Advent (57 page)

 
Around the edge of the garden, trees crooked black fingers at the invisible sky. She scanned them, brushing smears of wet hair away from her eyes, until the shadow appeared. It angled towards her, growing huge, and landed, raising puffs of snow to glitter on its feathered thighs.

 
Foul as it was, the woman felt a horrible lurch of envy. It swept along the air with such dark grace, where her own flesh was cumbersome and weak. It eyed her, head swivelling. She thought she detected resentment in the animal gaze.

 
‘Acknowledge me,’ she commanded.

 
‘Master.’

 
She swallowed, cleared her throat. When she had been a man, it had never occurred to her that speaking was an action of muscles and flesh, like walking. The woman’s voice was as hard for her to use as the woman’s limbs. She loathed the sound of it. A woman’s voice. How could that be suited to command? (
Johannes, turn.
She shivered, but not with cold, and thrust the memory away.)

 
‘You have not found the thief, then.’

 
‘No no.’

 
‘One child, alone in this storm, and you cannot find him.’

 
‘Never saw.’

 
The woman lurched closer to where Corbo stood. ‘You try to evade me again, puka.’

 
‘No no.’

 
‘You do. Your tongue is as filthy as the rest of the flesh I gave you.’

 
‘Hungry.’

 
‘Do you think I care for your carrion appetites?’ It ruffled feathers, loosening a white dusting from its impenetrable black. She thrust her chin angrily toward it. ‘If I have no use for you, I will let you starve.’

 
‘
Wraaak
,’ it cawed, bobbing its head.

 
‘Do you understand me?’

 
‘Yes yes.’

 
‘There are torments worse than hunger, puka. I can summon them with a word.’ She brandished her staff as she made the threat. ‘Answer me without evasion, plainly. Where is the boy who fled here with the witch’s ring?’

 
‘Never saw. Saw track.’

 
‘His track in the snow?’

 
‘Yes yes.’

 
‘So you know where he has fled?’

 
‘Out. Past gate.’

 
‘Then why did you not pursue?’

 
‘In box.’

 
‘Box?’ she echoed, before she could stop herself.

 
‘Big box. Dead thing. Track to it. Not past.’

 
She straightened her shoulders as best she could. She would not allow her confusion to show. ‘Why do you not watch this . . . this box?’

 
‘You called.’

 
Most of all she hated its voice, the inflectionless grating croak that always sounded as if it hid contempt. She regretted having conjured such a thing into existence. But she had been alone and helpless, ignorant as a newborn, her staff not yet recalled from the sea; the mistake was pardonable.

 
‘You watched it until I called? Just these last minutes?’

 
‘Cold. Cruel wind. Long watch.’

 
‘And saw nothing?’

 
‘Nothing in. Nothing out. Only snow,
kkraaaa
.’

 
‘Then why—’ She pressed her lips closed, swallowed, coughed. She must not ask weak questions, as though she were helpless without it and the dryad. She must not let it think that. Know that.

 
She began again, choosing her question carefully. ‘What of my familiar?’

 
‘Stuck,’ it said.

 
She shook snowflakes from the lank tangle of her hair. The beast stared back at her, passionless.
Stuck?

 
‘Repeat yourself.’

 
‘Stuck.’

 
‘Explain yourself!’

 
‘Stuck. Can’t go.’

 
‘The familiar?’

 
‘Yes yes.’

 
‘What has halted it?’

 
‘Holly.’

 
‘What?’ she blurted. Her foolish woman’s mouth. She bit her lip, anger rising, as it repeated its answer.

 
‘Holly.’ As though she were deaf, or stupid.

 
‘You tell me the dryad has . . .’

 
Impeded her. Betrayed her. She could scarcely believe it. She would have suspected the puka of some trick, but it was not capable of lying, and both question and answer had been without ambiguity. She stared at it with loathing.

 
These abortions. These spirits forced, at her will, through the passage she commanded, by the virtue of the ring, into substantial flesh; these miscreations whose only reason for existence was to do her bidding, how had they so much as conceived of defiance, let alone dared to defy her?

 
‘Where,’ she croaked, ‘is the dryad?’

 
‘Gate.’

 
It had been a bad mistake. Awaking from death, in a dark chamber of a dying world, she had reached out with the power of the ring and acted on an impulse of fear instead of wisdom. The servants she had conjured were poorly chosen. Puka and dryad, lesser spirits, mere exhalations of the crude earth. They should have been as far beneath the notice of the greatest magus in the world as the filth of a midden. She should have left them insubstantial.

 
It was past time to show them what obedience meant.

 
‘Follow,’ she ordered. The puka ought to witness what she would do. When the ring had been recovered from the Cathay brat, there would be ample time to look around and choose her attendants more wisely. And meanwhile the familiar at least would obey, as that fiery spirit always had, bound to the staff she had summoned back from the seabed. Though it had found flesh without her knowledge or her choosing, it was the same spirit and served her still. It had dedicated itself to her service long ago. It had not even named its payment.

 
(Unaccountably, she shuddered. Corbo let out a soft rattle behind her,
krkrkrrr
.)

 
The crow-beast stalked behind her as she staggered to the woods. Perhaps she should have ordered the old man to clear a path through the snow, but he appeared even feebler than she was, good for nothing but slumping in his chair with his dead eyes, only animated when he wept for the girl he called his daughter or appealed to the once-woman with a name that was not now hers and pleaded for things she could not understand. She struggled along until she gained the cover of the trees. There the way became somewhat easier and she could raise her head and stride more purposefully up towards the gate, or at least as purposefully as her woman’s flesh allowed. The puka’s silence behind her was like a laugh behind a raised hand.

 
She thought, I must regain the ring. Only let me be the keeper of the doorway to the eternally living realm and all obstructions will melt away as easily as these snowflakes on the back of my hand.

 
But as she ploughed through the deeper snow towards the house by the gate, the sight and sound she met there drove all assurance away.

 
The sound came first, a muffled thrashing and a stifled rolling growl like faraway thunder. She saw the gruesome outline of the form the dryad inhabited, one of its limbs pressed to the whitened ground. Beneath that limb writhed a snarling black blur.

 
‘Stuck,’ Corbo explained behind her, unnecessarily. ‘Strong arm.’

 
The woman who was no woman was for a few moments speechless and motionless with astonished rage.

 
‘A boy,’ the dryad sang out. She heard it easily though it was facing away. ‘A small boy, and out of his way. Your beast bared its teeth, Master. Must more necks be broken?’

 
Its wheedling unlocked the anger that had frozen her tongue. ‘Release it!’ she screeched. At once the limb curled up and the black dog sprang out of its cavity in the snow like shot from an arquebus, scattering white spray.

 
‘Master—’

 
‘Do not speak! Do not move! I forbid—’ She gagged on her fury and bent, coughing. The dog let out a brutish growl, shaking snow from its head. Its legs sank deep. It came to her in short leaps. She gathered her breath, almost as furious at the weakness that left her spluttering and crouching in front of these inferior things as she was at their treachery. Her familiar twisted its sleek muscled bulk around her legs, flame like drops of orange quicksilver spilling from its mouth and leaving dark stains in the snow.

 
‘Saved a life,’ Corbo muttered.

 
She turned to it, slowly. Her breath was racing.

 
‘What do you know,’ she began, ‘of human life?’

 
‘Short,’ it began. ‘Hungry—’

 
‘Silence!’

 
The beak-mouth snapped shut.

 
It deserved nothing from her except commands, yet she could not help herself. She spoke slowly, tightly, her shoulders shaking. ‘You.’ She pointed a thin finger at the puka, then jabbed it at the dryad behind. ‘You . . . creatures. Are nothing. Dirt. In the great order of creation you stand scant rungs above mere vacuum. I raised you. I gave you body.’ The finger curled to her own chest, where the ring had hung. ‘I did! I gave you mouth and limbs. I elevated you to substance and speech. You may not—’ Her voice rose to a horrible squawk; she choked it, forcing herself to maintain the dignity of a master before his servants. ‘You may not question me. You may not judge what I do, nor presume to speak of life to me. Silence!’ The jutting mouth had opened. ‘Listen!’

 
Gathering herself, she approached the dryad through the churned snow. Its two long limbs trembled and flexed, then swung suddenly, so fast that Corbo shuffled back with a startled caw. But they could not strike the once-woman. They swept up at her sides and came to rest above, barbed shadows against the sky.

 
‘A mere boy.’ Holly’s whisper might have melted ice. ‘An innocent.’

 
The woman who was no woman had expected wheedling and pleading. Long experience had taught her how such beings would beg for the things they had forfeited, or avoid the things they promised. She was becoming colder by the minute. She had no time for it.

 
She spoke the word that named the dryad, which she had learned as she wore the ring on her finger, and would not now forget. The tree wavered as if the earth it stood in had quaked.

 
‘Hear your punishment.’ She hated her tongue’s clumsiness. Her man’s mouth would have delivered the judgement with august finality. She sounded instead like a cackling witch in a stroller’s play. ‘I gave you those arms and that mouth. You used them to defy me.’

 
‘Holly hauled down the hunter. Never you said—’

 
‘Be still!’ It came out as a bark. By what corruption of the natural order did this mannequin think it had the right to argue with its maker? ‘You know the familiar serves me. You were not free to let the boy escape it. I will remind you of it for ever. You will not leave the spot where you chose insurrection. Your roots sink, now, and fasten you here.’ Holly quivered again, stretched its neck up, the mouth working in silent agony. ‘You will see, and speak, and raise your abominable limbs to the heavens. The earth will feed this body I gave you. You will live for ever within it and never move. You will remain always what you are now.’

 
A long, bitter groan came from behind her,
kraaaaa
. The sentence enacted, she turned to go.