A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) Read online

  My enmity is as boundless as my power.

  Men will evolve upon the Earth – my Earth, the invaders! – seeking life and joy and hope. I will give them confusion and pain and death.

  And at the end of all, desolation.

  In the whirling vertigo of its thought-images, the Worm did not notice, or took for an ache in its empty eye-socket, a small subconscious stone of doubt. If it had looked, it would have seen a chilling vista of eternity: Earth, stripped of all life and beauty, and itself, lying alone and motiveless upon the dead husk for ever. But it did not look. It had already found too much diabolic joy to care.

  Desolation.

  ‘It wasn’t the first time I had the nightmare,’ Medrian told the Lady. ‘Nor the last. But I remember that time because it was the turning point. I struggled awake, trying to scream. My lungs were burning with the stench of smoke, and my side was knotted with cramp; I couldn’t think where I was, what had happened. But then the dream faded and I remembered… I was sitting in the bottom of a rank, weed-choked ditch, concealed by black trees. There was smoke drifting through the branches, and I could still hear the occasional faint shout in the distance. There was a man lying with his head on my lap, my commanding officer… and he was near death.

  ‘Alaak had lived under Gorethria’s rule for centuries, but we never accepted it. The rebellion was inevitable – and well-planned, so we thought. Our army had drilled in secret for years. I was seventeen and had already been a soldier since fourteen. We could not have trained harder or been more devoted… and yet, in one fell afternoon, it was over. Gorethria crushed us; just one division, led by Ashurek. Half the population dead, the rest waiting for the Gorethrian army to sweep across them – and me, a survivor crouched in a ditch, wishing I had died with the others.

  ‘By rights, I should have done. I had taken a deep sword thrust in my side, yet it had not killed me. There was no blood. And my officer, even as he lay dying beside me, could not forget how he had always disliked and distrusted me.’

  Even now, eight or more years later, the memory was still unpleasant. ‘Why did it have to be you with me at my death? Why you, Medrian?’ the officer had gasped. ‘Like a bloody basilisk, you are, always have been. I don’t think you’ve ever given a damn about Alaak, or anything else. You fight like an automaton. You take a deathblow and do not die. Are you human?’ he demanded fiercely. ‘You must be as sick with hatred as Meshurek and Ashurek and the rest.’

  Hate! Images of desolation reeled across her vision. She longed to cry out, No! I don’t hate. All this has happened because something… something loathes us all: the Serpent M’gulfn. But the words turned to clogging dust in her throat. In bitter silence, she gave him water and tried to make him comfortable.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered at length, his breath failing. ‘It is not you I hate; it is Gorethria. Damn them to hell! Do we not even deserve to live? I am not afraid to die – I’m proud to die in Alaak’s defence. I have done my utmost. It is my only fit end. But you, soldier – I feel sorry for you. You are going to escape, and live. Have you done your utmost?’

  ‘It wasn’t long before he died,’ Medrian told the Lady. ‘Then I had no more reason to stay in the ditch… but no real reason to leave either.’

  She had remained with his body for a long time, staring through the spiky black branches of the trees at the white sky as if seeing a reflection of her own blank detachment.

  She waited, hoping to die.

  She felt numb, as if what had happened to Alaak meant nothing to her. Her throat ached with numbness. She ached for oblivion.

  ‘Have you done your utmost?’ The words echoed like an accusation. If he were me, Medrian thought, he would go down and seek out stray Gorethrian soldiers and kill and kill until at last they slew him. Then he would have done his utmost. But I cannot. I don’t have enough hatred in me.

  She shivered and pulled the black jerkin back on. She stood up, her legs nearly buckling with their cramped weakness. The sword-wound in her side pained her, but it was rapidly healing. There was little honour she could give her dead officer, except to compose his body and cover him with fallen leaves. Then she scrambled up the side of the ditch and emerged on top, a dirty, battle-weary figure.

  She stood up boldly, as if hoping a nearby Gorethrian would see her and fell her. But all was deserted. The acres of shimmering grass that swept across to the feet of stone hills were blasted by fire and battle. There were bodies everywhere, tragic scars on Alaak’s stark beauty.

  Medrian moved among the bodies like an expressionless puppet, seeing person after person that she knew. Why me, she thought, why did I survive? Did I not do my utmost?

  Then she found her horse.

  It was a crow-black, sinister beast that had seemed to choose her as its rider, and although she had felt repelled by it, she had been unable to drive it away. Now it lay dead, a great splash of blood congealing on its side. She had been riding it when she was struck, she did not remember it being injured. Its wound was in exactly the same place as her own.

  Oh, ye gods.

  It died in my place.

  Bastard! She screamed inside her head. She fell to her knees, pounding uselessly at the horse’s body as if to make it suffer for depriving her of death. It only stared back with a glazed, cornflower-blue eye.

  She recoiled, agony bursting across her chest. Her stomach knotted, her limbs turned to fast-flowing, dark floodwater. The wound in her side opened in a flower of pain. Her iron self-control broke; her numbness burst into thrashing life and all the ice of her soul was crushed, melted and borne away by the flood of her grief.

  Oh, my family, she thought. My mother and father and brother, down there in the village with the Gorethrians marching upon them. I can do nothing to save them. I will never know if they live or die. If only I could have loved them, and they me.

  Oh, Alaak! Oh, Gorethria! Why couldn’t you leave us alone? Was it too much, that even one small crumb of meat should fall from your mouth?

  You have done this, you mocking, hating Worm.

  Medrian raged in fury and grief until her throat was a raw, bloody cavern and her guts were curdled with pain. She struck the ground until her nails were ripped and her hands bleeding. Yet, all the time, she was inflicting physical pain upon herself to deaden the dreadful agony in her head that always came when she dared to feel emotion.

  All gone, gone; my family and home and land, before you gave me the chance to love them. And now I will never have that chance, ever. Great, racking sobs ravaged her body, shook her as if they would break her apart. She clawed at the ground and then rolled over, wrapping her arms around her head.

  Never, never. All gone.

  When she struggled to her knees again, she was screaming. As the nightmare sensation in her head grew worse, her cries weakened to throat-tearing rasps of air. She was scratching at her head as if to pull her brain from it.

  Grief and the hideous agony became intermingled, one soul-destroying entity. Long years ago she had steeled herself to an emotionless, ice-cold existence, for if she felt or showed one flicker of emotion it opened her mind to the ghastly presence of the Serpent. It would come crawling through the steel wall into her brain, tormenting her, mocking her, letting her feel the eternal grey horror of its being.

  Medrian was the Serpent’s human host.

  That an immortal being so complete in power and so alien should place its mind to exist alongside that of a frail human was unthinkable. It could have only one result: torment, madness and eventual destruction for that unfortunate human. So had all its previous hosts ended, although the Worm had kept their physical husks alive into old age. Yet Medrian had in childhood found a way to resist it. She had cut her mind off from it. She had concealed all her thoughts in ice, frozen all her feelings so that eventually the Worm could not touch her. If ever her coldness warmed for an instant, it would lash back at her with tenfold fury. Its evil grey mockery flooded her now, like thick-flowing acid she was he
lpless to wash from her body. It clung like spiders’ webs around her face, in her head – a suffocating nightmare of madness.

  No! This is what I have always fought against!

  No, Medrian, said the Worm, you have let me in and you are going to be sorry you kept me out. I loathe you as much as you loathe me.

  No! I will feel my grief – let me feel my grief, I’ve never been allowed to feel anything till now. I won’t be denied.

  I will not be denied either, my Medrian, said the Worm.

  She writhed in her struggle against it, squirming in the blood of dead warriors as she fought to release her misery without suffering the Serpent’s torment. She failed. M’gulfn was laughing at her pain. Even as she poured out her despair it seemed to ring with hollow mirth, as if death itself were dancing with skeletal glee at its own existence.

  When her mother had hugged her as a child, she’d had to hold herself stiff and unresponsive, lest the Serpent throw her down in a fit of agony. Eventually her mother had ceased hugging her.

  Medrian gulped air into her lungs and held it there. She took her arms from her head and stretched them out as if they were stiff with tetany. She raised her head, looked across the pale battleground and thought of coldness. Frozen steel and white ice came to encapsulate her mind until it was a polar wilderness.

  It took a long time. The Worm was reluctant to release its hold; it retreated with agonizing slowness, clutching at her brain with desperate tentacles. It was whispering, You can’t do this to me, I must see your thoughts and make you suffer, suffer.

  But at last it was over. Her violent emotions were under control and M’gulfn felt no worse than a reptile coiled in her brain, pressing persistently against the wall she had built between its mind and her own.

  She relaxed her taut muscles, falling forward like a rag doll. Her first long breath emerged as a groan of absolute despair.

  She pressed the heels of her hands into the earth, enduring the grit in her raw wounds like a penance. Never, she told herself with determined finality. Never again.

  She rose and looked about, making sure no one had seen her frantic struggles on the ground. The long plain of grass was still deserted. A warm wind from the Empire blew ash before it, lamenting towards the distant villages that now lay at Ashurek’s mercy.

  She could not bury the dead. She would not follow the Gorethrians and ambush them one by one until they killed all the old and young in retribution. She would not try to find her family.

  She must leave Alaak behind.

  She must stop the hatred in another way.

  Wearily, she began to trudge the leagues to the shore, there to find a boat and sail the straits to the Empire.

  I will not rest, she told herself, until I have done my utmost.

  Even had she known it would be eight years before the Quest of the Serpent was initiated, she still would not have turned aside. Although in despair, she froze herself against all such feelings and went steadfastly on. She did not care if it took a lifetime to fulfil her goal. Her one aim was to stop M’gulfn’s evil and bring an end to her own misery.

  Her eight years in the Empire were weary and soul-eroding. It was a vast continent and she had other countries to cross on her way to Gorethria. She trudged through jungles and tropical forests teeming with strange creatures; she waded dangerous rivers, crossed volcanic mountain ranges and arid plains of sand. She met electric storms, burning winds and floods; she fought strange creatures and was once captured by dark warriors of the Empire. Her only companion through these dangers was another crow-black horse that had forced its sinister faithfulness upon her. She knew it was a creature of M’gulfn that the Worm was using both to protect and intimidate her. But she tolerated the beast, and a dark love-hate relationship developed between them.

  The horse died when, in one of her darkest moments, suicide seemed the only escape from a fierce blue-skinned tribe who had imprisoned her. When she tried to kill herself, it died in her stead. Crying in terror that she was a supernatural being, a demon, one of the Shana, the tribe drove her away and she ran into the hills, laughing with hollow irony at her plight.

  A few days later a third raven-black horse came to her. Grinning like a fiend driven mad by its own evil, Medrian mounted it eagerly and drove it at an exhausting gallop towards the heart of Gorethria.

  Each adventure only shaped her for the worse, and she felt she had aged twenty years in those eight. The Serpent never ceased to fight her, creeping at her in nightmares, whispering to her through the wall, its mutterings like shouts in the silence of her mind. Only in great danger or physical pain did it withdraw. Whether it was enjoying the spectacle of her external suffering, or actually afraid to share her pain, she did not know. Each battle left her more despairing, but also stronger, colder, and more determined.

  The most difficult task of all was moving unseen through Gorethria itself. At first she travelled only at night, but when she neared the cities she found herself clothes such as a slave would wear, and became adept at skimming through the streets as if on a vital errand for her non-existent master. The horse was no problem, for slaves were allowed to ride; a mounted, well-dressed slave was a sign of a wealthy master. And they were allowed in public buildings, even libraries.

  Medrian came at last to the first goal of her journey: the glittering capital city, Shalekahh, and the vast library annexed to the palace. Here she hoped to find knowledge, and perhaps an answer to her own need.

  The sight of the palace, with its porcelain-white walls, chilled her. If it was possible to feel colder than she already did, that edifice sealed her icy destiny. It stank of demons. The thought of Meshurek, hunched on his throne in the grip of the Worm-serving Shana, nauseated her. She did not at that time know Meshurek’s tragic story, but the demon-presence around the palace was tangible to her senses. It underlined what she knew, that the Serpent was behind this savagery and misery.

  She entered the vaulted halls of the library like a thief, but went unchallenged past the tall, ornately dressed librarians. She moved along shelf after shelf of books, searching for any information she could find about the Worm. But perhaps scholars had been afraid to write about it, or the works were not taken seriously enough to be kept under the history or science sections.

  She went deeper into the library, ignored by the dark-skinned Gorethrian men and women studying there. At last she found a small, dim side-room with a sign over the doorway that read, Astrology, Religion and Superstition. The shelves were crammed with manuscripts and books, many in rough unmarked covers as if they had been bound only when they arrived at the library. Volumes were even stacked on the floor, but the dust that plumed from every book she touched showed how little the section was used.

  She soon found out why. Many of the books were mere myth and speculation. Others, more sinisterly, were in Gorethrian so ancient that only scholars could have deciphered it, but all the same, they had an aura that terrified her. As her eyes glanced over the alien text, the odd word she understood would scream out at her, filling her with dread of perceiving the meaning behind an incomprehensible nightmare. Laboriously she worked her way through the books, fighting a panicky sensation that she would never escape the room.

  In the writings of ages past, [she read in a great calf-skin volume] we find mention of a mythical creature called the Serpent or Worm M’gulfn. The origins of the belief in this creature are obscure. It is possible that such a being did once live, and certain people saw it and told others; in the retelling, such stories inevitably attributed the being with ever more awesome supernatural qualities. So myths are born. Even in the author’s lifetime there came a tale from the far North of the Empire, that a great grey monster had flown down from the Arctic and devoured many of them and laid waste their land. It can only be assumed that they were using symbolism as the best way to describe a devastating storm.

  Medrian slammed the book shut in disgust. The pompous rationality of the author made a sickening contrast with the
hideous reality that she knew. The words were like the laughter of a ghoul. In abhorrence she dropped the volume. Her heart sank as she began to realise that none of the authors had the knowledge she needed: what the Serpent was, and if it could be killed. They did not even understand that the need existed.

  The light was failing when she at last found a book she could understand. It explained, straightforwardly, the creation of the Earth and Planes, and how the Serpent itself had come into being – just as, years later, the Lady of H’tebhmella was to explain it. Medrian read avidly, and she knew, from the faint reactions of M’gulfn suppressed deep within her, that it was true.

  Men, animals and plants have evolved upon the Earth. Their existence owes nothing to the Serpent. So where do the Shana, whom men call ‘demons’, fit into the plan of things? Undoubtedly they are not natural beings and they live in a separate Region that is not of the Earth or Planes. We conclude that the Serpent made them itself. It has abundant energy; it has every reason to resent man’s presence on Earth; and so it has created beings of its own to torment and eventually master the human race which it hates.

  Now this to me offers conclusive proof that the Grey Ones, or Guardians, do exist and have intervened on Earth at times. The Shana have great power and are loathsomely evil. There is no reason why they should not have run riot upon the Earth and destroyed everything millennia ago (then, of course, they would have risen up against the Serpent and it, in turn, would have destroyed them); except that the Grey Ones, for the Earth’s sake, have placed what constraints they can against them. The Shana’s Region has been moved from under the Earth to outside it, and they can only come when men call. The summoning is arduous, and but few have the knowledge of it; and the Shana must offer something more than torment to the summoner, or they would never be called at all. But they are still dangerous, and the Grey Ones’ intervention has only made both them and the Serpent more vengeful in the long run…

  This was all new to Medrian. She read to the end of the small book, feeling that she had at least learned an external truth, even if she never discovered the internal.