The Resting Places, page 20
These last things they did not say aloud, but she saw the questions in their eyes. And of course they did not say that she could no longer stay in the village, but this too she read as plain as day on their ashen, downcast faces. She saw their fear, their mistrust, and she knew they now thought her cursed. The villagers had suffered too, they reminded her. They had all lost someone to the storms of wild magic that pillaged the land, setting trees ablaze with smokeless fire and cracking the earth. But none had suffered like Marianne, who had gone alone into the forest one night, and had returned to find her home, her life, reduced to nothing but scorched bones, picked over by wolves that had been drawn to the scent of death and sorcery. She had buried what little she could.
‘Are you a witch, Marianne?’ the village children had asked.
Though she was not much older than they, and though they had played together not so many years ago, now there was a distance between them that seemed to her to be immeasurable and insurmountable. She was gathering herbs and mushrooms, as she had every day since she was old enough to safely do so, for the poisonous varieties far outweighed the edible.
‘Did you kill your brothers and sisters with magic?’ They were wide-eyed, pale children and no strangers to death. ‘Can you teach us magic?’ they had whispered. When she had not replied, they started to lose interest. ‘Will you kill us too, Marianne?’ they said and then they had run, screaming and laughing into the woods. An image had appeared in her mind’s eye unbidden: a vision of a hangman’s noose, the black rope coiling and twisting around the pale skin of her neck. And she had thought: It is time for me to leave.
And now, she reaches the entrance to the castle. Her feet and hands are numb from the cold; she staggers under the weight of her pack though it contains only a few mementos, relics of the life she has lost. The walk has been much harder than she anticipated. The castle entranceway is hidden from sight by piles of fallen stones: the earthquakes have reduced the castle in stature, but its presence remains undiminished. It looms, ancient and foreboding, the black stone infused with an indescribable sense of menace. The great door is made from ghostwood, ashen white against the dark surrounds and ice cold to the touch. In the centre of the door there is an iron knocker in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head.
She hesitates. The last time she saw such a creature, the fur of its muzzle was stained crimson with blood.
The ring gripped in the wolf’s jaws is so heavy she has to set aside her pack in order to lift it with both hands. The sound of iron against iron echoes across the midnight forest. Inscribed on the wolf’s head is a symbol she recognises immediately: a single letter ‘V’. For as long as she has been alive, and indeed for many centuries before that, these lands and all the people in them have belonged to the Vyrkos.
She waits in silence at the threshold of the ancient castle, feeling like an intruder, like she does not belong here. Nothing stirs. Even the wind seems to hold its breath. Part of her wants to turn and run back into the woods, but where would she go? You must keep going, she thinks. Else what will become of you? She lifts the iron ring once more and is about to knock when from deep within the castle, she hears the sound of footsteps approaching.
The door swings heavily open and the figure that now stands revealed in the doorway causes her to take an involuntary step back. He is huge, so tall and broad-shouldered as to almost fill the doorway in its entirety and eclipse the glow of the torches coming from within, casting him for a moment only as a monstrous silhouette in a flickering penumbra of firelight. A shape more beast than man. Marianne falters.
Then the figure steps out towards her into the moonlight and she can see him more clearly: a man, then, though savage and unkempt. He is older than her, perhaps as old as her father. And he is handsome: his face is weathered with cracks and scars, but full of fierce character in the way of a well-travelled antique. He wears a blood-red brocade coat, a military fashion from some faraway land. It is threadbare, the golden buttons either undone or missing. His shaggy hair is the colour of dark iron and tied back from his face with a loose ribbon, and his skin – bare beneath his open coat – is as white as a river-dredged corpse.
Yet it is his eyes that consume her attention. His unblinking eyes seem to glow in the cold light. They are the palest shade of yellow. His pupils are huge and dark, like the bottom of a well sunk so deep that no sunlight ever graces it. The eyes of a predator, a creature that hunts by night. He looks down upon her. He fixates her with a look of such intensity, such vehemence, that she does not know if she will ever move again.
‘Do you know where you are, child?’ he says. He speaks quietly, yet his voice carries like the rumble of a distant storm heard across the valleys. His lip is curled with something like amusement.
She nods once.
‘And do you know what I am?’
Her heart is fluttering in the cage of her chest like a bird caught in a trap. She nods again, slowly and precisely, and on her lips the fated word Vyrkos: a word shrouded in mystery and superstition throughout her short life, a word that explains both everything and nothing at once.
He regards her in silence for a long moment, and then slowly blinks, just once, and whatever spell had seemed to hold her in thrall is broken. She exhales.
‘You came all this way barefoot?’
‘I hadn’t anticipated snow such as this.’
He nods. ‘A result of the great sorcerous works afoot in the realm. Death magic steals life even from the air itself. Come inside, out of the cold.’
His voice is deep and melodic. He does not sound unkind, she thinks, but she knows she tends to only see the best in people. The huge figure stands aside, and she steps across the threshold. He takes her pack, lifting it effortlessly from where she has put it down, in a single enormous hand that resembles nothing so much as the paw of some great animal. And what’s more – a detail that causes her to gasp – at the end of each finger is a claw, hooked and black and entirely, undeniably inhuman.
‘Why are you here?’ he asks. His soft voice rumbles near to her ear and causes the flesh of her neck to pimple and the wisps of fine hair to stand on end.
‘I have nowhere else to go. My family are dead. The villagers think me a witch.’
His yellow eyes flicker in the dancing light of the fire. ‘And are they right to think so?’ In a moment of profound strangeness, he sniffs her. A single deep inhalation. ‘The taint of sorcery, perhaps. Wild magic found you, I think. It has left a mark.’
‘There was black fire that burned without warmth…’ She thinks for a moment. ‘What great works? The works of the God in the Star?’
He smiles as if surprised, flashing long, sharp teeth. ‘Not him, no. The other. By whose tolerance you are permitted to draw breath in this realm.’
‘We must live unseen,’ she whispers. A fragment of something her mother used to say. She moves closer to a torch held in a sconce upon the wall; it is a blackened animal bone, the end wrapped in twisted tow and soaked in pine resin. The smoke is pungent, but the heat is welcome.
‘Yours is an old tribe. But unseen or not, it makes no difference. The gods do not tread lightly when they stride upon this realm. There is no safety here for such as you. So young. So powerless.’
He gestures broadly towards the debris that has fallen from the towers. ‘Even I was not spared.’ He laughs. His laughter is a strange and deep thing. ‘This castle has remained unscathed by the touch of any invader since the Time of Myth, and now this. Still, I did not suffer quite as you have.’
He pauses. Considers her.
‘Now, you are all alone.’
He is in such close proximity to her that she is overwhelmed by the smell of him, a smell of unfamiliar spices and leather and the earthy odour of an unwashed beast. It is not, she thinks, entirely unpleasant.
‘But so,’ Marianne says, with a sad smile upon her not-quite-beautiful face, ‘are you.’
He leads her into a wide corridor of dark stone. A threadbare rug is strewn with broken masonry and desiccated leaf litter, blown in from outside. Disintegrating tapestries hang crooked upon the walls and flutter as they pass, briefly animating the depicted renditions of wolves – for each of the dozen or so images she sees depicts a wolf in some form or other. He explains each piece as they walk, the heraldry they show, the events they describe. His voice is quiet and sonorous. Her mind is wandering so that she finds it hard to concentrate. The place looks as if no one has lived here for decades; the dim light from torches and candles is the only evidence of habitation. Her head is spinning. She staggers slightly.
‘My Lord Vyrkos…’ she says at last, her speech halting and uncertain. ‘You must excuse me if I faint. It will not be due to fear, but because I have not eaten for some time.’
He smiles again. ‘Of course. You left your home in a hurry.’
‘I had a vision of a grisly end.’
‘Perhaps a witch then, in truth?’ He picks up a stool from the floor and sets it upright, beside a small side table. She sits and rests her head in her hands.
‘Do you need a servant? I could clean for you.’ Her voice is shaky. She is reluctant to accept charity, even the smallest things.
‘Are you unwell?’ he asks.
‘No, I…’ But that is all she manages to say. She closes her eyes for a moment. An after-image of the flickering torchlight fades into abstraction against the inside of her eyelids; the twisting coils of flame turn from red to grey to black and become indistinct. He reaches out for her, cradling her head in one huge hand as she succumbs to sleep.
Marianne dreams. In her dreams black flames dance like leaves caught in a sudden eddy of wind, spiralling up and up into a vortex. A terrible dancing column of cold fire that devours all that it touches, its fuel the very essence of life. And then the vortex is no longer flame, but instead it becomes a thick black rope, a rope that twists in coils around the pale flesh of a young girl’s neck, looping around and around. This young girl turns to face Marianne. She is pale: pale as if crafted from the finest porcelain, pale to the extent that her skin is almost translucent, and a fine tracery of indigo veins can be seen beneath. She is beautiful in the way that death itself is beautiful. And the girl says, in a voice little more than a whisper:
‘You must know how this will end.’
Marianne wakes with a start. She is lying in a dark and unfamiliar room. He has carried her to a bed, she realises. There is no one here with her, but the echo of the whisper lingers in her ear. Her skin is pimpled with dread, and her heart races. She pulls the bedclothes up around her.
The chamber is large and barren save for a vast, empty fireplace and the remains of a dismal-looking wardrobe, reduced now to splinters under a heap of fallen masonry where a corner of the room has collapsed to reveal the crepuscular light of false dawn beyond. Snow drifts down into the room in a gentle breeze, vanishing into nothingness before it can settle on the bare stone floor. Fleeting shapes dart in the half-light at the limits of her perception as bats circle outside the castle.
She can smell food being prepared elsewhere in the vicinity and her stomach groans. After a time, she rises, standing unsteadily on feet which still feel numbed from the snow. She is distressed to discover that she is wearing only her underclothes. At the foot of the bed there is a pale blue garment that shimmers with a dull shine like oil on water. She looks around for the clothes she arrived in, but they are nowhere to be seen, and so with no other option she examines the blue dress. It is a simple shift, but finer than any garment she has set eyes on before. It is delicate and weightless but brittle with age, and in places the fabric has rotted such that it crumbles when she touches it.
Fragile and impractical, she thinks, but what else can I do?
She leaves the bedchamber and steps into the corridor beyond. It is a liminal space stretching between unknown, unseen parts of the ancient castle like a cadaverous artery, drained of blood and left hollow and decrepit. Dust motes hang suspended in the smattering of half-light that falls lazily from narrow windows. As she walks along it, she feels like she is the first living soul to walk here in a hundred years or more.
On one wall there is a huge oil painting. It hangs crooked, in a decaying gilt frame. The painting depicts a wolf of such magnitude that it towers over the forests and mountains at its feet. The wolf’s jaws are closed around a star, the brightest star in the night sky. This star she has always known as the god of her ancestors, always watching over her even though her tribe are lost and alone, far from his reach.
‘Hrunspuul, the god-wolf.’
The lord has approached her so silently she did not hear him until he spoke, his voice deep and gentle near her ear. She shivers. She had been lost in thought.
‘This land is his gift to the Vyrkos. It is said when he returns, he will devour the star of Azyr – he will pluck it from the heavens and swallow it and so plunge the realm into true darkness.’ He laughs softly. ‘My kind are forever conflating myth and memory. Nevertheless, there must always be a Vyrkos here in this castle, to await the return of the Hound of the Cairns and to protect his gift from invaders. So here I am, so here I remain.’
‘Have you always lived here?’ she asks. ‘Did your parents live here too?’
‘That was… another life.’
He takes her by the hand and leads her like a child.
‘Come, let us find some food.’
They descend a narrow flight of steps. At the bottom is a door which opens into a room that is something like a servants’ kitchen. It is in obvious disrepair: furniture lies broken and coated in dust and debris, plates and glassware are smashed upon the flagstone floor. There is an overwhelming smell of animals: of blood and musk and urine and of meat cooking on skewers over a stone firepit. He finds a chair and places it so she can sit at the head of a large wooden table.
‘You prepare your own food?’ Marianne asks. She looks around uncertainly.
On the table there are some small plates of fruit, fruit the likes of which she has never seen before, for none grows in this land. He gestures for her to eat and so she does. They are small, brown, shrivelled things, but they taste sweet.
‘I have no cook, no servants. This fruit has come from Ghyran.’
‘I could do this – I could prepare food for you.’
He places a wooden bucket filled with churning water on the table and rolls up the sleeve of his red coat. The bucket froths with activity: there are living creatures within that struggle and thrash. Long black tails coil around his arm, and for a moment she imagines the hangman’s rope, come alive somehow and following her here from her dreams.
‘These too are not native to this realm, though they come not from Ghyran – they have many kinds of eel there, of course, but this is something else, something I believe has been drawn here by the sorceries unleashed on the land. An unnatural phenomenon. The stream beneath the keep is infested with them. Parasites.’
She watches one of the creatures as it writhes in his grip, and she pities the wretched thing. It seems so pathetic, fighting for what little life it has left. It has a face unlike any eel she has seen before: it has no eyes and looks more like a worm than a fish, with a hideous funnel of tiny teeth in place of a mouth. As she watches, the creature loops itself around unexpectedly and bites into the skin of the Vyrkos’ forearm, latching on to the pale flesh as would a leech. He grunts and pulls it free, leaving a circular wound. There is a shocking amount of scarlet blood.
He dashes the creature’s head against the corner of the table with a sickening wet thud. Then he reaches into an inside pocket and withdraws a small hook-bladed knife. Holding the eel’s head with one hand, he cuts a shallow line around its throat. Placing the knife to one side, he uses his free hand to peel the skin back away from the eel’s head. With short, sharp tugs the skin tears free from the fish, revealing the palpitating meat inside. The creature is still alive, she realises; it thrashes helplessly, and even when it is decapitated the bloody core still squirms and the grotesque mouth still gasps. This he then carves into chunks and skewers. The head and skin he discards, tossing them through a blood-smeared iron waste grate in the floor, where they splash down into the darkness below.
She sits wordlessly for a while, listening to the meat sizzle and spit as he places it to roast over the fire. She waits for a wave of nausea to pass, and when it has, she asks him if this is how he usually eats his meals, here alone in this empty castle.
‘No,’ he replies, ‘this is not how I usually dine.’
He places a skewer in front of her. The meat is burnt and greasy. It tastes strangely flavourless. She has noticed that certain things seem to be draining from her world: flavour, colour, warmth. She sighs. Something is not right. She knows this.
He doesn’t eat with her. He says he always eats alone.
The next day he takes her to the topmost battlement of the keep. Anaemic sunlight dapples the forest far below. The horizon seems infinitely far, as if the land goes on forever and this castle sits atop it all. On a clear day you can see to the coast.
‘Why did you come here?’ he asks her. ‘What are you looking for?’
She doesn’t know how to answer, not precisely. The question is too big, it encompasses too much. She can’t articulate her thoughts – thoughts about how she yearns for some place in the world and some soul to share it with. She can’t explain that she wants to simply have an opportunity, a fair and equal chance in life. And above all how she hopes: an unspecific, unqualified hope that envelops everything she sees and touches. And that – even though it seems so forlorn – this hope includes him.
She shivers in the wind, and he offers her his coat. An heirloom, he explains, a gift from a compatriot in a distant land. There are not many memories he treasures; there are not many he would call friend.
