The Tower of Bones Read online

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Ainé was the daughter-sister of the recently dead Kyra in a lineage that stretched back into the mists of history. She was too shocked by the situation she encountered here to be free with gestures of friendship. And none was more puzzling than this youth, Alan Duval, who bore the Oraculum of the First Power of the Holy Trídédana. A callow youth, yet her mother-sister had trusted him like no other? She was obliged to take the word of her companion on that. Milish had been her mother-sister’s mentor in perilous times leading to a battle that had already entered legend. And if such legend were to be believed, this youth had stood shoulder to shoulder with the former Kyra in the thick of that battle. Out there, in the estuary, floated the strangest ship she had ever seen. People spoke of it with awe as the Temple Ship. All this the young Kyra knew. But knowing was not understanding. The warrior race of Shee, under her hereditary command, was exclusively female, as was the Council-in-Exile here in Carfon. Theirs was the honour and burden of protecting continental Monisle from the evil that beset it.

  She spoke brusquely, a whispered growl: ‘Nothing in my education by Seers and Aides reveals why such power has been granted to a youth, and an alien youth at that, who has arrived in Tír from another world.’

  ‘Appearances are deceptive. The Mage Lord lost his youth at Ossierel. You would be advised to treat him as a man.’

  The Kyra snorted.

  Most disturbing of all, her mother-sister had died without a Seer present, and thus without the opportunity of transferring her memories to her successor. With a sweep of her arm the Kyra drew her cloak about her shoulders. It was loose-fitting over a tough leathery jerkin fastened high about her neck and falling halfway over her trousers of pale green, which fastened at mid-calf above the cross-lacing over her thin-soled boots. Immediately the enfolding cloak took on the camouflage colours and patterns of the surrounding rocks and sand, so the young Kyra became close to invisible, and yet all the while she continued to watch the young man.

  The dwarf mage turned his gaze on the ancient walls, which appeared more substantial and awesome by the minute as the rising sun invaded the estuary from the horizon of the glittering ocean. ‘I see from your expression that you worry still about the silence from the Council-in-Exile.’

  ‘We’ve already wasted six days here, waiting for these people to agree to a meeting. Meanwhile Kate is suffering at the hands of that terrible creature.’

  ‘Mage Lord … ’

  ‘Alan!’

  ‘Alan – my friend. Though patience is trying in such circumstances, never has it been more necessary. The Councilwoman, Milish, has warned you that Carfon has ever been a city of intrigues.’

  He shook his head. ‘You know I find this formality a waste of time. I just don’t care about appearances.’

  ‘Here, above all, appearances matter. Carfon is a city under threat. Soon it may be under siege. Though the Tyrant’s armies have been repulsed from the Vale of Tazan, they may yet attack, in great numbers, from the sea. The Council-in-Exile has its own worries. To them you will appear no more than a distraction.’

  ‘Meanwhile we lose another day.’

  ‘My friend – when I was a child at my mother’s knee, she taught me how to play a board game called “Strategies”. The aim of play was to win a great prize, a victory of victories. But to obtain that final victory I had to learn not merely the rules of play, but also the importance of planning and patience. From what you have told me of your dreams, Kate is being held in the Tower of Bones. And her gaoler is none other than the Great Witch, also known as Olc.’

  ‘I don’t know a damned thing about witches.’

  ‘It was Olc who sent the succubus that ensnared your friend Mark. It would appear that she understands the need for strategy and patience. Her game set in train the series of events that seduced him and ultimately led him to his present fate. And it is another of her games that torments you through the capture of Kate.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of her, Qwenqwo.’

  ‘Fear her you should! You fought bravely against the Legun at Ossierel. But the Great Witch is far more powerful than a Legun. She is second in power only to the Tyrant himself. Were you to rush headlong into such a confrontation, you would lose. And what then would become of Kate?’

  Alan sighed. ‘I just can’t bear to think of how Kate is suffering.’

  The dwarf mage shrugged.

  ‘Hey – I know your advice makes sense. But I’m convinced in my own mind that the answer to my problem lies with the Fáil. We both know that there’s a portal to the Fáil right here in Carfon. I’ve got to find the portal and use it to help rescue Kate.’

  The dwarf mage shook his head. ‘Even if you persist in this course you must persuade the Council-in-Exile to grant you access to the portal. And they have refused to meet with you, despite Milish’s protestations.’

  The Ambassador, Milish, gazed beyond the estuary to the soaring walls of Carfon, where Prince Ebrit had offered them quarters in his palace on their arrival. But courtesy in Carfon was barbed with subtle obligations – not to mention dangers. The palace, more than two thousand years old and a labyrinth of hidden passages and spy holes, offered poor protection. And so, politely, she had declined the Prince’s offer. In the meantime the new Kyra had arrived to take command of the encampment of Shee on this side of the estuary. In the six days since their arrival it had mushroomed to cover a square mile of hinterland above the beach, with sentries posted by Bétaald, the dark-skinned spiritual leader of the Shee, herself not yet fully recovered from wounds received during the battle in the Vale of Tazan.

  Milish was aware of a stiffening in the posture of the Kyra. In the Oraculum of Bree she observed a heightened flickering. At the same moment a tiny bat-like creature erupted from the beach below them, close to the walking figures.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A snooper,’ Milish declared.

  In a blur of movement, the dwarf mage’s arm reached back behind his left shoulder and in a flowing arc of movement the double-headed axe was in his right hand. But Alan reached out to block the dwarf mage’s purpose.

  ‘Why does the Mage Lord hold the weapon back?’ the Kyra asked.

  ‘To spy, a snooper must need a communicating brain – for it accommodates no more than a tiny mind. My guess is that he wishes to follow where that tiny mind will lead him.’

  The Kyra followed the flight of the snooper until it passed through a crevice-like window in the city walls. From there, her eyes returned to the youth, whose attention had also followed the flight of the snooper. The movements caused the thick braid of her hair to strain against the silver clasp that tied it down onto her left shoulder.

  ‘The snooper has reported to a spy in the walls opposite. From what you’ve told me about this city we can anticipate spies aplenty.’

  A frown creased the Ambassador’s patrician face. She couldn’t help but be concerned at the thought of somebody spying on them. With her striking beauty and regal manners and posture Milish would have commanded attention in any world. Her hair was a lustrous blue-black, the thick strands parted centrally over her forehead and falling down in careful bundles over her temples, with folds that hid the upper third of her fleshy lobed ears. On Earth, with her hair and coppery complexion, she might have been taken for an Oriental noblewoman.

  The Kyra pressed her: ‘Would your instincts suggest that such a spy works for the Council-in-Exile?’

  ‘It’s one possibility.’

  The Ambassador shivered as the offshore breeze blew a tuft of hair loose from her plume of ornamental silver, the liberated hair gambolling over her fine intelligent features.

  A Song of Innocence

  ‘Out – Earthspawn!’

  Faltana’s figure filled the open door to Kate’s cell. The face of the chief succubus was like that of a porcelain doll, but with pallid blue eyes as cold as a snake’s. Her rosebud lips were tensed into a purse-string, drawn back over ivory fangs that had turn
ed blue-black and hoary with age.

  ‘Your attendance is commanded!’

  Faltana was spare with her flicks of Garg-tail, but cruelly accurate. The scaly whip, as wiry as steel and barbed at its end, raised a bloody weal on Kate’s thin neck, just below the angle of her jaw. Pain seared through her, sharp and sickening. She had to clench her fists to keep the scream from her lips. Faltana fed on such expressions of pain. To scream would provoke more attention.

  ‘Dung-eating wormchild!’

  Faltana gauged the precise moment when the pain had subsided to bearable levels to lash out again, raising a second weal, after which those doll’s eyes studied the effect, as if relishing Kate’s inner struggle to contain her anguish. It took all of her determination to rein back the tears.

  ‘My mistress is impatient. Do not keep her waiting.’

  With an occasional crack of her whip Faltana drove Kate before her, shambling and twisting through the organic warren of passageways that formed the interior of the Tower of Bones, with its rancid smells and echoes of pain. In her mind, as always, Kate whispered the mantra remembered from the school yard of childhood. Sticks and stones may break my bones! Sticks and stones may break my bones! She no longer remembered what it had meant to her as a child, only that she had injected it with new meaning here. Let Faltana tear her skin. Let her humiliate her with words but she would never break her will. So, driven through the labyrinths of nightmare, she clung on to tiny comforts, using them to blot out the terror and pain.

  ‘Soon,’ Faltana’s pointed red tongue licked her fangs in exultation, ‘there will be feasting and celebration. The Ugly Ones have captured a singer.’

  Kate was overwhelmed with horror: the Ugly Ones were the horrid bat creatures. And the singer they had captured must be a Cill child.

  ‘Make haste!’

  Faltana had driven her into the great chamber of the skull, opposite the pit that fell away into darkness. The chamber was filled with a choir of succubi who were crooning and writhing their bodies in concert with the Witch’s melody of triumph. Faltana brought the Garg-tail whip across the backs of Kate’s calves, causing her to pitch forward onto the bleached bone floor. Pain seared through the nerves of both her legs, from her hips right down to her toes. She gasped, feeling her muscles jerk and spasm, with the poisonous sting of the tiny barbs that added venom to the whip.

  ‘On your knees from here!’

  Witches! Succubi! It was madness. It was impossible – a nightmare she would wake up from, and, as she had always woken from nightmares, she would go to the barn-like bathroom in her uncle’s house and douse her face in cold water over the big old-fashioned white porcelain sink. But Kate saw no hint of normality. And that meant that somehow the nightmare was more real than any memory of the echoing bathroom, with its brass plugs and castiron fittings, more real than her memory of her dog, Darkie – friendly, loving Darkie, who must have been really missing her. A nightmare shouldn’t go on like this, for day after day. A nightmare shouldn’t feel this real. A nightmare wasn’t filled with such pain and fear and loneliness …

  Faltana grabbed hold of Kate’s hair and jerked her head around so she had to watch what was happening. It took all of Kate’s faltering reserves of willpower not to shriek in terror.

  Gargs! There were seven or eight of them, forming a semicircle in the chamber, their folded wings merging with the deep purple shadows that jerked fitfully over the vault of fossilised bone that made up the ceiling. The Gargs were hugely tall and skeletally thin, their bat-like heads peering down at her and their oily skins reflecting the red glow that permeated the chamber from deeper underground. Faltana had told her that it was Gargs like these that had captured her and flown her here, in some perverted homage to the Witch. And there at the centre of the semicircle, bound and venom-dazed on the bone-scattered floor, she saw their captive.

  The Cill looked very young, a boy of perhaps seven or eight years, completely naked, and bound into a ball, his body twitching and trembling. Kate was trembling herself, her teeth chattering. She didn’t know why Faltana had brought her here. She didn’t want to see what they were doing to the boy. It grieved her that she couldn’t do anything to help him. But she couldn’t just watch and let them do it.

  ‘Let him go, you … you monsters!’

  Faltana twisted the fistful of Kate’s hair so hard it tore at her scalp. She forced Kate’s head down and round on her neck until her eyes were only a few feet away from the Cill. ‘Since you are so interested, you should relish the sight. A Cill so young, it is rarer even than your insolent self. See how its flesh is now diaphanous with fear! Why, it is no more substantial than a puff of smoke. But sever those bonds and it would shift colour and form so fast the eye could not follow. It would become part of this chamber, invisible to every watchful sense.’ Faltana laughed. ‘Is that what you want to see happen? You would help it to flee?’

  ‘Why do you so delight in hurting him?’

  Faltana yanked so hard on Kate’s hair that clumps tore from her scalp and a trickle of blood ran down over her face. ‘Why – but for the pleasure of hearing it sing!’

  At this the company of Gargs laughed with their strange throaty gurgles in tune with Faltana.

  The Cill were said to be very brave. The older Cill could maintain a stubborn silence even when they were being whipped and tormented to death. But Faltana knew how they could be made to sing. In death a Cill lamented the passing of its soul spirit with the strangest, sweetest song. Kate couldn’t bear to think how this child would discover his beautiful voice. He would shrill his death song. All this Kate knew because Faltana had exulted in telling her about it, again and again. The young Cill were prized above all others because they sang so plaintively before they were eaten. Kate had never heard a Cill sing but she had suffered nightmares of imagining those songs of innocence. Of witnessing what she knew would come afterwards. The shrieks of glee that would accompany the devouring. The stink of blood and the crunching of bones as the succubi fed like ravens on whatever remained. Faltana had gloated over every detail, how they would lick every last drop of blood from the floor and then gnaw for days on the juicy bones. She took command, addressing the Gargs:

  ‘It must be unbound, in the position of supplication. Take care it does not shape-shift and flee. No shedding of blood – that honour is mine. First take a firm hold of its throat, so tight it can barely breathe. Only then cut its bonds!’

  The choir of succubi sang, melodious and vile. At Faltana’s demand, a Garg took the Cill by its throat, then a claw extended from the bent wing joint of another, from which a venomed blade, as long as a dagger, slit through the thong that tied the Cill’s ankles to his wrists. Kate tried to avert her face. She was gagging from the stink of the Gargs’ oily secretions, which grew more copious and rank with their increasing excitement. When their leader spoke, it was through slits in the leathery skin high up in its neck, its voice emerging as a warbling hiss.

  ‘Are we to be honoured with the presence of the Great One?’

  Faltana rocked from one foot to another, her quivering bulk preening like some love-sick girl: ‘Yes – oh, yes! My mistress is pleased with this gift. She will conduct the sacrifice in person. But first I must prepare the offering.”

  High-pitched cattish squeals and cries emerged from the gaping mouths of the succubi, as their singing became distracted by Faltana’s tormenting the Cill with precise flicks and lashes of the Garg-tail whip, circling his body with padding twists and turns of her figure on feet that seemed obscenely dainty and delicate, in a parody of a dance of joy. It was a belief amongst the succubi that the fully mature Cill had, through their ability to change form and colour, perfected the art of resisting pain. No extreme of torture could make them sing. Only the younger Cill could be made to sing, and the death song of a Cill child was prized as the highest delicacy by their mistress. Olc did not sacrifice children because she was merely hungry for their flesh. She devoured them because she coveted their spir
its. This sacrifice would devour the child’s very soul, and the strange, sweet death song would adorn her act of spiritual plunder.

  Alan paused in his stroll to allow Qwenqwo to reattach the heavy bronze battleaxe with its twin-curved blades to its harness at his back.

  ‘The snooper?’ the dwarf mage asked.

  ‘It flew directly to the Prince’s adviser, Feltzvan.’

  ‘You’re sure of this?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  A week earlier their arrival into Carfon had been welcomed by a barque of state. On board the barque, Alan’s hand had been taken by a short, corpulent man with a deeply pockmarked face and brown eyes as hard as glass. When he spoke his voice had been curiously soft and as high-pitched as a girl’s.

  ‘Permit me to introduce myself. I am Feltzvan, emissary of Prince Ebrit, Elector of Carfon. You are most welcome to this beleaguered city. Be comforted that you are now among friends.’

  Nodding his thanks, there was little opportunity for Alan to speak more than a word or two in reply, since he found himself being greeted by so many dignitaries at once. Within minutes the powerful oars had taken them across the estuary and through the Harbour Gate to enter the docking area, where they were welcomed by a band of musicians, adding a brassy medley to the cheers and general din.

  Alan kept his focus clear, scanning the crowds for the bent old woman who had issued a warning, mind-to-mind on their arrival. But there was no sign of her now among these welcoming crowds.

  ‘The Prince Elector,’ whispered Milish, during a lull in her manifold introductions to people, ‘is not among them. He’s the head of the most duplicitous of noble families, the Ebrits of Werewe. It will be interesting to see who greets you at the Water Palace. Keep alert in your conversations, even the most trivial. Trust no one, least of all those who seem most welcoming.’

  Alan nodded. ‘Are you in danger, Milish?’