by Adrian Cole
“So you demand even more of me?” growled the Keeper.
“Since you cannot answer all my questions, grant these other things.”
“Very well.”
The Voidal ignored Grabulic’s indrawn breath of shock. “You were speaking of the sword, Keeper. Well?”
“It is one of thirteen, one for each of the Dark Gods. Each sword has an individual property. You always bear one of them. They are as much a key to the power of the Dark Gods as that accursed hand. Find the being that forged them. He will tell you more than I can.”
“Find him? Where? Where is his lair?”
“I know only his name, which is Thunderhammer. He it is who has also forged a prison for your soul.”
The Voidal spoke the name softly, several times. “I will not forget it.”
“There is one other thing I can give you. I see that some of your memory has repaired itself. I can strengthen that, in exchange for the memory of what you have seen in Skull Keep. I will also open the gates of your memory on other times and events. And you shall see Grabulic restored. He shall hear again and he will ever be Grabulic. Perhaps this will help him to be more diplomatic in future?”
Grabulic’s mouth was too dry for him to answer, but the Voidal spoke for him. “I accept your terms.”
“I would rather you left without the images of what you have seen here.”
“So would I. Seal the bargain.”
“You may not like what you learn, Voidal.”
“Even so, I would look back at my recent past.”
“Then go to a chamber of rest. You will dream for a while. After that you will be returned to the many dimensions, to follow the path laid for you by the Dark Gods.”
Dreams.
Fashioned by the Keeper. Some were fragments of memory, some the tortured convulsions of the dark man’s own mind. The distinctions were not always obvious: Necral was secretive, devious. But the Voidal saw the interwoven threads of fate, time and the many dimensions, spun in an apparently chaotic pattern, though whatever messages were written in the fabric of creation were understood by the eyes of the Dark Gods alone. To share their cosmic workings, to have it all mapped out clearly, would have brought madness rushing in.
Flashing through this tapestry of time and space, the dreaming mind of the Voidal fastened on images brought into focus before it by the manipulations of the Keeper. Past lives, future ones, worlds, some to be born, others long dead, heaved and span. Cascading showers of molten stars burst across his inner eye. Single embers curled across space and he saw down to their depths, to the races and cities that infested them like bacteria.
Conflict dominated the shards of dream and memory. Sometimes single conflict, as men fought bitterly with bare fists, sometimes swords. Armies marched; towers fell in roaring flames, swept over by human tides that quenched the infernos of blazing worlds. Gods roared defiance at each other across immeasurable gulfs, while down in the rotting cores of worlds, others crawled, hiding from even the light of dead stars.
Death, deterioration and regeneration. The cycle went on infinitely. Life pulsed in waves throughout the omniverse, drawing in and thrusting out, ebbing and flowing, the Gods its titanic moon, directing the tides. Whatever mighty purpose they intended for it all was hidden by the vastness of the canvas upon which they worked. The Voidal caught only glimpses of colour and movement, his own place in the scheme of eternity masked.He saw himself stumbling along a broken path of destiny, drawn from one dimension to another by the beings that invoked him. Always he had to obey their summons, always to discharge the debt of the summoners. Death walked behind him, and only when they met could he move on. But would it end, or was it a circle?
Always he saw himself in darkness, so many facets of himself hidden from him. So much had been stolen.
Another dream focused on the face of a woman. Gaunt, eyes ringed with shadow, face drawn, pale, so pale. Briefly it flickered across his vision, lit by a dim moon. Then gone again. But the seed of memory was planted. She was part of him, but what?
A final image. Revealed as if by the rays cast by a dying candle. It was a mountain—black, colossal and sombre, guarded by demons that were amassed like flies over its rubble. From near its peak came the glow of a huge fire. Sounds echoed downwards—the sounds of a mighty smithy, forging some glinting blade for the gods themselves. Thunderhammer. The Voidal would remember him, and his mountain. When his journey brought him to it, he would know it.
Wake, Voidal!”
Through heavy lids the dark man looked up into what he thought must be another dream. But he knew at once that it was not.
Grabulic the Songster was looking down at him. “It’s over,” he said.
The Voidal shook himself and rose from his cold bed of stone. They were in a small chamber of bone. “The dreams—”
“They are over.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I have had my share, too. It seems the Keeper has kept the whole of his bargain with you. I remain as I was, though I still bear the scar of the murderer’s knife. But my hearing! I hear every sound, every breath that is taken in this place of death. Every breath! The power alarms me—I hear the coming of something dark and damned. I am to be winged away very soon, and I am glad of it.”
“You have atoned for your sins, Grabulic. And I have discharged my debt to you.”
“Indeed you have. And done more. You recall the beautiful musical instrument—”
“Layola. Aye, and what she was before.”
Grabulic’s eyes lit up. “I shall begin the quest to recover her. I will find her, I swear it.”
The Voidal smiled, for the man appeared to be fully restored, his audacity, his cunning, his wit, they all shone from those revitalised eyes. And the sadness, the sense of deep loss.
“You will find her,” the Voidal said. “And perhaps restore her.”
“I will never despair of that, not now,” Grabulic smiled.
There was a sound near the doorway and he turned. “Ah, this must be my very escort. Well, I must away. Once you chose to call me friend, Voidal, and for that we have both suffered.” He looked down at the dark man’s right hand. Suddenly his voice was fused with anxiety. “No matter what the darkness decrees, I hope we shall remain friends.”
“Our paths will cross again,” said the Voidal. “At least, it is my will.”
“Until then,” smiled the Songster.
“Find your beautiful Layola,” the Voidal told him and with no more ado, the Songster exited with the shades that had come for him.
For a time the Voidal was alone in the near dark. He reflected on what he had dreamed. Uppermost in his mind was the woman. Who could she be? His wife, his mistress, his kin? He knew that his destiny had set him apart, yet he must find her. In her would be strength. And the mountain, where Thunderhammer laboured for the Gods at his forge. Yes, the Voidal would know that place.
Sorrow taunted him now, for the woman’s face haunted him. Now that he had seen her, there would be pain until he found her. His burden, his enforced fate, had been wearying, frustrating, but the price for his repaired memory was a fresh misery.
Somewhere the Dark Gods were laughing.
A flutter of wings brought him from a deep reverie that had verged on another dream. Something lurched beneath him, sharpening his awareness. Around him was darkness. From below him came the whispering sound of a sea, and he stared down to see the Ocean of Souls skimming by like black glass. On its surface the barges drifted by occasionally, still-life figures. The dark man rode upon the back of a Sower: it took him away to rebirth somewhere ahead in oblivion. He felt sleep of a sort drizzling over him, but the sound of the fluttering wings was broken by a laugh near at hand. Gazing across the void, he saw another winged creature flap from out of the dark. Upon its back sat a hooded figure, its face hidden.
“I trust your dreams were wrapped in revived memories, Voidal,” came Necral’s voice from the hood. “Our bargain is done. I thought it
would be prudent to accompany you out of my realm myself.”
“What of the Songster?”
“It is as you wished. He is already awake somewhere in Phaedrabile. He will be content—for a while. As long as he is mindful of his tongue, he will not be troubled by the gods.”
“And where am I to be cast?”
“I have not been told. You must obey the laws of the weird cast for you. There may have been hints in your dreams.”
“Perhaps.”
“So, what of me?”
The Voidal looked cold, pitiless, almost as if another creature looked through his eyes. Slowly he drew from his cloak his right hand, a mechanical motion, drugged.
The scarlet eyes in the hood of the Keeper blazed in terror. “What! You have deceived me!”
“No,” answered the Voidal in a strange voice. “You have deceived yourself.” He turned and pointed back at the gigantic body of Skull Keep.
Necral watched that dreadful pointing finger, but it did not turn to him. In a moment the hand was again drawn out of sight.
“I had many dreams,” the dark man told him. “In one of them I saw a cycle of demi-gods as it revolved endlessly. Some of the demi-gods perished and were replaced, each one serving a time at a task allotted by other, greater Gods. Yonder, in the form of Skull Keep, lies the dead husk of the demi-god, Chandrehozer, who was once the Keeper of the halls of the quick and the dead, as you are now. In his ageless sojourn as Keeper, he sinned many times, using the dormant souls for his amusement. For this he was punished; he was made sterile, caused to decompose slowly; there he lies, eaten away by the things that burrow secretly inside him. He has reached the end of his cycle, for corruption and decay have raddled him utterly. See!”
Necral looked at Skull Keep in horror. The hands of the dead giant twitched, and as they did so, their flesh began to crumble into dust. Other parts of the huge body were turning to flakes and sloughing away. Huge cracks appeared over the pale mountain of chest and in the bleached skull.
“But—the Keep!” cried Necral. “The halls of the quick and the dead! They are indispensable—what is to become of them?”
“Others greater than I have decided their fate,” said the Voidal. “They will be rehoused.”
Necral, stunned, fell silent, but then let out a cry of sheer terror. “What are you saying?” But as he spoke, his shape began its own transformation, his body bloating like a gigantic maggot, squirming as its folds of fat bulged, shredding its flimsy garments. The hood fell away to reveal a blotched, bulbous head that must have been conceived in the wildest nightmare of a lunatic. Pocked and scarred with weeping sores, the product of Necral’s disgusting excesses in his anteroom of hell, it began to run with hissing slime.
“You are the new Keep,” said the Voidal dispassionately.
“Treachery!” came the scream from lips that were already melting and slithering down the rotting chin. “Your memory—I cleaned away what you saw in my dungeons in exchange for your past! Yet you have retained everything and cheated me! I demand justice! The Gods will not cheat me!”
The Voidal shook his head. “I recall only those things you showed me in dreams. I remember nothing about your dungeons.”
Necral’s head had become an amorphous mass, its dripping filth beginning to dissipate in wispy clouds. The Voidal emitted a hollow laugh that seemed to fill the realm of night with stentorian contempt.
“Then why am I punished—just as Chandrehozer before me was punished?” shrieked the fading voice of Necral.
“Those who aid the Voidal hinder the Dark Gods, just as you, yourself, told me! I am the Voidal, their pawn. Neither man nor god may succour me! To do so is to invoke their wrath. I am used. You should know this, Necral. Your slide into a pit of self-centred madness has rotted away your own caution. You have forfeited your right to be lord of the dead.”
As Necral screamed out his final anguish, the last of the old Skull Keep began to collapse into dust clouds. Countless figures drifted away from the debris like fleas leaving the dead. Necral, now grown monstrous, blotting out the darkness, began to drift into the cloud of dust that was all that remained of Chandrehozer. The head of the Keeper had become a hideous mask of bone, a white skull, devoid of flesh or corruption. Necral’s leprous body, thick with layers of fat, was finally hidden from view in the ensuing storm as the former Keep disintegrated.
The Voidal was carried on inexorably over the Ocean of Souls. When he at last looked back, it was to see a remote corpse floating in darkness. Necral had become Skull Keep, and if there was a new Keeper there, he neither spoke nor made himself manifest to the dark man. As the Voidal watched, the countless shapes that were the grovellers began to wing in to the new, fleshy body, eager to satiate their renewed hunger.
Sleep now began to exert an iron influence and the eyes of the Voidal became heavy with new dreams.
The Dark Gods had tricked him once more, for none of what had transpired in Necral’s realm had been his own doing: he had been used to instigate Necral’s downfall. Now he must go back into the omniverse and tread his weary path anew, at their whim. And yet, they had permitted him to take something back from them. New memories, new clues: the woman, the smith. And Grabulic had been made whole again.
Perhaps, the dark man mused, he had partially atoned for his crime. One day he would learn all of it. Then it would be time to think of revenge. But not yet, not when the Dark Gods could add it to his list of sins and use it against him, prolonging his restless wandering.
Chapter VII
ASTRAL STRAY
Coincidence is a state of mind. It is the Gods’ way of obscuring destiny.
If, as some would have it, fate is woven by servants of the Gods, Cloudway must be one of the many looms on which they work.
And Cloudway could be mistaken for the very crossroads of coincidence.
—Salecco—Philosopher, Sage, Exile
Threaded through the many dimensions of the omniverse like a wisp of silk runs the astral real; its own dimensions are as nebulous as mist, often no more substantial than dreams, though the Gods know its swirls and eddies well enough. Here in a shadow region dart flickers of light, swift as thought, entities that linger only briefly as they utilise the astral, moving between dimensions or across them. Most astral dwellers have masters and are linked to them by unseen strands of power, although there are some that move rudderless and blind in a sluggish drift, afloat on a seemingly mindless destiny. Imps carry the spells of sorcerers, ghosts bear the messages of the dead, while elementals are at the beck and call of those earthly beings powerful enough to control their turbulent natures. Familiars often pass through the astral realm, those creatures of witches, warlocks and other wielders of dark power who ever seek to gain more. It is said of these familiars that without a master they are as a man without a soul, or a warrior with no sword, or a dragon without fire. Of those familiars whose masters have perished in some calamity or twist of fate, there are a few, and for them the astral provides a haven, albeit a temporary one, for without a master their lives ooze from them as wine from a cracked pitcher.
Elfloq spread his delicate wings, preparing for a last upward sweep before drifting down to rest on the interminable vastness of the astral that loomed out of the drizzling mist below. He had been scanning for an age, looking for somewhere to lie up before moving on in his determined quest. To go back to an earthly dimension was always done at great risk, as his kind were the prey of numerous denizens there, human or otherwise. No: he had decided since the untimely (though wholly welcome) death of his erstwhile Master, Quarramagus, that he would seek a respite from the trials of earthly life here in the astral gloom. Since he had had no success with Loptoc the Gossip, nor with a number of other usually reliable sources, he felt as secure here as he was likely to feel anywhere. It would do until he could again pick up the threads of his new quest.
What was that? Somewhere below, etched against an auroral backdrop, rose a hill crested by thick growths
that had formed themselves into a curious whole. A wood? Here on the astral? And yet, Elfloq mused, screwing up his batrachian features in puzzlement, there must be many things here that he knew nothing of. In that wood he may well find a place to rest, and he did admit to himself that the place had a peculiar atmosphere about it, as though conducive to rest and refreshment, rather than unease and unpleasant dreams. He would at least make a cursory inspection.
Over the shrouded landscape he flitted, hovering above the impenetrable canopy of the strange wood, the trunks of which were hidden by trailing festoons of dark verdure. Cloud drifted veil-like over the silent foliage. There did not appear to be a way in: Elfloq muttered petulantly as his third circle overhead appeared to consolidate this fear. However, at that moment arrows of remarkable light angled out from the hitherto closed entrance high up, and a black shape flapped up into the starless astral skies. Cautiously Elfloq approached the place where the light had speared forth, pulling aside thin branches. Below him on a knotted branch sat a bent manikin, squinting through glassy eyes.
Welcome to Cloudway,” grunted the being, whose limbs were as tough and gnarled as the wood about him.
“Cloudway?” echoed Elfloq. “I have heard of this place.” He considered: if he were to admit to being without a master, it might exclude him entrance to Cloudway, though he knew it by rumour to be a haven, shared by beings of all kinds. There were said to be no rulers here, man nor god.
“If you came by chance, then enter,” said the manikin.
“Indeed I did,” affirmed Elfloq, nodding vigorously.
The manikin touched something and branches swished aside like skirts to allow the streams of light to escape once more. Elfloq muttered brief thanks and passed within. He alighted on a thick beam hewn out of living wood. Below him, at a deceptive distance, was the floor of Cloudway, not like the ferned carpet of a wood at all, but in the nature of the floor of a great hall. There, masked by the smoke that drifted hazily up from scattered tapers, were those who had broken their astral journeys for a time at Cloudway. Elfloq’s bulbous eyes smarted in the smoke, as he looked hard to see if there were any he knew below, particularly any that might be hostile, for in his short life he had incurred the wrath of many beings. However, all were strangers.
