Viper's Daughter Page 10

  Swiftly Torak laid his bow and arrows within reach, untied Orvo’s slingstones from his waist and dabbed earthblood on the bone weights.

  A faraway honking. The white cloud was rising: Wolf had put them to flight. Torak’s heart was pounding. Don’t whirl them above your head, Dark had taught him. Cast from your heel, twisting your body and putting your arm into it…

  Wolf had done well, the flock was speeding towards Torak, its shadow racing over the fell. The honking and whirring of wings grew to a rush, and still he kept low: if they saw him all was lost. Now the wind they were making was blowing back his hair. The leader flew overhead. Springing to his feet, Torak whirled the slingstones and threw. The thongs whipped round a goose, the weights clacked, the bird thudded to earth. Grabbing his bow, Torak loosed an arrow, downed another, then another. The flock was so huge he could have shot blindfold, but they flew fast, and as he flung round to shoot again, he hit one last bird before they vanished into the clouds.

  Wolf bounded up, lashing his tail. Good hunt!

  Torak sensed something sweeping overhead. ‘Thank you for bringing back my luck!’ he called to the snow owl.

  Wolf took two geese and Torak kept two for himself. Resisting the urge to rip them open and devour their livers at once, he cut off their heads and took one as an offering to the owl’s lookout, leaving the other on a bed of dwarf willow for the Forest. Then he cut out the livers.

  That first bite: rich, bloody and sweet… He skinned and roasted a bird to eat now, then smoked the other for later, with the hearts and tongues. While Wolf happily demolished his geese, Torak ate and ate, crunching crisp skin and juicy roast flesh, licking fat off his fingers, cramming his mouth till he couldn’t manage another bite.

  To fulfil the Pact he wrapped the feathers and bones in a goose skin and left it at the snow owl’s lookout. Soon afterwards the great bird swooped and carried it off.

  Snuggled under the skinboat, Torak lay listening to the crack of embers and Wolf burping contentedly in his sleep. He felt more hopeful than he had in days. Renn had tried to slow him down but it hadn’t worked for long.

  She would have enjoyed the goose hunt. He pictured her dark eyes fixed on the prey; her straight, strong back as she took aim. Drifting asleep, he imagined they were together in the Forest. He even heard the murmurs of trees.

  The day after the goose hunt, he reached Waigo.

  His safe-passage stick got him a bowl of rancid walrus in a Narwal shelter, but his questions met with blank stares, and there was no Orvo to translate. ‘Marupai? Naiginn? Renn? Rheu?’ Nothing. He drew a Sea-eagle tattoo on his hand, but if Renn had been here in disguise, they weren’t telling.

  Nothing to gain by staying, so he paddled away and put in at the next bay. Another day gone and what had he achieved?

  It was so windy he could hardly stand as he carried the skinboat onto the fell. He found scant shelter in the lee of a rocky outcrop with a stream rushing past. He was too angry and frustrated to care.

  Wolf was also in a bad mood, scratching furiously. When Torak tried to rub him with bloodstone, Wolf warned him off with a tetchy growl.

  The pack-sister was at the Great Den of the Taillesses, he told Torak.

  Torak asked where she’d gone, and Wolf’s gaze told him what he already knew: north across the Great Wet.

  Yes, but where?

  The sun was low, the charcoal sky shot with angry crimson. Now what? wondered Torak. He couldn’t simply head north across the open Sea, he might paddle off the Edge of the World.

  Wolf was still scratching.

  It occurred to Torak that he always scratched the same place: on his left flank, behind his foreleg.

  Suddenly Torak had an appalling idea. Gently he touched Wolf’s flank. This time his pack-brother let him. Torak parted the thick fur. It was as he’d thought: Wolf’s flank bore the scars of tokoroth claws from his battle three summers before.

  Torak felt as if he was falling from a great height. Wolf’s scars. Renn’s scar on her hand. The scar on his own forearm. All three had one thing in common.

  At last Torak knew what Naiginn truly was.

  The dark-grey sky was slashed with crimson as Naiginn’s skinboat flew over the waves. Waigo had dwindled to a speck. The Mage’s Rock was lurching closer. It made Renn giddy, but when she shut her eyes she felt worse.

  ‘Are you sick?’ said Naiginn without turning round.

  She leant over the side and retched.

  ‘Must be those ptarmigan droppings,’ he said.

  ‘I spat them out.’

  ‘Sea-sickness.’

  ‘I’m never sea-sick.’ Her head was spinning, his voice coming from far away.

  In the distance she saw Rip and Rek teasing a sea-eagle. Their twisting swoops made her dizzier.

  When she opened her eyes, Rek was perched on the side of the boat, peering up at her. Cuckoo, croaked the raven. Cuckoo.

  ‘Why do they keep doing that?’ snapped Naiginn.

  The raven’s fathomless black gaze met Renn’s with piercing intent. Cuckoo… What was Rek trying to say?

  The skinboat swerved and the raven shot skywards, uttering stony warnings: chuk-chuk-chuk!

  It took Renn a moment to realize that Naiginn had swept past the Mage’s Rock. ‘What are you doing?’ she cried.

  ‘It’s just a rock. Nothing there.’

  ‘But— You said Marupai’s doing a rite!’

  He laughed. ‘I made that up.’

  Clutching the sides of the boat, Renn watched the Rock sink beneath the waves. ‘Then where is he?’

  ‘Who cares?’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  He didn’t reply.

  Her vision was blurred, her lips numb. With a plunging sensation she remembered the bitter brew he’d given her at Waigo. ‘You drugged me,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Well done,’ he sneered.

  When Renn came to, she was lying in front of Naiginn in the bow. Her head was pounding, her wrists tied behind her back.

  Naiginn bared his white teeth in a grin. ‘I used Torak’s headband. I thought that was fitting, since he’s what drew you north.’

  Renn tried to sit up and bashed her cheek against the boat. Naiginn watched dispassionately, as if observing the scrabblings of an ant.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she said.

  Laying his paddle across his knees, he flung back his hood and took off his eyeshield. ‘Tell me,’ he said calmly. ‘What do you call a tokoroth when it grows up?’

  She swallowed. ‘That’s never happened.’

  ‘But what if it did? And what if, instead of a tokoroth – instead of some feeble little demon trapped in the worthless flesh of a child – what if you found yourself face to face with an all-powerful ice demon in the body of a grown man? What would you call that, sister?’

  Renn did not reply.

  He bent closer and his light-blue eyes were empty and cold beyond imagining, not a spark of human warmth. ‘Me.’

  Rip and Rek had been trying to tell her for days. Cuckoo. The stranger who pretends to be what he is not.

  She lay trussed like a goose, watching Naiginn scything the Sea with swift, sure strokes. His eyes were fixed on the skyline. He only appeared human. His face and form were those of a young man, but inside he was demon. No clan-soul, no sense of right or wrong. No feelings whatsoever – except a hatred of all living things and a raging hunger to destroy.

  ‘That’s why you don’t like earthblood,’ she said. ‘That’s why you hate the smell of bloodstone. You fear it because it smells of the Otherworld, where demons are trapped.’

  ‘I don’t fear anything,’ he snarled.

  ‘It’s why you hate the sun. Because it’s stronger than ice.’

  ‘Nothing’s stronger than ice! Ice chases the sun into a cave and keeps it there all winter.’

  ‘Then the sun returns and melts the ice.’

  ‘Where I was born the ice never melts.’

  ‘Where’s that?�
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  In his inhumanly perfect features, Renn saw traces of their mother, and although he was silent, she sensed his desire to talk: to boast how he had deceived her. This more than anything convinced her that he truly was Seshru’s son. He had the same soaring vanity, the same unshakeable belief that he was stronger and cleverer than everyone else.

  She said, ‘You told me once that your father met the Viper Mage on the fells. Was that a lie too?’

  ‘Why would I lie about that? She told him she came from the sun, and the lovesick fool believed her. She’d fled north after the Soul-Eaters were scattered, she needed a refuge where she was unknown. Marupai was perfect. She made him do whatever she wanted. Soon he blurted out his precious secret: that he alone of his clan had found the Island at the Edge of the World.’ His chin jutted. ‘She made him take her there. It’s where I was born.’

  Renn could tell that in his overweening vanity, he revered the story of his creation. ‘She tricked Marupai into believing that as I was a “child of the sun”, my spirit would scorch mortals to death unless she hid it with a spell. So while he stayed in camp, she took me to the ice mountain that rules the Island. She snared a great and powerful demon. She trapped it in my infant flesh.’

  It began to make sense. Seshru had longed to create a tokoroth, her own demonic creature to obey her will. She’d tried once and failed. What no one suspected was that she’d tried again – and succeeded. She’d captured an ice demon and trapped it in her child.

  ‘But if all this happened when you were a baby,’ said Renn, ‘how do you know about it?’

  ‘Are you so stupid you’ve forgotten what I told you? After seven winters she came back! She told me what I am. She promised that when I was a man she would return and set me free to fulfil my destiny: to roam the world, feeding for ever on the souls of the living.’ Hungrily he gazed at the skyline, envisioning limitless carnage.

  ‘But she never did come back,’ Renn said quietly.

  ‘She cheated me!’ he shouted. ‘I was glad when I heard she was dead! Dead like a dog in the dirt, with an arrow in her breast!’ His eyes were bloodshot, his face contorted with rage. Renn wondered how she had ever thought him beautiful.

  ‘So why do you need me?’

  He shot her a look of freezing hatred. ‘What she told Marupai about masking my nature was half-true. When she trapped my demon souls in that filthy, bawling infant, she made a second spell to hide what I really am.’

  Renn nodded. ‘A masking spell. That’s why I never sensed what’s wrong with you.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m more perfect than you’ll ever grasp!’

  ‘That’s why Torak didn’t sense it either,’ Renn said to herself. ‘Or Wolf. That’s why it made our scars itch: because we got them from tokoroths and the demon bear. But what about Marupai? Surely your own father—’

  ‘He’s not my father! That was Seshru’s lie, to make him care for me after she left. She made him swear to guard “his son” with his life – and he obeyed. He’ll go on pining for his “lost love” till his dying day.’

  ‘But now she’s dead, so your demon souls are trapped.’

  His face twisted. ‘Sixteen winters,’ he said bitterly. ‘Sixteen winters with “my father” and the other stinking mortals. Sixteen winters surrounded by the living, yet unable to feed. Making do with the shreds of souls that cling to eyes, tongues, heads: the taste and smell but never the souls themselves… Can you imagine what that’s like? Always famished, never satisfied?’

  Renn’s mind was racing. She was starting to see why he needed her.

  ‘You’re wondering how you fit in,’ he said.

  ‘You’re right, I am.’

  ‘Of course I’m right, I can read your every thought.’

  No, you can’t, Renn told him silently. This made her feel stronger. Naiginn was clever, but so was she. Struggling upright, she said, ‘So how do I fit in?’

  He tightened his grip on the paddle. ‘The masking spell that binds my demon souls can only be broken in the place where it was made. And only by a Mage who is bone kin to our mother.’

  ‘Ah. And you can’t do Magecraft.’

  He hated being reminded. ‘When I heard I had a sister who was a Mage, I knew it was meant to be. All I had to do was find a way to bring her north.’

  ‘So that dream Marupai had about your people starving, and the raven with the broken wing—’

  He laughed. ‘I had to tell you something when I “just happened” to find you floundering in that riptide!’

  “And before? How did you “make” me leave the Forest?’

  ‘Easier than I could have dreamt! At first I thought Torak was an obstacle to be eliminated. Then I saw how to use him. Oh, it was beautiful! All I had to do was make you believe you were going to hurt him!’

  The pieces were fitting together like pack ice. ‘You set that spring-trap. You put the viper in the tree, you planted the signs that sent me north. You scratched Torak’s marks on the bark.’

  He was shaking with laughter. ‘You were so ready to believe it! Whining about your mother and your Soul-Eater marrow! I wonder if your dull little human mind can grasp the brilliance of what I did? Can you see how I’ve used your disgusting human weakness – your love for your mate – to make you do what I want?’

  ‘But you can’t make me do Magecraft.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I can.’ Seizing her by the hair, he dragged her face close to his. ‘We’re going to the Island where I was made. You’re going to break the spell and set me free.’

  To catch your prey, you have to think like it. You have to become your prey.

  Naiginn was a demon. Torak knew that now. And the demon had Renn. With an effort of will, Torak stifled panic. Panic wouldn’t help her. Naiginn was his prey: Torak had to find him. This meant he had to think like him, he had to become as a demon and put aside right and wrong.

  In all the times he’d ever spirit walked, Torak had never become demon, but he had become snake. And like a demon, a snake knows no right or wrong. It knows no emotion except the urge to kill. To find Naiginn, Torak drew on the ruthlessness the viper had left in his souls. He resolved to break his word to the north wind – and fly.

  The wind knew what he meant to do. It screamed in his ears as he overturned the skinboat for a shelter, it clawed his eyes and tore at his hair. ‘You can’t stop me!’ he cried. ‘I have to find out where he’s taken her!’

  It wasn’t much of a shelter, wedged in the rocks below the outcrop. Wolf threw him a doubtful glance: Couldn’t you find somewhere better?

  Torak climbed to the topmost rock. It was spattered with droppings and around it he found eagle pellets crammed with bones, feathers and fur. Good. If these pellets had been left by a young eagle like the one he’d rescued, it should be easy to control; if by a full-grown bird, he would find some way to bend it to his will.

  To lure the bird to the rocks he tucked scraps of smoked goose heart in cracks, then went and hid under the skinboat.

  As he waited for the eagle to take the bait, he enticed Wolf into the shelter with more goose heart. He didn’t know enough wolf talk to explain about spirit walking. He couldn’t tell Wolf that while his name-soul and clan-soul were flying in the eagle’s body, his own body would remain here, unconscious and vulnerable. Instead he simply asked Wolf to watch over him while he slept.

  Wolf lay on his belly with his muzzle close to Torak’s. Sensing Torak’s unease, he snuffle-licked his chin. I am with you. I never leave. Torak breathed his pack-brother’s meaty breath and stroked his furry flank. He felt the comforting beat of Wolf’s tail against his leg. I know.

  It was two summers since he’d spirit walked, but before leaving the Forest he’d made Dark give him a piece of the black root that loosens souls. Its carrion stink evoked evil memories. Spirit walking is painful and hard. You never know what the other creature’s spirit will be like till it’s too late and you’re in its marrow.

  Huddled in the g
loom, Torak held the root to his lips and listened to the stream tumbling past the outcrop, the wind battering the skinboat.

  He thought of Naiginn’s ice-blue eyes and empty smile. He hadn’t wanted to touch Torak’s medicine horn. All demons fear earthblood; and the horn was made from an antler tine of the World Spirit himself.

  But why had Wolf never sensed that Naiginn was a demon? Why hadn’t Renn?

  And why had Naiginn saved him from being dragged overboard when they were fishing? Why leave those waymarkers for him to find? Did Naiginn want him to follow, for some mysterious purpose of his own? Or was he taunting Torak? You can’t catch me, but let’s see you try!

  ‘Oh, I’ll try,’ Torak said between his teeth. ‘I’ll keep trying till I find you and if you hurt her I’ll rip out your spine.’

  Sea-eagles fly quietly. Torak didn’t know it had taken the bait until Wolf pricked his ears.

  The root was so bitter he could hardly force it down. Darts stabbed his temples. Darkness gnawed his marrow, wrenching his souls loose. He shouted in pain…

  …and out of his beak came a screech.

  The eagle was furious, things kept going wrong, it was so humiliating. First he’d fallen in the Sea and been rescued. Now this wobbly landing onto his perch, for a beakful so dry he nearly choked. This shouldn’t happen to an eagle, eagles deserve respect.

  Deep in the bird’s marrow, Torak tried to turn its head towards the Sea, but though it was stupid, its spirit was strong.

  Like all hunters it was inquisitive, and it had spotted an odd-looking boulder below its perch. Lifting its tail it spattered the skinboat with droppings. Then, jerking its head to sharpen its sight, it spread its wings and hopped onto the wind.

  For the second time in his life Torak was flying. As a raven he’d been wild with the joy of flight, but now with an eagle’s pride he let the wind carry him higher in an exhilarating spiral. He was the strongest bird in the sky and he flew fast, piercing the clouds, challenging the sun itself.

  But he was hungry, so he tilted a wingtip and flew level to scan his domain. All lay beneath him and he saw all with the keenest sight of any living creature. Every detail was achingly sharp, colours more throbbingly alive than Torak had ever imagined. Through the eagle’s eyes he saw the russet flecks of dust on a lemming’s paws as it darted for its burrow. He saw the oily green sheen on a cluster of hare droppings, the strident yellow prickles on a caterpillar curled in the moss. He saw a purple water-snail hiding in the stream near the outcrop, and a shard of blue sunlight trapped in an icicle on a distant mountain.