Dark Requiem (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 3) (36 page)

Only the knowledge that
his family had survived the destruction of the Enwa people, and
that his seed would continue to flower on the Earth, was able to
give Akan a sliver of light in a world turned black with
despair.

Jow died a few years later
after a short illness. Her last few days had been ones of anguish
as she fretted over the fate of the child goddess.

“
You have to keep
praying.” She gripped Akan’s arm, her eyes staring wildly about the
room, her breath struggling to enter and leave her chest. “Only you
can save her.”

It was a burden he had
been unable to fulfil during Alayai’s short life. And it was
unlikely he would be able to do so now she was lost to the
underworld. Yet after Jow died he continued his hopeless vigil
amongst the empty streets of the ghostly village where the moans of
the dead could be heard deep in the night. Their torments whispered
on the wind in the silence of the noonday sun.

One afternoon he was on
his way to collect water, his gait slow and unsteady now that the
years had gathered themselves around his joints making them as
stiff as tree limbs. That was when he came to a stop and glanced
around the village in surprise. The homes all around him appeared
to be disintegrating, as if they were made of mouldy leaves instead
of stone. Most of the homes had completely fallen away. He turned
in a circle and stared around him. All the structures of the
village were slowly being erased as if by an unseen hand. Only the
temple remained along with the wall, but only because Akan resided
in the temple and the wall around the village kept him
safe.

Alayai.

He knew without a doubt
that somehow, wherever she was, she was the one responsible and she
wanted all traces of the village wiped from the face of the
Earth.

Akan got to his knees and
wept. Alayai was still so angry, and he could feel that anger along
with her pain. He bowed to the earth and prayed to the goddess of
the moon, to any deity that might take pity on him, and asked them
to save Alayai’s soul from the underworld. He stayed that way in
prayer until dusk crept into being, concealing the sight of the
decaying village with a night time veil.

When death found Akan, his
spirit did not join that of the others gone before him to the
nirvana they all dreamed of in life. It lingered by the temple and
he continued his lonely vigil, offering up a lamentation to the
true goddess of the moon, even when everything he had known
disappeared and the earth reclaimed the village so there was
nothing to suggest that it, or the Enwa people, had ever
existed.

Finally one of his prayers
was answered, the first prayer he had ever uttered to the goddess
of the moon: The prayer to one day be of service to her.

Before him was a way to
return to the world of the living for a short time. He could be
born again, although not as a man. It all made sense now, his
vision of the goddess, Alayai’s words when in the grip of the
ekniwa. The brown mare he had seen in his vision quest.

Agu had been right. The
horse was a glimpse of a future life. And in that life, he would be
able to be of service to the earthly incarnation of the goddess of
the moon by helping to keep her beloved alive so she would always
have a reason to return to the earthly realm. In this way he could
ensure her favour would always be his.

I was standing with Akan
in the ghostly echo of the courtyard of the abandoned village,
surrounded by decaying buildings, the sacrificial altar before
us.

“
It was only a true desire
to be of service to you that could ensure your favour,” Akan said.
“My spirit is before you now only because you will it. I am not
worthy to be in the presence of the true goddess of the moon, let
alone submit a request to her. But I beseech you, do not leave
Alayai in the underworld or trapped between dimensions as she has
been for centuries.”

“
Why have you only asked
me to save Alayai? Why have you not asked me to save the Enwa from
destruction?”

“
Because we brought it on
ourselves. We knew the sky gods were displeased we were consulting
with the vacoma. We could have stopped then. But we ignored their
anger and continued, even going so far as to offer human lives in
sacrifice to quiet the anger of the gods. Alayai was another of
those sacrifices. I should have done what Tanu said and gone to the
temple elders and told them she was just a girl. I should have
convinced them to stop the charade and free Alayai from the temple.
But I remained silent because I knew the sacrifices would begin
again if I did so.”

“
She killed tens of
thousands in her quest to inhabit a human body and live again. She
has also taken the lives of my earthly descendants. I cannot let it
go unpunished.”

He stared at me in utter
despair. Then he threw himself prostrate before me. He rose to his
knees and I saw tears fall onto his cheeks.

“
Goddess, Alayai’s sins
are because of my mistakes. I should have either killed her the
moment I laid eyes on her, spared her from Mutata’s evil, or taken
her away as I wished to do many times. Her sins are my sins. Please
do not let her continue to suffer for my wrongs.”

He lay prostrate before me
once more in a pose of surrender and helplessness.

I stared down at him in
frustration at his endless sorrow and his enduring love for his
child goddess, the entity which had haunted my family and shed so
much of their blood. If I denied his request, would his spirit
continue to linger, offering up prayer after prayer in the hope he
could save Alayai?

I sighed. The words she
had spoken to him so long ago were right. He had my favour. I would
not allow his spirit to linger and suffer.

I reached for him and
pulled him to his feet, my decision made. The decaying village
around us disappeared and we were in what the Enwa people saw as
their underworld.

It was in fact another
dimension that had no physical form. It was a place of never ending
darkness and chaos. A void with endless valleys where the desolate
face of despair was all one beheld. There was no sky in this hell
dimension, for if there was a sky one could dream of a sun rising
to meet it. So there was only emptiness where a sky should be.
There was also no ground in this dimension, nothing to stabilise or
keep a person rooted, only a long fall into emptiness.

We saw Alayai almost
immediately. She appeared as she had been when Akan first laid eyes
on her. She was on her knees surrounded by menacing shadows, tears
streaming down her face. A ghostly outline of the temple she had
been trapped in when she was alive could be seen in the dark. A
thin papery impression of Tanu’s corpse lay a few feet away. Before
her was a vague impression of Akan lying unconscious whilst blood
seeped from him. It seemed she was reliving the worst moment of her
life and tears were streaming down her face as she screamed Akan’s
name. Lurking all around her were the vacoma. Always hungry for
pain and misery, they revelled in her torment.

Her gaze fell on me and
hatred flamed in her eyes even as she began to cower in
fear.

Then she saw
Akan.

The hatred melted away
from her features, her eyes wide in her tear streaked face, her
small mouth in a perfect oval of awe even as her brow furrowed in
mistrust at what she was seeing.

Akan held out a hand to
her, anxiety in his dark eyes. At first she just stared at that
hand, then her gaze shifted to me, the hatred she felt for me
fighting for dominance in her eyes. I wasn’t sure she would be able
to look past me, and the hatred she had harboured against me for
centuries, in order to move toward Akan and out of this hell
dimension. It was a choice only she could make. At first I thought
the hatred was going to win out, but then she was on her feet,
pulling away from the vacoma and the never-ending darkness. She ran
into Akan’s arms and the hell dimension receded from
view.

They were gone. It was
done and they were both at peace now.

My mortal body was
hovering within seconds of death’s cruel fingers, but another soul
caught between the land of the living and the dead called to me. It
did more than call to me; it tugged painfully at my heart. I
surrendered and time parted for me once more.

His image blazed into
view, that of a small boy, shadows grasping for him. His eyes were
two coals alight with fever, fear etched in blunt lines across his
features as he beheld the flickering, skull-like faces of the dead
drawn against the darkness in chalk. The world of the living still
had him in its savage grasp and I saw a room, white walls, silks
and linens, along with the faces of the living drawn in sorrow. A
prayer uttered in another tongue for some higher power to save the
boy filled my ears.

The child was staring at
the dead stalking him, moving through walls and the people around
him. Then his gaze focussed on mine and held it. I moved to stand
before him, moving through the living. My presence, unlike that of
the spirits of the dead, seemed to calm him. I looked away from him
and toward the closed door.

She was here.

Her arrival was announced
by screams from below and the sound of furniture crashing. The two
women who were caring for Arnaldo ran from the room, locking it
behind them. She appeared in the room in a rippling of air, her
long dark hair hung loose about her, blood on her lips and staining
her dress. The black fire in her eyes softened and her mouth
quivered when she saw Arnaldo. She moved toward him.

I allowed a semblance of
my form to be seen and she came to a halt when she saw me standing
over the boy. She snarled at what she could see of me, the
apparition of a woman, her form undulating, dipping in the light
that burned in the room.

With a single thought, I
sent her flying across the room. She hit the wall and fell to her
knees, the black, feral look in her eyes replaced with
uncertainty.

Sacred.

She stared at me in
bewilderment, tears leaping to her eyes, and it was as if death
rode in along with those tears, turning her eyes into rain swept
landscapes of devastation.

Sacred
, I repeated.

Her face crumpled into a
wild, unrestrained desolation. She looked at the sick boy and then
back at what she could see of me. She lifted her face to the
ceiling and howled in rage and pain.

She vanished.

Arnaldo had not taken his
gaze away from me.

I knew he would survive
the illness and that Auria would return and turn him into a vampire
when he was older. Therefore Avery and I were likely to face a
powerful enemy in the future, one who did not hold the hatred for
Auria the boy vampire had. But I could not leave him as he had been
when we met: A man trapped in the body of a child.

I stepped away from him
and the room receded from me, the image of his face lingering, his
coal-dark eyes lit with that feverish fire as he peered at
me.

I was once more in the
void, watching shapes, places and people come and go, the past
mingling with the present and future.

It was done.

The chapel ebbed into
being around me. It was dark in the underground chamber now, the
sconces having been snuffed out. The dead trapped in the chapel for
centuries were now at rest and silence lay within it like a heavy
shroud. I returned to my body, back to the shocking pain, its
frailties and weaknesses along with the hardship and uncertainties
of the mortal realm. Death was only a breath away. I could feel it
hovering over me, enticing me away from the pain of my body and
back to the timeless existence that had once been mine.

Now the chapel entity was
gone, the aged building succumbed to time and the ravages of the
fire that should have destroyed it. I heard a dull thud as one of
the bricks fell to the ground near my face. More followed and all
around I heard a deafening cracking, a tumultuous roaring, as the
ceiling began to give way. I lay in the blood gathered around my
body like slick red glass, the staff protruding from my back as
debris rained down all around me. Death was almost upon me. I wept
at such a lonely, wretched death, having no way of knowing how long
I would have to wait this time before I could return to
Avery.

The chaos around me
dissolved from view. The last word on my lips was Avery’s name, my
thoughts only of him until the very end.

Darkness reigned once
more.

I knew I would return to
him. I just did not know when. Would it be decades or centuries
before I could gaze upon the face that had snared my heart, making
the relative paradise I existed in a hell I could not
endure?

It did not take centuries
or even decades. It took mere weeks.

The first sign I still
walked in the mortal realm was the sensation of soft lips against
my cheek, the simple touch a brand of desire that set my skin
aflame. A hand caressed my face, a benediction I would have spent
an eternity waiting for.

I opened my eyes, but saw
only blurred shapes.