Angel Isle

CHAPTER

21

Silence encased the island. Maja clutched Ribek to her and steeled herself for the arrival of the Watchers. She didn’t have long to wait. A group of five erupted through the turf and stood in a line on the far side of the little arena. Benayu, Zara and the Ropemaker turned to face them. The Jexes scuttled down from their perches and massed in front of them, carpeting a great swath of the turf with a protective barrier, all set to absorb and channel away whatever magic they might deploy.

The Watchers paid no attention, showed no sign of surprise. One of them stooped and laid a limp, pale object on the turf. Before he was upright it had grown to the thing Maja had glimpsed in the tunnel, a Watcher’s mask and robe, with a skeletal hand protruding from a sleeve. So these must be the Watchers who had been trapped on the other side of the touching point.

The rest of them appeared rapidly, in ones or twos, or several at a time. One of them was different from the rest, wearing a dark cloak and hood. It was clearly a woman, short and plump, though the hood concealed her features. She moved like a sleepwalker as one of the Watchers took her by the hand and led her to the body on the ground. The pale robe floated up and enveloped her. The Watcher stooped, picked up the mask and handed it to her. As she took it the Ropemaker broke the silence with a snap of his fingers.

The mask crumbled to dust. She raised her hands and threw back the hood of her cloak, shaking her head as she stumbled across the arena, like someone emerging from a dream. With a shock of horror and fear Maja saw that she was Chanad.

“All here, then?” said the Ropemaker affably. “One of you speak for the rest, eh?”

“We speak for ourself,” said a bloodless voice out of the air.

“Yourselves,” he corrected. “Twenty-three of you now. All different people. Bound you to cooperate while I was gone. Back now, so that’s over.”

“You are mistaken,” said the voice. “We are neither twenty-three nor twenty-four, but one. True, with our consent you bound us, and can release us from that binding. But of our own choice we have since bound ourself further and more fully, and there is no power other than our own that can release us. You have made a vacancy in our wholeness. Your choice is either to fill that vacancy and become one with us, or be destroyed. Your time is over, Ramdatta.”

The name they should never have known took the Ropemaker by surprise. He hesitated as the three quietly spoken syllables woke whispering echoes in the rocks, echoes which reverberated to and fro, growing louder and louder and louder, until they became three gigantic raps on the doors of time.

He flinched, staggered, and at the third blow he reeled back, throwing up his arms in front of his face. His turban unraveled and fell to the ground. His magical mane hung limp around him, a dull yellowish orange, streaked with gray. He fell to his knees and put his head in his hands. Zara was already a pile of silvery fabric on the turf. Chanad had fallen beside her and was struggling to rise. Benayu too reeled, but grasped the staff, and steadied himself. As the echoes rumbled into silence Zara’s urn cracked apart, leaving a mound of crystal phials lying among the shards.

Soundlessly, one by one, they burst, like soap bubbles. Each time, a puff of pale smoke rose, carrying brilliant flashes of multi-colored light, like sparks flying up from a bonfire, no sooner glimpsed than gone. The smoke streamed away on the gusty wind, and the animas of the original Watchers, the hostages that Zara had guarded through the centuries in the mysterious space beyond her cell, all that had once made them human, her ultimate power against them, were gone.

Benayu was the first to move. He plucked the staff from the ground, strode to the center of the triangle formed by the three stricken magicians and turned steadily round, with the point of the staff tracing a circle close beyond them. The air seemed to ripple above the invisible line, though the ripples didn’t rise steadily, like waves of heat, but twisted and eddied in an increasingly complex, close-meshed pattern, forming a visible surface, a known shape, a shell of the entangled light of two universes. For a short while Maja could still see the four magicians, three of them sitting or lying as she had last seen them, with Benayu still grasping his staff but kneeling beside the Ropemaker. The Ropemaker took something out of his pouch and gave it to Benayu, who hesitated and took it. He was rising to his feet as the shell misted over, was briefly translucent, and finally became that strange, opaque, impossible substance that had kept them safe in a world where they shouldn’t have been able to exist. Its near side shimmered, and Benayu stepped through it. He touched it briefly with his staff and watched it sink into the turf, then turned confidently to face the Watchers.

Maja turned too, and stared at them, her heart pounding, as she waited for the next shock of disaster. Why had they done nothing to stop him? Surely they had the power. But they seemed not to have moved at all or even to have noticed what he was doing. Something was happening to them, though. Those smooth, pale masks had a greasy, oily look. Their robes too. Blobs of pale ooze were dribbling from their hems, forming into pools around their feet. Their erect, formal stances were losing their stiffness, sagging as if they’d been carved from butter and left in hot sunlight. And the dribbles were rivulets now, and the pools starting to coalesce as the whole line of Watchers melted slimily away and down and were absorbed into a single smooth expanse. A faint but cloying odor wafted to and fro on the gusting wind.

The army of Jexes recoiled, jostling to get away from the spreading edges of the pool. A yellow one with bright blue blotches was staggering directly toward her.

“Jex! Jex! What’s happening? Are you all right?”

“Poison to us,” came the faint and gasping whisper. “Hold me.”

Instantly he shrank into his granite form. She snatched him up, looped his cord round her neck and tucked him into her blouse. The rest of the Jexes were already scuttling off to the surrounding rocks and dissolving themselves into patches of colored lichen. All but three. One of these the liquid must actually have touched. He lay twitching at the edge of the pool until the other two, though themselves obviously already affected, took his forelimbs in their mouths and started to drag him away across the turf.

“Poison?” Ribek muttered. “He said something about that before, didn’t he? Demon magic, wasn’t it? I don’t like the look of this. And Saranja’s got Zald. What’s Benayu up to? Talking to someone?”

When she’d last looked Benayu had been standing sideways on to them, leaning on the staff, gazing broodingly out over the pool. Now he had half turned his head away as if listening to somebody beyond him. She heard the brief murmur of his voice. The words had the lilt of a question, but at the same time were full of purpose, tension, fire. Peering, Maja imagined for a moment that she could catch the faint outline of part of a human figure, shoulder, arm and flank, shadowy, almost transparent, like the smudge of a finger on clear glass. Then she lost it against the jumble of rocks beyond. A man, she thought, if it had been there at all, the top and back of a head, dense hair stiff as a bottlebrush, a broad and stocky body, some sort of stiff kilt.

Benayu turned back to the pool, drew himself up and waited, intent and watchful.

No wonder. The whole body of liquid had begun to stir, turn, spiral inward, a single huge eddy. But this was no normal eddy. When water eddies in a stream it too spirals inward, but when it reaches the center it sucks itself downward and is lost. This was doing the opposite, swirling upward into a twisting column, and at the same time sucking itself away from the edges of the pool and leaving behind it not green turf but a swath of sickly-yellow poisoned grass. As it withdrew it revealed, one after another, a row of fleshless skeletons, sprawled where the Watchers had stood.

Meanwhile, at the center, it continued to swirl silently and slimily upward. It quivered, and the lines of the spiral fell vertical and became the pleats of an ivory robe. Shoulders formed, and arms, folded across the chest, and, as the last glutinous ooze of the pool was absorbed, the hood of a gigantic Watcher grew from the shoulders, a Watcher as tall as a forest tree, glistening from head to foot with the slime of the pool. This wasn’t just a coating, Maja could tell. The monster was made of the stuff. Neither bones nor sinews held it into shape. No heart, lungs, stomach, nerves, brain provided it with the machinery of life. It was utterly dead, more dead than the skeletons it had left behind, more dead than the rocks of Angel Isle, death embodied and held into shape by a single, powerful magical will. This was the One that the Watchers had chosen to become.

It differed from the Watchers as they had been only in one thing. Beneath the shrouding hood there was no mask, not even a featureless blank, but a black cavern, a dark and endless emptiness. Though it had no eyes it seemed to Maja to be looking directly at her, telling her that she must come to it, come and begin to fill that void. Unlike the demon north of Larg it yearned and ached not simply for the flesh of her living body but for her thoughts, hopes, dreams, the small natural powers within her, for all of her. Even before the Watchers had made their choice, she realized, it had been there, waiting. Been there, perhaps for ever, an unseen presence, waiting for the body that would give it power to act in the world of things. And now it had not only their physical substance but also their immense magical powers and it could begin to absorb into itself all the spiritual energies of this material universe, to satisfy its infinite, unsatisfiable hunger.

This was the ultimate demon, the demon destined to devour the universes. Starting with her, Maja.

“Come,” it told her.

Her shielding faltered. She snatched at her amulet and dragged it down to her wrist. The black bead blazed with smoky fire as it withstood the call. But Ribek had heard it too and was trying to get to his feet. She flung her arms round him and forced him down, struggling feebly in her grip. The horses were already moving blindly forward in response to the summons. Sponge as well, whimpering miserably at the compelled disobedience to his master’s order. Benayu heard, glanced over his shoulder and flung out a hand. Ribek subsided with a groan and the animals stayed where they were.

The demon appeared to notice him for the first time. It turned its hunger toward him, raised a hand and beckoned. He seized the staff, anchoring himself to resist. A gale from nowhere tore at his clothes as if trying to drag him forward. With his free hand he tossed something upward, and the gale became a blizzard, dense, huge flakes streaming in the wind, blanketing the Watcher, melting for a moment and instantly freezing into a carapace of close-packed ice. There had been blizzards like that sometimes at Woodbourne, waking the sleepers in the farmhouse again and again in the night with the crash of another huge branch rent from a forest giant by the sheer weight of the ice that had formed around it.

The demon, though, accepted the blizzard as an offering to feed its hunger. Before it had begun to melt the ice started to flow, not downward as water would have done, but upward and inward, into the cavern within the hood. If any of the powers that Benayu had used to create the blizzard were still incorporated into it, they too were now lost in that darkness.

The call was universal. Already, creatures that had nothing to do with the struggle against the Watchers were beginning to answer it. The white seabirds that had soared around the cliffs of Angel Isle were streaming toward the cavern, their harsh cries of alarm falling suddenly silent as they disappeared. Four or five small bees that had been busy around a spike of sea holly suddenly forgot their job and followed the gulls. Right out in the open, easy prey to a predator, a family of voles was threading its way over the turf. Nothing was too small to be taken.

The monster raised its arm and beckoned to Benayu again. He answered with a bolt of lightning, blindingly bright even by daylight, aimed not at the head but at the midriff. In the instant of its flight it veered from its course and followed the gulls.

Maja’s ears were still ringing with the thunder when she caught Jex’s desperate whisper.

“He needs time, still. Only a little more time. We must all distract the demon if we can. Put me on the ground.”

She hardly had him out of her blouse before he resumed his true form.

A tremor shook him as she placed him on the turf. He turned toward the demon, choked convulsively, staggered a little way forward and then, with what was obviously an enormous effort, started to back away. Beyond him on the rocks she could see several patches of lichen swelling into lizard form.

“Us too. Did you hear what he said?” she whispered.

“Just about. Help me up. Make as if we don’t want to—we’re fighting against it. It’s got to pay attention to us—force us, step by step. Right?”

A pace. A struggle to retreat. Another pace. Reluctant, fearful. To left and right the Jexes, rank after rank of them, were doing the same. She could see one, a little ahead of her and to her left, that seemed already to have lost the use of its hind end and was using its forelegs to drag itself onward and then force itself back.

Another pace and she and Ribek had no need to pretend. They must have crossed whatever barrier Benayu had thrown between them and the demon, for now, suddenly, Ribek felt the call. His struggle to resist it became real. She forced his hand against her amulet. Nothing happened. No, it had barely worked for him with the demon north of Larg, and this was the ultimate demon.

Only his will remained, as he fought with all the slight strength of old age against every pace forward, groaning and gasping as he was forced on. And Maja fought to help him, fought by fighting against him, or rather against the demon through him. She could feel the already exhausted muscles weakening, and at the same time feel the invisible power that drove them on growing stronger and stronger as the demon answered their resistance.

Nothing else mattered. Vaguely she could hear faint, fluttering pipings of distress all around her as the army of Jexes fought their own individual versions of the same struggle. Hopeless, all of them. Each one less than a pinprick. But all together, perhaps, an itch. That was their only hope. That the demon would lose concentration for a moment, and scratch.

So they battled on, losing all the time, pace by agonizing pace. The nature of the struggle barely altered when Ribek gave a final, dreadful groan and passed out in her arms. His eyes closed, his mouth sagged open, and his head fell sideways as if his neck were broken. But still his legs drove them forward.

So far she had been clutching him to her side with her arms around his upper body, wrestling to haul him back. Now she changed her grip, losing a precious couple of paces to do so as she worked herself round to get her shoulder against his belly. His body slumped above her, forcing her to bear half his scant weight. Gasping, she heaved with all her strength against the staggering onward drive of his legs. Her sandals lost their grip on the slithery turf and they toppled in a heap.

He fell on her, half winding her. By the time she’d got her breath back he was on his hands and knees, crawling blindly toward the demon, now desperately near. She saw it stoop, reaching out an arm to scoop him up. The fingers at the end of the ivory sleeve had no knuckles, no bones, but a double row of suckers along their inner surfaces, each like a tiny mouth.

Desperately she flung herself forward, grasped his ankles and hauled him back. Effortlessly the arm extended itself. The talons closed round his waist. She screamed, and her scream was answered.

Answered from high overhead by a sound she knew, a long, clanging neigh, like a war cry. The demon loosed its hold and she tumbled back, dragging Ribek with her.

In the moment that she was facing skyward she saw Rocky above her, wide wings hurling him forward, Saranja and Striclan on his back, the fiery line of the demon-binder snaking out, bright against the storm clouds, curling itself widdershins around the demon’s shoulders as Rocky swung the other way to begin the binding. The demon didn’t resist. It seemed not to respond in any way, or even to turn its head to watch them go. Nor did Maja. Immediately, with her lungs still heaving, her heart still thundering from her previous struggle, she started to drag Ribek further away.

All round her the Jexes, those who could still move of their own will and not the demon’s, were doing the same. She caught a glimpse of Benayu standing in the middle of them, with his staff erect in the turf in front of him. Half blinded with her own sweat, she couldn’t see quite what he was doing, but he seemed not to be even looking at the demon but at an invisible ball that he was holding cupped between his two hands close above the top of the staff.

She didn’t have time to think about it, to wonder what he was up to, or whether there was anything he could do to save them. All that mattered was to drag Ribek further away.

Another wild neigh from Rocky. Different. Terror? Rocky?

She looked up and saw that the demon had moved at last, effortlessly bursting several coils of the fiery binding to raise an arm and beckon.

Rocky was responding, swinging in toward the terrible darkness under the hood, while Saranja, protected by the demon-binder, fought to turn his head and force him back onto his course.

Useless. He was almost there. Another heartbeat and they would all three be gone.

It never happened. Before Maja’s heart could thud once more, it stood still. A gulp of air stayed in her windpipe. She could no more look to left or right than she’d been able to do when she was a rag doll. Rocky and his riders remained poised in front of the darkness. The racing storm clouds stayed in their places. Even sound was stilled. Not a mutter from the waves, not a whisper from the wind, broke the silence.

Something moved in that stillness. A small black object floated up at the edge of Maja’s vision, surrounded by…

By what? Nothing visible, but…Nothing, visible because it was less than nothing? Negative zero…?

Something below it now, grayer than gray…the top of Benayu’s staff, with the black thing floating above it like the dot on an i. Benayu’s hand gripping the staff, his other hand just below it, his arms, Benayu himself, floating up and forward into view, locked into total stillness like herself and Rocky and the demon and all the rest of the universe, his face set to stone as he poured all the powers in himself and the staff into keeping that single impossible sphere whole and balanced above the staff.

So in time outside time, he drifted up and forward, past where Rocky and his riders hung timebound, to the very edge of the darkness.

At that point time resumed. Benayu thrust staff and sphere forward with a twist of his wrists. The staff was still in his hands as he plummeted earthward, but the sphere was gone, engulfed by the darkness. Maja’s delayed heartbeat thudded within her rib-cage. The gulped air poured into her lungs. With a triumphant neigh Rocky swung clear. And the demon…

The demon ate itself. The darkness under the hood became an inward-whirling vortex, dragging hood and robes and the whole huge ivory figure into its emptiness, and then was gone. All of it gone into the sphere of nothingness that Benayu had somehow formed and kept in existence in the world of things by creating a space between two instants of time in either of which it would have been an impossibility. All that was left of the Watchers was a patch of dead turf.