The Resting Places, page 26
‘Oh please, Fate save me and protect me and take me from here, please, Fate, do not let harm come to me…’
Each silver link on the chain was as big as my palm, and they had been pulled so tight that I could barely get my hands beneath them. As I wriggled and pulled, the screams were rising on the other side of the Tree, all of them sinking into the resonant crystal and breaking apart into a weird kaleidoscope of sound. The buffeting of wings, the stink of corpses. The wet crunch of flesh and bone, the gurgle of screams suddenly silenced, the weeping and terror…
I had one arm under the chain now and tried to pull it up to my shoulder so I could get my head out. My legs kicked at the dirt. A cry, another cry, some bestial roar that turned my blood to water. Mylin looked at me – and then he was wrenched from the chains, whipped up into the branches of the Tree, into the cold darkness of the night.
I screamed, then. I gave voice to the terror that surrounded us, and the Tree absorbed it all and threw it back in a shrieking chorus that blistered through the air.
Blood spattered around my feet. I looked up into the branches, shaking with dread and terror, to see two red eyes glowering back at me, a monstrous distended mouth. The grave-stench of its foetid breath enveloped me, and the ragged wings unfolded like stinking sheets of leather.
I had a dream last night, Mylin had said. It was a mouth… Somehow, it had turned into a huge, screaming mouth, with sharp teeth, and it wanted to devour us…
I awoke on a rough stone floor. There were bars in front of me. Bars made of bone.
The ceiling was no more than an arm’s length above. It was so dark that, at first, I thought I had gone blind, but after a moment my eyes adjusted. Beyond the bars there was a rounded tunnel, curving away on either side and disappearing into the shadows. I was in some kind of alcove or cell, and the bone bars were lashed together with thick ropes of twine or sinew. I was under the Crystal Tree, I realised. I could see its roots in the ceiling of the tunnel. They glistened with a spectral green light, lit with tendrils of purple and red.
The alcove was no more than a few feet wide, less than that deep. I felt around in the darkness, fingers brushing against the rough, unworked stone of the walls. There were bones at my feet, scraps of cloth. I shuddered at the touch of them and wrapped my arms around my body, although the air was warm and sultry. My robes were tattered and torn, so I shrugged out of them. I was still wearing my tunic dress beneath. My bare feet were bloodied, and I think it was only the pain that kept me sharp and awake. I was so frightened. All I wanted to do was curl up on the floor of my cell and cry.
The smell of death was thick around me. It wafted down the tunnel, a channel of coarse, cloying air. Water trickled down the walls. Drips echoed in the distance. I could hear a shuffling, scraping sound somewhere down the tunnel to my right, but as much as I stretched to look, I couldn’t see what it was. I knew that I mustn’t call out, that only silence would keep me alive a little longer.
All I could remember was the darkness above me, those red eyes burning with death and hatred, the leathery clasp of those ragged wings. The screaming of the Nine, the wet sounds of tearing flesh…
I started to cry, crouching on the floor of the cell. I thought of my mother and father and my sister, their smiles of love and encouragement as I walked away. I thought of the look in the magister’s eye as he tied us to the Tree. Did he know what was going to happen? Was this what the Bird of Change did to everyone who was called?
Perhaps it wasn’t the Bird at all. Perhaps some monstrous beast had come along and scared it off, or harmed it in some way. That thought was almost more terrifying, and as I crouched there in the darkness, I pressed my hands together and prayed.
Fate, that governs all, sweet Bird of Change, be safe…
I must have slept again for a while, falling into tense and unsettled dreams. When I woke up the light had changed, as if the roots of the Tree were filtering down the sun. The dark green had become paler, the blues were lighter and more vivid. It almost felt as if I were underwater.
I peered up both ends of the tunnel again, trying to see around the bars of my cell, but I couldn’t see anything apart from the unworked rock and the smothering shadows. I could hear that shuffling sound once more, and then I realised that I still had my little obsidian mirror in my pocket. I stretched my arm out through the bars, the mirrored stone in my hand, and angled it towards the end of the tunnel. Stretching, turning it inch by inch, trying to see in that polished disc some sign of escape–
I cried out. There, reflected in its depths, I saw some hulking dark shape further up the tunnel, hunched and bat-like, with mottled skin and great clawed feet. There was a suggestion of furled wings, pointed ears; some snuffling, snarling muzzle. It was dragging something behind it, and as the mirror shook in my hand, I saw that it was a body. Two arms trailing in the dirt, a ravaged face half bitten away, a tangle of silvery hair…
Mylin.
The creature jerked its head around at the sound of my cry. I shrieked again and threw myself back into the shallow depths of my cell, weeping with fear. At any moment I expected the creature’s shadow to fall across the bars, for it to wrench them open and rip me apart, but the shuffling soon faded away into the depths of the tunnels. I was left with only the sound of dripping water, the panicked thunder of my heart.
I don’t know how many hours passed while I huddled there on the stone floor. All I know is that the light in the tunnel faded and grew dim and then slowly swelled again, and that I became so accustomed to the smell of rotting flesh and rusty blood that I barely noticed it. I slept and woke, fell into strange fluttering dreams. Thirst clawed at my throat, and so I licked the moisture from the walls to sate it. Would the creature keep me in here until I starved to death? Or was this some rancid larder, where it stored its food until its appetite returned from its last debauch?
I thought of Mylin, pulled up into the branches, the spatter of his blood. His face torn and savaged, arms trailing along the floor of the tunnel.
I wanted to cry, but I stifled my tears. What use were tears now? As the hours passed and the light grew dim again, I fixed my mind on the magister’s words as he had set the chains around us.
For the Bird of Change will bless you, and you will become one with the Tree…
The magister knew what was going to happen. He knew that those who were taken to the Tree were taken by the Bird in turn, dragged under into this chamber beneath it and ripped apart. Had Mylin been blessed, then? Is that what it meant? Had Yazeyla, and Zaharix, and everyone else who had been called as one of the Nine? Had I been blessed?
But no, how could I have been, when I was still here and all the others were dead?
I took the mirror from my pocket and checked my face for injuries, but apart from a smear of dirt and a scrape across my forehead where I had been struck, I was unwounded.
It took many long moments of thought while I turned this all over in my mind. The sweet Bird brought the Change, I knew that. It made you one with the Tree. Mylin had been changed, there was no doubt about it… He had met with the ultimate transformation, and he had given his life in service of the Bird. Is that what the magister had meant?
It was all so confusing, but focusing on these thoughts helped to calm me. I watched the light dim and strengthen, and then, when I was thirsty, I drank from the water that trickled down the walls of the cell. Hunger brewed in my stomach, but I tried to ignore it. I prayed, and I thought of my friends, and I tried to give thanks for the great changes they had undergone. And when the shuffling came again in the depths of the corridor, I made my decision.
‘My name is Vemari,’ I cried out. ‘Hello? Let me see you, please. Let me give thanks to you, if I can… Sweet Bird… Sweet Bird of Change…’
Shuffle and scrape; a low, choking growl. My hands shook against the bone bars, but I kept my feet. The stench preceded it like an aura: a rank, bloody smell of rot and death. I could not look on it as it crept nearer to my cell, as it filled all the spaces between the bars. I bowed my head, the tears slipping down my face. I felt a strange intelligence flicker over me – something both cold and frenzied, a block of ice in the middle of an inferno.
It was not the Bird. I knew that now. But it had brought such Change with it…
‘My name is Vemari,’ I whispered, sobbing. ‘Please… what are you? Who are you?’
I looked up slowly, straining every nerve to meet its gaze.
I stared at its grotesque, snarling face, the squashed muzzle flecked with blood, the dripping purple tongue that hung between a rack of yellow fangs. Its eyes, as red as raging fire, burned in its head. A crest of stiff, blood-encrusted hair ran down its spine. The wings, I saw, were the stretched membranes between its clawed fingers. It was more like a bat than a living man. It growled and slavered, and I knew it was only by some enormous effort of will that it was not tearing the bars apart and ripping out my throat right now.
‘Please,’ I said, as if mercy were something it would ever give me. ‘Please… If you are not the Bird of Change, then… what is your name?’
The scream that erupted from it threw me back to the floor of the cell, my hands over my ears. I sobbed with terror. The wings flapped and buffeted me with a gust of stinking air, and through my fingers I saw the eyes blazing with rage and hatred, and… something else. Confusion, maybe; a maddened, chaotic uncertainty. It scrabbled at the ground with its clawed feet and shook the bars, and then, with a last clatter of its wings, it was gone. I heard its howls echoing down the length of the tunnel, roaring and shrieking through the shadows, and a great darkness of dread and fear came over me.
Hours later, or perhaps even days, as I lay slumped on the rough stone floor in lethargy and sorrow, I heard the shuffling sound again. It came nearer, and the stink of death came with it. I prepared myself. I prayed to Fate itself to look after everyone I loved. I prayed that my Change would come on me quickly, and without pain.
The creature darkened the bars and looked down on me. The wings were furled behind its back, and its face was slack and strangely disturbed. The jaw champed and the tongue flicked, and then, in a voice hacked up from the very depths of its body, it said:
‘Krugar… My name is Krugar…’
It said no more to me that day. It merely turned and retraced its steps, hunched and creeping, wings furled, its dead, red-rimmed eyes lost in thought. Krugar, it had said, its foul necrotic lips twisting over the blades of its teeth as they formed the word. It was like the question had awoken something in it, something unexpected, and the name had risen up unbidden. And how long had it been, I wondered, since it had thought of that name?
The next day, it returned to stand in front of the bars and silently look at me, and it flung down the mangled corpse of a jackrabbit onto the floor of the cell. I fell to the cold meat, tearing it with my teeth despite the disgust I felt. I was ravenous. It had been days since I had last eaten.
‘Thank you… Krugar,’ I said when I had finished, my chin slick with blood. ‘You are not the Bird of Change, are you? And yet we are under the Crystal Tree…’
It frowned, the bat-like face contracting, the teeth bared. When it spoke, its voice was like something dredged from a swamp, thick and cloying, stinking of rot.
‘You… the village,’ it said. ‘I remember… feeding…’
It snarled again suddenly, and brought the knuckle of its wing up to its face. Pain or sorrow flashed across it, but after a moment it passed, and its face again became almost bewildered and unsure.
‘What else do you remember?’ I said. I crouched in the cell, staring up at it, trying to mask my fear with questions.
It closed its burning red eyes. It bared its teeth.
‘Krugar…’ it hissed. ‘And… the Change, my blood, the…’
‘The Change?’ I whispered. ‘What about it? Krugar, have you changed too? Were you once… once other than as I see you now?’
I stood and clutched the bars of the cage, and I could feel the stinking blast of its breath as it roared again. Its eyes danced with confusion. Blood dribbled from its lips and the crest of hair on its spine stiffened.
‘I was not… like this!’ it screamed. ‘I was… I was…’
‘What? What were you? What are you now?’
Again, the creature shrieked and spread its wings, and scurried off down the tunnel, howling with distress. I collapsed onto the floor, exhausted, my stomach cramping from the rabbit meat.
The Change… Krugar had not always been what he was now. In his way, he had been visited by the Bird of Change too… and it appalled him.
Days passed, and Krugar returned often to my cage. Sometimes he brought me food, a flask of water. He would stand there and stare at me as I ate and drank, as if trying to see in me some reflection of what had happened to him. Slowly, bits and pieces of his story emerged from the fog of his mind, shards of clarity that he held up to the light of his understanding, turning them this way and that as he tried to remember.
One warm evening, he crouched in the tunnel, his eyes level with mine as I sat on the floor and his leather wings tucked behind his back. The dark green light filtered through the roots of the Crystal Tree and fell across him like a shroud.
‘I was… I was a great lord,’ he said, ‘in a land far from here. There was… a castle, I remember. A great hall, with high battlements and deep dungeons… I had servants, soldiers, an army at my command. There was blood, so much blood…’
‘But you were not… like this?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Krugar said. His gaze was distant. ‘I was not…’
Sometimes he became enraged, as if the touch of the memories burned him like fire. He would shriek and batter the bars of the cell, and the tunnels would echo with his screams. The crystal roots of the Tree, breaking through the rock above us like shards of bone, would tremble with the force of his anger, and I was so filled with dread and horror that I felt it would choke me. He would be gone for hours or days, and when he returned there would be a butcher’s stink about him, a coppery tang of blood and flesh. He would settle himself down by the door of the cell and pick up the thread of his story, ravelling it in with more certainty and confidence, as if he had spent that absent time brooding on the past and knitting it all back together in his mind.
‘Blood, yes,’ he said, one dark, cold night. His words came easier to him now. He didn’t have to retch them up from deep inside any more. ‘My bloodline was noble and pure, and I was the head of a great house. Yes,’ he laughed. ‘I remember that. My scions always scheming beneath me… Such is the fate of those who command, while others follow.’
My heart swelled to hear the word.
‘Fate is ever fickle,’ I said. I tried to smile, to encourage him.
‘Fate has proved itself more cruel than fickle,’ he sneered.
‘Fate can be a wonderful thing as well, Krugar,’ I said.
His eyes flicked to mine, boiling in the darkness.
‘You will call me… lord,’ he hissed.
‘Yes, my lord,’ I said. ‘Lord Krugar.’
His mouth cracked open into a vicious, elongated grin. The yellow fangs gleamed with slaver. I backed away into the cell.
‘Lord Krugar…’ he said again, and I knew he was not talking to me, but to the shade of his memory. ‘The greatest of my name, the greatest of my house… A vampire lord of dread power, but…’
He shook his head.
‘Long ages I reigned over my kingdom. Centuries unnumbered, slaking my thirst wherever I pleased, conquering with my armies, enslaving all those who dared cross me…’
There was nothing of the animal in his eyes any longer. The wretched feral creature I had seen dragging Mylin’s body through the tunnel had receded in him. His form was still one of bestial savagery, but there was a dark intelligence in him now, a sense of arrogance and hauteur that was grotesque in such a frame.
‘I was not always as you see me, no,’ he said quietly. ‘When the long centuries and the dull millennia lay their weight against us, even the most exalted of my kind can fall prey to this… this degeneracy. Our appetites grow too strong. Our wills fracture, and we cannot keep the beast from enveloping us any longer. But you, my child…’
He stared at me, like he had never seen me before. He glanced around the ridged ceiling of the tunnel, the crystal lattice of the Tree’s roots as they broke through the stone, the bone bars of my cage.
‘I have been submerged,’ he whispered. ‘My mind and my will have drowned inside this thing, but now… now, I think I can reach the surface once more, the air, the light of the moon…’
He reached up towards the ceiling of the tunnel with his wing, the long fingers of his hand stretching out, the membrane stretching with them. In the flickering darkness underground, stained by those green and purple shadows, he looked more monstrous than he ever had before.
His squashed, bat-like face was still. The pointed ears twitched. He crept away again, silently, pondering all of this. I settled down on the floor of my cell, amongst the bones of the desultory meals he had thrown me.
He had been changing, I thought. Turning from the great lord in his high castle, to a beast that burrowed in the dirt and took the offerings of a frightened village. He had been on the very cusp of Change, and I had somehow stopped him, brought him back to what he had once been.
Mylin had changed. Yazeyla had changed. Everyone I had known was no longer as they once were. Except me.
When he opened the door of my cell, I thought my time was over. I had been stored in this larder for who knew how many days and weeks. At last, his appetite had returned, and I prepared myself for death. I was frightened beyond measure, but I was exultant too. My body and my soul would be transformed utterly, and pain would only be the barrier through which I would have to break, to meet at last with the Architect of Fate. If the Bird of Change had ever dwelled in the Crystal Tree, it was gone now, but I would become one with the Tree all the same. My screams would thread through its branches and through the jewels of its leaves. My blood would filter into the soil and bring richness to all that grew there. It would slake the thirst of Krugar and bring him one step closer to the new form he had fought against for so long.
