The Burning Man

2

The wind blasted down from the mountains with the cold threat of rain. Behind them, the lights of the Court of the Soaring Spirit had long been lost to the inky night. There were only the bleak, rising foothills of scrubby grassland, outcropping rocks and stunted, wiry trees.

Mallory led the way on horseback, with a lantern hanging from a staff attached to his saddle to guide them over the treacherous land. Sophie and Caitlin followed, heads bowed against the gale, and Jerzy took the rear on a small pony, frightened and jumpy.

Mallory kept one hand on his sword. The countryside all around the court was dangerous, and from the walls they had seen many of the Enemy’s outriders and small, marauding groups. Tension ran high within the alleyways and inns, fuelled by the expectation that it was only a matter of time before the Enemy was at the gates. And what was the queen doing to protect them?

It was a question Mallory had asked himself — and Niamh. But as much as he had questioned her, and spied on her whenever he had the opportunity, she appeared honestly concerned about her subjects and the court’s security. She made no attempt to stop them when they set out in search of the great library of Ogma, which Jerzy had heard about in the Hunter’s Moon; indeed, she barely paid any heed to them.

‘How much further?’ he shouted above the wind.

Jerzy spurred his pony to Mallory’s side. His frightened eyes were fixed on the dark. ‘Something tracks us,’ he whimpered. ‘Oh, master, please deliver us safely. Oh, why come under cover of night? Why not in the beautiful light of day?’

‘Because we’re an easier target then.’ Mallory followed Jerzy’s gaze. Behind them, several dark shapes moved close to the ground, keeping pace with them. ‘So, how far?’

‘A mile, perhaps.’

Mallory beckoned Sophie to his side. ‘Give us some cover. Just something to keep them occupied. Can you do that?’

‘If you have to ask that, you really don’t know what I’m capable of.’ She flashed a grin.

‘That’s what I’m worried about.’ Surprising her, he grabbed her cowl and pulled her in for a deep kiss. ‘For luck,’ he said.

‘Not that I need it.’

‘Not that you need it.’

She bowed her head for a second, and when she raised it her eyes had rolled back so that only the whites were visible. Her lips moved silently. An orgasmic shudder led to a moment of grace and then she gave a spent smile. ‘I wouldn’t hang around if I were you.’

Mallory beckoned to Caitlin, who had carried an air of sadness with her since they had left the Tower of the Four Winds. She smiled wanly and spurred her horse on.

Jerzy whimpered again as he indicated an undulating shadow moving up the hillside behind them. As it neared, they could see it was made up of a multitude of bodies: rats, fat and sinuous. A desperate hunger informed their rabid motion. Jerzy cried out and drove his pony as fast as it would carry him. The others followed, heads down into the wind. The rats surged towards whatever was tracking them, now the nearest source of food.

After about a mile, when the hillside was becoming increasingly rugged, Mallory reined in his horse. The way they had come was clear of any movement. That didn’t mean the threat had gone, but Mallory recognised the opportunity for a breathing space.

‘You enjoyed that,’ he said to Sophie.

‘It was invigorating.’ She threw her cowl off and shook her hair so the wind caught it. ‘The Craft works so well here. It’s such a buzz.’

‘A slight chance we could have ended up as the first meal break for your furry little helpers.’

‘What’s life without a little danger?’

‘Safe?’

‘You need to live a bit, Mallory. All my early years were safe. Middle-class home, middle of the road. But no meaning, in anything. The only time I started discovering what really mattered was when I threw all that in and left home. Travelling all over the country with a group of people all searching for the same thing.’ She stretched and shivered with pleasure. ‘You only discover the truth — about yourself, about the world — when you take risks.’

‘The trouble with risks is it can go either way.’ Mallory watched Jerzy gallop up to them from reconnaissance along the increasingly treacherous path.

‘We are here,’ he said with excited relief. ‘Finally, sanctuary.’

Without Jerzy’s explicit directions, they could easily have missed the entrance. Overgrown with dry, brown bramble and long yellow grass, almost obscured by fallen rock, there was only a dark passage disappearing into the hillside; it looked as if the library was retreating from the world.

Mallory’s horse grew skittish as he led it down the tunnel of dense vegetation until they came to the front porch of a large stone building set into the hillside. Above the porch was a tower topped by a weather-vane in the shape of a dragon. Caitlin tethered the horses while Mallory hammered on the door.

A moment later it swung open to reveal a tall man in robes so white they appeared to gleam with their own light. There was the familiar moment of disconnection while his features swam, but they eventually settled into a high, artistic brow, piercing grey eyes and long black hair and a bushy beard, both streaked with silver.

‘You don’t know us-’ Mallory began.

‘I know who you are, Brother of Dragons. I know your Sisters.’ He eyed Jerzy. ‘I know you, and who you represent. And I know why you are here.’

‘How could you?’ Caitlin asked.

‘I am Ogma, and my library contains records of all that has happened, and all that will happen, if one but knows where to look.’

‘That must really ruin birthdays and Christmas.’ Mallory had kept his hand on his sword, but there was no sense of threat coming off Ogma, just a calm wisdom that made him feel more secure than he had done in a long time.

‘We hoped you would let us use your library,’ Sophie said. ‘And we would be grateful for any guidance you could give us.’

Ogma motioned for them to enter. ‘Everything I have is given freely and without obligation.’ He picked up a candelabrum from a table beside the door and led them into the gloomy interior.

The library stretched into the hillside, a warren of dusty rooms and corridors, niches and vast halls, festooned with strands of silky cobwebs and filled with shelf after shelf of books, parchments, maps and mysterious objects of glass and silver that moved their position between blinks.

The portentous atmosphere gave Sophie a fit of the giggles that she made a poor job of stifling. Jerzy, though, was at peace, gambolling beside them, his fixed grin for once matched by the joyful expression in his eyes.

As they moved amongst the stacks, Caitlin grabbed Mallory’s arm and pointed. Shavi was examining a book, which, when opened, was only filled with light.

‘Shavi!’ Mallory called out. Uneasily, Shavi returned the book to the shelf and walked away.

‘He cannot hear you,’ Ogma said. ‘What you see has already happened — or will happen, in your terms — and the same is true of many of the events you will witness in this place.’

‘Then how do we know what is happening?’ Caitlin asked.

‘You do not.’

They entered a large reading room with several small tables set discreetly amongst the books, each with a small crystal lamp. Mallory had been thinking hard since they had entered the library, and said to Ogma, ‘We were told the library contained all the knowledge there is. Is that correct?’

‘It is.’

‘And you know where that knowledge is and how it all fits together?’

‘I do.’

‘Then you can tell us where Math is, and the others. Where the Market of Wishful Spirit is. The location of the Extinction Shears.’

‘That and more.’

‘We need that information. Everything depends on it.’

Ogma smiled and Mallory thought instantly of his father. ‘You are confusing knowledge, or wisdom, with the journey to achieve that wisdom. Both are separate, both equally important. For the journey is transformational, and is necessary to impart the power to use the wisdom once it is achieved. One without the other is worthless.’

‘So find it yourself — that’s what you’re saying.’

‘The key to your search is here and within your ability to locate.’

‘But people could be dying while we waste time looking! All I’m asking is to cut a few corners-’

Sophie restrained Mallory with a hand on his arm. ‘Everything valuable has to be earned. That’s the lesson of the Craft. We can do this.’

‘All right. But you’ll give us some help if we ask the right questions?’

‘Of course.’ Ogma gestured expansively around his library. ‘Open yourselves to Existence. It will help you.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Mallory muttered. ‘No such thing as coincidence. I know the drill.’

While Jerzy sat next to the blazing fire, the others drifted off amongst the stacks in search of inspiration. Superficially it appeared a hopeless task — there were more volumes than they could examine in several lifetimes — but their instincts told them otherwise. What they had witnessed during the ritual in Math’s tower still flickered across their deep unconscious with two words rising repeatedly — MAT and ANM.

Some of the books were in unknown languages that gradually became comprehensible the more Mallory scanned them. Others left him with inexplicable emotions, euphoria or dread, and he was forced to close them quickly.

Occasionally he would glimpse figures flitting amongst the stacks, ghosts of the past or future, some like wisps of smoke in a shaft of light, others unnervingly substantial, their feet dragging on the flags.

One, a chilling figure with a body constructed from twisted blackthorn and a face that appeared to be made from crushed and folded paper, paused then turned slowly to stare at him. Mallory sensed a threatening aura emanating from the creature. The paper shifted gradually into an expression that appeared to say, ‘Perhaps we’ll meet again, soon.’

Mallory hurried on.

After a while his attention was caught by a full-length mirror trimmed with ebony on a silver stand. It caught the torchlight in an unsettling way. A legend was inscribed in gold on the top: We are all books, our experiences writ large for everyone to read.

Don’t look in it, a voice in Mallory’s head warned. He looked.

A sensation of falling came a second after he saw the reflection of a Mallory he did not recognise. Memories swam before his eyes. The cocky young man who thought the world couldn’t touch him. Nights in the club, the music vibrating through his bones. The rushing joy that only came before you realised troubles might wait just over the horizon. And then the hard men who had taught him a hard lesson. The realisation that some choices are impossible, but you have to make them anyway, and the price is etched on your soul. He saw the blood on his hands and relived the feeling that nothing would ever be right again. He’d come to terms with what the sickening criminal thugs had forced him to do — worse, what he’d chosen to do — but he knew he would always be trying to make amends for it.

Death was always the catalyst, the philosopher’s stone whose alchemical touch transformed the base to the sublime, sadder, more frightened but wiser. That terrible night had given him new eyes. He recalled the next day, walking down the street and being able to tell at a glance those who had had their first experience of death, and those who were still innocent; you always remember the first time.

And then Sophie had come along and shown him that there was still life after death, a new life, more vibrant than the one before. Sophie who had saved him.

Blue flames flickered in the depths of the glass and Hal appeared briefly, superimposed over Mallory’s own reflection. A sad smile appeared on the flaming face and it mouthed the words, ‘Hold on to moments of joy — they slip through your fingers like sand.’