by Wayland Drew
Madmartigan and Airk looked at one another. “Willow,” Madmartigan said, “this is warfare, not agriculture.”
“I know, I know. But I have an idea how we can get inside the castle. Listen!”
Hurriedly, while the weird light glowed again in Bavmorda’s tower and the gong rang again, Willow outlined his plan.
“Impossible, little friend!” Airk said when he had finished. “Too much work to get done by dawn.”
“Besides,” Sorsha said, shaking her head, “Kael would never fall for it.”
The gong sounded again.
“Madmartigan, tell them! Elora needs us!”
“The chances aren’t good, Willow.”
“But at least it’s something!”
“He’s right.” Raziel looked around at the group. “If the child dies, all hope for the future will be lost. It’s a desperate chance, but we must try it. Otherwise . . .” She held out her hands to Bavmorda’s tower, as if giving over the world.
Silver light flickered there; the fourth blow on the gong echoed across the slate hills of Nockmaar.
“I’m going to fight!” Willow said.
Airk smiled sadly down at him, but Madmartigan laid his hand on the Nelwyn’s shoulder. “It’s time to decide who is going to fight and who is going to retreat.”
In the tower conjuring room, the dark Ritual had begun. As soon as they had seen Kael rush into the courtyard with Elora Danan held triumphantly above his head, the three priests began to prepare. They summoned guards to clear the room of trolls, who protested vehemently, slobbering and cursing as they were dragged downstairs. They freed the night herons, who rose through the opening in the roof, circled, then turned thankfully toward the marshes of Galladoorn. They prepared the copper altar, inlaid with its blood-red rubies, and chanted incantations over it, and laid the leather thongs upon it. They cleansed and readied the great stone crucible, and swept clear the platform around it. They tossed the skulls and bones from other ceremonies into a basket in an alcove ossuary, lest any clinging auras distract the queen from the great business at hand. They poured the bowl of blood from a bronze pitcher, with all proper ceremony. They readied on their pedestals the five small crucibles. They scoured the queen’s great shield with fire, burnishing it until its bolt of lightning gleamed. They chanted the solemn spell to open the secret recess, and when the hinged dolmens swung back, they bore out the bronze gong and set it in its place of honor. They ignited the flambeaux in the wall sconces. They arranged and sanctified the Thirteen Tapers.
When all was ready, they notified the queen. Alone, Bavmorda came out of her apartment. Alone, she climbed the stairs of the tower. When she stood before the altar, her gown wrapped tightly around her, they brought her the child. Then they sealed the door of the chamber.
Bavmorda nodded to the altar, and the priest bearing Elora laid her on it and bound her down with the crisscrossing thongs. The child screamed.
“Your Majesty . . .” For a moment the old priest faltered.
“Silence! Move away!”
The Ritual began.
“Come thunder,” Bavmorda murmured, drawing her hands out of her cloak and reaching toward the opening in the massive granite ceiling. “Come lightning. Touch this altar with your power.”
Sheet lightning shimmered down, wrapping queen and child with baleful radiance.
Elora shrieked again, struggling helplessly against her bonds.
The gong sounded once; flame glimmered on the wick of the first of the sacred tapers. The tallow burned with the scent of death.
Bavmorda smiled. “Dark runes, dark powers! Blend and bind, bind and blend this night of Nockmaar with the universal Night!” From her sleeve she drew a thin knife taken from the elves long ago. A perfect knife. A knife that never needed sharpening, never lost its razor edge. She drew it gently across her palm and, sliding close to the bound child, cut three locks of her brilliant red hair and placed them in the first of the five small crucibles.
“Black fire forever kindled within, let the second rite begin!”
The priest at the gong swung his muffled hammer twice, and the repercussions swelled through the window slits, blending with the swirling smoke of the volcano. Another priest lit the second of the Thirteen Tapers.
A cold wind blew through the tower. The candles guttered. The gong swayed on its straps, moaning as the wind crossed its embossed face.
The priests shivered. One of them glided forward to daub Elora with livid paint—feet and hands, brow and heart.
Bavmorda plunged her hands into the bowl of blood and raised them toward the opening in the roof, toward dark stars which only she could see. Blood streamed down her arms. Inside the folds of her gown it coursed over her breasts, trickled across her belly.
The gong sounded, thrice.
The queen trembled. Her lips twitched. She muttered incantations unknown to the priests. She was growing darker as the Ritual proceeded, thicker, uglier at every stage, as if the energy to summon the powers for this destruction were being drawn from the marrow of her bones. Her eyes sank deeper. Cords stretched in her neck. Skin drew tighter about her teeth in a grimace increasingly hideous.
“Ocht veth nockthirth bordak!” She gestured upward, and the small body of Elora Danan, magically freed of bonds but clenched in the grip of the charm, rose off the copper altar.
The gong sounded again, four times. Four dark tapers burned. The air sucked in to feed them whistled through the window slits . . .
Through the first light, through drifting smoke, alone on an empty field, Willow and Fin Raziel walked toward Nockmaar. In one hand, Willow carried a drum on a tripod, and a stick. In the other, he held the braid of Kiaya’s hair.
“Your wife, your family will remember this day, Willow,” Fin Raziel said, seeing the braid clutched in his small fist. “And I shall remember. I’ve waited all these years to face Bavmorda, and you have made it possible. Thank you.”
“Oh, Raziel, do we still have time? That was twelve blows on the gong!”
“Yes. If our plan works we have time. The last stage of the Ritual is the longest and hardest, and the child is safe until the very end.”
Just beyond arrow-shot from the castle wall they stopped. Willow set down the tripod and the drum. On both sides, the slate and barren hills of Nockmaar loomed over them. Behind, where Airk’s army had bivouacked in the cold winds the night before, there was now nothing but flattened tents and abandoned equipment. Ahead, stood the dark fortress.
Raucous laughter echoed down from the parapet. Summoned at first light from his carousing, Kael had climbed up to the battlements to savor his victory. He gazed out over the desolate litter on the plain deserted by the broken and demoralized rebel army. He laughed coldly with his lieutenants, slapping the cold stone.
So insignificant were the two small figures of Willow and Fin Raziel that at first no one saw them. Not until more light had spilled into the valley did one of Kael’s officers point them out.
Kael leaned forward, squinting.
“Surrender!” Fin Raziel commanded.
“What?”
“Surrender!” Willow shouted. “We are all-powerful sorcerers! Give us the baby or we will destroy you!”
Kael and his men laughed incredulously. They roared, enjoying this good joke. And then, when he had grown tired of laughing, Kael brushed his hand outward as if at a pesky fly. “Kill them!”
Fin Raziel clasped her wand, Willow his drumstick, watching the bridge descend across the festering moat.
“Ready, Willow!”
“Courage, Raziel!” he answered, managing a smile.
And then, as the drawbridge fell and a squad ran out to do Kael’s bidding, Willow turned and struck his drum. The sound boomed down the valley.
Kael roared in laughter again, slapping the parapet. “Is that your magic, little man? Is that your fearful sorcery?”
“Yes!” Willow shouted back. “I bring warriors out of the ground! Like hedgehogs!”
Suddenly the valley came alive. With a surging cry, men and horses threw off their coverings and lunged up out of shallow pits. Some had trained their mounts so well that they had lain down still in the saddle, and horse and man now rose as one. So fast were they, and so complete was the surprise, that before Kael even had time to shout, “Raise the bridge!” the first of Airk’s men had charged over it and was inside the Nockmaar courtyard. The assassins who had come out to kill Raziel and Willow were slain in their tracks.
Airk bent down and scooped Willow onto his saddle, and Sorsha lifted Fin Raziel onto hers. Madmartigan had been one of the first inside, and by the time Willow reached him three gatemen lay dead at his horse’s feet and a fourth was gaping at blood spurting from his arm. In no time Kael was on his horse and roaring his battle cry, rallying his defenders at the top of a long ramp which led up to the tower. “Form your line there! Loose the dogs!”
Sorsha slipped Fin Raziel off her horse at the foot of a broad staircase and then dismounted herself, giving Rak a slap on the rump that sent him back out through the gates and away from the fighting. A moment later, Madmartigan found her there. He was laughing as he leaned down and reached to embrace her. “Sorsha, you are my moon, my sun, my stars!”
“What? Not again!”
“I mean it! You are!” He drew her close and kissed her.
Then the Nockmaars sallied down the ramp and the fight swirled close. His horse shied and pranced away. Airk galloped up and lowered Willow to the ground. Then the two friends rode together, roaring in laughter, their swords whirling, cutting down a charge of five Nockmaar troopers.
“Willow! Raziel! There’s another way to the tower. Here!” Sorsha hurried them through a doorway and into a dark and narrow corridor.
Behind, Airk waved his bowmen forward. He pointed up the ramp where Kael had marshaled a phalanx of troops. “Let’s squash ’em!” he yelled, and he and Madmartigan led the charge.
For Franjean and Rool, cowering in the very bottom of Airk Thaughbaer’s saddlebag, all was confusion—a mayhem of blows, and lunges, and the terrible sounds of dying. They knew only that men and horses were perishing around them, and that this was a fight without pity or quarter. Airk’s great horse took a Nockmaar bolt in the thigh, and another in the neck, launched from crossbows on the parapet, and at the same moment a pikeman danced close and laid open its stomach, spilling its intestines into the mud. The beast fell, shrieking. Franjean and Rool were thrown out of the saddlebag and into the thick of the fighting. They found themselves surrounded by plunging hooves and singing arrows. They scampered for safety under a flight of stone steps and ventured out only once for the rest of that battle—to hamstring a huge trooper who had cornered Madmartigan. The man dropped to his knees and Madmartigan ran him through. “Thank you!” he shouted, waving under the steps. “Maybe you’re not so bad!” Then he was challenged again and drawn back into the battle.
Roaring like a bull, Airk Thaughbaer had meanwhile fought his way out of the mud, up the steps, and along the parapet to a cauldron of boiling oil. Directly below, a squad of Nockmaar troops had linked their shields together and were now advancing, a formidable human machine, threatening the flank of Airk’s brigade. Straining mightily, Airk reversed the apparatus of the cauldron and tipped it, spilling boiling oil down on this armored unit. Men died hideously beneath those shields, flayed alive, broiled in their breastplates. Their awful wail rose above the clamor and drew Kael’s attention from across the courtyard. His gaze locked with Airk’s; their war cries clashed. Kael gripped his sword. He hefted his mighty axe. Airk strode down to meet him.
Their combat went unseen in the melee by everyone but Franjean and Rool. For decades afterward, as their beards grew long and white, they would describe that fight to circles of wide-eyed brownies in the Woods of Cherlindrea: how Kael fought like a demon possessed, raining blows so thick and fast on Airk Thaughbaer that his arms blurred and his axe struck fire off the stones of Nockmaar; how Airk fought bravely under that savage attack, ducking, weaving, striking back, until at last Kael maneuvered him to the top of the ramp and forced him down; how Airk Thaughbaer lost both balance and life in that muddy place, hacked by Kael’s axe, pierced by Kael’s sword; how Kael kicked him without honor over the edge and into the mud below; and how Madmartigan, seeing this last act, hurled his sword spearlike into the antagonist he was facing and ran to his old friend . . .
“Airk!”
“If you . . . ever stand . . . on my grave, Madmartigan . . . I’ll haunt . . .”
Madmartigan wiped the blood and mud from his friend’s face. He held Airk while life faded from his eyes. He freed the hilt of Airk’s great weapon from his locked fingers. “Give me your sword, old friend, and I’ll win this war for you.”
Kael was not the first to feel the bite of that sword that day, but he was the last. Madmartigan fought his way through to him, and when at last they came face-to-face on the parapet, they were directly beneath the queen’s tower, in the first rays of the rising sun. Their duel was even more spectacular than Airk’s, but this time it was Madmartigan who rained the blows on his opponent, swinging Airk’s broadsword as if it were a mere rapier, battering that grim death’s-head helmet, knocking the axe spinning from Kael’s left hand, slicing into Kael’s side above the hip bone. The general fought with all the desperate strength left to him, but he was, finally, merely human. He was tired in body, tired in soul, tired of life—tired, perhaps, even of killing.
Perhaps (Franjean and Rool would suggest when they told this tale to admiring fairies) enough of his heart remained for him to know the wickedness of his cause, to know he should make an end. Perhaps that was why, at last, he did not strike when Madmartigan gave him an opening by lifting Airk’s sword high with both hands. Next instant, it plunged down through Kael’s breastplate and ripped open his heart. Kael’s last sound, as he fell backward over the parapet and into the moat, was laughter.
Swiftly after that the battle in the courtyard ended. Nockmaar troops threw down their weapons. Officers fled. A few witless trolls continued to shriek and gibber from niches in the battlements, hurling poisoned darts until they were picked off by archers. A few Death Dogs, loosed in the depths of Nockmaar by their trainers, hurtled into the last of the fray and onto the weapons of Galladoorn lancers. But soon the fighting ceased. Except for the moans of the wounded, the courtyard fell silent.
The rising sun went dark.
The real battle, the one in the conjuring room, was about to begin.
Grimly, Sorsha had led Willow and Raziel through corridors and up staircases that she knew well. Once she beheaded a troll who leaped snarling from an alcove, and once a Death Dog that came pelting in silence, eyes fixed on her throat. Soon they were climbing the corkscrew stairs that wound up to Bavmorda’s tower. Below, horses roared and men bellowed. Steel struck steel. Steel struck stone.
Willow’s heart had faltered as he peered down through the arrow-slits into the courtyard and saw Kael, saw the strength of the Nockmaar force. Yet he climbed doggedly, following Sorsha, followed by Raziel.
At the top, harsh light throbbed under the oaken door of the conjuring room and spilled down the wet stairs. From behind the door came Elora’s small wail, and overriding it, killing it, the shriek of Bavmorda.
Willow faltered utterly at that sound. His heart urged him on but his body failed him. He sank trembling to his knees. “No. I can’t go on.”
“It’s all right,” Raziel said, laying a hand on his shoulder as she went past. “You don’t have to, Willow.”
She murmured a chant to the barred door and it slammed open, sucking such a draft of air up the stairway that it flattened Willow where he knelt and snuffed the flames on the sacred tapers.
Bavmorda stood lost in the distant intricacies of the Ritual, her arms lifted to the dawn. The wind swept around her, whipping at her sleeves and the hem of her gown. “Raziel!” she said, turning slowly.
She had begun to change in the ear
lier stages of the Ritual, and now, toward its end, she had become unrecognizably grotesque. Her eyes had sunk into dark pools; her mouth twisted in a snarl of frightful depravity. Bereft of grace, bereft of dignity, her body had grown taut, her movements tense and quick, like those of spiny creatures in the froth of the sea. Crouching, she turned. “Raziel . . .” Her laughter was like the grating of pebbles. “Good! Now you will witness my greatest triumph!”
Sorsha stepped forward and halted abruptly, frozen by the icy wall of Bavmorda’s hatred. “Mother . . .”
“You! Get back! How dare you speak to me! You’re pathetic!”
“She has discovered kindness,” Raziel said from the doorway. “She has discovered love.”
“So!” Bavmorda hissed. She crept closer, arms stretching, fingers spread like talons. “Then you have seen your father.”
“I have seen what you did to him. But he’s alive in spite of you!”
“Traitor child! I shall destroy you now as if you had never been! You will become less, now. Ever less! Less than a child, less than a seed, less than a single germ!” Bavmorda signaled the three priests from the shadows and they slid forward like one body, beginning in unison the Chant of Infinite Diminishment.
Sorsha cut them down. She did it cleanly—three strokes of her sword across their necks. She stepped across their bodies toward the altar where Elora Danan lay, whimpering pathetically. “You will not kill this child!”
“Away! Avaggu strokt!”
The rising sun vanished. Lightning struck through the roof, paralyzing Sorsha. Bavmorda’s curse lifted her off her feet and hurtled her backward toward a wall of spikes where traitors were pinned, where truculent trolls and laggard servants were skewered, where all those were hung who gravely displeased Bavmorda in the circle of her conjuring room. But, before Sorsha could be impaled, a second spell slid between her and the spikes, and against its blessed cushion she slipped to the floor, unconscious.
So, she did not see the last battle. Only Willow saw; Willow, quaking in mortal terror but summoning enough courage to creep to the top step and peer over.
