"My birds gave me the idea," said Ruby. "For the make-up, I mean. I thought the charade might appeal to you."
Carnival's fists tightened around the bars of her prison. Dawn had come outside her cell; she could feel it in her howling blood, in the creaking chains around the house. The coming night would be the last before darkmoon.
"But you never submitted until tonight," the witch went on. "You always fled before I could tempt you into my cage." She toyed with the ribbon in her hand. "Year after year after year, you'd come whenever the wind made my crystal garden sing, but you wouldn't stay." She gave a small shrug. "Over the centuries I've gotten to know you quite well, dear, although you never did remember me."
"Liar."
"Tush. A couple of half truths here and there, perhaps. My only real lie was the claim that I could make you beautiful." Her violet eyes were smiling. "Not even I can do that, child."
Carnival said nothing.
"Shall we have that tea now?" Ruby said cheerfully.
She placed the kettle over the fire, then left the room while it warmed, returning a few minutes later with a porcelain pot and two cups on a tray. She moved out of sight.
Carnival slumped to the ground.
The witch was fussing about at her desk, humming to herself, clinking crockery. "You brought such shame upon our family. Upon
Him
! The Church can ignore a witch when it suits them... but you? No, you can't be tolerated. Not even by yourself." She appeared before the bars again, stirring her tea with a small black key. "Would you like a cup, dear?"
Carnival wondered if it would be poisoned.
Ruby said, "I nearly caught you in... When was it? The sixth century. That's right... when you weren't quite so inhuman. You asked me your mother's name." She took a sip of tea. "But it would have been improper to tell you. Some part of that scarred brain of yours might remember, and I believe we should retain a little of our dead, not just from God, but from demons too. Are you sure you won't have a cup?"
The angel studied the bars of her prison – too thick to bend, perhaps, and certainly too narrow for her wings to pass through the gaps between. She wandered around the cell, looking at the floor, ceiling and walls.
All brick.
The witch sipped her tea again. "I think you ought to look at yourself in the mirror," she said. "You might be pleasantly surprised."
Carnival could feel her scars throbbing under the make-up on her face, her blood tearing through her veins. The dressing table stood to one side of the grate, the mirror angled away from her.
She turned it towards her.
The face which looked back was a mask of waxy paint, as white as a Spine assassin's, or a skull. It had dark, murderous eyes outlined by vulgar smears of brown paint, which had run and made streaks across its cheeks. The lips were blood-coloured and thickly distorted, the corners blurred into a hideous, lunatic grimace.
She let out a wail of anguish.
"My my," said Ruby.
The angel smashed the mirror with her fist. She kicked the dressing table savagely, reducing it to shards of wood. She fell to her knees and beat at the broken pieces with both clenched hands.
Ruby set down her cup. "I'll leave you now," she said, "and let you ponder all of this."
Carnival threw herself at the grate, clawing at the air through the bars, but the witch just smiled and said, "Let me know when you're ready for some tea, dear."
Carnival slunk back, hissing. She twisted round and round. And then she punched the wall, hard. Crumbs of brickwork fell to the floor. She gnashed her teeth, flexed her shoulders, and flung open her wings. Again she drove her fist into the wall, and again and again and again. More fragments of brick crumbled.
Ruby's violet eyes shone with amusement.
The angel paused, sucking air through her teeth, summoning every fibre of her hatred and rage, letting it twist inside her.
Then she attacked her prison. She pummelled and clawed at the brickwork. Her nails broke. She saw flashes of blood, dust, grit. Her knuckles and fingers shattered, but she ignored the pain – the bones in her hands would heal soon enough. Fury crowded everything from her sight but the bricks before her and the frenzied blur of her fists.
Through the choking air she glimpsed sunlight.
She had made an opening.
She pushed a hand through, grabbed the edge of a brick and heaved. Rubble crashed to the floor, billowing out thicker clouds of dust. The hole had widened. Carnival kicked at the surrounding bricks. A window-sized section of the wall fell away. Sunshine flooded in, blinding her.
The witch coughed. "Dear me," she said, nonchalantly.
For a moment Carnival could see nothing but a blaze of white light streaming through the dust. She screwed her eyes shut and reached through the hole in the wall she'd made. Her fingers closed around a metal bar.
The room had been built inside a cage.
Ruby was still coughing. "I'm sorry, dear," she said. "But I became aware of your penchant for demolition a long time ago. The temple sappers were kind enough to reinforce my dressing room for me. Both the cage and its locks are made of sapperbane, quite strong enough to hold you for all eternity."
Through her black rage, Carnival sought the source of the voice. She couldn't see anything through the roiling clouds, yet the witch sounded nearer than she had been a moment before.
How close was Ruby to the cell door?
Not close enough. Carnival could not hope to reach through the bars and grab her. Unless...
The angel held her breath, and then reached around behind her own shoulder. Her fingers touched hard muscle, tendons, feathers. She felt for the place where her wing sprouted from her back. Then she gripped the bone and broke it.
Blind and snarling, she charged at the place where the voice had been. Her shoulders slammed against metal. The grate? She cried out in pain. Twisting, she forced herself between the bars, her broken wing hanging loosely behind her back. Agony tore through her chest. She felt her ribs snap. She pushed harder. Lacking the strength to break her cage, she broke herself instead.
Carnival would heal.
The angel groped around her. Her fingers brushed the witch's wrist.
She grabbed it.
Ruby screamed.
Carnival put her boot against the iron bars and pulled. She felt the old woman's shoulder dislocate. Then she heard a snap, fabric ripping, followed by a softer, rending sound. Warm liquid spattered her face. Still the witch shrieked and gibbered. Carnival reached back through the grate. She groped the wet floorboards until she found a stockinged foot. It tried to struggle, pull away from her, but Carnival held on firmly.
Snow lay thickly over the forest of the third hound. The trees seemed even older and more twisted here, furred with hoarfrost. Overhead, an inkscrawl of black branches patterned the eggshell sky. Sal Greene's boots creaked as he walked ahead of his two companions.
"You seem much keener than before to reach my master's domain, Mr Greene."
"No point mucking around," the prospector replied. “If we're going to find the heart of the beast, then let's get it done quickly. I only hope your master isn't as fussy as he was the last time. Clock's ticking, Cope."
Even Ravencrag seemed to have resigned himself to Greene's determination. He kept pace with the other men, although his scowl looked like it could have pickled cabbage.
They walked for several minutes before Greene became aware of a crimson glow in the forest ahead. A mist? He sniffed the air, and a feeling of sickness crept over him.
Cope said, "The Forest of–"
"I know," Greene snapped. "I know what it is."
It was a forest of corpses. Like the edge of a shore, the snow ended and a land of blood began. Ahead of them the ground glistened red. Trees of bone and flesh grew from this mire, all gangrenous and rotten. Every bole and bough bore a wound of some description, as though the trees had been set upon by an army of butchers. The whole forest was bleeding.
Ravencrag's stomach bucked.
"
This
is heart of the demon?" said Greene.
The thaumaturge's eyes were wide with wonder. "The strongest aspect of Basilis to survive intact," he confirmed. "This is the heart of Ayen's Lord of Warfare. Is it not glorious?"
To a carrion crow, perhaps.
The prospector left this thought unvoiced. He did not want to converse any further with Othniel Cope.
"I can't do it." Ravencrag spat and wiped his mouth. "Gods help me, Sal, don't make me go in there."
"What did you expect?" snarled Greene. "Daisies?"
The phantasmacist heaved again.
Greene growled and cricked his neck. "You and me, then, Cope." He set off into the crimson woodland.
They marched through red mulch until their boots were sodden. The ground rose and soon became treacherously slippery. It squelched under his boots. To Greene's disgust he was forced to clutch at flesh and bone in order scramble up the worst of it. Maggots infested the roots. Ribbons of fluid trickled and gurgled all around him. He spied veins in the pallid earth and veins in the branches. The stench was so rich that it coated his tongue and cloyed at his throat.
Cope seemed unaffected by the forest; indeed, the thaumaturge appeared to delight in the wonders around him. With passion he said, "Basilis will steer us, as he did in the Forest of Teeth."
"Steer us to what?"
"To the part of him he wishes us to retrieve."
Greene decided he'd rather not know. Unease crawled over his skin. If this rancid woodland represented the heart of Basilis, how could he, in good conscious, set the foul thing free? He thought of Cope's dog, that mangy, defenceless pup they'd left in Mina's care. The branch had granted the mutt vision. The sword had given it teeth. Yet this last forest was a place of muscle and bone. What monstrous thing would Mina's pet become?
Finally the slope levelled. They crested a ridge from where the prospector could gaze far across the landscape ahead.
Red trees stretched to the horizon under a white sky. The forest glistened like a sea of rubies. In the far distance, phantasms swooped and glided on translucent wings, their torsos scintillating gold as though clad in brilliant armour. Angels? They flocked around ivory-coloured hillocks which rose in places between the trees.
Greene halted, panting, almost driven to despair by this hellish vision. His topcoat hem and sleeves were greasy, clotted with scraps of gore. Liquid sloshed within his boots. He felt something wriggling between his toes.
Othniel Cope made an observation: "My master's pets have been busy making nests."
"The flying things?"
The thaumaturge nodded. "Once they were the memories of warriors who attended Ayen's court, but they have since become something else. Basilis has long forgotten Heaven."
Greene continued to survey the landscape. "How far does the forest stretch?"
"It goes on forever, Mr Greene."
"Then I need a break. Forever is a long way."
They rested under the boughs of a gigantic corpse tree. Sap trickled from a score of puncture wounds and other lesions, gathering in hollows between the roots. Four yards above the ground a deep gash had cleft the trunk open, revealing corrugated muscles, and three white, rib-like protrusions. Greene leaned against the tree, but recoiled when the bark trembled. He heard insects crawling inside.
By the time they set off again, the prospector felt no less wearier than before. They moved downhill, into the vast wet woodland. With no sun to keep them travelling in a constant direction, Cope consulted his branch frequently, making alterations to their route when necessary. For a while they followed the course of a stinking brook in which white nodules floated, fording it eventually where it widened and became shallow.
Later, Greene saw a ghostly figure watching them from among the trees. He grabbed the thaumaturge and pointed toward the apparition.
"It's dead," said Cope. "The dead have no power here."
"I wish Ravencrag was here to see it."
"Instead of you?"
"Naturally."
The sky darkened; gloom crept into the Forest of War. The phantasms appeared more frequently, but they never moved, simply stood in silence and watched the two travellers pass by. Greene's revulsion did not waver. Each footstep he took was one too many. His instincts rejected this weird place: the sky which was not sky, the odours from the weeping trees, and the suck and slurp of the red morass under his boots.
Finally the thaumaturge signalled for him to stop. They had reached the edge of another clearing, somewhat brighter than the surrounding woodland. Narrow vein-like roots radiated from the centre of this space, where, like some hideous tuber, grew a beating heart.
Cope brought out the sword from the Forest of Teeth, and then crouched to inspect the roots. After a long moment he frowned. "This is extremely complex. I shall have to make many delicate cuts. It seems that the heart is quite intricately connected to the forest."
"Let me," said Greene. He reached for the sword.
The thaumaturge shook his head. "You have already injured my master enough."
Greene sighed. "Suit yourself. But I reckon it's going to hurt him whichever way we do it. I'm of the school that thinks it's better to get the pain over with quick, rather than suffer prolonged agony. But that's just me. Basilis might prefer you to sever his veins nice and slow."
Cope's throat bobbed.
"Let me just stand back a yard or two," added Greene. "I don't want to be in the way when the spurting starts."
The thaumaturge's face had paled. He stared at the sword, and then at the network of red roots spreading across the ground. "Perhaps you're right, Mr Greene," he said. "After all, your blunt approach has already freed two of my master's aspects. I wouldn't want to cause Basilis any unnecessary pain."
The prospector held out his hand.
Cope handed him the sword.
Green killed the man with a thrust to the back of the neck. The thaumaturge's body toppled forward to the ground.
"Sorry, Cope," muttered the prospector. "In a fair fight you might've beaten me. I got my family to think of."
He'd weighed it up all the way through the long trek through the Forest of War. To kill Carnival, he'd have to release Basilis. But why replace one monster with another?
And now he had little Mina to think of. Basilis would remember his humiliation at the hands of the Greene's granddaughter.
The penultimate Scar Night of the year was due, and the old man had come to accept that he would probably die. But Ellie still had fifty years to sell the house in Lye Street and leave town. They could start a new life in Sanpah or Clune. At least there they'd have a future.
He wiped the blade clean on Cope's topcoat, then strode towards the beating heart of Ayen's Lord of Warfare. All around, ghostly figures had appeared among the corpse trees, hundreds of them. They looked on in silence.
The old prospector raised his sword above the heart. "Time to die, you bastard."
Whirling smoke claimed him before the blade fell.