The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (44 page)

“How was it shaped? The heart and lungs.”

“Like a crescent moon,” Durandond said. “The blood and breath of the man.”

*   *   *

I let him rest then. The spirit was not just weary; it was expended. Apprehension filled the mortuary house. Perhaps it was protected against whatever possessed the hill, but this long-dead king was aware that his founding nation was in great danger. Whether he knew, in that spirit-sense, that Ghostland had already claimed his kingdom, I didn’t know. I had disturbed a rest that was already disturbed. I would disturb it no longer.

I dismissed Morndun and summoned Cunhaval the hound, and with Cunhaval’s aid scrabbled my way along the winding shaft, back to the surface.

Chapter Thirty-two

Discarded Dreams

I was weary by the time I reached the upper chamber of Durandond’s burial shaft. I could feel the fresh air from above and took two deep breaths.

The next thing I knew, a small shape had launched itself at me from one of the corners, and draped her arms around my neck.

“Did you find him? Did you speak to him? Did you raise him from the dead?”

Niiv was nothing if not exuberantly curious.

“Yes. I did.”

In the darkness, all I could see was a strange glow from her eyes, a hint of light coming from deep within her. Her breath was sweet. She brushed her lips on mine, a cursory acknowledgement of being glad to see me, before she persisted, “Did you use Morndun? To raise him?”

“Of course I did. And it hurts to do so.”

“Teach me how to hurt like that. Teach me the death mask.”

“You never give up.”

“I’ll always give in!”

Again she kissed me, but now she felt the tiredness in my bones and ceased her unsubtle fingering of my weary carcase in search of any pattern, inscribed on the hidden ivory, that might give her that extra little bit of “charm.”

“You need to sleep,” she said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Did you get answers? The answers you were looking for?”

“Yes, I did.”

“May I share them?”

“Yes, you may.”

“But not now!” she insisted, to my surprise. “Time for that later.” She was fussing at me, concerned for me. “Get some food; get some sleep. The hounds don’t seem to worry about us moving around the orchard, just as long as we stay inside the fence.”

“That’s good.”

“You didn’t really subdue the metal monstrosities, did you!” She was teasing me in the dark. Her voice gave her away.

“Didn’t have to. They were set to stop you leaving the orchard, not the lodge. And they didn’t see me coming in because I’m good at that sort of thing. But they’re powerful. All of Shaper’s creations are powerful.”

“He transformed the land.”

“He transformed himself!”

“Can
you
do that?” We had started to crawl up the shaft.

“No. The summoning of the shadow-masks and possession of beasts—my talents—are not the same.”

“He’s more potent than you. Is that what you think?”

Her question caused me to shiver. Indeed, what
did
I think? I had never experienced anything like this Daidalos. For some time now I had been wondering whether or not he was one of the original
nine
who were sent to walk the Path. The nine children selected for a task whose design and outcome were facts withheld from them. I didn’t remember him from childhood. And I was sure that only Medea and I had failed, as yet, to return to that starting place; to return home after all the millennia. Daidalos, then, was perhaps from a second home. The past was almost as mysterious as the unknown, unfathomable future. More profound and wiser minds than mine had shaped the world, then, and I was perhaps a far smaller rock in the mountain than I’d realised at that time.

“He’s … different to me,” I replied to the eager Niiv. “He draws his strength from a place I don’t understand.”

There was silence for a while as we found the grips and steps that led us up to the grove and the fallen stone and small light. Then Niiv whispered. “Take care, my Merlin. Be careful. I want to find you again after—after everything is finished.”

*   *   *

There had been a strange look in her eyes and a wistful note in her voice. Had I been aware of both these things at the time? I imagine so. Her words, ambiguous, haunted, gentle, had struck me like a dart. But I had brushed them off, as I would have brushed off the stab of an insect’s sting. Noticed, but not allowed to be notable.

I remember thinking only that I did not want to leave the girl; that I did not want to lose her, not yet. And that yes, of course, I would be careful.

She made her way into the shadows of the orchard. A breeze blustered for a moment, a whisper of nature that seemed to speak words: it was my imagination, of course. Wasn’t it? To hear the breeze whisper:
Don’t go back to her
.

Whatever it is, it has transformed the hill.

Cathabach’s words: but had they been said as warning? Or as guidance?

The old shaft will take you down, Cathabach had said. The old shaft? It took me a moment only to intuit that he had meant the sacred well.

I made my way through the stone maze. It was a small shock to discover the shrivelled, shrunken remains of the three young women who had guarded the place. Each was seated, arms folded, head thrown back, mouth gaping. They looked exactly as if the very spirit and air had been sucked from them in a single instant.

I had descended into the hill by way of the well before. There is a feeling of drowning, then of intense cold. The walls contain you, the waters spin you, icy liquid forces itself into your lungs; the deep earth itself seems to be pulling at your feet.

And then you are on a damp ledge, by a flowing river, illuminated by streaks of phosphorescence in the cavern walls. This is the place where the waters of Nantosuelta feed the labyrinthine currents of the hill, channels that flow between the rocks, and spill in several places onto the land as simple springs.

Taurovinda had always been connected with Ghostland, and this watery, placental link was proof enough.

Shaper had been here, though for how long, I couldn’t tell. Long enough, however, to have left his mark on the walls and ledges. His symbols were everywhere; the stone had been shaped into figures; he had played, here, played at animating the rock itself. Discarded discs, pressed from poor metal, lay scattered everywhere, but it seemed to me that for a while at least they had functioned.

He had made Taurovinda into a Shaping Chamber. How long ago? Not that long. Perhaps he had probed here from the Otherworld over the years, before establishing his first foothold in Urtha’s land, across the river, an advance camp preparatory for the full invasion.

He had listened to the life above him. He had viewed the land. He had directed his attention to the East, away from the setting sun. East. Home. His birthplace.

His life, his mind, his fury resonated here, fresh in the ancient place of smoothed rock and flowing stream. Discarded dreams, echoes of new challenges, still sang from the surfaces. Wherever Shaper went, he left a trail of desire. I was reminded of the eerie afterpresence of Queller, in the cave above Akirotiri, another entity so old, so close to the embrace of earth and forest, that her scent lingered wherever she journeyed, like a distant cry caught on a spiralling wind, fading slowly, never to vanish completely.

What are you doing?
I asked of the slick faces marked on the cavern.
Where are you going?
I whispered to the freezing water. The earth rumbled, a mournful movement, the echo of a storm.

I didn’t need to answer my own question. But I needed to find Shaper. And he was still at the river, at the ancient boundary. Why had he not crossed by now? Was he still searching for a way to extend the boundaries of Ghostland? What was holding him back, this man, this creation, who could reassemble his own being, his own life, from the machinery that he himself had fashioned from the ores of the earth and the dreams from the stars?

Shivering in the cold of the underground, staring at the discarded bronze discs, the crude figures on their dulled surfaces alive with the phosphorescence, a thought arose: vengeance. And a name: Jason.

And thinking of Jason, of the last moments I had seen him, crouched and anxious on the river’s edge, preparing to cross to Ghostland, I felt suddenly afraid for the man.

We should not have gone our separate ways.

I should have told him who was crossing the Winding One in the second boat, entering a forbidden realm, drawn there by the dying mother, the mother out of time.

Rather than risk Niiv attaching herself to me again, insisting on coming with me, I eschewed the easy ascent by which I might return to Argo. I slipped into the freezing water and let Nantosuelta carry me through the hill and below the plain, to where this snaking limb of water joined with the main river, in the heart of the evergroves.

After I had wrung out my clothes and shaken myself back to warmth, I went to find the ship. It came as a surprise and yet no surprise at all to find that she had gone, taking with her the honey child.

I could have laughed had it not been for the fact that I now knew what was to come.

And Jason? This is what I learned—later—of Jason.

Chapter Thirty-three

Shade-Magic

The moment Jason launched the boat from the bank, he tried to take control, using the slim paddle to push across the flooding water to the darkness opposite. The river itself snatched the paddle from his grasp. And when he flung his weight against the hull, to try to make the small craft spin, he might as well have been striking the wall of a cliff.

The boat turned at its own pace, lulling him quiet, progressing to Ghostland in its own time, in its own way.

Lying back, gazing up at the stars, Jason smiled as he surrendered to the river. Then he laughed out loud. The heavens moved around his gaze, a restless farm of images, but he could not see the “archer”—the Centaur! Chiron. This river was too far north, he knew.

Nevertheless, he invoked his old friend:

“I tried, Chiron. All my life I tried. And for most of my life I succeeded. You gave me good advice. Can you send a horse for me now?”

Nothing stirred in the night sky.

Chiron had told him that should he ever need help, he need only look to the heavens. “There I am,” the self-proclaimed “centaur” had teased his young charge, indicating the constellation known as the Man-Horse Hunter. “That’s where I get my strength.”

“That’s a goat, not a horse.”

Chiron was amused. “The goat dances in Cornus! Over there.”

Jason was dismissive of this elemental magic. “You see shapes where I see directions. I see stars that one day I’ll need to sail by. Useful signals. That’s all I see.”

“Well, yes. But sailing is about more than ships and seas—at least, when it comes to being a king. You don’t need to believe in the heavens. But you ought to understand how others believe in them.…

“And hopefully not to confuse goats and horses.”

Jason had laughed at that. “I’ll try not to. So those stars are a man and a horse, an archer on four legs.”

“It’s a man who holds close his animal nature. Wit and strength, Jason, young Jason … wit and strength.”

What was the river doing? The water flowed past him, but the boat was still, caught, as it were, in an eddy, its low prow pointed towards the narrow darkness between thrusting willows, whose night arms reached to embrace him. Fires burned beyond that dark crevice of gloom. And there was movement there.

Jason wanted to leap into the river and swim. But the fight was out of him, and he lay quite still, alive in starlight, embraced by the river, ready for life, death, vengeance, or release. Anything.

He thought of his father, Aeson, and of his childhood, and his growing years when he had been sent north, to that country of horses and wild riders, to die or survive, taken into the care of Chiron. Foul-breathed Chiron. Moon-howling, self-immolating Chiron. Chiron—supposedly a Dacian—who spent so much of his day strapped to his dust-grey steed, grey with dust himself, disguised with leaves and dressed in the drab colours of his plains-roaming people, that he might easily have been confused with a centaur.

Even Chiron joked that when he dismounted, he had to tear the skin of his thighs from the horse’s hide.

The man had been saved from death by Aeson at the battle of Xenopylas—no poet had been there to record it—and had in turn saved the king, who had never forgotten that saving grip and the rescuing grasp of the horseman as they’d fled the field, never abandoned the memory, kept contact and sent favours to the
wild man
in return for a single horse every summer, a gift appreciated.

Chiron had trained Jason in everything he needed, but most especially in the use of his wits and cunning. “There is a difference between a foot soldier who fears the sudden thrust of a spear through his guts and a king who fears an omen. The first strides forward to meet the fear, survives or not; the second lets fear root him to the spot. Easy to chop down.”

As he floated gently in the middle of the Winding One, Jason laughed again and cried out to the stars, to the memory of his old friend: “Grant me at least that I proved
that
point, old horse! Never rooted, always restless!”

The boat nudged the gravel of the bank, between the drooping fronds of the willows. The second craft was there as well, but waterlogged, its lowest strakes hacked by an axe.

Jason scrambled ashore, drawing the boat behind him, securing it. Around him, the land was alive with sound, not of voices, but the low droning of beasts and the heavy movement of machines. There was no brightness in this night air.

He had had no expectations of what he would find on this side of Nantosuelta, except that Medea would be close. He unbuckled his sword belt, wrapping the leather around the sheath and carrying the weapon in a way that would make it hard to use. He found moist leaves and wiped the mud from his boots. He wondered whether or not to remove one of them, to walk one-booted into whatever was waiting for him.