And his powerful, stocky body, racked with cramps and raw lungs, carried him on, pounding away, skidding on blood and water, tripping over the dead, weeping now in blocked rage.
Get me out of here … out …
Around a bend and everything in flames and he thought this must be the dark burning rock here that took fire like charcoal: thick black smoke billowed and the air lost its virtue in his lungs.
Burning stone …
Dull, creeping flame-fingers that groped and grew … Flew into another hole, the madness singing shrill in his ears and he tried to distance it through all the sudden jolts, flashes, howls, warring, death and darkly flaming rock …
Clinschor felt light and free, bounding down the slope where (though he didn’t know it) Gobble had deserted him. He was sure this was the way to the bottom. He perceived his enemies in a vast ring surrounding this place; saw their pitiful pastel, fluttering demonstrations at the rim of his swelling power, and he bubbled and mouthed his exultation because in a few mere steps he would unleash the full force of earth, spit long lightnings, rain fire and vomit irresistible armies …
“Gobble, Gobble,” he told the twisted lord he clearly imagined hobbling along behind him, “what joy is mine!”
Coming out in a huge cavern between two gigantic statues, his wink of torchlight hinted only at the feet, great, deep clawed toes of brassy green stuff. He hurried along a processional aisle of these figures, whose bent shoulders supported the roof that seemed the mass of all the world. He clearly saw the long limbs, titanic shoulders, long, cold faces … his armies behind him, steel glinting in the sourceless light of darkness concentrated. He gave his voice full force now, letting it burst into these muffling spaces that soaked up its thunder:
“All you who have followed me with faith and strength are near your reward!”
He watched them far, far below. Saw them begin to stir their immense, recumbent limbs among spell-dark stones at the bottom of earth and time. Eyes like dark jewels shifted. He kept his fist sealed close around the metallic splinter, believing it would vanish if it broke contact with living flesh. Had it not remained embedded in Lohengrin’s skull, he believed, it would have been lost forever. But his destiny had never given him up and never would …
“All of you!” he cried.
“This way!” shrieked Gobble, veering suddenly into a side passage, body seeming (to Broaditch) to head two ways at once.
“To where?” he called after.
“Matters it?” Lohengrin asked over his shoulder, leading his mother.
Broaditch shrugged and followed. At the outskirts of the ruby-orange illumination, Gobble seemed to be dissolving into mist as he walked, and then the filmy strands were flashing back from the flames and coiling in the air around them. Layla exclaimed with disgust. Broaditch waved his hand and caught up hundreds of fine threads: spiderwebs, he realized. A few more steps and they were covered with the sticky stuff. For some reason Layla suddenly found all this very amusing.
“On through the webs,” she said, “to save the world …” Giggled and wobbled.
If she be not drunk, Broaditch reflected, I’m a sow’s get …
She giggled and spun like a child, waving her slender arms to catch the glinting gossamer. The stuff trailed behind them all now, wrapping and flowing like robes.
“I’m pleased you knew this way,” Lohengrin told Gobble who beat on ahead.
“We’ve all become ghosts,” Layla observed, brightly, spinning, “so we must be dead.” She glancingly reeled into the wall. She looked like she was spinning a cocoon, Broaditch thought. Lohengrin had closed his helmet. He kept picking to clear the eyeslits.
“This is a light weave, indeed,” his mother announced, holding up a shimmering arm. “Well, fellow ghosts, whom do we first haunt?” Skipped a little down the steepening slope. “I’ll choose your father … the bastard … I’ll haunt him …”
“If still he lives,” said her son in his muffling helmet.
“Never fear, boy,” she assured him, “he always turns up. You think he’s gone and there he is scratching at the gate again … all innocence, the bastard …” She wasn’t amused now. Brushed violently at the endless, filming webs. Wobbled. “I’m not going this way … This is the way to the dead lands …”
Gobble cried out, stopped, a short bent shape (reminding Broaditch of a melted-down candle end) in the palely gleaming spidermist, feeble torch held high.
Something was standing in the deeper web fog beyond, massive, menacing, long arms reaching down as if to seize the shrunken cripple.
Lohengrin drew and stepped closer, slicing through the dense stuff, opening his helmet. Behind him Layla giggled again, irrelevantly. Broaditch saw her tug free the flask this time as her son, in the strange, cloudy pall, poked at the tall figure with his swordtip and heard it ring and scrape.
“Stone,” he said. “Come on.”
A carven man whose arms seemed to hopelessly clutch at the myriad strands that enveloped him. And Broaditch thought that could have been any of them turned to stone … any of them …
“Where?” wondered Broaditch.
Layla giggled. Gobble lurched on into the misty wall that endlessly tore and clung and dissolved in the torchfire. Lohengrin paused, thoughtful.
“Haste,” said Gobble, “haste.” He spun around in his strange, gleaming shroud.
“What tells you this way leads anywhere?” Lohengrin demanded.
“This is the spiderway,” he screeched. “The spiderway … they all speak of it … it leads to the bottom …”
“To find what?” Lohengrin pressed him. “No one has passed through here in years.”
“To find lord master,” Gobble said. “I told you that. His sickness changed him! … made him mad …” Turned and went on.
“I trust not your sneaky mind, runt,” Lohengrin said. Watched him lean on ahead, torchflames spurting the gossamer. His mother took another semi-furtive nip. Broaditch shook his head.
“Does he believe what he says?” he wondered.
Up ahead, Gobble shrieked again.
“Now what?” asked Lohengrin. “A statue of a dog’s ass? A heap of batshit?”
Howtlande suddenly was in a wide corridor, steeply tilted, and as he stared into the blank openings filled with shouts and cries and smoke, the main din and maddened horror came around the near turn like a flood. He realized that the passages on this level had funneled them all here. The stinging smoke packed them together. He backed against a wall as several lithe black-robes came bounding out of a sideway and stood baffled and panting, bloody, blackened, some snarling, some afraid; coughing, choking as the smoke boiled out behind them from every hole now.
“Every way leads nowhere,” one said, chest heaving, waving a bloody knife, facing the approaching mass of runts and normals, a few racing desperately ahead of the pack as others began spilling from the side corridors and colliding, falling, rolling, screaming and cursing, the naked teenagers were caught with the rest, ripping their blades around frantically now, trying just to clear room to run. Howtlande was backing away, half-running, as the space filled with death and pain and rage and fear. The panic became a force, a thing of tom and broken flesh that now drove down a single, smooth tunnel with no more openings lining the sides, a tilt that had half of them rolling like a snowball coming down a winter hillside. And he didn’t hear his own voice saying, shouting:
“Wait! Wait! This is senseless! We can all join forces! Listen to me! Fools! We can all join forces! We …”
He didn’t see the opening behind him … the sudden staircase …
The pig was descending the sheer, immense set of steps, with torches set every few yards, only a few lit, and then total blackness after that. John was pleased, gazing down into the chasm, because the betrayer would soon be delivered up to inexorable vengeance …
He barely glanced up as a big, blurred form (everything was misty save for the awesome being guiding him) went spinning past, shouti
ng a blur of words too, rolling and flopping down the ten-yard-wide staircase as up behind an incredible din exploded. The smoke and insane battling had driven hundreds more into struggling clumps that jammed the halls and all were caught in the savage panic …
John paid no mind. Spoke and listened only to the vast intelligence before him. Heard nothing but mumble when Howtlande crashed past him, bloody, blackened, rolling helplessly down with crunching spattings, shouting:
“… I … aaaa! … help me! … aaaaa! … it hurts … it hurts meee! …”
His loose clothes and fatroll shook as he bumped and bounced out of sight, faster … faster …
The wordless din mounted at John’s back but he didn’t turn or care.
Howtlande was on his belly now, starfishing like a boy on an icy hill, spinning, screaming, futilely clutching the racing stair edges, fingers snapping … down … down … body vibrating, rattling his bones, friction searing now; clothes starting to smoke as he sped at incredible speed (stomach keeping his head safely high) past the last torch, his screaming a hopeless bleat against the final dark …
Fountaining light poured down in gold-tinted vibrancy, poured over and into him. The liquid colors bubbled and pulsed into his blood, filled his throbbing heart, burst into his head, washed away every shadow, every stray thought and now streamed, he felt, from his eyes as all things floated in radiance and ringing music. He held his wings still now, letting the light rush lift him as he turned, soared … saw Unlea adrift beside him in this shoreless, unending exquisiteness, saw her glowing limbs and streaming hair of fire and gold … time without time moved without passing. He kicked himself gently forward through the lucent billows, tenderly taking her hand (that felt like cool flame), rushing towards the mysterious land where deeper, darker brightness lay, where mountains and valleys were fractured bloodruby jewels … the golden-tinted overlight spilled down and then he saw the fortress. The source of the light was within it, streamers of unbearable brilliance spewing from behind black walls, and he caught a glimpse of the shape that stirred there for a moment, and then something within the sweet glowing, shifting rays that were his mind too, said:
The beast waits.
Because something was rising there against the darkly burning sky. He sensed it crouching over the pulsing, singing light source and he followed, floating her along, riding the golden rays, letting the reflected light within draw him to its source and bear him (because his body was but swirling colors) like a feather on a breeze …
Unlea screamed all the way down through black vacancy where the invisible waterfall crashed. Clung to Parsival … and then the impact stunned and blanked her … then the pounding, deafening foaming booming … choking now … Parsival, she didn’t realize, towed her by one hand to the jagged rocks they’d missed by fractions — where he saw the rugged, dark lands filled with blood-colored fire and the ineffable light that was being blocked and dimmed …
“… help,” she babbled. “… help … oh … oh … oh …”
It was dawn outside. Alienor had just started to dig at the packed ash sealing them in utter blackness. Tikla was sobbing; Torky was beside her, scraping his fingers into the dense, gritty stuff.
“Mama,” he asked, “will we die in here?”
“No,” she said, grim, digging her hands in as if the stuff were solid rock and her fingers chiseled steel. “No.”
Her husband, meanwhile, and his companions were all staring through the misty webbing (he kept wondering where the flies could have come from to have justified so many spiders) at where Gobble was limping backward, pointing.
Layla was amused again.
“We all look like cocoons,” she announced.
Broaditch studied the shape there, a massive shadow like something seen through a fog. The dense strands glinted in the fireshine.
“Another statue,” Lohengrin said, passing Gobble, who’d stopped screaming. “Looks to be a knight … a good ten feet tall … if carvings scare you, what happens when they’re real?”
Before Gobble could respond, Lohengrin was already ducking back, sword drawn, as the dim figure struck at him, and Broaditch, shocked, was just registering the sound: a scraping bray of creaking stone and metal as the six-foot blade lashed around and rent the cobwebs with awkward speed.
“It comes to life!” wailed Gobble. “Were doomed …” Limping behind Layla. “It’s his spells, he’s bringing the very rocks to life! He has the power now …” Gobble was imagining mountains moving and smiting cities, the earth suddenly sentient as the forces of the deepest world rose to the surface …
Broaditch and Lohengrin were side by side, the big peasant crouched behind his spear. After the stiff, shrieking movement the thing was motionless. Broaditch noted the feet hadn’t moved.
They both went forward, carefully, holding the torches high, eating away the webs … suddenly the giant blade snapped back the other way. They ducked. Broaditch held his ground as the next chop came overhand, squeaking, grinding, and Lohengrin threw his torch at it and in the brief flash they saw the jointed, naked figure that barred the passage and glimpsed the exit gaping behind it.
It was still again: a naked male carving holding that outrageous sword.
“There’s no room to pass it here,” Lohengrin noted. “Clumsy as it be, it’s quick enough.” Was amused. “Only the arm seems to move.”
“Aye,” agreed the other. “And only when we come in range.”
“We’ll have to go back,” Gobble said. “But then the first we passed will be living now as master’s spells spread …” He squatted down, panting, eyes wobbling restlessly.
Layla took another drink. She felt more than justified. What next? she wondered … She blurrily watched Broaditch and her son draped in phantom, fluttering robes.
“It’s a machine of some kind,” Broaditch asserted. “Like the toy knights at fairs.”
“We’ll have to charge it, I suppose,” Lohengrin said, grimly.
“Solid stone and steel? And then what?”
“One of us might pass the sword.”
“Unless the other arm decides to move as well.”
“Mnn,” Lohengrin grunted.
Layla had wobbled closer. With most of the webs cut, her torch clearly lit the deadly machine.
“Quite a fellow,” she remarked. “Look at that prong they gave him.”
“Stay a distance, mother.”
“Never fear,” she answered, “I have known enough like him, who might as well be stone, to keep away …” Giggled. “A pity that one part were not carved and unbending on a man and the rest …” She shrugged. “More soft …”
Broaditch had been studying the thing carefully.
I should be used to this sort of business, he told himself. Because he saw it was another riddle. They had probably trained their warriors here, whoever they had been … It sees nothing yet it strikes … how like a great political lord … He was sure he had the answer. Measured the distance with his eye. God knows, if I’m right, our retreat was cut off by some worse mechanism …
“Hold this, my lady,” he said, handing her his torch and setting down his spear. Then he took Gobble’s sword and scabbard, his expression brooking no argument. “As you don’t use them,” he said.
“What are you about?” Lohengrin asked.
“You’ll learn, if I live, my lord.” He took a good start and, holding the sheathed blade, charged past Lohengrin, and about ten feet from the statue he leaped, hung in the air, waiting for the grinding cut to take him, and then his heels hit and he careened into the thing’s smooth, hard body, banging his shoulder, panting. Layla thought the webs trailing from him had looked like wings as he jumped. She tentatively flapped her own arms, shaking the torchlight.
“Well done!” yelled Lohengrin. The statue hadn’t budged.
“Like a great moth, he flew,” she murmured.
Broaditch reached up, both hands gripping the sword and scabbard.
“It’s the floor ther
e,” he called over, “sets it going. Take a step to make it move and then fall back.” Which done, Broaditch was almost stunned by the explosive rasping grind as the arm flailed stiff and terrific at the young knight, whose mother, he noted from the corner of his eye, seemed to be weaving forward into range. He leaned into it (feeling what must have been vast weights shifting and turning in the floor) and jammed the sword into the shoulder joint so that as the stone arm crunched back the steel was twisted. Before Lohengrin could grip her, his mother had taken an extra step and the blade chopped back and forth, back and forth, the arc restricted now so that she simply swayed past it, each backswing missing her waist by inches. She reached Broaditch, who still clung to the grinding, squeaking, naked, blank-eyed carving, and said:
“Just look at that outrage …” Gestured between the stone legs. “Do you think there’s a gear to make it move?”
The thick, oily smoke from whatever was burning had choked off every corridor, forcing Tungrim down from entrance to entrance, trying to break out of the twisting, sickening maze of insane fighting, naked children, black-robed killers, crazed dogs, thrashing, screaming runts …
Finally he was forced into the main passage. Torches guttered on the muddy floor among mangled bodies … and then, choking and battling, they all came flooding in, and he instantly was waist-deep in dwarves (who stank of fear, blood and bathlessness) as the smoke and fighting packed everyone together, bigger ones climbing, running a few steps over the others before being dragged down into the swarm that filled the hallway, tearing, frantic. He fought to keep upright because to fall was death. Then, as the mass spun him, he glimpsed Howtlande up ahead, mouth wide, as the flood of flesh poured around the next bend … on the following spin he saw the fat man gesticulating wildly, backing away, seeming to harangue the bearded, blackened and bloody crew retreating with him … and then the mass careened in a flopping, howling wall of madness. Tungrim was striking at everything, blood and flesh splashing from his short sword, his mind falling … falling far, far away … from this … himself too, and he didn’t hear Howtlande’s arguments blotted over by the howling of this feral horror that his own wordless, flat, ferocious cries melted into as clubs, hands, teeth, swords were shocked into one ravening heap that spewed like a burst bungplug, vomiting onto the steps, popping Howtlande first to roll and stagger and finally slide and sail past John (and his guiding shape), then the rest bursting down the sheer staircase to the depths. Tungrim, as he flailed desperately, saw his home, the hills … bright water … and Layla there, as in a dream … very clear and impossible …
The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) Page 30
