Lilith’s Castle

Lilith’s Castle
Gill Alderman

In this sequel to The Memory Palace, fantasy crosses over to the real world as the Malthassan Archmage Koschei Corbillion becomes Guy Parados, his creator.When the magician Koschei escaped through the mind of his creator Guy Parados into the world where he is fiction, he became Guy Parados. And Parados became the Red Horse in the land of Malthassa… his own invention, he believed. But Malthassa has deeper roots, as deep as hell, and it is there the Red Horse must go.Gry’s father passed along the road to the Palace of Shadows where Asmodeus rules, King of the Lightless Garden. Pursued by the shaman Aza and riding the Red Horse, Gry must follow the same road, though it is the road to hell.From hell all other places are accessible: this is a reason to go there, the only one not steeped in madness. But it is not Gry’s reason. Gry is only running from home, riding the Red Horse which was once her father’s horse – not a woman’s. And surely she is mad, for the Red Horse talks to her…At the Fortress of Lilith the two worlds will meet, and between the two walk the Gypsies.

GILL ALDERMAN

Lilith’s Castle

Each page a promise that all

shall be well

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_ced21c2f-cce0-5948-8654-c7352afaf335)

Harper Voyager

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1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

Copyright © Gill Alderman 1999

Gill Alderman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006482727

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008228446

Version: 2016-12-22

DEDICATION (#ulink_9393e627-5754-5553-954c-93943ad4b048)

To Justine and Dorothy

with love.

CONTENTS

Cover (#ubc801442-c9ee-527b-9c7e-0ffa5a2f5a1c)

Title Page (#ud7dfbb93-7b19-541a-aeb2-a3d88ef671ee)

Copyright (#ulink_4ef57e15-d690-5409-8cd8-98b0309c4858)

Dedication (#ulink_05abee13-a0d3-5166-b2d9-42cdc910258c)

Prologue (#ulink_380484c4-84cc-5cef-aada-f20868d6a562)

The Pathless Way (#ulink_e7c791e9-a4f4-5f64-802a-ca2be4d31bd9)

The Palace of Shadows (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_ab2504eb-6387-55a4-a84b-16630c67d4db)

he fleeth as it were a shadow

Nandje, Rider of the Red Horse, Father and Imandi to the Ima tribe, lay still beneath the ceremonial blanket which covered him. The bustard feathers woven into it pierced his face with their long barbs and the rawhide strips lay heavier than lead on his throat, part of him and also something separate, deadly and symbolic. The felted horsehair had sucked up his blood and sunk into the rotting craters which were his wounds. He knew himself to be no longer human and a man but as much and little as the earth on which the Horse Herd also trampled, wounding its soft surface with the same lunular pits.

It was ill to be thus trapped underground, within a redundant body whose eyelids were held down with stones, nostrils and lips sewn shut with dried Plains grasses. Nor could he recall the Past, whatever that unlikely concept was, or look into the Future as he had once been able, in life. The Now, terrible, endless, was all: death inescapable, triumphant, eternal.

Aza, the Shaman, lifted the blanket from Nandje’s face and observed the dead Imandi’s crushed skull and grotesquely distorted face. The skin was drying out and splitting, pulling his twelve-month-old stitching apart. He found an end and pulled the grass strands out, to the last shred and wisp, using his nails where the flesh had tightened round the thread.

‘The sleep of death is long,’ said Aza ‘but there comes a time to awaken.’

He took up the pointed stick he had prepared during the long mourning and thrust it between the lips and teeth of the corpse, down savagely, hard to the base of the throat. It groaned and belched as the gases rose and bubbled from its liquid interior and a terrible stench was hurled into his face. The corpse moths which had been incubated in Nandje’s body flew free, a many-winged pied cloud.

‘Nay, go peacefully to the Palace of Shadows!’ he cried. ‘Be wise and kind, as you were with us.’

The final alteration had taken place with the freeing and the flight of Nandje’s soul. All that remained was lolling, putrefying matter which Aza might leave alone to complete its metamorphosis, flesh to grass. Tenderly and carefully, for this was the last office he was able to perform for Nandje, he rolled back and folded the death-blanket and carried it with him, up into the light.

THE PATHLESS WAY (#ulink_9bd4ae5d-e2fa-5517-af70-2e6e044f6448)

Leave the past behind; leave the future behind;

leave the present behind

It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare

to be strayed and destroyed