A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  Into Bolldhe’s mind flashed an image, another message from outside: it was Scathur, at the top of the ziggurat, during the siege. He was bent over something monstrous, too terrible to behold, and into this recumbent form he was pushing the flamberge with the care and precision of a surgical instrument. Scathur looked up frantically at the approaching soldiers but still did not cease in his work, pushing the sword in slowly, ever deeper – for Rawgr-slaying is no simple task . . .

  Bolldhe reeled. The corridor was gone, and he now stood on the roofed viewing platform of the tower, the soul-house’s highest point. The stonework was splitting and exploding all around him, falling into the foggy oblivion that surrounded the crumbling edifice, and he knew just how little time there remained to him.

  ‘A decision!’ Yorda said to him from behind. ‘You must make one now!’

  He stared down helplessly into the brown fog that still enveloped his soul-house. It was just as thick as before, except that this time he saw it was not fog, but a thick greasy smog, as though belched from a thurible. He glanced up at the shaking riven ceiling, hoping in desperation that the rune Wodeman had spoken of with such consequence might still be there. But all he saw was a single eye staring back at him, even as it sank into the metal teeth of a meat-grinder . . .

  (‘. . . maybe the important point is your refusal to look at it . . .’

  ‘I’m a stubborn, arrogant shit . . .’)

  The gargoyles came skittering up the outside walls of the tower from their places above the gatehouse, squealing as they dodged the chunks falling from the viewing platform. Finally gaining the top, they vaulted up onto the last remaining balustrade and glared at Bolldhe. Three of them came in further, one perching upon his left shoulder, one on his right, and the third squatting before him with an expectant look on its stony face. As before, each bore the likeness of his quest-mates, though now injured and disfigured, spoilt almost to the point of ruination.

  In the one that resembled Methuselech all Bolldhe could see was a vision, an image of the soul of Mauglad Yrkeshta flitting about among the mounds of slain in the chamber, trying desperately to find a new host to possess.

  The hefty blank-faced gargoyle was the Peladane. That stony plainness it possessed spoke clearer than any words: Hate thine enemy as he hateth thee. Kill without mercy, without thought, for only an idiot stands still while under attack.

  And behind him an entire host of souls exhorted, ‘Do as your leader tells you, Bolldhe. We made you what you are, and what you will always be: a Peladane!’

  Even Paulus, that mercenary to the Peladanes, and Kuthy, the ex-Peladane, joined in this chorus. But what were those two, Bolldhe wondered, other than future reflections of what he would be himself one day?

  His eyes flitted past the gargoyle of young Radnar to land upon Finwald. The crumbled remains of this simulacrum, which now adorned Bolldhe’s left shoulder, were little more than a heap of gravel, and yet it spoke. Though the words were no more enlightening than the crunching of old stone, they seemed to echo the sentiments of the Peladane and his followers.

  But you failed us, Finwald, Bolldhe thought, you failed us all utterly. Betrayed us even after dragging us all the way here. How much does your opinion count for?

  With one hand Bolldhe brushed the pile of gravel off his shoulder onto the floor.

  Of them all, only Appa had ever rejected the sword outright. ‘Nothing good can be achieved by it, Bolldhe,’ it now whispered into his ear from its position on his right shoulder. ‘You of all people should know that. Just think what those Peladanes did to you back then, of the burden they loaded you with – one that you carry with you to this day.’

  ‘But, downstairs didn’t your own god just tell me to use the sword? To take the flamberge and strike the Rawgr?’

  The Appa-gargoyle hesitated a second, then shook its stony head. ‘Forget what’s in this crumbling ruin. Forget what you’ve seen in here. Your journey is not inside this place, but out there! Bring down those walls that enclose your courtyard, and let people in. Live, Bolldhe, and love!’

  ‘Wonderful!’ Bolldhe exclaimed. ‘But there’s still the matter of the Rawgr and his horde. We’re all about to be butchered! What d’you want me to do, go out and love them?’

  Appa was struck dumb. Clueless as ever he had been on their journey.

  In desperation, Bolldhe turned finally to the ragged little gargoyle that squatted before him. (The Gapp one still bounced up and down trying to be heard – but why would anyone want to listen to him?) The Wodeman-gargoyle, meanwhile, wore the hopeful yet slightly guileless expression of one who waits and, as usual, begged Bolldhe to look into himself.

  ‘BUT I AM!’ Bolldhe howled, and the roof of the tower was torn off and borne away by the same gale that was demolishing the house, dragging its tatty clothes line along with it like the streamer of a kite. ‘I’m in myself, and I still haven’t got a clue!’

  Then it struck him. He turned round and looked directly into the eyes of the one behind him. Yorda’s eyes.

  ‘YOU!’ he cried above the increasing tempest. ‘You’re me! So you tell me: what must I do?’

  ‘Yes!’ squeaked the Appa-gargoyle, suddenly reanimated by hope. ‘Listen to her! She is the way! She is the path you should have taken so long ago! Behold your beloved; is she not fair beyond even your wildest dreams?’

  Bolldhe paused and thought about this. His wildest dreams tended to involve situations like walking around a marketplace stark naked, and thus he had to concede that Yorda, though in truth a tad plain, was at least fairer than this prospect.

  ‘So I kill Drauglir with love?’ he asked incredulously.

  A lull in the wind. A second’s stilling of the quaking of the soul-house. Then Yorda fixed Bolldhe with a look forged of steel.

  ‘No, Bolldhe,’ she replied coldly. ‘You stick him with your sword. It’s the only way. You’ve known it all along.’

  Bolldhe was struck dumb. Throughout his journey with her, Yorda had not once proffered an opinion, had only ever asked him for his. But now that she had done so, Bolldhe found himself gaping in astonishment that she, of all of them, should be the one to say this.

  ‘Decision! Decision!’ the gargoyles shrieked. ‘Quickly! Now!’

  ‘Quickly. Now.’ Yorda repeated softly, calmly. There was sympathy in her tone as well as strength. He began to quake in time with the shaking of his soul-house. Into his mind flashed images of his early travels, when at times he had wept with loneliness and had yearned to take that gentle hand that was offered him into his own. Yet, for all his desire to give in to her, still Bolldhe could not ignore the faint echo of insincerity that lingered on her persuasive tongue. He had suffered so very much in his life, too much to allow anyone – even his soul-guide – to cash in on his miseries.

  With a sickening lurch, Bolldhe felt the foundations of his soul-house give way. He was sick, so unbelievably sick of listening to others’ opinions, so brain-sore from being tugged this way and that, that he felt he might just go completely berserk. The tower, the entire house, was about to collapse, fall into the brown smog, and he along with it.

  Then, before him, the gargoyle that was Wodeman broke into a series of twittering chirps, and began cavorting in pain and alarm. It scrabbled madly at its face until some of the stone flaked away, and Wodeman’s face – Wodeman’s real face – broke through.

  Bolldhe!’ he shouted. ‘None of this matters! Just ask yourself what makes you so different!’

  Bolldhe stared at the crumbling form of the gargoyle, and that vision he had experienced before entering Drauglir’s vault came back to him: Granite. That’s what I am . . . Nothing to do with all this “metal’ shit.

  A scream went up from Yorda, and she lunged at the Wodeman-gargoyle. It tried to grab Bolldhe’s ankle but was too slow, too ponderous, and she kicked it full in the face and sent it flying, howling, into the foggy oblivion.

  She wheeled on Bolldhe, and cold fire was in her eyes. ‘You think
that Torca is any wiser than the others?’ she screamed. ‘You believe him more than them? Let me show you just how honest he is! Let me show you where he really got that blood!’

  She snapped her fingers and for a brief few seconds Bolldhe’s eyes grew wide and hot and red as the sun. There before him was the scene from the storehouse out on the dock. There was the hedge wizard, all crouched over and stinking; there was Yen, the Quiravian woman, pressed back against the wall in her fear; there were the malicious little rune tiles, openly laughing at Wodeman. And there, in the middle of it all, amid a widening pool of steaming blood, sagged the shuddering form of his only true friend in the world, his beloved Zhang.

  ‘Bastard . . .’ was all he could manage.

  Then the tower collapsed.

  Down, down through the cascade of falling masonry they fell, through the freezing brown fog that tore the wind from their lungs, down towards an ocean-sized vortex of seething gases and spinning fragments of soul-house. And as Bolldhe fell, so too did Yorda, with him.

  Bolldhe!’ she wailed. ‘Save us! Save us all, for pity’s sake!’

  Yorda, himself, his comrades – all dying at this moment. The old priests who had tried so hard and suffered so much just to help him . . . The funny little boy and his dog . . . Those crazy adventurers with their permanently pissed-off Wyvern . . . And big fat laughing Wintus, he who might have been his friend . . . Now all lost in the melee of dead.

  Bolldhe’s mind reached out for them, even as he fell, struggled to call to mind a picture of them, of those he was defending, those he loved. But in spite of his efforts, there came nothing save perhaps for the dim skulking shadow of his own reflection.

  ‘Strike the Rawgr, Bolldhe,’ Yorda called out to him, strangely calm. ‘Save those you love.’

  Still he fell.

  ‘Strike the Rawgr!’ she repeated, louder this time and more insistent.

  But still he would not. Still he fought his inner battle. The vortex reached out for him, expanded, howling louder than any sound he could ever imagine possible.

  A pause. Then the voice of Yorda came, one final time, and the sound of it was harsh as dry twigs being snapped.

  ‘STRIKE THE FUCKING RAWGR, I SAID!’

  The eyes of the Benne Nighe exploded before him, enveloped him, and into their crackling bonfire Bolldhe tumbled.

  The tempest-roaring of worlds’ collision, a world of souls screaming in torture all around, downward, ever downward, spiralling into the ripping and crushing mandibles of hell, and ever before him those hovering eyes, swelling in size as the hero dies, the eyes of Yorda – the Benne Nighe or whatever it was – pools of liquid fire burning his heart out, an abomination of conflagration.

  And into the lake of hell he plunged, every brain cell screaming in pain, stench of bubbling skin fouling the air, choke and gag on sulphur and smoke, searing gases blistering through nostrils and into collapsing lungs, great flames roaring around him, shrivelling his flesh with unbelievable agony before his incredulous eyes that boiled then burst from shattered sockets, skin charred to weeping blackness, bones splintered under the heat into fragments that suppurated with the marrow boiling up from within . . .

  Bolldhe was in hell, and around him the company fell, chopped down, hacked into pieces, torn limb from limb, skin flayed from convulsing flesh, split by wire . . . and the eyes still laughed in victory before him.

  In the last moment of most exigent need, all men cry out to their gods to deliver them from eternal damnation, some to their mothers, some to their sergeants, their comrades, their brothers . . .

  The ones they love.

  But Bolldhe had no such bonds. No loyalties. No one. He was alone. A chip of granite tumbling all by itself through the void of space. It would not have occurred to him to ask for help, not even here on the point of his own destruction. This he had to do alone, because for him there had never been any other way.

  He had a flame of his own, a flame forged of steel, gripped fast in his hand. And those eyes – mocking, cruel, laughing at his torment, scorning his puniness, gloating over his failure – he had to plunge his sword into them, give release to his agony, his madness, his hatred, had to stab them, put them out, purge them with steel, hack, gouge and smite them with all the years of blackness in his heart behind each stroke, until they bled out their molten evil, and fled wailing into the abyss.

  It was what they all wanted, what they all cried out for. Who would not have done the same? Who – unless it be a fragment of granite tumbling alone through the void of space?

  But I am Bolldhe, he seethed, grinding his teeth in anguish. I am granite . . .

  ‘AND I WILL NOT BE DIRECTED!’

  The words rolled like thunder from the summit of the ziggurat, and Bolldhe the Great, flamberge in both hands, swung the blade with all his insanity, away from the eyes and straight down onto the altar stone by his feet.

  At the first stroke of Flametongue upon the stone, the sword rang throughout the chamber, but held. All movement within that place ground to a halt as each and every one there gaped and held their breath; men, part-men and parts of men, all stood stricken to the spot, waiting for whatever was to befall.

  At the second stroke of Flametongue, still the sword held, but all movement beyond the chamber, in and around the entirety of Vaagenfjord Maw, in every night-black hall and hellish crevice, was stilled: the bubbling magma, the gusts of snow, the waves upon the strand, even the crawling life that dwelt upon the ocean floor (that had never even heard of Drauglir, and would probably not have cared much even if they had, rawgrs never having had much to do with fish in the first place).

  Then Bolldhe, his soul-vision melting away around him, became aware of the sea of upturned faces, the audience below him, all around the ziggurat and way beyond, that frozen congregation that had arranged themselves upon one side or another, and gathered here upon this day to witness the chance that would befall the world, and still balanced upon a needle’s point.

  Bolldhe focused upon Flametongue, that undulating serpent of metal that still shone with cornelian lustre before his eyes, and yet held firm in his trembling grasp, intact, unblemished . . .

  As whole and flawless as when he had first held it in the silver mines.

  They think it’s all over, his stricken mind choked.

  Then he brought it down a third and final time.

  ‘It is now,’ he whispered, and Flametongue, the soul-jar that had contained the life force of Drauglir intact within its writhing case for five hundred years, exploded into a billion shards of violet and cobaltite brilliance.

  The sarcophagus blew apart, Bolldhe was hurled backwards through the air and, amid the seething furore of coruscating light that broiled atop the ziggurat in a beacon of chrysoberyl, lapis lazuli and jacinth fire, the face of Yorda appeared. All coyness and cajolery were gone, replaced by a countenance of stunned incredulity and absolute incomprehension. Then, as an awful realization spread across those spectral features, the chimerical visage of Yorda dissipated and transmogrified into its true form.

  For one split second of inconceivable abomination too terrible for any of its beholders to suffer, the face of Drauglir finally appeared. It was the face of his uttermost undoing. His total despair. His last instant of existence.

  Then, for a time in which no sound could endure, night became day, and a pulse of white light lanced through the eyeballs of all present, punched through the retina and seared the brain beyond with its glaring intensity.

  Cuna burst out into a shrieking, roaring thunderclap of laughter and slapped his hands upon his celestial thighs in amazement.

  Appa, blood-drenched and utterly spent, collapsed to the floor, his task, beyond all hope, completed.

  The ragged and battered Wodeman – in his gore-soaked wolfskin now resembling nothing more than fresh roadkill – fell upon his knees in blessed awe at his charge.

  Gapp stared agog from beneath the sheltering arch of Shlepp’s hind legs, believing (wrongly)
that for the first time in his life someone had actually listened to him.

  And Mauglad Yrkeshta, with a tired but almost loving smile gracing his non-corporeal lips, blew out his candle, rolled over and finally, gratefully, gave up the ghost.

  The breath of life swept through the chamber, a spring wind that carried blossom’s perfume across a winter landscape. It made no sound, it caused no sensation to the skin and it carried no weight. But in its wake the Dead dropped, slumped to the floor without protest like string-cut marionettes. The wire-faces fled before it, howling as they went. And the Children of the Keep, meeting it in their headlong stampede towards the chamber, simply unravelled into a hundred slices of wriggling rawgr-meat.

  Out of the Chamber of Drauglir it issued, and surged through every passageway, every hall and every pit of Ymla-Myrrdhain, out through Smaulka-Degernerth, the Moghol, and into each and every last crevice of Vaagenfjord Maw, from the depths of Gapp’s sea cave to the very pinnacle of Ravenscairn.

  And, as it poured out over all the lands, the weight of it was ultimately felt by everyone, for in its momentum it turned the scales of Good and Evil, and shifted the entire world around upon its axis.

  SEVENTEEN

  Despair

  SO THE LAST FLICKERING gasps of rawgr-fire sputtered and died, and the reeking smog of the thuribles dissipated, both purged from the chamber by the breath of life. But in one corner high up among the corbels that adorned the upper walls a new fire suddenly flared. It was the tiniest, most delicate flame of blue and yellow, one that sprang into life within a warm and fragrant bouquet of phosphorous smoke, and wavered daintily, uncertainly. In giant hands it was held, cupped protectively to shield it from the troubled currents of the astral wind. Carefully but without difficulty these hands guided it towards the end of a white tube of aromatic dried herbs and held it there.