Best Laid Plans (46 page)

A multitude of others leered at him, their eyes burning through his disguise, baring his true form; revealing him for the skeletal aberration he’d become.

‘No,’ Cadman moaned. The black dread of annihilation he’d fled all his life boiled up from within. ‘No!’

‘NOT GOOD ENOUGH!’ All the heads yelled in unison.

Cadman screamed, his bony fingers fastening around the fragments of the statue, wringing force from the petrified remains of Eingana.

Fangs of lightning ripped through the night sky, flaring with amber radiance. The air withdrew with a hissing rush, and the scene atop the
tower was suspended for an instant. Cadman stood outside of himself, looking down. The Dweller ceased its writhing and stood like a petrified insult to life, a mass of heads and tentacles, a glistening sculpture of malice. Rhiannon was held in midflight, halfway to the stairs, and Callixus—
oh, Callixus
—was frozen as his black blade arced towards the demon. Not only had the air withdrawn, but it seemed to Cadman that time had retreated like the waters before a tsunami. Pressure built—he fancied he could see shapes cordoning them, a ring of horrors from some unimaginable nightmare. The hiss was still present, but not in a true audible sense. No sound, just the sense that his ears needed to pop, that something was about to blow.

Cadman plunged back into his skeleton. Callixus’ sword resumed its swing and the Dweller lashed out with flaccid tentacles. With the screech of a thousand banshees, the air rushed back, slamming into the demon and tearing it apart.

Cadman staggered and fell, but Callixus caught him.

‘The woman—’
Callixus said.

‘Let her go.’ Cadman lay back in the wraith’s ghostly embrace. He was tired. So tired. He thought about the undead outside. They would kill her. If he wasn’t so tired he’d call them off. She didn’t deserve this.

The pieces of amber in his hand flared and started to throb. Cadman struggled to sit up, opened his fingers and stared in horror at the segments pulsing like a beacon. ‘Oh my God, oh my God—’

A fissure appeared in the sky, a jagged split of cobalt. Callixus turned to look up at it, at the same time helping Cadman to stand.

‘What is happening?’

‘Oh my God,’ Cadman said. ‘It’s him. It’s him!’

The fissure widened, permitting them the vision of a man upon a throne. The image zoomed closer and Cadman simply watched with paralysing dread. It wasn’t a throne, he realized: it was a metallic chair bedizened with crystals and lights, an array of leads dangling overhead, terminating in the scalp of the seated figure. The man himself was dressed in grey, his hair slick and unnatural, his face bloodless. Worst of all were the eyes. They were cold, sharp as scalpels. They examined Cadman as if he were nothing more than an ant, a specimen.

The eyes flared with argent, searching out the hidden spaces of Cadman’s mind. He tried to pull away, but was held entranced. Suddenly, it seemed as if he were tugged towards the chair, but at the same time a spectral image of the man upon the throne shot towards him, hit him with the impact of a fist and sent him tumbling in on himself.

Cadman saw the chair and its figure withdraw, the fissure closing behind them, but the man’s image—his doppelgänger—was within him. It was inside Cadman’s body. No, he realized. It was inside his mind.

The man reared up like a giant, immense and powerful beyond all reckoning. Cadman squealed and ran, but where could he go? How could he run? He was in his own head.

‘Do you know who I am?’ the intruder asked in a voice devoid of expression.

‘Yes!’ Cadman wailed. ‘Yes!’

Cadman whimpered and crawled away—not in any physical sense, there was nothing physical here—but he backed into the shadows of his mind, covered himself with emptiness as if it were the soil of the grave.

‘Say it!’ the intruder’s voice boomed through every cell and synapse, forcing Cadman to bury himself deeper and deeper in forgetfulness. ‘Say it!’

Cadman screamed as he plummeted into an abyss within himself. ‘Sektis Gandaw!’ he cried, falling, falling, gyring and spinning.

He tried to slow himself with his arms, but when he extended them there was nothing there—only wisps of blackness as wraith-like as Callixus.

Something sucked at him, tugged him to the side. He yelped as he hurtled forwards, hit a hard surface, and bounced. No—not bounced: dispersed.

Cadman saw movement as if through glass. Wait—it was through glass. He was inside something made of glass. A tube. He was in a tube. Giant fingers closed around the tube as he fought to orientate himself. God, what was he? He lacked substance. He was roiling about in a test tube like trapped gas.

A gigantic eye peered in at him.

Let me out!

There was no sound.

The tube rocked and images passed by in blurry succession. Finally, with a jolt, it settled. It seemed to be standing upright. There were other tubes beside it, each with their own gaseous contents swirling about.

Where am I?
Cadman screamed silently.

Where am I?

***

Sektis Gandaw looked through Cadman’s eyes and sought to synchronize the experience with his own body back inside the Perfect Peak. Bi-location took some getting used to.
Just a slight calibration
…His fingers on Aethir tapped out a sequence. The interior of the mountain shimmered and superimposed itself over the top of Cadman’s vision. Mephesch was kneeling beside the projector seat checking connections.

‘You have him?’

The words must have come out of both bodies simultaneously as the ghostly figure that had been atop the tower with Cadman inclined its head towards him.

‘In a test tube with the others,’ Mephesch said. ‘No doubt to linger there forever, unless you come up with some use for him.’

Unlikely,
Sektis Gandaw thought. Not with the Unweaving so close now. Nevertheless, Cadman’s memories might still prove useful in the meantime. He’d learnt long ago, from his conflict with Blightey’s unnatural minions, that there were no organic memories to pilfer. Cadman had rotted away to little more than bone and cartilage. But the power that animated him, the strength that allowed him to endure, was eminently accessible, if you had the technology to process it.

‘Sever the link with my own body, but not with Cadman’s test tube,’ he told Mephesch. ‘Being in two places at one time is disorienting.’

There was a faint click in his skull—Cadman’s skull—and then the images from Aethir vanished.

Sektis Gandaw gazed at the amber fragments in his hand: an eye and a fang. The body of the serpent and the other fang were inside the Perfect Peak, ready for the work of Unweaving. Just one more eye to locate. One more piece and Eingana would be whole.

The wraith insinuated its way into his vision.
‘Doctor?’

With an effort, Sektis Gandaw closed his eyes and drew upon the memories of Cadman’s essence, stowed away beneath the Perfect Peak. Callixus. Yes, that was it. Cadman had bound the dead knight to his service and then released him. Sektis Gandaw could soon remedy that.

Cadman’s control over his creations was strong, almost innate. With the merest thought he shackled Callixus to his own will.

The wraith rippled, his eyes flaring with surprise or rage.
‘But you promised—’

‘Be silent,’ Sektis Gandaw said, striding to the edge of the parapet and gripping it with skeletal fingers.

Dark shapes lumbered around the edge of the forest, every one of them connected to him by the merest thread of sentience.
Excellent. A readymade army.

He drew upon more of Cadman’s memories—a winged creature named Ikrys, flashes of stories, faces, hints, clues, speculations. Cadman must have been an imbecile, he thought as the words of an epic poem played across his mind, the story of the Dreamer Huntsman coming face to face with his so-called gods.

‘Hybrids!’ Sektis Gandaw almost felt anger. He moved his jaw from side to side, grinding his teeth. Speaking with this body could take some getting used to. He saw an image of a tabletop mountain in a sprawling red desert. ‘So that’s where you fled to.’ The Dreamers had a name for it, that much he deduced from the poem…the Homestead. The place Huntsman had brought about the Reckoning.

He held up Cadman’s pieces of the statue and concentrated. Nothing. Not the slightest link with the missing fifth piece. Either it was shielded, or Eingana was still finding ways to hide from him. Maybe it was Nous, he scoffed. After all, it had been with the Templum fleet.

Another of Cadman’s memories insinuated its way into his consciousness. The bard had told Cadman the tale of Otto Blightey stealing the artefact from Aeterna. It had been concealed in the Ipsissimal Monas. What if that was still the case? What if the supreme ruler of the Templum was here in Sahul, a sort of last guardian of the statue?

With the power of the two pieces in his hands, and two more on Aethir, he knew he should have no trouble confronting the Templum force, especially with the backing of Cadman’s undead army. But he was used to certainties, and the fact that he couldn’t detect the last piece was evidence he’d been wrong, either about the statue or those who now held it. He hadn’t had time to look at all the variables. What if the Ipsissimus had some means of resisting him? He must have come all this way for a reason. Maybe Huntsman had a trick up his sleeve. Perhaps he’d underes timated them both. Sektis Gandaw didn’t know the terrain, didn’t know what forces could be arrayed against him. He was the one who should be calling the shots, not them. Maybe it was a mistake inhabiting Cadman’s body. He could have waited on Aethir; played his usual patient game.
Too late to worry about that now. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Where had that come from? Perhaps if he stirred things up at the Homestead, Huntsman would be forced into a desperate act to protect his gods. He might even persuade the ruler of the Templum to come to their aid. At least that way Sektis Gandaw could choose the site of any battle and plan accordingly.

‘Where is Ikrys?’ he asked.

‘Below,’
Callixus answered like a dutiful slave.

‘Fetch him,’ Sektis Gandaw said. ‘Tell him I’m going to need a bigger army.’

Much bigger,
he thought. It never paid to take chances.

S
hader’s anger trailed him like a cloak as he strode down the Domus Tyalae towards the templum. He wasn’t even sure it was anger, and if it was, he wasn’t clear who to direct it at. He kept telling himself he was furious with Lallia, but he knew that wasn’t fair. Whatever she was, however she chose to lead her life, he knew he was just using her as a scapegoat. Was it Gaston? His death? What he’d done to Rhiannon? Was he angry with Rhiannon for listening to Huntsman and wrecking whatever chance of happiness they’d had?

He stepped over a black-clad body lying in a pool of its own blood just inside the narthex. He resisted an urge to kick it and carried on down the aisle towards the sacristy. He stopped at the door, wincing and clenching his fists. For a moment he felt the shame of what had happened with Lallia and was overcome with self-loathing. Suddenly he had perspective on his life, saw it for the sham it really was. His fingers brushed the hilt of the longsword Dave had mysteriously returned to him. He was definitely made from the same mould as his father, a man of violence, bred to be a killer. It didn’t matter how hard he tried to hide that truth beneath a veneer of Nousian piety, the path of peace was beyond him. The monks at Pardes had known that all along, so why had they played along with the farce? Had they taken some sort of sick pleasure in watching him fail? Maybe Hagalle was right about Nousians. Maybe it was just some global cult of control…

Shader shook his head to put the thought from his mind. Nous wasn’t to blame for his weakness. The Templum hadn’t made him what he was. If anyone had shaped Shader, it was Aristodeus. But even the philosopher needed to be absolved as far as Shader was concerned. If the confessional had taught him one thing it was that you left all your excuses, your blame of others, outside.

He pushed open the door and passed through to the corridor that was flanked by the priests’ chambers. Frater Hugues was on his hands and knees scrubbing at the blood on the tiles. He seemed only to be diluting it, spreading stains of pink across the floor.

‘Where—?’ Shader started but stopped himself. His voice sounded too harsh.