A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) (57 page)

He sat up and looked round to see that Lilithea was awake, her dark eyes very wide. ‘I’ve just had such a realistic dream,’ he said, smiling at her.

‘E’rinel,’ Lilithea said, her voice somewhere between a gasp and a whisper, ‘E’rinel, I saw her too.’

The horses were standing with their heads up and ears pricked, startled by the bird. As the chirping grew more strident they saw the large female blackbird singing in the branches of a tree a few yards from them. Her beak was like burnished bronze and her feathers had the sheen of rich tawny-gold silk. And as she sang, she gazed at them with a dark, liquid eye in which leaves and trees and woodland animals were reflected. The look seemed to say, ‘What made you think such as I could perish? Am I not reborn with every sunrise?’

Tears were running down Lilithea’s face. She had never seen any creature more beautiful than that simple blackbird, who was the embodiment of love and hope.

‘Her name is Miril,’ Estarinel whispered, and Lilithea replied softly, ‘Yes… I know.’

They watched her without moving, hoping that she would come to them, or at least stay singing in the tree. But Miril was swift to follow the direction that Medrian had taken. With a last, sweet note she stretched out her sunlit wings and soared out onto the misty woodland air. Then she, too, was gone.

The next story set in the Earth of Three Planes begins with Book Three:

A BLACKBIRD IN AMBER

Read on for an extract of Chapter One: A Survivor of the Serpent

It’s been a strange and eerie experience revisiting these books that I first began when I was only sixteen. They may not be the best-written fantasies in the world, but goodness, they are passionate! A Blackbird in Darkness now strikes me as sombre, serious, not full of wisecracks and therefore probably unfashionable – but innocent and heartfelt. The ending still made me cry. Re-editing has taken me back to the roots of why I started writing in the first place; an urge to recreate the magical atmosphere that other writers had inspired in me, to express a sense of wonder, to explore all those questions of friendship and passion, bravery, suffering, heroism and myth.

Escapist wish-fulfilment? Maybe. Who wouldn’t love to visit the idyllic Blue Plane? Yet there is grown-up stuff here – about guilt, conscience, seeing yourself for what you really are and taking responsibility for it. In real life, of course, genocidal military commanders don’t become reformed characters, and dictators don’t suddenly recognise their own evil and destroy themselves in horror – deposed, they continue in wounded self-justification to the end – but wouldn’t it be great if they did? The purpose of A Blackbird in Silver/ Darkness is to suggest how things could be, if thrown into the light of self-awareness.

Although I created the blackbird Miril, I’ve often wondered what she is. I now realise that she’s a kind of goddess, embodying hope and compassion in a real being who is physically lost and found – and, more important, spiritually lost and found. She’s a symbol of attributes that matter in reality.

This is why critics who scorn fantasy and science fiction are missing the point. They don’t understand that fantasy fiction, like any fiction, is a journey through an inner landscape that we must explore. The power of fantasy is to distil big life issues into pure metaphorical form and come at it head-on, without the complications (or indeed the libel laws) of real life getting in the way. Fantasy writers are creating myth, and myth has a central and serious purpose. As the scholar Joseph Campbell puts it, ‘I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive… Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.’ Campbell says that myths bring messages, ‘They’re stories about the wisdom of life.’ And his point about the hero’s journey – the staple of myth and fantasy – is that it applies to us all: ‘To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity [childhood] to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey – leaving one’s condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition… When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.’ The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive.

Furthermore, A Blackbird in Darkness strikes me as being oddly topical. The Serpent itself grew out of my subconscious horror at the idea of nuclear mass destruction. And the Grey Ones or Guardians… grey men and women whose main concern is balancing the books, who twist and mangle the truth in order to make themselves look good, who will trample on anyone to achieve their own ends, who equip people with dodgy weapons and send them to fight messy battles on their behalf, yet who still expect to bounce up reeking of roses at the end of it… remind you of anyone? I only wish I’d thought of giving them the power to raise taxes.

A Blackbird in Silver and A Blackbird in Darkness form a duet telling one complete story. The novel became a two-parter due to my original publisher suggesting I make it a trilogy. However, I didn’t want to write a middle volume of ‘padding’ and so it became a duo. The two books should ideally be read as one. If you would like to read the whole thing in real book form, Immanion Press publishes them as a paperback omnibus edition,
A Blackbird in Silver Darkness.
And the same applies to the second duo,
A Blackbird in Amber Twilight
, in which we meet Ashurek and Silvren’s formidable daughter Melkavesh.

Soon, I hope, there will be a brand new Blackbird novel telling a further tale that’s been in my head for more years than I dare admit: the story of Filmoriel, she who gave her name to the magical ship,
The Star of Filmoriel
. You will meet her in A Blackbird in Amber and A Blackbird in Twilight: available on Kindle in August 2015.

PS. If you have enjoyed this book, PLEASE WRITE A REVIEW!

This novel is also available as an audio book from
Audible

And in paperback from
Immanion Press

A Taste of Blood Wine

A Dance in Blood Velvet

The Dark Blood of Poppies

The Dark Arts of Blood

Elfland

Midsummer Night

Grail of the Summer Stars

The Court of the Midnight King

Dracula the Undead

The Amber Citadel

The Sapphire Throne

The Obsidian Tower

Dark Cathedral

Pagan Moon

The Rainbow Gate

Sorrow’s Light

A Blackbird in Silver

A Blackbird in Darkness

A Blackbird in Amber

A Blackbird in Twilight

A Blackbird in Silver Darkness (omnibus)

A Blackbird in Amber Twilight (omnibus)

Darker than the Storm

For further information:

www.fredawarrington.com

Freda Warrington was born in Leicester, England, and began writing stories as soon as she could hold a pen. The beautiful ancient landscape of Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire, where she grew up, became a major source of inspiration.

She studied at art college and worked in medical illustration and graphic design for a number of years. However, her first love was always fantasy fiction, and in 1986 her first novel A Blackbird in Silver was published. More novels followed, including A Taste of Blood Wine, The Amber Citadel, Dark Cathedral and Dracula the Undead – a sequel to Dracula that won the Dracula Society’s Best Gothic Novel Award in 1997.

So far she has had twenty-one novels published, varying from sword n’ sorcery and epic fantasy to contemporary fantasy, supernatural, and alternative history.

Her recent novel Elfland (Tor US) won the Romantic Times Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2009. Midsummer Night, the second in the
Aetherial Tales
series, was listed by the American Library Association among their Top Ten SF/ Fantasy Novels of 2010.

Titan Books are republishing her vampire series – A Taste of Blood Wine, A Dance in Blood Velvet, The Dark Blood of Poppies, and a brand new novel The Dark Arts of Blood (2015) – with gorgeous new covers. The first three were originally published in the 1990s, long before the recent explosion of vampire fiction! (So – no teenagers, no kick-ass super-heroines, no werewolves… but a solid, dark, gothic romance for grown-ups, set in the shadowy, decadent glamour of the 1920s.)

Freda lives in Leicestershire with her husband Mike and her mother, where she also enjoys crafts such as stained glass and beadwork, all things Gothic, yoga, walking, Arabian horses, conventions and travel.

Read on for a sample of
A Blackbird in Amber
, and more book information…

The Quest of the Serpent is over, but the Earth of Three Planes’ future is just beginning. In Gorethria, the young Duke Xaedrek plots to seize power – but he does not bargain for the arrival of Melkavesh, Ashurek’s daughter, a powerful sorceress with plans of her own. Will she prove an ally or an enemy? And together, will they save or destroy a world in turmoil?

Extract from Chapter One. A Survivor of the Serpent

Duke Xaedrek of Shalekahh struggled to wake from the dream, but it held him, a velvet trap.

He rarely dreamed. The last time, some years previously, had been a long, detailed nightmare about his mother and father. On waking a messenger had arrived to inform him that they were dead, lost in war. Since then he had dreaded dreams. Despite that, even in the throes of subconscious vision, some part of his mind remained detached, watching the strange scenes with analytical coldness.

There was a ship, delicately built of pale wood, drifting with obscure purpose in a pearl-green ocean. On the ship was a child with red hair. No ordinary red, but the dark, iridescent plum of copper beech leaves, mingled with the rose and gold lights of sunset. This vision seemed to have no beginning, no end, and no meaning. Yet it persisted as a glimmering backdrop to the rest of the dream, which was startlingly vivid, yet equally devoid of sense.

Xaedrek found himself in the Emperor’s palace, moving slowly between the marble pillars of a long, salt-white hall. The walls were lined with the portraits of all the Gorethrian rulers since the first Ordek; hawk-faced men and women, with dark brown-purple skin and luminous brooding eyes. The legendary Empress Melkavesh, her white hair the only sign of her great age. Ruby-eyed Surukish I, from whose female line Xaedrek himself was descended. Her son, Ordek XIII, and grandson Varancrek II, and Varancrek’s son, the eagle-fierce Ordek XIV, who was father of the infamous Meshurek II, wrecker of the Empire.

In the dream Xaedrek had the strange impression that he was underwater. He was drifting, not walking, down the hall, and everything was surrounded by an aureole of blurred light. A few feet ahead of him was a tall woman with long golden hair, and he observed without any sense of surprise that she was translucent, as if formed of a liquid slightly denser than the water. He could see straight through her to the portraits beyond, yet he knew that she was real, and should not be in the palace. In slow motion he moved to her side, purposing to challenge her.

She was staring at the painting of Meshurek; the broad chiselled face with its cold half-smile and deep-set, disturbed eyes. Next to it, Meshurek’s twin brother Ashurek was captured exactly by the artist. The brilliant green eyes in that dark, high-cheekboned face were lifelike in their intensity. Xaedrek felt an illogical need to stop the woman from looking at those portraits and attend to him instead. He shouted, and although his voice made no sound, she turned to him as if she had heard.

Then he saw that, despite the pale hair, she was Gorethrian. Dark-skinned, arrogant, a terrible cold passion burning in her face. The shock-wave of some unknown, unpleasant emotion shuddered through him so that he could neither move nor speak, yet it was not her expression, nor the wrongness of her being there that distressed him. It was simply her hair. A superficial detail, yet in the dream it seemed all-important, shimmering with malevolent esoteric meaning. No Gorethrian had ever had blond hair.

Then she was no longer at his side, but walking up an endless white staircase, while he was helpless to do anything but stare after her. The water swirled and darkened around him. The darkness became total; he could not escape, could not breathe – he flailed wildly, fighting to wake up. He was being crushed by an intolerable pressure, by slow, heavy waves of power that emanated from two massive, opal-smooth globes of rock. At first he could only sense them in the void; then, as if starlight had begun to glimmer round their edges, he could see them: two perfect spheres from which luminous energy flowed in deep, soul-annihilating pulses. This seemed of such profound importance that the world itself was dwarfed, but the actual significance remained, agonisingly, just out of his grasp. Again he struggled, but the weight of the dream pinned him. A sensation of dread, awe and inexpressibly poignant weirdness filled him, something that he yearned to capture and to escape at the same time – his mouth stretched in a silent cry as the two terrible spheres thrust him towards oblivion with their leaden sweetness.

Then the child on the ship was there again, and she released from her hand a little bird the exact red of her hair, and at this Xaedrek woke up violently, shaking and sweating.

Around him the air was as thick as musty black velvet. He could not get his breath, as if a malign power were still pressing down on him. In panic he pushed back the silk sheets that were clinging damply to him and half-fell from the bed. He was across the chamber and groping for the door before he became awake enough for reason to reassert itself.

It had been no more than a stupid, childish nightmare, the cause of which was obvious. Recovering his composure, he walked steadily across the pitch-black room to the window, intending to let in some fresh air. He found the edge of the curtain, its jewelled fringe cold and heavy against his palm. Drawing it back, he was astonished to find that it was not night, but broad daylight. He had slept well into the morning.

Around his mansion, the city of Shalekahh shimmered like opal under a perfect sky, her delicate white towers gleaming with flashes of colour.

Xaedrek turned back to the room to see the darkness bleeding from it, slowly, like ink. He stood for a few moments in thought. Then he crossed to a chair, put on a robe of dark green satin, and sat down at his onyx-and-silver desk to reflect.

‘What manner of nightmare was it?’ he asked himself. ‘That of my parents was no mere dream, but foreknowledge of their death. Yet this was different. Mental impressions induced by an actual… presence, or whatever… in the room?

Xaedrek had a scientific mind not prone to flights of fancy. He knew that the intense darkness within his chamber had not been a product of his imagination. Rather it had been a similar darkness to that which he had conjured by a certain experiment the previous day. The experiment had left him disturbed and exhausted, hence his long sleep.

‘However,’ he murmured, ‘it was not disquiet that made me dream. It was an actual return of that darkness.’

He considered the effect that the dream had had upon him, and discovered that the lasting impression was not one of horror or dread – but of exhilaration. Promise. The experiment had not failed after all, and he was on the verge of discovering something, the existence of which even Meshurek had never conceived.

Elated, eager to progress his work, Xaedrek summoned a servant and asked for his breakfast to be prepared. He bathed and dressed in a robe of white silk, heavily embroidered with silver thread and jet beads. He paused briefly to look out of the window as a line of Imperial Cavalry passed along the street below. Xaedrek sneered. They were bedraggled, battle-dusty. War was imminent, and they were all Gorethria possessed to defend herself!

The anger he felt at this was no uncontrolled, impotent emotion but a lifelong passion, his main motivating force. It centred on two questions: how had Gorethria come to this? And what could he, Duke Xaedrek, do to restore her to her former glory?

Xaedrek was a court official, protector and friend to the young Emperor Orhdrek. At Xaedrek’s own suggestion, Orhdrek had given him the task of investigating the distasteful events of recent years, which so far had been a mystery even to the wisest in Shalekahh. Why had Ashurek deserted his post of High Commander, just as the Gorethrian army was poised to vanquish Tearn? What had possessed him to murder his own sister, Princess Orkesh? And above all, what had become of the hated Emperor Meshurek II, who had vanished without trace some four years later?

For sixteen chaotic years since these events, theories had abounded. Xaedrek was sick of theories. He wanted the truth.

There was a longstanding ban by the Inner Council against such research, imposed to prevent people’s ill will towards the royal household from becoming something more dangerous. However, it had been easy enough for Xaedrek to persuade Orhdrek that it was time for the mystery to be solved. He had obtained the Emperor’s personal consent to do anything he deemed necessary to that end.

Xaedrek made his way to the dining hall, a simple, beautiful room of marble, polished agate and gold. He asked a servant to bring some fruit, and sat abstractedly chewing a piece of spiced bread as he continued to pursue his thoughts.

Xaedrek, in the true Gorethrian mould, was tall, slim and graceful. He had a languid way of moving and a quality of stillness that could seem menacing, although his arched brows and well-shaped mouth lacked the grim set that marked most of the Gorethrian nobility. In a way this made him seem more dangerous, for it made the expression on his handsome face impossible to interpret. His skin was of deep, sheeny brown with the merest hint of violet, and his irises were blood-red, like firelight glittering through garnets. He was only twenty-five, having inherited the dukedom at his father’s early death, yet despite his youth his long, silky black hair had streaks of white at the temples.

Ten years older than the Emperor Orhdrek, he had made a point of befriending the boy from his birth. Even as a child, Xaedrek had known that such care must one day repay him richly. Indeed, it had already borne fruit. He had been allowed access to Meshurek’s private chambers – sealed since his disappearance – and had found there, concealed by various ingenious devices, a remarkable collection of private papers and books. Xaedrek had spent some weeks studying them, translating and interpreting and discarding until he finally reached what he became convinced was the heart of the enigma.

Meshurek had practised the lost art of summoning those beings called the Shana, or demons.

His records of what the demon Meheg-Ba had done for him – or demanded of him – were fragmented, hard to understand. Xaedrek realised that Meshurek had gone mad, just as everyone said. The details of the actual ritual of summoning were contained within an ancient book, evidently found by Meshurek in some forgotten corner of the palace library. It was hard to read. The pages were yellow, their edges crumbling to dust, and the ink was almost gone. Xaedrek had spent hours studying the tome, struggling with every obscurity – just as the equally clever but less perceptive Meshurek had once done – until he felt confident that he understood the ritual well enough to make it work.

Xaedrek was not a fool. It was clear enough to him that the summoning of such a being was dangerous, that the bargains they offered were false and that all they desired was to leech strength, sanity, everything from the summoner. But he possessed an insatiable desire for knowledge that sometimes undermined his better judgement. Understanding the danger, curiosity still compelled him to practise the ritual. His advantage was that he went into it open-eyed, viewing it as a particularly risky experiment; his mind was calm and scientific, not ravaged by fear and paranoia as Meshurek’s had been. Once he had encountered a Shanin, whatever happened, he would understand what had destroyed Gorethria.

Yesterday he had locked himself within a subterranean marble chamber and performed the long, arduous ritual. Once, twice, three times before exhaustion forced him to desist. And he had failed, no demon had materialised, not even the faintest glimmer of argent light in the blackness.

Cold and sick, his mouth thick with the tang of brass and dust, he had eventually collapsed, thinking he was about to die. But his bitterest emotion was frustration, the single thought, ‘What did that idiot Meshurek do that I have failed to do?’ That refusal to be beaten had given him the strength to escape the marble room, gain his bed and fall into hag-ridden sleep.

Now he took a long draught of a honeyed drink from an exquisite glass cup. Even in these times, the craftsmanship of Shalekahh was unsurpassed. Rest, refreshment, thought, and daylight … all were excellent for putting problems into perspective. He still could not accept that he had performed the summoning incorrectly.

Perhaps there were no longer any demons.

And yet, there had been something. A darkness that was more than lack of light; a thrumming of power, like someone in another dimension repeatedly plucking a low string. A pressure in the air, something that had manifested itself a second time within his bedchamber; something that he had seen, draining from the air like liquid.

A wave of excitement shook him, but he suppressed it. ‘Scientifically,’ he thought with calm deliberation, ‘it must be possible to capture and channel that power.’

‘Is anything wrong, your Grace?’ said a voice at his shoulder. He looked round and saw a serving-maid of about sixteen or seventeen, holding a large dish of fruit. She was neatly attired in a full-sleeved dress of russet silk. He lived alone and had few slaves, so was mildly surprised to see a new face.

‘No. I’m just tired,’ he said. ‘I don’t know you. How long have you been in my household?’

She seemed startled that he should take a personal interest in her, but she answered without any trace of servility, ‘Seven days, Your Grace. Your steward has been training me. My name is Kharan.’

‘And where do you come from?’

‘An’raaga, Your Grace.’

‘Ah, An’raaga. The “quiescent” land. Are you quiescent, Kharan?’ The question sounded ominous. Xaedrek had the quiet, imposing presence that was common to Gorethrian nobility, and an ability to inspire terror in his subordinates without really trying. But this maid seemed to realise he was only teasing her.