Elder Race(29)

“And Farbourand itself?”

“Overgrown. Not by the forest but by . . . the usual. We don’t want to go there.”

“Your familiar, can it do anything else except look?” Because she wasn’t going to turn away any help, right now.

He blinked, and she sensed he was puzzled, though if so it was a puzzlement locked deep within him, only a faint curiosity making it to his face. “It can do many things, but it won’t. I do not have the authority to simply make it obey. There are rules governing what it will do at my bidding, and what it will do of its own reckoning. Lyn . . . esse Fourth Daughter, forgive me, but you are taking what I say very calmly. You . . . I’m sorry, you can’t understand what I . . .” He frowned. “And I shouldn’t tell you, of course.” Sorcerers were reticent creatures, after all. Perhaps part of his bargain with the familiar was that he kept its secrets.

“Can you at least tell me what the demon said to you?” she asked. The attack, Esha’s infection, these things had shouted louder than his revelation just before, but she had been given plenty of time to brood. “Did it tell you what it wanted? Is there some way we can command it, or placate it?” She had been very ready to fight the demon, but the more she had girded on her armour and readied herself to make her challenge, the less she felt it would achieve. A late moment to start thinking like her mother, that grand storybook gestures were perhaps not the most efficacious way to help the world.

Nyrgoth Elder was staring blankly at her, but then he plainly understood what she meant. “It spoke,” he said slowly. “I could not understand it. Whatever it said to me was different from the communion it had with the parts of itself. But . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t have the language, in my tongue or yours. It wants something. Or at least it is driven to do something, perhaps, from its very nature, as a tree’s nature is to grow. Not conquest. Not hunger. Not cruelty. It has a need and a reason for doing what it does and being as it is. But neither need nor reason meant anything to me. I don’t even have words or concepts for it.” The thought seemed to badly shake him, and she felt as though the ground itself had become unstable beneath her. This was the Elder, the ancient sorcerer who had lived in his impregnable tower since the dawn of time and come back from the dead. And he feared, even if it was his lack of understanding he feared more than the demon itself.

“You use this word, ‘demon,’” he said at last. “What do you even mean by it?”

Lyn frowned at him. It hardly seemed her place to lesson a sorcerer in such things. “Surely you . . .”

“You remember the broken worker we met in the mountains?”

“That yet follows you.”

“I’ve told it to sleep, to go away, but the part of it that should obey such words is flawed.” He shrugged. “You wouldn’t call it a ‘demon’?”

“No.” Obviously, but apparently not to him.

“And the servants that Ulmoth suborned, when Astresse and I went against him, not demons?”

“Monsters.”

“A distinct word, unrelated in origin,” he noted, as though to himself. “So what is a demon, then? What has everyone recognised, in this thing we face?”

“Something from outside.” She felt he must be testing her. “Something that is not part of the world, and that wishes us harm.”

“Outside,” again more to himself than her, and then waved his fingers at the night sky. “Up there?”

“No, outside,” and she had the curious feeling that now it was he, the Elder, failing to understand her.

*

The next morning she was awakened by Allwer’s yell. He had taken the last watch, and the dawn had brought more than just daylight down through the branches.

Lyn had her sword out before she made any decision about it, leaping up and swinging the point at the gaps between the trees. Her dreams had been full of demon-taint anyway, familiar faces and places disfigured by that scaly, eye-pocked growth. Now she expected a staggering host of the merged and the eaten-away, the malformed and the unrecognisable to be emerging all around the clearing.

There was just one visitor, though, and if it was not exactly welcome, nor was it demon touched. Nyrgoth had called down the monstrous flying servant.

The first rays of the dawn touched its metal hide as it swung ponderously towards them through the air. The rings that were its wings, each wide enough that Lyn could have fallen lengthways through them, rattled the branches, sending a fine dust springing away from them. It had lost a leg since last they saw it, and its carapace bore shiny scars from who knew what encounters. It was still a fearsome sight so close, though. Nyrgoth stood before it, one hand up and his fingers seeming to signal and govern its descent. The three of them watched him silently, there in the monster’s shadow and yet undaunted. Lyn thought about what he’d said, how the creature was left over from the distant past. It had been a magician’s servant, and now it had no master and so it shadowed Nyrgoth, hoping he would instruct it.

He spoke to it in words none of them knew, sometimes commanding, sometimes questioning. It had no voice of its own, but his manner suggested that satisfactory answers came to him somehow, and at last it rose unsteadily into the air, veered abruptly sideways to rip and scrabble against a tree, tearing up the outer layers so that the sap jetted out in a mist, and then returned to the air, ascending until it was only a shape again.