Shadow (5 page)

‘But your father is not a mage. And even if he were, no man has ever had such power about him. Not the greatest wizard who ever lived. No man
can
hold such large amounts of it, let alone shape it by design. Far less than that which surrounds Vous now would slay him, but for my study and rituals. It was not easy, Aziel. It was centuries of work, often tedious, most of it very dangerous.

‘Although the power surrounded him, he had no hands to shape it. Now, suddenly, it is almost like Vous has a
hundred
hands. All moving on their own around him, faster than he can see, let alone control. So he forms shapes he doesn't intend. Even some which are terribly bad for him. And for us.'

‘Is Ghost…?'

‘Ghost is one such form, yes, though not a very dangerous one. Made long before you were born. Part of Vous was guilty, or fearful of – well, of ghosts. The ghosts of his own hands' murders haunted him, as ghosts of the murdered are said to do. This fear consumed him in those days. I remember it. I tried to calm him, with the usual results. So he found a way to calm himself before the fear could consume him.'

‘So he made Ghost by accident? And made it his friend, so he wouldn't have to keep being afraid?'

‘Yes. Even before the changes began, your father was a strange man.' The Arch Mage seemed to realise the deformed side of his face had come into her view. He shifted it away. ‘This is why I'm nervous. About how things … progress. What remains of the human in your father has other fears, other guilt, other secrets. And far more power than when he made Ghost. We do not ask Tempest or Mountain how they handle the powers about them – they will not tell us. Nor what their powers are really meant to be used for – we can only guess. Nor do the Spirits possess human frailties. And as we have seen, even gods can lose control.'

‘Inferno?'

He nodded. ‘And your father is already, I fear, less stable than was Inferno, before that god met its end.' Arch poked at a nearby glass shard with his staff, sending it scraping across the floor away from him. ‘I sense your excitement, Aziel. No, do not be ashamed of it. You alone in the castle are permitted that emotion. I fear that lately, with the change, Vous has gone from having a hundred hands to having a thousand. And by the time he is truly a god, he may have ten thousand, or more. And control of none of them. It is a dangerous time.'

‘Didn't you … didn't you—' She could not get the words out.

‘Did we not consider this, back in the beginning?' The human side of his face smiled without mirth. ‘Of course not. We were so very young. This science was new. We did not know what would happen. That was partly the point. To learn. There was no other way to learn but to proceed. Mistakes made this time won't be made the next.'

She wanted to go and embrace him, seeing his tiredness and his fear. She even moved to do so. But the square gem turned in its eye socket, rippling the flesh around it with a faint sound of scraped bone. She caught a whiff of burned flesh from his cooling body and recoiled, with a stinging pang of guilt. She pretended to be adjusting her position on the bed. ‘Are you saying Father destroyed the Wall? By accident?'

‘What he did – among other things – was open the Entry Point to Otherworld. That vast, strange place. I think we've shut it off. But some Pilgrims came. The first in my long lifetime. How many made it through I'm unsure: at least two. It may be one of them who destroyed the Wall. They have such marvellous weaponry! If only my Engineers could mimic it. They have tried. Images and descriptions are not enough for them to work with.' He sighed and stood to leave.

‘You're going?' she said.

‘I must.'

Aziel fought back the urge to plead that he stay to talk a little longer. He, like Ghost, had not been to talk in a long while. He hobbled to the door, hesitated, then turned back. ‘Why is it, Aziel, that I come to speak with you?'

She frowned, finding it a strange thing to be asked. A thought came completely unbidden:
Because you like to be around things in cages.
It gave her another pang of guilt. ‘You're my friend,' she said, and smiled at him.

He nodded without reply and hobbled out of the room, careful as always his horns didn't scrape the door frame. ‘I'll see about your move to the lower floors,' he said. ‘As soon as I'm sure it's safe to move you.'

Then he shut the door and twisted the key in its lock, sounds so familiar she hardly noticed.

3

Do you swear to me?

It was a sad voice that tugged Aziel out of troubled sleep and dreams filled with distant screaming. She sat up, rubbed her eyes and discovered the screams were not of her nightmares – they were quite real. Footsteps rushed past outside her room. Yells, wails, a rattle of chains, a grinding like great stone teeth rubbing together. Something heavy and metallic scraped through the hall outside, right past her door. Whatever it was, it caused more screams at the corridor's far end, until abrupt silence fell.

A flickering glow appeared which showed blood seeping under the door. Aziel did not notice. Her father, Vous, stood in the room with her. He was a glowing outline, through which faint lights pulsed like blood, meeting within him in a hundred tiny splashes of sickly colour. One arm extended toward the ceiling. His head slumped forward on his chest.

Aziel didn't scream. She felt calm. It seemed that a deep sadness poured from her father and filled the room. It did not touch her heart, or share itself with her own sadness (much of which she was hardly aware of), but she felt it pouring off him as sure as the dimly glimmering light. She could not recall what he'd said. ‘Father?'

The words came without his mouth moving:
Many of them swear to me, on shore. Many of them do, ankle-deep in the lapping waves I disturb. Many do, waist-deep, neck-deep, as the waters go above their heads.

‘What do you want from me, Father? It's late. And you're not well.'

Aziel. Daughter of mine. Changed daughter. I mourn. Evil is about me. My limbs thrash through it like a man drowning, disturbing the evil this way and that. But should I lie still there would be no difference. All others will be washed from where they stand, gawking and speaking my sweet name, eyes drinking down sight of me. Drowned they will be, as I gush through forests and fill valleys. Drowned in the cities where they have lived as shadows of shadows of shadows. Until the driest plains are drenched in me, waters never to recede, all shall drown, all shall drown. I take their bodies on my surface skin, calm and glassy. I collect their bodies on my churning surface skin.

‘Father, I don't understand you. And I don't think that's really you. Not your body, certainly. It's illusion, isn't it? Like Arch sometimes does. Are you doing it on purpose, Father? To scare or punish me? Why must you always punish me? I never hurt you. And if I did I never meant to.'

Vous's head rose slowly to regard her. A smile spread across his face. His eyes widened and grew till they were far too large. His mouth opened into a fissure of swirling gloom. From deep in its depths, as though from a long distance, came a pained cry. Then he was gone, leaving nothing but the blood slowly trickling across the floor. The bedroom door swung slowly open without the
click-clank
of someone unlocking it. A body was slumped just outside the door.

Aziel stood and quickly dressed, surprised to feel so calm and unafraid. She stepped into the hall. No brands had been lit but there were sweeping beams of light snaking over the walls. To the right where the hall curved around, Vous – rather, a ghostly simulacrum of him – stood with his back to her. At his feet were the remains of guards. Something had cut them in half.

A high-pitched voice sang,
Shadow, Shadow. Come back, Shadow.

‘Aziel, stay in your room!' said Arch urgently. He stood leaning hard on his forked silver staff, the ends of his horns pouring out thick smoke.

Vous turned about, on his face a look of amazing viciousness, teeth and eyes far larger than they should be. A hoarse, hissing breath rasped from him. Two big stone faces flung from him at speed down the hall, scraping the floor with the same heavy grinding noise she'd heard before. Their mouths snapped,
clack, clickety-clack.

Something unseen shoved her back in her bedroom an instant before she'd have been caught in the snapping jaws. The beast heads flew at Arch. He vanished and they smashed into the wall, gouging parts of it loose before falling into two crumbling piles of stone.

On hands and knees Aziel peered around the corner of her bedroom doorway. Up the hall, the ghostly image of her father had one arm aloft, his head downcast again in grief, before the image flickered and went out like a blown candle. Screams and cries sounded from the lower floors as some terror wound its way down through the castle.

Stay in your room,
Arch had said. She should, she knew. But its door was so very rarely left open. And part of her understood something, though
how
she understood it she could not have said: her father had come to her not to kill or terrorise her. He'd come for help. And she believed there was only one way to help him.

She took from her dresser a knife with gems embedded in the handle, and stepped out into the hall again. In each room she passed were the massacred remains of grey-robe servants and armoured guards. Some crawled wounded and dazed through the ruins. Some of the corpses moved spastically and chattered away like invisible playful hands jerked them around and played mockingly with their voices.

In the big chamber before Vous's private quarters she paused in the doorway. Ten or more simulacra of her father stood, each motionless, each a ghostly projection in an identical pose. One by one they came to life and launched into a strange dance. It was slow and graceful, all of them moving in a wide circle.

A voice, not her father's, said,
THERE IS WORSE THAN PAIN.

With a shriek in unison the mirror images dashed away, as though the voice had scared them off.

Calmly, still calmly, she went to the door of her father's chamber, which swung open for her. Within, twenty grey-robes stood with heads bowed, in rows of five, before her father's throne. He was upon it, body writhing and convulsing, eyes rolled back in his head. His voice spoke and filled the room.

I do this to you for no reason. I do this to you, gaining nothing from the deed. I am parting waters with my hands. I am drowning all of you within me. I am parting waters, pushing out the air. I am rushing waters, taking all things with me.

A stone-coloured beastly head swept up from the floor, snapped its jaws shut on one of the motionless grey-robes, biting it in half. The others still didn't move, even as more such stone beasts erupted in their midst, or descended from the ceiling. Aziel screamed and shielded her eyes for what seemed an age, though she did not shield her ears from stone jaws snapping through meat and bone.

The grey-robes – four remained standing – turned as one to face her, expressions blank as metal masks. Still Vous writhed and thrashed on his throne, but she felt his awareness of her. Something invisible flew at her. She felt it come and flung herself sideways. It crashed into the wall behind her with a passing rush of hot air.

‘Aziel, get back to your room,' gasped Arch, hobbling toward her.

‘What's happening?'

‘Go now!' Three ghostly forms of Vous, all naked, sprinted out of the hall, rushed at Arch with their too-long arms thrashing, horrible noises gargling and growling from their throats. Arch vanished from sight and reappeared further away. The Vous-things howled and loped after him until he'd led them up the hall away from her.

Aziel dropped the knife and ran weeping back the way she'd come, back to her room. She wedged a chair under the door handle.
THERE IS WORSE THAN DEATH,
a voice said outside, before something smashed down hard enough to make the tower itself shiver.

She barely heard the newly replaced glass of her window breaking. Only the orange burst from a lick of fire brought her attention to the thing lodged in the frame.

She blinked, at first not believing her eyes. It had to be more of her father's insanity at play. But it looked like a fat red drake. Coughing and spluttering, it crashed down on the floor, grunting at the impact. It stood very clumsily, stretched out its wings like it barely had any idea what they were for, then lowered its head to her, as though it wanted her to get on its back.

In fact, she knew that was just what it wanted. ‘Did Arch send you?' she said.

The drake just looked at her.

‘Should … should I hop on? Where will we go?'

It lowered its head further. She looked around at her belongings, wondering which, if any, she should bring. She may need food. Something warm to wear, certainly … she slung a cardigan about her shoulders and a scarf around her neck, and swept a few other bits and pieces into a carry-bag while the drake watched her. Awkwardly she took a seat on its back, where there was a dip like a saddle between the raised scales. Warmth poured out to her skin from the fire inside the creature.

The drake refused to move until she'd taken a very firm hold on its neck. When she had, it stretched its clumsy wings, hopped up on the window sill after two failed attempts, uncurled its scaly tail across the floor and heaved a big sigh.

‘How long are we to be gone? We're coming back, aren't we? Once Arch cures Father?'

By way of answer, the drake leaped out into the night sky.

OUTCAST COUNTRY

1

It was not the sky which broke into pieces and thundered into the ground at World's End, but the gaps high up in the breaking Wall gave that illusion, as the early morning light set in. Glass-thin slivers carried by the wind pattered harmlessly and settled in people's hair. Fist-sized lumps of it and occasional huge sheets slammed down with lethal force, kicking up dust clouds which obscured the picture revealed of the new world, of Southern Levaal.