Chapter 22
After the coldly visceral wash of fear, followed close upon by the experience of thinking I was faced with immediate imprisonment, or death (I’m not sure which of the two I would have preferred), I threw myself back into bed with the girl. I can’t honestly describe how I felt: a strange and over-rich blend of relief (of several kinds), satiation and… furious resentment, and salvation.
But there was to be no permanent salvation possible for anyone while Murah remained in the picture. She had no place in any of my plans. How could she? The one-handed demon who stripped away my crime had taken with her my peace of mind. I know that my fantasies have often been things of aggression or a show of power – I was never going to waste my time in doing anything other than dominating my partner: no mere romantic, I – but when I woke to that red nightmare, my mind went white and blank. Had I really hurt the girl? It seemed unlikely but not impossible, and into that half-world of not impossible, the nightmare figure called Murah had come to reign.
She was offering herself to me as an ally. We had, she said, an enemy in common in whose destruction we could share. But I didn’t want an ally. I didn’t want a shared anything, most of all a war, least of all a person. And war there would most definitely be. It felt as if I had plummeted out of one kind of imprisonment merely to enter another. This second prison might look smart enough and useful, but bars are bars, no matter the metal from which they’re struck.
Murah. I knew who Murah was, or what she had been when she shared the living world with the rest of us mere mortals. Murah had come from the Red Temple. But who had taken her hand? Who was to be our mutual enemy? Ashe came to mind, immediately, followed on sharply – why? this was unexpected – by the image of Alexis. Alexis. Captain of the Mercian army and my sister’s lover. Gods,… I’d even wondered if I might meet my equal in power and lust there.
So much for wondering.
But ex-prisoners are very specific types. If they’ve survived incarceration without going under, there is still hope for them. Murah had power unlike any I’d heard of or met, but she was still in pursuit of revenge, which made her a more human member of the demon world, if such a thing exists. With some vestige of humanity I might be able to work on her. Or die trying: I had had enough of coming second all the time.
*****
Ruth’s madness was slowly eating her from the inside out. Laure encountered her former friend and servant in the clear light of early morning. Lammor’s queen had been unable to sleep; even beneath the softest of sheets her skin seemed to burn. She had walked down to the tomb of other Lammoran queens, seeking peace, solitude and possible answers, and into that calm state, Ruth had wandered.
Even Ashe, who had suffered more at Ruth’s hands than anyone else in Lascar, might have pitied her. Ruth, who had been – in despite of her many faults – so intelligent, so clear-thinking and almost primly turned out, with roots not far from Laure’s own, was found asleep on the top of the white marble steps that led up to the Lascan hall of the dead. Her clothes were ragged and stained and her hair, of which she had once been vain – it had sprawled across her shoulders, red as fire – was thick with dirt.
Laure observed Ruth with candour and something like envy. This, then, was what became of the mad in Lascan society. Sleeping with the dead and looking pretty much like one of them. Laure thought back to the days in which she’d ordered Ruth about the city, searching for Ashe or on some other errand that she’d invented for the sheer pleasure in watching someone rush to do her bidding. How are the mighty fallen, she thought, not enjoying the irony.
Laure sat down on the top step, from which she could look out over Ruth’s sleeping body to the east, and the rising sun. She was no fan of autumn; it had always seemed like a compromise to her. Better the ferocity of the summer sun, and the awesome power of the winter. Spring was alright, she supposed. Spring could stay.
There had been a time when at least a half-dozen servants would have seen and noted Laure’s path, arranging themselves at regular and useful intervals, to serve her should she require it. Now, although things were improving, no-one seemed to have noticed Laure’s movements.
Suddenly almost desperate for recognition of some kind, human contact of some kind, Laure put out a hand and stroked Ruth’s matted hair. Until the sun had risen high enough to wake the mad-woman, Laure sat with Ruth, gently stroking her hair.
*****
The two of them walked steadily. There might pass between them a silence of two or three hours, or they might talk or a minute or two. They tended thus to share much more silence than conversation. Ashe enjoyed the quiet hours: she was free to think about the good things: Betany, the child, Caer Arianrhod, the future, but she allowed herself an equal investment in a consideration of the bad things outstanding. The Red Temple. The Beast. Murah. Ashe just knew that Murah wasn’t out of her life for good. That would be too damn easy.
Alexis was puzzled about the Guardian aspect of Ashe’s life. She kept framing questions about the powers and ambitions of the group, but could not find a handle she felt sufficiently confident about enough to begin with. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Ashe. There was nothing royal about Ashe, nothing remarkable, nothing… awesome. That was the thing. To be a Guardian, that sounded like something vast. And here was Ashe looking just like anyone else. Of course, Alexis reminded herself, she does have a tendency to come back to life with alarming rapidity. Then she’d smile wryly at herself, relax, and take too deep a breath that made her grunt with pain. What was almost worse than the pain itself was the half-smile she thought she could see on Ashe’s face at such moments.
“The Red Temple,…” Ashe threw out the words as they descended over the soft turf of another Downland hill. Alexis glanced at her. “I have to finish the Red Temple. The Temple and the Beast.” She sighed. “I just don’t know where to… start.”
Alexis nodded. She’d been spooked by the Temple from the minute she saw the rise of its walls. The very air in the courtyard she’d covered so very quickly and silently had been still with a sense of underlying… wrongness. The idea of the Beast, a mile or a dozen miles beneath the Temple itself… that was a really bad image. She said, “Would pulling the whole thing down be a good start? A possible start?”
“I don’t know if its bricks and mortar answer to the limitations of the real world,” said Ashe. Then she grinned at the pomposity of the sentence. “Sorry,” she said, “the place just plain scared me. Weird creatures in the rooms beneath ground and monsters above.” For a moment she was back in the Room of Temptation. She said, “What one thing would make you forsake everything for the sake of possessing it? Or being it,” she added. “Something you wanted so badly that you’d give anything for it?”
Alexis walked on in silence a little time before saying, “People as well as material things?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then I’m not sure.” She looked down and said, “She was… she was so much to me, and yet I can’t wish her back. It’s not the way I work,” she added, as if Ashe had questioned her philosophy. “I mean… Calypso and I were good together for a long time, and I would have done almost anything for her. But I was always the subordinate: I fought in Calypso’s army. And she… when we first got together I kept stopping and asking if the whole thing was real – she and I, I mean – and then I gradually got to feel comfortable about it.”
Ashe said, almost uneasily, “And then there was Laure?”
Alexis said, “Yes. I knew that Calypso thought a merger was a good idea. For my own part, I was never sure. I assumed that she’d keep me on even after she’d been allianced to Laure, and when I was hurt,” she paused and didn’t look at Ashe, “when I was hurt she hardly left my side. I think she would have bled all of Lammor for me, even if it wouldn’t save me. You know?”
“No,” said Ashe. “But I can imagine it. It seemed to me that there are two types of bond. No,” she hesitated. “Three. The kind of bond that stands between Laure and Ruth, where there’s allegiance on one side and rank on the other. There’s the kind that ordinary people make, and then…” She broke off. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. I loved Laure and I never asked myself if she loved me back. At the beginning I was too proud of being her lover. Later on I started feeling used.” She sighed. “I’ve only ever loved two women. Only ever wanted two women.”
Alexis smiled a little bitterly. “That’s two more than many people have.”
“Do you think so? I really lost my heart to Laure. I was a kid and she was a princess, I know that, but there was something magical about those early days. At least, I think there was. Maybe it’s that same old thing: everything looks better in retrospect.”
“You really love Betany, don’t you. No, don’t say anything: I know you do. And a part of me is glad for you, even while another part of me says: you took my lover from me. You nearly took me from me.”
“If we’re going to fight again,” said Ashe, “you should know two things. Firstly, I need a sword. Secondly, the moment you take a swing at me, I’m going to throw everything I have at your ribs. Take a moment out and think about it.”
“I’m not going to fight you any more. With you, sure. Against you, no. That anger’s gone. Maybe it’s just that in Betany I’ve seen something better than I’ve met with before. I suppose I’m a bit envious of you.”
Neither of them said anything for another hour. Ashe was pacing herself, preparing not so much for an attack from Alexis (she didn’t honestly anticipate that) as for the first sight of Caer Arianrhod. She was missing Betany very badly. Now that they were within physical reach of the place and the woman Ashe kept thinking that something would arrive to stop them. Not Murah this time, not Berrach, even. But what?
It struck her that she was nervous because she wanted seeing Betany to be every bit as wonderful as she had imagined, and she wasn’t wholly sure that Betany’s feeling for her would have out-lasted the long wait, the loneliness and the fact that she, Ashe, had chosen to go out into the wide blue yonder rather than staying where she was loved. There had been too many good things in too short a time, and Ashe hadn’t been used to good things for very long.
*****
One of my strengths, if such a positive term can be applied, is that I can make something out of nothing. At least, something out of very little. The years I spent concealed, unnamed, unneeded did not roll by easily or quickly. In some ways my life was very simple: I had very little, I could only ask for very little and I had no name. When they came to pluck me from my solitary prison, the second gift they bestowed upon me – the first involved unlocking the door to my cell – was my name. Berrach. I inherited that name from a famous, if distant, ancestor. It had been Berrach who first set up camp on these grounds, and who eventually founded and named a city. Berrach of Mercia. It’s a good inheritance, and in some ways it’s the only one I have. And in my years of concealment, I read. I read everything. I read scrolls so dull I felt that I was being buried in them. I read literature and geography, the history of the known world, and magic. I read everything that I could lay my hands upon, and, some small trick in the system be thanked for it, no-one ever thought to deny me words.
I hadn’t heard of Murah, but I knew of the Red Temple. The Temple had been the subject of one of my past intellectual drives. Earlier in the year I had found a single reference to it that instructed my imagination and my curiosity. The drive took months to complete: that first reference was by no means in-depth or informative. No matter where I looked, I could find no single and overt description of the Red Temple, though it was mentioned, time and time again. Its siting was suggested in one history, ignored in half a dozen, and then decked out a little in the realms of literature. One might be lead to imagine that the Red Temple posed much less of a threat if one thought it nothing more than a startling fable, with no foundation in truth. It was the usual thing: be good, be quiet, be attentive, or you’ll be sent to the Red Temple. But, at the same time that literature made it into a tale for badly-behaved children, history was marking it down as a place of learning, almost fabulous in terms of the education it could offer. And so the Temple grew: the bones of nightmare were so deeply and skilfully hidden that, but for the cross-referencing, one might not see at all.
Because my life was so dull that death by sheer inertia often seemed the most likely end to it – some days I thought I’d simply die of inaction – I had to make the most of what I had. There were times when I might pick up a new scroll, late in the day, and put it aside if only to give me a reason for rising at all. the next day. I was a desperate case, but I knew my demons, and how to keep them at bay. Magic, folklore, fiction and suggestion were the four quarters of my internal map.
Picking out the salient details to find the Red Temple had been a demanding and far-distant pastime, but I had been satisfied with the end results; I had made my own notes at the time. Now I would have to find those writings again, and learn from them..
Last night, after Murah had gone, after the sense of impending nightmare had gone, too, I lay back on my bed, my new companion asleep beside me – still alive and well, too – I cast back to see what I could remember about the Red Temple. Today I have done nothing but pursue those memories.
Last night and today I had to achieve a certain frame of mind before I could access those carefully-inscribed notes. Because… Because I do not see the world as others see it, there are times when patterns make themselves apparent to me. This requires a kind of relaxation, a mood close to that of meditation. If I can keep an idea in my head but not pursue it, not question it, and simply let my mind open, new truths become apparent. The Red Temple is as old as Mercia, as old as any country or city, or race. The Beast that resides beneath the Temple is no ordinary animal, but of course, that’s probably already clear.
The Temple is a melting pot of energies and resources. One area in which I can’t find clarification is what happens within the Temple. I know that it is meant to be a place of education and edification, but more than one text has suggested that for twenty who enter the Temple, only one or two depart. That can’t be right, surely? Is that simply another nightmare image that the nervous and hesitant have applied to the myth to sharpen its blades, or is there a truth there that I simply can’t see?
There are happy-ending stories about scattering the teachers from the Temple over the known world, with an in-built agreement that former acolytes must not meet or discuss what they saw and what they learned. This sounds neat enough, but it’s far too unlikely to be accurate description. Why should a dozen women from one village, who would have grown up together and possibly grown close together, agree never to see one another again? Why it is that no two such teachers have ever been known to exist? They go in, but they don’t all come out again.
If that is true… I think that that might be true. It fits with the twenty going in and two going out. If I am right then the Temple is a funnel. And if that is the case, and if not everyone can fit through the funnel, where do they go?
That is self-evident: they must remain within the Temple. But in what form do they remain there?
Murah is a spirit and a demon. That much is clear enough. But there are spaces in that intelligence, too. She displayed to me either the truth (and I so hope that wasn’t the case), or a visual hallucination real enough to hang me. She is clearly very powerful, that I can’t help but admit, but there are flaws in her make-up, or why did she not design for herself a magical hand to replace the (apparently) human one that had been there? This means that she is powerful but not unlimitedly so. And she is angry, which makes her closer to human. And lastly, of course, she needs me, or she would not have turned up as and when she did.
The woman from the Red Temple is not infallible.
I enjoy this process, that of threading on clues one after another, like beads onto a necklace. But I took no pleasure at all in the time it took for the process to become a natural part of me. When I was younger and still confused about why it was that I alone lived apart from the world, I was often too angry to think at all. The skills that I came to hone had their roots in frustration, loneliness and, I think, despair. And now I am going to need them.
Ashe is rumoured to be one of the Guardians. I have read about that race. They are immortal spirits in human form. Ashe, I think, is unusual: most of the other Guardians understand their ancestry almost from birth. It must be a strange sensation, finding oneself sharing a world with friends and then out-living them all. If Ashe cut off Murah’s hand (why could it not have been her head, and saved me all this trouble?), then Murah will need help if she sees going against Ashe as taking up arms against the Guardians. I am smart, but I’m not infallible. And Murah is skilled but not immune from pain or damage. Where is the connection? I’ve read enough, I’ve seen enough: I know that these events, disparate as they may seem, will probably connect at some future point. But where? And how? And besides, what if it’s Alexis at the root of all this?
It seems unfair that after my first night of unbridled passion – nightmares and visions of blood exempted – I should be sitting at my desk thinking rational thoughts and making notes in ink on parchment. But there are two points in favour of this mode of behaviour. One: I need to find some kind of leverage over Murah.
Two? The girl is coming back this evening. Why should the Red Temple be my only means of education?
*****
They had reached the great plain that stretched as far as Caer Arianrhod to the north-east and south as far as the Green Sea. The plain was dotted about with dwarf trees: stunted oaks, crooked birches and a thousand misshapen thorn trees, and the sky above it all was grey and strange. Ashe felt anxious and wary, looking about her all the time for something that would give her anxiety a name. Alexis shared the sense of uneasiness, and as a result, the two of them had covered almost ten miles before any kind of conversation crept in between them. Ashe’s pace was brisk enough and settled enough to keep Alexis on her toes, so to speak, and as the clouds above them grew darker, they were both looking about for some kind of shelter.
Ashe put out a hand to test for rain, and her palm was almost immediately drenched. The sky above them opened and the rain flooded down. In a matter of minutes they were incapable of seeing the ground around them, let alone keeping to the faint path that had seemed the likeliest route across the plain.
Ashe tugged her hood over her head and the water beat down against the seasoned leather in a sound that was not unlike the fastest and least steady heartbeat she had ever heard. She kept her gaze fixed on the ground immediately before her feet and was so hemmed in by the element that she jumped when Alexis put a firm hand on her arm. “We need to keep together,” Alexis shouted through the rain.
As they stumbled on toward where they both recollected some semblance of cover on a slight incline, it struck Ashe that the partnership was becoming less likely by the moment. Being in physical contact with Alexis wasn’t just strange, it was insane. But at that moment in time, with lightning sparking across the sky, and thunder bellowing at intervals, the slight comfort that it gave wasn’t something Ashe would have easily relinquished.
In another half hour they were still wedged in beneath the branches of the blackthorn. Ashe stuck her hand out to wash off the blood: the thorns had been as sharp as teeth. Alexis hadn’t done any better: in the returning light, Ashe could pick out the jagged line that had been scratched across her cheek.
At length, the rain stopped. They both rolled out from beneath the blackthorn. Ashe said, “Not exactly what I’d consider ideal accommodation.”
Alexis laughed and shook herself, dog-like. She raked back her hair with her fingers. Then she turned to the plain again and put up a hand to her mouth. Ashe, staring, followed Alexis’s gaze. “Oh, fuck,” she whispered.
The last of the lightning had done more than simply strike the ground; it had split the earth. The plain had been wrenched back on both sides, to reveal a gaping chasm that went on – Ashe stood looking down – seemingly for ever. The ground that she could see in the new division was ruddy and jagged, and the split went on for as far as the eye could see. She measured the distance so far as she could judge it and scowled horribly: the split was at least a quarter-mile broad.
“How the fuck…” Ashe let the words trail off. “How the fuck are we to cross that?”
“I… have… no idea,” said Alexis, staring, too. The change to their view had unnerved her. She said, stupidly, “Fly? How could this have happened?”
“Lightning,” said Ashe, faintly. At the same time that the word escaped her lips, something escaped the divide. They both heard the sound of fingers scrabbling desperately for a grip, and in another moment both saw those fingers appear at the break in the ground. The fingers were crooked and misshapen and each possessed a set of claws.
Alexis reached, right-handed, for her sword, her left hand going automatically for her short-bladed knife, as she assessed the approaching enemy. The chasm had seemed to go on for ever: just how many of these… creatures might there be down there? She glanced – momentarily – toward Ashe, whose behaviour had at first mirrored her own: Ashe had both hands fixed on the pommel of her sword and her shoulders were set. Alexis had a single moment of something like arousal: there was something incalculably good in facing an enemy in the company of someone you know is at least as good at fighting as you are. Possibly better.
Ashe weighed her sword: she left her fighting knives in their twin sheathes, suspended from her belt. The first creature reached the lip of the chasm proper and began to approach them. It was certainly not human, and it took a second for Ashe to recognise one of the demons she’d seen back in the hall of the Red Temple.
Ashe blinked. The creature was still there. Now it was joined by two more of its fellows. Ashe looked at the shining eyes and the very sharp teeth. She tightened her grip on the sword and began to raise it. Then she stopped dead.
Alexis couldn’t believe it. Ashe had lowered her sword, had even changed her facial expression: wrath and anticipation had been replaced by something entirely new. Alexis said, “Uh, Ashe? Imminent danger. Monsters. What the fuck is the matter with you?”
Ashe said, the words meaning little or nothing to Alexis, “Last time… Last time I only saw them in the mirror.” She straightened up. She grinned.
“Whatever the fuck the joke is,” said Alexis, “it’s not reaching me in any way. Be ready to fight, Ashe, or we’re going to die here.”
Ashe said, impossibly, “Trust me.”
“What?” The creatures were getting closer. Ashe put out a hand and smiled at Alexis.
“Trust me,” she said.
“Ashe, there are fucking monsters closing in on us and you want to fuck?”
Ashe laughed out loud. “Nope. I just want you to trust me.” She sheathed her sword and put out a hand to Alexis. She raised an eyebrow. “Come on. Just the once.”
Alexis never knew afterwards why she obeyed the request. There was no logic behind it, obviously, but she reached out, all the same, and took Ashe’s hand. The touch of Ashe’s skin shocked her: a fever of some sort was clearly burning its way through her system, and her eyes were far too bright.
“Let’s go,” said Ashe. And she took off, hauling Alexis along with her. She aimed for the chasm at its widest and least attractive aspect, speeding up as they reached the edge of the lightning-blacked grass.
Alexis shut her eyes at the last moment. She didn’t stop running, and she didn’t stop breathing – though it was a near thing – and she clutched on to Ashe as if the whole world depended on that continued contact. Perhaps it did: Ashe was only guessing, at best, and her heart skipped at least a half-dozen beats as they strode out into the chasm.
*****
She’s nice. It seems such an odd admission to make. Last night, and the night before and soon again, she was waiting for me in my bed, alive and well, laughing and talking; breathing. I thought that last gone for good.
Murah has not contacted me again, and I don’t believe that she is waiting here in the shadows of my study. I don’t think that simple voyeurism is her chosen occupation: besides, she made her big impression on me and she must know that I won’t be forgetting that in a hurry. But I haven’t wasted my time: last night I finally did reach that place of memory and notation. That was an exhausting process, and it tired me in more ways than the simply physical, and I need to rest.
Well, some of me needs to rest. There are better things to do in bed than sleep. And… this last surprises me more than I could have anticipated: it is good not to sleep alone.
To Be Continued
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