Boris was not alone – he was a twin-thing – and he was not Boris! The sensation was weird, frightening. He clung tightly to the memory of Boris, rejected the other.
No, no! Let yourself go. Enter the thing. Be one with it. Know what it knew. Like this:
There was warmth … a hard firm platform beneath, soft warm down overhead . . . sky no longer bright and blue but dark . . . many white pricks of light, which were stars … the night was still … a warm weight pressing down, wings covering … the twin-thing snuggling . . . something close by, a sound, a hooting! … the warm body above – the parent body – pressing down protectively, wings closing tighter, trembling … a slow, heavy beating of the air, growing louder, passing, fading, growing faint . . . again the hooting, farther afield … the owl hunted smaller prey tonight … the parent body relaxing a little, her rapidly beating heart slowing . . . bright points of light filling the sky … soft down . . . warmth.
Now break the body, Dragosani! Tear it open! Crush the skull between your fingers and listen to the vapours of the brain! Look at it in your hands, the entrails, the guts and feathers and blood and bones! Taste it, Dragosani! Use all your senses: touch, taste, see, hear, smell! Use all five – and you will discover a sixth!
Time to fly! … time to go … the air calling, lifting the small new feathers and beckoning . . . and the twin-being already gone, flown … the parent beings eager, frustrated, fluttering, guiding, calling, ‘come, fly, like this, like this!’ … the earth a dizzy distance below, and the nest swaying in the wind.
Part of the fledgling, Boris launched himself with it from the shuddering platform of twigs which was the nest. For one brief moment he knew the triumph of flight . . . and in the next knew failure. A squally, blustery day, the wind caught him unawares, side on. After that: utter confusion rapidly turning to nightmare! Spinning, tumbling – an untried wing catching in the fork of a branch, twisting and breaking – the agony of hanging by broken wing, and then of falling, fluttering, plummeting – and the final sharp crack of a small skull upon a stone . . .
Boris snapped back into himself, snapped out of the spell, saw the mess of a thing he held in his hands. There! said the old devil in the ground. And do you hill think I can teach you nothing, Dragosani? How is this for knowledge, and was there ever a rarer gift? In all my lifetime I knew only a handful with a talent such as this. And you have taken to it as a- why, as a fledgling takes to flight! Welcome to a small, ancient, very select fraternity indeed, Dragosani.
The mess slid from Boris’s hands, stained the earth, left slime on his palms and slim fingers. ‘What?’ he said, his jaw hanging open, clammy sweat suddenly starting from his brow.
‘What. . .?’
Boris Dragosani (answered the devil in the ground) -necromancer!
Then, the horror of the thing bursting over him, Boris had screamed long and loud; and once more he’d fled, and fled in such panic that later he could remember very little of it except the pounding of his feet and heart.
But he couldn’t run from his ‘gift’, which from that moment on had gone with him.
Or perhaps it wasn’t the horror of what he had done (or the suspicion of what he had become) which robbed his mind of the memory of his terror-flight that time, but something else, which came between his screaming and the flight proper. At any rate, vague pictures of that something had remained in his mind ever since, and would spring to its surface on occasion when he least expected them – as now:
The gloomy glade of the tomb, and the shattered corpse spread in a welter of feathers and guts and limbs wrenched from their sockets. And a thin and leprous tentacle thrusting upward through the scummy earth, pushing aside soil, pine needles, clots of lichen and chips of stone. Leprous, yes, and composed of something other than flesh, but with scarlet veins pulsing.