A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) (4 page)

‘Medrian, you must not doubt your strength,’ the Lady said gently. ‘If you accept the small amount of comfort we can give you here, I believe it will increase your strength, not undermine it.’

‘When there’s no hope, how can there be any comfort?’ Medrian exclaimed savagely. ‘I’m sorry, my Lady. It’s selfish to think only of my own hope – I forsook that many years ago. I have received healing here, and without H’tebhmella the world would have no hope at all. But no one can help me. Not even you. I’ve accepted it.’

The Lady felt inwardly stilled, almost stunned, as though the very fabric of the Blue Plane had shifted beneath her feet. What a fool I have been, she reflected. I thought I knew everything. Now, the revelation. Medrian is unhappy on H’tebhmella; even we, here, cannot really touch or ease her misery. Have I deluded her, as well as myself? Must the Serpent triumph?

Now the Lady of H’tebhmella knew: she had no power to reassure or even console Medrian. She could not even say,
don’t be discouraged
, because Medrian already was. Despair was all that kept her going.

The Lady could look into human souls as into crystal, and she shared deeply in their suffering, devoted all her strength to alleviating it. Yet human beings had an insubstantial quality that she could not quite touch, any more than a rock can grasp the sea that washes against it. She knew she could never cross that essential barrier, for she was H’tebhmellian, immortal. And now, faced with this Alaakian woman, whose soul was as intangible as a shadow, the Lady felt the void more acutely than ever. All her compassion, strength and wisdom failed her. She felt wordless, powerless. Diminished. I cannot heal her. M’gulfn has won.

When the Lady spoke at last, there was a quality of inner exhaustion in her voice that Medrian had never heard before.

‘I accept that you feel like this, but I wish you would tell me your story, so I can understand more clearly what has brought you to this depth of hopelessness.’

Medrian hesitated, and the Lady felt sure she would refuse. But at last she said, ‘Very well. I will tell you, my Lady, because you’re the only one to whom I’ll ever be able to speak freely. Not that relating my story can change anything, but it might restore my strength of purpose.’

Emotionless, the words falling from her lips like cold, white pebbles, Medrian began to describe her life: a nightmare such as even the Lady could not have envisaged.

Medrian dreamed.

She dreamed that she was lying in snow under a black dome of night, and the light of stars was burning around her – stars that quivered with mocking pain, like the fragments of a shattered crystal.

She dreamed that her body was long and loathsome, a thick grey cord of knotted muscles covered in a colourless, flaky membrane like the discarded skin of a snake. She felt so heavy, as heavy as pitchblende, and at her sides leathery wings twitched feebly, impotent of flight. Yet within the core of her body a latent energy vibrated, radiating along every muscle rope, as slumberous and fierce and deadly as the power at the Earth’s heart.

The snow felt lukewarm and ice crystals grated against her skin membrane; the feeling was both irritating and deeply familiar. She rocked the weighty body from side to side, groaning faintly as she failed to lift her lead-heavy head. Unfamiliar, nightmarish sounds rent her lobeless ears. Someone was singing, though she had never heard a voice before, nor any sound except the fall of snow and the creaking of ice, and the moaning of the wind in the stars.

Medrian dreamed she was the Serpent.

Or rather, it dreamed and she was forced to share it, seeing through its eyes and experiencing its feelings and thoughts. Its thoughts were wordless images, vivid and explicit and nightmarish, redolent of age-old, unforgotten terror. For the Serpent suffered its recurring phantasm of eons ago, when it had been the only living being on Earth, and the Guardians had come to rend it of its power. And Medrian was entrapped in the nightmare, no longer knowing that she existed as herself. She was the Serpent, and to her the dream was real.

She lay upon the roof of the world, safe and inviolable in her domain of sighing, snow-filled gales. Of her origins she remembered nothing; she had always been there, past and future a grey tunnel of eternity. She – the Serpent M’gulfn – was in perpetual symbiosis with the Earth, her kingdom and home.

Until this moment.

Grey figures stood before her, their shapes both vague and chillingly real through her three Serpent’s eyes. They stood upright; each had a torso and a head and four limbs but each was shrouded in an ashen robe. She had never seen – never seen anything but snow. One of them was singing. She had never heard –

The song seemed to pinion her long Worm-body to the ground as if each word was a lead arrow. All the appalling power of the Serpent was rendered impotent by the song; she could not fly – could not even raise her head – could do nothing but groan.

She saw them flinch back at the terrible sound of M’gulfn’s voice, but the song grew stronger and she weaker. They advanced upon her. The words of the song made no sense, for she had never heard words before, but still they purged her every sinew of its strength. Now a throbbing, sick sensation filled her dim consciousness, terrifying in its very unfamiliarity.

For the first time, the Serpent felt fear.

To the Serpent, fear was not a word; it was a feeling. An image of bones crushed to dust, skin flayed from nerveless muscles. Medrian thrashed in the prison of her dream, rocked her Serpent body and groaned as the figures glided closer, filling her trinary vision.

Her three eyes twitched and rolled in their sockets, muscles in spasm as if trying to draw the orbs back into the recesses of her skull, there to hold them safe. The effort speared her with pain, but her eyes remained vulnerable –

Pain!

M’gulfn-Medrian saw the flash of metal before it cut under her centre eye, continued to see it even as the eye was dragged from its socket. And when the nerves and muscles were severed, the flash continued as a scream of white fire shafting through her head. Through that blazing agony, her two remaining eyes saw the figure step back, clutching the small blue orb as if it were a deadly creature that would inflict a fatal bite if he did not hold it firm. No flesh-fibres hung from it. It did not bleed.

My eye!

The white sword of pain rent her skull with impossible pressure. Her struggles were useless. A long, long age passed before she knew that the hurt was not caused by metal struck through her head, but by nothingness. The socket was empty, there was no knife. No eye.

Now there was no dread song to pinion her against the snow. The Serpent’s vast energy was returning. Soon pain was forgotten, fear a blurred, hollow memory. And Medrian-M’gulfn felt rage. With a roar, she lifted the thick body into the sky on trembling, primeval wings. But beneath her, the only witness to her ponderous, dreadful circling was the wind sighing across the ice-plains like the weeping of the world.

The figures had gone. And with them, her precious eye. The Serpent screamed its torture, its frustration and rage; screamed until even the wind dared not challenge its voice. Images exploded across its primitive mind.

They have taken my eye, the thought-pictures said. Men will come to the Earth. The world will teem with their small, frail bodies that are made in the image of the Guardians – head and limbs and torso. I have always known that men will come, I have always waited for their coming and I can still wait – what is a million years to me but the drifting down of a single snowflake? They have taken the eye with which I could have looked into the hearts and minds of men, bent their petty wills to mine and made them see that I am supreme on Earth; I am the Earth.

They have tried to take my power. The next time they come, they will try to slay me.

They shall not slay me, not me!

Emotion tore apart the Serpent’s mind then. It sparked and ran like fire along every sinew of its body, as if the fibres were tinder poised for the ignition of insult and pain. Its body thrashed, scored and engulfed by the flames.

The emotion was hate.

Hate. Medrian writhed in the dream, the cosmic intensity of the Serpent’s malice filling her lungs with burning pain. The Guardians, I hate. Men, in their image, I loathe also. When they come into existence, I shall despise them doubly. The image of hatred was more terrible than that of fear. It was blood and rage and violence, and worse; it was grief, despair and desolation; and overlaying all, the grey of escapeless eternity.

Men will come to the Earth and because the Guardians have taken my eye I cannot see into their hearts and they will not worship me. But I have other powers. With my two remaining eyes I shall keep watch over the hideously dry, warm lands where they will live. I can hold sway over the elements.

I have boundless power. I can make for myself helpers who will instill chaos into their existence. And – grim triumph shook the Worm’s body like an earthquake as the idea came to it.

I can take for myself a human in which to hide my mind, so that I can move unseen among men, learning their words and ways and weaknesses. In the second body I can hide when they try to slay me. And then I can still – even without my eye – see into their hearts!

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.