The Tower of Bones Read Free Page B

Kate’s inner struggle to contain her anguish. It took all of her determination to rein back the tears.
    ‘My mistress is impatient. Do not keep her waiting.’
    With an occasional crack of her whip Faltana drove Kate before her, shambling and twisting through the organic warren of passageways that formed the interior of the Tower of Bones, with its rancid smells and echoes of pain. In her mind, as always, Kate whispered the mantra remembered from the school yard of childhood.
Sticks and stones may break my bones! Sticks and stones may break my bones!
She no longer remembered what it had meant to her as a child, only that she had injected it with new meaning here. Let Faltana tear her skin. Let her humiliate her with words but she would never break her will. So, driven through the labyrinths of nightmare, she clung on to tiny comforts, using them to blot out the terror and pain.
    ‘Soon,’ Faltana’s pointed red tongue licked her fangs in exultation, ‘there will be feasting and celebration. The Ugly Ones have captured a singer.’
    Kate was overwhelmed with horror: the Ugly Ones were the horrid bat creatures. And the singer they had captured must be a Cill child.
    ‘Make haste!’
    Faltana had driven her into the great chamber of theskull, opposite the pit that fell away into darkness. The chamber was filled with a choir of succubi who were crooning and writhing their bodies in concert with the Witch’s melody of triumph. Faltana brought the Garg-tail whip across the backs of Kate’s calves, causing her to pitch forward onto the bleached bone floor. Pain seared through the nerves of both her legs, from her hips right down to her toes. She gasped, feeling her muscles jerk and spasm, with the poisonous sting of the tiny barbs that added venom to the whip.
    ‘On your knees from here!’
    Witches! Succubi! It was madness. It was impossible – a nightmare she would wake up from, and, as she had always woken from nightmares, she would go to the barn-like bathroom in her uncle’s house and douse her face in cold water over the big old-fashioned white porcelain sink. But Kate saw no hint of normality. And that meant that somehow the nightmare was more real than any memory of the echoing bathroom, with its brass plugs and castiron fittings, more real than her memory of her dog, Darkie – friendly, loving Darkie, who must have been really missing her. A nightmare shouldn’t go on like this, for day after day. A nightmare shouldn’t feel this real. A nightmare wasn’t filled with such pain and fear and loneliness …
    Faltana grabbed hold of Kate’s hair and jerked her head around so she had to watch what was happening. It took all of Kate’s faltering reserves of willpower not to shriek in terror.
    Gargs! There were seven or eight of them, forming a semicircle in the chamber, their folded wings merging with the deep purple shadows that jerked fitfully over the vault of fossilised bone that made up the ceiling. The Gargs were hugely tall and skeletally thin, their bat-like heads peering down at her and their oily skins reflecting the red glow that permeated the chamber from deeper underground. Faltana had told her that it was Gargs like these that had captured her and flown her here, in some perverted homage to the Witch. And there at the centre of the semicircle, bound and venom-dazed on the bone-scattered floor, she saw their captive.
    The Cill looked very young, a boy of perhaps seven or eight years, completely naked, and bound into a ball, his body twitching and trembling. Kate was trembling herself, her teeth chattering. She didn’t know why Faltana had brought her here. She didn’t want to see what they were doing to the boy. It grieved her that she couldn’t do anything to help him. But she couldn’t just watch and let them do it.
    ‘Let him go, you … you monsters!’
    Faltana twisted the fistful of Kate’s hair so hard it tore at her scalp. She forced Kate’s head down and round on her neck until her