The lodes were wretched, their master cruel. Locked here. Locked here. Locked here.
The Lode stung him with its rising awareness, its memory of his blood and his guilt.
The water conducted the Lode’s power and as Cadell walked further up the stream it focussed on him. The water grew dense around his limbs, began to defy its natural tidal inclinations. Shapes took form within its depths. Lights winked into being. And all around it was an odd and breathless sort of shock. You are here. Why are YOU here?
Cadell reacted to the Lode’s shock, its recognition, with a sort of shock and recognition of his own.
Strange, the things you forget, he thought. The power and the agony.
Old code words, old data flickered to life in his memory, dim at first, they increased in intensity, beacons of energy to which he was drawn.
But he also sensed a hesitancy, a distant doubt. Was it his own?
Ah, but he always had doubts. Always. They rang in his bones and rattled, ancient as fear, in his skull. The Engine merely magnified them, as did its cruel punishments.
The Quarg Hounds howled, no doubt about their hungers.
He glanced over at David then back to the Hounds, they were at the hill, racing towards the pale bare rock of its summit. Fierce as they were and deadly, this weather was still too cool for them, the run and the rain had taken their toll. The beasts whined between each howl; dark blood streamed from their jaws. They were weakened, but what strength remained was more than enough to rend David limb from limb.
Cadell clenched his teeth. He could not put it off any longer, already his stomach was cramping, his ears ringing in anticipation. He took one final breath and raised his hands.
This was going to hurt.
“Now,” he cried. “NOW!”
And his bones turned to ash. Pain hammered into his skull.
“Now.”
The Quarg Hounds had reached the summit. On that final “Now” they stopped, as though yielding to his command.
But it was not the Roilbeasts that Cadell’s words commanded. The Quarg Hounds’ bloody snouts rose up quizzically.
One of them opened its mouth, then shut it, swiftly, cocking its head, as though it were listening to something distant but racing nearer.
Silence. The air cooled, something hardened within it, became crystalline and deadly.
Ice enclosed Cadell’s skin, burnt and bit deep. His body shook with energies and their absence, because that was the wounding truth of it.
His power was an absence, a vacuum, and a slowing, and all that lived quailed from it.
Insects fell, dead and frozen, out of the air, an entomological hail.
At the top of the hill, the Quarg Hounds yawled, thrashing and screaming, as all that cold struck them. David had fallen forward, on to his hands and knees, in a field of frost-coated grass, his face a mask of winded agony.
The Quarg Hounds howled again, a beaten horrible sound that dropped at last to a whine. They crumpled in on themselves, all their menace, all their strength gone and only their blackened skeletons and brittle skin remaining. And that was somehow more horrible than claws and howls and hunger, perhaps stillness always is.
The ice around Cadell’s legs turned to slush, and his blood started stinging, singing and stinging, as it forced its way back into constricted veins. The stream began to flow again almost as it had done before. The icy skin on the stream cracked and drifted away.
The Lode continued to burble inside his head, its ache rising to freeze much more than it already had, to wake its siblings and blanket the land for hundreds of miles around with cold. But only the Engine was capable of unlocking all that ice, of slowing the shuttling atoms of the world, and he did not command it. In fact he could feel it, a distant and disapproving presence.
Yes, he did not command it at all.
Not yet.
He shivered. The thought of such appalling power filled him with terror. Perhaps it was better if he never did.