A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) Page 5

  The next book slid into her hand as if it had been waiting for her. It was a volume of only twenty thick, handwritten sheets carefully bound in dark leather. There were three or four different handwritings, all very old but more or less legible. Even in the fading light she could read the words easily, as if they were glowing with their own ghostly light, and they conveyed to Medrian the feeling of a distant, haunting dream whose subject was forgotten, but whose terror and mystery still called to her across an abyss of years. The book was called The First Witness of the Serpent.

  I walked with Eldor across the snow, [the first writer said]. I don’t know where I was. We could have been in the Arctic, or anywhere. The snow was flat and the night sky like crystal. I felt that the Earth was very young, though I know this cannot have been, so perhaps the whole thing was a dream. But at least in the dream Eldor attempted to make rational the rest of my life, which has been a phantasm of terror, and for that I bless him. I asked him why the Worm has made my life a nightmare.

  Medrian read the words with a thrill of dread, suddenly knowing that they had been written by a previous host of the Serpent. It was as though she had written them herself, so intimately she knew the pain behind them. At the same time, she felt M’gulfn stirring within her. Its emotions revolted her, but this one was new. She cautiously lifted the mental screen between them, so that she could glimpse its thoughts. Grimly, she read on.

  ‘Understand,’ Eldor said to me, gently as to a child, ‘the Serpent is not just a living creature. It is a solid manifestation of unearthly power. When the Earth itself was curdled from the vast cosmic forces of the universe, the energy produced by that creation struggled to separate itself into two parts. In that dreadful conflict the Planes were struck into existence; and when they at last diverged, the negative part of the energy spun in upon itself, until it birthed itself into a creature of cosmic powers – the Serpent. And the positive energy whirled outwards into an infinite ring that long ago passed beyond helping us…’

  Within Medrian, M’gulfn’s strange emotion became stronger. She could not yet identify it, but gasped at its intensity; it was like a frantic possessive jealousy, yet there was more to it than that.

  Even the Guardians [the writer continued] have been unable to destroy or even to restrain it. Eldor told me, ‘They tore an eye of power from its head, but that has only filled it with rage and malice, made it aware that it has enemies, and thus more dangerous. So do not torture yourself with thoughts of destroying it, for such a thing is impossible, and it would only revenge itself on you for thinking of its death.’

  I despaired when Eldor said this, thinking there was no hope. I could only hope for death, though with the knowledge that the Worm would then seek a new host for itself, make another’s life agony, and another’s, and on and on. But Eldor did give me hope – only a small thought, intangible, but it has kept me sane enough to write these words, if ever they may be of use to another.

  He told me of the bird Miril. ‘She is a tiny fraction of that lost positive power,’ Eldor said. ‘The Guardians captured the dot of energy to guard the stolen Eye, but they did not create Miril from it; she created herself. She is beautiful, and sad, for she knows she cannot keep the eye safe forever. One day the Serpent will find a way to unleash it upon the world, and at last regain it, and dominate the Earth with its horror. But she is still the World’s Hope. The sun does not shine brighter than her outstretched wings, and the crystal rocks of the Earth are her tears…’ So said Eldor.

  Sweet Miril, Hope of the World, I keep you in my thoughts; you alone the Serpent cannot dominate, you are our only symbol of love and freedom until the end of time.

  Medrian dropped the book into her lap with a stifled cry, then sat white-faced and swaying. Another emotion flared from M’gulfn’s mind into hers: loathing of Miril. More than loathing – it was the repulsion of complete opposites, tainted with hate and even fear. M’gulfn despised Miril, would tear her from the sky and devour her if ever it could. Medrian cringed, trembling, under the force of that hatred, feeling she was the one being devoured.

  She reopened the book and read on. The next hand was spiky, wild and demented in form. But she recognized, in acute detail, the fractured images of his suffering.

  ‘This black snake comes to me, it came out of my childhood, hiding in the corners of my room and in my head, I see the Worm-form of it, the grinning Snake that bites my head with razor-teeth…’ As she forced herself, shuddering, to read to the end, she seemed to be drifting down a long twilit tunnel of horrific revelation – and at the end M’gulfn was waiting, waiting for her to see the truth and surrender in despair.

  The next writer seemed to have written her account in secret and in a great hurry, having no time for detailed explanations, nor anything but objectivity.

  I am a woman of Morrenland. I am in prison. No one will believe my experience, but as it is true I must write it. I was in the army that went north, at the King’s command, to destroy the Serpent. The King thought it a heroic exploit to add to his glory. How little he knew of the truth. Still, I had no power to tell him.

  We sailed to the Arctic and marched across the snow. The others went proudly, joking and laughing bravely at the cold and at the spectres the Serpent sent to haunt our path. But it was tormenting me, and I could not speak aloud to warn them all and turn back the insane mission.

  In due course we found the Serpent. It was smaller than we had thought, grotesque, lying in the snow as if it could not move. The others grew arrogant, thinking they could overpower it. But at our first attack, the Serpent rose up on wings and circled us, spitting down acid. Several died in that first foray. All the time it was raging its furious glee in my head. I could stand no more. I prayed to be killed quickly. At its second attack it snatched the rest of the soldiers in its jaws in several swoops, chewed them and dropped their broken bodies in the snow. I did not escape, but alas, I did not die. When I came to myself, lying in the bloody snow, all my comrades were dead and the Serpent was staring at me like an impassive gargoyle amid their crushed bodies. I was in terrible physical agony. My arm and leg were broken, my head cracked, and my body rent from throat to abdomen by its stinking teeth. My skin burned with its venom. Then I understood that I should be dead, except that the Worm was keeping me alive.

  I cannot bear to describe what it said to me as I stood there, how it laughed at my misery and pain. I don’t know why I didn’t go mad, but that would have been too easy an escape. It berated me, then it forced me to walk – with my leg broken and my skin in shreds – all the weary miles through the bitter Arctic, across the tundra and down through Tearn to Morrenland. I felt every detail of the pain. I was a walking corpse, animated by the Serpent.

  I came to Morrenland and stood before the King. The Serpent forced me to report the failure of the mission, with all its derision my voice. Their fear of me was obvious; I must have looked and behaved like a Serpent-possessed ghoul. The only thing they could do with me was to imprison me, and impose the sentence of death upon me.

  Now I await the hanging. I hope the Serpent will let me die, although if I do – sorrow for the hangman! I feel composed now. The Serpent is distant. Strange that I am so calm and rational, as if my very lucidity is a manifestation of madness. I am only sorry that I will die having learnt nothing, except that fighting the Serpent is foolishness. I have never suffered fools.

  The woman finished her account with a bold underline. Below, in a black, erratic scrawl, were the words,

  Sorrow for the hangman indeed! Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow!

  And that was all. But Medrian had learned that if the host were killed, the Serpent would enter the body of the killer. To her, the spidery writing was a perfect graph of his torment.

  She stared at the blank end-paper of the book as if willing words to appear on it. She felt bloodless, raw, her lungs full of grit. There must be more, she thought. Is this all there is? I haven’t found everything out yet. What about the thousands of other
hosts there have been?

  Then she realised.

  The truth was inside her, waiting to be explored. All the knowledge and memories were in M’gulfn’s mind, if she only had the courage to look at its thoughts. She had already felt some of the memories, in that strange emotion resembling jealousy. The Serpent, although it had treated all its hosts cruelly, apparently also felt an attachment for them, a sick, possessive love. She recoiled inwardly as she recognised that. Distorted by evil as it was, it was not a parody of affection. It was real.

  Closing her eyes and leaning back against the shelf of books, she let herself drift down the Serpent’s corridor of memories. She saw every detail of its long solitary existence in the Arctic snow, the stealing of its eye by the Guardians, all its many hosts, the few hopeless missions to destroy it, the giddying flights across the world that left it torpid and exhausted… She reeled away from its mind, fighting to re-establish her own identity. She had learned… she had learned more than she had ever desired to know. She had felt blood in her mouth…

  Medrian staggered to her feet, wavering like a dying tree in a cold wind. I’ve learned the truth; what have I lost? I never had hope anyway, never any hope, she kept telling herself. She tucked the book, The First Witness of the Serpent, under her jacket and smuggled it from the library with the ease of an adept thief. The librarians were locking the doors. Outside, all was darkness.

  Medrian wandered from Shalekahh and eventually left Gorethria’s borders, not knowing or caring where she was going. She wandered as if blind, numb to almost everything outside and inside herself.

  She was so stricken by the truth she’d discovered at last that she ceased to function. The Serpent could not be suffered to live. Yet it was, she now knew, indestructible. Even she could not endure such a depth of despair within herself, and so instead she stopped feeling and thinking. She let the horse carry her where it would, staring ahead as it plodded on. If anyone spoke to her, they were ignored.

  Sometimes she sat and stared at the unmarked last page of the book for hours, searching for some unforeseen revelation there.

  Then a nightmare came and shook her out of her stupor. A confusion of impressions, something that the Serpent was experiencing physically, flickering through its mind to hers. Although it had not moved for centuries, it was preparing to fly. To attack.

  No!

  Like the painful first cry of a baby, her awareness, her thoughts and feelings and nerves, screamed back into life. Don’t attack – not Forluin – not anywhere–

  But the Serpent did not listen to Medrian. It flew and ravaged a peaceful island, while she endured the nightmare of vague impressions – blood and death and vertigo – until, sated, it returned to the Arctic and lay in torpor, brooding on its pointless victory.

  And Medrian lay awake on the hard ground, wide-eyed and shuddering throughout a long night, while the horse grazed impassively close by. It is not just my suffering, she thought – it is everyone’s; and the hosts – there were thousands before me and there will be thousands after me, and I can do nothing.

  When morning came, Medrian had made her decision. She filled in the last page of the book, turning increasingly grey as she wrote, as if she were engraving her own future onto the most appalling story of horror ever written. When she had finished, she tucked the book beneath her jacket and secured it there with her belt. Then she mounted her horse and rode to the nearest port. I have been a fool, she thought. I have learnt the truth, and lost even the hope of hope, but what does that matter? It doesn’t matter at all, it means nothing. But Alaak’s suffering – Forluin’s – mine – I can only try – I said I would not rest until I had done my utmost. It’s all I can do, there’s nothing else left.

  She found a small ship to take her to Eldor, because she knew of nowhere else on Earth she could go. The sage, at least, might know something that could help her, if only in the small way that he had helped that previous host by telling him of Miril. Later, she was surprised to find that Eldor seemed to have been expecting her, that a Quest was to take place and in due course Estarinel and Ashurek arrived to go with her. It was as if pre-ordained. Despite what she had written in the book, she had not expected such concrete help; and although her struggle against M’gulfn had hardly begun, let alone ended, she found a kind of peace in knowing that she faced a final journey.

  When she first arrived and met the sage, she could not speak. The Serpent would not allow her to explain what she was. Eldor, however, as soon as he saw the small dark-haired woman, her face as coldly white as quartz, needed no explanation. He recognised the shadows in her eyes and he recognised the thin book she was clasping in her hands. When he reached out and took it she seemed to uncurl herself grimly from the volume, like a witch who had learnt terrible spells therein.

  He turned its few pages and found a new hand on the end-paper, compressed and erratic as if the writer was struggling against a persuasive power to express herself. He read,

  The Serpent has nightmares.

  I have lived alone with it in the quiet void. I have heard its thoughts, seen its snowy home through its own eyes, dreamed its dreams. I have seen desolation. It makes me afraid.

  It possesses me, though I struggle to defy it. But escapeless bleak eternity cannot be denied forever. Once I spoke to it, offering my surrender to its will if only it would stay in its cold domain and not fly south to feast upon innocent flesh… No, it said to me, your long silence has caused me pain. Now the bargain does not suffice.

  Never again will I offer it surrender. Though the denial has been colder than the frozen wastes of space, it is ice that can never again be thawed. When the desolation of the Serpent overwhelms me at last, as I know it must, my coldness will burn it. The Serpent should not have made me more desperate than itself. It has lost me for all time.

  All say the Serpent must win. I have perceived this through the inescapable nightmare of my life. But the Serpent, too, has nightmares. It must have cause; and if not, it will be given cause before I die.

  I am Medrian of Alaak.

  I am the Last Witness of the Serpent.

  Chapter Three. Forluin

  Medrian was leaning against a spindle of blue rock as she finished speaking, tracing the facets of its glittering surface with her fingers. She murmured, ‘It is so easy to dream of staying here forever… and so treacherous. For I know that I must leave here and resume the Quest, and when I do…’ she turned around in the mist, a slow, graceful movement like the strange calm of madness. ‘It will be waiting for me. Waiting for me.’

  ‘I had thought your deliverance from M’gulfn whilst on the Blue Plane to be a welcome respite,’ the Lady admitted sadly. ‘Now I see that it may only serve to make things harder for you in the end.’ Medrian nodded, her eyes dark with suppressed dread. ‘Estarinel and Ashurek do not yet know who you are, do they?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Medrian replied with a self-mocking smile. ‘The Serpent would not permit me to tell them. How can the host protect it, unless she is silent and anonymous? At the House of Rede, I thought Ashurek would kill me when I refused to say anything. But even if I had been able to speak, I still would not have done so. Because they must not know until the very end.’

  ‘Yes, you are absolutely right in that.’

  ‘In a way, I’m surprised they haven’t guessed. The times M’gulfn fought me, and I almost betrayed the Quest… but they still don’t know. Perhaps it’s because they suspected Arlenmia. And Ashurek believes I came upon the Quest in despair, after Alaak, which is partly true. I don’t know what Estarinel thinks about me. Strange, I never cared what anyone thought of me – until Estarinel.’ Again the question leapt into her throat, but she could not force the words out.

  ‘Medrian, there is something you need to know, is there it not? Don’t be afraid to ask me,’ the Lady encouraged her gently.

  Medrian spoke swiftly, before doubt stopped her. ‘Well – I am free, for the first time in my life. But the Blue Plane is not Ea
rth – it’s so beautiful that it’s painful to me. I just wondered – what it would be like to be free of the Serpent on Earth, just for a little while. So I could know what it’s like to be… normal.’ She uttered a dry laugh. ‘It’s something you said, that the Serpent had “overlooked” Forluin. If I went with Estarinel – is it possible that M’gulfn could not touch me there?’

  Oh, Medrian, the Lady thought. This little I can do for you.

  ‘What I said was true. The Serpent attacked Forluin physically, because it cannot exercise power of mind over the island. You can go there in freedom.’

  ‘Thank you, my Lady,’ Medrian murmured.

  ‘As to whether your visit is right or wrong,’ the Lady added, her eyes shimmering with tears, ‘that you must decide for yourself.’

  #

  Ashurek and Calorn stood together on a promontory of rock that rose only a bare few inches above the glassy surface of the water. Several yards before them, on the very end of the promontory, three H’tebhmellian women – including Filitha and the Lady herself – circled a cloud of sparkling blue light, coaxing it into a cohesive sphere with strange, metallic instruments. With them stood Medrian and Estarinel, both wearing H’tebhmellian clothing of pale blue silken material, Estarinel in breeches and a loose shirt, Medrian in a long dress gathered at the waist and sleeves. They were waiting anxiously for the Exit Point to be completed.

  A peculiarity in the complex orbit of H’tebhmella’s Entrance Points meant they passed across Forluin more frequently than anywhere else on Earth. A rare conjunction would allow Estarinel and Medrian to return to the Blue Plane in a few hours’ time.