Crusader

But he stopped in that heartbeat before he should have lifted into the air. The whispering had gone now — had it ever existed save in the dark spaces of his mind? — and the object looked innocuous, safe … save … save for that irritating sense of power emanating from it.

This object was a thing of magic. A fairly sorry object, granted, but mayhap his master might find it amusing.

The Hawkchild hopped forward, flapped his wings so he rose in the air a short distance, and grasped the object between his talons.

A heartbeat later he was gone, rising into a thermal that would carry him south-west into the throbbing, blackened heart of the wasteland.

Qeteb laughed, and the wasteland cringed.

“He thinks himself safe in whatever hideaway he has built for himself,” he whispered (and yet that whisper sounded as a roar in the mind of all who could hear him). “And when I find it… when I find its secret…”

The Midday Demon strode stiff-legged about the interior of the Dark Tower, his arms flung back, his metalled wings rasping across the flagged flooring of the mausoleum.

He screamed, then bellowed, then roared with laughter again.

It felt so good to be whole once more! Nevermore would he allow himself to be trapped.

Qeteb jerked to a halt, and his eyes, hidden beneath his black-visored helmet, fell on the woman standing in the gloom under one of the columned arches.

She was rather more beautiful than not, with luminous dark hair, a sinuous body beneath her stained and rust-splotched robe, and wings that had been combed into a feathered neatness trailing invitingly from her back.

Qeteb wondered how loudly she would scream if he steadied her with one fist on her shoulder, and tore a wing out with the other fist.

She said she was his mother, but Qeteb found he did not like to hear what she said. He was complete within himself, a oneness that needed no other, and he had certainly never been entrapped in her vile womb. She had never provided him with life!

But she had provided him his flesh, and for that Qeteb spared her the agony of sudden de-wingment. For the moment.

There was a movement from another side and Qeteb almost smiled. There, the soulless body of a woman, waiting for him. He lusted, for he found her very soullessness inviting and reached for her, but was distracted by the voice of Sheol from beyond the doorway.

“Great Father. One of the Hawkchilds has returned with —” “With the gateway to the StarSon’s den?” Qeteb demanded.

“No,” Sheol said, and stepped inside. Behind her walked a Hawkchild, carrying something in its hands.

“Great Father!” the Hawkchild said, and dropped to one knee before Qeteb. “See what I have discovered for you!”

He placed the object on the ground before Qeteb, and the Midday Demon looked down.

It was a wooden bowl, carved from a single block of warm, red wood.

Qeteb instinctively loathed it, and just as instinctively knew that it would bring him great fortune.

Beyond the mausoleum the Maze swarmed with creatures dark of visage and of mind; the vast majority of demented creatures within the wasteland had found their way to the land’s black heart. They climbed and capered and whispered through every corridor and conundrum of the Maze, a writhing army of maddened animals and peoples, waiting only for Qeteb, waiting for the word for them to act.

Out there waited a hunting, for the hunt in the Maze had proven disappointing in the extreme. The man, the false StarSon, had offered his breast to the point of the sword without a whimper (indeed, with a smile and with words of love), and now the hopes and dreams of the maddened horde lay in drifts and shards along the hardened corridors of the Maze.

There was a hunt, somewhere. There was a victim, somewhere. There was a sacrifice, waiting, somewhere, and the whispering, maniacal horde knew it.

They lived for the Hunt, and for the Hunt alone.

There was one creature crawling through the Maze who was not at all insane, although some may have doubted the lucidness of the twisting formulations of his mind.

WolfStar, still covered in Caelum’s blood, still with the horror of that plunging sword imprinted on his mind, crawling towards what he hoped might be a salvation, but which he thought would probably be a death.

Creatures swarmed around and over him, and although a few gave him a cursory glance, or a peck, or a grinding with dulled teeth, none paid him any sustained attention.

After all, he looked like just one more of their company.

Chapter 2 The Detritus of an Epic (#ulink_ff55c47b-a0e9-54e4-a787-eb1ee6c27a90)

A rather tumbledown, grey-walled hovel sat in the centre of the clearing. Flowerbeds surrounded the hut, but they were overgrown with mouldy-stemmed weeds and thistles. A picket fence surrounded the hovel and its gardens; most of the pickets were snapped off. The once-white paint had faded and peeled from the pickets that remained whole, so that the fence resembled nothing so much as the sad mouth of a senile gape-brained man.

Ur’s enchanted nursery had fallen into unhappy days.

Two women sat on a garden seat set in a small paved area.

Several of the paving stones had crumbled, and dust crept across the uneven court.

The Mother wrapped Her fingers around a cup of tea and tried not to sigh again. She was tired — the effort of closing off the trails to the Sacred Groves against any incursions by the Demons had been exhausting — but more worrying was Her overwhelming feeling of malaise. The Mother did not feel well. In truth, She felt profoundly ill.

Tencendor had been wasted by Qeteb, the Earth Tree was gone (surviving only in embryonic form in the seedling She had given Faraday), and the Mother could feel the life force ebbing from Her.

But not before — oh gods, not before! — that life could be restored elsewhere!

“Is it gone?” a cracked voice beside Her asked, and the Mother jumped.

“What? Oh, no, thank you, I still have a half cup left.” And yet almost everything else had gone, hadn’t it? Everything…

Ur grumbled incoherently into her cup, and the Mother looked at her. The hood of Ur’s red cloak was lying over her angular shoulders, revealing the woman’s bald skull. The skin over Ur’s face was deeply wrinkled, but it stretched tight and angry over the bones of her skull.

Ur had lost her forest. For over fifteen thousand years Ur had tended her nursery hidden deep within the trees of the Sacred Groves. As each female Avar Bane had died, so her soul had come here to be transplanted out as a seedling in a tiny terracotta pot. Forty-two thousand Banes had transformed in this manner, and Ur had known them all — their names, their histories, their likes and loves and disappointments. And, having cradled them, Ur had then handed them over to Faraday to be replanted as the great Minstrelsea Forest.

Which, after only forty-two years of life, Qeteb had then turned to matchsticks.

Matchsticks! Ur rolled the word over and over in her mind, using it as both curse and promise of revenge.

Matchsticks.

Ur’s beloved had been reviled, murdered, and utterly destroyed by the excrement of the universe.

Her lips tightened away from her teeth — incongruously white and square — and Ur silently snarled at her ravaged garden. Revenge …

“It is not good to think such thoughts,” the Mother said, and laid Her hand on Ur’s gaunt thigh.

Ur closed her lips into a thin hard line, and she did not speak.

The Mother fought again to repress a sigh and looked instead out to the forest beyond Ur’s decaying garden.

Everything was fading. The forests of the Sacred Groves, even the Horned Ones themselves. The Mother had not realised how closely tied to Tencendor the Groves were — as was the health of all who resided in them. Tencendor had been wasted, and if DragonStar could not right the wrong of Qeteb and his companion Demons, and finish what the Enemy had begun so many aeons before, then eventually the Groves would die.