Naked and shivering, James followed Tavin through the newly-created door and out into a courtyard, hemmed-in by walls of shifting black needles. The pool lay at the centre of the clearing, a circle of unblemished black peeking from beneath the rotting remains of a thatched roof. Like the bathhouse of Galendar, an area of decking surrounded the pool’s edge; its surface as buckled and twisted as the house beside it.
Without the use of a pail to perform the symbolic gesture of introduction, James followed Tavin’s example and cupped his hands at the pool’s edge, splashing the oily water across his kneeling body. His breath caught in his throat as the icy cold bit into his flesh, but with the promise of the pool’s warmth, he followed the young man beneath its surface. The initial cold quickly subsided and soon the inexplicable heat of the wellspring enveloped him. With a sigh of relief, he reclined his head against the smooth stones lining the pool, and breathed the damp aroma of moss into his lungs. The sound of the pattering rain filled the air with its music, and for once Tavin appeared content to remain silent.
James peered warily into the darkness of the trees, their shifting movement conjuring sinister shapes in his imagination. After the past days of pursuit, it was baffling to him that his companions now appeared so at ease within their temporary shelter. He had said as much to Tavin as they had undressed back inside the house, and his unsettling reply still resounded in his head: ‘My brother must rest before we brave the elements again,’ Tavin had replied simply. ‘If we are found, we are found. It boots nothing to worry about that which is beyond our control.’
Frowning, James gazed across at the young man, his pale face an indistinct smudge above the surface of the pool.
‘Tavin?’
‘Yes, Jame?’ the young man replied sleepily.
‘Who’s doing all this?’
Tavin remained silent, and for a while James assumed his question had been ignored like so many of the others he had asked over the past two weeks. But when the young man finally spoke, his reply caught him off guard.
‘We do not know for certain.’
‘What do you mean you don’t know?’
‘We know as much as any could know of someone, or should I say, some-thing, we have not yet seen with our own eyes,’ Tavin replied guardedly. ‘We are not wont to believe the tall-tales and rumours that spread like plagues before it.’
‘What damned rumours?’ James barked. ‘What the hell aren’t you telling me?’
‘Perhaps before you ask any more of your questions, you should know that I have been forbidden to talk upon the subject,’ the young man said, shifting uncomfortably beneath the water. ‘Rest assured, that all of your many questions will be answered once we reach the Citadel.’
‘If we reach this damnable Citadel you mean!’ James said, his hand angrily slapping the water.
Tavin opened one eye and grinned ruefully across the water. Reflected light from a crack in the doorway glinted for a moment across the man’s long hair, laying slick against his shoulders.
‘I will say this much,’ Tavin said, closing his eyes once more. ‘The person, the thing, who pursues us across the leagues, does so from afar.’
‘And what the hell is that supposed to mean?’ James snapped. ‘I didn’t ask for riddles! I want the bloody truth, damn it! Lord Galen said they were coming for me. I want to know who they are and what the hell they want!’
Tavin opened his eyes and sighed heavily, folding his arms across his chest in exasperation.
‘The barbarians upon the central plains call him the Dread God, a supernatural being that was somehow awakened in the far reaches of the western realm. Some say that he resides within a tower that he cannot leave, a tower that touches the clouds and bruises the sky,’ Tavin said, smiling grimly in the half-light.
‘Now, tell me, does that sound like a rumour you would readily believe?’
For once, Tavin’s infectious smile had no effect upon him. A creeping chill traced the bony ridge of his spine despite the continued warmth of the bath. He saw again the narrow walls of his half-remembered dream, the tunnel of stone that receded into the sky. Ever since the dream in the bathhouse of Galendar, he had assumed the curious circular room had been buried deep beneath the ground. But what if it wasn’t? Could the room have instead been enclosed within the walls of a tower? An impossible tower that touched the clouds and bruised the sky?
‘Where is this tower?’ James asked, his voice rising above the insistent patter of rain.
Tavin shook his head.
‘Please be content for now that you are in the company of those who would keep you from such evil. In the meantime, please do not darken our friendship any further by pursuing these pointless questions.’
James slumped back against the side of the pool and closed his eyes firmly shut. The soothing calm that had initially been imparted by the pool was replaced now by a creeping dread. As much as he had desired to know who – or what – was pursuing him, he was beginning to wish he had never asked. Was the half-seen figure of his dream the same man who now so doggedly pursued them across this strange land? Try as he might, he could not reconcile the intimation of kindness and concern he had felt in his dream with that of the faceless entity that killed, tortured and mutilated innocent lives all around him.
Taking another deep breath, he tried to clear these troubling thoughts from his head and focused instead upon the distant roll of thunder prowling through the forest like a restless animal. Sleep was the last thing he expected, but when it came it descended upon him suddenly, like a heavy cloak draped from the sky.
***
A familiar sight of verdant green slowly resolved out of the darkness. Like wisps of smoke, the myriad colours of the garden swirled around him, the mighty tree of the watchtower rising like a flowing ribbon into the clouds above. He breathed the delightful perfume of its flora into his lungs and his heart rejoiced, for the House of Galendar had not been destroyed after all!
There was a blur of movement, and then one of the curious transparent birds was perched upon his knee. It cocked its head to one side, its tiny black eye regarding him intently. James studied the creature with renewed wonder, the transparent feathers covering its slender body like tiny windows into the tangled assembly of its innards.
As though in answer to his scrutiny, the bird’s delicate body began to tremble. The furious blur of its tiny heart, pressed so tightly to its chest, began to slow before stopping altogether. By rights, the bird should have keeled over and died, but it remained where it stood like a stuffed toy perched on his knee.
The disturbing sight brought the first twinge of disquiet to the tranquil scene. The garden seemed to sway and pitch as though gravity itself had become unseated. The tiny claws of the bird prickled his skin, its razor-sharp beak gleaming like the black blade of a knife.
With growing unease, he peered more closely into the frozen interior of the bird. The last time he had seen such a creature, its stomach had been filled with the seeds and berries of its foraging. But the specimen he now studied revealed a diet that was an obscene violation of its true nature. Bloated to the point of rupture, its tiny stomach was filled with the bloodied flesh and bones of another creature.
As though in retaliation for this grim discovery, the bird jerked its head forward, burying the sharp blade of its beak into his thigh. Before he had chance to react, a terrible paralysis swept through him, locking his body rigid. Only his eyes moved, and they were fixed back upon the bird, now sucking his blood like an oversized mosquito. Drinking greedily, it filled its stomach of bones with red until the already swollen organ burst, spilling its contents into the cavities that surrounded it.
James’ hands were like lead weights at his sides, but slowly he was able to raise an arm into the air. The movement was excruciatingly slow, but at last it hovered above the bird; now a freakish, bloated parody of the delicate creature it had been moments before. Trembling with revulsion, he closed his eyes and grasped its tiny head, causing it to pop like an overripe grape between his fingers. A warm slick of blood erupted across his leg as the sodden remains of the bird fell wetly to the ground.
The killing of the bird sent the garden pitching and reeling around him in a dizzying blur. The paralysis was lifting, but so too was the bile seeking its way up his throat. Peering down at his wounded leg, he saw the severed beak of the bird protruding from his flesh like a black thorn. But the blood that slowly oozed from its hollow end was no longer his own. This fluid was thick and cold and as black as tar…
James cried aloud as he awoke within the darkness of the pool. Frantically, he clawed at his thigh as though still trying to remove the severed beak of his dream. It wasn’t until he had recovered his senses that he noticed Tavin was no longer with him. The storm had worsened whilst he had slept, and the rain now hammered its furious fists upon the thatched roof above his head.
The lingering images of the nightmare filled him with a sudden foreboding which made him scramble for the edge of the pool. Bracing his hands upon the warped decking, he began to slowly pull himself from its cloying embrace. He was halfway out of the pool, when he felt something tangled around his leg. With a shudder, he thought of the tendrils of under-growth that lined the bottom of the bathing pool. Somehow one of the tentacle-like fronds must have become tangled around his thigh; perhaps inspiring the unpleasant dream he had just endured. Jerking his leg in revulsion, he tried to dislodge its slippery length, but to his horror it only seemed to tighten.
Before he could do so much as draw another breath, he was violently pulled beneath the water. His hands blindly reached for the front which bound him, but as he sank deeper he felt other tendrils fasten about his limbs. In desperation, he began to flail in panic, but their grip only became more certain, the under-growth now squirming across his body like a pit of snakes. At last, his burning lungs gave up their futile struggle and he gasped a painful breath of the wellspring. The icy bite of its water seared his lungs as his limbs flailed uselessly around him.
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A shrill whistling filled his ears as the darkness suddenly erupted with light. The water and pool were gone, replaced by an expanse of sky as green as a stagnant pond. The wind tore tears from his startled eyes and tumbled his body end over end. If this was another dream, it was not of flight but of falling…
There was a sickening crack as James hit the ground. The air was thumped from his lungs, his eyes bulging as he tried to draw breath. Clawing the dusty ground, his chest at last obeyed his plea to expand and gulped its searing heat inside him. Spluttering on the dust that accompanied the hot air, he caught a glimpse of his ruined legs. One lay folded to the side, jutting out at an obscene angle, the other almost cut in half by a splintered shard of bone which protruded from his leg like the gleaming blade of a knife. Fleeing from the sight of their ruin, the pain at last flooded through him making him retch.
Spitting the cloying taste of blood and dust from his mouth, he stabbed his eyes at the desolate plane upon which he had fallen. The ground was hard and sun-scorched, littered with bones bleached by the remorseless heat of a tiny blue sun. The blasted ruins of some forsaken city rose out of the ground around him, charred and blackened by a conflagration that had melted stone into jagged shards of blackened glass.
As he blinked against the sun’s glare, he asked himself if this was yet another world his damaged mind had conjured up for him. Next to the gigantic sun of which he was now so familiar, this was like a tiny blazing marble in comparison. Yet, the incredible heat searing his skin was almost intolerable.
On the edge of his vision, something compelled his head to turn despite the terrible pain reaching up from his destroyed legs. What he saw there was impossible, yet it lanced up into the sky with such unyielding solidity that it couldn’t be anything but real. It was a tower, but a tower made by no mortal hand. The column of black soared into the sky from the horizon like a jagged thorn impaled in the earth. And the higher it climbed, the larger it became, until its top, bristling with dark towers and spiked prominences, filled half the sky with its impossible mass. It appeared at times to be on the verge of collapse, but then its stupendous solidity reasserted itself in his mind and it became a thing unbearable to behold.
When the demonic siren suddenly detonated in the sky above, James screamed in terror. The deafening sound rolled like heavy waves through the air, driving doom-laden vibrations though his body and into the trembling earth. Clamping his hands to his ears, he tried in vain to block its roar from his senses, but the remorseless sound invaded every part of his being. It made the siren he had heard in the deserted village sound like a cheap imitation; this was a siren played for the end of the world, a rallying cry for the damned and demented.
Before he knew what was happening, James realised he was moving. Painfully craning his neck upwards, he saw his own hands mechanically clawing at the ground, dragging him forward inch by inch. It was as though his body were at the mercy of a puppet master, and the maddening siren the strings that bound him. Helplessly, he watched as his hands and arms propelled him across the dusty ground, trailing the broken wreckage of his legs in their wake.
At first, his body’s compulsion to move was merely confounding, but when he saw the edge of the cliff to which they were bound he screamed again in terror. The only part of him left to his control was his head, which he now drove into the ground like an obscure anchor to his wayward body. His scalp grated against the hard earth, but his clawing hands were now feverishly working in unison, pulling him ever closer to his death. He could taste the blood his head was trailing behind it, but he gritted his teeth and pushed it harder still into the ground.
When he felt his fingers grasp the edge of the cliff, he gasped as his head was dragged over the precipice. He waited breathlessly for the final shove that would send him tumbling to his death, but as he stared down at the rocks far below, his body was finally released from its possession.
The siren was finally dying upon the air, but its lingering warble seemed to whisper parting words in his ear: behold, the fruits of my labour!
With his breath wheezing in and out of his chest, he gazed out at the desolated vista his body had conspired to show him. Far below, a range of blasted foothills bordered a wide lake of shimmering white. The sides of the hills were scorched and denuded of all life, its rills and gullies dead and barren as though victim to a plague of pestilence from which it would never recover. The lake was blinding in the fierce light of the tiny blue sun, and James’ eyes quickly filled with tears. Even so, something about it seemed odd, for its surface seemed not to move; as though despite the unrelenting heat of the sun the lake was somehow frozen. It wasn’t until his bleeding fingers pawed away his tears that he finally understood, for it was not water that filled the bottom of the valley, but a sea of bones.
A flicker of movement caught his eye and he craned his head to the side. Upon the precarious edge of a rocky escarpment, a tall figure was gazing down at the wasteland at its feet. The man was emaciated beyond the point of starvation, his skin adhered to his bones like a skein of black paint. But as frail as he might have appeared, there was a potency of power emanating from the frame that held him aloft. His pose was dreadful in its certainty, wreathed in billowing robes that stretched behind him like a great black cloud.
James could not see the man’s face from this distance, but he felt his stare when his gaze turned suddenly in his direction. Like the putrid light cast by a demonic lighthouse, the man’s glare raked across his face.
Shrieking, James struggled backwards, forcing the rock of the cliff to intercede. His watering eyes sent involuntary tears rolling down his cheeks where they raised dark blotches in the thick dust. The sight of that freakish man made him shiver despite the baking ground pressed to his face. He was the physical embodiment of all the pain and malice that had been visited upon this tortured world, an entity of hate, despair and endless loathing.
As James’ breath rattled in and out of his throat, he stared uncomprehendingly at the dark blotches left by his tears. A pattern had formed within the damp earth, a pattern that was strangely complex and oddly familiar. His tired mind had almost grasped its meaning when a loud noise intruded upon the quiet. The sound was like the sails of a ship being savagely torn from their masts, followed by a dull thud which sent tremors racing through the ground beneath him.
Instinctively, James knew he was no longer alone upon the cliff. Somehow, the terrible man from the devastated valley had bridged the gap between them. He felt his diseased gaze like hooks impaled in his back, the sharp tang in the air that belonged neither to man nor beast. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than for his betraying hands to resume their treacherous work and pitch him from the cliff. But instead, his body obeyed the command of the other, rolling him slowly over like a tortoise exposing its soft underbelly to a ravenous hawk.
The dark man stood over him, his billowing gown moving like slow waves on a sunless world. The very light of the sun appeared unwilling to illuminate his features, but what passed for the man’s face threatened to tear what little sanity James had retained. For, the face that scowled down at him was a blur, a shifting sculpture of grotesquery that used the human skull as its muse.
When at last he spoke, his voice had a timbre as deep and maleficent as the chasm below.
‘Pitiful.’
A sound like the mockery of laughter seethed from the blurred face, a sound as obscene as the scream of a child falling to its death.
‘Desperate old fool!’ he cackled.
The figure bent closer, his skeletal arm resting nonchalantly upon his bended knee.
‘James,’ he whispered, ‘I want you to understand something very important.’
James nodded obediently, as though to display any other reaction to his words would be unforgivable.
‘You will suffer.’
The man’s words were laced with such hate and delivered with such overwhelming certainty that James felt sure he was about to be killed where he lay. But instead the man turned and walked to the edge of the cliff.
Raising a skeletal arm high above his head, a lurid green light ignited in the palm of his hand. The light was feeble, like the phosphorescent glow of swamp gas, but steadily it grew brighter until it blossomed into a blinding orb of light like a second sun birthed from his hand.
Cowering helplessly where he lay, James squinted past the frenzied flickering of light to the shattered hills far below. From out of a gaping hole in the side of the hill, a liquid black poured forth. It looked like smoke from some smouldering ruin beneath the earth, but gradually it began to take shape, forming tendrils and fronds like the poisonous underbelly of a jellyfish. As the entity drew nearer, its shape grew more certain, its vast bulk knitting together as it flew through the air towards them.
The thing that eventually came to rest upon the cliff edge was an abomination beyond all description. It was a creature of rippling black muscle and blazing yellow eyes, a cancerous growth that had been ripped from the earth and given the means to spread its rot.
Turning the painful blur of his face to the hulking beast at his side, the man’s voice once more imprinted its malice upon the air: ‘Bring him to me alive, kill the rest.’
The monster flexed its giant body in reply, bracing its many tentacles upon the ground like coiled springs. A violent shudder passed through its body and then it leapt into the sky like a bolt of black lightning.
For a long time the man stared at the receding shape of the monster he had created, but when at last he turned, the blurred outline of his face was contorted by an obscene smile. The man walked forward as the air shimmered and crackled around him. The bones littering the ground were pressed into dust, the ruined soil smouldering like the bed of a funeral pyre.
‘You will all suffer,’ the man said, repeating his earlier words as though confirming a promise already made.
Raising a foot as black as pitch, he poised it above James’ head and stamped down with all his might.
***
A strong hand closed around James’ shoulder and wrenched him out of the pool. Water lurched from his throat, splattering the arms of the man who held him aloft. Gasping for air, he looked up into Torrinth’s lined face and for the first time saw emotion flicker across his gaunt features. It was not anger or reproach he saw in the other man’s face but the cold snap of fear.
The first words that spilled from his mouth were a senseless babble, yet the old man’s face grew pale as though he had instead imparted some grave truth.
James steeled himself, shaking his head in fear and frustration. But at last, he heard the words he sought springing from his lips.
‘Take me to her!’
Torrinth complied without hesitation and pulled him to his feet, before ushering him across the windswept courtyard. They had almost reached the door to the house when James came to an abrupt halt.
Something he had heard amidst the shrill rattle of pine needles made him clutch the old man at his side. The sound was distant, hiding behind the fall of rain and the rumble of thunder like an impostor… but its baleful signature was familiar to him now. Somewhere, in a faraway corner of the forest, the demonic siren was wailing into the storm.
Throwing his weight against the door, James pitched himself inside the house. Leander and Tavin looked up from beside the fire, their eyes widened in surprise. Tavin grinned and was about to say something in jest, when James cut him short.
‘Weevil!’ he spluttered.
Leander jumped to her feet, aware now of Torrinth standing beside him.
‘I hear the siren!’ James cried. ‘The weevil are coming!’
Leander and Tavin exchanged concerned glances before the young woman stooped to wake Fen. But James shouted again, causing the sleeping woman to jerk suddenly awake.
‘Something else is coming too, something worse!’ he cried, bracing his arm upon the old man’s shoulder. ‘I had a vision, a dream, whatever you want to call it,’ he said, pointing a trembling finger beyond the darkened walls. ‘I saw a horrible thing… a monster, coming to kill you all!’
The door to the house was suddenly thrown wide, revealing the solid bulk of Kirrin silhouetted against a blinding flash of lightning.
‘Men approach from the northwest, less than a league from the house,’ his voice grated. ‘They do not travel quietly.’
The tall man cast a questioning glance towards James, but Leander was already striding toward him.
‘How far to Ruinsgrave River?’ she asked, strapping a quiver of arrows to her waist and reaching for her bow.
‘Seven leagues. In haste we can reach the crossing before dawn.’
Leander nodded grimly and turned back to James, her body lithe and dangerous in the frenzied flickering of firelight. Despite the obvious resentment that continued to smoulder within her, she seemed unable to refute the converging powers intent upon his life.
‘I pray that my father knew better than I. Get dressed, we leave at once.’