realised the magick was in the music and Skanda's song was summoning something, something bad, and Graal felt a sudden urge to flee this place, get on his horse and ride for all he was worth. To hell with dominion and ruling the world; some dreams were best left dead.
Skanda's song was a beautiful wail, dropping low into the deepest depths of reverberation, then shrieking high and long like a pig impaled on a spear, but all the time the notes came tumbling and they were beautiful and surreal and they spoke of an ancient time, a time of blood and earth and song, a time before the vachine, a time before the vampires, when Falanor was young and fresh and the Ankarok were good and proud and strong. Graal fell to his knees, choking suddenly, and Skanda was standing above him and he seemed to stretch upwards, he was huge, and no longer a boy but savagely ugly, his face the black of carved scorched wood, twisted like the roots of a tree, his face thick with corded knots of muscles and tendon uneven and disjointed and disfigured and this huge face loomed down at Graal and thin tentacles grew from his eyes and his mouth elongated into a beak and his eyes shrunk, became round and circular and still the song went on and on and on and huge powerful hands took Graal, and held him tight, and two more hands moved round only they weren't hands they were mandibles and they clamped Graal with sudden ferocious pain and he screamed, screamed as he looked down at the tiny glass disc on the floor before him, glowing black, radiating power and some ancient stench that had nothing to do with even human or vampire; and one of the claws rose, clicking softly, and a smell invaded the place and it was the smell of insect chitin. Graal swallowed, an instant before the claw lashed out and cut Graal's throat. He felt his flesh peel apart like soft fruit under a paring knife. Blood vomited from the new hole, his flesh quivering, his body pumping, heart pumping, emptying his blood-oil, his sacred refined blood-oil into the glass disc where it bubbled and was sucked down, absorbed. Graal would have screamed, but he could not. He would have fought and thrashed and run; but he could not.
Graal's body twitched and pulsated, and emptied itself onto the altar of the Ankarok.
Still Skanda sang, and looking back he was a boy again and Graal's eyes met Skanda's and Skanda gave a single nod, smiling, and released Graal to slump to the floor where he lay, curled foetal, twitching spasmodically. His fingers lifted, and touched his throat. Touched the gaping wound from whence his blood-oil and blood-magick had been sucked…
'Come and watch,' whispered Skanda, and without any control of his body Graal climbed to his feet and as he walked, boots thumping clumsily as if he were a puppet on strings, he followed Skanda and a cool breeze blew through the room and into the gaping wound at his throat but he was not dead was not dead and he walked across the stone and out into the weak grey daylight -
The city was squirming.
Old Skulkra was alive, every stone surface a maelstrom of movement as things seemed to shift, and move, and push under the surface of the stone, as if the very buildings themselves were fluid, vertical walls of thick oil trapping large desperate creatures within. The whole world seemed to shift and coalesce, and Graal wanted to heave and vomit, but had no control and his open throat was flapping and if he could, he would have screamed with two mouths…
Skanda stood, and watched, and on his hand squatted a tiny scorpion with two tails, two stings, and Graal dragged his unwilling gaze back to the city, back to Old Skulkra, and he watched.
The walls squirmed and pulsed, and now the ground was fluid, heaving and churning as if under the blades of some terrible plough. Paving stones cracked and shifted, and the whole world was alive with movement, with shifting, with coalescing images a blend of reality and the fluid, a mix of sanity and the insane, and Graal watched with lower jaw hung open and his slit throat forgotten as from under the earth and from inside the walls they came, they pushed, they heaved, they were born.
The Ankarok emerged, and they were children, and their skin was gloss black and shining as if smeared with oil, and their teeth were the black of insect incisors, and many had four arms and claws for feet, some had pincers and mandibles and one young boy crawled forward, and Graal could see he had a thorax. The Ankarok weren't simply children, they were blended with insects, with scorpions and cockroaches and ants and beetles, and they shifted and squirmed and scampered like insects and there were hundreds of them spilling from the walls like ants from a nest, and there were thousands of them, surging from under the earth like a flood of beetles from a dunghill, and we have been imprisoned for thousands of years and we have been waiting for this moment, biding our time and we were sent here, and trapped here, tricked here, lost here but now we are free, now we can work, and that's all we wanted, all we ever dreamed, the joy of the labour, the joy of the slave, the joy of the making, the joy of the killing -
Old Skulkra squirmed and heaved beneath him, and Graal faded away into a realm of impossibility, into a plane of unexistence in which the world was ruled by the Ankarok, and they were all-powerful.
CHAPTER 12
Saark was drunk. Saark was allowed to be drunk! After all, it'd been a hell of a day.
He staggered from Grak the Bastard's quarters, set high in the fortress walls and, in times of war or attack, doubling as a store-room and a place for archers. It also made a good vantage point looking out over the plain to see who approached Black Pike Mines.
Saark, in his drunken state, found another use for the archer's slit in Grak's bedroom wall, and as his urine arced far and long over the snowy field below, Grak patted him heartily on the shoulder and suggested it was time for bed.
Saark staggered across the frozen mud of what was now the 'Training Yard', although in all honesty, Saark left most of the training to Grak. Grak was a capable man, and Saark had to admit that he himself was capable of drinking, and enjoying a roll with a woman, and hell even cards or betting on bear fights were high on his agenda; but training men? No sir!
As Saark mounted the steps to his room, he recounted the week's success stories. Kell would be proud, no doubt, when he returned. They (meaning Grak) had whittled the men into a raw but efficient set of fighting units. They weren't an army. Not yet. They (meaning Grak) would need to put in a lot more effort to make sure the men could fight now as a whole, that's what Grak kept saying, a bloody whole – or was it hole? Saark stopped, and scratched his balls.
Still, they could charge in several formations, and at shouted commands or blasts from a tinny bugle, they could change from square to line to wedge, they could lock shields, they could disengage shields, they could charge and retreat. Because most of the men had worked (and indeed survived) the Black Pike Mines for a long period of time, they had great upper body strength and impressive stamina and endurance. Greater than Saark, as today's humiliating race had contested. But then, Saark had been drunk the night before. And the night before that. And, what a surprise, the night before that!
He stumbled to his room, and as the world swayed he removed his clothes and stood, hands on hips, naked and proud and desperate for a tankard of water. He moved to a water barrel and dunked his head in, coming up with a splash and lick of his lips. Gods he was hungry! What did he have in the room? Bread, cheese, donkey- meat…
'Saark?'
She sounded sleepy, and sat up in the bed, her dark hair tousled and illuminated by the moonlight easing through a small square window. Saark could make out her upper torso, naked, and he licked his lips again only not, in this case, with the need for water.
'Hello there,' he said, and moved towards the bed.
'Have you been drinking?'
'Only a drop, sweetie,' he murmured, and crawled onto the bed.
'Good,' said Nienna. 'I warmed your blankets. I hope you don't mind?'
'Of course not,' he said, and she knelt up before him, and her body was perfect, white and pale, gleaming in the moonlight, her small but firm breasts young and pert, her lips slightly parted as her head tilted, and she stared at his face.
