I might have laughed myself sick at that; but nothing in that harsh corvine croak made laughter possible. I believed him, and that belief sank down around me with the stifling weight of a leaden cover, of unimaginable responsibilities. He seemed
to see that, and smirked.
‘All this suggested, shall we say, an avenue, through which you might be of service to me. The forces involved were so great I could not be sure of handling them myself. That was what brought me here, to find an ally sufficiently powerful and knowledgeable, in its way. The price was high, perhaps, but the benefits were great, and the potential triumph …’ He closed his eyes and shivered, and crooned softly. I remembered him making the same noise over a seagull he was about to use in a cruel spell.
‘Vast!’
‘And Lutz?’ I demanded, watching for an instant when his vigilance might slip, feeling as if I really did stand astride that unsteady balance. ‘Where did he come in?’
Le Stryge twitched his lips contemptuously. ‘The Herr Baron von Amerningen? Through my new ally, as you suspect. He was already a rising adept and as viciously ambitious as such creatures tend to be. Some of his companies dealt with your business already. It was easy to improve the acquaintance, and when you launched this absurd money-grubbing scheme of yours I instructed him to become one of its backers and draw you into his circles. He seemed quite surprised when it began to make him money.’
I nodded. ‘He would. Maybe I do owe you one thing, Stryge. I’ve always wondered how an ageing playboy with an inherited business and about as much vision as a blind slug ever had enough faith in my idea. It worried me, at times. Now I know it was pure accident.’
Le Stryge chuckled. ‘An apt description. Yes, he found you hard work, I believe. When he failed to corrupt you indirectly I grew impatient, seeking to gain a more direct hold over you and try the power I suspected. Luring you, with your straggling romantic notions, to the margins of the Heilenthal was easy enough, only those idiot Knights interfered, and you broke free somehow. Completely, I feared; I frightened von Amerningen into making a more direct approach, to lure you here. And then,
potz sapermentz
, some mischance or other alerts you against him and the idiot panics and tries to kill you!’ He struck his brow. ‘You, upon whom my whole scheme hung! I
was quite hard put to it to forestall him.’
A great light dawned. ‘So it was
you
who intervened on the
Autobahn?
That truck?’
‘A sending, to save your life. Still more obligation, if I chose to claim it.’
‘When you endangered me in the first place? Bugger that!’
‘I? You would have been in danger anyway, believe me. Nothing you do, no idea you have, is truly called coincidental; it is all part of your self, your personality, and its potential. That was why I needed you for the task, knowing that you were the only ordinary human who could touch the weapon without dire peril. And you still don’t know why, do you?’ He chuckled, and his fingers wove a distracting pattern in the air. ‘If I tell you now, you …’
He paused, and looked up expectantly, as if he somehow heard something over that horrendous babel. The moment his eyes were off me, I lunged.
Not fast enough. Warped branches that hadn’t been there a moment before were suddenly whipping forward as if a gale bent them; they lashed painfully at my arms, my ankles, around my bruised side. Straight thorns sank deep into my flesh. They tangled around me and tightened, till my feet left the ground and my breathing was constricted. Only my hand with the Spear was left free; they wouldn’t go anywhere near that. But I couldn’t move it enough to do anything, even to touch the wood; it might if I let it fall, but I wasn’t about to risk that. I struggled uselessly, gasping; I could barely twist around enough to see the others just as entangled. I seethed bitterly at my own stupidity. With Le Stryge nothing had only one purpose. Those extravagant gestures, perhaps some of his very words, had been the subtle medium for some kind of spell. ‘So it was all a ploy!’ I choked. ‘The goading, the threats – just to hold us while you worked up all this! All those carefully measured revelations—’
The old man made a modest
moue.
‘But naturally. Even honesty has its uses, and truth can be turned to account. Nothing less than frankness would have held you. Why else should I bother to reveal anything? Now be quiet, or you will suffer more greatly.’ As a swirling streak of lost souls reeled away towards the heights again I heard what he’d heard – a deep buzzing drone in the air somewhere very close, too quiet to be a helicopter.
Stryge unfolded himself and hopped nimbly
down from his perch. ‘That will be the other airship.’
‘What
?’ yelled Alison.
‘The
Raven
, I believe you call it. Please do not trouble yourselves with hope; it bears only my followers. For this’, he drew a deep breath, ‘this is the real fulfilment of my plan.’
Alison sagged in that cruel grasp, and closed her eyes. Le Stryge evidently saw no need to explain any further, but she seemed to guess just what the old beast meant; and I had the awful feeling I was beginning to see it, too. I struggled against the entangling, trying to ignore the pain and the little patches of stickiness starting as the thorns punctured clothes and skin. An instant’s hope burgeoned as the branches beside me heaved and seemed about to loosen; but it was Mall, with all her great strength, barely tearing free an arm. She shouted with raw triumph, and for an instant it looked as if she would explode out of the entwining mass; but Le Stryge’s cold gaze lit upon her, and suddenly her struggles seemed diminished, her achievement useless. I saw her hand sag. He gave that straight-lipped little smirk. ‘Ah, madam! However hot the flames within you, in this place they are all but quenched. I know you, I have seen you; and I am greater than you.’
‘You sawn-off little ratfink!’ yelled Jyp, flailing against his own bonds. ‘You’re no greater’n all shit, y’ hear?’
‘You are scarcely equipped to judge, Pilot,’ said the little man imperturbably. ‘But even you can perceive the scale of the force that dwells here – and the power of the Brocken, remember, is mine. It will become more so, as only through me it achieves its ancient ends, which began when the first men spread across this land in the wake of the retreating Ice. Then … ah, yes, then!’ His chilly eyes became gloating suddenly. ‘A new Master is about to emerge.’
Jyp stared, and I understood what had struck him. That wasn’t at all like the old Stryge, austere and cruel but never betraying such bare ambition. He was a monster, in his way; but this was Le Stryge plus something else, and far, far worse. This was a devouring devil. And yet obscurely, impossibly, I found myself pitying him.
The airship was circling now, easing
in towards the landing shelf with a hesitant care that made me realize just how good Jyp and Alison had been at piloting it. Le Stryge nodded, amused; he seemed to be thinking the same. ‘You have talents, abilities beyond the common, all of you. That is my only reason for keeping you alive. It would be criminal to let such gifts perish needlessly. Therefore, if you do not all wish to be thrown away and wasted utterly, if you wish some tiny shred of your individuality and identity to remain, then you would do well to hold yourself in readiness and accept what comes. Remember, I am not a sadistic little idiot like that fool Don Petro. I will rule, not despoil.’
I looked at him; and I remembered his dark brand of magic, the awful familiars in human form he kept and the black suspicions of how he’d come by them, the murderous cold wrath he’d more than once displayed. And now, I guessed, he was hardly more himself than Don Petro had been; he’d plunged too deeply into dark waters, and been overwhelmed. Like so many others I’d encountered, he’d made what he thought was an alliance and turned out to be servitude. It was the mysterious creature of this mountain, wherever it dwelt, that looked out from behind those eyes now, as much as the man himself. The fate he was predicting he had already met himself. He’d swallowed fire in order to breathe it, and become the first to burn.
There was no need to ask what that force would do; the example was all around us. A degradation and depravity beyond ordinary comprehension, almost infantile in its viciousness; that was what the alliance of these two dark minds would create. No doubt they meant to spread it, too. Now I could guess the point of Lutz’s neo-Nazi links, and the Children of Night fomenting riot and murder in a peaceful demonstration. Their corrupting purpose would spread like gangrene from country to country by that kind of means, by old suspicions and hatreds inflamed, by war even. I could just imagine that cold face gloating over the aftermath of a battle or a brisk bout of ethnic cleansing, then stirring up the losers to return the favour, until in the end the whole human race was swept up. A fate like Katjka’s, with no chance to fly from it—
Like Katjka’s. Voices rode the air, tearing at my ears.
The winds are scarcely merciful. And they are never still.
The image was bitter in my mind, bitter and terrible; I hardly dared confront it. Katjka dangling over that impossible gulf, with the creatures of the winds plucking at her like sharks at a struggling swimmer, and that fearful blend of
terror and longing distorting her face.
But me – leave me where I belong!
Her hand, slipping away from mine. Her shape whirling away, barely visible against the smoke and the glare. The creatures hadn’t pulled her down. It was Katjka herself. Even after centuries of remorse the things she had done, the unhallowed pleasures she’d taken in them, those had weighed her down. The remembered lure, the scarred self-image; they had made her want to fall. As a dog returns to his vomit, the addict to his drug, pleasure and punishment together; and if only I’d understood I might have reached out more than a hand to her, more than merely physical support. But there hadn’t been time. It was too late.
Was it – entirely?
I reached out with my free hand, my Spear hand, straining hard against the binding withies; but my arm was still held down. Le Stryge glared at me; but after a second he laughed contemptuously, and turned away to watch the other airship wobble in to land. In my heart I knew he was right; alone, unaided, I couldn’t shift anything. I needed something extra, something that came from within, I needed to burst into flame like Mall—
I twisted violently about to catch her eye, but her head sagged, and I didn’t dare make a noise in case Le Stryge noticed. Desperately I willed her to just glance my way, even for an instant; but deep gouges on her neck and arm leaked blood over the thorns, and her hair overhung her face. Softly I pursed my lips and blew; the curls stirred, and I caught a flash of green. But beneath it, on her cheek, I saw something that shocked me more deeply, a single smudged streak. On her?
Mall?
I mouthed at her, furiously, praying she wouldn’t make a sound. Her eye was dull and dazed, as if the weight of this place had settled on her more heavily. But she seemed to understand what I was saying, because slowly, hesitantly, she burrowed her free arm back into the branches again, wincing as the thorns pawed at her. But she kept it coming, until there was a stirring in the branches that caged me, and her strong bony fingers entwined with mine and held fast. I clenched my grip, pulled myself as close as I could, feeling my own neck savaged, and risked the faintest of whispers.
‘Fire, Mall! That can save us …’
The answer came softer still, barely
a breath.
‘Stephen, heart, I have none – darker and older than mine, these flames here – alone I cannot assail them – I am embers …’
‘But you’re not alone! With Katjka the flame changed – and with the Graal! He said I was kindled! Mall, woman –
kindle me!’
Her jaw dropped; but her eye glittered with green mischief, and her fingers clamped so hard on mine I almost yelled. ‘I’ love o’ God’s will!’ she murmured. ‘Will the man never stop trying!’ And, wonder of wonders, she chuckled; and yet in that chuckle I sensed something else, and at last I begun to understand what fired her spirit.
It was nothing I hadn’t felt in myself often, only enlarged and broadened by century upon century of bruising life. Anger seethed and bubbled till at last it boiled dry; and the residue was laughter. Laughter at cruelty, laughter at crime unpunished, laughter at the torment of the weak, laughter at injustice, laughter at fear and agony and the final devastating kicks of destiny. Laughter, because tears were helpless; tears were defeat. A laughter that scraped against anger like a match against a wall, that left a trail of stinging sparks and finally, when it seemed there could be no more, struck a flame within the mind, pure and sharp and cleansing. In a lifetime you might see no more than a glitter in the eye, a piercing brightness to a sudden glance; but Mall had known many lifetimes, and her laughter could make the corners of the wide world ring.
She laughed silently now, but the tremor of it passed through her grip to me. My own swelled up in answer, till holding it back strained my ribs and brought me near to choking. Jyp was laughing too, with the cold manic glitter his eyes wore in a fight; and he was staring at me. So was Alison, where it should have been Mall they watched; because there was a light in her eye again, a flash in her sudden grin, a swift transparency under her face as if the bones had turned to frozen milk. Her hair stirred and heaved, and I felt my own scalp crawl as I watched it lift and billow in some private wind of its own, some interplay of vast forces from the margins of human experience. Yet they were still staring at me – her too. I struggled to point; then I understood. In front of my eyes, over the back of that hand sparks were passing, little crackling arcs, not blue like Mall’s, but yellow, golden even. And they ran along the
Spear, right to its tip.
Then I laughed aloud. The golden fire blazed up in blinding corona, and hurled a long black shadow of Le Stryge upon the ground. He turned quickly, only to hide his eyes and howl. ‘Idiot! That will avail you nothing! You will only summon worse!’