The Sight

  ‘It’s no good, Larka,’ muttered Kar wearily. ‘We’ll never manage like this.’

  ‘We’ve got to, Kar, if we don’t...’

  Suddenly the wolves felt a strange sensation. At first Larka thought it was Wolfbane. They felt a stillness about them, as though some of the air in the passage had been drawn away. Then Tsarr began to growl. He was trembling, but not from fear. The ground was shaking. Larka felt it too, coming through her legs.

  Tsarr and Kar leapt back as the earth tremor shook the mountain. The wall in front of them gave way in a shower of swirling dust and they felt a gust of air like a wind. A rock hit Kar and, whimpering, he slunk back past Larka. As he did so a great scree of rock and rubble crashed to the earth in front of him, cutting him off from the others.

  ‘No,’ cried Kar desperately, ‘Larka!’

  They could hear his voice from behind the stones, but there was no way through.

  ‘Kar,’ called Larka, and the she-wolf felt a sense of relief, ‘we must go on without you.’

  ‘Larka, the pact.’

  But the way ahead was clear and now Larka sprang forward. Kar turned and began to run, to run with all his strength.

  ‘Wait, Larka,’ gasped Tsarr. ‘He’s here. Let me face him.’ Larka felt it too, stronger than ever before. That terrible anger.

  ‘No, Tsarr. I am young and I must face this thing alone.’ Larka stepped along the passageway as Tsarr crept behind her. It rose even more steeply and after a while, they began to see a dim blue light in the darkness. But as the light grew, that feeling of darkness grew with it. Larka remembered Morgra’s strange words.

  ‘To fight love,’ she muttered, ‘to fight love itself.’

  Every step Larka took was an agony and now she was aware only of the presence beyond. She no longer knew anything of her parents, or Tsarr and Kar. Her whole body had grown burningly hot.

  Nearer and nearer Larka came, and the passage began to open. Ahead, she realized that it gave on to a kind of chamber and she could see the moonlight filtering through the entrance beyond. She stopped and felt a new wave of fear wash over her. Some deeper terror. Some knowledge.

  Larka lifted her head and raised her tail. She set her front paws square and snarled.

  ‘Wolfbane. I have come to meet your evil.’ Nothing stirred inside.

  ‘Wolfbane. Too long you have filled the wolves with fear. Face me.’

  Larka shuddered, and fancied something moved beyond.

  ‘Come, then. It is time that you stopped hiding in the shadows.’

  Larka stepped into the chamber. It was a strange place. A cavern. High-ceilinged with great pilasters, like the stone trees, carved into the rock. On the floor of the chamber was a mosaic that formed an intricate human pattern. At each side stood a wolf and two snakes weaving around their throats. In between them was a man and, in his hand, he held a great hammer that was raised above his head in the act of striking flat two sheets of glinting metal. Behind him flamed a blast of the human’s burning air, that leapt from the doors of a painted furnace.

  Larka had no thoughts for the image now. As soon as she entered the chamber she knew he was there.

  ‘Show yourself, Wolfbane.’

  Suddenly a shadow fell across the mosaic and a shape stepped fully into the moonlight. Larka’s eyes opened in horror.

  ‘No,’ she gasped, ‘it can’t be. It can’t be true.’

  16 - The Sight

  ‘Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back;guilty of dust and sin.’ George Herbert ‘Love (III)’

  A terrible weakness entered Larka as she stared into that face and saw the sliver of green in his eye. Her brother’s right eye. Fell was standing before the mosaic. The black Varg had grown into a powerful adult, but it was him. Fell looked back at his sister, and his eyes were veiled and wary. He hardly seemed to see her as he snarled quietly in the chamber.

  ‘Fell,’ shuddered Larka, gasping for breath and almost staggering. ‘It can’t be you. You’re dead. I saw you, in the meadow.’

  The white wolf felt as if her whole world was tearing apart. This. She couldn’t face this.

  ‘Fell,’ she stammered, ‘it’s me, Larka. Don’t you recognize me, Fell?’

  ‘I am Wolfbane,’ growled Fell coldly. ‘I have been expecting you.’

  ‘Fell. Tell me what happened. After the ice.’

  ‘Who are you,’ snarled Fell angrily, ‘that you know of my dreams?’

  ‘Not dreams, Fell. That night on the river, when we were trying to escape the pack boundaries, and the ice gave way.

  You slipped through and Kar and Huttser tried to save you. It was terrible. You were clawing at the surface and we couldn’t break through to you.’

  ‘Tricks,’ cried Fell suddenly, ‘it is the Sight that tells you this.’

  ‘No, Fell. It is not the Sight. I was there.’

  ‘Silence,’ snarled Fell. ‘You could not know of my birth. Yet you talk like one... like one that had shared my dreams. For suns and moons I was under the ice, before I was born. When I saw images of things of this world. Of wolves calling me. Calling me into being. I was a thing of reeds then. Of cold and of pain. I was death. I was water. But this world had summoned me. Called me to join them. I broke the veil. I was born to the river bank in splintering cold. I became a wolf, tended to by other wolves. Fed and warmed into life.’

  ‘The Balkar,’ whispered Larka with horror, shivering, as she thought of the water and souls doomed never to find a resting place. ‘They must have found you when you broke through further down the river.’

  ‘They were my servants. They obeyed me and they brought me... to my mother.’

  ‘Your mother,’ shivered Larka in horror. ‘You think that Morgra is your mother?’

  ‘Silence,’ snarled Fell, padding on to the mosaic. ‘You dare to name her? She who summoned me. She who taught me what I am. The child of her dark power. Wolfbane.’

  ‘Wolfbane is just a name,’ pleaded Larka, ‘plucked from a story. Nothing more.’

  ‘Fool,’ cried Fell, ‘don’t you know of my power. As your coat is white, so mine is black. But I am the Sight. I am darkness.’

  Larka was trembling.

  ‘But how,’ she whispered suddenly, ‘how can this be? That you have the power too? Why could I not foresee this?’

  Larka’s own memories were not strong enough to carry her back, back to the sun in the den before Fell’s eyes had come, and Brassa had first suspected that Fell possessed the Sight. But she remembered Tsinga’s strange words to Huttser ‘Can you look into the darkness and predict the future?’ Now she understood why Tsinga had gasped in horror that day. But suddenly she thought, too, of Skart. That’s why he had looked so guilty when she talked of Wolfbane. He too had known all along.

  ‘You can foresee nothing,’ growled Fell, ‘but tonight, when the moon climbs to its zenith and Mother looks through the child’s eyes and controls all. Then she has promised me that she will give me the power to know the future, and the past too. To know all and be free.’

  As Larka looked at Fell she felt a terrible wave of pity surge through her.

  ‘Fell,’ she pleaded, ‘what has she done to you? Remember the cave, Fell. When we played as cubs. Remember Bran and Khaz and Brassa. Remember the Stone Den and Wolfbane living at the top. That was a story too. Just a story. Like your name.’

  Fell’s eyes narrowed, but again he snarled.

  ‘More dreams. I left the dream world long ago. When she ... when Mother taught me of the world. Taught me the true glory of the Putnar. Taught me that all life is pain and that to overcome pain is to gain power. I grew strong on her hate and saw many things. I looked into the minds of snakes that slither on their bellies and tasted the flesh of beetles in the night. I ran through rivers of blood and listened to the howls of agony that wake the world. I was the hunter and the hunted, too.’

  ‘She is not your mother, Fell,’ cried Larka desperately.

  ‘And though she may have taste
d pain and injustice, she has become evil. Evil because of her lies and hate. Palla gave birth to us in the den. We slept curled beneath her belly. She gave us life and warmth and love. Remember, Fell.’

  Fell was shaking furiously. His eyes were lost and empty.

  ‘Palla?’ he whispered faintly.

  ‘Yes, Fell. Palla and Huttser. Your family. Come to them.’ Fell was staring at the white she-wolf as though looking into his own faint memories. Larka had stepped forward and now the she-wolf stood facing him on the strange mosaic. There they stood. Black facing white. Brother facing sister, as the eerie moonlight shimmered in the chamber.

  Fell dropped his head and bared his glittering white teeth. Larka was quite unable to spring. But suddenly there was a noise behind them.

  ‘Tsarr,’ cried Larka, half turning her head, but not taking her eyes from her brother, ‘Tsarr. Get to the entrance. Get to our parents.’

  Fell growled savagely, but he too kept his eyes on Larka as Tsarr slunk forwards. But as Tsarr edged round the mosaic, Fell suddenly turned his head. With the very turn of his muzzle Tsarr was flung sideways.

  ‘You see, Larka,’ whispered Fell coldly, ‘the third power has entered the world. It is as strong as a wind.’

  ‘Yes, Fell,’ cried Larka immediately, ‘you named me. I am Larka. Your sister, Larka. Huttser’s daughter. The pact, Fell, remember the pact we made with Kar, by the Stone Spores.’

  For a moment Fell’s eyes seemed to clear.

  ‘He told me,’ muttered Fell bitterly, ‘on the ice. He told me it was safe. He lied. He is the Betrayer.’

  ‘Oh, Fell. Dear Fell. Huttser could not see, from where we were standing. He did what he thought was right.’

  ‘You do not know me any more. I have been so lonely,’ cried Fell. ‘There is nothing, but darkness.’

  Fell tried to turn away, but now Larka thought of what Skart had said of healing the mind, and she held him.

  ‘No, Fell,’ she cried, ‘for I have you in my eye.’

  For the first time ever the wolves were glaring deep into each other’s eyes without flinching. But something held them in check as they strained forwards. It was as if their very thoughts were trying to touch. Closer they came and closer, and now they were looking at each other’s foreheads. Suddenly there was a flash in their minds’ eye. In front of Tsarr they stood motionless on the mosaic, held in check by their own confusion, but in their minds they found themselves in another place. The poppies around them were quivering red and everywhere there were spectral wolves staring at them. Waiting. Watching and judging silently.

  ‘Fell,’ whispered Larka, and her voice drifted through the meadow. ‘The Sight. It is not for evil. It can heal.’

  ‘I am Wolfbane. The hunter. The friend of the dead.’

  ‘No,’ cried Larka, ‘Look around you. Those faces. Brassa and Bran. Khaz and Kipcha. That is truth.’

  But Larka’s mind thrilled with doubt. She had seen her brother here before. Yet what had the Searchers said? ‘We are like your memories.’ That was it. Larka had thought Fell dead. What she had seen had been nothing but her own memory of her brother, as he had been before the ice. So even the Sight could lie.

  The shapes around them stepped forward now, summoned by their names. As Fell looked about him in the red meadow, he saw the faces from his childhood. The spectres of his past.

  Fell felt his mind beginning to race. Other memories were flashing into his head. Of the Night Hunters. Of the terrible journey beneath the ice. Everywhere he saw death and violence and pain. He saw his own part in it all, and it could never stop.

  ‘Remember,’ snarled Larka, ‘but remember right, Fell.’ Larka’s mind, too, was on fire and a terrible darkness surrounded her. A yawning emptiness filled her heart. But suddenly Larka thought of Kar, standing between her parents. His face made her heart thunder, but Fell was staring at his sister’s throat.

  ‘I died,’ he cried, ‘you left me. Left me to the water and the cold. Huttser and Palla, all of you, you all betrayed me. There is nothing but death, death and fear and betrayal.’

  ‘No, we thought you were gone.’

  But the darkness was surrounding Larka too. Death. It was waiting for her, on the mountain. So close she could almost smell it. What did it really matter then, any of it, if it was only death that lay at the end? It was all meaningless. Let Morgra win, for she had suffered too. Everything suffered and nothing was better than anything else. The Putnar, the Lera, the humans, it was all one. Larka felt a desperate longing to be free of it all, to break the bonds of her own misery.

  But was the end of the journey, of any journey, just darkness, stretching out beyond the moon and the sun and the wolf trail? Part of Larka longed to be with Fell, to follow him wherever he chose to go. Because of the loneliness. For brotherhood. But as she gazed at her dead brother her mind pulled away again.

  ‘No,’ she cried angrily. ‘That is not love.’

  The word sounded like a howl through her being. Suddenly Larka saw another image, so startling in that place that her mind seemed to take on a crystal clarity. It was a spider, weaving its web. Larger and larger the web grew and flies were caught in its grip. In that moment Larka knew the answer to a question she had asked long ago. That the spider was not conscious of what it was doing, not in the way the Varg was conscious. Not conscious and so, not to blame. The flies were struggling for life, but without them the spider could not live and around the flies the web grew. More and more complex, more and more beautiful. It glittered brilliantly in the sunlight.

  ‘It only seems cruel and empty,’ cried Larka, ‘but we give our lives for each other, so that one sun perhaps one of us may know. Perhaps a Lera may truly find an answer. And I shall give my life. Gladly. For you, Fell, and for life itself. Just as Sita gave up her life. One sun your soul will find a true resting place. Huttser never betrayed you. There is love and light and courage. I know now I was meant to prove it to you.’

  ‘I will blind you,’ snarled Fell. ‘I will kill you.’

  Suddenly Larka felt a great strength enter her, a strength that made her feel invulnerable.

  ‘You cannot, Fell,’ she whispered, ‘I am already dead. For I know my own future. But it does not matter. You will not kill me. You will live. I give myself for you.’

  ‘No,’ growled Fell bitterly, ‘I am not worth that.’

  In the chamber Tsarr was edging past Larka and Fell, but as he crept towards the moonlit entrance, his eyes opened in amazement. Brother and sister still stood there, trembling and motionless, but between Larka and Kar a shape was glittering. Tsarr blinked and growled and, at first, he thought it was a trick of the moonlight, for he had never seen such a thing before. As he looked on he could see a grey Varg hovering between them.

  ‘You are not evil, Fell,’ whispered Larka in the meadow, ‘you have just been robbed of love. Of light.’

  Fell gave a terrible howl. Larka sprang to meet him and they struck, rolling over and over in the field of poppies.

  Palla’s legs were shaking uncontrollably as Morgra led her across the bridge.

  ‘Fell,’ she kept whispering, ‘my little Fell.’

  The Night Hunters, as if held by an unspoken command, waited behind them, and with them was the bear that Morgra had tempted from the forests to be her servant. Palla’s head reeled as she looked into the plunging chasm below them, but suddenly she heard a noise in the night ahead. It roused her from her confusion. It came, strange and mournful across the arched bridge, from the statue beyond. It was the crying of a human child.

  Bran was sitting below the stone she-wolf on the altar itself, gazing around it, and the sobs that came from his little body made him shake violently. He was bathed in moonlight and Palla could see the tears glinting in his blue eyes. Slavka was at his side and her eyes were blank and morbid. Morgra was controlling her, too.

  Morgra walked towards the altar. She stopped and looked coldly at the human creature below its stone counterparts. Then she
turned to Palla.

  ‘Stand next to it, sister.’

  Palla was helpless. She was overcome by her sudden knowledge, by the moonlight and the citadel and the creature sobbing quietly to itself. She felt as if she was in a dream, mesmerized by the giant moon, mesmerized by the human stones.

  ‘So, Palla,’ snarled Morgra, as she crept closer still, ‘now you know that I, too, have felt the Drappa’s care. The love of a mother. For your own son.’

  ‘You could not love him,’ whispered Palla bitterly.

  ‘You are wrong. I love his hate,’ growled Morgra, staring down at the living child and thinking of how delighted she would be to kill it when it was over. ‘But enough. It is time. The Man Varg waits.’

  Palla lifted her throat meekly.

  ‘Finish it, Morgra.’

  ‘It is a pity, is it not, that you must die, Palla. Just as your dear, betrayed sister fulfils her greatest dream.’

  ‘I have seen enough,’ whispered Palla sadly, and she felt terribly old. ‘I have seen too much.’

  Morgra’s eyes glittered with delight.

  ‘Would you not see me come to power, sister? Well, you shall,’ said Morgra quietly, ‘or at least you shall know of my victory. For I would not slay my own blood.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘The legend,’ hissed Morgra, ‘it says that the altar must taste blood. But not that you must die. Not yet. Very well. It shall taste blood, and you shall have your wish, too. You shall never see me fulfil the legend.’

  Palla could not understand what Morgra was telling her. The moonlight seemed to swamp her vision.

  ‘I shall take the blood from around your eyes, Palla,’ whispered Morgra, ‘and let you live. I shall watch the beading droplets fall from your eyes like tears, like the tears I shed all those years ago.’

  Palla couldn’t speak. Her eyes were wide now, staring into the ghastly distance.

  ‘Kraar,’ cried Morgra suddenly, ‘again I have need of you. Of the tongue of the scavengers.’

  There was a fluttering behind one of the statues and suddenly the raven hopped out into the open. Kraar cocked his head and his little beady eyes peered viciously at Palla as she stood there in the moonlight.