Book Of Shadows Part 29

Though whispered, the words left his lips and found the ears of every listener below. The wind spoke and asked the same question as it scattered the women's hair, whipped through the trampled gra.s.s, tossed about litter, flapped people's clothes flapped Anfen's and Sharfy's too as they hung back at the very edge of the throng, watching like everyone else. The thunder asked the same question in its deep loud voice, clanging and booming about like a maniac striking a drum. The rain hissed down, demanding to know if Shadow was among them in its babble of many tiny voices. The crowd watching spoke many different things, but each word translated itself, took on the meaning of the words their Friend and Lord had spoken. But no one had the answer. If Shadow was there, he hid somewhere.

'Is Shadow among you?' Vous repeated in a louder voice, a hint of displeasure showing itself. And a warning. The crowd shifted on their feet nervously, several thousands of them pressing in together on the castle lawn, pushing at the steps and the barricades set up to keep them out, the older frailer ones among them crying out weakly in pain.

Upon whom should their Friend and Lord's displeasure fall? They were one ent.i.ty here after all, as seen in his eyes from far above. The skies darkened and thunder bellowed a threat. Lightning stabbed the higher castle towers and the ground shivered.

Vous's voice became a scream louder than all other sounds. ' Is... Shadow... here?' The last word drew out and echoed, shrill and obscene. Their Friend and Lord's face was blazing with hate and rage and fear, eyes huge and gleaming as the beam of his gaze swept through all of them below, like a light searching, searching for Shadow.

Vous's screaming voice was all fear and pain; for now his rage had left him, and was the people's to express. A third of them changed so that their faces were Vous's face, eyes ablaze, the fine chiselled features identical to his, their bodies changing too so their arms were thin like his, their fingers long and delicate like the artist Vous had fancied himself to be, centuries before. All things, he'd fancied himself to be, unique and special and brilliant among all the history of men, the finest of warriors, the deepest of thinkers, beauty and charm to seduce the G.o.ddess Wisdom if indeed he deigned to do so (he did not). Yet now on the lawns he was replicated several hundred times. Old women with Vous's head hissed angrily at their neighbours in the throng, 'Is Shadow here?' A thousand chattering words, spoken by those with Vous's face, and alike by those who were unchanged, said, 'Is Shadow here?'

Babbling, babbling, a screeching cacophony of voices demanded to know, while Vous far above them screamed with his jaw hung wide as a wolf's, eyes blasting their light through sheets of rain warm as blood. Anfen grimly watched while Sharfy held his ears, wishing for it to be over, not knowing what he witnessed, only that it was worse, somehow, than anything else he'd ever seen, in all the vast catalogue of death and pain and misery his past held.

Those with Vous's face dug out the others' eyes with their fingers, scratched and bit off their ears, bit their throats, ripped hair and strangled, spilling blood all down their chins. Those being slain screamed, broken by pain out of the spell, while Vous above stared down, still screaming, still screaming. The last sound in many dying ears, his voice. The last sight in many dying eyes, his face, branded into the features of a stranger, or onto a wife's or husband's or son's or daughter's who'd made the journey here to the castle lawns with the very person they now clawed and bit and ate to death. Vous, high above, watched this death he had created with no sign of whether or not he approved or even understood what he'd caused. Anfen watched it silently, not drawing his weapon, and not seeming concerned that any of the fevered crowd would turn their way.

Blood soaked the gra.s.s of the castle lawns, churning beneath thousands of stamping feet as those on the edges of the crowd panicked and fled.

3.

Shadow was among them. Shadow watched some distance back, fascinated by the strange, beautiful creature standing so far above the crowd. The sight of that being who glowed with light that seemed to be angelic, whose screaming voice was in Shadow's ears a beautiful song filled him with a peculiar emotion which shifted, moment to moment, from longing to rage. He wanted to kill that being for no reason he could find, yet he loved him without knowing what love was.

Fear could be seen all through the emanating light around the slender, delicate-looking creature so high above, Vous's own fear, seeping from him and bleeding into the air all around, till it had filled the denizens watching below.

The sense Shadow had watching Vous was far stronger than, though similar to, that emotion which had marked Eric as a point of reference. He wanted to yell in answer to Vous's voice, to sing in harmony with it at the same time as shout it down and blot it out. He did not know what to do. He dared go no closer, though the urge to do so was near overwhelming. His mouth opened wide and he tried to find his own voice to match Vous's screaming, but he could not.

This was the first thing to take from Shadow's thoughts the prison he'd just escaped. How sweet it had been at first, his entrapment in what had seemed a round thin room, spinning about itself. He'd fallen backward through suspended clattering chains of many colours. Their touch was pleasure itself: they scratched itches, quenched thirsts, gave sensual delights of a kind his body had not conceived. He had felt whole there, known peace and contentment, felt free of the need to roam and to learn in that outside place where all lessons so far showed that pain or hollowness was at the heart of all things, or that horrible mess lurked inside each person's pleasing exterior; that the pretty things in the landscape were just there. There, in that backward-falling s.p.a.ce, it had all been balmed and cured, all dissatisfaction and restlessness. It truly was just what had been promised by the lure that had called him across this world, across countless miles, and had eluded him at the tower when Eric and Siel had tricked him.

But with time the chains had grown hot, till heat and pain overrode all pleasure and each second became a shrieking agony. Every thought and instinct bent toward his being free. He'd been so mad with pain that he did not remember how he had come to be free; he half recalled a cold wind rushing over him as though a tiny door had been opened, and remembered diving toward it ...

And by chance he had ventured here. Now Shadow did scream, a more successful attempt to echo Vous, whose arms now reached up to embrace the storm above him. On the lawns the people swarmed and splashed in blood like Shadow had seen fish do in a river in the wild country, swarming through waters turned to b.l.o.o.d.y froth as the fish ate the killed animal he'd dropped among them.

At the sound of Shadow's scream those Vous-things nearby turned toward him and went still.

4.

As Anfen drew his blade it sang like a rasping metal throat. A burst of silver flame ran from handle to tip and Sharfy recoiled from its ice-cold burn. Even when Anfen had cut down the Tormentors, the blade had never burned with this coldness.

He followed Anfen's gaze and his heart leaped when he saw Eric, the Pilgrim, who in Sharfy's mind occupied the exaggerated place of a dear friend and comrade. He was deeply alarmed to see Eric so close to danger in fact what was he doing here? Who was he with?

The things with Vous's face had turned Eric's way. So it seemed natural enough to Sharfy that Anfen had drawn his blade and was now moving with some urgency toward Eric, surely with the intent of protecting him. Sharfy drew his own sword and followed, through a shoving ma.s.s of people screaming as they fled the Vous-things.

It was soon clear that something was wrong. Eric didn't look right: he looked like a mage's illusion or something, with blurred outlines, and that noise, that screaming sound! Eric's mouth had gone wide as a beast's; his eyes were dead black holes which seemed both far wider than Eric's face and to fit inside it at the same time. Sharfy recoiled from the sight.

A Vous-thing with an elderly woman's starving body clawed at Sharfy, scratching grooves of skin from his neck and lunging to bite his throat. He yelped and kneed her but she kept coming till he slashed his blade across her midsection. She fell sprawling, still trying to get up despite the guts falling out of her, till she was trampled into the gra.s.s.

Sharfy ran to catch up with Anfen, who cut a wide arc through the swarming crowd with a cold flare of silver fire, not mindful of whether he slew Vous-things or their fleeing victims. Sharfy had time in the tumult to wonder if one day Anfen would be back here, hopeless with grief over these careless swipes of his blade and eager to polish more long-dead bones. The crowd swarmed away from his cold silver fire. Sharfy held his sword firm as a Vous-thing ran straight at him and impaled itself. He released the blade, stuck fast in the body, and sprinted until he was practically riding Anfen's back.

'Is ... Shadow ... here?' Vous screamed louder than the peal of thunder which followed. To Sharfy's disgust, many of the dead flopped and twitched as though they'd heard a cry to arms. Trampled, mangled, with pieces of their faces hanging loose, with eyes clawed out, they rose and Vous's face pressed itself into their ruined features. They staggered to their feet.

Anfen had reached the Eric who could not really be Eric. Sharfy had no idea what to think if it was Eric, he was under some curse or evil spell beyond their curing. The Eric-being turned to face them, screamed its emotionless scream, utterly inhuman, the voice of rusting metal or barren turf or Sharfy knew not what. Like that big metal wagon that screamed over the bridge, when we went into Otherworld, he thought.

A flock of Vous-things swarmed toward the Eric-thing. Anfen's arm had surely never moved faster, not even when he was in the cusp of youth. He cut them down and the air was filled with his cold silver fire. More of them swarmed over, realising that the enemy Vous feared and screamed for was here. Sharfy knew then that this was it, the final moment, death had come and it bore Vous's face. Had he time for one last mug of ale to reflect before the moment came, he'd have found it fitting that it took the world's Friend and Lord himself to kill him.

But Anfen cut them down. They came in waves but he cut them down, until there was a ma.s.sive pile of bodies for the others to scuttle over. And then Anfen's sword did strange things, for he seemed to swing it in a circle about his head and yet, some distance away, the oncoming ones would fall back with limbs and heads sliced off, as though the blade had cut them from a distance. Sharfy with his knife in hand was perfectly useless, could only watch with growing shame Anfen's sword saving him from what would have been a warrior's death.

The Eric-thing watched Anfen too, then it flickered and was on the ground behind Anfen, laid out behind him like a shadow ... like a shadow ...

A moment later Shadow was before Anfen again. One arm was long, thin and bladed. It cut through the air, struck the breastplate Valour had made, and was halted with a shower of sparks. Shadow's sword arm broke and fell away. He stared down at the stump left, hesitant and confused.

Anfen wheeled like a dancer, swung his blade in a wide slashing arc, silver fire tracing the swing through the air. Shadow screamed, a worse sound yet than the one he'd made before, as a part of him was cut away.

As the wound was made there was a blinding flash. A force knocked them all down as though it were a blast of the strongest wind. All the Vous-things and their fleeing victims toppled, Sharfy and Anfen blown hurtling back among them. When the flash of light cleared, up on the castle balcony Vous was gone from sight. The Vous-things got to their feet and sprinted away as mindless as insects. The dead ones who had risen fell back and resumed their interrupted sleep.

5.

Shadow streaked blindly across the world, shrieking in pain, his path a drunken zigzag covering miles in heartbeats. He went in a line from the G.o.dstears Sea to the unnamed ranges as though from one side of a room to another, so fast he sent his own senses spinning and almost undid himself by the act; as though by doing something that impossible, he nearly made himself impossible. A trail of heat blazed behind him, igniting fires to either side of its path as the world objected to this impossibility.

He paused, waited, recovered his senses. The wound still hurt. He was whole, but the left part of his body seemed to flow like molten silver. With agonising slowness its terrible heat dimmed.

Southward he went just a little slower than before, trails of heat like whip lashes on the world behind him. Though his pain gradually subsided his confusion did not. Why had the man done such things to him?

The mechanics of the situation he grasped; he'd shadowed the man but had not been able to shadow the sword and the armour. The stranger's wanting to attack him, that was incomprehensible. He'd toyed with elementals, with Lesser Spirits and other dangerous things. Even the dragon had fled from him! Here a man, a normal soft-skinned man, had wanted to hurt him and had done so worse than anything else ever had.

But ah, that glorious creature up on the castle balcony, embracing the sky. Was Vous one of the things with which to fill this emptiness? None of these people filled him! Not Eric, not the charm (which called him again, promising sweet balm for his pain). They had all left him unchanged.

What of Siel? He wanted to see her long hair in its twin braids, to watch how the braids swung, to hear her voice, whether it laughed or whether it quavered in fear. Either would sound sweet after this bitter, bitter pain. Where was she? He combed a vast distance in search of her, though he didn't yet know what he'd do if he found her.

INTO DANGER.

1.

The village Gorb had once called home was deserted, its stores plundered. There was no sign of where the locals had gone, nor why. Their tracks led off in all directions. Most of the cupboards were bare. They scavenged what little had been left.

The half-giant emerged from Bald's old workroom with a few of the Engineer's odds and ends, where Siel waited with Far Gaze in his wolf form. The Engineer Bald crouched in the dirt, picking things out to eat them. 'I told him to stop that,' said Siel. 'I don't think he trusts me.'

Gorb plucked Bald up and put him under one arm and they set out following the wolf, who chose their path by scent. He headed east, for the city of Tanton.

The night's quiet was tense and heavy, as if the gloom to either side of the road were filled with watchful eyes. Now and then Gorb held aloft a piece of lightstone Stranger had enchanted for him, which glowed brighter when he squeezed it. Its beams swept aside a veil of darkness to show roadside fields that had never been settled on, never farmed. Like every place a boot could fall on, blood had been shed here in war. Siel began to wonder if war was man's natural destiny, not an aberration at all but the sole purpose of life, for the entertainment of Valour or some other G.o.d. Peace was the aberration, she felt, nourishing man with its scant sc.r.a.ps throughout history so that he'd fight on, when the call came again.

The tollways, guard houses, roadside stores and booths they came across all sat empty. Even the message towers were abandoned. Rumour of war had spread and people here had seen so little of it that the thought scared them away. Indeed Far Gaze told Gorb before they left that he'd smelled it coming. A vast army of castle soldiers marched south, men who did not follow Valour's ideals of war. Occasional war-mage shrieks could be heard from the clouds, though the creatures could not yet be seen. There was no knowing if it was part of the large flock the dragon had decimated and scattered, or if they were new ones and part of the invading force.

Far Gaze trotted ahead of the others, his ghostly white coat gleaming. He sniffed the breeze and whined in fear. Bald, tucked under Gorb's arm, muttered nonsense. Siel now found the quiet stifling. 'I wonder where they all went,' she said, thinking of the villagers and of the peaceful life she'd so recently envied. It was a melancholy relief to know it had never been on offer after all.

They could see an occasional redness to the southern sky, but the veil covering the barrier had not lifted. 'Old Nightmare's still guarding the gate,' said Gorb. 'Just saw him going west. He was moving fast. Keeping the stoneflesh from going over. That Pendulum stuff must be true. Don't understand it, myself.'

'Each thing has in its make-up an ascribed value, you ninny!' snarled Bald, spittle flying. 'Value, weight. Weight, ma.s.s. Ma.s.s, power value. Anything! A man's worth a million bugs!'

'Bald-'

'Now you will listen! I divulge secrets! Both halves being of even power value in total, a vacuum effect occurs if a power value's traded-'

'Yeah well, you're smarter than me I guess,' said Gorb, shifting the spluttering Engineer to his other arm. 'Shoosh now, that's why the wolf's growling. He's telling you to shut it.'

Far Gaze had halted, head turned to the south. His low growl grew fierce.

Siel slipped her bow from her shoulder and peered into the incline on the road's right-hand side. She could see and hear nothing in the darkness. 'What is it?' she asked the wolf. 'You growl to scare something off, but you may just draw something toward us! Hush now.'

Far Gaze whined, looking from her to the road ahead, undecided.

'If you scent a path less dangerous, take it,' she said, patting the wolf's side, not knowing how much of her talk Far Gaze could understand. 'We'll follow. If there's danger in all directions, that's our fate and we'll meet it like warriors.'

The wolf heaved a sigh but trotted forward at a quicker pace, almost too quick for them to keep up.

'What's worried him?' said Gorb.

'Choose from a dozen threats or more,' she said. 'My bow has never felt so useless.'

'If it's that dragon again, I can't do much about a dragon. Even a little one,' said Gorb.

If it's that dragon, it's probably not very interested in any of you, Siel thought with a shudder.

'What's that sound, anyway?' said Gorb. 'Maybe that's what got the wolf stirred up.'

'I can't hear anything but our footsteps. Can you describe it?'

'Sounds the way wood sounds when you bend it. Creaks and cracks and groans of wood, that's what it sounds like.'

'I don't hear it.'

'The wolf does. And he doesn't like it.'

2.

Gorb had put away the piece of enchanted lightstone since they did not want its light being seen from afar by other things. The road was true enough, and just enough light leaked through the gloom to see their way when it bent and wound. Siel's legs began to tire from the pace they'd kept over the past hour. She still heard nothing but the scuffle and tap of their boots on the road, and Bald's occasional muttering. The wolf whimpered constantly, bounding ahead and turning back to glare at them for their slow pace.

The plains to either side were flat as a dinner plate. Now and then campfires could be seen across the flats, caravans pouring from outcast country and making their way to High Cliffs or Tanton, the last two cities to resist their certain fall. The sight of caravans was heartening somehow, camped in rings for safety from bandits. The wind carried smells of smoke. How tempting to head to one of those campfires and beg a night's sleep under their watch.

'That fire's too big,' Gorb muttered just as Far Gaze halted ahead of them again and growled. 'Look! Whole wagons are burning.'

Shouting voices faintly reached them across the plain. It was as though a battle were underway somewhere in the gloom. The hairs on Far Gaze's back stood on end. He crouched low, his growl fierce.

Siel peered into the darkness. At the very furthest reach of her vision it looked like a wagon was indeed burning. She notched an arrow, wondering who she would be shooting at. Had the castle army reached this country already? Or were Blain's men attacking?

Gorb took the piece of lightstone from his pack with a grunt as though he'd forgotten he possessed it. He squeezed it. It spat out its glow, pushing darkness away from the road around them.

They all recoiled. Standing horribly close to the road was what Siel would have taken for an instant to be a burned tree, if she had not seen Tormentors before. Its obsidian skin glistened in the lightstone's light; its rock-lump eyes stared down from double her height. Its mane, a thick fan of spiked needles, rattled.

Far Gaze ran behind it, growled and yelped as though to draw the thing's attention to himself. With exaggerated sweeping movement its head swung around to peer at him, the stiff limbs of its body creaking. Siel's arrow struck its chest and bounced off broken she might as well have fired at a wall of stone. Forgetting the wolf, it turned to her. She froze in its gaze, paralysed with horror.

It seemed later, when looking back on this memory, that she stood there staring into its eyes for a moment that stretched out forever. While the thing regarded her, she searched its face, looking for something to understand. A hungry animal that wished to eat her, she'd have understood; a bandit wanting to rape her, a war mage doing its mindless duty for its lords, an enemy soldier raising his weapon: those she'd have understood. But not this creature. Something burned in its heart, but whatever it was was utterly foreign.

It seemed in that long-drawn stretch of time, as she tried to comprehend this alien horror, that all her understanding broke down, that nothing at all was real, she herself least of all. She was nothing, abstract. That it would now draw her to itself and with its spikes and blades unmake her body, for no reason she had a hope of discerning, all dwindled to irrelevance.

A sound thwock! and the top part of the Tormentor's face flew away. Gorb had one of Bald's guns out, planted on his knee. He quickly stuffed another sharpened stone down the barrel.

The Tormentor's body turned toward him, arms flailing in the gestures of some surreal elegant dance. Siel watched it with her mouth hung open, still transfixed, until the half-giant scooped her up in his arm.

The wolf whined and ran. Gorb followed with Siel and Bald under his arms, his big strides keeping pace with the wolf, though his breathing was laboured. Siel watched the fields by the road, the whole world jolting heavily with Gorb's steps. Set against the odd distant fire dark shapes were silhouetted, though some were surely tricks of her eyes. She still saw that thing's face, staring, and wished desperately to know its mind. It had not hated her, whether it meant to kill her or not. She was sure of that much.

They ran on. As the first light of day bled through the gloom Gorb staggered, clearly exhausted. Still he kept pace with Far Gaze, who now veered off the road, past a farmstead where a family stood on their porch armed with crossbows and burning brands. They watched two Tormentors stalk across their land some way distant, hardly noticing the new trespa.s.sers.

Far Gaze yelped and tore across the sloping fields, faster than Siel had yet seen him run. Gorb stopped, bent double, huffing air. She climbed out of his grip. Over a rise in the ground came eight men on horseback, with almost as many vacant horses in tow. They wore Tanton's deep scarlet lashed with gold; High Cliff's colour, gold, taken after that city was conquered long ago, an insult never forgotten. She knew the figure leading them, one arm in a sling, was Tauk the Strong.

For the sight of his injury her heart rose with hope: here was a leader himself willing to fight and risk his precious flesh, to brave a journey such as this. Some of the Mayor's entourage saw them and gestured in signal language: Approach if you are peaceful, flee in safety if you are not, we seek no needless fight with you and shall not pursue. Siel gestured back: We are friends; do not mind the wolf.

The men watched with interest as the huge white wolf approached them, whining only to point out it was not growling. A good distance from their alarmed horses Far Gaze lay down and began to shift form, writhing, twitching, convulsing, shedding hair, his bones breaking. By the time Siel and Gorb slowly crossed the rise and joined him, he was almost finished.