The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (33 page)

Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more obvious it became: Talienze was not like me, not like Medea, not of the oldest of the world: but he was a servant of that world.

He was constantly refashioned, given fresh life; a carving given a trim and a polish whenever its wood became soft and corrupt on the outside. The question, then, if I was right: Was he a creature of Shaper? Or of Queller? He might have been either.

I would travel as Skogen, I decided. The shadow of unseen forests. The memory of wood.

I summoned the mask, unable to stifle a cry, startled by the unexpected pain as the wood flowed into my face—that was something new! Then I summoned the form. And when I was shrouded in forest, I summoned the oak image of Segomas from Argo. The lost warrior crept quietly into one of my groves, found a place of security, and bound himself to the trunk of a tree. I could feel the pulse of his heart, the brew of his thoughts, the hope and fear at what he might find.

A dead man (whose name meant “victorious”) in tow, I began my journey across this secretive island.

*   *   *

I flowed over the hills, following the course of rivers, touching the caves and walled enclosures that appeared, suddenly and mysteriously, in some of the remotest of areas. Segomas had taken on a more human form, now, searching for his remains. He was lithe as he clambered over walls and ducked into the dark mouths of caverns.

When we engaged with another forest, we felt empowered, as if the living woods were giving succour to this ghostly echo briefly coexisting alongside it, moving steadily onwards.

We paused for a long while at the Dyctean cave. The scent of Queller was strong here, and there were echoes of younger creatures. Ahead, to the setting sun, stretched low hills, then grim mountains. But the youths could surely not have travelled so far in this short time.

Skogen turned to the south, and we began to search these closer hills.

Everywhere, fallen among the trees, slumped in forges, were the green, ruined giants, Shaper’s talosoi, the island’s guardians, from the time when he was strong. Their sad features were homes for birds and bats. Their outstretched hands were almost indistinguishable from the thick, mossy roots of trees. Had they all fallen together, I wondered, or had they fallen over time, each seeking out a place to die before collapsing with the groaning of forge-cast metal into their eternal slumber.

Home to birds and bats. It was Segomos who sensed in one these leviathans a different form of life.

Small, terrified life, hiding in the metal skull.

I would have shed Skogen at that point, but Segomos asked me not to. I wrapped the forest around the broken giant, and Segomos descended into one of the eyes, acting with a lack of caution that no Argonaut would have dared.

He emerged with one of the
kryptoii,
a boy called Maelfor, we found out. He was bleeding from the face and mouth, his clothes ragged, his hands filthy with earth and mould.

I manifested my form in the small grove. He seemed anxious for a few moments, then, peering more closely, recognised me and relaxed. Relief, indeed, made him sink suddenly to a sitting position, his battered head cradled in his arms, tears flowing quite freely.

When he had recovered a little, Segomos knelt down beside him. He’d found water, which he offered the lad in a piece of bowl-shaped bark; and grapes from the vineyard into which we had flowed. Ghostly though Skogen appeared, we could feed off the land through which we passed as shadow.

“Tell us what you know,” the Coritanian asked. “Where are the others? What happened? Tell us whatever you can.”

“I don’t know what to tell. Talienze had told us that we should scout the land for clues to the disaster on Alba. That our eyes and minds were sharp because freshly honed. That things hidden would be revealed. That we were to bring them back to Alba.

“We followed an old track for a day and half the night. It’s a bright moon at the moment. And our eyes soon got used to the dark. But soon after we’d settled for the night, the woman creature rode into our small camp. She was terrifying, wilder than any mourning woman in my land. She was straddling a wolf, or some creature like a wolf, the size of a horse. It ran at Talienze. He flung his cloak across its face and shouted to us to run. I don’t know what sorcery he used then, but he kept the woman at bay with astonishing fury. Fire and ice seemed to flare and freeze between them. He howled words that were meaningless. The woman was screeching, but her gaze, a terrible look, was on the group of us who were running.

“Talienze saved us. His last words were a scream of ‘Find a chamber! Find discs! Find Merlin!’

“His abilities were limited. He seemed to droop, and the wolf leapt at him and took him in its jaws, grabbed him by the throat and bounded away. He was very limp. The woman’s hair was long, like a cloak of flails, tipped with bone. She shook her head violently as she rode off, and the flails whirled about her.

“Then other creatures came, strange animals, neither wildcat nor hound. Kymon, Colcu, and I were making a better run of it, but Dunror and Elecu fell beneath the claws and were dragged away screaming.”

“What happened to Kymon and Colcu?” I asked.

“Lost on the hillside. We were hunted until the moon went down below the mountain. Then for a while we just ran. And the next night I slipped and tumbled into the ravine; I landed on the face of a giant metal man. I was able to hide there. He’s not hollow, but he has hollow parts to him. The creatures that pursued me prowled about the ravine until dawn. I suppose they hadn’t got my scent. I was too frightened to come out. There was a lot of movement in the metal man, from farther down. I didn’t care to find out what it was. That’s all I know until you found me.”

Queller had taken Talienze, and by the sounds of it, killed him in the taking, and she had left it to her pack to hunt down the boys. There was a chance that Colcu and Kymon were alive, but now the matter was urgent. I had dismissed that urgency before, too anxious to hear what Argo would have to say, to try to understand the significance of events in her life. That had been a mistake.

But those boys would be somewhere nearby, somewhere in these gouged hills and forests, perhaps close to a river, perhaps hiding like Maelfor.

Maelfor had imagined that the hunting animals had failed to get his scent, but perhaps there was another reason why they hadn’t leapt in through the gaping eye of the giant and torn him to pieces.

The
talosoi
was a Shaper creation. It had been a king’s guardian on the coast of this island. It had been hated by Lady of the Wild Creatures.

And Segomos also was a Shaper invention, woodwork and bloodwork, fused and fashioned from the visionary mind of a man who had taken ideas flung at him from the heavens. He had constructed such virile figures of oak for the amusement of warlords, in Greek Land, when it was still known by its more ancient name. And he had constructed them again, centuries later, in Alba, from his prison in the Otherworld.

It seemed that Queller was still afraid of Daidalos’s constructions, even when they lay dead and broken. Even in the breaking, then, perhaps they kept a certain power.

And this is why Argo had brought along Segomos, with his faint flicker of a broken life: to be a shield for us. Perhaps.

This is why Snake Lady had so swiftly savaged Talienze, a weaker creation.

Perhaps.

But first: to find a son and a nephew of two kings. One of those kings was also at large in these hills. Urtha and his
uthiin
would be a poor match for what Queller could throw at them, I imagined.

*   *   *

They had run like beasts, tripping and stumbling, pausing to gasp for breath and ease the pain in their lungs, then finding new strength in their limbs to carry them farther from the howling and screeching of the pack.

Descending hillsides, crossing waist-deep through the crystal waters that flowed between the slopes, clambering through sparse woods, finding brief shelter in the crush of and hollows of rocks, they became lost in the land, disorientated and confused. There were times of quiet. These were the times when they heard the rumbling of their stomachs, the drumbeat of strong hearts pushed to their limits.

Then, always, the pack.

It was quiet during the day, and they made slower progress, even managing to scoop a large fish from a shallow area of a river. They cut it up and ate it raw.

There was never any shortage of water.

Then night, and the land began to bay. The cry of a woman was sudden and distant, shrill and songlike. It came and went on the breeze, but even the wind seemed to shift with each ululation. The clouds shuddered as if being commanded. The land rumbled deeply, as if shifting its hidden channels.

The pack came closer.

During that second night, as they scrambled in the darkness along a ridge, illuminated by the moon, vulnerable and terrified, Maelfor suddenly cried out. He had slipped and was rolling and tumbling into the darkness. His cry lasted a long time before he was suddenly silent.

Kymon could hardly move from the shock of it. Colcu grabbed his shoulder. “He’s gone. We have to move fast.”

“I know.”

Kymon knelt down on one knee and stared into the ravine. “Make your way home as best you can. That was a good run, cousin.”

“I didn’t know he was your cousin.”

“Would it have made any difference? Let’s get off this ridge.”

On the third day, in a valley, in woodland, Colcu spotted a young boar, and the two boys hunted it, Kymon stalking it from the side, Colcu from the front, both wary for bigger members of the family. When the squealing animal broke cover, they chased it hard, leaping fallen trees, somersaulting over rocks, jumping up to branches to get a longer view, signalling with whistles and hand signs which way the black, sleek creature was moving. This was the best run of all. They had been born for this particular chase!

The pig was fast and well knew the shortcuts through the wood. It was up against experienced hunters, however, and no matter which way it turned, one of those hunters came racing up to it and flung his sword, narrowly missing, narrowly missing again, but the pig’s day was coming to an end.

It turned, cornered against a tall face of grey rock. Squealed. Made a stranger sound. Summoned its guardians, begged its guardians to hear its call. Then squealed again as Colcu’s knife plunged down into its neck, sending the thrashing beast to the ground, its small tusks inflicting small wounds on the Coritanian’s left arm.

“Well chased!” Kymon complimented the older boy.

“Well chased yourself,” Colcu replied with a grin. “And well run, young pig,” he said to the dead animal. “You’d have been fit for the forests of Alba.”

They had no means of making a fire, so they gutted the boar and shared the warm liver. Then they cut the softer meat into strips and chewed quietly for a while.

Colcu removed the tusks, and the strip of bristles from its neck.

“The pack will soon get the scent of this,” Kymon said, and Colcu agreed. He looked around nervously, wiping blood from his mouth.

“We should wrap the carcase in moss and leaves and bury it.”

Kymon had stood up to search around the area where the hunt had finished. He realised, looking up, that this was no ordinary face of rock, but a fashioned stone of enormous size. There were markings on it, so obscured by wind and rain that they could not be clearly seen. As he walked along its base he found a narrow passage, a mere slit between two faces of the stone. He edged inside. The passage was mazelike, but he persevered until he could see to its distant end, where daylight illuminated an open space, and something gleamed there, bright, then dull, as clouds shifted across the sun.

Edging back and calling for Colcu, he returned and completed the squeeze through the rocks, emerging into a small arena where the grass was dry and high, growing around a dozen or more stone, sleeping human figures. Five low openings in the curving farther wall suggested chambers or passages leading away from this sunlit space.

The shining object in the centre, perched on a stone platform, was a crystal or glass amphora, with a curled human figure inside.

Kymon waited for Colcu to arrive. He eased from the passage, grunting with the effort of hauling the boar’s carcase by its back legs. “That’s a girl,” he said in surprise as he saw the glass pithoi. “She looks dead.”

He dropped the beast. Together they made their way through the grass and thistles to where the sweet face, eyes open, stared towards the entrance to the arena. The child was small, hands folded across her chest, legs tucked neatly below her, white tunic caught as if shifting in a sudden breeze. She was suspended in a pale yellow liquid, and Kymon intuited at once that it was the product of the bee.

Colcu walked around the pithoi. “She has wings.”

“Wings?”

“Look at this.”

Kymon stood by his friend and marvelled at the folded wings, black and white feathered, stitched and tied to the girl’s shoulders, neck, and waist by tethers and tendons of various hues and varying girths.

The significance was not lost on either youth. They had both listened to Tairon’s tale of Icarus and Raptor.

Colcu broke away, looking around him anxiously. “What
is
this place?”

Kymon, though, had begun to study the pictograms on the edge of the round stone base. “That image again,” he said to the curious Colcu. “You didn’t see it, but I did. The same image as the shape of the entrances to the hostels at the edge of Shadow Hero Land. Look here.…”

He showed Colcu the repeated pattern of two animals facing each other, on their hind legs, separated by a strangely featured woman, whose hands rested on their heads. There were ten such triplets of woman and beast. She held a pair of wolves, stags, tusked boars, bulls, hounds, cats, cranes, eagles, hares, and rearing snakes.

“What do they mean?” Colcu said aloud, thinking out loud.

“She’s quelling them, subduing them. These are images of that flailing woman who’s pursuing us. Lady of the Wild Creatures. This plinth is hers.” Kymon stood, scratching at his chin-cut, searching the openings in the wall. “But I don’t think this was always her place.”