A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) (6 page)

Within Medrian, M’gulfn’s strange emotion became stronger. She could not yet identify it, but gasped at its intensity; it was like a frantic possessive jealousy, yet there was more to it than that.

Even the Guardians [the writer continued] have been unable to destroy or even to restrain it. Eldor told me, ‘They tore an eye of power from its head, but that has only filled it with rage and malice, made it aware that it has enemies, and thus more dangerous. So do not torture yourself with thoughts of destroying it, for such a thing is impossible, and it would only revenge itself on you for thinking of its death.’

I despaired when Eldor said this, thinking there was no hope. I could only hope for death, though with the knowledge that the Worm would then seek a new host for itself, make another’s life agony, and another’s, and on and on. But Eldor did give me hope – only a small thought, intangible, but it has kept me sane enough to write these words, if ever they may be of use to another.

He told me of the bird Miril. ‘She is a tiny fraction of that lost positive power,’ Eldor said. ‘The Guardians captured the dot of energy to guard the stolen Eye, but they did not create Miril from it; she created herself. She is beautiful, and sad, for she knows she cannot keep the eye safe forever. One day the Serpent will find a way to unleash it upon the world, and at last regain it, and dominate the Earth with its horror. But she is still the World’s Hope. The sun does not shine brighter than her outstretched wings, and the crystal rocks of the Earth are her tears…’ So said Eldor.

Sweet Miril, Hope of the World, I keep you in my thoughts; you alone the Serpent cannot dominate, you are our only symbol of love and freedom until the end of time.

Medrian dropped the book into her lap with a stifled cry, then sat white-faced and swaying. Another emotion flared from M’gulfn’s mind into hers: loathing of Miril. More than loathing – it was the repulsion of complete opposites, tainted with hate and even fear. M’gulfn despised Miril, would tear her from the sky and devour her if ever it could. Medrian cringed, trembling, under the force of that hatred, feeling she was the one being devoured.

She reopened the book and read on. The next hand was spiky, wild and demented in form. But she recognized, in acute detail, the fractured images of his suffering.

‘This black snake comes to me, it came out of my childhood, hiding in the corners of my room and in my head, I see the Worm-form of it, the grinning Snake that bites my head with razor-teeth…’ As she forced herself, shuddering, to read to the end, she seemed to be drifting down a long twilit tunnel of horrific revelation – and at the end M’gulfn was waiting, waiting for her to see the truth and surrender in despair.

The next writer seemed to have written her account in secret and in a great hurry, having no time for detailed explanations, nor anything but objectivity.

I am a woman of Morrenland. I am in prison. No one will believe my experience, but as it is true I must write it. I was in the army that went north, at the King’s command, to destroy the Serpent. The King thought it a heroic exploit to add to his glory. How little he knew of the truth. Still, I had no power to tell him.

We sailed to the Arctic and marched across the snow. The others went proudly, joking and laughing bravely at the cold and at the spectres the Serpent sent to haunt our path. But it was tormenting me, and I could not speak aloud to warn them all and turn back the insane mission.

In due course we found the Serpent. It was smaller than we had thought, grotesque, lying in the snow as if it could not move. The others grew arrogant, thinking they could overpower it. But at our first attack, the Serpent rose up on wings and circled us, spitting down acid. Several died in that first foray. All the time it was raging its furious glee in my head. I could stand no more. I prayed to be killed quickly. At its second attack it snatched the rest of the soldiers in its jaws in several swoops, chewed them and dropped their broken bodies in the snow. I did not escape, but alas, I did not die. When I came to myself, lying in the bloody snow, all my comrades were dead and the Serpent was staring at me like an impassive gargoyle amid their crushed bodies. I was in terrible physical agony. My arm and leg were broken, my head cracked, and my body rent from throat to abdomen by its stinking teeth. My skin burned with its venom. Then I understood that I should be dead, except that the Worm was keeping me alive.

I cannot bear to describe what it said to me as I stood there, how it laughed at my misery and pain. I don’t know why I didn’t go mad, but that would have been too easy an escape. It berated me, then it forced me to walk – with my leg broken and my skin in shreds – all the weary miles through the bitter Arctic, across the tundra and down through Tearn to Morrenland. I felt every detail of the pain. I was a walking corpse, animated by the Serpent.

I came to Morrenland and stood before the King. The Serpent forced me to report the failure of the mission, with all its derision my voice. Their fear of me was obvious; I must have looked and behaved like a Serpent-possessed ghoul. The only thing they could do with me was to imprison me, and impose the sentence of death upon me.

Now I await the hanging. I hope the Serpent will let me die, although if I do – sorrow for the hangman! I feel composed now. The Serpent is distant. Strange that I am so calm and rational, as if my very lucidity is a manifestation of madness. I am only sorry that I will die having learnt nothing, except that fighting the Serpent is foolishness. I have never suffered fools.

The woman finished her account with a bold underline. Below, in a black, erratic scrawl, were the words,

Sorrow for the hangman indeed! Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow!

And that was all. But Medrian had learned that if the host were killed, the Serpent would enter the body of the killer. To her, the spidery writing was a perfect graph of his torment.

She stared at the blank end-paper of the book as if willing words to appear on it. She felt bloodless, raw, her lungs full of grit. There must be more, she thought. Is this all there is? I haven’t found everything out yet. What about the thousands of other hosts there have been?

Then she realised.

The truth was inside her, waiting to be explored. All the knowledge and memories were in M’gulfn’s mind, if she only had the courage to look at its thoughts. She had already felt some of the memories, in that strange emotion resembling jealousy. The Serpent, although it had treated all its hosts cruelly, apparently also felt an attachment for them, a sick, possessive love. She recoiled inwardly as she recognised that. Distorted by evil as it was, it was not a parody of affection. It was real.

Closing her eyes and leaning back against the shelf of books, she let herself drift down the Serpent’s corridor of memories. She saw every detail of its long solitary existence in the Arctic snow, the stealing of its eye by the Guardians, all its many hosts, the few hopeless missions to destroy it, the giddying flights across the world that left it torpid and exhausted… She reeled away from its mind, fighting to re-establish her own identity. She had learned… she had learned more than she had ever desired to know. She had felt blood in her mouth…

Medrian staggered to her feet, wavering like a dying tree in a cold wind. I’ve learned the truth; what have I lost? I never had hope anyway, never any hope, she kept telling herself. She tucked the book,
The First Witness of the Serpent
, under her jacket and smuggled it from the library with the ease of an adept thief. The librarians were locking the doors. Outside, all was darkness.

Medrian wandered from Shalekahh and eventually left Gorethria’s borders, not knowing or caring where she was going. She wandered as if blind, numb to almost everything outside and inside herself.

She was so stricken by the truth she’d discovered at last that she ceased to function. The Serpent could not be suffered to live. Yet it was, she now knew, indestructible. Even she could not endure such a depth of despair within herself, and so instead she stopped feeling and thinking. She let the horse carry her where it would, staring ahead as it plodded on. If anyone spoke to her, they were ignored.

Sometimes she sat and stared at the unmarked last page of the book for hours, searching for some unforeseen revelation there.

Then a nightmare came and shook her out of her stupor. A confusion of impressions, something that the Serpent was experiencing physically, flickering through its mind to hers. Although it had not moved for centuries, it was preparing to fly. To attack.

No!

Like the painful first cry of a baby, her awareness, her thoughts and feelings and nerves, screamed back into life. Don’t attack – not Forluin – not anywhere–

But the Serpent did not listen to Medrian. It flew and ravaged a peaceful island, while she endured the nightmare of vague impressions – blood and death and vertigo – until, sated, it returned to the Arctic and lay in torpor, brooding on its pointless victory.

And Medrian lay awake on the hard ground, wide-eyed and shuddering throughout a long night, while the horse grazed impassively close by. It is not just my suffering, she thought – it is everyone’s; and the hosts – there were thousands before me and there will be thousands after me, and I can do nothing.

When morning came, Medrian had made her decision. She filled in the last page of the book, turning increasingly grey as she wrote, as if she were engraving her own future onto the most appalling story of horror ever written. When she had finished, she tucked the book beneath her jacket and secured it there with her belt. Then she mounted her horse and rode to the nearest port. I have been a fool, she thought. I have learnt the truth, and lost even the hope of hope, but what does that matter? It doesn’t matter at all, it means nothing. But Alaak’s suffering – Forluin’s – mine – I can only try – I said I would not rest until I had done my utmost. It’s all I can do, there’s nothing else left.

She found a small ship to take her to Eldor, because she knew of nowhere else on Earth she could go. The sage, at least, might know something that could help her, if only in the small way that he had helped that previous host by telling him of Miril. Later, she was surprised to find that Eldor seemed to have been expecting her, that a Quest was to take place and in due course Estarinel and Ashurek arrived to go with her. It was as if pre-ordained. Despite what she had written in the book, she had not expected such concrete help; and although her struggle against M’gulfn had hardly begun, let alone ended, she found a kind of peace in knowing that she faced a final journey.

When she first arrived and met the sage, she could not speak. The Serpent would not allow her to explain what she was. Eldor, however, as soon as he saw the small dark-haired woman, her face as coldly white as quartz, needed no explanation. He recognised the shadows in her eyes and he recognised the thin book she was clasping in her hands. When he reached out and took it she seemed to uncurl herself grimly from the volume, like a witch who had learnt terrible spells therein.

He turned its few pages and found a new hand on the end-paper, compressed and erratic as if the writer was struggling against a persuasive power to express herself. He read,

The Serpent has nightmares.

I have lived alone with it in the quiet void. I have heard its thoughts, seen its snowy home through its own eyes, dreamed its dreams. I have seen desolation. It makes me afraid.

It possesses me, though I struggle to defy it. But escapeless bleak eternity cannot be denied forever. Once I spoke to it, offering my surrender to its will if only it would stay in its cold domain and not fly south to feast upon innocent flesh… No, it said to me, your long silence has caused me pain. Now the bargain does not suffice.

Never again will I offer it surrender. Though the denial has been colder than the frozen wastes of space, it is ice that can never again be thawed. When the desolation of the Serpent overwhelms me at last, as I know it must, my coldness will burn it. The Serpent should not have made me more desperate than itself. It has lost me for all time.

All say the Serpent must win. I have perceived this through the inescapable nightmare of my life. But the Serpent, too, has nightmares. It must have cause; and if not, it will be given cause before I die.

I am Medrian of Alaak.

I am the Last Witness of the Serpent.

Medrian was leaning against a spindle of blue rock as she finished speaking, tracing the facets of its glittering surface with her fingers. She murmured, ‘It is so easy to dream of staying here forever… and so treacherous. For I know that I must leave here and resume the Quest, and when I do…’ she turned around in the mist, a slow, graceful movement like the strange calm of madness. ‘It will be waiting for me. Waiting for me.’

‘I had thought your deliverance from M’gulfn whilst on the Blue Plane to be a welcome respite,’ the Lady admitted sadly. ‘Now I see that it may only serve to make things harder for you in the end.’ Medrian nodded, her eyes dark with suppressed dread. ‘Estarinel and Ashurek do not yet know who you are, do they?’

‘No, of course not,’ Medrian replied with a self-mocking smile. ‘The Serpent would not permit me to tell them. How can the host protect it, unless she is silent and anonymous? At the House of Rede, I thought Ashurek would kill me when I refused to say anything. But even if I had been able to speak, I still would not have done so. Because they must not know until the very end.’

‘Yes, you are absolutely right in that.’

‘In a way, I’m surprised they haven’t guessed. The times M’gulfn fought me, and I almost betrayed the Quest… but they still don’t know. Perhaps it’s because they suspected Arlenmia. And Ashurek believes I came upon the Quest in despair, after Alaak, which is partly true. I don’t know what Estarinel thinks about me. Strange, I never cared what anyone thought of me – until Estarinel.’ Again the question leapt into her throat, but she could not force the words out.

‘Medrian, there is something you need to know, is there it not? Don’t be afraid to ask me,’ the Lady encouraged her gently.

Medrian spoke swiftly, before doubt stopped her. ‘Well – I am free, for the first time in my life. But the Blue Plane is not Earth – it’s so beautiful that it’s painful to me. I just wondered – what it would be like to be free of the Serpent on Earth, just for a little while. So I could know what it’s like to be… normal.’ She uttered a dry laugh. ‘It’s something you said, that the Serpent had “overlooked” Forluin. If I went with Estarinel – is it possible that M’gulfn could not touch me there?’

Oh, Medrian, the Lady thought. This little I can do for you.

‘What I said was true. The Serpent attacked Forluin physically, because it cannot exercise power of mind over the island. You can go there in freedom.’

‘Thank you, my Lady,’ Medrian murmured.

‘As to whether your visit is right or wrong,’ the Lady added, her eyes shimmering with tears, ‘that you must decide for yourself.’

#

Ashurek and Calorn stood together on a promontory of rock that rose only a bare few inches above the glassy surface of the water. Several yards before them, on the very end of the promontory, three H’tebhmellian women – including Filitha and the Lady herself – circled a cloud of sparkling blue light, coaxing it into a cohesive sphere with strange, metallic instruments. With them stood Medrian and Estarinel, both wearing H’tebhmellian clothing of pale blue silken material, Estarinel in breeches and a loose shirt, Medrian in a long dress gathered at the waist and sleeves. They were waiting anxiously for the Exit Point to be completed.

A peculiarity in the complex orbit of H’tebhmella’s Entrance Points meant they passed across Forluin more frequently than anywhere else on Earth. A rare conjunction would allow Estarinel and Medrian to return to the Blue Plane in a few hours’ time.

‘Estarinel doesn’t look happy at the prospect of visiting Forluin,’ Calorn observed.

‘What have any of us to be happy about?’ Ashurek said gruffly.

‘Being in H’tebhmella?’ Calorn suggested.

‘This can last only a few days more. The idea of attacking the Serpent makes me far from unhappy, but there is still Silvren…’ he stared down at the soft blue-green moss beneath his feet.

Calorn could sense how powerless and restless for action he felt. She was eager for activity herself, and longed to find some way to help him regain Silvren. There was nothing more dear to her soul than a dangerous mission with a satisfying outcome.

Ashurek’s green eyes were bright with danger against his fine-boned, dark purple-brown face. He glanced at the H’tebhmellians again. Calorn’s thoughts dwelt for a moment on his evil and bloody past, then dismissed it. I know the man, not his reputation, she thought. The H’tebhmellians have spoken no ill of him.

She opened her mouth to speak, but at that instant Filitha called out that the Point was ready. Ashurek and Calorn went forward to watch their two companions leave.

‘In eighteen hours’ time, an Entrance Point will pass the place where you emerge. Be ready – you must not miss it!’ the Lady was saying. She kissed them both on the forehead. ‘Now go, with my blessing.’

Estarinel and Medrian stepped into the cloud of blue light and disappeared.

‘I don’t know that his decision to visit Forluin was wise,’ Ashurek muttered. ‘Still, as long as they don’t lose their courage to continue...’ He turned and strode swiftly along the finger of rock back to the shore without waiting for Calorn or the others.

Calorn watched him for a moment; then she made a decision, and started after him.

#

Estarinel and Medrian emerged from the Exit Point onto the soft floor of a wood. The change in their environment, in the very touch of the air, was so great that both stood amazed for several moments. The atmosphere lost its crystal clarity, but took on a warmer feel, pleasant and earthy. Late sunlight filtered down through the trees, outlining each leaf with silver and flooding the space between the trunks with a bronze haze.

‘It’s summer, just as if I’d never left,’ said Estarinel. ‘How strange to think a year has gone by. The voyage from Forluin to the House of Rede took months; I never really thought of the seasons changing here, while we were out on the sea.’

‘Do you know where we are?’ Medrian asked.

‘Yes. Trevilith Woods. My home’s about an hour’s walk, that’s all. I spent so much of my childhood in here–’ a rush of memories silenced him.

‘Come on, then,’ Medrian said, but Estarinel stood rooted.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t think this was a good idea – to go back in the middle of the Quest. I feel I’ve gone in a large circle and been nowhere. It’s wrong. I don’t want to see anyone – what can I tell them? That I’ve nearly been killed several times and achieved nothing? Yes, I’m back but the Quest still hasn’t begun, I have to go away again. Oh, they’ll understand when I explain… and then they’ll feel fear for me, and reliance on me, as if I could save them – all of them – just me. It was the easiest thing in the world to set out on this Quest… now it’s become the most difficult to carry on. It’s not fair on them to have to rely on me. I don’t want to remind them, when perhaps they’re starting to forget. I shouldn’t have come back.’

Medrian looked at him. She felt very strange, as if she were floating. The Lady had spoken truth: M’gulfn had no power over Forluin, and for the first time she was free of it on Earth. But she still dared not relax, dared not allow herself to feel or behave any differently. She could not let herself show sympathy for Estarinel.

‘It’s too late,’ she replied quietly. ‘You’ve made your decision. Come, we can’t stay here for eighteen hours.’

He stared into her dark eyes, wondering why he was able to hold her gaze when before it had filled him with coldness. She had always, in her own reserved way, supported him through the worst moments of the Quest; now she was in his land, and must be able to trust him as he trusted her. He sighed and tried to smile.

‘You’re right, as usual. This way.’ As they began to trudge through the glade, he added, ‘I’m glad you came with me.’

She did not reply. She walked in silence beside him, the hem of her H’tebhmellian dress brushing the earth. She felt dreamlike, but she had never had a dream like this before; it was at the same time heartrendingly real, making the rest of her life seem a bizarre nightmare. She could appreciate the feel of the leaf-mould beneath her feet and the touch of breeze on her face, the silver-bronze sunlight and the rough, rich texture of tree-bark without suffering the Worm’s mocking punishment for daring to love something. For the very first time, she experienced normality; and it was everything she had longed for.

They came from the ragged edge of the wood onto a broad meadow of grass and bracken. Green fronds filled the air with fresh aromas. Estarinel increased his pace and they ploughed through the knee-high growth, through a small copse and out onto a hillside. A patchwork of fields and trees stretched before them, green and amber and honey-gold in the late sun. Nearby, a couple of sheep grazed, and a single bird called forlornly from the sky.

Forluin, Medrian saw, was beautiful.

But to their left, the sunset was a splash of garish carmine, a wound in the clouds. And she could not fail to recognise the greyish haze drifting along the horizon. She felt Estarinel shudder at her side.

For a few minutes he could not speak, so sweet and familiar was this view to him. How often he had ridden, walked or run over this beloved landscape that was only less dear to him than his family. But he saw the Worm’s haze, polluting the sky and distorting the colour of the sunset. The curse had not left them.

‘This area – my home – lies just south of the worst of the attack,’ he began to explain, the words like grit in his mouth. The neighbouring farm was crushed – ours just escaped.’

‘I remember, you told us,’ Medrian said hurriedly, trying to spare him the pain of talking.

‘You can’t quite see the farm from here,’ he went on, ‘but it’s only a couple of miles more.’

He led her down the hillside and along a path overhung by great golden beeches.

Eventually Medrian said, ‘Forluin is beautiful, the loveliest place I’ve ever seen. Even now.’

‘Normally… before,’ he answered with hollow sadness, ‘the meadows and copses would be teeming with life. Birds singing, deer among the trees. There were sheep and horses everywhere…’ he shook his head, unable to continue.

They skirted another clump of trees and followed a well-worn bridle path along a hedgerow. As they came out into a broad, undulating meadow, Estarinel almost broke into a run. Fixed in his mind was the image of the bowl-shaped valley when he had last seen it: still green, the old stone farmhouse sitting contentedly on the valley floor amid vegetable gardens and meadows, as if nothing had happened. And beyond, at the open end of the valley, had been blasted trees and the ruins of his friend Falin’s farm. His family’s escape had been that narrow.

Suddenly, the prospect of seeing his beloved parents and sisters again swept all doubts from his mind. They were, at the last, all that was truly important.

‘Come on!’ he called to Medrian. ‘Here’s the rim of the valley.’ He ran ahead of her and gained the green lip of the Bowl Valley from which he could see every detail of his parents’ farm.

Medrian, trying to keep up with him, saw him stop. She saw the sudden rigid disbelief shake his body; she gasped with the effort to make herself catch up, to see what he had seen.

The valley was a bowl of blasted ash. Trees lay in grotesque ruin, like scorched bones scattered across ground that seemed to be rotting in acid. The ruin wreaked by the Serpent’s poison extended up the sides of the valley to within a few yards of where they were standing. What remained of grass and hedges was slicked with glutinous venom. A stench of desolation, tangible to the skin and eyes, came up from it. It carried the Worm’s hate; an undeniable destiny where sickness and misery became the same thing. And in the centre lay the crumbled remains of Estarinel’s home.

The ruins looked still and sad, like a small animal that had died of fear.

At first Estarinel was so devastated, so stricken by bitter incredulity, that he could not move. He felt paralysed, numb. A steel wire was tightening around his throat, causing blood to burst blackly across his vision. His head swam with confusion.

‘How?’ The whisper rasped from his throat. Then a tide of anger, of horror and grief flooded him like a scream of ultimate denial. No! No!

The word became his being, animated him like a crazed puppet into a stumbling run down the valley. The soul-shattering shock of grief thrashed through his limbs as if it could only find release down in the Worm-ruined house.

Medrian was after him in an instant. She threw herself sideways at him to knock him off course, seized his arms and tried to pull him to a halt. He struggled with her, eyes wild. He did not seem even to recognise her.

‘Stop!’ she cried.

‘Let me go,’ he whispered hoarsely. He tried to break free, but she hung grimly on to him.

‘No!’ she shouted frantically. ‘If you step in that stuff, it’ll kill you. Don’t you understand? It’s acid, it’s poison!’

He stared at her, shaking convulsively; but he was seeing Sinmiel, Falin’s sister, dying in a pool of venom. Dying, because she had not watched where she was walking and had stumbled into the Serpent’s flesh-eroding effluent. With a hoarse cry, he broke away from Medrian and ran raggedly up to the top of the valley, then started around the rim towards a small, undamaged, stone cottage.

Medrian raced after him. The Serpent’s smell caught in her throat and she was coughing, gasping for breath. She could not match his hell-driven pace. She saw him enter the cottage, only to dash out again a moment later. She cut across towards him, but he still outran her, tearing across the meadow and down a path between dark trees that looked like skeletons rigid with dread.