The world changed.
I fell into a new existence. My vision became a series of glowing lines drawn on black. The stable, the guards, their weapons, all became unreal—simplified. Only I was real, only I existed. Beyond the paper-thin veneer of reality I could sense a roiling, a black fire fuelled by life. All I had to do was reach through and the fire below would be mine. I could cast away the guards, the stable block, the rotten castle that housed it and every blessed who used others like tools. I could do it all with a thought and a flick of my mind.
It would be a pleasure.
“I am sorry, Girton. But I cannot let you do this now.”
A whisper from another world.
A cool hand against my neck.
A darkness all-enveloping.
Interruption
This is a dream?
He swims.
Swims after her
Swims through a sea above the land. Through water blue as flame, red as hot liquid, green as life. Pellucid water clear as duty and as thick and murky as choices. Animals swim around him. Shoals of mounts dart through the water between waving fronds of seaweed that reach up into the black sky to become the pillars supporting it. Herds of fish run across the land and far away the sourings sing sewage and the throne of the hedgelord, Blue Watta, rises.
He swims after her.
The water passing through his lungs is as sweet as sorrow: it tastes of fear and spite. It is the warmth of a hand offered in unexpected friendship. It is the drowning steel of a knife blade through the gullet. Currents pull him through the doors and windows of a ruined castle and the decayed faces of people he-may-but-may-not-know scream a welcome at him. The dizzying spin of a whirlpool drags him through a hedging’s door, shrieking and joyful into the depths.
He swims after her.
Beneath him his mount supports him, and it is a marvellous creation of mechanical scales, as intricate and perfect as a water clock. It writhes and twists through the water with all the striking grace of death. Its antlers are gilded for war. Its saddle is as supple as love. Its eyes are scars that can see through time. In the distance is death and in the foreground is death and in the mid ground is death and in the roof of the stars is death and in the floor of the ocean is death. Xus the unseen laughs at him from where he hides between the shining cracks of his mind.
He swims after her.
Beneath him are the dead gods with their throats slit, imposing bodies piled carelessly upon one another, flesh of alabaster, ebony, azure, ruby and sand. Skin as soft as refracted light within a diamond, faces as achingly beautiful as they are terrifying. A pair of eyes, heavily browed and puzzled, stare out of an ugly face. “Why?” He does not know why or what or who. He feels judged and judgemental. He feels guilty and proud. The bodies of dead gods writhe together in a fertile frenzy, slit throats moan in ecstasy, bodies grow scars. Their forgotten children, the hedgings, shout for attention from below a wall of transubstantial flesh.
He swims after her: ghosts in the water She is a reminder.
He is a creature of the land. He should walk on two legs. His mounts are furred and his fish swim. This is not real and the water he breathes is as lethal as any ligature. His memory is a memory of life that dooms him to a watery death as surely as it steals away the magnificence of the seascape around him.
He chokes.
She goes where he cannot follow.
A noose constricts around his neck.
The pain is a knife in his eye. It is his heart being cut out. The strange world fades. Little by little it becomes more mundane until it is gone and he stands alone in an amphitheatre. Below there is a play on. Merela Karn fights off a thousand little men armed with tiny daggers, and when she is finally overwhelmed blades rise and fall like bloody metronomes.
a dream
Is this?
Chapter 24
I lost three days to grief and shock.
The first day I cannot remember at all.
The second was a haze. A mist of sweat, pain, twisted blankets and mental recriminations. Should have saved her. Could have saved her. I should have saved her.
How? How could you have saved her.
Merela Karn should have saved her. Cleverest person I’ve ever met. Best fighter, greatest assassin. Wasn’t she? Wasn’t she? She could have done it, should have done it. She could have disguised her, hidden Heamus’s body away …
How? The guards were on us almost immediately.
Somehow! She should have done it somehow. Instead she practically talked Drusl into suicide.
Drusl. Oh Drusl. The pain is sharp like Conwy steel cutting into my breast. My master, how could she? How could she do that? Let Drusl die. She just let her die. Let her die. How could she let her die. Kill her.
My master killed her. Talked her into death.
What else could she do?
Something!
She could have done something. She should have done something. Instead she talked the woman I loved into death.
Did she?
Yes!
“Thank you for your kindness, daughter.”
Drusl said there was no way out. She knew there was no way out.
She was right.
No.
She was right.
No, she wasn’t!
Should have saved her. Could have saved her. I should have saved her.
How?
And round and round and round it went in a circle of tears and anger.
On the third day I faced the truth, met my master and woke to a new world.
It was not the world I had walked through before. It was a world dulled. My colours were the washed-out colours of a land beneath sky the grey of threatening storms. I heard sound as though I stood in a landscape covered in deadening snow, the highs and lows absorbed by ice. Somewhere, far away, a piper played but I could no longer hear the melody, only noise. When I ate the food which had been left out for me it was even more tasteless than usual.
There had been no escape for Drusl. Three times she’d killed when threatened and each time she had used more power. It had never been under her control. If it had been under her control she would never have harmed Xus. Never.
And I’d touched the magic in a way I never had before.
At the thought of magic my mind started to slide away on a sheen of silver, sword-blade bright. I pulled it back.
I’d felt the magic in the stable that day in a different way. I had felt its power, its terrifying power, and I knew the truth of it was just as my master had said. It wanted to be used. It desired to be used, and its voice was a slick, an oily membrane that spread across the mind it touched. It promised so much: pleasure, power, safety.
Revenge.
Whatever you wanted was within it. “I can give you that,” it said, though it had no voice. It was more subtle than that. It was as if the magic were a dark bird that settled on your desires and its weight pushed them to the forefront of your mind.
“I can give you that.”
I felt the pull again but it was dulled, like everything else. The only thing that was sharp and focused was the pain in my chest.