Darkburn Book 4: The Haunt of Ternss by Tayin Machrie - HTML preview

Chapter 35

Maeneb spat out a mouthful of salty water and pedalled herself around. The surface rocked with liquid hills; steam rose in puffs and wisps. It was warm, this water, so she guessed the serpent was somewhere in there with her, although she couldn’t see it.

It had caught her round the waist, burning through the leather jerkin – but only for an instant. She had been fully conscious when she was flung in. But what a fling! She had thought it would go on for ever, that soaring flight and fall, until suddenly she’d been underwater and battling her way up. At least no shock of cold disabled her. She had shrugged off the burnt jerkin and prised away her boots to make it easier to swim.

Now she trod water. Where was Gaelera? What did the stupid woman think she had been doing? What had she intended – to poke the serpent with a pin?

But there she was, thank the stars above: her head was bobbing not too far away. As Maeneb began to swim towards her she saw another small dark figure leap out from the building’s ruined top, a shower of stones following. The stones fell clattering against the bottom of the cliff, but the figure plunged into the sea.

Then she lost them both amongst the rocking waves which threw her to and fro like a piece of flotsam. She feared that every fretful swell of water was the serpent: but it did not reappear. Maybe it was deep beneath her, an uneasy thought.

A moment later she caught another glimpse of Gaelera, this time with a second head close by hers in the water: it was that Kelvhan captain. Gaelera seemed to be endeavouring to fight him off before she sank beneath the waves. Was he trying to drown her?

Maeneb swam over, the waves swamping her from second to second. But when she reached Gaelera she saw that the Kelvhan was trying to hold her up. It was her dress that was trying to drown her.

“Take it off,” yelled Maeneb, getting another mouthful of warm salty water. “Take it off.” The dress was burnt. But of course Gaelera could not take it off, it would need a maid and a full quarter-hour to undo all the tiny hooks and buttons down the back of the bodice. “Hold her up,” she yelled at the Kelvhan, and she grabbed the back of Gaelera’s dress in both her hands and ripped.

What an oddly satisfying thing. But Gaelera screamed and thrashed at her.

“Oh, shut up,” yelled Maeneb, and she began to pull the sleeves down, Gaelera kicking her underwater all the time. But Maeneb tugged furiously at the seams until half the skirt was loose. She ripped it off and watched it drift away, sinking, like some wallowing sea-creature heading for the bottom. And then Gaelera herself pulled off the stiff bodice, to reveal her under-linen – embroidered of course, but much lighter than her overclothes.

Yet despite losing the weight of her skirts she began to sink again and was dragged up to the surface by the Kelvhan.

“Keep still, my lady,” he shouted over the roar of the sea. “I’m going to hold you up.” He grasped her underneath the chin and began to swim on his back, dragging her along. Gaelera did not thrash and flounder any more, but lay quite passive, drifting in her petticoats, hair streaming on the water.

“Stay away from the cliffs,” the soldier cried to Maeneb; and she understood. The waves would dash them on those rocks. They needed to find a shallower beach and hope they would wash up on it.

She knew there was a beach to the east, for she had walked along it only yesterday. But the current would not let them swim that way. It pushed them west, so forcefully that they had no option but to go with it. The Kelvhan stayed on his back, towing Gaelera, who had ceased to struggle except when from time to time a larger wave crashed over them and sent them underwater. Each time, the Kelvhan pulled her up again. He seemed a strong swimmer; but Maeneb already felt herself tiring.

The steam around them grew thicker, and the water warmer: yet Maeneb, surfacing and gulping hot air, still could not see the serpent. The choppy waves and billowing steam hid any tell-tale bulge upon the surface.

She hoped it had swum far out to sea – but the water told a different tale. It was definitely heating up. The darkburn must be somewhere close, she knew. Where was the shore? Nothing was visible in this fog of steam.

Above the crash of waves she thought she could hear distant shouting. Rescuers? That brief hope was immediately gone. For from close on her left there came a more ominous noise: a hiss. Huge plumes of steam rose up as if from a colossal kettle.

And then, no more than twenty yards away, she saw it: the mound rising in the sea, silver and green until it shed the water from its flanks and turned to steam and then to blackness. She saw the swell of the long body. Where was the head? Could it see them, smell them? Which way was it facing?

Too close, too close, was her immediate thought. The water now was not just warm but growing hotter with each wave that surged towards them. In her mind she saw the helpless Durba caught in the creature’s coils, to be left a burnt and mangled wreck.

We’re about to follow her; we’re going to be broiled like cabbages, thought Maeneb in blank dismay. I had rather let myself drown first.

And next to her Gaelera suddenly began to struggle.

Too hot, too hot. No doubt the heat was what Gaelera fought against: but Maeneb felt a lethargy that made her limbs slow down, the legs want to cease kicking, her face turn up and gasp for cooler air. How long would it take to drown? Could she force herself to let go and do it? Soon she might have no choice. She drank in gulps of steam which did not satisfy her lungs. Her body was protesting. She thought she saw a sheen, as if of long hair floating on the surface; was it Durba’s or her own?

Durba, she said into the over-heated water. Where are you? Where did you go?

Another hot wave submerged her. It took an effort to come up. She threshed and gasped in sweltering steam. Her heart was pounding now, her brain was thick and heavy, she needed some relief, some cold cold rock to cling to…

And there, suddenly, bizarrely, there it was. A sheen held the water’s surface still: it looked like a thin layer of glass. She swam into it, and it immediately broke up into fragments. But there was another, a thin slick sheet that cracked and shattered as her flailing arms made contact with it. It was wonderfully cold.

Ice. Ice floating on a heated sea. For a moment Maeneb did not even question it, just floundered to the next shimmering sheet and lay on it feeling it crumble to dissolving shards beneath her body – but it was cool for those few seconds, so blessedly cool!

She breathed great gasps of air – that, too, had cooled a little – and saw another thin slab of ice take shape before her eyes. First, that oily sheen upon the water: seconds later, it solidified, with a faint sound of cracking, sending out long strands of icy hair to bind the surface, becoming a sheet that grew rapidly out and down into the water. This one was soon two inches thick, a whitish raft of ice.

It must be Leor’s work. No other explanation came to mind: no natural force could do the work of a freezing winter week in seconds. She looked up through the mist to the monastery’s parapet – or what was left of it: an uneven silhouette atop the cliffs. No-one stood there looking down. All the same, this must be Leor’s work. She blessed him to the stars.

And then withdrew that blessing; for as she looked around she seemed to see that sheen of drowning hair on every side. It was all ice. Crystals were continuously growing from small specks into long pointed fingers that reached out for her: the ice was spreading rapidly across the sea, poking at her skin with sharp cold nails. She must not get trapped under it.

“Watch out!” she shouted at the Kelvhan, who was still swimming on his back with Gaelera in tow, pushing his way against new sheets of ice. “Don’t stay in the water! We need to get on top of it!”

For the thin sheets were now linking with each other, trying to form a continuous plane. Despite the frequent cracks and splits as the restless sea fought back, the ice was winning – and at an extraordinary pace. Already the sea felt slushy. The sheets of ice swayed less. The nearest one to Maeneb was bigger than a mattress, and as thick, and still growing visibly: it nudged her knees as she trod water next to it.

She had to board it. Not an easy task. She slipped and slithered as she tried to find a handhold: and when she had gripped at a numbingly cold crack, it took several attempts before she could haul one knee up onto the slab of ice. But then the other knee followed, and she lay sprawled on top, trying not to slide off as the glistening raft beneath her tilted.

Stay in the middle, she told herself. Spreading out her arms and legs she laid her cheek upon the ice to feel the chill run through her face and body. It was a huge relief. She closed her eyes and savoured the delightful coolness. Durba’s hair, turned to fine white crystals: Durba’s skin, a giant naked body drifting, clear and cold.

Why had Durba done it? The picture turned over and over in her head: Durba running at the darkburn across the steaming sand. So brave, so foolhardy. Having stabbed the thing, why had she not just run away again? Had she not been able? Had she not wanted to?

Maeneb rested her forehead on the slab as if it would tell her something. But Durba was a mangled corpse upon the shoreline. She was not here. There was no answer in the ice.

Think of now. What about the Kelvhan and Gaelera? Raising her head, Maeneb saw the soldier ahead of her; somehow he had managed to to push Gaelera up onto another slab of ice and now he was struggling to heave himself up after her. Gaelera sat rigidly, doing nothing to help him. She was probably afraid of sliding off: Maeneb felt that she herself could not have stirred, precariously laid out on her slab as she was, like a lump of chilling meat. One sudden move might tip her back into the water.

The Kelvhan’s strength must be great, however – for with another heave he drew himself right up onto Gaelera’s slab, crawled a yard and lay there panting next to her, his chest heaving.

Gaelera ignored him. She sat up with her lips slightly parted, her linen underdress torn and bedraggled. What was she thinking? Impossible to tell. She was staring out to sea.

Of course – she was looking for the darkburn. Which Maeneb had momentarily forgotten in her effort to mount the ice. Now she gazed around to check how close it was.

At first it was not visible. For a hundred yards in each direction, sheets of ice swayed and broke into jagged upward-pointing blades that grated and then fused together in fresh, irregular sheets: a newly made white sea that did not seem to know quite what to do, how to behave. The steam was clearing rapidly and the waves were muted, their rush and roar replaced by a sullen shallow swell and a constant throaty groaning.

And then she saw the darkburn. That sudden upthrust of the ice, about seventy yards away. The head emerged, followed by the long black neck: it did not rise as high as it had previously, but instead flopped down upon a slab of ice that instantly began to hiss and steam. The darkburn’s heat must have cut through it – yet not immediately; for only slowly did the neck sink down into the channel it was forming in the ice.

Then both head and neck vanished underwater for many seconds, until they emerged once more in a shower of water: she felt a gust of warmer air before the serpent’s snaking neck thumped down a second time on to another slab of ice and began to slowly melt its way down through it.

Maeneb watched, transfixed despite her own predicament. Durba would have liked this, she thought. Could she see it now? She seemed to glimpse Durba, sitting, long hair loose, on a nearby block of ice. Tricks of the steam and her own befuddled brain. A mermaid of the mind, watching the instrument of her death. Had that really happened?

Around the thrashing darkburn the ice was taking on strange, other-worldly shapes. Hollow curving domes and caves and columns were being sculpted, melting and refreezing as she gazed, as if the thing were assiduously creating some fellow monster out of ice. Was it trying to attack the ice-floes with those writhings? Did it know what ice was?

Death is cold, said Durba.

And it occurred to her that in its repeated thrusting at the ice the serpent might be endeavouring to cool itself. A strange idea and surely one that could not possibly be true. Yet to cool a darkburn sufficiently might be to kill it.

Death is cold. She remember Rothir describing darkburns he had seen submerged in the stagnant pools west of the Gyr. Not fully dead, but dormant.

At least this huge foul serpentlike darkburn was not attacking them, for now. Maybe her stones repelled it: for when she checked, she still had two inside her inner pocket. But no; she reflected that on the monastery roof all the stones in many pockets had failed to repel the thing.

Whatever the reason, it kept its distance for the moment, twining, carving slowly through the ice. She turned her head to assess her own position.

The ice rafts, drifting slowly westward, were now well past the section of the cliff on which the monastery stood. The cliff’s end, where it lowered itself again to sea level, was not too far ahead. Eventually they might drift there – but only gradually. For the whole sea had become sluggish with ice.

Her raft and Gaelera’s were only a few yards apart; more chunks of ice were filling up the space between. The swaying of her slab had become much less intense as it had grown in width. And it was very cold. The glad relief of coolness had now gone: Maeneb was shivering. She sat up, like Gaelera, to minimise the contact of her skin with ice.

How had Leor managed this? It was an extraordinary feat, one she would not have thought him capable of. For still the ice was thickening, the plates breaking less frequently, tightening together more securely. Would ice spread right across the seas and hold them all fast in its grip? Would it spread up the rivers? The thought chilled her mind even more than her cold platform chilled her legs.

Carefully she stood up, her wet clothes sticking to the ice. She pulled them free. The slab barely shifted underneath her as she got to her feet and looked around.

There was the darkburn, within its own ice harbour. She saw a flash of a dark coil appear and disappear amidst the white. Beyond it was more white – but it did not extend too far. Well before the horizon she could see the dark swell and shifting glint of waves.

She frowned at the diminishing line of cliffs. Although the end of them was close now, the steady drift of her ice raft had slowed almost to a complete stop. The slabs and chunks of ice that had been grinding together, sometimes with almost deafening rasps and groans, were now joining forces: fusing to create one vast white rocky sheet that went right up to the shore.

“See there!” she shouted at the others. “We can walk to land.”

The Kelvhan stood up cautiously and gazed around. Maeneb walked gingerly across her slab, on stockinged feet that were rapidly becoming numb: although it dipped a little underneath her weight, it did not move enough to tip her off. The edge was frozen fast to the next slab, so she stepped across the icy joint. With every step her path seemed to feel more solid.

“Gaelera!” she called. “Stand up and walk. We need to get to shore.”

Gaelera, dismissing the Kelvhan’s offered hand, was already getting to her feet. She did not walk gingerly; without hesitation, without a pause to test the ice, she set off marching as if she expected a royal trackway to have been laid out for her. Maybe it had been. Maybe that was part of Leor’s plan; for as they crossed the ice floes, parallel to the cliff, the ice beneath them scarcely stirred. Twice Maeneb slid and fell, but without injury.

Thus the three of them walked beside the shrinking cliff – Gaelera never faltering – until they came round a final projection where the edge plunged down to sea-level. And there beyond it was the shore.

Maeneb had expected to see someone looking for them, Riders or Kelvhans reaching out to greet them with relief. Where was everybody? She paused atop the frozen sea and wondered. Had the army frozen too? She could hear nothing but the creaking of the ice.

And she herself felt frozen. Not in body, apart from her feet, which had progressed from numbness to throbbing pain; but in her mind. She looked back, searching for a fourth survivor, somehow miraculously brought back to life by ice.

But she could no longer see even those strange glittering strands of crystal hair. Only a cold hard sea with a giant darkburn making and remaking some ever-changing form. Durba was dead. She knew that. She simply did not feel that it was so.

I would prefer Gaelera to have died instead, she thought, despite the trouble it would cause. Kept alive she will cause trouble anyway. I do not trust her: she is too like me.

Gaelera had stopped now also, poised like a statue on her raft, looking to the shore. The Kelvhan soldier stood watchfully behind her. Maeneb began to run, heedless of her painful feet, skidding and leaping so that she would arrive at the ice’s edge before the others did.

She jumped off the ice onto the wet stones of the beach, on which she could not run but only walk with caution. Although the steam had lessened, a rise of grassy dunes prevented her from seeing inland. But now she could hear distant shouting.

Gaelera and the Kelvhan followed her on to shore. She turned to address them curtly.

“I don’t know what’s been happening. I’d better go and check it’s safe. You two stay here.”

“I shall, indeed,” Gaelera said. “It is my wish to view the serpent before it disappears.”

“If it disappears,” said Maeneb grimly. “I need to find Huldarion.”

The Kelvhan nodded. “I will guard the lady,” he told her.

Gaelera ran her hands down her wet skirts, and turned her face towards where the sun lurked, a mere glimmer behind the mist. Sleek, wet, basking like a seal, thought Maeneb.

She turned away and trudged across the stones until they turned to sand and grass. Then she could run.

And for a disconcerting instant she saw Durba running alongside her, dripping, smiling in anticipation of excitement.

“What were you doing? This is not a game,” said Maeneb.

“But it is an adventure,” Durba said, eyes bright. Her voice had no sound.

“It is not! It is not an adventure!” Maeneb muttered furiously. “Go back! Go back! Just go away!”

“Ohhhh,” said Durba, with a long sigh of waves on shingle. Her image slid apart and was dissolved into the sea.