Silver's Bane. Anne KelleherЧитать онлайн книгу.
clenched as she saw long, shadowy strands and huge clumps of glutinous fiber swirl through the depths, like shadowy leviathans roaming the deep. If one of those things takes me, I shall be lost, she thought, and she stroked harder, kicked faster, even as the water gathered around her, congealing into rubbery strands. Dismayed, she kicked harder as the stuff twined around her limbs, sapping her strength. But still she had hope, that here, at last she had come to where the Hag dwelled, and she whipped her hair out of her eyes, stroking desperately toward the savage-looking boulders rising tantalizingly, mercilessly, just out of reach.
At last, when finally she thought she could stand no more, her feet touched solid stone. Nearly weeping, she looked down at the thick gelatinous clots that swirled and clumped around her ankles and her calves. She wiped and kicked them away, shuddering with disgust at the way the stuff persistently slimed around her as she plowed up the steep slope. Her teeth began to chatter audibly even before her knees broke the surface of the sea and she clutched her arms close about herself, shivering in the cold, cold air, even as she scraped the thick slime off her chemise and her skin, raking it out of her hair. At last she stood on the shore. She turned and looked back. In the dim greenish light, she could barely make out the white spot of her clothes, the round, black shape of her guide crouching patiently beside it. The water pushed up against the shore, as if searching for her, and she stepped farther away from it, warily peering in the dim light for some sign of the Hag.
She thought she heard a chuckle, and she whipped around, but it was only the insistent lap of the water against the stone. She drew herself up, and opened her arms as wide as her shaking body would let her. “Great Herne,” she whispered, “if ever you were with me, be with me now.” She drew a deep breath and cried, into the thick and chilly air, “Great Hag! Great Hag, come forth upon my call.” The rock was slick beneath her soles, and she felt something slice through her feet as she took a single step forward. She cried out and nearly lost her balance. She looked down and saw that unlike the opposite shore, these boulders were punctuated by shards of what looked like glass. She squatted down, watching her pale blood roll down the slope into the sea, carefully feeling all around her for smooth places between the razor-edged outcroppings. She edged forward, feeling her way with questing hands and careful feet. But for all her care, the jagged edges sliced unmercifully and she nearly fell more than once. At last she reached a relatively smooth plateau, beside the cluster of boulders that rose from the center of the island like the throne of the Goblin King in his stinking hall.
“Great Hag,” she whispered, scarcely daring to give the words voice. “Great Hag, come forth and heed your child’s plea.” Her voice echoed up and around and down the vault of the ceiling, sighing and rippling across the water, and she saw the depths dull to dark green as the drifting shadows within it seemed to thicken in response. It was as if everything about her in some way was so intimately connected to the place that every move she made, every breath she drew, every thought, even, had some effect. “Great Hag,” she whispered, this time pouring every ounce of need, of desire, of hope she possessed into the words. “Come forth.”
But the boulders were silent and the sea was still.
Vinaver sank shaking to her haunches, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her guide was wrong, so obviously wrong. And she was so stupid, so obviously stupid to have trusted him—it. What could she have expected from a blind, deaf, voiceless, practically senseless creature? What could she have expected from the foul misshapen things that led her to it? Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, seeping down her fingers, rolling down her arms unheeded. Was all of this for naught? Had she truly come here to the underbelly of the world to find nothing? She would not survive another swim back across that swarming sea. She had failed. Faerie would disintegrate, Finuviel, her fair son, so bright with promise, would die the true death, and all the great and shining beauty that was Faerie would go down into nothingness. Down here, she thought, into this primal soup. There was nothing else to do but wait for it.
She rested her cheek on her knees, and in the soft and swirling mist, wooing as a lover’s whisper, she thought she heard a snatch of music, clear and airy and piping as any ever drifted across a Faerie meadow. A woman’s voice danced through her mind, low and mocking. “A queen who’s never a queen to be—is that who comes to call on me?”
Slowly Vinaver rose to her feet, forcing herself to straighten, as a sudden fear greater than any she had yet known gripped her like a vise. “Great Hag?” she whispered, for the voice was not that of an old woman. Scarcely daring to believe that here, at last, was the end of all her striving, she peered into the darkness, gaping in astonishment as the boulders lifted and shifted and finally resolved themselves into the hideous visage of an old woman hunching over a great black cauldron. The cauldron was balanced over a firepit by a curious arrangement of two polished crystal globes, and a makeshift tripod of iron legs beneath a flat disk where a third globe should have been.
As Vinaver stared in horror, steam spiraled up from the depths of the cauldron, half obscuring the grinning, toothless rictus on the Hag’s gray-blue face, which was striated with wrinkled folds carved like channels into the bedrock of her sunken eyes and cheeks. She gripped what looked like a thick branch—for a few dead leaves still clung to it—in two clawlike hands as she stirred her brew.
The Hag’s bright eyes fixed on her, and Vinaver gasped. Like Herne’s, glowing red then green, they pierced her with a force that made her stagger. She regained her footing and took a single step forward, forgetful of the sharp crystals that slashed her feet to the bones, and cried out as the pain lanced up her leg. As more of her pale blood leaked into the rock, it shuddered beneath her feet, smoothing itself beneath her bleeding soles. And she understood she was to draw closer.
Each step was agony but she refused to flinch. She had come so far. She could go a little farther, after all. There was neither kindness nor cruelty in that glittering green gaze, just a hungry interest. The Hag’s gray tongue flicked over her yellowed and blackened teeth and for a moment her eyes turned red.
Suddenly more frightened than ever, Vinaver paused. Such was the nature of the Hag, Vinaver understood with sudden insight, she who destroys that all might be made new. Everything was fodder for her cauldron, grist for her mill, silt for her sea. Vinaver wanted to speak, but something that felt like her heart blocked her throat. She saw more clearly the improvised contrivance that supported the cauldron in place of a third globe. It was of iron—three cast-iron legs bound into a tripod, a small disk placed on top. And suddenly, with cold and certain knowing, she knew exactly where the third globe was.
“The moonstone,” she whispered, daring to meet the Hag’s eyes. “The moonstone globe—the one that wears the Caul within my sister’s Palace—that moonstone globe is yours.”
The Hag hissed, her rheumy eyes darting from side to side. She gave a great turn to the stick and the steam rose and swirled and in the depths, Vinaver thought she saw a familiar face—a furtive face that turned his back and threw a robe over his head before the image dissipated into nothing.
“Timias,” Vinaver whispered, recognizing her mother’s Chief Councilor and perpetual thorn in her side. “’Twas Timias who took your globe?” Another hiss was the only sound the Hag made as she swung her shoulders in a mighty arc as she gave the cauldron another stir. A shiver ran through Vinaver. She looked down at the other two globes, this time more carefully, and saw that one gleamed black as pitch in the bluish glow of the unnatural fire that burned within the stone pit beneath the cauldron, and that the other was flecked with specks of black, white, green and red. And suddenly, in a flash of insight, Vinaver understood something of the nature of the problem. The black globe—the goblins, perhaps. The other, the mortals, most like. And the missing moonstone that Timias had apparently stolen in some way represented Faerie. It WAS Faerie, Vinaver realized. And Timias had taken it from the Hag. She had always wondered why the stories were so vague about the origination of the globe. “The trees have told me that Faerie is dying. I see that your globe is—is missing.” These two were connected in some way, she was sure of it. She hesitated, attempting to gauge the thoughts behind the creature’s burning eyes. And then she gathered her courage and spoke quickly, lest she lose her resolve. “I know there’s something terribly wrong for Alemandine is unable to conceive her Heir. And the trees told me to come