Cloud Castles (36 page)

‘There will be others to help me!’ hissed the captain, from somewhere nearby. ‘Any minute! Then you and your friends will be slaughtered piecemeal in your misty traps! Cut to pieces! Eh?’

Rubbing my ribs, I didn’t answer. I wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction. There were other voices in the fog, but I ignored them.

‘
Was sagt er denn daran?
Do you hear me?’ I had the direction. Not something I’d ever made a habit of, this, but it gave me a certain satisfaction now; I pursed my mouth and spat forcefully out into the mist.

The captain should have waited. I was afraid he would, despite my provocation; but I suspect he wasn’t very sane by then. He sprang in suddenly, from a different direction, aiming the killing thrust he should have started with – too predictable, for such a good swordsman. It passed through the mist above me. I’d ducked down easily; and my own cut rose almost from the ground, with two hands behind it and
all the force of my anger and my fear. It struck right into Dragovic’s exposed side, and across him from stomach to shoulder, trailing a spraying scarlet banner into the air. He flew up and over backwards, legs akimbo, hit the ground like a sack of potatoes and lay twisting. I levelled my sword and sprang forward, but one look was more than enough.

All the same, I jumped violently when one scrabbling arm slid down suddenly, with a metallic clatter. But it was only the thing he’d been carrying. I sprang on it as it rattled free among the stones, fumbled desperately with the blood-slicked catches and flung back the lid.

It should have been a dramatic moment, a little thrill of satisfaction at least. It wasn’t; things were too urgent for that. The Spear gleamed against the soft lining, its obsidian head deeply lustrous even in this dim mirk. I took a deep breath, banished all hesitation, and closed my left hand about the shaft. It felt glassy smooth itself, polished by untold ages of being grasped perhaps – and by who knows what hands? The thought gave me a sudden thrill, as if I teetered on the brink of some startling understanding. I plucked up my courage and easily, carefully, I lifted it from the case.

In the faint wind of its passage the mist fell back and began to grow thinner and disperse. I let my arm fall, and found myself standing on the narrow bare margin of the hillside above a very respectable cliff indeed, part of the same formation as the larger shelf. Below me, among the trees behind it, the bloody battle was still raging; the shelf was a mass of bodies. Around me, startlingly close, were Alison and the others, thankfully all right, staring down at the dying captain.

‘Said you were better!’ she muttered softly. But she wouldn’t have sounded that relieved if she’d been sure.

I shook my head. ‘Nearly had me!’ I panted. ‘Would have, if he hadn’t tried a low one!’

‘Not the better sword,’ she said quietly. ‘The better man.’ Then her eyes lifted and widened, as she saw what I held.

Careful of the tangle around, I brandished it high above my head. The tattered streamers of mist boiled up suddenly into the crest of a great wave, collapsed, sank back on themselves and faded. The mountain loomed above now, vaster and more terrible than it had seemed from the air; and
as I saw it for the first time clearly, saw something of what those lights were, and those flying swirls, my brief moment of triumph and relief sank down like lead.

And worse; for a dry cough drew my attention back to the ground I stood on. In front of us, perched comfortably on a granite outcropping, was the old necromancer
himself, Le Stryge.

Those lights were fires, fires in clearings dotted all over the hillside, and the nearest ones were easy to see. The fires were made before great stones set up like altars, and before and around those altars figures shuffled and danced, silhouettes passing in front of the flames, some grotesque, some monstrous, some nakedly, fallibly human, whirling in the grip of frenzy, screaming and mouthing and gibbering. It was impossible to make out all the things that were going on, but there were worse things there than Children of Night – worse even than anything I’d seen in the dark
tonnelle
when the malformed
loa
of Don Petro descended, worse than the dead legions of Rangda. I thought I made out shadows with spidery spindled limbs and sunken ribcages, monstrous heads sunk between their shoulders, black hunched figures that trailed their hands or waddled along on all fours, and worse, crawling, flapping worse; I could never be sure. What must this Brocken creature, this residing power, look like, if those were only its servants? Some of them seemed to change shape instant by instant, or maybe that was only the flickering of the flames.

Things were done, rites carried out; that was clear, though what they were or why I couldn’t guess and didn’t want to. No wonder the medievals interpreted them as parodies of church rites, deliberate blasphemies; so they were, but against every concept of reason or sense I could imagine, even warped ones. I’d heard somewhere that fetishes and obsessions carried to extremes usually lose any resemblance at all to sex, at least to outsiders who don’t share the secret; what I saw here felt like that, only far worse. As if at the centre of the bizarre
ritual was emptiness, its meaning that it had no meaning; but even emptiness hid a tiny twisted core, malice and evil too arcane to expose fully to itself. And even on the surface the rites were cruel.

Some of the human shapes didn’t dance or caper; they were dragged along, half slumping, loose-limbed. Figures jigged around them, postured, gestured; suddenly at the nearest fire something was cast into the flame so it blazed reddish-green, and by that sickly light I saw some of their faces, lank and sick and miserable, jaws sagging like their exhausted bodies so that dark slaver trickled down onto their sunken chests. Their limbs bled, they were spilling their guts and I guessed they wailed, though I couldn’t make it out among the clamour. They looked exhausted, but more than that – they seemed spent or used-up, like a coal half turned to ash and clinging together in a shadow of its outward solidity, only to collapse suddenly and disintegrate. The other dancers, human or monstrous, had no mercy on these drained things, but pawed and mauled them and flung them around in their filth like sacks with manic shrieks and laughter. It was ghastly, like plague burial pits come to life; but what was above them was worse. For all the shock of the old villain’s appearance, it held our horrified eyes entirely.

Those swirling haloes, those swooping flocks that circled the mountain crest like the bands of an airy crown – those were figures too. All of them human, as far as I could make out; they moved almost too fast to see, except when a flowing band stooped low above our heads, trailing a terrible clamour of wailing and screams and a waft of choking vomitous stench. What held them so high I couldn’t imagine; there was nothing of flight about them, a writhing tangled mass like eels in a torrent. It was more as if they were pinioned within rushing currents of wind that flung and tumbled and battered them against one another, but never let them drop. Even as the wind collided them they scrabbled and they clawed at one another, fighting like drowning people in a current, so that they were a mass of blood and bruises and horrible injuries, faces screaming with eyeless sockets, an ear torn away or a cheek as they spun and spilled over one another, dangling shreds of clothes and flesh. Not only panic drove them as they clutched at each other, scrabbling indiscriminately for any shred of sensation, pawing and
coupling – there wasn’t a better word for it – at frenzied random in the cascading, boiling tumult of flesh. Some of their appetite, horribly, was hunger; for many tore the living flesh around them and stuffed it in their mouths, and I glimpsed some who licked and sucked the blood and snarled at neighbours like hyenas on a kill. All this at once, a living hymn of hatred to human flesh and human senses, twisted about the mountain like a living crown. I’d only glanced at Dante, but I remembered something like this; and I wondered what infernos that man really had passed through. It was only afterwards I thought of Hieronymus Bosch, and Breughel.

Now I understood what those halo-things were that had plucked at Katjka as she dangled, that had torn her from me. So did the others. Jyp was suddenly and violently sick. Mall closed her eyes in agony, that awful sudden empathy of hers stiffening her rigid. Alison, her clenched fist jammed against her lips, was the grey shade of her uniform.

Le Stryge gave his thin cold laugh, and clicked his knobbed knuckles. ‘What is amiss, ladies and gentlemen? The brave pilot, is he airsick? The harridan who’d right the wrongs of womankind, does she blanch at the play they make with men – or recall her own beginnings? A Knight of the Graal, surely she doesn’t falter at the sight of blood,
hein?’
He turned towards me. ‘But you, boy, you surprise me, truly. This I would have thought is your everyday life in its essence, eh. The world of finances and affairs, the struggle for survival, dog-eat-dog, the mindless, incessant mating and eating. So much your true
milieu
I feared you might have to be restrained from plunging into it. Headlong.’

‘No, Stryge,’ I said tightly. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

He flapped a hand. ‘Bah! There’s no pleasing some people. In any event, you may as well relax and take what pleasure you can, because no more is left you. Your mission has failed. Those rabble Knights of yours now blunder wildly throughout this hospitable forest, led ever more apart and astray by visions and delusions, torn by thorn and briar, falling into snares or simply the consequences of their own carelessness. Those that are not picked off one by one will soon become irrelevant, as have you.’

‘And this?’ I lowered the Spear, and held it out before me, carefully, testing the ground ahead before I put
my weight on it. ‘You ran from this before. What do you think it’s about to do to all your bloody pretensions?’

He shrugged, and waggled his fingers in a contemptuous gesture. ‘Why, nothing, boy. Nothing at all. Here, upon the very flanks of the Brocken, I could shield myself for some time against such an enfeebled force – far longer than I will in fact need. I never did care so very much about the thing, you know, except as its loss furthered my real plan. Do by all means retain it if you wish – no, please, I beg you!’

Those stark mad eyes of his fastened on me with a weird intensity, part menacing, part politely pleading. Behind us the wind shook and rattled those skeletal trees. I lowered the Spear again slightly; I’d been about to lunge, and the old bastard had spotted it somehow.

‘I would have to stop you, and you would not like it,’ he said sharply. ‘A word of Arraignment, at the least, if you try any such foolishness. I do strive to warn you; you may remember, I am not without a sense of obligation. And you, truly, are the one responsible for all this.’

Alison touched my arm. ‘Is he hell! He’s never willingly done anything to help you and you know it! We know it!’

‘That’s so!’ snapped Mall. ‘Sneck up thy tongue, old blindworm, it stings us not!’

‘Goes for me too!’ said Jyp. ‘I know you and your goddamn obligations, Stryge! Know him, too, and he’s none of yours!’

Stryge smiled. ‘Now there, I may inform you, you are both right and wrong. He has become mine, this empty-headed boy, because he was not himself. Right from our first encounter, when he began to dabble in things beyond his measure, I sensed something about this Stephen Fisher. Something I did not like, something that made me itch.’

I wheezed with laughter. ‘No shortage of those around you!’

His eyes flamed an instant. ‘You! What would
you
know of necessary austerities, of ritual abasement? That, I,
I
, should have to humble myself thus in the quest of power – and be insulted for it by you, you base-born scraper after filthy commerce.’ He shrugged again, dismissive. ‘But you are chiefly appearance, why should I expect more? It was that very emptiness that intrigued me, for beneath it lay a hint of something else, something disturbing. That was one reason I agreed
to help, even at great risk to myself; and when even my powers were spent I saw you –
you
– summon down an Invisible, a near-divine, and contain it, and share its powers so fluently …’ He breathed deep, and steepled his long bony fingers. ‘The watch I set on you found nothing at first. As well I was patient; for then came that business in the East, and you somehow contained and challenged a still greater power. Then I set out to trace you in both directions, to find your ancestry, and from that to divine your destiny.’ He nodded sourly. ‘I traced your family back to the Rhineland of medieval days, and beyond. It began at the heart of modern Europe, with the bastard child of a Merovingian princess at the Frankish court of Rheims.’

I shrugged. ‘I could have told you that, the Rhineland, anyway. Glad I didn’t save you the trouble. So what difference does it make?’

The twist of his bloodless lips was nothing like a smile. ‘You are correct, of course. It makes little, now. But it was unusual enough to set me on the quest of your destiny also. And do you know? It proved both hard and costly, to my surprise, for I had sharper tools at my disposal than a witchling’s cards.’ He gave a sudden cackle. ‘Oh, you start? A little friend forgotten, is that it? But who can tell where she may be by now? Or whether you would know her if you saw her. Warlocks and witches as she was, they are swept up for a brief spell of frenzied indulgence and excess, the ultimate communion of the Sabbat; most survive. But those the Brocken punishes touch the earth no more. The winds are scarcely merciful, and they are never still.’ He sniggered softly. ‘She should have read her cards more closely. What did she read for you? Very little, I guess. That in itself was the most intriguing thing of all. I sought events which would shape your fate, and found almost nothing.’ He rubbed his hands with a business-like gleefulness, while the rest of us, I suppose, simply gaped at him. ‘You do not comprehend? Of course you do not. It is rare, boy, very rare. As if the course of destiny depends upon you, not you upon it; as if you yourself are some great fulcrum, a point of balance upon which historic forces hang. Naturally no divination involving such a person would ever yield any clear results.’