By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar

Author:Lavie Tidhar [Tidhar, Lavie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838931308
Publisher: Head of Zeus

41

‘That fucking fuck,’ Laudine says.

‘Oh, I will deal with him in due course,’ Guinevere says darkly.

They ride out of the Dolorous Tor at daybreak. The sky overhead is bleak. This smog in the air is bewitched with dark sorcery. Guinevere thinks of star stones and poisoned metal. She thinks of devastation.

Perhaps from the air you can see it, she thinks. A dark path cutting across the landscape. The route of fire plotted by the fallen star.

All through that day and the next the sun is hidden behind the smog. They’d entered a land of mist. Shapes move in the fog, and coloured lights, and she can hear sobs and screams. Footsteps come and go. She hears the neigh of horses. She hears the ghostly clash of steel. The tang of sulphur in the air, the stench of coal, the burned taste of mistletoe. The smoke gets in her eyes and into her mind and makes her see fantastical shapes, all bursting stars and ghostly apparitions. There are no maps in this land beyond the wall. The Angels travel blind.

At night it gets colder and there are no stars and distant fires glow behind the wall of smoke. The night is restless with the tread of troubled spirits. The Angels stop, exhausted, make camp beside a giant oak. They come to realise too late it is a gibbet. The mutilated corpses of some hideous beings hang from thick ropes. She’d seen nobody like them. They are mutatio, transformed. Human shapes but made deformed and awful, some with arms like trunks and some with skins all green and covered in boils. One has three eyes. The girls have not the energy to even cut them down. They huddle by the ancient tree and fall into uneasy sleep. They do not build a fire.

In the night a beast passes questing through their camp. Guinevere wakens. The creature moves stealthily, almost sadly. It has many mouths and tongues. It looks at Guinevere out of multiple sad eyes. It stops and stares.

‘Hello,’ Guinevere says.

The creature warbles at her. It cannot form coherent words, but she can sense the need behind it, the desperate aloneness, the fear and pain. She says, ‘You are a girl,’ in mild surprise. The creature warbles. Guinevere strokes her fur.

Footsteps in the fog. A knight appears. Bedraggled, thin. The creature turns and faces him. The knight looks on at her. A look of longing, and despair.

‘My girl,’ he says. ‘My girl.’

The creature shrieks in wordless love and pain. The sound’s awful, it cuts the night. The Choir of Angels awaken, they stand guard, instinctively, knives drawn, siding with this questing beast.

‘I mean her no harm,’ the knight says tiredly. ‘She is of me. My daughter.’

The creature keens.

‘Then let her be.’

‘I can’t.’ The anguish in his voice seems real. ‘It’s like a part of me and if I go too far I die, or she does, or we both.’

They seem frozen there, staring at each other.

‘Where do you come from, knight?’ Luned says.

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