by Hugh Cook
Gorn came to Blackwood one day.
'Have you got a tinder box?' he said.
'I have,' said Blackwood. 'And it's dry. But every- thing is damp. There's nothing dry to burn.'
'No,' said Gorn, 'I've been carrying things we could burn. They've been next to my skin for a long time now. Bits of bamboo, small strips of wood. They're dry now.'
'That was a good idea.' i thought so too,' said Gorn. 'Light the fire for me. We'll build it right here, on the raft. The logs are too thick and sodden to catch fire.'
'Then what are you scared of?'
'What?'
'Sorry,' said Blackwood, who had spoken without thinking, i must have been imagining things.'
'No,' said Gorn. 'You're right. I'm afraid. I'm afraid… I may have gone blind in the dark.'
Til light the fire,' said Blackwood.
The first sparks from the tinder box delighted Gorn, for he could see them. But it was hard work lighting the fire. Blackwood persisted till the moment brighter than magic when the spark caught, twisted into flame, flared, hissed, crackled, then burst into a conflagration that set light and shadow leaping in the gloom. Gorn whooped. Men stirred, woke and staggered to their feet. And what a crew they were: sunken eyes, unkempt hair, faces marked by bad dreams and despair. But now, seeing the fire, they cheered.
'Hah!' shouted Gorn. 'Light! Light!'
Then something screamed.
High overhead in the darkness it screamed. It screamed with malevolence in the bowels of the earth. It screamed with pain, with rage, with hatred.
'Out!' yelled Hearst. 'Put the fire out!'
Gorn dashed his arms into the water. With his wet arms he swept the fire over the side of the raft. Men filled their helmets with water and flung it on the burning remnants. There was the hiss of fire relapsing into char. Then everyone waited and listened to the darkness.
There was the sound of wings beating overhead. One 231 set of wings. Two sets of wings. A dozen sets of wings. They were huge. They circled. The rafts bumped and nuzzled each other. Men sat rigid as if skewered. Fingers tightened on weapons. The wings circled, circled, and then ceased to be heard.
After they had no longer heard the wings for a long time, someone ventured to speak…
***
In the darkness the men began to die. They did not cease breathing straight away, but they slept more than they stayed awake. They ceased to talk. Few of them bothered to fish. Those who did fish caught flesh which tasted strange; exploring fingers found these fish had no eyes. Some were reluctant to eat them, and ate only siege dust and the occasional handful of mouldy food from their packs.
'They'll all be corpses if this goes on,' said Alish. 'We've seen it before.'
'We have indeed,' said Hearst.
They had seen it happen often enough in the Cold West. There, in the snows, a man who gave up the will to live would be dead overnight. Here underground it was not really cold, but if the men did not eat they would die all the same.
Garash and Miphon stayed sane. They settled into a pattern of meditation which absorbed most of their waking moments. If asked what their mumbled chanting was for, they would say they were maintaining the Balance and building their powers. Blackwood, Hearst, Alish and Gorn moved to the raft the wizards were on; the chanting was better than the unbroken ripplerush of the water.
Every so often, Alish and Hearst would rouse themselves to make a tour of the rafts. Alish would try to encourage the men, and Hearst would curse them and kick them, and warn them the Melski would come and cut their throats. Both tried to get the men to talk, sing, move, fish, eat. When Alish and Hearst were on their rounds, Gorn and Blackwood talked to each other. The wizards hardly spoke at all, but did not seem to be disturbed by the men talking.
'Are you enjoying our holiday?' said Gorn one day, when most other subjects of conversation were exhausted.
'I'd rather work than be idle,' said Blackwood. 'And I don't like this dark wet hole.'
'I used to be a great one for dark wet holes myself,' said Gorn. 'The smaller and warmer the better. How about yourself?'
Blackwood said nothing. i knew a man who liked them old,' said Gorn. 'Hard to believe, isn't it? But that was his fancy. We were together the night we sacked a city in the Cold West. It was a city by a river of ice. He had an old one and I had the youngest. I'll always remember that night, you know. He got rich. He found it was always the old women who had treasure hidden in the safest place. They didn't think anyone would touch them, you see. But they were never safe with him. That's something to remember, isn't it? Look for the oldest face, if you want to get rich. Me, I just wanted to ride them.
'So my friend got rich. Then he fell into a crevasse in a glacier, a crevasse being a crack and a glacier being a river of ice, if you know what I mean. He always said he'd like to die wedged tight in a crack, but I don't think that was the sort he meant. There were those who wondered why I risked my life to climb down to his body, but I knew there was more than one set of jewels hidden in his clothing.
'So I went back to Rovac rich. But I could never settle down. I always wanted… the excitement. The moment just before it all starts, when the blood boils, when it sings in your ears. And afterwards… afterwards… the way their mouths gape. When there's a knife at their throats. I wanted another campaign, not a dangerous one, but just something to give us some fun. So I came to Estar with Alish and Hearst.' 'As a bodyguard.'
'Yes,' said Gorn. 'But Hearst was with us, so I knew there'd be action sooner or later. Soon Hearst was planning a war for the prince. It would have been good.'
Gorn sat in silence, reflecting on how good it had been. Images swam in Blackwood's head, roused by the tales Gorn had told him. White flesh on red velvet. Blood staining satin sheets. Hands of mud fingering, mauling, repressing, while screams thrashed and floundered under smothering weight.
He made himself think of other things.
He thought of Estar. Estar in sunlight, and the blue flowers of spring that bell as bright as the sky. He thought of green grass and baked potatoes, bees and birds on the wing, leaves budding and hot roast meat. If only he could have escaped, if only he could have rescued Mystrel and led her away from the madness at Castle Vaunting into the safety of the Penvash Peninsular in the north…
Mystrel…
It was no use thinking of the past. And, his eyes hot, he told himself that revenge could not alter the past. He wept.
Later, falling asleep on the rocking, rocking raft, he dreamt of thighs, breasts, buttocks, dugs, damp hair, a woman's heat…
He woke to the raft, to the sound of water, to the sound of rafts bumping against rafts; he woke to the damp of a skin of leather against his skin; he woke to a night darker than blindness.
Cold leather.
Cold metal.
What had woken him?
A wave slapped against the side of the raft and spattered his face with spray.
'What is it?' he said. 'Hush,' said Gorn.
Blackwood peered into the darkness. He felt that he had been living in darkness for a lifetime: eating and drinking and dreaming the darkness. Their stomachs were bloated with congealed shadows.
There was another wave. And a smell, a stench like the stink of black mud and rotting vegetation. There was something in the water, and it was huge.
'What is it?'
'Pray to your god if your god can hear you in this place,' said a voice, Miphon's voice. 'Otherwise be silent.'
They were silent.
They listened.
There was a surge of body bulk and a splash. A wave rocked the raft again. Listening, they heard furtive scrabblings and small splashes. They realised those Melski who still survived were coming out of the water.
The raft heaved up.
The ropes securing raft to raft burst. They were thrown up and over to the shock of cold water. Blackwood grappled current in the darkness. He swam, then realised he could as easily be swimming down as up. He was breathless, but
let himself float. He began to drift up. So that way was up. He struck out for the surface. Air slapped his face. Breath burst into his lungs. A wave slopped up his nose and a raft clouted him. He grabbed for the raft. Somewhere a scream cried for mother then shrilled into agony.
There was the sound of rending timbers. Then another scream. Snapped off short and bloody. Blackwood hauled himself onto the raft, crawled towards the centre, then bumped full-face into alien skin. He realised there was a Melski on the raft. The next moment, the Melski grappled with him.
His knife was out and in faster than a scream could escape.
He was panting.
There was a rumbling roar from a throat that sounded big as the mouth of a small river. Blackwood lay on the raft, waiting to hear that roar closing with him. But he heard nothing more, nothing but the ripple of water and the small talk of rafts and loose logs discussing their chance encounters in the river flow.
Much later, when Blackwood asked what they had been attacked by, Garash would not say. Miphon said only: 'If there had not been enough of us to more than satisfy its gluttony, we would never have got past it.'
***
More men died.
Their bodies, weighted with armour to sink them, were thrown overboard. One body woke as it was being searched for valuables; Alish realised that some of his men were now so far gone it might be hard to tell the living from the dead. He checked every corpse himself after that. The last check he did was to bare the chest, make a slit with his knife, then put a finger on the heart to see if there was any movement. He never found any, but at least that way he was sure they were not throwing living men overboard.
A simple burial: a splash, and that was it. No chants, no rites, no songs of remembrance. They could not even see the faces of those who sank away into the darkness.
Finally Alish could no longer bring himself to make the rounds of the remaining rafts. He knew why they were here. They were here because, face to face with Heenmor, Alish had failed to close with the wizard and kill him. Of course, as soon as Alish had stepped forward for the kill, the copper-strike snake would have bitten him – but Heenmor would have died.
Now he was going to die anyway, and, because his courage had faltered at the critical moment, ail the men in his command were going to die as well. Uselessly.
For no purpose. And Heenmor, given time to experiment with the death-stone, would doubtless one day obtain sufficient control of it to destroy the world – and of course Rovac was part of the world the wizard would destroy.
Accepting his death, accepting his failure, Alish sat silently, his mind empty, or slept, dreaming of shadows and glottal rock-swallowing boglands. Hearst talked to him, shook him, abused him, pleaded with him, threatened him, hit him, sang to him, threw water in his face: all to no avail. Alish had given up. He was certain to die before very many more days had passed.
It was about this time that Blackwood started coughing. The rafts drifted on, occasionally bumping and grating against loose logs from those rafts which had been smashed to pieces. Blackwood coughed… and coughed… and slept… and woke coughing. There was phlegm in his throat. When he coughed with his hand to his mouth, his hand came away greasy. He did not know what was wrong with him, but he felt sick.
Now that Alish would no longer make his rounds, Blackwood and Gorn helped Hearst. Blackwood went from raft to raft, coughing. At least he could give men something to swear at. More men died, and the bodies were rolled overboard. Each time Blackwood pushed a body into the water, he remembered the words of Saba Yavendar:
The will may require, but the night has the flesh: To darkness, to darkness.
Darkness, yes, darkness, and the darkness went on for so long that in the end Blackwood began to dream he had been born in it. He thought it would go on forever.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It was Blackwood who saw the light first, but he took the distant glimmer for no more than another of the hallucinations that had begun to make his waking moments nightmarish. Then Hearst, who still trusted himself to tell reality when he saw it, named that far-off rumour of day.
'Light,' was all he said.
Light.
Soon they could all see it. It was faint: pallid as the belly of a dead fish. But it was daylight.
As they drew closer, things began to take on shape, then colour. Looking around, they found it hard to recognise their comrades because of their ragged beards and prison pallor.
Then the river shot the rafts down a foaming white-water chute, swept them out into the sun, and left them drifting on the surface of a huge lake hemmed in by high cliffs. The water shimmered with heat-haze. Some cried out in pain, for the sun hurt like the blinding light after the darkness of the womb.
'There's a bird scratching my eyes,' wailed one man, waking from nightmare to nightmare.
Gorn cursed him, and he was silent.
The rafts drifted, idle, silent. The survivors lay face down under the hammer of the sun, sheltering their faces from the blinding light. Then Hearst rolled over; but he kept his hands over his eyes. Red bloodlight filtered through his fingers. Light…
– So we have come through. Yes. And some have said that Morgan Hearst would never lie down till death laid him out, but I'm happy enough to lie here now. Now, yes, and forever if I could…
The sun beat down on his corpse-flesh.
After a while, he opened a narrow slit between his fingers. Slowly he scanned the drifting rafts. He was amazed at the height of the heavens, at the intense blue of the sky, at the ferocity of the sun. His lips cracked apart in a smile.
– Yes, we have come through. And then:
– But look at us! A meal for vultures. Or, at best, a band of half-dead runaway slaves.
Fungus sprouted from the logs in mounds and lugs, white, orange and purple. It sprawled across leather in threads of white or bile-green splashes. Hearst counted the rafts: only eight left. On one was nothing but a corpse; on others sat men in various stages of collapse. The survivors were as pale as the inner bark of trees, the white flesh of grubs, the kernels of almonds. Some had inflamed scarlet rashes, boils, and stinking ulcers.
Blackwood had cold, grey, slimy smoke drifting in coils about him. He coughed, and more smoke vomited out of his mouth. Hearst went to help him. Blackwood waved smoke away from his face.
'I wouldn't come any closer if I was you,' said Blackwood.
'He's right,' said Miphon. 'Stay away for the moment. The smoke is parasitic, but the light will weaken it. Soon it'll trouble him less, and be too weak to batten onto anything else.'
'How can I get rid of it?' said Blackwood.
'You can't,' said Miphon.
Hearst shook Alish by the shoulder.
'Time to move,' he said.
'Time ran out long ago,' muttered Alish.
Hearst again tried to rouse him to action, then gave up.
'Oars into water,' sang out Hearst, getting to his feet. His voice drifted away over the dazzling surface of the lake. Slowly men began to grub away the sodden ropes holding down the sweep-oars. Every knife was rusty and blunt; one could have wept to see those fine blades so cankered and dishonoured. With oars in the water, the men began to work the rafts toward the shore. Seven moved; the eighth, with only a corpse on board, stayed where it was. Slowly they drew away from it.
'You're lighter,' said Hearst to Gorn.
'My travelling companion has suffered,' said Gorn, looking ruefully at the remnants of his paunch. 'The wizard Garash also looks lighter than he was.'
The rafts crawled along under the sun like crippled insects. Hearst tried to strike up a rowing chant, but none would take up the song, so he let his voice trail away. On the eighth raft, the one they had left behind, the body stood up. Hearst realised it was Valarkin, who now cut free an oar and set the raft in motion.
'We mustn't lose him,' said Miphon. 'He's got the ring to the bottle. We should try and get into that bottle soon.'
'Yes,' said Gorn. 'There's
food in there.' 'We'll take him when he gets to the shore,' said Garash.
'He's going the wrong way,' said Gorn. Hearst shouted.
'Valarkin! Where are you going? Valarkin!'
'Maybe he's heading for the other side of the lake,' said Gorn. 'Shall I swim after him?'
'What's the use?' said Hearst. 'He could always throw the ring in the water if you caught him. Besides, there might still be Melski in the water.'
'There's a bow tied to my pack,' said Blackwood. 'Over there. The quiver is inside the pack. You might try that.'
Hearst found the bow. He fitted an arrow to the string and drew the bow. The string snapped. it's rotted through,' said Hearst. 'Garash?' i have enough power to kill him,' said Garash. i have more than enough power to kill him, but the fire would also destroy the ring.'
They had no way of catching Valarkin.
Under the sun the fungus grew brittle, curled up, became black, writhed and began to stink. Slowly, too slowly to leave more than the slightest ripple of wake, the rafts worked their way toward the shore. Those not on the oars lay for the most part as if dead, sheltering from the sun under weatherworn cloaks.
Gorn drew a helmet-full of water and peered at his reflection.
'How's your beauty?' said Hearst.
'Better than I'd expected. I'd have thought my hair would have gone grey after all we've been through.'
Garash peered at the shore with his protuberant eyes. In places the rocks were black, in places red; some were stained yellow with the sulphur-spill of hot-water springs. Steam rose in plumes from fumaroles. it won't be easy getting up those cliffs,' said Garash.
'Weil make it,' said Hearst. 'How do you feel now, Alish?' i feel like the yolk spilt from an eggshell.'
'Rest then. You'll feel better later.'
The first raft crunched against the stones of the shore. Those on the oars let them drop and sat down or lay down.
'Ashore!' yelled Hearst. 'On your feet and get ashore. Move now, move! My sword's in my hand, and it won't be the flat of it I'll be using.'
