The Tower of Bones Read online

  Blood issued from the old woman’s eyes. Her breath came in gasps. Alan couldn’t just stand aside and ignore her torment. He had to help her.

  Placing his arm around her shoulders he extended the oracular protection from his own body to hers, allowing her fallen head to rest against his shoulder.

  ‘Foolish! Ach …!’

  ‘Please, tell me! You sense something important in the words of the prophecy? Something that connects to Kate?’

  ‘I … I cannot be sure. But Diarmuid … a great Seer … Ach … I burn!’

  ‘Diarmuid – what did he mean?’

  ‘Such a spirit … omens …’

  He was losing her. Alan wished he had a little heal-well to ease her suffering. ‘Hold on – please. Just a moment longer!’ He brushed her brow again, cupped it in his pulsating hand. Though it seemed cruel to press the tormented Sister for more information, yet he felt he had to. ‘What do you mean?’

  Her voice gathered a shrill crackling strength from his embrace. ‘The Great Witch … she resurrects the soul spirit of Fangorath. Fangorath … the most dreadful … the Dragonbane …’

  ‘Fangorath?’

  ‘Half divine …’ Hocht’s voice was the merest whisper, so he had to listen closely to her dying breath to catch her words. ‘A god’s own son … a titan of darkness.’ Her hand flailed, clutched at his face, as if in warning. ‘Beware …’

  ‘Beware this Fangorath?’

  The old woman’s blood was soaking into his shoulder. His hand was dripping with her blood, yet still he held her to him, infusing what he could of his own life force into her, to keep her alive for mere moments longer.

  ‘What will happen if Olc resurrects Fangorath? She plans to use him – to use Fangorath’s soul spirit – to give her the power she craves?’

  Hocht clutched at his face with fingers over which the parchment skin and even the very nails had been stripped to bare bone. ‘Worse!’

  ‘What could be worse? What is it about the Tower of Bones?’

  She whispered a few words, so slurred it was almost impossible to make them out. But he saw the shape of them come from her destroyed lips. And he heard them, like a thunderclap, through the oraculum in his brow.

  ‘The Third Portal!’

  Alan realised what she must mean. He recalled the advice given to him in Dromenon: In Carfon is one of the three portals …

  ‘The Tower of Bones – it’s a portal? A Third Portal to the Fáil?’

  Sister Hocht sighed, a low-pitched guttural croak, and her head fell back, her eyes boiled white.

  Slug Beast and Lizard-Dung

  Kate knew that Faltana was nearby even though she couldn’t see her. She could smell the rancid odour of her and she could hear her laboured breathing in the glimmerless dark as she arrived to grasp her arm and check her pulse. Though any sense of contact should have been welcome in this chamber of unfeeling, Kate felt nothing but disgust at the regular visits from her tormentor, knowing that Faltana was terrified of what would happen if Kate died on her before the Witch’s purpose was served.

  A flare of light: it was no more than the sickly glow of a wyre-stone, its candle-like illumination framing Faltana’s hand, but Kate was so accustomed to pitch dark it forced her to clench her eyes tightly shut as if she were staring into the noonday sun.

  Faltana’s voice hissed so close into Kate’s ear she felt the wet of her spittle, ‘Open your eyes, lizard-dung. I know you hear me.’

  Through lids swollen with cold and hunger, Kate struggled to see the creature she so hated, etched in sweat by the lurid glow. Seeing Faltana gave her a focus for her loathing, that dark bulk, that slug-beast, a denser evil within the darkness, her empty eye socket rimed where the light glittered over her sweaty countenance.

  ‘Why don’t you just kill me?’

  ‘I shall – be assured of it. But not yet. No! In her wisdom my mistress orders that killing is too pleasant an end for you. But pain! Ah, the delicious thoughts of that. I crave your pain as you crave the coming of your saviour.’

  Kate shivered. She couldn’t help the trembling that racked her body. But she tried to make her voice stronger than she actually felt. ‘You don’t dare to touch me. I heard what the Witch said.’

  ‘Ah, do I not? Is that what you fondly wish for – what you hope for?’

  Kate struggled to create a half-laugh, half-cough in her dust-dry throat. ‘Not if you value the one eye you have left.’

  The surviving eye of the Chief Succubus glittered back with loathing. It travelled over Kate’s shackled limbs in a slow writhe of pleasure. Faltana’s spit-flecked whisper crawled into Kate’s ear. ‘He senses it – this saviour or yours. He feels what you feel.’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘You know I do not lie. He feels it – every sting. Surely it doubles my delight. But enough of foreplay. Let us engage in earnest.’

  The first stroke of the Garg-tail gouged Kate’s skin, as if it had been brushed with a red-hot poker. Faltana was careful not to lash her – the scourge of the lash would show in ravaged flesh and livid scars. This torment raised a scalding weal of agony, but nothing that would permanently scar her flesh. It was followed by a pause, as precise as the weal, a minute or two to allow the agony to subside, which encouraged the growing dread of the next weal. Kate closed her eyes, shut them tight, again.

  ‘Think you still that he doesn’t feel it?’ Something sharp – a nail, like a talon – gouged the burning track of the weal, causing her to squirm and writhe. ‘Yeees – yeees! Upon my poor lost eye, as I feel it still, so also does he. He feels each lick, even more than you do.’

  Kate sensed how the arm of the slug-beast rose again, that leisurely, almost delicate crescent of contact, the slide of agony gauged to unerring precision behind the pale flat glitter of the single eye. She tried to jerk her body away, but her feet were manacled with irons to the floor. Her heart shrank from the coming pain. But her body was too exhausted to tense any more.

  ‘Yeees! Let him savour it as we do – mmmmmmmmm!’

  As the venomous barb hit a nerve Kate was unable to stop the scream.

  ‘Ahhhhh! It sings!’ The liquid sound of her tormentor’s lips opening, the slightly rasping sounds of the tongue licking. The barb suspended, waiting for the moment the agony peaked and began to fall, before it repeated the selfsame course to elicit another scream. A pause for the scream to fade before the whisper, slobbery now with glee, continued to torment her:

  ‘You hope it will end? I believe you really want it to end. You would welcome death, would you not? Or perhaps you hope that Faltana will tire of her sport? No, no – Faltana will never tire.’ The arm rose again, the same precise and delicate sketch upon Kate’s skin, probing for the same nerve to see if it would work again.

  It worked.

  Somehow Kate had to find a source of strength, of comfort. She must bear it in the knowledge that it had to stop. Faltana was taking a risk. She was disobeying the Witch’s orders. Somehow, she had to find a way to make it stop.

  As if Faltana was reading her mind those lips smacked again. ‘You are praying, perhaps? Praying to some misbegotten god of your world? But it will not work. Believe me, they all pray. But it never works.’

  ‘Damn you!’ Kate’s lips tried to make the sound. Her mind willed her lips to make the words, but no words came.

  The barb whispered over her skin, finding precisely the same place, following what must be a livid gouge. Kate shrieked.

  Slobbering with the joy of it, drooling spittle onto her chin and neck, Faltana exulted in the fact that she had so easily found her rhythm.

  ‘No respite will come of such wishful praying. No hope lies in your friend coming here to save you. No hope in any direction you wheel and turn. For in this world there is but you and me.’ She toyed with the weal but fleetingly with the tip of the barb, evoking an exquisite agony merely through toying with her. Kate heard her throaty gurgle of delight. ‘No hope of Faltana tiring.’ The barb des
cended. Another scream. Was it the fifth or sixth time? Kate had lost track of the number. How long could a single nerve be tormented before it died? Then the dreadful thought: just how many such nerves like this were there in the human body?

  ‘No respite – no hope! Faltana will increase your pain, little by little, until you cannot bear it. You will beg your god to let you die. But you will not die. Not until your saviour takes the bait and enters the trap.’

  She was lost in a sea of agony, yet she sensed the barb’s descent to score its precise curve of fire through her bewildered consciousness. She would not scream. Not again. She would not scream … The scream tore through her clenched teeth, through the fabric of her mind, bringing the darkness she craved, the darkness she hoped would bring a final end to this torment …

  She rose from darkness to a vague awareness of utter silence. Her eyes were too exhausted to open. As if from a great distance Kate felt Faltana raise her wrist, the probing finger on her pulse. The succubus was terrified she had killed her. But the pause would not last. Faltana would merely wait for her to recover from her faint before starting again. But, somehow, Kate was determined that from now on she would not give her the pleasure of hearing her scream. From now on …

  A hiss in the darkness, a different sound … a scary sound, yet it seemed to come from so far, far away …

  A new voice, much deeper, a cawing … It sounded like the scuttling of something dark and evil through caverns of slime and bone:

  Did we not give you warning, wretch? If you have killed it …!

  ‘No – no! See! I feel her pulse. It is fast but strong. She lives yet. Certainly, she lives. She merely sleeps.’

  Silence!

  The voice alone was more frightening than all of Faltana’s tormenting.

  Fool! You have amused yourself at our expense. You have scourged it perilously close to death.

  Kate heard the sound of weeping from very close to where she lay. She cracked open her eyes. Through the slitted lids she saw an enormous claw confront the remaining eye in Faltana’s terrified face. The claw made a gouging movement, a pantomime of slowly tearing away the small muscles that held the eye, a painstaking dissection, that would cause the spherical and bloody orb to emerge intact, clutched between the long, sharp talons of the finger and thumb.

  ‘Mercy, beloved Mistress – your faithful servant! ‘Not the other eye – not my lovely remaining eye!’

  If it dies because of you, much more than an eye shall we extract from you.

  A glimpse of the huge multifaceted red eyes and Kate’s own eyes clenched shut again. She heard another shriek. Then the screaming even louder than before, followed by the slobbering sound of Faltana’s renewed weeping. Kate though that she could detect the smell of blood.

  ‘Muh-Mistress – buh-buh-beloved one! This is a deceiving creature – unlike any I have ever known. Its flesh will not abide with harm.’

  What foolishness is this?

  ‘I pray thee! I offer blessings, Faltana, your humble servant. Your most obedient servant … eternally. Let me show you with a single lash.’

  The chamber reverberated with the Witch’s rage.

  Still would you ignore our caution!

  ‘Mistress – beloved …!’

  Kate cringed from the sudden bellow of pain, then a snapping sound, the breaking of bone, as loud as a blow. Something torn off. Crunching noises as the bone and flesh were eaten. Shrieks, slobbering, the renewed smell of blood …

  The Witch’s presence – Kate was overwhelmed by it. She could feel the raw red heat of it on her face.

  One more moan and your entire hand rather than a finger shall it be!

  ‘Blessed, merciful Mistress!’

  One more squeal!

  Silence then – utter silence, apart from the shudder of breathing. A pregnant silence amid the heavy stink of blood.

  Kate could feel the Witch’s eyes return to her.

  A touch of something sharp and hard on Kate’s brow. The lurid glare of blood-red light as her eyelid was raised. Vileness invaded her vision. A sense of shock, as if the talons of the Witch had pierced her chest to feel her very heart inside. Her pulse rose to a frantic flurry.

  And yet, though thin, it is not the mere bag of bones we had imagined, knowing the slops you feed it!

  Faltana, forbidden to speak, writhed and twisted like a child throwing a temper tantrum on the filthy floor.

  A claw-tipped tentacle lifted the Garg-tail, brought it forward for inspection by the insectile eyes, which turned back to inspect Kate’s body from head to toe.

  Where was the recent scourging – here on its back? Speak quickly, or you will feel our wrath.

  ‘On her back, indeed. Here – precisely six or seven times – this very spot.’

  We see no mark.

  ‘You see, my beloved Mistress – all is healed, within moments of being inflicted.’

  A perfidious one, this. More dangerous, perhaps, than we had imagined!

  ‘Dangerous?’

  Yet so fertile do we sense in mind and spirit! Perhaps we have been too kind to it?

  ‘Yes – yes. Oh, too kind!’

  It is strong – stronger than appearances suggest. There is a power dormant in it, such as we have not seen before. Henceforth no more food – not even slops.

  ‘Such wisdom, beloved Mistress!’

  Henceforth only water!

  Kate no longer cared. In the enveloping silence, as the Witch and her servant abandoned her to darkness, she hoped that starvation might bring release, even if it was only the release of death. Oh, she hoped so. She so longed for it. She longed for it with every beat of her faltering heart.

  The Portal

  Alan was badly shaken by the death of Sister Hocht. And there were questions he hadn’t had time to ask her. Now there would be no answers. And Kate was suffering again; he sensed the deepening of her pain. But what more could he do? A sense of helplessness overwhelmed him. All he could do was to find his way back to the Council Chamber, where the murder of the venerable old sister threw the Sisterhood into a panic. A furious Sister Siebe descended to the floor and insisted that he should leave the Old City at once. ‘The murder of our sister is your fault. All these years she has lived here in safety. Not until you come here, with your arrogant demands, does this catastrophe befall us!’

  ‘I’m really sorry about the death of Sister Hocht. But my purpose here remains as vital as ever. My friend, Kate, is in mortal danger.’

  His oraculum was pulsating powerfully, and Siebe backed away from him.

  Sister Aon spoke from the platform. ‘Mage Lord Duval – I beg of you. Leave this chamber. Please, go at once!’

  But Alan refused to budge. ‘Perhaps Sister Siebe is right and it was my coming here that brought down the Tyrant’s rage. But then ask yourself why the deathmaw focused on Sister Hocht? I stood next to her. Why not attack me? Why – unless it was her knowledge of the portal that was important. If the Tyrant can penetrate these walls to kill her, he can strike against any of you here.’

  Aon rose to her full height in outrage. ‘In all of history, none but the Great Blasphemer has dared to confront the Portal of Destiny, and the consequence of that blasphemy was the ruin of Ossierel!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sister Aon, but I can’t take no for an answer.’

  ‘What you contemplate is as great a blasphemy as that of the De Danaan herself. I speak for all when I say that we cannot help you in this additional blasphemy. Indeed we could not help you even if we wished to do so. There is none left who could assist you – none even who could lead you to the portal.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to find it without your help.’

  The oraculum in his brow pulsed once, powerfully, causing the entire council to shrink back in their seats. But Aon stood firm. ‘The Princess Laása led you here. She knows her way well enough to take you back to the ferry.’

  Milish came to his side, placing her hand on his shoulder. ‘Mage Lord – let us go
. We will take the counsel of the Kyra and the dwarf mage.’

  ‘There’s no time for counsel any more, Milish. Kate’s spirit is failing. You’ll have to go back on your own. Tell the others what’s happening. Wait for me at the camp of the Shee. Look after Mo for me.’

  With that he stormed out of the Council Chamber, trusting to the oraculum that was pulsating wildly in his brow.

  The Fáil was calling him, leading him through a maze of passageways and doors, until it became apparent he was descending deep into the bowels of the ancient city. After some time he found himself in a wide circular chamber, so dark he needed the light of the oraculum to examine it. In that rubicund light the surrounding walls seemed craggy, as if this place had originally been a natural cavern over which the entire ancient city had been built. The oraculum beat even more insistently, as if great power was very close to him here.

  A signal from the shadows beckoned him and, to his astonishment, he found it was the young sister who had earlier been his guide. His voice echoed, unnervingly, in the chamber. ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  She placed an anxious hand on his arm. Her voice was soft, full of concern. ‘I was novice to Sister Hocht and assisted her in negotiating these passages. Now none other than I know the way.’

  Alan peered about the chamber but he could no longer make out the entrance. It was as if he had come through an opening that had then sealed itself shut.

  ‘Who are you? Earlier you refused to give me your name.’

  ‘We have no names, only numbers. But I see your pain and concern for your companion. I know that my teacher trusted you and wished to help you. So I feel it my duty to help you also.’

  Awkwardly, with bowed head, she pressed something hard and surprisingly heavy into his hand. Alan looked down onto a sphere of perfect crystal, about two and a half inches in diameter. It was chocolate brown in colour, semi-transparent, with whorls of silver coursing over its surface like the shapes of continents over the surface of a planet. A tiny pinpoint of light pulsated at its core.

  ‘What is it?’