The Seventh Tide (27 page)

Gladrag moaned softly to herself.

‘There they are,’ said Market, pointing ahead with his beak.

The main Kelpie vortex was clearly visible, a huge impossible column of water balanced on the top of the cliffs. It seemed to reach for the moon, but they knew that lifeless rock wasn’t what it wanted. There were no souls to suck on the moon.

It was waiting for
them.

Even from this far away, they could feel it. All the joy of flying, of being feathered and streamlined and strong, drained away until there was only the effort left.

The closer they approached, the harder it became to keep going.

‘Do we really have to go?’

‘I mean, it’s not as if we’re going to make any difference. It’s entirely up to the children now.’

‘That’s right. And it’s not as if we won’t
know
what
happens. We’ll know soon enough how it ended. They only have till dawn.’

‘We serve no useful purpose just keeping watch.’

‘It isn’t as if we’ve done a lot of good
so
far, either.’

They were all in perfect agreement. There really
was
no earthly point in going to the Island.

They went anyway.

16
Blood Moon

The actual arrival of the three G on the Island was faster – and less elegant – than they might have wished. The dead air surrounding the Kelpie vortex offered no real buoyancy or currents to glide in on, so it was more of a collapse out of the sky than a proper landing. The humans who appeared out of the bird shapes were bruised and dishevelled and a good bit shaken. Fortunately, even though the G avoided the Island whenever possible, the place was included in their robe-distributing system.

The Queen seemed surprised at first to see them, but she recovered almost immediately into a default sneer.

‘So glad you could join us,’ she half-purred, half-snarled. ‘And don’t worry My people wouldn’t
dream
of touching you before the Tide is complete. Why break the Rules when so soon you will be a
legitimate
… menu item.’

The G stared at each other, bemused.

‘What does she mean?’ muttered Market.

‘They can’t touch us
anyway –
they’re stuck inside the
v… v…’ Interrupted’s voice trailed off into silence as he realized that the maelstrom’s outer wall of water was beginning to
thin…

In ones and twos at first, and then in crowds, the vortex was ejecting its cargo, a violent, random birth. Within minutes, the entire top of the Island swarmed with Kelpies – horses, women, men – bucking and screaming and running as if they hadn’t been free in the air for a thousand years. The G were dizzy with all the noise and the swirling motion, not to mention the wholesale mesmerizing that hit them from every side like a solid fog. There was
so much
the effect was nauseating rather than alluring. The Queen held her place at the centre of the commotion, but she shrieked and jerked convulsively, drunk with the mad expectant ecstasy of her subjects.

Looking up, the G saw that the eclipse was almost complete, and already the moon’s face had turned a coppery red, as if painted with pale rust or a thin wash of blood. The vortex itself remained, as tall as ever, but transparent now and half its original circumference. Gladrag had a momentary vision of the whole enormous volume of water collapsing in on itself and washing them all away, and thought what a relief that would be… but it didn’t happen.

The Queen screeched a command and the mad swirl of bodies around them froze. In the silence, hundreds of black eyes turned towards her as she cried,

‘To the Pool!’

She moved away from the vortex, the G trailing after her and swathes of Kelpies opening before. She led them a little distance across the broken ground to a shallow depression and stopped.

The Western Isles are blessed with thousands of ponds of sharp, clear water, tinged with peat, stone-drained, icy and fresh. The Pool was not one of these. It was small, perhaps two metres across, its water blurred with algae and slime. It was probably a sort of murky lime-green colour in daylight but under the Blood Moon it showed a horrible thick grey like mouldy soup. And it smelled, a clinging, bad smell.

‘Makes you want to go away and scrub yourself with soap, doesn’t it?’ Market murmured.

Meanwhile, the redness of the moon had intensified – now, at its highest point in the sky, it justified its name. The Queen tipped back her head and opened her arms in welcome.

‘Blood Moon,’ she breathed. ‘How beautiful!’

‘Very nice,’ said Gladrag, suppressing a shudder.

The Queen grinned at her, and her teeth glinted red in the weird light. Then, without taking her eyes off the G, she pointed into the seething crowd of Kelpies. Three emerged and stepped up to the far edge of the horrible Pool.

‘Equal numbers,’ the Queen explained smugly. ‘One for each of your
heroes.
’

The three she had summoned stood there for a moment, to make sure the G were really taking them in. It was a disheartening sight. Two of the Kelpies were towering, strapping men, and the third, a female, was almost as tall and just as magnificently muscled. They were overwhelmingly a match for any of the heroes of old, and the idea of them in competition with three
children
was, frankly, ludicrous. But there was worse to come.

The Kelpies began to change, all at once, so that the G
struggled to keep track of what was happening. It was the same horrible
deforming
of shape they’d seen the Queen undergo, an ugly twisting of limbs and face. It looked agonizing. The end result for the two males was the appearance of a monk from Adom’s time and a Guardian from Jay’s. Without understanding exactly how, the G knew these were dangerous shapes and no good would come of them. But the third Kelpie, the female, seemed unable to
find
her final shape, writhing and shifting continuously –until they realized what she was meant to be. From animal to human to bird to sea creature, the Kelpie was…

‘Of all the cheek!’ exploded Market Jones. ‘She’s trying to be
us
!’

At which point the Kelpie became a replica of each of the G standing there before her, one after another, ending with a version of Hibernation Gladrag – but with the addition of some truly outrageous curves.

‘Well,
really
! Gladrag huffed, though her two Companions went quite quiet.

Then the show was over. The Queen clapped her hands, once, and immediately the three Kelpies walked forward to the edge of the horrid murky Pool and dived. The G gasped in horror – surely the water was only centimetres deep? – but there was no sickening sound of the demons hitting the rock bottom. Instead, they simply disappeared, hardly seeming to break the surface gloop.

There was a moment of appalled silence. Then the Queen leaned over and passed a finger through the slime at the edge of the Pool, lifting a long, green, glutinous rope of it to her mouth and licking it luxuriously.

‘Bliss,’ she said.

‘Yuck!’ said a chorus of G.

17
The Seventh Tide

‘Where are we?’ said Adom. ‘Is this it? The Dry Heart?’

The Traveller had dumped them on the rocks at the foot of a cliff, on the scattered stubs of old lava flows. Immediately behind them a towering, vertical slash in the rock led into darkness, but as the three staggered to their feet, they didn’t at first even notice it. Their attention was focused in the other direction.

‘It’s gone,’ whispered Jay. ‘The sea’s gone!’

A weirdly coloured moon lit up an alien scene. The tide had receded beyond the visible horizon, leaving a ragged landscape of slimy puddles and deeper pools divided by exposed rock. Ridges and outcroppings of the sea bed seemed to be seething, as stranded creatures flailed and struggled to reach water again. An eerie wailing sound drifted on the breeze: whales, trapped and cut off from each other in remaining gullies of sea, calling urgently. The air was thick with the rank smell of mud and weed.

They stared, unable to understand what it could mean. Then Eo gave himself a shake.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll worry about that later. One invigorating challenge at a time.’

For an instant he sounded just like Professor Hurple, so much so the others turned sharply to him. He looked deathly in the moonlight. They all did. They looked like three children who had been ill in bed for some time and really shouldn’t be up for a good week yet. What they did
not
look like were heroes, mighty, magnificent, muscly loins girded and weaponry on display. No lighting effect known to art or science could successfully achieve an impression of
that.

Squaring his slim shoulders, Eo headed into the cliff anyway and, with a sigh and a shrug, Jay and Adom followed.

The cave was high as a cathedral, but no more than a few metres wide – more of a soaring crack than a cave – with a narrow ledge running along one wall. If there’d been any water it would have lapped the edge of it. As it was, the drop from the ledge was straight to the dark floor of the gully.

The moonlight penetrated only a little way in, then the blackness took over. The three felt their way forward gingerly along the ledge, waiting for their eyes to adjust.

‘Well, at least there are no sheep,’ said Adom, trying to sound cheerful.

‘We could really do with my torch round about now,’ muttered Jay.

Eo turned back to look at her, his face a pale smudge in the gloom with a white crescent at the bottom. She realized he was grinning.

“Yeah, it certainly has been useful – how long ago was it you broke that? First Tide?’

‘I wasn’t even
on
the First Tide! You boys were still on your own then.’

‘And how many things did
we
break, eh?’

‘Well, I broke my arm,’ rumbled Adom.

‘There! See? My point exactly! Ha!’ – at which point Jay fell off the ledge.