guards,' said Shand.
At the top there was sign of Ghashad, trampled snow and burnt wood, but they
saw no one. It was almost dark by the time he and Tallia arrived at the little
stone pavilion beside Black Lake. The moon had not yet risen.
They reconnoitred all around, as well as they could, but found no more sign of
the enemy. By the time they regained their campsite, the moon was rising past
its full, the angry face already turning away. It was the fourth day after
hythe. Endre, mid-winter week, was finally over. Not daring to light a fire,

they dined on cold meat, bread and fruit, took a swig each from Shand's flask
to warm them and turned quickly into their sleeping pouches.
Before dawn Tallia was wakened by Shand's hand on her shoulder. He handed her
a hunk of dark bread and a mug of ice water. The bread was so cold that she
had to gnaw at it as they walked along.
It was near midday by the time they reached the steep
climb below the amphitheatre. There were no tracks, for everything was covered
by the night's heavy quilt. The day was still; again the sun shone brightly.
Tallia eased her head over the crest. Carcharon crouched directly in front of
her. In the bright sunlight she saw that part of the tower had collapsed.
Carcharon looked different, wrong, as if it had become plastic and deformed
under its own weight. All the faces and angles of it were changed. 'Better be
careful,' she said. 'The whole tower could come down.'
'It looks empty,' said Shand. There were no guards on the walls, where
previously the Ghashad had been everywhere. Nonetheless they crossed the arena
warily. Finally, looking down on the winding track that led to the gate, they
took their courage in their hands and ran.
'What a terrible, desolate place,' said Tallia as they climbed the steps. 'No
wonder Basunez went mad.'
'He must have been mad to build here in the first place!' They continued up to
the top.
Tallia eyed the bronze statues outside the door with new understanding. 'These
are thranx! How did Basunez know how to make them so accurately?'
'I'd say his studies were more successful than anyone thought,' Shand panted.
They found the gate locked, though rubble where the wall had been breached
made a ramp up to the base of the gap, offering easy entrance. A breeze sighed
through the broken wall. Climbing the pile, they looked into the tower at the
level of the first floor. There was nothing to be seen but more rubble and
drifts of snow. Tallia clambered in.
Inside, the atmosphere was even stranger. The stairs appeared different each
time Tallia looked at them. Sometimes they seemed to lead down instead of up,
and sometimes both down and up at the same time, impossible as that seemed.
And once or twice, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a mirage Wall curving
through the building.
The spiral staircase was largely intact, though a number of steps had
collapsed. Here and there on the walls were abstract carvings with an ordered,
crystalline geometry. They were beautifully executed but quite
incomprehensible. The Ghashad must have done them, for they were fresh. They
paused halfway up. Tallia looked out an embrasure, seeing nothing but steep
rock faces and ice all the way to the bottom of the gorge, and the other side
rising up as steep and bare, though not as high.
'I don't like this place,' she said. 'I can feel the very stones groaning.'
'Well they might, the sights they have seen. But it was a strange place before
Carcharon was built, and will still be when every last stone is gone. It is
one of the most potent sites in all Santhenar, where the currents in the very
core of the world sweep to a focus. Karan's father was fascinated by the
place.'
'What was he like?'
'Galliad? A strange man, in some ways. Brilliant but an outcast. He was
half-Aachim, you see, and at odds with the world both here and in Shazmak.
Wherever he went he was an exile.'
In the topmost chamber they found a scene of devastation. A good third of the
eastern wall had fallen outward, leaving the shattered roof frame sagging down
to the floor. A low wall had scorch marks on it and some of the stone had
melted, running down to congeal in a slaggy pile at the base. Nearby they
found a huge depression in the floor as if something heavy had moulded the
stone like jelly. It was as smooth as glass and shaped with odd curves and
corrugations reminiscent of the construct. Except for some food scraps and a
broken plate, the room was empty. Carcharon had been abandoned.
The very air in the room moved sluggishly, glittering with little drifting

specks of fire even when the sun was covered by cloud. Their voices changed
all the time, sometimes
echoing as if they spoke inside a bell, at other times sinking into the
plastic walls so that they had to shout to be heard at all.
Shand sat down on the roof wreckage, drumming his heels against a rafter. He
looked quite defeated.
'What's the matter, Shand? All the life seems to have gone out of you.'
'I'm too old. I've nothing left to live for.'
'What about finding Karan?'
'He's taken her with him. There's absolutely nothing I can do about it.'
Tallia left him there. Going downstairs, she searched the whole place; every
storeroom, every cupboard, the yard and all the sheds and lean-tos, mostly
unroofed, that clustered against the walls. She looked in the cellars and even
the water cistern. There was thick ice on the top of it. Tallia paced around
the walls, peering down to see if anything had been thrown there, or anybody,
but found nothing except a neat pile of waste - bones, scraps and a few broken
items -in one stone bin.
Climbing up again she found Shand still staring at the moulded floor. 'There's
nothing left,' she said. 'Whatever they brought with them they took away. No
sign of Karan either.'
He sighed. 'Let's try to unravel what happened. We know that the construct
worked well enough to find a way into the void, for the thranx can't have come
from anywhere else.'
'How do you know such things? Even Mendark did not know its name.'
'Another time,' said Shand.
'Has Rulke gone back there, do you think?'
'No one goes willingly to the void. It is a place to escape from, in desperate
times to travel through, to get from one world to another. But not even the
things that dwell there would drag him back - they would be too anxious to
make their own escape. No, he has either gone to Aachan or he is still here.'
'Here?' she wondered.
'I mean on Santh - in Shazmak with his Ghashad, presumably. There were many of
them here. It would have taken more than one trip to ferry them all to
Shazmak.'
'And Karan too. I wonder what went wrong? The thranx must have shaken him.
Look at that.' She pointed to a puddle of what appeared to be frozen purple
blood. 'He must have wounded it, or the lorrsk that attacked Nadiril. And this
hollow in the floor - I can't even imagine how that got there.'
'I can,' said Shand. 'It's as if the construct fell on its side and the floor
moulded itself to its shape. Something went badly wrong.'
Shand looked even older and more defeated, if that was possible. He groped
blindly inside his coat for the flask, took a huge swig then offered it to
her. Tallia shook her head.
'I need something hot. I'm going to make a fire.'
Shand did not respond. She went down the stairs but returned looking
dispirited. 'No wood!' she said.
Wordlessly Shand pointed to the remains of the roof. They gathered splinters
and bits of broken beams, and made a fire on the other side of the room, well
away from the bloodstain and the hollow.
'Look,' said Tallia, going back for more wood. 'Isn't that Karan's knife?'
She pulled it out from under the rubble. They heaved the mess of timbers
apart, peering underneath in case her body was trapped there, but it wasn't.
Tallia made a pot of stew. Shand sat back, occasionally sipping from his
flask. Leaning against the wall, he closed his eyes. His lips moved, though
whether he was talking to himself, or reciting a prayer, she did not try to
find out.
'I'm so weary of the world,' he said. 'It's almost time to go. Almost time.'
Tallia had no idea how to help him. She busied herself with a more thorough
search of Carcharon, which was as fruitless as the previous one. What could be
done? Shazmak