Kingdoms of the Cursed, page 21
He shrieked in Errol’s face and brandished a big wooden club. It looked sort of like a baseball bat planed flat with garfish teeth set along the thin edges.
“Look,” Errol said. “I’m just trying to get out of here.”
The man swung the club. Sheer reflex made Errol raise his arm, and the weapon hit him, hard, sending a numbing shocked through his arm and shoulder and knocking him sideways into the water.
When he came up, the guy was starting another swing. Not knowing what else to do, Errol drew his sword.
His arm seemed to jump up on its own, catch the descending club at an oblique angle, then cut forward, pulling him with it. The warrior dodged back, but only barely. He came back at Errol, the club singing through the air as it came down on him.
The sword stopped that, too, and this time the return cut hit the man on the arm. Blood spurted from a nasty-looking cut, and the guy fell back, dropping his club and grabbing at his wound.
Errol sloshed out of the water and started running again, but now they were everywhere, yipping and screaming. Arrows hissed and snapped all around him; one dug into the armor deep enough to hurt.
He was finally starting to tire; his lungs were burning and his legs were getting wobbly, and running wasn’t getting him anywhere. He didn’t want to fight these guys, but it looked like he didn’t have a choice.
He stopped, put his back to a tree, and yelled.
“Come on!” he said. “Let’s do it!”
For a moment, they did. He counted maybe fifteen of them starting to fan out in a circle around him. He eyed the nearest; if he could knock a couple down, maybe break through their circle . . .
They stopped coming forward. The warrior he’d cut arrived and approached a little closer, but then he, too stopped, looking past Errol.
Their eyes turned up. And up, as if watching something rise into the sky.
Every single one of them turned and ran.
“What?” Errol started. He looked behind him and saw a bunch of trees falling his way.
“Holy crap!” he yelped and took off after his erstwhile enemies.
The ground beneath his feet shivered once, twice, again. The din of shattering cypress was ridiculously loud. Looking back, he couldn’t make out what it was, only that it was big, far taller than the trees. And coming fast.
His breath, on the other hand, whistled in his chest, and his whole body ached. The armor made him stronger and faster, but it didn’t make him a superman. He noticed almost absently that he was oozing red where the sharp-edged club had hit him, but he didn’t have time to consider the consequences of that before something came down, through the tops of the trees, breaking limbs above his head before slamming him into the ground and holding him there, pushing the breath out of him. It almost felt like a gigantic hand, but almost as soon as he had that thought, it was gone, the pressure released, and he was lying in an Errol-shaped depression in the mud, water slowly filling in around him.
He hurt. Everywhere. But everything appeared to be working. He pushed himself up with his arms, then clambered to his feet.
Above, something had cleared the canopy so he could see the sky, and behind him was a long swath cut through the forest, a lot like the path of a tornado. But whatever huge thing had been after him was no longer visible.
Then he heard a faint groan and tracked his gaze down into the undergrowth of cane and ferns.
A young man lay there, about his own age, naked as the day he was born. He looked up at Errol with a blank expression on his broad, brown face.
Errol blinked. He knew the fellow.
“Billy?” he said.
FOUR
THE PATH OF BIRDS
Aster dreamed of dark forests and caves beneath the earth, of serpents and centipedes and maggots. She dreamed of her own bones, becoming clean and polished.
She dreamed that despair was the best she could hope for as she sank ever deeper into the world.
When she was about ten, she had become fascinated with dirt daubers, the wasps that build their nests from mud. She’d broken open some of their tubular nests and found them filled with spiders. The spiders appeared dead, but they didn’t rot. On her next trip to the library she’d checked out a book on insects and learned that the spiders weren’t deceased, but paralyzed. Eventually they would slowly be eaten by the pupae of the dirt daubers.
That was how she felt, when things were clearest; as if she was slowly being eaten—would feel every bite taken from her—and be unable to do a thing about it.
The very worst dreams were of him. He came to her in her coffin and lifted the lid, and kissed her on the lips, touched her body, wept, laughed, spoke softly to her the way one would a lover. She knew he was the worm, the offspring of the dirt dauber, slowly devouring her.
Soon, all she wanted was for the dreams to end, for absolute oblivion. She wondered if this was what Errol felt the night he tried to kill himself. She had always seen her path clearly; her father had saved her, loved her, sacrificed for her, and now it was her turn to do that in turn for him.
Yet he was fine without her. Evil, terrible—but fine. And Errol, whom she also picked to save, no longer needed her help. Veronica was on her own path.
No one needed her. No one but Vilken, and what he desired was so awful it was better not to be needed by anyone at all. She knew that one day he would come again for her—not just for a kiss or to fondle her—but for everything.
It was better not to be here when that happened. It was better that she somehow found a way to die first.
And she found it, in the magic, in the elumiris that still dwelt within her. Once before she had invoked the magic of dream. It was possible that she could do so again, that she could make another wish. Not to escape or kill Vilken or anything so big and showy. But she might be able to do something very small, like burst a blood vessel in her own brain. Then, at least, she could have the consolation of knowing Vilken would never have her the way he wanted.
Gradually, she gathered what elumiris she could, preparing to focus it through a very simple wish—the wish to die. Her fears began to fall away, the mortal reflex to fight the inevitable to dull.
Then, unexpectedly, she dreamed of birds.
Thousands of them. Millions. They filled the sky—crows and cardinals, mockingbirds and parakeets, wood ducks, humming birds with ruby throats and viridian wings, swallows, woodpeckers in scarlet headdress, grackles, blue jays, coots, peacocks fully plumed, buzzards, canaries, graceful stilt-limbed grey herons, macaws, geese, red-tailed hawks, clouds of blackbirds. They swirled and dove, flashed their wings, danced their dances, warbled, piped, cooed, and shrieked their songs. All were lifting up, rising to a form an immense flight, a flowing river of birds, a path across the heavens.
Watching them, she almost felt as if she had wings herself, as if she strained enough she might take flight and join that migration to that passage that went beyond the sky.
She heard the flap of wings, very near and in her dream she pushed against the lid of her glass coffin, and painfully, with difficulty, opened it.
The coffin lay on green grass at the crest of a hill, surrounded by apple and pear trees. To one side, the hill rolled down gently to a stream before rising again to lift up a modest mansion built of white shell. On the other, the land fell away to reveal an azure sea.
And she knew this place. She remembered lying in the sun, watching grasshoppers amongst the blades of grass, giants in their own jungle. She remembered the slightly tough, bitter skins of the apples and the nectar that lay beneath, the buttery flesh of the pears. She remembered her father, his red hair caught in the wind, looking out to sea.
And a woman, with rose-gold hair and eyes full of light . . .
She remembered it all.
Above, the last of the birds had vanished into the limitless sky.
All but one, the one that stood a few feet away, regarding her with eyes of coal and amber, her white wings tucked against her sides, her long, slender neck turned elegantly.
“Hello,” Aster said to the swan. “Do I know you?”
The swan didn’t answer, but she came closer, hopped up on the edge of the casket, and laid her long neck and head against Aster’s breast. For a few heartbeats, she knew the most profound peace she had ever known. She stroked the white bird’s head; her feathers were like silk.
“I don’t know if this is real,” Aster said. “But I need help. I thought I knew what I wanted, but now—can you help me?”
The bird said nothing but withdrew her head and once again stared into Aster’s eyes. She raised her wings so the sun shone through them, turning them coral. Aster could see the fine bones within.
The swan clapped her wings against the air and rose up into the winds. Aster watched until the bird was a white speck on the horizon.
After the swan was gone, the sky darkened; the sun faded to a pale lemon color. Shadows grew, and from those shadows dark things began to creep. Aster held on to her memory of the birds, of the swan, as nightmare closed in on her once more.
Delia had always wondered what it would be like to sail on a tall ship, and now she knew—sort of. Kostye took her down to the docks and onto a ship that might have been at home in the Spanish Armada, with its many masts, sails, and pennants. After a bit of fussing and making ready, the ship sailed out of the harbor with the wind. The sky was full of gulls; pelicans skimmed inches above the waves, and she saw a pair if dolphins, grey backs arcing out of the water. When they were farther out, flying fish came skimming and skipping along the swells. By then she felt mildly seasick, and while she figured it was worth it, she hoped it would end soon.
It did, but not due to her adaptable constitution—rather, because the ship left the water and its waves behind, climbing into the sky.
She had ridden in a hot air balloon before, so that part was weirdly more familiar than the ocean-bound portion of their journey.
They passed through clouds for quite a long time, until ahead of them a massive thunderhead appeared, anvil shaped like most such storms, but more gigantic than any she had ever seen in the world of her birth. As the ship’s angle changed she saw there was not one, but two storms, twins, with the narrowest of blue gaps between them. On either side of that sliver of light, the clouds were almost as dark as night except when lightning flared within them, fluorescing the depths of the storms orange and blue-white. It reminded her of the footage she’d seen of an air barrage of London in World War II, with artillery shells filling the sky with terrifying, deadly light.
But there was no thunder, no sound at all except the creaking of the rigging and the voices of the sailors giving each other instruction.
“What is that?” she asked. “Are we really sailing into that?”
“The Cloud Straits,” Kostye told her. “It is the only approach to Vilken’s demesne. The only easy one, at least.”
“If that’s the easy way in,” Delia said, “I can do without seeing the hard way.”
In the end it wasn’t as terrifying as it looked. The gap between the storm clouds was bigger than it appeared, and the air there calm. Beyond the straits, the sun was rising over a grey-green sea, and a mountainous archipelago—one large island and at least a dozen more laid out in a curving strand. She felt dislocated; when last she had seen the ocean, it had been very, very far below, and until this moment she had never had any sense that the ship was descending; it had always seemed to be tilted upward, climbing. The waters felt far closer than they ought, as if the world was put together like a wedding cake and they had just sailed from one tier to another. Had the clouds hidden an immense waterfall, thousands of feet high? Or was it something weirder, more arcane? More Jack-and-the-Beanstalk?
The ship put into port near a quaint, mostly-abandoned waterfront town on a small island. As the sun in Kostye’s realm was stuck at sunset, here it appeared to be permanently sunrise, the eastern ocean horizon pleasantly layered in rose, canary, and aquamarine.
From the port they went by carriage across a causeway to small, walled city with streets of cobblestone. The buildings were ornate, with domes, spires, and square towers springing asymmetrically from them and lavish, curvilinear decorations between stories and around their many windows that reminded her of vegetation, though they were more abstract than that. She thought it had a European—perhaps German—character, although she had never been to Europe.
In the center of town—in the midst of a great square—stood a castle that reminded her of the illustrations of the Tower of Babel in her children’s Bible or a telescope placed with the big end on the ground.
The place might have once been cheerful, but it had a rundown feeling to it. The colors on the facades of the buildings were dirty and dull, but the more than that, almost everything was spattered in bird droppings. This was hardly a surprise, because she had never seen so many birds in one place. In one long glance, she saw everything from parrots and macaws to pigeons and ducks—perching, nesting, hopping, waddling, and excreting on every available surface. Clearly, no one was bothering to clean any of it up.
Vilken himself did not show when they arrived, but a handful of his demon-boys escorted them to their rooms in the lower reaches of the castle. Compared to Kostye’s rooms, they were heavy, and dark, with only a single narrow window overlooking rolling green hills and a distant, rocky strand of coast.
“I have something for you,” Kostye said, when they were alone.
He dug in to his bags and produced a garment of some sort, or at least the flimsiest excuse for one. It was so sheer that the light from the window passed through it almost unaltered.
“Oh,” she said.
She’d worn a negligee on her honeymoon; she’d thought it was pretty and sexy, but Scott had hardly noticed. She’d decided that was a good sign, in a way—he liked her as she was, without any fancy packaging. A few months later, after returning from a trip to New Orleans, he had proudly presented her with “a little something” he’d picked up there. She’d put it on for him, but it didn’t make her feel pretty or sexy. It was uncomfortable in every way, but the worst part about it was the way Scott treated her while she was wearing it—as if she was someone else, someone who would routinely wear something like that. She tried to play along, but when he wanted her to wear it again, he had seen her reluctance.
“But you like lingerie!” he’s said, angrily. “You wore some on our wedding night.”
She tried to explain the difference, but it only made him angrier.
Now here was another, very different man presenting her with “a little something.”
She took it from him. The fabric felt almost like water in her fingers. She was relieved to see that for all of its near-transparency, it was a floor-length robe with a hood.
“It’s pretty,” she said.
“Try it on.”
She hesitated. “Should I . . . ?”
“Yes,” he said. “Disrobe first.
She reached for the fastenings of her dress.
“Could you turn around?” she asked.
“I have seen you unclothed,” he reminded her.
“Yes,” she replied. “But you either undressed me, or—I just find it weird, that’s all, sort of like stripping.”
He shrugged and turned around. She quickly got herself out of her dress and pulled on the robe.
It wasn’t exactly normal. The hood had no opening for her face; it just pulled on, like a hold-up man’s stocking mask.
Well, that was a little kinky. She wondered how it would feel to be kissed through it.
“Okay,” she said.
He turned, but instead of appreciating the result, he looked past her, toward the back of the room. She turned to see what he was looking at, but there was nothing there but a wall.
“What is it?” she asked.
He smiled, slightly. “Don’t you understand?” he asked.
Confused, she looked down to see if she had it on wrong and saw—nothing.
“I’m invisible,” she said.
“Indeed,” he replied.
A negligee that revealed nothing at all? Her mind had been completely on the wrong track.
“Why am I wearing this?” she asked.
“So that while I’m occupied with Vilken, you can search for Aster.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. I thought—never mind. Should I get started right away?”
“After,” he replied. He found her shoulders by feel. She learned what it was like to be kissed through an invisible negligee.
She woke to voices nearby, and after getting her bearings, realized it was Kostye and Vilken talking. They were discussing going someplace; Vilken was saying later would be better, Kostye was insisting now was the best time. Quietly, Delia rolled out of bed.
She realized she had fallen asleep still wearing her “veil”—that was what Kostye called it. The window was dark; when she glanced outside she saw stars, so she’d been wrong about the sun. Could it have been a whole day? Had she slept that long?
After adjusting the veil to make certain she was completely covered, she padded toward the door.
The two men were in a sitting room adjoining the bedroom. Kostye was fully clothed in russet pants ticked into high leather boots, off-white linen shirt, and a long coat that didn’t hide the sword he had belted on.
Vilken was bowing as she came out. He didn’t look pleased.
“As you wish, sire. We shall journey to see them now.”
“That is what I wish,” Kostye said. He rose.
“And the Lady Delia?”
“She will not be coming,” Kostye said. “These matters are between you and me, and no one else.”
“Understood,” Vilken said.
With that they both walked out of the room.
Delia froze for a moment, uncertain what to do. Kostye had said he would distract Vilken, and perhaps that was what he was doing. Or maybe he really didn’t want her to see whatever he was going to see.
She didn’t have long to make her decision, nor did she take long to make it, but followed them through the door and down the stairs, out of the castle and down a road that crossed the island to a landing and a rather large barge with a crew of six young men in Vilken’s black livery. Unlike most of his retainers, these looked fully human, with no obvious aberrations. The two men went aboard, and she slipped along behind them. The young men began cranking a capstan, and a large cable pulled up from the water. With a few more turns, they were in motion.
