The Scarred God Read online

  She tried to move herself. As she struggled, it became apparent that there were so many of them that in spite of their frenzy, the eels could not strike. Their real threat lay in the crushing power of the weight of their bodies as they came together in the melee like logs rolling down a river, and the prolonged periods under the blood, unable to breathe. The odd nip hurt Anya, but the constant fight to get back to the surface to draw a breath was what was wearing her down. Unable to get to her sword, she drew a short dagger from her belt and did her best to stab at any eel that came close enough.

  Anya was able to get her head free of the blood long enough to draw in another lungful of air. She glimpsed Vedic managing to get to his feet a few yards further towards the bank, standing either on the riverbed or on the eels and hacking off any heads that tried to go for him. There was hope, then, that she could at least get to her feet, if she moved further towards the bank. This was swept away as she was pulled under once more. The last thing she saw before she disappeared under was Akyar emerging from the river, swinging his bow to bat away the eels that tried to strike at him.

  All was churning blood. She was going to die.

  Your grandfather was right. You should not have sought the ink.

  Anya fought with all her wit. She sliced with her dagger and shoved with her free hand. Where her blade struck, the eels slammed back with their jaws in an attempt to hit their attacker but more often bit themselves. Where she shoved, they attacked one another. This allowed her to surface, briefly orientate and form a plan. She dived under the eels. Below them she could swim through the blood even if she couldn’t see. She made for the bottom, where the riverbed was littered with bones but solid enough to cling to, and using the current as her guide, she made her way to the bank over the uneven surface of the bottom. Her body protested at the dwindling air from her lungs.

  As the riverbed began to climb, the prospect of breathing and getting out of the waterway made Anya push for the surface. She took the first eel with her dagger, ripping its belly out, but as the creature sank below, it pulled the tiny steel from her hand, nipping at her legs in its death roll. Unable to reach her sword, bitten on the thigh already and her warm blood attracting more attention, she beat the eels around her with her fists.

  Desperate, she tried to reach the bank. She could see land, could almost touch it. She felt a tentacle-like creature slide up her leg, in a winding, spiralling creep, as an eel wrapped itself round and pulled. She yelled in frustration, throwing herself for a handhold that she couldn’t see and wasn’t sure was there. Someone caught her outstretched arm.

  The ferryman’s hand was pallid, cold and dead to the touch, but also strong, and he pulled on her limb with all his strength, or so it seemed to Anya. The dead man’s strength gradually won out, and the ferryman pulled her back towards the bank, stretching her between river and land, eel and hand.

  She shouted in pain. ‘You’re tearing me in two!’

  The ferryman tilted his head as if shaking his brain into alignment in order to translate the words. He did not let go, but without moving or pulling any further, he drew Anya’s sword from the sheath on her back. The dead man moved in a sudden twist that would have been impossible for a living person, sweeping the blade round at the eel, slicing the creature in two and letting the spin of his strike whip his other hand round, flinging Anya onto the bank. The two of them collapsed in the mud in a tumble of limbs.

  ‘Still alive?’

  Anya looked up at the woodsman. He looked like he had just come from a battlefield from one of her grandfather’s nightmares. He was covered in the blood from the Acheron, and like Anya he had a few nasty-looking love bites from the eels, as if he had pulled arrows from his own flesh. There was gore dripping from what was left of his hair. Somehow he had managed to pull his pack from the river, and it dangled from his left arm. Akyar limped along behind him.

  ‘I’m hard to kill,’ she said, in her best impersonation of Vedic. The Tream laughed.

  ‘Where’s the ferryman?’ asked Vedic, kneeling by her leg and checking the bite wound that had gone through her leggings and the remains of his original dressing.

  ‘He said he would try to find the boat.’

  Akyar shook his head. ‘In this current? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Perhaps he ran away, then,’ said Vedic, pulling a small hip flask from his waistline. ‘Fortunately, your original wound was pretty much healed, but I won’t be able to do much until we reach the forest again.’

  Anya eyed the flask; she couldn’t believe he’d brought drink with him. ‘I’m not sure a drink—’

  Vedic poured the wysgi onto her wound without warning. Her leg erupted with pain, and she cursed with language she’d never had the courage to use before.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Vedic, in a tone that suggested he was anything but. ‘Got to make the bite clean. I did mine just now. Hurts like a banshee on heat.’

  ‘A little warning,’ said Anya, through clenched teeth, ‘next time.’

  Vedic shrugged. ‘You argue everything. You’d have been infected by the time I convinced you I didn’t want to drink it. You lost this.’ He dropped her dagger at her feet.

  Anya flushed.

  Vedic sniggered. ‘Don’t worry, little one. I’m going to drink this as well.’

  Anya returned her gaze to the horizon. She really couldn’t work out where they were, and that wasn’t even the worst thing. Looking around each of her companions, there was precious little left in the way of supplies that hadn’t been contaminated by the Acheron. They needed to get out of this place as soon as they could, or risk dehydration or starvation. Anya knew what happened to people cut off from food. Her grandfather liked to tell stories when he was drunk as well as when he was sober, and he wasn’t the most temperate censor of the content. Anya had nightmares about the ones in which battalions were cut off from their supply lines. They needed the ferryman to return. She cursed herself for letting him go in the first place.

  ‘We should rest,’ said Akyar, sitting down next to Anya. ‘We’re exhausted.’

  The woodsman looked like he was about to argue the point. He seemed to share the same worry that Anya did regarding their supplies, but the fact was Anya couldn’t have moved right then, even if she had wanted to – the river had taken too much out of her. She was grateful for the Tream’s intervention as Vedic acquiesced and flopped down next to them.

  ‘You were brave on the river,’ said Anya, lying back to look at the mottled orange sky. ‘I saw you fighting the eels. No fear.’

  Vedic picked his pipe from his belt. Finding it broken, he threw it away in disgust. ‘I was just trying to get away from them. Self-preservation is a great general. I’m not sure I thought about it much.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was brave to fight those things. You’re better than you give yourself credit for. They were evil; they just sought to bite and tear and destroy.’

  Vedic looked at Anya. ‘As do most living things. You don’t know whether they had eaten, what the Morrigan had done to them or why they attacked, beyond a few spurious words from someone who now appears to have deserted us.’ He looked away at the river. ‘I am many things. Brave is not one of them.’

  Anya blinked in surprise. This was one of the longest things she had ever heard the woodsman say in a single sitting. ‘You don’t think they were evil?’

  Vedic paused, nudging the ground with his boot. ‘I don’t know what evil is. I just know the description you gave could apply to any creature that was desperate. My actions had little to do with bravery. Most people stand and fight if they have to.’

  Anya looked at Vedic with sharp, unwavering eyes. ‘No, they don’t. Nearly everyone in Anaheim ran. Even the few warriors we had.’

  The woodsman looked away at this. Unpleasantness hung over them. She wasn’t sure what dark precipitation the cloud was carrying, and she would have said more if she hadn’t seen a glint on the distant river. She leant forward.

  ‘I s
ee it too,’ said Akyar.

  Anya smiled. ‘Our runaway has come back.’

  The ferryman, on his boat, slid up the river, clearing eels with a makeshift plough carved from wood and attached to the bone hull with leather thongs. The vessel came to a rest at the edge of the bank, where Akyar helped him lash the vessel to a secure stump of bone that protruded from the sandy bank.

  ‘I never doubted you’d return,’ said Akyar, offering his hand to the ferryman. Anya wondered at where he’d learned to do that and that he wasn’t offended when the ferryman ignored it. What does the ferryman have against Akyar? What could anyone have against him?

  ‘Time to go, little one,’ said Vedic.

  ‘I wish you’d stop calling me that,’ said Anya. ‘I have a name.’

  The woodsman looked startled, as if she’d slapped him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m just tired.’

  ‘No,’ said Vedic. ‘You’re right.’

  The woodsman left her standing on the bank as he got into the boat. He settled in the stern with what was left of his pack, and Anya reflected again that he looked pale as his eyes darted around the landscape. He looked as if he feared another attack, and while that was a real danger, she conceded, he had not reacted to the eels or the wolves in this way. What happened to Vedic when he was here before? Pushing that thought to the back of her mind, she gathered her things and limped into the boat.

  ‘We are nearing the road,’ said the ferryman.

  The road was actually nothing more than an empty, dusty track that led up from the river into the hills of Golgotha. In the distance, the ribbon of dark that lined the far horizon-like cavern wall seemed wider and closer. They could see the trail they would take from the river, and a huge range of cliffs marked a finger of red against the black. Anya rubbed her arms. She felt cold as the prospect of another artificial night in Golgotha loomed. She’d realised that whatever else Vedic knew, and whatever had led him down here with the Morrigan, he wasn’t very familiar with the Arawn legend. She was the only one who had any idea what they would have to go through to escape this underground prison. She expected the Cave of Shadows to focus on her over the others as a full human clanswoman and because she had run away. Ghosts already haunted her, and so she was terrified by what she would see in the final climb to the surface.

  Of course, that was assuming they could rescue the boy from the Morrigan.

  Vedic nodded at the ferryman. The woodsman had lost weight on their travels. This had left him rangy, his skin loose in places where his well-developed muscles had retreated from lack of sustenance. This made him look much older, the dust of Golgotha settling in the crevices and crags of his face and almost casting him in stone, like the figures you might find in the ruins up near the desert. Perhaps it was the dust that gave him such a grey look as they drew ever closer to the road. Anya wasn’t sure. At times, she thought she saw his hands shake, and his eyes continued to wander around the landscape. Perhaps he was seeing his own ghosts.

  ‘I don’t understand this place,’ said Akyar.

  Anya cast her gaze from the woodsman, who was studiously ignoring her, to the Tream, who was not. Akyar was different: generally ready with a smile or a bit of encouragement, but like Vedic she was sure that the Tream was withholding information.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked, turning in her seat. She really was uncomfortable.

  ‘Well, Golgotha is your underworld, your afterlife, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. She was unsure where he was going with this.

  ‘So where are the dead people?’ asked Akyar, raising his hands to indicate the empty banks.

  ‘What?’ asked Vedic.

  ‘Well, we heard a creature on the wind last night, but we’ve actually seen no one the whole time we’ve been here – not one corpse, just bones,’ Akyar continued, folding his arms.

  ‘Maybe it’s just the Shaanti that come here,’ suggested Anya, uncertain. She’d seen her own ghosts, but they seemed to be in her head, as no one else had reacted to them. The ferryman didn’t show any sign of seeing them either.

  ‘No,’ said Akyar. ‘That still wouldn’t make sense – do you really think no one has died in the time we’ve been here? With the Kurah invading?’

  ‘The living cannot see the dead,’ said the ferryman. He did not look from where he was gazing, guiding the boat. ‘Even in Golgotha. Only in one place can that happen.’

  ‘The void?’ asked Vedic, softly.

  ‘No,’ said the ferryman, turning to look at him. ‘No one knows what lies there. I speak of the Cave of Shadows.’

  ‘You’re saying we can’t see the dead?’ said Akyar. ‘Then they could be all around us.’

  The ferryman looked directly at Akyar. ‘They are all around you. As far as the eye can see, an endless sea of the dead, streaming from the shores of the Acheron to the Styx and the crossroads and the void beyond. They cannot see you, and you cannot see them. This land is full of the dead.’

  Akyar raised his eyebrows in surprise. He shifted in his seat, worried by what he couldn’t see, and wrapped his robe around himself in an attempt to ward off the cold.

  Anya let her gaze wander from him back to the bottom of the boat; she didn’t want to think about all those souls, about what that meant, what was going on above them and whether or not the dead souls could see her. Whether they could or would judge her for what she had done in running away.

  Vedic leant over to her. ‘Keep your weapon handy,’ he whispered, his face pallid and his brow sweating despite the cold. He looked feverish.

  Anya drew her weapon and placed the sword on her lap. She wanted to ask the forestal questions about his time in Golgotha and what he meant by her keeping her blade to hand. Vedic did not look in a question-answering mood. He sat where he’d placed himself when they got back in the boat, in the rear, against the edge of the stern with a storm on his face.

  ‘The Kurah must have taken the Shaanti lands,’ said Anya, putting her head in her hands. ‘And many people are dead. For they must all be dead to fill this land.’

  ‘So sure are you?’ said the ferryman, with a low, wet chuckle. ‘Your people still live, Anya. To the Kurah this is Purgatory; to the Delgasian this is Limbo; and to others this land has names for which you have no equivalent. This is just one aspect. The truth is far stranger than you can comprehend. Be wary before you seek it.’

  There was a growing feeling in the pit of Anya’s stomach that she did not much care for, a pressure on her chest that felt like her soul was being pulled out of her. This was probably her imagination, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if the Morrigan had sent ghosts to attack them. When the wind rose up, she could see Fin and, occasionally, her grandfather running along the bank alongside them. This, too, must have been her imagination – she was almost positive, as again the ferryman showed no signs of seeing them. She wished she could see them for real, just once, just to say sorry.

  ‘There is a dangerous magic around you humans,’ said Akyar, annoyance painted on his face. ‘It seems to me that my ancestors made a sound argument – humanity is too dangerous for its own good. You just imagine these creatures and places, and they appear, up out of nowhere.’

  ‘Be quiet, Akyar,’ said Vedic, picking at the hull with his knife.

  The sound of stone shingle on the hull and a sudden stop told them they had arrived.

  Anya stepped off the boat, following the other two. Behind her the ferryman cast off his cloak, stepping uncovered from the vessel. Ahead the two men looked back at Anya, their faces frozen by what they saw. Akyar’s hand dropped to his sword. Anya turned. Walking towards her, hands outstretched and broiled with festering sores, came the ferryman. The good side of his face was flushed with heat. The bad side of his face glistened purple and green with rot, and his teeth were yellow and cracked, visible through his ruined cheek.

  ‘Payment,’ he said, reaching for Anya.

  She fumbled for her sword, unable to get he
r hands to obey her mind. On the wind, she thought she heard the sound of Kurah jeering and the voice of the boy-warrior she had killed.

  ‘No,’ said Akyar, stepping in front of her, his blade drawn.

  ‘Promised,’ said the ferryman. He stank of rot. ‘She promised: anything.’

  ‘Anything, sir,’ said Akyar, circling the ferryman. ‘Not everything.’

  You would let the Tream fight for you? The mocking tone of her mother did nothing to help. Anya felt sick as she watched the dead man draw his own sword from where it hung on his back, a curved scimitar that gleamed like the moon. The ferryman’s motion was mournful, as if the act caused him intense pain. The ferryman swung the sword in lazy arcs before slicing at Akyar. The Tream flipped over him, running the ferryman through with one smooth motion before withdrawing. The ferryman turned and tried to strike again.

  Alarmed and confused, Akyar danced out of range.

  Anya wanted to run in with her own weapon but found she couldn’t bring herself to raise her sword, because her grip felt loose and trembling. Weak. She pushed her mother’s voice away. The fight was mesmerising, such an intense ballet of violence. She feared they would have to make an end to the ferryman – more blood on her hands and another ghost to carry.

  ‘He’s not alive,’ called Vedic, not moving to help. ‘And you don’t know what he wants yet.’

  ‘Shut up, woodsman,’ said Akyar, blocking another blow and trying to strike the ferryman with the broad edge of his sword. The blow made contact with the ferryman’s neck but bounced off in a shower of sparks.

  The ferryman’s foot connected with Akyar’s jaw in a smooth roundhouse and sent the Tream sprawling onto his back. Winded, the Tream spat blood onto the shingle and struggled to rise. He is going to be killed, thought Anya. She placed a hand on the Tream’s shoulder as he tried to rise once more. Stepping past him, Anya walked up to the ferryman with her own sword gripped tight in one hand until she stopped, whereupon she drove the blade into the ground.