Bone, Fog, Ash & Star (23 page)

Eliza nodded, barely taking this in. She couldn’t think of the whole impossible task ahead of her. One thing at a time: the Realm of the Faeries.

“He was known long ago by other names, such as the Wandering Enchanter, the Great Bard, and the Wayfaring Rhapsodist,” said Foss, getting the look he often got when embarking on a long tale. “He travelled both worlds, it was said, and made songs of all the things he saw. Before Nia emptied the books, the Mancer Library held all the known transcriptions of his songs. Indeed, much of our collected knowledge of the worlds has been gleaned from them, for he sang about topography, the creatures he encountered, the shape of flowers and their properties, relating not only great tales of adventure but also the tiniest details of life in the worlds.”

“I’ve heard of the Wayfaring Rhapsodist,” said Eliza. “I didnay realize it was the same person. He must be very old. Is he immortal?”

Foss frowned. “Of course not. The only true Immortals are the Four Great Powers. But some others, like your friend Charlie before this latest accident, are gifted with great longevity. In his six hundredth year, the Wayfaring Rhapsodist went south and crossed the Dreaming Wasteland to see the Hanging Gardens of the Sparkling Deluder. Many have made the journey and only a few have returned. All but the Blind Enchanter came back raving mad, bearing little semblance to their former selves, sometimes having aged far more years than they were gone, others having been gone a century without aging a day. He was not mad but he was changed. He had walked the world making songs of all he saw, but when he returned from that place, he could no longer sing or see. He was blind, his voice blighted, his wanderlust gone. Now he goes nowhere, sees nothing, and though he welcomes travellers and their tales, he does not tell his own. What happened to him is a great mystery. It will not be easy to get him to tell you anything about the Sparkling Deluder.”

“But you’ll be safe there?” asked Eliza.

Foss smiled. “The Mancers will be pursuing you, not me,” he said. “And south is the safest direction from here. We will go through the yellow mountains.”

“The Cra live in the yellow mountains.”

“We are both far too old to be palatable to the Cra. They will leave us alone.”

Eliza felt a wave of sorrow. She wondered if she would ever see him again. As soon as she had thought it, she buried the thought. It was too awful to contemplate.

“I have to go,” she said. “Be safe, Foss.”

He held her hand tightly and smiled up at her. “May the Ancients guide your steps,” he said.

She nodded and left him there.

~~~

Charlie and Nell were silent for a time, watching the ball, until Charlie could not hold his tongue any longer. Very quietly, he whispered: “I’m sorry, Nell.”

She had begun to sway to the music and caught herself when he spoke.

“What for?” she asked.

“Getting you into this. If it were nay for me, you’d be safely studying for your test in Di Shang.”

“Lah, that’s what friends are for,” she said, putting her hand in her pocket to stroke her tiny folder. “And we’re still friends, nay?”

“Of course we are. I wish things hadnay been so strange between us this year. I didnay want that. I just felt…”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said swiftly.

Charlie gave her an unhappy look.

“Look,” she hissed, a little impatient, “I know
why
you were avoiding me.”

“You do?”

“Of course. It was so obvious.”

“Lah, that’s why…I mean, I thought that if you wanted to see me, you’d let me know. I sort of thought it was up to you, aye. I didnay want to
force
myself on you.”

“That’s ridiculous. But you were angry, I spec. And rightly so.”

“I wasnay
angry
. Why would I be angry?”

Nell looked down, could not make herself meet his non-Charlie eyes. “You blamed me. I blame myself, too.”

“For what?” Charlie was utterly confused now.

“Ander’s death, of course!” she burst out, her eyes filling up with tears. The tears washed away the changing Faery colours and revealed her violet irises. Charlie was confused by her words and the sudden appearance of her own eyes at the same time.

“That’s nay…” he began, but Mala had turned to glare at them again. Then her eyes flitted to something behind them and widened in horror. Reflexively, Charlie and Nell followed her gaze.

It happened in the blink of an eye. Five black-clothed members of the Faery Guard swept down upon them, chaining their wrists in silver. Mala was pulled roughly from the group and chained as well. The music rose and the Faeries at the ball kept spinning by the scene, oblivious. They were bundled out the archway and through another, all three of them chained together within a morrapus before the reality had really sunk in. When it did, Nell began to shake uncontrollably.

Chapter

~14~

Jalo stayed on the mountainside,
preferring not to enter the tower, and Eliza could hardly blame him. The Hall of the Ancients was a ruin, the statues torn from their grottoes and broken across the floor, stones crumbling from the walls. The place reverberated with horror. And there, broken spear in one hand as if poised to throw it, stood Nia, the Xia Sorceress. The Urkleis jerked in Eliza’s chest as if it might break loose. At that moment, she almost wished it would. To be free of it.

Nia was unchanged. Her lovely face was white and tense, her red-gold hair coming loose about her shoulders. Her eyes seemed to look right into Eliza’s, and the young Sorceress felt,
knew
, that Nia could see her. Frozen within the loop of her own Magic she could neither move nor speak. But she could see, she could think, she could feel. The white tiger, emaciated, slunk from behind his mistress and surveyed Eliza with coal-black eyes. His red tongue hung from his mouth. He looked as if he would like to pounce on her and eat her but did not have the strength. The ravens swirled and screamed. Eliza felt her heart would break with pity, or perhaps that was only the pull of the Urkleis.

“I need something,” she said, her voice shaking badly. She had to be quick or the awful rage and longing filling the hall would undo her, split her open and draw the Urkleis from her. She ran to Nia and reached for the vial of brilliant liquid hanging from her neck by a slender chain: Malferio’s blood. This had rendered Nia immune to Illusion and would do the same, Eliza hoped, for her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, unclasping it. She did not want to touch Nia but she could not help it. Her hands brushed the Sorceress’s hair, the cold skin of her neck. The moment Eliza touched her, the Urkleis leaped in her chest and Nia’s free hand swung down and closed around her wrist. Involuntarily, Eliza looked up into the eyes of the Sorceress.

They were bright green-gold and they bored into Eliza. Her grip tightened. They stood still like this for a moment, the Urkleis tearing against the flesh that held it. The tiger roared and roared, the world was full of its roaring. Eliza’s chest burned, her fear crescendoed, and she felt something within her breaking thread by thread. She was lost in Nia’s devouring eyes. Her ravens multiplied above, shrieking,
now now now
. She burst free, something snapping. It felt like her body exploding. It felt like threads of fire running through her. She burst away from Nia, clutching the vial of Faery blood in her beak. She shot out of the half-destroyed tower and down the mountain on black wings. She might have continued flying forever, for she had no sense of direction or purpose, only a mad beating desire to escape, but a net of light fell over her and pulled her out of the air. On hands and knees in the snow, she was Eliza again. She turned on her assailant, dagger flashing, cutting free of the net. Ravens poured out of the sky. She forced her enemy back into the snow, driving her dagger into him, again and again. She was hurled off, landed in a snowdrift screaming, the sky swarming with inky ravens. Jalo stood over her, sword drawn. Blood like liquid light trickled from the wounds in his chest, stomach, and shoulder. His face was white with rage.

“How dare you!” he roared. Eliza was sobbing; she could not stop. There was something in her mouth. She spat it out into her palm: the necklace, the vial of blood. The tiger’s roar from the Hall of the Ancients carried down the mountainside, echoing. Jalo looked up at the tower and then back at Eliza. She was covered in snow, weeping and shaking.

“What happened?” he asked her, calmer, but she could not speak, even to apologize. She shook her head, fastening the vial around her neck with trembling fingers. She did not look up at the tower on the peak, where Nia was still desperately trying to pull Eliza back to her. She staggered towards the waiting myrkestra and Jalo helped her onto its back, wincing with his wounds. The only cure for this was distance. She had what she had come for.

~~~

They paused to rest by a river the following day. Eliza sat at the bank murmuring until a Tian Xia invisible eel leaped into her hands. She had everything else she needed in a little gourd the Faithful had given her. She cut the eel open with her dagger and let its blood drain into the gourd.

“You will be searched before you are allowed to see the King,” said Jalo from behind her. He had been a little less cool since they had left the Hall of the Ancients, though his wounds still pained him. Perhaps he had been reminded that in the past she had saved him, too, from Nia. “They will not allow you to carry a potion.”

“I willnay carry it,” said Eliza. Later, when Jalo was not watching her, a raven appeared at her side. She fed it as much of the potion as it could drink. It faded from sight but she felt it on her shoulder, sharp talons digging into her coat as the myrkestra flew over the witches’ forest and the Sea of Tian Xia.

~~~

After the long journey over the Sea and the fiery volcanic land on the other side of it, Jalo’s lovely, mournful song brought them into the Realm of the Faeries. In spite of the vial she wore, Eliza found herself unable to say quite how it happened – only that the fire and black stone became a general, diffuse darkness and warmth, and when she found herself no longer on the myrkestra but standing in a grove of trees from whose branches white flames danced and flared in place of leaves, it seemed that she had been standing there for some time. The path under her feet glittered with diamonds and at the end of it stood a golden gate. Beyond the gate lay a brightness that made her eyes water.

When she had used Faery Blood to escape Nia’s prison in the Arctic years ago, she had seen the Illusion like a semi-transparent veil over the real world of ice and snow. But the Realm of the Faeries was a land of Illusion. With the enchanted vial of Malferio’s blood around her neck, hidden beneath her clothes, she
felt
rather than saw how ephemeral the world was, how insubstantial, always shifting slightly beneath her feet. It made her feel a bit seasick and she longed for the stillness and solidity of the world she knew. Shadows flickered here and there, on the path ahead and among the trees. She fixed her eyes on a large shadow just to her left. It became two gorgeously attired Faeries, looking at her in some surprise between the trees, the faint outline of an elegant room around them. She blinked and they were gone. When she looked up, birds span overhead and then vanished. It was dizzying, this sense of a hundred scenes laid over each other, each one haunting the background of every other fleeting reality.

A troupe of the Faery Guard came to greet them. They came and went many times, as Eliza negotiated her visit. The King wanted to see the Gehemmis before he would grant Eliza an audience. Eliza refused. She would show it to him herself, she said. They were unsettled to find that she wore Nia’s vial and demanded she give it to them. She would not and they did not try to take it by force. They wanted her to remove the dragon claw dagger before entering the King’s presence. Again she refused and the Faery Guard eyed Jalo, who was obviously injured. She began to despair of being allowed to see the King, and yet she was not willing to be unarmed and unprotected in this place.

“He has agreed,” said Jalo wearily, at last.

“Good.” She let out a puff of breath.

“I will see to the other matter,” he continued, and she nodded. They had agreed on a meeting place on the western shore, and he was to take Nell and Charlie there.

He left her there, walking away between two trees and becoming shadow. She followed the Faery Guard towards the gate and the bright light beyond it, feeling very much alone among beings who did not value her life in the least. The invisible raven on her shoulder shifted slightly from one foot to the other.

~~~

The Faery Guard led her into and through the light. She felt a shimmer of pain as she stepped through but shook it off. Jewel-encrusted archways stood in rows on a vast stretch of marble, and within each archway was a light as brilliant as the one they had just stepped through. When she looked harder, though, looked at the faint, flickering shadows, she saw the archways were half ruined, ivy twined about them, young saplings bursting up through the rutted, broken stone floor. The Faeries led her quickly through one of the archways, and now she found herself at the bottom of a stairway soaring up into the sky.