Sinner (47 page)

Somehow she held on to her reason.

After long minutes she looked up. Four figures stood about the rim of Star Gate, gazing into it. Then one, the thin man with the loathsome face, suddenly reached down and grabbed a hand.

Faraday slowly sat up in astonishment as a lovely Icarii woman emerged, a strangely sluggish baby in her hands.

Who?

Barzula leaned forward, and kissed the woman on her lips. “Welcome home, Queen of Heaven.”

Faraday frowned. Queen of Heaven? Could this be StarLaughter? And the child? WolfStar’s son?

Then another woman stepped through, throwing something into a darkened corner of the chamber as she did so, and this time Faraday could hardly control the despair that swept over her.

No-one would survive. It had all been useless. Axis and Azhure would die arthritic middle-aged fools in the desert wasteland that had once been Tencendor. StarDrifter would suicide into bloody oblivion, Caelum would be torn apart by dogs, and Zenith would be used by bandits until they tired of her, tore off her wings, and threw her over a cliff. Within a generation, it would all be lost. No-one would –

“Stop it!” Faraday hissed to herself. “
Stop it!
”

She battled the vision, appalled by its severity. If she, who still retained power after the loss of the Star Dance,
could hardly repel this despair, then what chance did the ordinary folk of Tencendor have?

Gods, but she had to do something to help this land before all
was
lost!

“There, again!” Mot swirled about, his bones seeming almost to clank with the abruptness of his movement.

“Power,” said Barzula.

Sheol frowned, irritated at this distraction. “StarLaughter? Can you recognise the power being wielded?”

StarLaughter concentrated, rocking the child absent-mindedly in her arms as she did so. “No,” she said slowly after a moment or two. “No, I cannot. It is not Icarii power, nor what I know of the Avar, or even the Charonites.”

She shrugged. “It is negligible, in any case. Perhaps it was originally left by the Enemy when they crashed through.”

“Can we use it?” asked Rox.

StarLaughter shook her head. “It is almost…directional power. I can find no other way to describe it. Ignore it. It is no threat to us, and we cannot use it. Sheol, what do we do now?”

“We use the final reserves of Drago,” Sheol gestured impatiently to what she had discarded on stepping through the Star Gate, “to move to a more congenial site. Come!”

She clapped her hands, and the Demons, with StarLaughter and her child, vanished.

But if Sheol had vanished, then the sound of her hands continued to reverberate about the chamber.

Statues crumbled into piles of useless rubble. Archways groaned, and almost a third of them collapsed while the others wavered and creaked. The Dome split into five sections with one almighty crack.

Faraday, terrified but knowing she had only one chance, rushed from her hiding place. She looked about frantically, shielding her head with arms and hands.

There!

The object Sheol had discarded as she stepped through the Star Gate.

Faraday hurried over, tripping and almost falling over a tumbled statue. Whatever the nature of the object, it was now shrouded in grey dust and small rocks. Faraday worked with her hands, dusting and pushing aside the rubble.

When she had uncovered it, she sat back on her heels, unmindful of the chamber shattering about her, her face expressionless.

Before her lay a sack of bones, wrapped about with skin.

Faraday reached out a trembling hand and touched the disgusting thing fleetingly.

She drew her hand back, grimacing. The skin felt cold and clammy.

Poor Drago to have come to this. Digested and spat out as this pitiful clump of skin and bone.

She reached out her hand once more. This time she did not pull her fingers back as she touched the skin. This time she softly stroked the remains, running her hand over as much of it as she could.

“Poor Drago,” she whispered, ignoring the great rock that crashed not half a pace away from her. “Poor, sweet, lost Drago. Where are you now? Come home, Drago. Come home.”

She fancied that the skin grew warm under her hand, and firmer to the touch.

But the bones still shifted and scraped each against the other in their sack.

Faraday remembered the sack that Drago had clutched so desperately when he’d entered this chamber weeks
(months?) previously. Now
he
was the sack, but now he possessed the power that the original hessian sack had contained. Faraday understood that very clearly, and she hoped Drago would be able to come to terms with it also.

“Poor, sweet Drago,” she murmured. “Come home. Come back to Faraday.”

It did not occur to her to pick him up and rush him from the chamber before both were forever crushed in the grave it was rapidly becoming.

Eventually she looked up and realised the danger. The chamber was collapsing into itself – already the Star Gate was half full of rubble.

Faraday’s eyes filled with tears. So much beauty to be destroyed! She remembered when Jack and Yr had brought her, a naive and foolish young girl, to this chamber. She had been deeply moved by the beauty and lure of the universe beyond the Star Gate, and deeply moved that something this beautiful, this magical existed beneath the dusty plains of Achar.

Now it was being destroyed. Within a few minutes at most, the beauty and power would be gone forever.

Faraday’s hand stilled.

Within a few minutes all would be destroyed – but she still had those few minutes.

And this chamber and the Star Gate was magical. Not as much as it had once been, for now the music of the Star Dance had been stilled, but there was still power here.

She turned slightly back into the chamber, one hand on the skin and bones, one hand outstretched towards the Star Gate.

And she concentrated, concentrated on pulling all the power left in the chamber into her, combining it with what she herself was, and then channelling it into the skin and bones.

Then she felt something. She looked at the sack, gasped, and shuffled back a pace.

It was filling out.

It filled, then lengthened, widened, then filled some more. Again it stretched, and now the buds of arms and legs became visible. They filled and lengthened, and then Faraday saw the head.

It was Drago’s head. His face firmed and fleshed out. It was Drago’s face, although somehow different.

Indefinably different.

His transformation completed itself, and Drago crouched there, blinking in confusion, his hands patting distractedly at his nakedness.

Faraday put her hand on Drago’s shoulder and shook him as hard as she could.

“Drago!” she said sharply. “Drago! Pay attention! It is time we were gone from this place.”

He groaned, shuddered, and made as if to stand up. But his muscles were still weak, and he had to try three times before he managed.

Meanwhile rocks fell about them in an increasing crescendo of destruction. Faraday glanced at the dome above them – there were now dark gaps between the five sections. When it came down, as it surely would, the entire chamber would be lost.

“Drago! Come
on!
”

“Faraday?” He reached out with a hand, and she grabbed it, hauling him to his feet.

“Yes. Now,
come!
We will die if we stay here!”

“Faraday? Faraday, there is something I must get.”

“
Drago!
”

He paused, ignoring Faraday’s attempts to pull him away, then he hurriedly pulled his hand from hers and bent back to the rubble.

“Drago!
We’ve got to get out of here!
”

“Wait,” he mumbled, feeling with hands that were cut and abraded by the loose rocks about him. “Wait.”

He grasped the end of something and pulled it free. “Ah!”

Faraday stared at it. It was a rosewood staff, very plain, curved into a shepherd’s crook at its tip.

Drago hefted it in one hand, and with the other grabbed Faraday’s. “Run!”

They escaped just as the Star Gate chamber finally collapsed. The five sections of the dome fell inward, landing within the Star Gate itself.

They filled it completely, jutting out in jagged spires.

An instant after the dome collapsed, the walls fell inward, covering what remained of the statues and the low circular wall.

The Star Gate and the chamber that had housed it for countless millennia was no more.

On the Island of Mist and Memory the sickly cobalt beacon that speared skyward from the Temple of Stars flickered, flickered again, then abruptly died.

The temple and Star Gate were dead, the Star Gods were made mortal, Enchanters were as ordinary birdmen. Icarii magic was no more.

The Dance had ended.

The Demons crouched atop one of the destroyed Barrows, StarLaughter at their side. Above them wheeled the Hawkchilds. Suddenly they veered to the north, vanishing in the haze of dust from the destruction amid the Barrows.

“They hunt,” Raspu said, then looked at Sheol. “Now it is time for you to feed, my dear.”

I
t was mid-afternoon in Tencendor, and despair ruled. In Carlon a boy carting fruit to the market let his load drop from his back and watched expressionlessly as it rolled down the gutter.

It was no use. He would never rise above the rank of fruit-carter. He saw himself as an old man, his back bent and bowed by seventy years worth of oranges and apples, his old age a helpless mess of pips and bruised, rotting fruit skins.

He threw himself under the wheels of a driverless wagon careering round the corner of the winding street.

A Goodwife of western Tarantaise was outside hanging her washing when despair swept the land. She paused, and silent, hopeless tears slid down her cheeks.

At her feet a toddling girl sobbed.

The Goodwife looked down. What life was her daughter destined for? Marriage to a man who abused her at night and cursed her by day? A life spent wringing wet washing amid the never-ending rain?

What kind of life was
that
?

Sniffing loudly, swallowing her tears, the Goodwife reached down to her daughter, lifted her skyward, and twisted the washing line about her neck.

She left her hanging there with the washing, choking amid the sad, wet, flapping sheets.

Then the Goodwife went inside to see to her infant son.

The Icarii birdman was drifting the thermals high above the plains of Skarabost when he suddenly realised his life was pointless.

There had been no use in recreating Tencendor. The StarMan had wasted his time and the Icarii nation’s energy in battling Gorgrael.

The StarMan hadn’t killed
every
Skraeling, had he?

No, some had escaped. Some had fled north again, doubtless there to breed and whisper revenge.

No doubt Skraelings were even now massing in the northern tundra to nibble and whisper their way south again.

The birdman had been present at the massacre of Earth Tree Grove, and his mouth was filled with the memory-taste of blood smeared over feather and flesh chewed to mincemeat in seconds.

It had been pointless. They would all suffer the same fate again.

He wailed, flipped over on his back, and watched the sun diminish in size as he plummeted to the ground.

He died impaled on a rake left outside by a careless harvester.

Cattle went mad in their fields. Sheep screamed. Pigs grunted and stampeded.

However, some stilled, as if listening. Then the cattle began to raven, and the pigs to plot.

For hours rubble continued to collapse inward from the destruction that had been the Barrows. There was a steady drip, drip, drip of rock and earth onto the pile of masonry that had filled the portal created so long ago by the flaming craft of the Demon’s Enemy.

Nothing more could pass through to harry Tencendor.

Nothing could escape.

There was no music.

Nothing save the slow settling of the rubble and the cold, silent, broken, half-buried wings of the marble statues.

The Avar withdrew deep into their forests and prayed to their horned gods and to the Mother that she might have the strength to repel the invaders. The Acharites huddled inside tightly shuttered homes, apartments and palaces and wondered when it would be safe to scurry outside again.

In the Silent Woman Woods some twenty-four thousand men looked to the east and saw nothing but darkness and rubble. They turned to look at each other, and saw nothing but darkness and rubble reflected back by their companions’ eyes.

“Courage,” said Zared, and bent down to Caelum, sitting head in hands at his feet. “Courage.”

Under one of the trees of Minstrelsea, Axis gathered Azhure in his arms and held her as tight as he could. Everything had been so bright. Gorgrael had died, his family had grown laughing and frolicking in Sigholt. Now it was all dead. Tencendor lay under the rule of the TimeKeeper Demons. Gorgrael had been a child’s creation next to them. The Dance had gone, the Star Gate was no more. There would never be any magic or Song or music again.

No matter what they did, no matter how potent Caelum proved against the Demons, the music and the Dance were gone.

Azhure took a tremulous breath and raised her head. “What now, beloved?”

He smiled bitterly. “Now? Now we relearn our limitations. We learn all we can about these Demons. We help Caelum.”

He paused. “Now we start all over again.”

But in his mind, a mind Azhure could no longer share, Axis thought,
when I finally meet Drago I will tear his life apart with my bare hands for what he has done to this land.

Under the first trees of Minstrelsea, Faraday pulled her cloak tight about her and looked at the man crouched in the half-light by her side.

“Can you feel the despair sweeping Tencendor?” she asked.

He looked up. “I am responsible for it.”

Faraday remained silent.

He cast his eyes slowly across the wasteland beyond the trees. “Who am I?”

“You know that.”

“Yes.” He sighed. “I am the Enemy.”