Sinner by Sara Douglass. Book One of The Wayfarer Redemption

“And you?”

Faraday paused before answering. “What I have has not been affected by the cessation of the Star Dance, Zenith. I have enough to protect me.”

“I hope so, Faraday. How can you know what you will face when the Demons break through?”

Faraday smiled suddenly, brilliantly. “Zenith! I have been through so much. I have been rent and torn and reborn too many times to fear death again. I doubt the Demons will worry me over much. And Drago will need me.”

“Drago… who knows if he is even still alive?”

Faraday’s smile died and she dropped Zenith’s hand. “Given where he has gone, and what uses him, I doubt very much that Drago will come back through the Star Gate ‘alive’. But however he comes back, it is all we will have to work with. Now, rest here, Zenith. I shall come back. I promise.”

And then she was gone.

Faraday walked quietly but briskly towards the Ancient Barrows. About her the forest was still. Waiting. The birds had roosted; she could see rows of them lining the branches of the trees, all looking south-east towards the Barrows.

They knew what was coming.

As did the other creatures of the forest. They lay or crouched unmoving amid the undergrowth, humped shapes in dark shadows. All, as the birds, aligned southeast. Waiting.

The trees’ Song, normally such a beautiful undertone to the forest, now hummed and buzzed with agitation. Beneath the murmuring of the individual trees, Faraday could hear the angry hum of the Earth Tree herself, far to the north in the Avarinheim.

What would happen, she wondered, when the Demons broke through? Would the trees attack? Or would they just watch?

It depended, Faraday supposed, on how the Earth Tree herself perceived the Demons. Would she see them as a threat to the land, or just to the people – and the plains people in particular? If so, then the Earth Tree and the forests might leave well enough alone.

Perhaps she might even be glad that the Plains Dwellers, as the Avar still tended to refer to the Acharites, were being decimated.

But the Icarü were affected, too. Deeply so, since they had lost the Star Dance.

Faraday shook her head. There was no point in trying to second guess the trees’ reaction.

There was a step to one side, and Faraday halted.

Goodwife Renkin stepped out from the trees. Still dressed as ever in the country worsted draped inelegantly about her coarse frame, she nevertheless exuded the power of the Mother.

“I do not like this, Daughter,” she said without preamble.

“What can you do, Mother?”

“Watch.”

“But-”

“I cannot know what assails us, nor what I or the trees can do about it until it moves among us, Daughter. Tell me, is Axis’ son Drago responsible for this?”

“Is he responsible for the fact the sun sets each night? Is he responsible for the rain that batters your trees?” Faraday took a deep, angry breath. “Drago is a pawn. He is being used by the Demons to enter this world, but the Demons would have come eventually anyway, with or without him.”

Better with him, she thought, better by many, many lives.

The Mother eyed Faraday curiously. “And what will you do, Faraday? You move through these trees with purposeful step.”

“I will help,'” Faraday said. “I am discontent with just watching.”

She approached the spaces about the Barrows cautiously. There was no sign of activity, and they would have appeared abandoned were it not for the heavy air of tainted expectation that lay over them. She shuddered, wrapping her arms about herself.

The blue flame above the bronze obelisk stuttered and flickered, sickened nigh unto extinction.

“Drago,” Faraday muttered, reminding herself that it was, indeed, necessary to go down the tunnel.

She flicked a glance at the sun. Gods, but it was sinking towards mid-afternoon!

Fighting the nervous impulse to retch, Faraday lifted her skirts and ran towards the tunnel entrance leading to the Star Gate. It was too late to rely only on her legs now, and so as she fled inside the black mouth of the tunnel, Faraday wrapped herself in Noah’s strange, ancient power.

Sheol tipped back her head and howled.

All the Questors, as well as StarLaughter and the now beaked children who huddled close, were wrapped in consuming darkness. There was no sense of any world about them now, they were suspended in time and space just below the Star Gate.

Sheol abruptly swallowed her howl and looked about her at the others. Her sapphire eyes glittered with power and hunger, momentarily lighting up her companions.

“It is time,” she hissed.

The other Questors murmured, while the children shuffled in excitement, but StarLaughter gave an incoherent cry and jiggled the child agitatedly in her arms.

Raspu reached out to her and laid his hand on her shoulder. “Quiet, Queen of Heaven. Our time is nigh. Soon your child shall live and breathe again.”

StarLaughter stared at him with wild eyes. “Soon?” she whispered.

“Soon,” he murmured, kissing her brow. “Very soon.”

“Now,” said Sheol and, lifting her arms, called to bear all the residual power the Questors had drained from Drago.

About her the children shrieked and wailed.

As one, every statue in the chamber of the Star Gate cracked. Fissures ran from feet through the bodies, then splintered to run to the tips of each outstretched wing.

There was a sound, as if of a sigh, and then small chips of marble began to fall to the floor.

Faraday, huddled in the gloom behind one of the archways, put her hands to her mouth in horror.

They would destroy the chamber? She had not thought this.

And then another thought, more frightful than the last. Would they then destroy the Star Gate itself?

“No!” she wailed between her fingers, and rocked back and forth in agony. No!

The Star Gate began to boil. Faraday could not see it from her hiding place, but she could feel it. The blackness within the Star Gate was boiling as surely as a fetid soup over the fiery pits of the AfterLife.

Within the chamber the atmosphere thickened and warmed.

Faraday crept one or two steps closer, the limit of her courage. Everything within her screamed to flee before it was too late – but she could not. Drago would be lost without her, and Tencendor would be lost without Drago.

Then humps, lumps, shapes – she did not know how else to describe them – rose through the Star Gate. Scores of them, rising as if through swamp of thick black mud, their true nature cloaked by the as yet enveloping blackness.

“Gods, gods, gods,” Faraday whispered, unable to help herself. She sobbed, choking on words, and she had to drop her eyes to gather her courage.

When she raised them she was numbed with horror. Through the Star Gate, she did not know how, were emerging black, winged shapes. There were many scores of them. Hundreds of them.

Faraday flattened herself against the tunnel wall, hiding from the strange black orbs that had replaced their eyes.

She knew they had to be the children, but they no longer looked like children, and only their wings connected them with their Icarü heritage.

In every other respect they appeared gigantic black hawks. Only… only that at the tip of each wing groped a scrawny, clawed hand, and the beaks were more mouths than horn. Mouths with enlarged, protruding upper lips that had hardened into a sharpened beak at their centre.

They might be more bird than Icarü, but they had retained their mouths with which to cry WolfStar’s name, and hands with which to grasp their prey.

Now they had emerged fully from the Star Gate, and shucked off what remained of the gloom that had been their birthing membrane. They fluttered, ran, hopped, and flew about the chamber in disordered horror. They clutched, clawed and pecked at their companions in anger and frustration as they collided and careened about in their mad chase about the too-small chamber.

There was a whisper, and the children – hawks -halted.

“Hunt.”

And again. “Hunt.”

Faraday pressed her hands against her ears now, for she could not bear to hear that voice again.

The hawks exploded into purpose. They turned for the archways that led upwards to the twenty-six Barrows and rushed through. There was a noise, a strange wailing, and Faraday realised it was the sound of the Hawkchilds surging through the tunnels and apertures leading up from the chamber into the Barrows themselves.

The Barrows exploded. They burst apart in a shower of earth and gorse and rock, sending gouts of material several hundred paces into the air.

And from the wreckage of each Barrow erupted the black shapes of the Hawkchilds, higher yet than the rocks and earth, straight up.

Zared’s men, the accompanying Strike Force throwing fluid shadows from overhead, had fled through the morning and into the afternoon. By the time the northern border of the Silent Woman Woods loomed before them, men were clinging in weariness to saddles, and horses had blood dribbling down their legs from scrapes where they’d stumbled to their knees in exhaustion.