The Lord of Lies: Strange Threads: Book 2 (41 page)

His eyes opened. He was sitting on the banks of a clear stream just outside Whisperwood, against a willow tree in the shade. The heat was slow and thick, and running water the only sound. For the first time in a long time, he was at ease. The ache of the wounds given to him at the Shining Mines had finally begun to fade.

Movement by the water caught his attention. On the forest side of the stream, someone emerged from the trees. She kneeled by the water, singing in a language Corlas hadn’t heard before, but which resonated with him somehow. It was beautiful. Her wild hair shone gold in the sunlight, her small ears were pointed. She ran her hands through the water, fingers slim
and graceful. She looked up and saw him watching. He felt awkward, a hulking battle-scarred warrior sitting in the shade, staring silently at a beautiful girl. He thought she would run and was filled with sadness. Instead, she smiled in greeting.

‘Are you from the healers’ valley?’ she called.

‘Yes,’ answered Corlas. The word floated by itself, oafishly alone.

She jumped to her feet and began to wade into the stream with no regard for her dress. He tried to rise, but his body creaked, and before he knew it she was kneeling at his side.

‘Don’t get up,’ she said. ‘You’ve been hurt.’

‘Some months ago now, miss,’ he said, dumbfounded by how bold she was. ‘I’m almost healed.’

Her blue eyes were shot through with orange flecks and turned up slightly at the corners. He realised she had Sprite in her blood, and a strong dose at that.

‘The wounds, yes,’ she said. She touched him where his flesh was tender, and his surprise doubled. ‘But not returned to vitality, I think. You should spend some time in the wood – you’d quickly return to your full self.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

She laughed heartily. ‘Why, because of your Sprite blood of course! The wood looks after its own.’

He chuckled, though confused. ‘I have no Sprite blood, miss.’

At this she laughed even louder. ‘You don’t even know that you have Sprite blood?’

‘I don’t see how I could,’ said Corlas. ‘I have none of the marks. Though you do, stronger than I have ever seen.’

‘Seen? Seen?’ she repeated, eyes flashing. ‘Do you mean pointy ears and twice-coloured eyes? I am talking about the blood underneath your skin!’

She reached up to put her hands
on his forehead. He froze, unwilling to move lest he startle her.

‘
There
it is,’ she exclaimed. ‘Bubble, bubble. You need to learn to look underneath the surface, my fine fellow.’ She leaped to her feet. ‘I think you should come for a walk in the wood!’

Corlas was enthralled. Right then he might have joined her if she’d announced she was walking to the moon. She grabbed his arm to haul him to his feet, and he rose clumsily, still marvelling at her forwardness.

‘Are you not afraid to go walking alone with a strange man?’ he said.

‘Alone
and
with?’ She chuckled. ‘You make no sense. Besides, you are not just a human man. I certainly wouldn’t allow one of
them
to catch sight of me by the stream.’

He allowed himself to be led into the water, the flow soaking his trousers.

‘And I never,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘would let one hear me sing that song.’

‘What did it mean?’ he asked. ‘Your song?’

‘Don’t you remember?’ she said.

‘I have not heard it before.’

‘Not with your ears.’ She smiled and thumped him on the chest. ‘But maybe your heart remembers.’

She sang again, and something within him stirred.

They walked into the forest, which he hadn’t left since.

The Lady Vyasinth
wafted through the trees above the hut. She would have to become more involved again, she knew, as she had been when Mirrow was very young. Back then Vyasinth had appeared to the girl almost every day, to look after her and teach her the ways of the Sprites. Mirrow had been supposed to pass the knowledge on to her children, a plan which, sadly, had died with her. Vyasinth now regretted having ignored Corlas, offended by his refusal to believe what he was. She would have to put her qualms aside, unless she wanted the child to grow up in ignorance, as good as an end to all her hard work. Yes, she would speak to Corlas, but not now, not yet – for there were strangers in the wood, presences that pricked at her far-reaching awareness.
Why are they here?
she thought, even though she knew the answer, knew with a horror like an inversion of the joy she’d felt when Mirrow’s hair had turned blue with her pregnancy. Arkus and Assedrynn coveted that which was hers.

Her ire increased as she thought of those two. Everything was their fault! How she longed for the days when there had been only one type of magic in the world – Old Magic, as it was now called – which had existed when the two gods had ruled together. Arkus, God of Light, and Assedrynn, God of Shadow, had once lived in duality and balance – night and day, water and fire, certainty and uncertainty, truth and dreams. There had been only one Great Well, where all souls journeyed upon death to become part of a collective. That had changed when the gods had gone to war. They had closed their domains to each other, and come to one final agreement that made it possible for one to destroy the other: to break the Great Well. Each god had drawn out his
own aspect from the Well, shattering the duality that had previously existed. The souls of those not fully dissolved had suffered the most, their very beings wrenched apart. Vyasinth remembered vividly their cries.

After that, the Old Magic had no longer worked. Instead each god created a new Well of his own, in his own domain, so that the souls of his people would go to him alone. With shadow and light thus divided, a creature could be born only of one or the other. Born of light returned to light in death, and born of shadow returned to shadow. Vyasinth had seen it as a violation of the natural order and, unlike the other minor gods, had refused to side with either Arkus or Assedrynn. As punishment they had banished her here, to Whisperwood; meanwhile, her people suffered greatly.

The Sprites weren’t like the luckier creatures of the land who had more easily survived the division of magic. The Zyvanix wasps, for example, had always built their hive cities in the arid plains of the north. Their neighbours, the Varenkai, were bronzed farmers, growing food under the sun in open fields. These were folk of the light, and Arkus had always been their god. The Varenkai’s pale cousins, the Arabodedas, lived by the sea in the cloudy south; here, deep water offered up food and life and icy winds drove their robust ships. There were the Vorthargs who dwelled in caves, and the Graka who lived in the storm-laden Bentemoth Mountains. These were all folk of shadows, and their god naturally became Assedrynn. They had made the transition quickly, instinctively.

The Sprites, however, were folk of the forest in whom Old Magic was strong – after all, trees keep their roots in shadow and leaves in the light,
relying upon a balance of both. Robbed of balance, the Sprites had died in their multitudes. Only those living in Whisperwood survived, for with Vyasinth’s presence it became the only place in the world where Old Magic could still exist. The survivors weren’t many, and had been forced to interbreed with Varenkai, so their blood had thinned over generations. Soon there had been no true Sprites left, only half-breeds or less, beings who could survive outside Whisperwood. As they had spread out into the land, all vestiges of culture had been lost and no more souls returned to Lady Vyasinth and the Well that was Whisperwood.

In Mirrow, Vyasinth had sensed, for the first time in centuries, almost pure Sprite blood. She had decided it was time to rebuild; her sorrow finally replaced with purpose. She had called Mirrow to the wood, and time had even brought her a suitable mate. When Mirrow’s hair had turned blue with her pregnancy, Vyasinth had guessed that the child would be born special … and maybe she could even hope for more than simple rebuilding. Maybe she was to be delivered a champion.

It was then that she had decided to give Mirrow the Stone. She had never told her that it was special, created when the Great Well was broken, retrieved by Vyasinth before she was cast down into the world. It would make a fitting weapon for a blue-haired hero.

And yet others had discovered him too. Now, despite what they had promised her, Arkus and Assedrynn trespassed in her domain.

Battu’s consciousness dissolved from
his body and melted down the sides of Skygrip Castle like black butter. He trickled down stairwells and spread over balconies, seeped through cracks and curled around doorways. Sometimes it was useful to travel so slowly and widely. With his awareness diffused, he gathered impressions of all that he touched. In his broadest moments he could
feel
the castle itself, as if he were a glove over an enormous hand.

Skygrip rose a league into the sky, a cyclopean tower of black stone. At the top rested a globe of rock twice the width of the tower that supported it, from which four stone spikes reached up to the sky. From between the spikes rose a thick stream of vapour like a slow-moving hurricane, feeding upwards into the Cloud. The Cloud, which covered all of Fenvarrow and kept it safe in shadow.

Skygrip had been built by Kryzante, the first Shadow-dreamer. Legend said he had carved the castle from a single piece of rock, once
called Mount Mokan. What power must he have possessed to shear the slopes from a mountain? To carve the tower and its sceptre peak, to hollow the corridors and caverns within?
He must have had help from the gods
, thought Battu. C
urse their arbitrariness.

He reached the fortifications at the base of the castle and gathered himself together. From there he sped north over the mountain’s old foothills, through the capital city of Mankow in the blink of an eye, and out across the Ragga Plains. Beyond the ringlet of the five goblin cities he found the bulk of his gathering army. Thousands of soldiers marched the earth flat. Teams of engineers moved between smoking war engines. Battu was pleased by the convincing display – it looked very much as if he was preparing for war. The Throne of Kainordas could not help but take notice, even if he suspected it was nothing but an enormous diversion.

Onwards he travelled, to rockier lands. Here a fine mist hung suspended in the air and made the Stone Fields slick. Battu slipped easily through a cobweb of cracks, covering an expanse of nothing much but rock and twig, and came to rest at the edge of his realm.

The border divided the world into perfect halves, from east coast to west and further out to sea. Above Battu the Cloud ended, and during the day a wall of light fell unhindered to earth. The border was harder to see under the moon, but was there nonetheless – a darker line across the ground where the Cloud’s shadow fell.

Only a few shadow creatures made their homes this close to enemy lands. There were huge malformed moths, which sometimes crossed
over in pursuit of the moon. There were quick and viscous shadowmanders – lizard-like things that hunted across the border. Battu noticed one now, a blood red flash that slipped from rocks and darted into Kainordas, becoming briefly visible as it wrestled a brown beetle. A second beetle scuttled away in alarm, and the mander leaped to kill it too – though it only brought one back to Fenvarrow to eat. It seemed that shadowmanders killed creatures of light more instinctively than hunger dictated. Battu admired them.
If only they were bigger.

Other common but more pathetic denizens of the border were spirit creatures known as the Trapped. These were creatures once born of light, which were now consigned to a different life. Leftovers from the Shadowdreamer Assidax’s war, shaped by the constant panic of being so close to their homeland and yet unable to cross the threshold, they were the slightest of the undead.
The best to be said about Assidax
, thought Battu,
is that she’d caused the enemy such heavy losses
. Those who had been resurrected by her would never find their way to Arkus’s Great Well, even once their bodies had rotted off their souls. They were shadow creatures now, and they would go to Assedrynn.

The Trapped sensed Battu’s presence in the shadows and drifted clear of him. One made the mistake of flashing past and he seized it instinctively, as a cat would snatch a flashing object. The thing twisted pitifully in his ethereal grip.

Who were you?

The Trapped couldn’t remember. Its weakness filled Battu with disgust and he focused his power to destroy it. Somehow it felt what was
coming and writhed eagerly. It wanted peace so desperately, it would gladly go to the Well of its ancient enemy. If Battu had been in his body, his stomach would have turned. He pushed the wretched thing away, denying it the mercy it sought, and it wailed soundlessly in despair.

Battu spread out along the border like oil on water, searching for a point of safe access into Kainordas. There was none to be found. Despite the storm in Whisperwood, here the skies were clear and the moon shone brightly. He didn’t dare travel into Kainordas on such a night. There was too much risk that a shadowline would break and cut him off from his journey home. He would have to rely on other eyes to know what went on in Whisperwood tonight. He sped along the border with another destination in mind.