OrbSoul (Book 6) (20 page)

   At last he rose. He walked stiffly to the window and looked out into the dense night. A few flakes of snow drifted down. For some moments Anzejarl appeared to grow immersed in the distant weirdlights, then he turned his body slightly, wincing, and angled himself a little more towards the south. That way, further now than he could calculate, lay his homeland, Karai. There were the peoples of whom he could never again be a part.

   I am stripped. I am shamed.

   Prince Anzejarl knelt before the window, his spine erect, his buttocks resting between his heels. His gaze remained fixed upon the southern horizon, and into his mind came the sacred Karai incantation, the mantra ingrained from birth into the subconscious of every Karai warrior, the final induction to be invoked only at a time of irreversible disgrace, loss or defeat.

  
'I am the dead,
' he intoned silently.

   'I am the dead.'

   'I am the dead.'

   'I am the dead . . .'  

EIGHT

i

   'Why did you let me live, Aunt Issul?' enquired Moscul. He beamed up at her, for
all the world like an inquisitive small boy, except that there was a cloyingly and affectedly winsome quality in his smile, and his violet infant eyes shone with something more than innocent inquiry.

   The question took Issul aback for a moment. 'I- It was because- Moscul, I think you know the answer to that.'

   'But I want to hear it, from your lips.'

   'Why?'

   His face darkened with sudden pique. 'Don't question me!'

   Issul was confused by him. Though she was dauntingly aware of the peril of her situation, she still fell so easily into the habit of addressing
him as a three-year-old. His manner and appearance were disarming and deceptive, and he played on this with some skill before jolting her rudely back to reality.

   'It was because I am a human being,' she said.

   'Ah! I understand. Human beings don't harm newborns.'

   'That’s so.'

   'Even when they know that the newborn is not all it seems?'

   'Nothing was certain at the time.'

   'Was it not? Aunt Issul, are you so sure of that? You certainly knew that something quite out-of-the-ordinary was happening? You were there! You witnessed me give birth to myself, out of your sister's corpse. Did that not suggest something to you?'

   Issul gripped the inside of her lower lip with her teeth. She was exhausted and deeply dispirited and her thoughts would not come clearly. She recalled the awful birth, and her sister Ressa's prior entreaty that she tell no one of the coming child and that she, Issul, take care of the baby in secret.

   'You should have strangled me then, Aunt Issul. You know that, don't you? All this would have been avoided, wouldn't it?'

   'It is easy to see clearly with hindsight,' replied Issul. 'But still I’m human, and humans are fallible.'

   Moscul was shaking his fair curly head from side to side, his lips compressed. 'Actually, you are wrong.'

  
'In what respect?'

  
'In every respect. But firstly in thinking that my death would have changed things. The truth is, had you slain me at birth, you would have changed very little. Virtually nothing at all. Though you might have saved
yourself
a deal of trouble - in the short term, at least. But nothing more.'

   'I don't understand.'

   Moscul grinned, then hunched his shoulders and giggled behind his hand. 'Shall I tell her?' he mused out loud to himself. 'Shall I? Shall I? Yes, I think I may. I must. But not yet. Not quite yet.'

   Issul was horrified. She saw in his face, for the first time, the likeness of her sister, Ressa. It brought bile to her throat. Moscul looked back at her with watery violet eyes, and smiled.

   They were deep in the forest - Issul could not tell where - resting after a day's arduous travel away from the tail of the Portal where she had been snatched by Moscul's grullags. The day had turned bitter. Sometime during the afternoon it had begun to snow, a dense fall lasting perhaps half an hour. When it ceased the forest lay beneath a light, patchy, serene dusting of white.

   Issul and Moscul were seated on a fallen black branch beneath a sprawling oak. Grey Venger waited a little distance away, chewing on rabbit-flesh as he sharpened a knife, his back against a towering, jagged jut of limestone. Elsewhere, all around, were the hulking, heavy-headed shapes of grullags. Some ate, a few dozed, others prowled or squatted listessly between the trees and boulders, and some kept watch.

   Issul had prevailed upon Moscul to untie her wrists so that she could eat, insisting that with so many grullags in his company - she had estimated more than twenty - she could not possibly hope to escape. As it happened, when the food was brought she had declined to eat. The 'meal' had consisted of the raw flesh of freshly killed rabbit and wild pig. Moscul and Grey Venger, as well as the grullags, had torn into it with relish. For Issul's part, though she was becoming faint with hunger, she could not bring herself to eat.

   She shivered and looked up towards the sky. 'Where are you taking me, Moscul?'

   'Home, Aunt Issul. Back to Enchantment's Reach.'

   'Why?'

   'Oh, because that is where you will understand. And then you will die.'

   She weighed this. The implication was that she was safe in the Legendary Child's custody, relatively speaking, until they reached the capital. Why? She was as perplexed as ever. What was he intending? To hand her to the True Sept as he assumed the throne and established the new era that they awaited?

   She glanced across to where Grey Venger sat, still whetting his blade with quick, agitated movements and throwing her hate-filled, leering glances.

   'He won't touch you, Aunt Issul. Not unless I give him the word.' Moscul looked up at her guilefully. 'Trust me.'

   He winked. Issul recoiled inwardly. There was something not only mocking but disturbingly inappropriate in such an arch, cynical gesture from a three-year-old boy. But then, everything about Moscul was disturbing.

  
He is no child, he is a monster!

   It was hardly necessary to remind
herself. There was only aberration here; he was a travesty.

   But then Moscul came forward and laid his curly head tenderly upon her thigh.

   'Aunt Issul,' he coo-ed, in a parody of affection and vulnerability.

   Issul looked down at his slim white neck, bared before her. So easy to break it, now, with a single, simple, calculated blow of her hand. Would it end all this? It would end her own life, that was certain, but to slay the Legendary Child, now - would his death bring an end to the horror that had befallen her land?

   It surely could not be so simple. Not now.

   Moscul lifted his head and gazed again directly up at her. 'I am still your little nephew, you know.'

   Issul closed her eyes, fighting back the same image of Ressa's pale body, writhing and twisting as it struggled to release this unnatural child. When she opened them Moscul's shoulders were shuddering with mirth, his little hand covering his mouth again. She glanced away in anguish into the trees.

   'I bear you no ill will, you know,' Moscul said after a pause.

   'Your manner of demonstrating it is unique.'

   'I am doing only what must be done.'

   'Who
are
you?' demanded Issul with sudden vehemence.

   'Aha!' Moscul raised fair eyebrows and one forefinger. 'Perhaps it is who I am not that is really of most interest to you.'

   Again, his manner was that of a knowing adult, the keeper of a secret, who wishes you to know he possesses it but to keep you ignorant of its nature. Additionally, in his bright eyes there was that element of quiet, confident menace that she had witnessed before, in Lastmeadow.

   'Did you discover who the old woman was, at the pond?' he enquired.

   'Yes.'

  
'And the other one? The young man?'

   'Yes.'

   'His name is Shenwolf, you know.'

   She nodded.

   'Am I being helpful, Aunt Issul?'

   'It might have helped more if you had told me at the time.'

   'But it would have been less fun.'

   She clenched her jaws, fighting her emotions. Moscul remained silent for a while, appraising her with a fixed smile. And it hit her then, that what he had said a few moments earlier, about taking her back to Enchantment's Reach, carried a chilling resonance. Why would he take her back to her own home?
To ransom her? But he had said she was to die there.

   'Moscul, is Enchantment's Reach in
Karai hands now?'

   Moscul giggled. 'Ooh, you are quick, Aunt Issul.'

   'It has fallen? Truly?'

   'Would I lie to you?'

   Should she believe him? Her mind rebelled against it, but that was reflex, wanting,
demanding
, that it not be true. The likelihood, she was forced to acknowledge, was that he did not lie. And if he was genuinely taking her back to Enchantment's Reach . . .

   What had become of her family, friends, staff,
retainers? What had become of her people?

   Issul fought back tears.
Pader, have I failed you all?

   And another, dreadful, familiar voice arose inside her:
And all because I failed to act. All because I let this vile creature live.

   'Where is Uncle Leth, Aunt Issul?' asked Moscul sweetly. 'Where were you both going with your dear children and Shenwolf?'

   For some moments Issul could not speak. When she found her voice she said, 'In order to know that you will have to return to where you captured me.'

   She wondered, what would be the consequences were Moscul to do that? Were he to step through the Portal into Orbelon's World and Urch-Malmain's tower. Would it be the end of everything?

     She wondered about Leth and the children. How did they fare? Were they safe? She knew that Leth would not have been able to come after her. Did he have any idea of what had happened to her?

   'Won't you tell me, Aunt Issul?'

   'I can't. I don't know.'

   'You don't know? There was something hovering in the air, just above the ground. You were all stepping into it and vanishing. You were being transported somewhere, and you don't know where?'

   'It was a place of relative safety. I know nothing more. Only Leth knew, and he preferred that it remain secret until we were safely there.'

   'So that, should one or more of you somehow fall into the hands of an enemy, you could not divulge your destination and so imperil the others' lives?'

   'That’s it precisely.'

   Moscul's eyes bored into her, but she held his gaze.

   'Well, I have a secret, too, as I told you a minute ago,' he said. 'It concerns you. It concerns everything about you and all you struggle for. And everything about me, also. Do you want me to tell you what it is?'

   She
nodded, a sinking feeling in her gut.

  
'Hmm. I think I'll whisper it in your ear.' Moscul rose and stepped over to her. He placed one pudgy little hand on her shoulder to help his balance. Issul bent her head and he stretched onto tiptoe so that he might put his lips to her ear. His other hand came to rest on the swell of her breast. It was an intimacy which, in an ordinary child, would have been purely incidental and would have caused her no unease. In this case his plying fingertips made her stiffen. She caught a glimpse of his face as he came close: the look was utterly inhuman.

   He began to whisper.

   She gasped.

   His words poured ice into her blood.

   He paused at one point and drew back, presumably to observe the effect he was having upon her. What he saw brought a tiny, twisted smile to his lips. Satisfied he stretched up again to deliver the remainder of his message.

   Issul was not aware of the point at which Moscul ceased speaking. The world had retreated. She had a sensation of having tipped backwards into a vast, toneless void, slowly spinning. There was only her and the resounding echoes of Moscul's words. They raced back and forth across the inside of her skull, back and forth, back and forth, relentless, tormenting, uncontrolled, enlightening her even as they pitched her into thorough despair, forcing her to see how she - how all of them - had been mistaken from the beginning.

   They had been led. Fooled, every step of the way. It shocked her to the core, but she could not deny the sense of what Moscul revealed to her. So much suddenly fell into place. She did not doubt him.

  
Oh Leth, we have searched in the wrong places. We have been led to the wrong source! Enchantment's Reach! Ressa, oh Ressa! How you suffered! And Mawnie, poor Mawnie, I hear you now! At last I understand!

   She couldn't move, seemed to have lost control of her limbs. Her breath roared in her ears. She had a sensation, somewhere far-off, of falling.
Her stomach turning over, the world tilting precipitously. To one side the white ground heaved itself upwards and rushed at her. She tried to cry out; it rammed hard into her and she heard her voice scatter away from her in a thousand fragments.

   She grew aware that she was lying on her side upon the cold earth, the trees black and spidery against a luminous sky above her, and snow was falling, snow was falling. . .

   The child's face appeared before her, very close. He peered into her eyes, grinning. 'You do believe me, Aunt Issul, don't you?'