The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (30 page)

“A river. And navigable,” Idas pointed out grimly. “We could have saved ourselves the walk. My feet are blistered on those blasted rocks.” He held up his ruined sandals.

“The river isn’t marked,” Jason said. “There must be a reason for it. This place is not meant for visitors.”

“Maybe so. But send for Argo. I don’t want to walk all the way back.”

Jason suddenly held up his hand. “Do you sense it?”

“Sense what?” asked Tisaminas.

“We’re being watched.”

“From where?”

“From somewhere—up there, on the mountainside. Well, well. Closer than we’d realised.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Shaper

There was often movement on the tracks that wound around the base of his mountain, cutting though the woods and leading along the river, so the file of men moving purposefully below him did not alarm him.

They were almost certainly hunters, though their tunics—dark red on black—were not the familiar colour of the hunting parties that scoured these hills and forests for the rich and complex game that could be stalked there. And something else about them was odd, yet he couldn’t see it. They carried spears and bows; and they were not looking up towards the false cave that hid the deeper cavern. They were minding their own business.

To be on the safe side, though, he sent the high call to two of his guardian dogs. Their long, lean wooden backs rose above the undergrowth as they untwined themselves from their sleeping curl. Bronze muzzles turned briefly towards the cave, then lowered again as the two beasts began to slink towards the track, one ahead of the band, one to its rear. They would not attack unless the men left the path.

Satisfied with this, Shaper turned his attention back to the task ahead.

At the first streak of dawn, he had seen fire fall from the sky. It had descended to the west, flaming through the darkness, so straight for most of its fall that he had decided it was, indeed, only a shooting star. But then it had curved towards him, seemed to shake in the gloom as it approached the early morning light, before vanishing into the dawn shadow of the land.

Raptor’s accuracy, casting these discs from wherever in the Middle Realm he had landed, was getting more accurate, but more risky. Whatever was happening up there, beyond vision, beyond comprehension, there was clearly a sense of urgency about these later falls.

All around the island, the seabed was scattered with Raptor’s earliest attempts. The mountains in the far west still contained hundreds of the discs that Shaper had never been able to find. That was the country where Queller held power, though, and it was always hard to enter her brute-howling heartlands to recover the bronze plates.

Now Shaper walked back through the mountain, through the winding passage that skirted the central cavern and emerged facing exactly towards the midwinter setting sun.

He pulled his pack across his shoulders, selected a strong staff to support his descent, and a small cage of bees. Alerted to the task ahead, the small creatures began to stretch their wings. The cage rattled with the impact of their small bronze faces and their crystal-faceted eyes. Then they settled.

When he reached the bottom of the mountain, Shaper released his scouts, and the bees buzzed away in a flicker of light and colour.

He continued to walk due west.

After a while, one of the bees returned, flew twice around his head before settling on the ground and beginning its curious, looping dance. After ten turns of the intricate pattern, Shaper knew where the disc had fallen. He changed his direction, and a while later could smell the burning of wood.

He found the disc embedded in the trunk of an aspen. Blackened from its descent from the heavens, a brisk polish with a cloth soon began to reveal the spiral of images on each side of the thin plate.

Shaper studied the figures and shapes for a long time. He recognised many of the forms, but there were new ones, too, and that meant more interpretation. More interpretation, yes, but therefore more knowledge of the Middle Realm.

And perhaps this time he might find the one message he had been longing for, the few images that he might interpret as his own name, and a cartouche of shapes in which he might find a message more personal to him from the boy he had trained to fly, and had lost in the final, brilliant flight.

He packed the disc carefully and turned back towards his mountain. One by one the bees found him and flew into their cage, settling quietly on the floor.

It was now well after noon, the sky darkening with clouds scudding in from the north and west. The forest was restless. His mountain loomed ahead of him, apparently no more than a wooded, rocky façade, though his trained eyes could see the shadow pattern where the small entrances and exits to the cavernous complex inside breathed in the fresh air, breathed out the damp of the rocks within. Like gills on a fish, these narrow crevices could close to the passerby, or open when wishing to attract and consume an unwary animal.

Animals!

The skin on his nape began to prickle, and the hundreds of tiny bronze hairs he had inserted on his back sent warning signals through his body, the rippling pattern of the sensation alerting him to the south and east.

Queller!

He had allowed his guard to fall. He had ventured west alone and unprotected. But she had not dispatched her monsters as far to the east as this for a generation or more. He could just hear the rasping movement of snakes, her favourite form of terror. But others of her fury-fashioned creations were moving stealthily through the trees.

He began to run. As he ran, he released the bees, all but one being sent to harass the approaching coils, jaws, and claws.

That single bee he sent to alert the hounds, and at the same time he began the high call, the silent whistle of summoning, though he suspected he was too far away from his fortress.

Running, then, he found new speed with the enhanced tendons and ligaments of his legs. He opened his heart and strengthened his spine. He closed off all unnecessary senses. The forest, streams, rocks, low cliffs, and tangles of thorns became smaller to him, and he wove his way through and over, heart pumping, sure-footed, head singing with the songs of distraction, a wailing mind-music that he laid behind him like a stunning, snaring trail: to confound and strike apprehension into Queller’s beasts.

He began to feel his great age.

Slumping down at a pool, he sucked in water to refresh and revive himself. As the surface calmed, he stared down at the sodden and lank grey hair that fell around his hollow, haunted face. His gaze was returned through eyes that were as bright as a child’s, but nothing other suggested anything else than time’s ruin. And then his face transformed into something simian, something blue, something out of nightmare: a fear-forged monstrosity, a nature’s child born from a twisted womb.

A Queller thing.

He was up at once and running again, but found himself scrambling up a steep incline, towards a ridge of granite. Too high! Too impenetrable!

He need not have worried.

Seven dark forms flew out across that ridge, the fading light catching on bronze and wood and the wet foam that streamed from their gaping mouths. His hounds had heard the call, heeded it, and now bounded into the tangle of cover, to howl and bay as they hunted and pursued the creatures that Queller had sent on this skirmish.

Shaper caught his breath, then slumped down against a hard rock, fingering the new disc through its pouch, glancing up at the first star, low on the horizon, the evening star, already bright.

The killing seemed to take an eternity, but soon five of his beasts came bounding back to him, torn, incised, scratched, covered in clinging ivy and snagging briar. They lay panting at his feet, staring at him hungrily for a while before busying themselves with tearing the thorns from their flesh, teasing the creeper from their bodies, jaw-working furiously to rid themselves of these natural pests.

“Well done,” Shaper whispered to each of them. “You got rid of her hideous inventions. Well done. Hers are too old. My new ones are stronger. Well done, my beasts. My star-fashioned beasts.”

Each in turn glanced at him affectionately before returning to its grooming.

Later, Shaper returned to the cave, his guardians snuffling and snarling their way behind him, scavenging for a little wild food—a
memory
of the wild, a mere illusion of wildness in their wood-and-metal bodies—before they returned to their stations. Shaper had made them well. In their quiet moments, away from their duties, they dreamed of the life in whose image they had been constructed.

Shaper returned to his chamber, his small shaping chamber close to the main cavern, and placed the disc on the polished stone surface where he worked. The phosphorescent light from the walls made the surface shine. The carved symbols in the walls of the chamber were reflected in shades of pink and green from the stone. The dark disc and its latest news drew him steadily downwards, downwards into its mysteries.

It was then that he heard the soft echo of footsteps, deeper in the mountain, and at once realised that his cavern had been entered and was being searched.

How could anyone have passed his guardians to get so close? What was happening? He had been taken by surprise for the second time in a day!

He ran softly to the entrance to the cavern. Five men were prowling through the mechanisms, swords bared, shields lowered, their hard faces etched with curiosity as they studied the strange forms around them. One, the tallest and most authoritative, was spinning the rack of discs and laughing as they made their low sounds.

These were five of the seven he had seen that morning. Not hunters at all. Adventurers. And now he realised what it was about them that distinguished them from the local people.

From the curious way they braided their hair, from the swords and round patterned shields they carried, they were Greeklanders.

*   *   *

They had patrolled the base of the mountain for the better part of the day, adopting the movements and postures of hunters, each in turn taking the opportunity to glance up at the cave, to assess the approach and the dangers that had been laid for them.

The path to the cave mouth was complex; Jason would have expected nothing more from the shaper of mazes. Lynceus with his sharper eyes constructed a mental map of the convoluted approach. The measure of the dangers awaiting them became obvious soon enough, when two bronze-and-cedar-wood hounds, snarling and fierce, pounded into the group, intent on savaging the intruders.

Flame-hardened Iophestos knew about metals. He had been apprenticed in the forges of Haephestus before following a dream-call to join the Argonauts on the Quest of the Fleece. Whilst working at the forges, Haephestus’s favourite apprentice had collapsed in the heat and spilled molten bronze onto his stomach. Iophestos had scooped the deadly metal from the boy, flung it into the flames, before opening one of the water sluices, cooling the wounds on the boy and on his own hands.

As thanks, Haephestus had made Iophestos’s hands capable of melting bronze by touch alone. The leather-skinned man now flung himself at each beast in turn and fused the gaping muzzles.

After that it was easy to twist a sword through the wooden skin of each hound to the sapwood heart.

Other terrors awaited the Argonauts as they ascended the mountain, but these men had vanquished the so-called
harpies,
those stinking reptilian flying creatures that had tormented poor, blind Phineus, thus earning the Argonauts the final directions in their Quest for the Fleece; they had defeated the army of the Dead that had sprung from King Aeetes’s “dragon’s teeth,” as they had fled from Colchis, Medea and the fleece in their possession; they had outsung the singing heads in the groves of the Hercynians, cut down the Teutonean
Ig’Drasalith
before those monsters could uproot, in the forests at the source of the river Daan; to these men, then, the devices of the “shaping man” seemed simple and crude, though not without a certain charm.

Imagination had gone into their making. But they were no match for Jason and his half-human retinue, though they had delivered mortal wounds to Acastus and Meleager.

“Just like old times,” Jason had breathed, with a smile, as he and his crew reached the rim of the cave.

Now they prowled the Shaper’s realm, bemused and amused by the towering figures and strange mechanisms that filled the cavern. Some of these forms were designed for flying, some for walking. Shaped wood and hammered bronze abounded, but there were eyes made of many facets of crystal, in faces that had more in common with dragonflies than hounds. And half limbs, and whole limbs, and the heat from fires contained within bulbous cauldrons, narrowed at the top.

The discs fascinated Jason. As he spun them around, they made a sound, deep and mellow, like a voice heard in a distant dream. There were racks of them. They were suspended in such a way that to spin one spun them all, and an eerie and unharmonious sound emerged for a few moments until they were still again. But in those few moments, when the cavern filled with the vibrant moaning, the mechanisms that surrounded them seemed to shudder, as if struggling for life.

“Haephestus’s hammer! What
are
these things?” Tisaminas breathed nervously.

Jason was thoughtful, examining several of the bronze plates in turn. “I don’t know. There are figures marked on them; some I recognise: men, a man walking, helmets, crests, ships, towers, constellations of stars. Others make my vision spin. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

“They are voices from a world beyond dreams.”

Jason turned, startled, as the words were whispered in his ear. Tisaminas and the others, too, had swung round, blades singing from sheaths, shields held before them defensively.

“Who’s there?” Jason demanded. There was a long silence. Then the same quiet voice, speaking in clipped syllables: “The collector of those voices. You have had a rare privilege, whoever you are. You have listened to the song of a world that exists, unseen and unknown, between the earth and the heavens.”