Ren’erei stepped away and Erienne ran on without a second glance, following the sounds in her mind, reaching the door to the Whole Room and throwing it open.
‘What the hell is going on?’ she demanded, but the last words almost died in her throat. Lyanna, apparently happy, was drawing on a chalk board with bright coloured chalks, the Al-Drechar clustered around her desk, staring intently at her work.
Ephemere glanced up. ‘Erienne, you look flustered. Has something happened?’
Erienne frowned. The wailing sobs in her head were gone, the screams a distant echo.
‘I heard—’ she began and took a pace forward. ‘Lyanna, are you all right?’
Not even looking up, Lyanna nodded. ‘Yes, Mummy.’
Erienne turned back to Ephemere who, with Aviana, was walking towards her across the bare but warm, firelit chamber, the flames dancing across the polished stone walls and ceiling.
‘Do you feel all right?’ she asked.
‘No, I—’ Erienne’s frown deepened. ‘I heard . . . in my head. Lyanna was crying and screaming. It was horrible.’
‘I can well imagine,’ said Aviana. ‘It’s probably memories she’s exorcising subconsciously. I’m sorry that they are affecting you. This isn’t a side effect we’d anticipated. But, as you can see, Lyanna is quite contented.’
The two Al-Drechar continued to move toward her and Erienne felt herded back to the door.
‘It wasn’t a dream,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t imagining it.’
‘No one’s suggesting you were,’ said Ephemere, her arm out, shepherding Erienne away. ‘Perhaps you need some air.’
‘Yes,’ said Erienne. ‘Lyanna, do you need Mummy?’
‘No,’ came the bright reply.
‘Fine.’ She couldn’t fathom it. The cries had been of pain and fear. She had felt them and come running as she had done a hundred times before in Dordover. Yet Lyanna was completely untroubled, on the outside at least. It didn’t make sense. Exorcising memories. Perhaps. She had to think. ‘I’ll take that flight above the house, if you don’t mind,’ she said.
Ephemere smiled. ‘Of course. An excellent idea. Clear your head. Come back when you’re done. Lyanna will be finished by then, I’m sure.’
‘See you later then, darling.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Lyanna continued her drawing.
A loud, flat crack, echoing in the distance brought Lord Denebre to a slightly confused wakefulness in his chair by the roaring fire. Taking a nap in his warmly-decorated tower chamber as he always did after lunch, with the sun streaming in through the widened castle window, the old Lord shook his head, wondering whether the sound hadn’t been part of a dream. His health had never fully recovered since his town’s occupation by the Wesmen and the pain that periodically gripped his stomach was getting worse and more prolonged as the seasons went by. It was an occupation that had claimed the life of Genere, his wife of forty-five years, and the pain in his stomach was eclipsed by that still in his heart.
Lord Denebre levered himself from his chair and walked slowly over to the tower window which overlooked the castle courtyard and across into his beloved town, from which every scar of Wesmen invasion had been scrubbed. It was a warm late afternoon, though there were clouds sweeping up from the south that promised rain.
Looking down over the beautiful lakeside town, Denebre saw that the noise hadn’t been a dream. Everywhere, people had stopped to look. Though he was old, Denebre’s eyes retained all their sharpness. He could see his townsfolk point or shrug, shake their heads and continue on their way. The market was picking up again after the midday meal, the hawkers’ cries floated above the hubbub, men and women had turned out of the handful of inns and traffic moved sedately down the cobbled, impeccably clean streets.
Lord Denebre didn’t have a vast fortune but what he could spare, he set to keeping the place of his birth as he remembered it as a child. His people respected and protected the town and those who travelled in and sought to take advantage of what they saw as a soft underbelly soon discovered a hard edge to the Lord’s governance. He wouldn’t have gibbets on display in the town, but on the approaches they occasionally swung with the corpse of robber or thief. In his naïveté, he had thought a couple of examples were all that it would take but over the years he had never ceased to be amazed at the arrogance and stupidity of criminals.
Mainly, though, his life had been a joy and his sons and daughters had pledged to keep the idyll when he was gone. That had made it all the harder when the Wesmen had come, threatening the destruction and death of all he held dear.
Gone now, of course. Back across the Blackthornes. He doubted they would ever invade again. And certainly not before he was long entombed. Denebre smiled to himself and took a deep breath at the window. A second crack shattered the calm of the day, bringing silence to the market. It was an unearthly sound, reverberating through the ground and sending a tiny shudder through the castle walls.
Denebre’s face creased into a frown and he squinted out, shading his eyes with a shaking, mottled hand and peering away towards the low hills that bordered the small lake’s southern shores where he had fished as a boy.
A black scar ran down the face of the grass- and bracken-covered slope. Denebre had not recalled it being there before . . . perhaps a fire during the hot, dry summer. He dismissed the notion; it was not something he would have missed.
His heart skipped a beat and raced. The scar was moving. Outwards and down, swallowing more of the lush green and belching a cloud of dust into the sky.
‘No, no,’ he whispered, breath suddenly ragged. Two more cracks assaulted the ears, two more fractures appeared, land falling into the instant chasms, the hideous brown-black lines rushing down the hillside accompanied by a low, dread rumbling.
The vibration through the castle increased. In the marketplace, voices were raised in anxiety and incomprehension. Stalls were rattling, a stack of oranges spilled and bounced onto the street as stallholders rushed to make their goods secure, first instincts for preservation of business, not self.
Moving impossibly fast, the ruptures, which the town’s people couldn’t see, tore through the south shore and disappeared beneath the lake. For one blissful moment, Denebre thought the water had halted the charge but the rumbling never died and the tremors increased their intensity. A picture fell from the wall behind him. The logs shifted on the fire.
Turmoil churned the placid surface of the lake. Waves fled out from its centre in every direction, great bubbles boiled to the surface and finally, with a huge, sucking thud, a wall of water erupted, sending a mist into the air, falling back like a deluge of rain.
Denebre gripped the window sill, the vibrations through his feet leaving him uncertain of his balance. Dust shivered from every crevice and his chair rattled against the stone flags.
Devastation was coming. The farmland north of the lake fell into the void as if hell were pulling it down. Tears were streaming down the old Lord’s face. What the Wesmen couldn’t achieve, nature would wreak in the blink of an eye.
He leaned out of the window. Down in the town, milling confusion reined. People were screaming or barking warnings. Feet slithered on heaving streets, doors were closed, windows fell from frames and the roar of approaching doom still had no face.
‘Run, run.’ Denebre cursed his voice. Weak with age, it couldn’t hope to carry and though he waved an arm frantically, even if anyone was looking, they couldn’t hope to understand what he was doing. He was helpless, and the earth was swallowing his town.
Land folded inwards at its borders, the fractures tore into the first building and moved on, faster than a horse could gallop and straight as an arrow, heading for the castle. The world was shaking. Sudden subsidence robbed Denebre of his purchase and he fell heavily, feeling a bone in his hand snap as he tried to absorb the fall.
He cried out, his breath coming in short gasps, but no one would be hearing him. Outside, the rumble had become a deafening roar, as of some earthbound leviathan finding its voice at the surface.