The Tower of Bones (44 page)

‘Well done, Turkeya! Can you save them – will they survive?’

‘I don’t think so, Mo.’

‘But some might. And you’ve eased their pain. You’re helping people.’ Mo spoke softly, reassuringly. ‘Your coming along wasn’t a mistake. You’ve been blaming yourself ever since Kataba died. But you’re needed here.’

The young shaman nodded, grateful for her words. ‘I was wrong to distrust the Garg. Iyezzz has proved to be a friend. And he spoke truly of this place,’ he whispered. ‘We journey through a tormented land.’

Kate’s voice interrupted their whispering as she joined them in the tiny makeshift hospital: ‘The Witch’s doing!’

Mo threw her arms around Kate and hugged her, so glad of the return of her friend. ‘We can’t just let her win.’

Turkeya agreed. ‘Iyezzz warned us not to rest within the wood. But what can we do? There are so many wounded.’

Kate shook her head. ‘I don’t know. But we have to think of something.’

He insisted: ‘Can’t you use your power?’

‘My power is intended as the power of healing – and rebirth. But up to now I’ve only ever tried turning it on the land. I have no experience of using it to heal wounds.’

‘Didn’t you use it to restore the dragon’s wings?’

‘Oh, yes – I did. Of course I’ll try. But Turkeya will have to help me. You must explain to me about wounds, and poisons, and thorn trees.’

They soldiered on. It seemed almost miraculous that, sweating and exhausted, they managed to hack their way further until late afternoon. They had been encouraged by messages from Iyezzz, who signalled that they were halfway through the woods. But then, abruptly, they heard him cry out.

‘Beware! The trees are moving.’

The Kyra halted their progress, and ordered the Shee to hack out a clearing that could be defended. The warriors made a wall of swords about Alan, Kate, Turkeya and Mo. Through his oraculum, Alan attempted to read the mind
of the Garg. ‘Iyezzz – I need to see what’s happening. Let me look out through your eyes.’

Through Iyezzz’s mind he saw a wave-like movement, such as one might see from a stone thrown into a pond. The pond was the forest of ash-pale branches and leafless crowns, but the ripples were moving in the opposite direction, arising from without and building towards a crescendo at a single focus. His heartbeat rose into his throat when he realised that the company was that focus.

‘What is it?’ the Kyra demanded.

‘The trees are coming towards us – from everywhere.’

‘How can this be?’

‘They’re tearing themselves out of the ground.’ Alan pointed to the forest immediately surrounding them, where the thorn trees were swaying, backward and forward, as if determined to rip out their roots. The swaying became more and more extreme until, with an audible tearing, one of the trees completely uprooted itself. But then the movement did not halt. The uprooted tree rolled itself into a tangled ball. And the enormous ball, covered with dagger-like thorns, began to roll determinedly towards them. Other trees were doing the same. There was a thunder of loosening roots. All about them a wall of thorn trees was advancing in a deadly embrace.

Ainé went down on one knee, murmuring a prayer with closed eyes, and then, one by one, she pressed the blades of her warrior sisters against the pulsating Oraculum of Bree in her brow. The Shee immediately
moved out to hack at the trunks of the trees that surrounded them. Sparks of green rained down from the clash of blade against the resisting trunks. But it was close to suicidal for the Shee. Branches moved, lashing back and then forward, sweeping the giant warriors off their feet and inflicting terrible wounds with their thorns. The dwarf mage, Qwenqwo, joined the Shee, slashing at trunks with his rune-glowing battleaxe, chopping back tree after tree.

‘Help us,’ the Kyra flashed Alan, mind-to-mind.

Alan waded in with the Spear of Lug, his oraculum blazing with power, and runes flaring over the long spiral blade, so it cut through the advancing wall like white-hot steel. He destroyed one thorn tree, then another, but for every tree he destroyed several more tore themselves loose and curled into giant balls of malice, hurling themselves against the protective wall with poisoned daggers. Only yards from him a Shee hacked an enormous branch from a tree only to see the remaining branches explode, deluging the warrior in a rain of thorns that ripped her body to shreds.

Many Shee were already dead. Yet their sacrifice had hacked out a ring of broken trees as a protective barrier around their company, and against this a cannonade of newly arriving trees crashed and disintegrated, showering them with splinters of wood and thorns. The thorn trees were building up, layer upon layer, in concentric rings about them, until the barrier, at its inner perimeter, was
several trees high. Through the terrible destruction of trees tearing against one another, Alan heard a wailing – as if the forest were screaming in agony, maddened beyond reason.

He probed the avalanche of violence that attacked them from every direction. Wave after wave of incoming trees crashed against the barrier, the violence of which threw huge fragments into the air, and already some of the attacks were breaking through. The despairing company huddled under the massed shields of the Shee. They gazed out onto the mania of destruction, watching it contract with deadly certainty, and expecting annihilation at any moment.

Kate wailed: ‘Do something, Alan. Use the First Power!’

Alan stared out at the crumbling barrier. He heard the tremendous ripping and tearing, saw the breach in the protective circle, where a lava-like flow of those enormous spiked balls was coming through. The memory of the gyre haunted him – the knowledge that if he called up the power in his oraculum it might be out of his control. The First Power might destroy them all.

‘Do it now – or we’re done for!’

Rage flowed through Alan, spreading to become an incandescent lightning, erupting out of the oraculum and down through his arm into the extended spear. The lightning crackled and spread, in an instant forming a dome of incandescence over the shield wall, then roaring outwards in an all-devouring wave, burning whole trees
to ash with its touch, then sweeping through the forest until not a single tree survived its fury. Gasping for breath and with his heart still pounding in his throat, he became aware that Kate was signalling to him. She was begging him to stop. In those charged moments, when he was still emerging from the rage that had consumed him, he saw how Kate’s eyes were wide with fear.

Wiping his sweat-soaked face down with hands blackened with ash, he hugged her fleetingly, then headed off in search of the Kyra. He found her covered with wounds, yet still alive.

‘Aides!’ he roared.

Kate gazed out into the ruins of trunks and branches that extended for mile after mile. Her legs were buried up to mid calf in ashes. Alan had done that – through the awesome power of the oraculum in his brow. Now that the obscuring forest was gone she saw, however distantly, the blood-red light of the Tower of Bones, which was invading the sky from the north. And high overhead, black shapes, limned by the glow of the sky, which must be Gargs – Garg spies – who had been observing it all, and who would report back to the King.

Her mind numbed with shock, she turned to face the two Aides, themselves injured, who came to the assistance of Shee on the ground nearby. Everywhere she looked, she saw wounds that were deep and festering with poison. She had been hurt herself, over her arms, her back and
legs. She held her arms out in front of her and stared at her own cuts and slashes, which were livid and pus-filled, in places penetrating to the bone. She began to tremble.

‘Granny Dew!’

Kate felt the impulse to separate herself from the company, to wade out into the sea of ash and stand alone. She discovered a small hillock standing a little higher than the wasteland of ash and whirling smoke. She recalled the words of the Momu:
A goddess empowers you. Be not afraid to invoke her help
.

Holding the purse before her lips she blew on it while turning slowly in a circle, addressing the wounded land, which had known nothing but torment for thousands of years. As she rotated her body, dispersing the seeds, the green light of her oraculum pulsated with the rhythm of her heartbeat, its light falling over the charred limbs, the ashes gambolling in the rising wind. Her lips were pressed tight together, her words expressed exclusively through the oraculum. She had no idea if a blighted land would understand her attempts at comforting, but she tried anyway.

‘How terrible your suffering must have been. Once you lived in beauty and harmony with all of life. But the coming of the Great Witch changed you. She ravaged your spirit, and with it all hope, so you came to know only despair. You have endured that despair. But now, through the power given to me by Granny Dew, I return the spirit of life to you. I return the joy of the seasons, the hope of the seed
in spring, the life-giving sunlight in your leaves, the healing rain, the flight of pollinating insects among your flowers, the song of the birds among your branches.’

Alan had arrived to stand beside her, his arm about her shoulders, staring out with her at the rain that was now pattering over the smoking ashes. As the first large drops struck their faces they saw the rising green begin to sprout everywhere, the tiny shoots penetrating the ash before throwing apart their embryonic leaves.

With a noisy flapping of wings, Iyezzz alighted before them. He knelt before Kate, kissing the rain-soaked ash so the white of it coated his gargoyle face like a mask. Qwenqwo, Mo and Turkeya had come to join them, their faces lifted to the rain, speechless with shock, yet their feelings altogether clear from their tear-filled eyes. The wounds that had cut their arms to the bone were closing.

‘The Kyra – the others?’ Alan hardly dared to ask.

‘All healing!’

Alan threw his arms about Kate and hugged her. ‘Oh, wow! Kate! How we’ve needed you!’

‘I’m not Mr Nice Guy!’ Mark addressed the silence in which he basically didn’t exist, except in spirit, needing to communicate with the being that was the Temple Ship, which was unable to communicate in words.

‘No, you are not.’

He imagined Nan, and within a second he saw her. In his mind she was standing beside him on the white beach, wearing Kate’s clothes. He assumed she was imagining him also, standing beside her, wearing jeans and leather jacket.

‘I’m Mr Angry.’

He saw, mind-to-mind, that she was reaching out as if to touch his cheek. By now she was sufficiently practised to know the feel of his cheek. He even felt the touch of her fingers on it.

They could do this more easily now. It was comforting – helped to keep him sane. But he needed more. They both did.

‘I’m not Mr Romeo.’

‘No – you are Mark Grimstone.’

He laughed, making a little snort through his nose, a nose that in reality did not exist. ‘That’s right!’

‘Good!’

‘Good?’

‘If you are Mr Angry, I am Queen Angry!’

She was a fast learner. He laughed again. ‘If only we were together, really together. If I could touch you, I’d kiss you now.’

‘Kiss me, then!’

They kissed, as best they could. There was something thrilling about it, but it was a long way from a real kiss.

‘It’s no good, Nan. I can’t rest – I can’t focus on anything else but the thought of getting out of here.’

It was a bad idea to think too much about it. You could become overwhelmed by it, frantic. He couldn’t rest until he attempted the crossing between worlds, even if the risks – and he had a suspicion that there were almighty risks involved – might cost them the spiritual life that was all they had. ‘Okay. The thing to do is to get it crystal clear in our minds. There must be a first step?’

‘Which is to grasp the impossible nature of our dilemma.’

He chuckled, again. ‘You’re really good for me.’

‘To visualise our extraordinary need.’

‘Keep on talking – I like it!’

‘You mock me?’

‘What – Her Royal Majesty, Queen Angry?’

‘If I had flesh, I would slap your cheek for your impudence.’

‘Ow!’

They laughed together.

He was silent again for a while, thinking deeply. In spirit he knew that he and the Ship were one. But that didn’t seem to be enough.

‘To be born again.’ He whispered it slowly, musingly, finding words to best express what he was now thinking.

‘To be born again.’ Her answering concord.

‘I don’t fully understand what it involves, how it happens. But I sense, even if it’s only vaguely, that it involves something like that … When the Ship changes. When it metamorphoses.’

‘The Ship is born again?’

‘I think so.’

‘How glorious!’

‘Yeah! But the question is – what does that really mean?’

‘But you did it – you brought about the raptor change.’

‘My friend’s life was threatened.’

‘So?’

Somehow that threat, in Mark’s heart and mind, had become a visceral fear. Mark’s desperate need to save Alan had communicated itself to the Ship. But this situation – this present need – was too subtle, perhaps.

‘There’s something missing. Something I’ve been
racking my brains to think through. Like back then, when we were stuck in the ice-bound lake …’

‘Think back.’

‘We all sensed the Ship. I sensed it deeper than the others. A feeling of desolation, of sadness.’

‘Like loneliness?’

‘Yeah! Maybe. The Olhyiu were about to set the Ship on fire.’

He was aware that she was looking at him. He showed her the image of himself blinking.
We’re becoming more subtly aware of each other
.

‘They had to melt the ice to escape.’

‘So you felt it – you felt the Ship’s sadness?’

‘It was more than that. I knew that was what they were planning to do – and I felt strongly about it. It was similar in Isscan.’

He knew that she was lifting her fingers to touch his lips. He imagined that he was feeling her touch.

‘How similar?’

‘Kind of empathic. As if the Ship understood our need. Nan – it needs to know how desperately we feel it.’