our thoughts? And was it worth it, if it left Co:pern:ica like this?”
Colm Fellowes shrugged. “How did the universe evolve from a cloud of gas? What defines the way a seed, once watered, divides into leaf and stem? How
does a firebird’s tear replenish the earth? Maybe some questions are too big to answer – and therefore better left alone.” He turned and checked the position of the sun. “We should leave. The journey isn’t long but it
is
hard and we need to reach the ruins before nightfall. Keep drinking from your vessels. If your breathing becomes difficult, signal me or Mathew. The air grows thinner towards the peak.”
“How?” asked Bernard. “It can’t be
high enough to register a significant
change of atmosphere?”
Colm Fellowes looked at them both in
turn. “You can ponder that mystery along the way. Trust me, it’s better to think than to talk.”
From a nearby hut, Lefarr and the medic, Terance Humbey, came to join
them. After a further check of provisions and a few more words of advice from
Terance, the party made its way to therising ground. Men working singly in thefields to either side leaned on their
improvised hoes and watched them go.
“Why are they so solemn?” Bernard whispered to Lefarr.
“They fear we may not come back,” he replied.
That stopped Harlan before he’d struck the path. “Why?” he asked directly. “What are you keeping from us?”
“We should tell them, Mat,” Colm Fellowes said, the ground almost cracking with the weight of his stride. He stopped and took it upon himself anyway. “Men have been known to go mad up there. They say the ruins are haunted.”
“By Agawin?”
Fellowes glanced back at Lefarr and said, “Some travellers have returned from the Isle with a tale – about a flying beast many times bigger than any firebird. They say it guards the tower, though none of us have seen it from the settlement below.
They say its fire can steal the air fromwithin a man’s lungs.”
“Roderic attaches a name to it,” said Mathew. “He was a scholar of Historyonce. He identifies this creature by theanonymous term ‘dragon’.”
Bernard gulped and loosened the neckof his robe. “A fire-breathing creaturebigger than a
bird
?”
“You may both turn back if you wish,” Mathew said.
And what kind of choice was that?
thought Harlan. He pressed on, dropping in behind Colm Fellowes. “Have either of
you ever encountered this ‘dragon’?”
“We have both felt its presence,”
Mathew said.
“With respect, that tells me nothing.”
Colm Fellowes tightened his lip. He nudged a few pebbles to one side of the path. “You will have the opportunity to test your scepticism when we stand at the doorway to the tower, Professor.”
“If it’s ruined, what is there to see?” said Bernard, adopting Colm’s example of avoiding the stones; they felt like small explosions on the soles of the feet.
“At the centre of the tower is a dais,” said Lefarr, “made from the same grey stone as the building. It rises to about the mid-height of a man and is circular,
equidistant with the walls of the tower. Carved around the edges of its flat, upper surface are symbols no one has been able to interpret. At its centre is an image.”
Bernard paused to quench his thirst. His slightly bloated cheeks were already beginning to glow with the first signs of perspiration. “Of the beast that haunts the place?”
Lefarr stopped and opened his own water vessel. “No. The figure of a man in the creature’s image.”
“A man – with wings and fire?”
“And is
that
Agawin?” Harlan said.
“We believe so,” said Mathew.
“The Followers say the dais is his tomb,” Colm added.
Bernard’s lips made a gentle smacking sound as he wiped them dry of water.
“There has never been a successful excavation,” said Lefarr, in anticipation of the scientists’ next question.
“But there have been attempts?” Harlan pressed him.
Mathew capped his drinker with a firm thump. “There won’t be one today,” was all he said. And at that moment, it began to rain.
Bernard instinctively reached for ahood. Not finding one attached to his robe,he accepted it, as Colm and Mathew haddone, and let the water run where itwould.
“Tread carefully now,” Mathew advised them. “The rain is refreshing but it makes the way slippery. There is no cover here other than the ruins. The
quicker we reach them, the better. We
won’t speak again unless someone is in
trouble. Are we clear?”
“Clear,” said Harlan, hitching up his backpack. Bernard nodded, and they both fell into step.
Despite Lefarr’s warnings, the pathwayhad enough grit mixed with the mud tomake sure their sandals made a good,sound purchase. There were imbalances,but no embarrassing falls, and the partymoved ahead in open file, at reasonablepace. All around them the sky was gravidwith rain, which did little but inflate thedark character of the land and kept ‘sight-seeing’, as Bernard called it, to aminimum. Harlan, likewise, despite hiscuriosity about Agawin and the creaturewhich allegedly guarded the tower, could
find little room in his mind to think of anything other than his next sure step. But as the muscles in his thighs began to burn, announcing the onset of the final incline, he suddenly felt a swift loss of pressure in his lungs and had to drop back, a few paces off the others. He gestured to Colm that he was fine, just pausing for a drink of water. But before he knew it he was on his
knees, clutching at his chest for any kind of breath. A high-pitched whine made his eardrums sing. Blood pooled against the wall of one nostril. His eyeballs felt as if they wanted to burst. He could still see Colm, but only as a hazy ‘S’-shaped line against a sky suddenly swollen with heat. He cried out to him, but the thickened air folded his words right back. And when he stretched a hand forward to signal for
help, something inhuman came to meet it.
He felt nothing but the pressure waves crossing him at first. His robe billowed and his modest shock of hair fanned out.
Claws with the strength to crush bonesinto paper took him by the shoulders andlifted him as if he were an empty shell. Hewas some way off the ground when heheard the muffled shouts of the men
below. More pressingly, another voice
was in his mind.
Beware the Shadow of Isenfier
.
The next thing Harlan Merriman knew,his body was impacting on the slopes of Alavon and his consciousness was backwith the other three men.
“Harlan?! Harlan?! Are you all right?” Lefarr’s voice swam into play. “Colm, pick him up. Carry him to the tower. Lay
him down there.”
“In the
tower
?”
“On the dais itself if you have to!
Move!”
And Harlan felt himself lifted again,cradled in the arms of the once-engineer.
When he did become fully awake, therain had slowed to a creeping mizzle. Hewas lying by a curving wall of stone thatreached for the sky like a funnel to thestars. “The tower,” he whispered.
“Yes,” said Bernard, kneeling besidehim. He rested the back of his hand on
Harlan’s forehead.
Lefarr swept up, offering a vessel. “Drink,” he said.
Harlan shook his head. With Bernard’shelp, he managed a sitting position. Onceagain his back was wracked with pain.
His left ankle was a bloated ball ofbruises.
“What happened, Harlan?” Lefarr asked urgently.
“I don’t know,” he muttered.
“You were floating,” said Bernard.
Harlan coughed a little. “Floating?”
“You were ten feet off the ground when we reached you,” said Lefarr.
Harlan looked all around him. For one moment he experienced a quieter repeat of the singing in his ears. “Where is it? Where did it fly to?”
“Where did what fly to?” Bernard asked.
“The creature. The dragon that picked me off the hill.”
Bernard and Lefarr exchanged a glance. “All we saw was you hanging limply in
the sky. There was no dragon.”
Harlan stared at the dais. There was
blood in his mouth and fear in his heart. He touched the stones he was propped against and said, “It goes by a name, this invisible thing. This creature that drives men to madness.”
Lefarr ran a thumb across his dryinglips. “You commingled with it?”
“It with me.”
“Was it Agawin?”
Harlan looked at the shifting clouds,framed by the circle of stone above. “No,”he said. “It called itself ‘Gawain’.”
5
“We should return to the Shelter,” Colm Fellowes said, letting his gaze roam slowly across every patch of sky. He was standing with his back to the other three men, just beyond the arch-shaped opening that would have brought him into the tower proper.
“Harlan is in no state to travel,” said Lefarr. “He may have broken his foot.”
Colm turned, imploring Mathew to look at him. “Two men, in turns, could carry him down with ease. If nothing else, let me go back for Terance.”
“No one leaves yet,” Harlan said quietly. “Bernard, help me up.” He put out an arm. Using Bernard’s shoulder as a
crutch, he struggled to his feet, holding his swollen ankle off the ground.
Colm strode up to the archway, placing his hands on the walls to either side. The
surface stonework crumbled against his palms, echoing, perhaps, the feeling in his heart. “That thing is all around us,” he whispered darkly, hoping to induce some sense into Mathew. (He had not even bothered to question Harlan’s statement.) “Night will be upon us within the hour. If we don’t go now it may be too late. We cannot fight what we cannot see.”
“We’re not here to fight it,” Harlan said. He grimaced as he tried to put pressure on his ankle. “We’re here to solve a riddle. Besides, it could pick us off at any moment. An invisible being has no need for the cloak of darkness. Relax,
Colm, it means us no harm.”
Colm struck a hand against the wall andstepped back. “Men have been known toput a knife through their heart after they’veencountered the soul of this beast. How
can you speak of it in gentle terms when it picked you up and cast you aside like a leaf?”
“It needed to prove something to me.”
“And what was that?”
“That it’s real, not imagined.”
Colm threw up his hands in despair.
“I understand your anxieties and I’m not trying to belittle them,” said Harlan, “but I’m certain that this dragon has never intended to prey on the tribe. Its auma is at such an intense vibration that it simply overwhelms the minds of most men. It’s
the fear of what they don’t understand that
kills them, not the fire of the beast.”
Lefarr regarded Harlan thoughtfully, tilting his head in a searching manner. “What exactly did you learn from it, other than a name?”
Harlan hobbled over to the dais. Hebrushed some loose dirt off the circle of
symbols and asked Bernard to clear the far side as well. “As you know, in the commingled state it’s possible to assimilate something of the co-host’s nature. This dragon is a trans:dimensional being. A wandering spirit, lost in time.”
“It’s seeking our help?”
“Possibly, yes.”
Colm let out a hopeless sigh.
“It gave me a warning,” Harlan said.
Now Colm turned and looked sharply at Lefarr.
“It was telling me to beware of something. Have you heard of the ‘Shadow of Isenfier’?”
“Ice? What is ice?” Colm lifted his shoulders. “We know of fire, but—”
“Not a conjunction of words,” said Harlan. “I heard just one. I’m sure of it.”
“Izenfire?” Mathew tried.
“Close,” said Harlan. “It means nothing to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Me neither,” said Bernard, shaking his head.
Harlan tightened his lip. “Then allwe’re left with is this,” he said. He laidhis hands flat on the dais. “Tell me, Mathew, why does the tribe ‘follow’ Agawin?”
Lefarr came to stand beside him. “The
legend was in place well before I arrived.” He pointed to the centre of the dais, where there was indeed a worndown image of a winged man. “In the early days of Alavon, when the tower was first explored, a superstitious conviction began to grow around this figure. Its basis was simple enough: if we demonstrated enough belief in our winged man, he would protect us from starvation and the stuff of nightmares.”
“ A
religion
?” Harlan looked up in surprise.