secret mosses, skulking fungi, until she found a single black fruit on a low bough, ripening into a head which opened ice-blue eyes at her and said: ‘You.’ She remembered the smell of fire, and the dragon rising, and the one voice to which both she and the dragon had listened. The voice of the dragon-charmer. But the head was burned and the voice stilled, for ever and ever. And her thought shrank, reaching further back and further, seeking the pain that was older and deeper, spear-deep in her spirit, though the wound, if not healed, was all but forgotten. Now she probed even there, needing the pain, the loss, the guilt, fearing to find herself heart-whole again for all time. And so at last she came to a beach at sunset, and saw Rafarl Dévornine rising like a god from the golden waves.
But she had been so young then, only sixteen, in an age ten thousand years gone. And now I am different, she thought. In Atlantis, they thought I was a star fallen from the heavens. But now I am a witch—not some pagan crone from a dream of the past but a witch of today, a twenty-first century witch. My skills may be ancient but my spirit is as modern as a microchip. As modern as a hamburger. Would I love him, if I met him now? When Someday comes, if it comes, will I even know him, or he me? And the tears started, not from the return of pain but from its loss, so she thought the lack of pain hurt the more, and there was an ache inside her that was not her heart. Gaynor suffers, she sensed, for her Gift or their friendship showed her what the other sought to hide, but at least she suffers because she loves. I have lost all the love I ever had, and it will not come again, because you love like that just once, and then it’s gone for good. I must be a fickle creature, to love so deeply and forget so fast. And her tears dried, because she saw them as an indulgence, playing at grief, and she lay in the dark empty of all feeling, hollow and cold, until at last she slept.
And dreamed. She moved through the dream as if she were an onlooker behind her own eyes, with no control over her actions, traversing the city with the desperate certainty of someone who was utterly resolved on a dreadful errand. It was a winter evening, and the glare of the metropolis faded the stars. Many-windowed cliffs rose above her, glittering with lights; modern sculptures settled their steel coils on marble plinths; three-cornered courtyards flaunted fountains, polished plaques, automatic doors. Recent rain had left sprawling puddles at the roadside which gave back headlamp and streetlamp in glancing flashes. In places the city looked familiar, but at other times it seemed to change its nature, showing glimpses of an underlying world, alien and sinister. Sudden alleyways opened between buildings, thick with shadows that were darker and older than the nightfall. Flights of steps zig-zagged down into regions far below the Underground, where crowds of what might be people heaved like boiling soup. Faces passed by, picked out briefly in the lamplight, with inhuman features. It came to Fern that she was looking for something, something she did not want to find, driven by a compulsion that she could not control. She had always believed in the freedom to choose—between right and wrong, good and evil, the choices that shape the soul. But she knew now that she had already chosen, a choice that could not be unmade, and her feet were set on a deadly path.
Presently she came to the turning that she sought, a pedestrian walk that passed under an arch in a façade of opaque windows. When she emerged at the other end of the tunnel she was in an open square. It was large—far too large for the buildings that enclosed it on the outside, as if she had passed through a dimensional kink into some alternative space. Stone pavings stretched away on either hand; distant groups moved to and fro, busy as ants on their unknown affairs. In front of her, broad steps spread out like low waves on an endless beach, and above them rose the tower. She had been expecting it, she knew—she had been seeking it—but nonetheless the sight gave her a sick jolt in her stomach, a horror of what she was about to do, her fearful necessary errand. It was taller than the surrounding buildings, taller than the whole city, an angular edifice of blind glass and black steel climbing to an impossible height, terminating in a single spire which seemed to pierce the pallor of the clouds. Reflected lights gleamed like drowning stars in its crystal walls, but she could see nothing of what lay within. It was of the city and yet not of it, an architectural fungus: the urban maze nourished it even as a hapless tree nourishes a parasitic growth, which has outgrown and will ultimately devour its host. For this was the tower at the heart of all evil, the Dark Tower of legend, rebuilt in the modern world on foundations as old as pain. Fern looked up, and up, until her neck cricked, and dragged her gaze away, and slowly mounted the steps to the main entrance.
Guards stood on either side, scarlet-coated and braided across the shoulders. They might have been ordinary commissionaires were it not for the masks of dark metal covering their faces. Iron lids blinked once in the eye-slits as Fern passed between them. The double doors opened by invisible means and she entered a vast lobby a-gleam with black marble where a dim figure slid from behind the reception desk. A voice without tone or gender said: ‘He is waiting for you. Follow me.’ She followed.
Behind the reception area there was a cylindrical shaft, rising out of a deep well surrounded by subterranean levels, and ascending beyond the eye’s reach. Each storey was connected to the shaft by a narrow bridge, unprotected by rail or balustrade, open to the drop beneath. Transparent lifts travelled up and down, ovoid bubbles suspended around a central stem. Fern flinched inwardly from the bridge, but her legs carried her across uncaring. The lift door closed behind them and they began to rise, gently for the first few seconds and then with accelerating speed, until the passing storeys blurred and her stomach plunged and her brain felt squashed against her skull. When they stopped her guide stepped out, unaffected, unassisting. An automaton. For a moment she clutched the door-frame, pinching her nose and exhaling forcefully to pop her ears. She didn’t look down. She didn’t speculate how far it was to the bottom. Her legs were unsteady now and the bridge appeared much narrower, a slender gangplank over an abyss. Her guide had halted on the other side. She thought: It looks like a test, but it isn’t. It’s a lure, a taunt. A challenge.
But she could not turn back.
She crossed over, keeping her gaze ahead. They moved on. Now, they were on an escalator which crawled around the tower against the outer wall. At the top, another door slid back, admitting them to an office.
The office. The seat of darkness. Neither a sorcerer’s cell nor an unholy fane but an office suited to the most senior of executives. Spacious. Luxurious. Floor-to-ceiling windows, liquid sweeps of curtain, a carpet soft and deep as fur. In the middle of the room a desk of polished ebony, and on it a file covered in red, an old-fashioned quill pen and a dagger that might have been meant for a letter-opener but wasn’t. There was a name stamped on the file but she did not read it: she knew it was hers. Her guide had retreated; if there were other people in the room she did not see them. Only him. Beyond the huge windows there were no city lights: just the slow-moving stars and the double-pronged horn of the moon, very big and close now, floating between two tiers of cloud. A scarlet-shaded lamp cast a rusty glow across the desk-top.
He sat outside the fall of the lamplight. Neither moonbeam nor starfire reached his unseen features. She thought he wore a suit, but it did not matter. All she could see was the hint of a glimmer in narrowed eyes.
Perhaps he smiled.
‘I knew you would come to me,’ he said, ‘in the end.’
If she spoke—if she acknowledged him—she could not hear. The only voice she heard was his: a voice that was old, and cold, and infinitely familiar.
‘You resisted longer than I expected,’ he went on. ‘That is good. The strength of your resistance is the measure of my victory. But now the fight is over. Your Gift will be mine, uniting us, power with power, binding you to me. Serve me well, and I will set you among the highest in this world. Betray me, and retribution will come swiftly, but its duration will be eternal. Do you understand?’
But Fern was in the grip of other fears. She felt the anxiety within her, sharp as a blade.
‘The one you care for will be restored,’ he said. ‘But it must be through me. Only through
