Sinner by Sara Douglass. Book One of The Wayfarer Redemption

Behind them, at a distance of perhaps a hundred paces, rode Zared himself, and behind him at another half a league came Caelum and his force.

The Strike Force, as all Zared’s men, were safely within the Woods when Zared pulled his horse to a halt some forty paces before the first of the trees.

He dismounted, patted the beast, and slapped its rump, sending it trotting towards the forest. Then he turned and watched Caelum riding towards him.

As he waited, Zared felt an oppressiveness settle over his shoulders. He shuddered, and looked about, but did not know to what to attribute it.

Then his eye caught the sun. Mid-afternoon.

He dropped his gaze and beckoned urgently at Caelum. “Faster!” he screamed.

Caelum, as every man behind him, dug boots into exhausted mounts and gained a last spurt of speed. A few of the riders outpaced Caelum, but Zared stood his ground as they thundered past him and into the trees.

“Thank the gods,” Zared said as Caelum pulled up beside him. “I thought you would not -”

There was an earth-shattering roar to the south-east, and Caelum’s horse had to fight to keep its feet.

“What…?” Zared said, and Caelum half stood in his stirrups and shaded his eyes so he could peer towards the Ancient Barrows.

“Merciful Heavens,” he said, then slumped down into the saddle.

“What is it?”

“The Barrows have exploded.”

“Then they are coming -”

“My parents are there,” Caelum said in a curiously toneless voice.

“You cannot help them now!” Zared yelled. About them horses and men ran for the trees with forgotten reserves of strength. “Quick!”

Zared grabbed at the reins of Caelum’s horse, but Caelum shook himself and reached down a hand.

“It will be faster if you ride behind me, Zared,” he said quietly.

Zared stared at him, then grabbed his hand and swung up behind his nephew.

Faraday slowly raised her face from her arms and looked back into the crumbling Star Gate chamber. The black forms of the Hawkchilds had gone, but they had been only a prelude to the true horror about to step through.

Faraday didn’t so much see the Demons, as she was aware of them.

A man with bones that stuck almost through his skin stepped through first. He paused, looked about, and burped through his gluttonous smile. Mot.

Faraday was almost overcome with an overwhelming sense of hunger, a hunger so deep she knew she would hack off her own foot to assuage it. She fought it with whatever power she could bring to bear, and it slowly faded into a persistent ache in the pit of her stomach.

The man leaned back into the swirling, nauseous mess within the Star Gate and aided another of his companions into Tencendor.

Faraday began to itch, her eyesight blurred and she felt her blood slither towards every orifice of her body. Her skin twitched, and pustules simmered eagerly beneath its surface.

Raspu, Demon of Pestilence, hugged his companion, and together they aided Barzula, Tempest, through the Star Gate.

Faraday felt something rush through the tunnel towards her. Air, fire, water, ice-stones the size of her fist -where had they all come from? Instinctively she fought back, and the storm dwindled and died.

Mot, Raspu and Barzula turned towards the shadows where Faraday lay huddled.

“What was that?” Raspu said.

“I felt power,” Mot said.

Barzula took a step towards the archway. “Unusual -is not the Star Dance dead?”

Mot caught at his arm. “No time. It does not seek to harm us. And look, Rox emerges!”

Faraday was crushed by a sense of terror so extreme she almost voided her bowels. Surely she could not survive in the face of this! She slid to her belly on the dusty floor of the tunnel and whimpered, her hands clutching at the detritus about her.

Somehow she held on to her reason.

After long minutes she looked up. Four figures stood about the rim of Star Gate, gazing into it. Then one, the thin man with the loathsome face, suddenly reached down and grabbed a hand.

Faraday slowly sat up in astonishment as a lovely Icarü woman emerged, a strangely sluggish baby in her hands.

Who?

Barzula leaned forward, and kissed the woman on her lips. “Welcome home, Queen of Heaven.”

Faraday frowned. Queen of Heaven? Could this be Star Laughter? And the child? Wolf Star’s son?

Then another woman stepped through, throwing something into a darkened corner of the chamber as she did so, and this time Faraday could hardly control the despair that swept over her.

No-one would survive. It had all been useless. Axis and Azhure would die arthritic middle-aged fools in the desert wasteland that had once been Tencendor. StarDrifter would suicide into bloody oblivion, Caelum would be torn apart by dogs, and Zenith would be used by bandits until they tired of her, tore off her wings, and threw her over a cliff. Within a generation, it would all be lost. No-one would –

“Stop it!” Faraday hissed to herself. “Stop it!”

She battled the vision, appalled by its severity. If she, who still retained power after the loss of the Star Dance, could hardly repel this despair, then what chance did the ordinary folk of Tencendor have?

Gods, but she had to do something to help this land before all was lost!

“There, again!” Mot swirled about, his bones seeming almost to clank with the abruptness of his movement.

“Power,” said Barzula.

Sheol frowned, irritated at this distraction. “StarLaughter? Can you recognise the power being wielded?”

StarLaughter concentrated, rocking the child absent-mindedly in her arms as she did so. “No,” she said slowly after a moment or two. “No, I cannot. It is not Icarü power, nor what I know of the Avar, or even the Charonites.”

She shrugged. “It is negligible, in any case. Perhaps it was originally left by the Enemy when they crashed through.”

“Can we use it?” asked Rox.

StarLaughter shook her head. “It is almost… directional power. I can find no other way to describe it. Ignore it. It is no threat to us, and we cannot use it. Sheol, what do we do now?”

“We use the final reserves of Drago,” Sheol gestured impatiently to what she had discarded on stepping through the Star Gate, “to move to a more congenial site. Come!”

She clapped her hands, and the Demons, with StarLaughter and her child, vanished.

But if Sheol had vanished, then the sound of her hands continued to reverberate about the chamber.

Statues crumbled into piles of useless rubble. Archways groaned, and almost a third of them collapsed while the others wavered and creaked. The Dome split into five sections with one almighty crack.

Faraday, terrified but knowing she had only one chance, rushed from her hiding place. She looked about frantically, shielding her head with arms and hands.

There!

The object Sheol had discarded as she stepped through the Star Gate.

Faraday hurried over, tripping and almost falling over a tumbled statue. Whatever the nature of the object, it was now shrouded in grey dust and small rocks. Faraday worked with her hands, dusting and pushing aside the rubble.

When she had uncovered it, she sat back on her heels, unmindful of the chamber shattering about her, her face expressionless.

Before her lay a sack of bones, wrapped about with skin.

Faraday reached out a trembling hand and touched the disgusting thing fleetingly.

She drew her hand back, grimacing. The skin felt cold and clammy.

Poor Drago to have come to this. Digested and spat out as this pitiful clump of skin and bone.

She reached out her hand once more. This time she did not pull her fingers back as she touched the skin. This time she softly stroked the remains, running her hand over as much of it as she could.

“Poor Drago,” she whispered, ignoring the great rock that crashed not half a pace away from her. “Poor, sweet, lost Drago. Where are you now? Come home, Drago. Come home.”

She fancied that the skin grew warm under her hand, and firmer to the touch.

But the bones still shifted and scraped each against the other in their sack.

Faraday remembered the sack that Drago had clutched so desperately when he’d entered this chamber weeks (months?) previously. Now he was the sack, but now he possessed the power that the original hessian sack had contained. Faraday understood that very clearly, and she hoped Drago would be able to come to terms with it also.

“Poor, sweet Drago,” she murmured. “Come home. Come back to Faraday.”

It did not occur to her to pick him up and rush him from the chamber before both were forever crushed in the grave it was rapidly becoming.

Eventually she looked up and realised the danger. The chamber was collapsing into itself – already the Star Gate was half full of rubble.

Faraday’s eyes filled with tears. So much beauty to be destroyed! She remembered when Jack and Yr had brought her, a naive and foolish young girl, to this chamber. She had been deeply moved by the beauty and lure of the universe beyond the Star Gate, and deeply moved that something this beautiful, this magical existed beneath the dusty plains of Achar.