A Step into Darkscape (The Legacy Novels Book 2) Page 17

  Hero looked to the opposing page and the drawing there. It was of a crude tower, only slightly resembling that which they’d travelled through.

  “This is a new section,” he said, “starting much later, by the sound of it.”

  “Yes,” came a voice. Blades were drawn, and Raven clawed his empty scabbard as a small man emerged from the shadows. “It continues much later, but please,” he gestured, smiling a little, “go on. You read it so well, after all, and time is of the essence I think.”

  His eyes darted to the window.

  “This is Britanus,” Raven whispered.

  Hero nodded and the man bowed in return. “Please,” he said again, “do continue.”

  Hero studied the man. He was small and shrew-like, his eyes flashing in the flicker of the candle. Was he friend or foe? How could they know?

  He looked back to the page.

  “The Temple Tower,” he said, clearing his throat. A goblet had appeared by his hand, though he’d not noticed it arrive, yet looking around he found they all had one. He grasped it and sipped. Fresh, clean water. Uncomplicated. He continued. “The Well has been sealed within a tower of worship, and work has begun to build a palace for Romany over the water—these are all things physical.

  “But I have more to say on other matters.

  “I am a witness to these events and yet I alone seem to have retained my faculties, or so it would appear. That is not to say I have not been affected by the goddess, Romany—for I have, in many ways. I’ve been gifted with sustainability, though it is hard to truly explain how or why or when…especially when. I now eat little and less often, and I hardly need to drink at all, though I still need both to survive. I can run and swim, leap and walk with much more vigour and longevity than ever before. I see further, hear better, sleep well and feel more alive since my awakening. Yet she has taken over the village and enslaved us, and I shall continue to keep a record of this. And something further troubles me still. We visit the Temple Tower every day when the moon rises high over the sea, and we settle there within. The cover is removed from the sacred Well and we pray and worship within its light. This has been the same since Romany appeared to us, and I have faithfully attended as each of us have; yet the closer I am to the sacred Well the more I feel that I’m not myself. Memories come to me that are not mine and I witness events I know nothing of. I cannot make sense of these images. I see a girl, a girl with dark hair and eyes that flash curious colours. I see her with a sword, and I see a woodland bleak—and I am angry. I see white, horned horses and hooded men. I see blue light between black trees.

  “When it happens I want to scream and run, yet I feel I’d never outrun the alien imagery, and at times I visit the temple hoping to gleam even more. I shall write down what I see, and keep it with my other writings, hidden and safe, a chronicle of the strange and unusual.”

  Hero stopped and looked around him.

  “Princess Ami?” Raven puzzled. “How? If this was—”

  “How indeed?” Britanus rocked back and forth on his heels. “Perhaps a little more? I’m sure you all enjoy long and exciting, epic tales?”

  “This Romany, this goddess—”

  “Oh, she is no goddess,” he said, shaking his head, “but please, go on. It gets better.”

  Hero took his goblet and looked to the window where the storm was letting up, the sky brightening a little, a blue hint through grey.

  He knew they needed to hear more, but there was something curious about the small man that made him wary.

  A bird screamed somewhere far away, and Hero continued to read.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Wake up girl, for heaven’s sake.”

  Even in the darkness there was a smell of sweet pine, the scent of a recent rainfall, the feel of cold, wet grass beneath her cheek. Also in the darkness was her voice, the old cracked voice she’d heard before, disembodied and floating, demanding. There were other things in the darkness though, things that hid behind shadows and refused to reveal themselves, shades of black on black that were separate and yet one and the same. Ami’s head spun at the thought, her mind building a maze of black walls dividing darkness from darkness, and from behind each a voice whispered beneath a breeze. Hero, one called; Raven, said the other; yet neither voice were the same as the one that called to her now, the one that seemed so close. She turned a corner of the maze, finding only the same darkness there and there and—

  “Open your eyes, girl. Have you forgotten how to see? Golly.”

  Light fluttered like a moth against a flame, and the darkness fled, the maze undone, blurry shapes becoming solid as colours fazed and faded with each blink. There, up ahead and coming into focus, was the wooden shack, bleached wood creaking, moaning; and even closer were the trees, filtering daylight and swaying in a gentle dream; and also, closer still, were two seated figures…

  Her sword lay beside her and Ami scooped it into her grasp quickly.

  “Oh, stop movin’ about,” the same voice crowed. “You’ve been crawlin’ around in your sleep an gone an hurt you-self.”

  Ami tried to stand and settled on a swaying stoop instead, her blade pointed down at an old woman, seated in her rocker.

  “Call me Grammy, that’s what you should call me. Even though we ain’t kin.” Struggling up from her seat, the old woman slid her cane into the mud and anchored herself steady, her blind eyes staring. “I’m blind as a bat, yet I see you just fine, girl. You blaze hotta than a sun. Hell, I saw you walkin’ down that road t’other night as if you were on fire, blazing like you do! I can’t see cack all else, but I see you, alright. Lucky you got away before you were given over to him.”

  “Him?” Ami motioned to the only other body present, the blind old man, Jonus, tied up and leant against a tree.

  “No. We’ll get to him,” Grammy said, working her way slowly toward her. Ami moved to help, but the woman waved her away. “You look after your own stability,” she murmured. “You been rocking back and forth the whole time. ‘Haps you should be in the chair?”

  Ami grasped a low hanging branch, her back to the shack. She felt its power, its call. The blade in her hand vibrated to its tune.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Grammy gave a sharp laugh. “You don’t know? You don’t know nothin’ then, girl.” She hit her cane between two trees and stepped up to Ami. “You don’t know nothin’…yet.”

  The old woman was surprisingly strong and sure as she took her hand and lifted it, releasing a bolt of white power that passed between them. Her cracked calluses dug into her flesh and set her skin a tingling. The hairs on her arms stood on end as purple, green and white sparks fell to the ground like a November treat. All aches and pains from the fall disappeared, grazes on her bare knees rapidly healing; and then the light finally faded, and the woman dropped her hand.

  “There you are,” Grammy said, stepping back. “I can see the breaks in your colour have changed, the wounds healin’ nicely.” Ami looked down, the torn flesh now only red smudges across her skin. She brushed at them. “Right as the rain, for sure.”

  All around them the trees began to chatter as a hollow breeze shifted through the leaves.

  A new day had taken hold that had washed away an unsettled night, and all was clean and fresh; though just beneath the polished surface, Ami felt the thrum of power behind her, the town, the palace, the woman so close, just beyond the veneer.

  She turned back to the shack and fumbled for the totem she knew she no longer carried, the chess piece she’d lost somewhere.

  “What you searchin’ for?”

  “I need to go back,” she said. “My friends, they’re back there, they’re—”

  “They’re safe, for now.”

  Ami stopped rummaging. “How do you know?”

  “Laws, I swear, if you don’ stop askin’ silly questions I’m gonna take this cane and rap it across your skull, girl.” She chuckled, though her old, lined face looked less than amused. Her white h
air was tied tight behind her head, an unsympathetic school mistress.

  Ami looked away from her and closed her eyes, feeling out through the darkness for the light that filled a clearing and fell upon a ruin. Quick stepping across the green, she headed for the columns and arches that stood tall upon their white stone and marble base. Short blades bent underfoot as she sprung up, stopping before the triple arch.

  Then she saw it, so suddenly that she was amazed she’d ever missed it.

  Her eyes opened to the wood, the track, the swaying shack, and to the ruins of her mind and Romany’s memory—a meadow of green, of columns and arches. They’d gathered in their thousands to watch their own ending. Like a jigsaw, the pieces began to fall into place. So obvious…

  “That’s it, girl, I see you’re gettin’ it now. Your colours are a-changin’.”

  “What colours?” Ami asked, her own voice vague and far away as she watched again the fabric of reality crack, the memories of another.

  “In the dark I see you clearly. You’re surrounded, girl, all the time, by so many colours. Your aura, some would call it. I think the word colours is jus’ fine.”

  Ami heard the words but continued to watch the beings crowd across the meadow, not quite people but beings wrapped in logic and form. They shimmered an almost luminous silver, and then were ripped and formless. “Some became as horses, some became as trees…”

  “And some as men, and some as women.” Grammy paced a circle, her cane leaving boreholes like woodworm in the earth. “She hoped in that singular moment of panic to escape and run to the woods. Several parts of her made it. Thousands of parts did not.” The timbre of her voice changed. “Certainly she merged with a woman, though she didn’t know it for the longest time. Ages passed, ages past. Of course, by the time she stopped her wanderin’, found a place and a people? The loneliness had killed off who she may have once become, and instead she became what she became.”

  Ami fondled her sword and caressed the smooth metal, tracing the symbol of infinity.

  “The tunnels, the portals, all put in place by fragmented Sentries tryin’ to pull the world together again. That’s what the portals are.” Grammy spat the last word and turned to the shack. “They presented in different ways, sure, the different layers settlin’ all different from one’nother. In that layer it was a hole in the ground. In another it was hollowed out trees where Sentries merged. In this layer? One of those places is here, a wooden shack, overgrown and broken. It’s broken for a reason. The whole place is alive with the power. You feelin’ it, girl?”

  Ami looked through the doors of the shack, the broken staircase barely visible at the end.

  Jonus stirred.

  “The portal in that other place, where she is, is not stable, and is no more than a frayed rope. Romany, she pulled on it, tried to pull herself in—only it threw her out! She thought herself rejected, cast out from her lands she still believed to be out there. Course, now she knows different. We told her straight.”

  We. Ami let it slide.

  “She built the temple around it,” Ami said.

  “Yes, to secure it, to enslave a people. Still she tried to enter it, time and time again, even when she figured she was the only one—course, she was wrong about that, too.”

  “You are a Sentry, aren’t you?”

  Grammy smiled, but shook her head.

  “No, girl. I used to be, once. I used to be part of one, the one that you’ve just been havin’ dealin’s with.” Her blind, white eyes found her, her eyebrows lifting. “I was part of the one you call Romany. One of many and but a slice, a sliver of a Sentry.” There was no resemblance between them, yet how could she doubt it? Ami had watched the splitting of Romany over and over again in the given memory, and if the land had split, and the people had split, too, then there weren’t just infinite layers of the world, but infinite layers of all living things, people, animal…Sentries.

  “Impossible,” Jonus slurred.

  The old woman held up her cane, the tip a glowing ember of white fire. “Don’t be so sure, beardy.” The ember flashed and flourished, a star exploding. Jonus squirmed against his bonds.

  “You can see him, too?” Ami looked between them as the cane lowered and she leant down on it heavily.

  “No, but the power within me can. I trust in it, for I have lived my entire, long existence blind. I see only through the power.

  “Romany wanted to return to Celestial, and we told her that wasn’t possible. She tried to pull the layers together herself, at great cost. She wished to recreate the lost realm of her youth.” Grammy walked slowly back to her strangely placed rocker, and climbed down into it, sighing as she did. “But what she found instead was something much deeper and darker. A new way, a new weapon.”

  “The sword? But I have it here.”

  “Was she concerned with the sword?” Grammy chuckled, rocking gently. “No, girl, she was on the wrong track there. Powerful, yes, but only a second-hand relic of a Sentry’s true power. No, the weapon she found is blacker than anything in these tame layers. Of course, the greatest weapon she’s been gifted with has been yourself.”

  Ami blinked. “But she hasn’t got me.”

  “You’ll have to go back for your friends, and then she’ll have you,” Grammy said. “And though you won’t give yourself willingly, and mustn’t, she’ll find you and use you. You see, you’re the child of the power itself. You were bred by the power, a human-Sentry. With Romany a Sentry-human, you are her equal. Your powers combined would accomplish everything she’s been trying to do alone for the last few thousand or so years.”

  A squirrel ran a path between two trees, jumping a gnarled root before leaping to a trunk. It scrambled up, pausing only to re-grip the large acorn within its mouth, and then disappeared into the branches. Ami watched it, listening to all the sounds around her. She could neither hear nor see anything of Darkscape or Romany here, though it was only a dream-span away. But she couldn’t mistake the pull from the strange shack. It was a magnet for her, and it was hungry for her.

  “What does she want?” Ami asked.

  Grammy rocked harder, tapping her cane against the mud underfoot. “To break the barriers between the layers; to smash the walls that divide unlimited worlds. She wishes to recreate Celestial, and she means to knock down all the walls to do it.”

  The cracks in the earth Raven had described; the quakes beneath. The layers were splitting.

  “But, how am I meant to stop her? By leaving my friends there?” She turned in a circle, pointing to the shack. “Should I just leave them there and never return? Why don’t you stop her? Why aren’t you her match?”

  “She will achieve her goal in time, even without you.” Grammy continued to rock, nodding. “And I am only a guardian of a portal. I am old and used, and a thinner slice, if you like. I ain’t her equal.” She stopped her rocker and climbed back up with revived vigour. “You have to go, Princess Ami of Legacy. You must go. You must lead her back to that which remains, the only thing that remains, of our dead world. Only there can she be defeated. She mustn’t be allowed to break the layers.”

  “What is the weapon? The dark one you mentioned? Who is him?” Ami thought of Adam.

  A laugh broke out behind her as Jonus choked and spluttered. “The darkness is an old, old creature. She will raise it, as it rose before. She will raise it, for the goddess is powerful.” His laugh grated on Ami, and she turned without thinking, her sword extended and armed with sparks of jaded fire.

  “Not so powerful,” she hissed under her breath, “for she needed you.”

  A lick and a blast, and Jonus fell slack against the trunk.

  *

  “Hero, I think—” Raven pushed his face against the glass, looking out into the street where a moment ago he was sure he’d seen something, someone. He cupped his hands, feeling Florence nudge in next to him to join his vigil.

  “I see him,” she said, and a moment later had pulled the door open, letting in a bris
k blast of frigid air. Raven followed with Hero at his flank, and beneath the cover of mist, rain and shadow, the three of them charged out into the street.

  The man lay as if a grey heap of rags, swamped and soaked and barely moving, his groans only whispers. A skeletal hand, barely visible, poked from beneath a sleeve, old fingers grasping at nothing. Hero had squatted down and uncovered his face, which was badly bruised and bleeding.

  “We need to get him inside,” he said. Raven and Florence nodded, setting to the task immediately.

  “Don’t bring him in here,” the book man’s voice called out from inside, but they paid him no heed as they lifted up the sodden vagrant and dragged him between them back into the dry, the door slamming shut behind. “He can’t be in here.” A whisper.

  The man’s robes fell open, mud splattered, smelling of stale urine and rot. He’d obviously been beaten, and by the slow rasps of breath from his chest, it was obvious that he was not long for this world.

  Hero brought the candle close as the other two lay him out on the table. “He’s in quite a state. Do you have blankets?” But Britanus was nowhere to be seen. “Never mind then.” He removed his own robe, handing it to Florence—leaving him in only plain undergarments—and stripped the wet clothes from the old man, throwing them to the floor. “Put my robe around him to keep him warm.”

  As she did, the man murmured something, his lips barely parted. Raven listened intently, yet couldn’t make it out. What was left of his face broke into a gargoyle’s grin, baring all his teeth.

  “Don’t try to speak,” Florence said, rubbing down his arms, pushing the robes to his chin. His beard was matted and she stroked it out of the way.

  Raven looked him up and down. “I’m sure this is one of the men who took Ami and I. They chained us up.”

  “He has power,” Florence said, “only a little, but enough to be wary of.” Hero nodded and placed his goblet against the man’s lips, wetting them and allowing a sip to slip between them. “We can clean him up, but his wounds are too severe. I might harm him if I tried to heal him.”