She shuddered as the energy surged from his skin to hers, plunging through this tenuous membrane into the depths of her being, but almost immediately her stone-stiff hand started to relax as the power coursed through her system, revitalising weary cells and loosening up the fibrous, leathery bindings of old scar tissue.
What Lightning Bird really wanted the energy to do, however, was to work its magic on her brain, that most valuable of organs housed inside her wispy-haired cranium. His fervent desire was that this power from the old forest would pry open the locks and strike off the rusty chains that kept all the secrets Parvati had once known locked in inaccessible dungeons, and haul them once more into the light of conscious knowing.
Through this trance he thought he heard her whispering; was her mind coming back to her? Was the power of the forest working its restorative magic in the crumbling ruins of that once glorious, bustling city between her ears?
Then he felt it: a pulsating inferno, fierce enough that his hands started blistering from the building heat … but it was coming not from the earth, but from her.
It wasworking.
The pain, however, was starting to become unbearable, for the heat of Parvati’s fire seemed to be intensifying at an exponential rate, and for Lightning Bird, it rapidly began to reach a point at which it seemed that his meat was about to slough off of his bones, which themselves felt as if they were on the verge of being pulverised to dust.
With a cry of agony, he yanked his fingers from the soil, jerked his hand away from hers and collapsed onto the grass, breathing hard and groaning with pain, and curling slowly into a foetal ball. Jun, meanwhile, observed the entire spectacle without moving a single muscle on his mask-like visage.
‘I am the sky, I am the earth, I am the ocean. I am everything that has ever lived and everything that is yet to live.’
The words were spoken with such clarity, such conviction and such confidence Lightning Bird at once sat bolt upright, despite his suffering, and stared in wonder at Parvati, who was smiling down at him with an aura of shimmering gold radiating from her face. Jun took notice of this too, his blank expression morphing into one of unabashed awe. Parvati’s eyes were alive now with raw, energy-charged life. Lightning Bird observed this, and his spirit soared despite the blasts of agony that were raging within his system.
And then a fact of even greater significance hit him: she was smiling. Her face was no longer paralysed.
‘By all the powers in the universe!’ he gasped, shocked and panting from the overwhelmingness of it all. ‘Parvati! You’re … you’re … you’re back!’
‘I feel … new,’ she said slowly, peering around her with the fresh wonder of a newborn. ‘Released after centuries in a dark jail. Reborn … resurrected.’ She narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow with concentration, and managed to lift her bone-thin arm up from the armrest of the chair. She curled her formerly frozen fingers into a fist, and then uncurled them again. ‘Yes…’ she whispered, her smile broadening. ‘It is … returning.’
Lightning Bird, soaked with sweat and shaking as if caught in the grips of a deadly fever, scrambled to his feet.
‘This is, this is incredible,’he managed to utter, his mouth hanging open with both surprise and joy. ‘We must tell the others at once.’
‘It’s … a miracle,’ Jun gasped. ‘I, I never believed in miracles … but this, this is one! I saw it, no, I’m seeing it, seeing it with my own eyes!’
‘I am not fully restored,’ Parvati cautioned. ‘There is still a long way to go. We have, however, taken the first steps up the mountain.’
‘The first steps are all that is needed for the moment,’ Lightning Bird said. ‘The fact that we could take them at all, after all these decades of trying, has filled me with a joy and a new hope that is impossible to describe! Come, hurry, let us go.’
Parvati smiled again, taking great delight at being able to do so after so many long years of paralysis, and turned her chair around to head back up to the mansion.
***
‘I just received word that the chopper is on its way to pick you up,’ Maksim said, blowing out a voluminous puff of cigar smoke as he spoke to Lightning Bird, Jun and Parvati.
The three of them were seated on a balcony that overlooked the estate’s lush, rolling grounds, which were wet with silver-blue moonlight, pouring in a silent deluge from the effulgent white disc in the sky above them. Daekwon, though, was absent; he had gone to assist the men who were guarding the mansion, even though Maksim had insisted that his men needed no help.
‘Thank you, my friend,’ Lightning Bird said.
Maksim took another drag on his cigar and then glanced at his phone again.
‘It should be here in less than an hour. There is a helipad on the upper level of the roof back there,’ he said, pointing behind him at a tower that extended up towards the dark, star-sprayed sky.
‘It couldn’t get here any sooner,’ Lightning Bird muttered, his words taking on a sense of foreboding. ‘I have a feeling that something terrible is about to happen.’
Maksim puffed on his cigar and extended an arm in a sweeping gesture outwards.
‘It is a full moon, so visibility is excellent. My men are armed and alert, Lightning Bird; nobody is going to be getting in here without an army backing them up.’
‘What if that person is an army?’
Maksim chuckled dryly.
‘Ha. I’d still like to see him try.’
‘He will, if he finds us.’
‘You worry too much! Come, let’s go inside. I want to show you some of my violins before you leave. It will take your mind off this constant worrying, I think.’
A kilometre away from the mansion
