The Rose of the World (68 page)

A few minutes later, they came upon its erstwhile rider, seated below the mouth of a cave, the roof of which appeared to glow with a fierce red light.

With a start, the figure looked up.

Bony hands cradled a bony chin; but this was no afterwalker, no reanimated corpse.

‘Alisha!’

Saro remembered the nomad woman on the journey he had taken with her caravan, south from Jetra. Then, he had thought her wonderfully attractive, with her springy masses of auburn curls, her warm olive skin, unusual pale eyes and luscious body. Now, only the striking pallor of those eyes remained, points of light in a stripped and sun-blackened face which had sunken in on itself, adding decades to her thirty-odd years. The simple human consequences of grief and starvation had taken their toll; but how much of this ravened, feral appearance had been caused by her use of the deathstone?

Beside her, a small figure lay curled in on itself, as if asleep. Saro felt his heart thud disturbingly against his ribs, an instinctive reflex, as if his body was preparing to run even before his mind had reached such a decision.

‘Falo?’ He could not keep the quiver out of his voice.

As if stirred by the sound of its name, the thing shifted its position, coming up on one elbow to look at him. Saro wished it had not. Falo it undoubtedly was – or whatever was left of him, once the carrion creatures, natural entropy and the privations of the desert had taken their toll. Apart from the arm the boy had lost to the militiamen, the reanimated child had also lost its eyes, and misshapen lumps and cavities now covered by some sort of grey skin suggested that wild dogs had worried and feasted on its corpse.

Alisha Skylark put an arm around the boy and drew him close.

‘He’s not well,’ she rasped, her voice hoarse from the heat and lack of water. ‘He must rest. The others are inside the mountain, helping the Man. But he and I can do no more.’ She looked mournful. ‘And even our horse has deserted us.’

‘Night’s Harbinger?’

Alisha cocked her head. ‘The same. He fell when they ambushed us, but the stone brought him back to me.’ Her hand went instinctively to her breastbone, patted and rubbed: a strange, placatory gesture.

‘And Falo?’ Saro could not take his eyes from the macabre sight of the boy, lolling his skull against his mother’s arm.

Alisha blinked. ‘The stone won’t work on Falo any more. But he looks much better than he was,’ she added brightly and smiled at Saro, her teeth a startling flash of white. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Give me the stone, Alisha,’ Saro said sternly, coming up the slops to stand over the pair.

She looked mulish. ‘It might work again, away from here.’

‘It might. But you must give it to me. You know it is my burden to bear, not yours.’

She stared at him and he thought for a terrible moment that he would have to overpower her and her dead boy and forcibly take the stone from her; then she reached inside her robes and held out her hand to him. On the flat of her outstretched palm lay the eldistan which Hiron the mood-stone-seller had given him at the Allfair, the stone which might be the most dangerous object in all the world, pale and innocuous now, a cloudy yellow in colour, as if it, like the woman, lacked focus and energy.

As simply as that, it was done, and Saro had what he had come here to fetch. Even so, it was with considerable reluctance that he closed his hand around the deathstone. As he did so, it glowed briefly with a bright white light as if recognising its true owner, then subsided abruptly.

His heart raced.

‘Ah,’ Alisha sighed morosely. ‘That was the end of it. One little spark of life, and now it’s gone again. You wasted it,’ she accused.

Grimly, Saro turned to his companions. Mam’s face was twisted into a grimace of disgust; but Katla remained impassive, her face lit by the unearthly fires of the sword. Then, without a word, she walked past him, drawn by the flaming blade, scrambled over a boulder in the path and disappeared into the mouth of the cave, the sword illuminating it with weird new light.

Saro watched her go, watched till the illumination flickered and vanished with her. He stood there irresolute. With the stone restored to him, his task here was accomplished. He could turn and leave, make his way back across the desert and go north to find the Goddess. His companions were on their own quests now. If Persoa was still alive, he felt sure he and Mam would find one another. And Katla, too, was powerful, self-sufficient, even when not possessed by the sword. She didn’t need him; didn’t love him, barely seemed even to like him. There was nothing keeping him here.

But all the logic in the world had no bearing on his heart.

Tucking the stone into the empty pouch he wore around his neck, he strode after the Eyran girl, quickening his stride till he was almost at a run, scrambling over rocks and scree with the reckless determination of a man about to lose the one thing in his life that truly mattered.

Mam watched Saro run after Katla Aransen with an unreadable expression which fell somewhere between admiration and sorrow, had there been anyone there to interpret it. But there was no one left in this grim place but a mad woman and a dead boy. Even so, she could not pass them without asking the question that burned inside her.

‘Have you seen a man come this way,’ she asked Alisha Skylark, ‘a hillman, from Farem?’

The nomad looked blank.

‘A handsome man, with the tattoos of his tribe on his face?’

A twitch – of recognition, or irritation?

‘An eldianna,’ she persisted.

At this, Alisha looked up. ‘Eldianna,’ she repeated softly. ‘
Eldianna ferinni monta fuegi
.’

‘What?’ Mam took a hasty step forward, lowering her face to the woman’s.

Alisha cringed away, a protective arm shielding Falo from this terrifying looking creature with the wild white-blonde braids and glinting saw-tooth maw.

Mam straightened up, hands spread. ‘Persoa,’ she said. ‘His name is Persoa. Please tell me if you’ve seen him. I must find him. I must—’

Tears sprang to her eyes. No one on Elda had ever seen Finna the Teeth weep before, and if anything it was even more alarming than her habitual grimace. But the nomad woman reached out and caught Mam by the hand. ‘You love him, yes? The eldianna?’

Now the tears fell. Mam wiped them away with her free hand, snorted horribly and hawked over her shoulder. ‘I do,’ she mumbled. ‘Yes, I do.’ She fixed the nomad woman with a fierce stare. ‘If you have seen him you must tell me, please.’

‘Yesterday, I think it was. He came yesterday. He tried to take the stone from me, but I wouldn’t let him have it. He was angry, he shouted at me. Then he saw Falo here, and he cried and went away.’

‘Where, where did he go?’

Alisha gestured vaguely behind her. ‘Into the mountain,’ she said. ‘He went into the mountain of fire. To help.’

‘Help who?’

The nomad woman turned a smile of utmost gentleness upon the mercenary, transforming her ravaged features to a sudden beauty.

‘Sirio,’ she said simply. ‘They are freeing Sirio. The Three will be One again, and then we shall all be released from this wheel of fire and torment.’ She cradled her son tight, rocking him to and fro. ‘We shall all be free, Falo, I promise.’

Mam left the mad woman crooning to her long-dead son, and took the path into the volcano with her jaw thrust out like the prow of a warship breasting a stormwave.

‘Katla! Katla, stop! Wait!’

Brought up short by the sound of her name, she turned and stared back over her shoulder. Fiery lights shone in her eyes: she looked like the spirit of the volcano, Saro thought with a shiver; an avenging spirit with an avenging sword. He remembered now how frightened he had been by her when he had taken up the blade in the corridors of Jetra’s castle and he had thought she might strike him down for his temerity. He had seen her wield it with such determined violence he had thought her possessed by it; he remembered how alien she had seemed to him then, how remote and inaccessible. But through it all, he loved her still, for all his denials and evasions. Guaya’s touch had released him not only from the gift of empathy, it seemed: it had also confirmed the depths of his passion, and released him from his fear.

‘Katla,’ he called, and his voice was low and steady, ‘Katla, wherever you are going, I’m coming with you. If you walk into the depths of Falla’s fire, I will walk with you; if you enter the kingdom of the dead, I will be there at your side. If you fight, I will fight with you; I will guard your back like the warriors of old, against all comers, be they man, beast or afterwalker.’

Those shining, inimical eyes swept over him then and he felt himself both assessed and judged in a few long seconds. Then she bent down, picked something up out of the darkness and threw it towards him.

‘If you are going to fight with me, you will need a blade.’

He saw the blur of its long shape catch the light as it fell end over end, and knew that he must show his mettle now or never. Rather than stepping away to allow the weapon to fall harmlessly at his feet, he took a pace forward and readied himself to catch it, knowing that if he misjudged the take, he might lose his hand, or worse.

The pommel end came towards him out of the gloom and he caught it neatly, turning with the blade’s momentum, dancing in a tight circle.

When he came around to face Katla Aransen again, she was gone. Only her voice echoed behind her. ‘It’s been a dead man’s sword once: take care it is not such again.’

Grinning, Saro ran to catch up with her.

The farther they penetrated into the cave system the brighter came the light from below and a great clamour began to reverberate off the cavern’s walls: shouts and screams, roars and howls, groans and wails and the clash of metal on metal. And when the path they trod began to angle downward, with every step it became hotter and hotter.

Saro wiped his hand across his face and wondered what scene might be revealed to them when they reached the source of these hellish sounds. However hard he tried, he could not escape the comparisons his mind threw at him to the noise that Tanto’s victims had made as they died by their hundreds in the torments of his pyres. Almost, he expected his brother to leer up out of the darkness at them, vaster than ever and gruesome with death.

But the sight that met them when they finally came down into the pit of the mountain was stranger and more terrible by far.

Driven thus far by the deathstone, drawing their vitality from the very land they traversed, now the dead appeared to be compelled by another cause entirely. From his vantage point above them, Saro could see that Alisha Skylark’s reanimated army was fighting and dying anew. But such was the chaos and the crush of figures, it was hard to tell just what they might be battling, other than the mountain itself, for great gouts of fire and smoke and hurled rock obscured the scene.

He stared in horror as a blackened figure shot backwards out of the fury of it all, followed shortly after by one of its discorporated limbs, ribbons of fabric or flesh trailing after it. Then, from the midst of the hubbub something gave a full-throated roar that made the hair stand up on his neck.

‘Bëte,’ he whispered. How could a cat, no matter how great, survive in a place like this? How could anyone? The sulphurous fumes belching up from the fiery depths singed the cavity of his chest every time he took a breath: he found himself breathing as shallowly as was possible and still maintain consciousness and life.

But nothing was slowing down Katla Aransen. On she strode, the flaming sword at one with its new surroundings, leading her down and down. Saro tried not to imagine what horrors they were about to be engulfed by, what death might await him there; tried not to think at all. Head down, sweat pouring in rivulets inside his clothing, he followed Katla down into the pit of the world and the deathstone pulsed against his ribs like a second heart.

The dead were everywhere. Or rather, the second-time dead were everywhere, strewn around in grotesque postures like dolls torn apart by a vicious child. Some of the corpses smoked with heat, bones newly exposed, white against blackened skin. Some lay as if asleep, but did not stir even when fire licked their faces. Others appeared to be hard at work, engaged in some kind of excavation, for boulders had been piled high to one side of the cavern, while half-molten rock came flying up out of the ground on the other as if propelled from somewhere out of sight. Beyond this, a battle was in full fray: and this – of course – was where Katla was headed.

There, three figures, two men and a vast black creature, battled against a single foe. It was no bigger than the two men it fought, and considerably smaller than the great cat; but it fought with such agility and ferocity that it was able to keep them at bay with one hand while picking off recruits from the dead army with the other and hurling them with unimaginable strength against the walls of the cavern, or back down into the molten lava below.

Saro gasped. He thought that he recognised two of the combatants. But Katla, though she had not yet realised it, knew more.

‘Persoa!’ he cried out; and, ‘Bëte!’

Katla’s response was quieter; but even in the ruddy light he could tell that all her natural colour had drained from her face.

‘Tam,’ she breathed. ‘By all that is holy . . . Tam Fox . . .’

Then, unwillingly, she turned her eyes on their opponent, standing there with his feet in the magma, shrouded by drapes of hot yellow smoke.

The Master of Sanctuary had lavished all his most potent skills on the one who battled his son, the eldianna and the Beast. The transformation which had overtaken him had been thorough, but was not so complete that Katla Aransen did not recognise her own brother. He did not much resemble her twin any longer, though his hair flamed as red as hers, and his eyes shone a cold and piercing blue; but from head to foot his skin was as black as charcoal and shone with a dull metallic sheen. One limb shone brightest of all, as if all human trace of it, all the muscle and sinew and tendon and bone, the flesh and blood of it, had been removed and replaced by the cartilaginous matter of some vast insect, for it appeared to be an arm no more, but a great hooked scythe, like the killing-claw of a gigantic crab or mantis.