Come Armageddon

by Anne Perry

  With a force she could not have imagined, Tathea was aware of Cassiodorus ceasing to exist. At the moment of dissolution his spirit vented all its years of hatred upon her. She no longer saw the forum in the City and the gathered crowds, but the souls he had destroyed with fear, wandering white-faced, in memories of the terror which had robbed them of eternity. Some she knew—people who had loved and laughed in the earthly realities of life, but whose courage had failed the test. Some had scarcely realised, until it was too late, that fear was their undoing.

  She felt an ever-increasing cold bite into her, hard and sharp as steel, and in spite of all her efforts to see, the darkness closed around her so thickly she could touch it. It crawled over her skin and clung to her as if it would never leave.

  Someone was shaking her. She tried to pull away, crying out. The grip tightened, but she could see no one.

  Cassiodorus was all around her, his hatred beating in her mind, hard-edged, violent, blinding with pain.

  She felt a stinging slap on her cheek. She was being shaken so roughly she bit her tongue and the stab of it made her gasp. There was blood in her mouth. A voice called her name.

  “Tathea! Tathea! Listen to me! Make him go away ... you can! Command him, in the name of God!”

  She tried. “In the name of God, I command you to leave me!” But there was no sound except in her head. There was dizziness all around, a whirling, then a breaking of the darkness and she saw Ishrafeli’s face, and the fear in his eyes.

  “It’s all right,” she said hoarsely. “He’s gone. I don’t think he exists any more. I didn’t think that could happen to him.”

  Ishrafeli said nothing.

  She remembered Ardesir and the prophecy on the staff, “when the man of faith embraces terror to himself”; she had seen its literal fulfilment! Tathea leaned forward slowly and put her hand on Ishrafeli’s shoulder and clung to him. It was victory. The first Lord of Sin was gone ... and so was the first warrior of God. It was glory, and grief, and the beginning of the end. Now, more than ever before, they would need courage.

  Asmodeus was stunned. He had not believed any of the Lords of Sin could be destroyed, let alone by such a man as Ardesir. How could it have happened? He, of all of them, was a coward! What had suddenly given him the courage to face Cassiodorus, of all the enemies his soul had known? He might have believed it of Ishrafeli, or even of Sardriel, perhaps of Sadokhar—he was brash and hasty enough!

  Could it be the ridiculous answer that only a man who knew the full measure of fear, and overcame it, forged for himself the weapon to destroy Cassiodorus? That would be like God: that was His sense of morality! If it had not been so bitter, so vile, it would have been laughable.

  It was Tathea’s fault! It was to defend her that Ardesir had stepped forward, and for that she would pay, again and again, to the last moment of her existence. But how? His superb plan to make her love Ishrafeli more than she loved God had not succeeded! He did not understand it—it should have worked sublimely. He would think again, harder!

  So what was most precious to her? What was the one thing she could not exist without? He knew the answer. Not Ishrafeli—but God! The centre, the purpose of it all.

  He must make her believe that her entire perception of earth and heaven was false: shatter her faith. Without that she stood alone, and would be as easy to destroy as a child lost in the night—and that is what she would be!

  If she relied upon God—then take God away! Simple!

  He laughed aloud, the sound of it cannoning off the walls of Erebus and shooting away into the gloom.

  But first he would get rid of Sardriel. For that he would use Azrub, the Lord of Delusion. He could create the dream that filled Sardriel’s heart. Asmodeus knew him so well! He still yearned for the woman Elessar, dead these many years. He carried her in his heart, twined through the fibres of it so he could not let go without tearing himself beyond healing.

  Asmodeus stared into the roaring chaos without form or sense, a blind, wheeling oblivion, and summoned the golden dwarf to him.

  “Azrub!” he roared. “Azrub!”

  Why did he not come instantly? Why was he so slow to answer the summons of Asmodeus, the second son of God? “Azrub!”

  Azrub appeared next to the wall, rubbing his white hands together.

  He hated Asmodeus because Asmodeus knew him. He saw inside his being and read his lust to feed on the desires of men, watching their hunger and their need. Seeing them fulfilled by mirage, and then shattering it and leaving them alone and broken, stilled the ravening appetite inside him and took away some of the rage at what he could never possess for himself. Only Asmodeus could give him the chance to satisfy his craving, before it came back, redoubled, to gnaw at his vitals.

  “What keeps you that you dare to hesitate in obeying my command?” Asmodeus shouted at him, and clouds of dust rose high into the air and were torn away by the winds of destruction.

  Azrub knotted his hands even more tightly together. “What is it you want?” he asked, standing on the sombre battlements of Erebus, and smiling.

  Slowly, relishing every detail, watching him with eyes that bored through every guard and pretence, Asmodeus told him precisely what he should do to destroy Sardriel, now that he had gained power in the Lost Lands, and the ground was prepared.

  “Yes ...” Azrub’s lips curved up, showing the stumps of his teeth. The satisfaction of lust gleamed in him, like sweat on the skin.

  Asmodeus was revolted almost beyond his power to control. His soul was sick with it.

  “Without what pleasure I allow you, you will starve,” he said in little more than a whisper. “You think you cannot die ... don’t you?”

  “We none of us can die,” Azrub replied, but there was something in Asmodeus that troubled him, sent a cold trickle of fear inside him.

  “No, because we have not life, as mortals have!” Asmodeus said with a voice more bitter than wormwood. “But we can be destroyed! If you doubt it, go seek Cassiodorus. He does not exist any more.”

  Azrub’s yellow eyes widened almost imperceptibly. The Lord of Delusion knew lies from truth.

  “I know what destroyed him,” Asmodeus went on now quite calmly. “I will loose it upon you if you disobey me again—after I have watched you starve for a season or two, or three.”

  Now Azrub was truly frightened.

  Asmodeus knew that Azrub would obey him only as it suited his own purpose. Very slowly Asmodeus smiled and the darkness above Erebus emptied and spread out a cloud of dust and filth that obscured the wheels of stars a million miles away.

  “I will give you the best prize of all,” he said gently, watching Azrub’s white hands and his glittering eyes. “I will give you Tathea!”

  In spite of himself, Azrub drew in his breath and his tongue shot out to lick his lips. It was beyond his power to hide his appetite, and he hated himself for his weakness. It was as if Asmodeus had stripped him naked to watch what above all he would have kept private. His soul burned like acid. But a prize like Tathea ...?

  “What do you want me to do?” he responded. “Tell me!”

  “Win Sardriel,” Asmodeus answered. “And when you have corrupted him to choose the dream of his heart over reality, then we can take the Island at the Edge of the World, because he will corrode its soul.”

  “That is not Tathea,” Azrub argued, shifting his vast weight from one foot to the other in his raging hunger and the fear that it might not be met after all.

  Asmodeus loathed having to explain himself to this foul creature, but it was the only way to be certain of him.

  “When I have the Island,” he said, glaring at the dwarf, “then I will make her see the whole earth a ruined waste that even God no longer loves, and is powerless to heal. Then she will taste the ashes of despair, and her soul will die. Now go and obey me! Or I shall allow her to destroy you instead. Get out!”

  Azrub turned and slunk away, but he was smiling, and his white hands rubbed each other fas
ter and faster as he disappeared into the night.

  Chapter XVIII

  SARDRIEL LEFT THE CITY in the Centre of the World and sailed first to Tirilis in his search for Azrub, the golden dwarf who was Lord of Delusion. The land of shifting money, of debts and promises, seemed the place most fertile for his twisted arts.

  A dozen times Sardriel heard word of him, but each time he reached the town or the city, he was mistaken or too late. He met blind denial, laughter, meaningless apologies. Months went by fruitlessly.

  Finally, on the western shore overlooking the sea towards the Island and beyond the Maelstrom and the reefs, his own Lost Lands, he heard a whisper that Azrub might be in Kyeelan-Iss. The thought weighed heavily in his heart: knowing the hatred Siriom bore him, and the hunger for revenge that had consumed him ever since Sardriel had first entered his hall, fear already touched him for the Lost Lands. The sea had guarded them against all human foes, but not even the Maelstrom was proof against Asmodeus, and surely his dark hand would not hold back now?

  He sought out a Lost Lands ship in the harbour and took passage on its return voyage. He stood on the deck as they cast off and put to sea, staring at the blue water ahead.

  “Siriom of Kyeelan-Iss has landed in Orimiasse,” the master of the ship said beside him when they were alone.

  Sardriel was not surprised. Some part of him had already known. He turned to the master and saw the hollow lines of his face.

  “We don’t know how he crossed the Maelstrom,” the master went on. “He brought only two ships, but nobody in the Lost Lands has the will to fight him.”

  Sardriel was surprised only by the fact that Siriom came with no army. It seemed to make so little sense. He forced his mind to think. This was a time for reason, not emotion. “But he is still there?”

  “Yes.” The master nodded.

  “How did you escape?” Sardriel asked him.

  The master shook his head as if he barely understood the answer himself. “I was at sea when they landed. By the time I put ashore it was all over. There are hardly any occupying soldiers, just a score or so, and Siriom living in the Prince’s House on the hill. I only stayed an hour or two. No one tried to stop me leaving. It was as if they didn’t care.” His eyes were pleading, still hollow with shock. “You must lead us, make us fight again—be the people we used to be! Better we die defending ourselves than live as passive slaves to Siriom!”

  Sardriel did not argue. These were his own people, his battleground in a way Irria-Kand or Camassia never could be. Perhaps he had always known the fight must end in the Lost Lands. He loved them with heart and blood and bone as he could love no other place. “Yes,” he said, facing forward again. “Of course.”

  A week later, at last he heard the roar of the Maelstrom in the distance, different from any other sound on earth. It was the primal fury of the sea raging in a vortex that had never ceased since the ocean had been formed out of chaos.

  He could see it already in his mind’s eye as he stood facing west towards it. It was the call of home, deeper than the conscious mind. The mountains of shimmering water towered into the air, drowning the sky, white-crowned with spume. The green depths were hollowed out like tunnels into the belly of creation.

  Yet they would survive. After the noise, the battering, the drenching, bruising, all-consuming water, they would at last be spewed out at the far side, beaten and exhausted, but alive. The men would haul up the sails again and set course for the harbour of Orimiasse with its quiet houses set on the steep hill, and its sunset-coloured ships at ease. He knew it, savoured it in his heart as if it had already happened.

  The reality of the Maelstrom left his body bruised, exhausted and cold, but this was slight compared with the deeper coldness that filled him when at last they approached Orimiasse.

  The helmsman skirted wide around the headland, avoiding the harbour, as if they were merely a deep-water fishing vessel coming into its own mooring. They put ashore in a further bay. Sardriel had agreed with the master that he should put out to sea again immediately, and return every ten days.

  As Sardriel’s foot touched the pale sand, he was already dismissing emotion and trying to judge his wisest way to act. He must learn all he could: the nature of the occupation by Kyeelan-Iss, and why there was no resistance, if indeed that were true. He had friends here in this quiet bay. He would seek them first, and learn whatever they could tell him.

  The way was familiar, the path winding in and out of the wild sea lupins, which were heavy with perfume, the bleached driftwood like white bones in the twilight. The mounds of sea pinks were almost colourless now as the glowing sun burned and died on the horizon, the echoes silver across the arch of heaven.

  Sardriel reached the door and knocked. There was no sound but the surge and wash of the sea as it glimmered on the shore.

  It seemed a long time until the door opened and a man he had known since youth stood facing him, blinking as if uncertain what he saw.

  Sardriel stepped into the light. “Farramon ...”

  “Oh! Sardriel.” Farramon’s expression cleared, and he pulled the door wider. “Come in.”

  Sardriel accepted, and was startled to see the once-handsome interior of the house dull, filmed with dust. The carpet in the centre of the floor which he remembered as sea green was blotched with stains. Could the occupation of the enemy have left such marks in less than two months?

  He looked more closely at Farramon, but he could see no sign of tension or grief in him. He seemed relaxed, almost indifferent.

  “I suppose you’ve come back to join us now,” Farramon remarked. There was no discernible emotion in his voice.

  “Yes.” Sardriel stood uncomfortably, trying to ignore the neglected room. Had some fearful loss robbed Farramon of all feeling? “We must stand together and fight ...”

  “Fight?” Farramon shook his head. His confusion was so vivid that Sardriel stopped. Why was the thought of resistance extraordinary to him? Did he imagine victory impossible? Perhaps it was, in the physical sense, but the time was past for that. This struggle was of the spirit, though he should not have assumed Farramon knew that. His thoughts turned to his cousin, whom he had left as lieutenant in the place when he had gone to Tyrn Vawr to join Sadokhar. “Where is Okanthar? Is he still in Orimiasse?”

  “Okanthar,” Farramon repeated the name slowly. “No. He’s dead. I think he was in the boat that went down. We lost a few people then. It was a shame.” His face showed only slight emotion.

  It caught Sardriel with a bitter grief. Okanthar had been a strong and honest man, with the same love of truth as Sardriel himself, which was why it had been easy to entrust the government of the Lost Lands to him. He would have stood against Siriom whatever the odds. His loss was more than that of an ally gone; Sardriel was aware of a new and more complete loneliness than even a moment before.

  “We must gather our forces and fight—” he began.

  “Fight whom?”

  “Siriom, of course!”

  “Why should we fight Siriom?” Farramon asked, his eyes puzzled.

  “Because he has invaded our land!” Sardriel replied, and saw the moment he had spoken the words that they were useless.

  Farramon shook his head. “No he hasn’t! He is only visiting us! It is an honour he comes with such a court. And we have plenty for everyone. The Lost Lands have never been so rich.” He shrugged and extended his arms. “Look around you! We have abundance of everything.”

  Sardriel saw only poverty and neglect. He looked at Farramon and met the eyes of a stranger. Yet there was no cunning in him; his expression was transparent. He believed what he said, preposterous as it was.

  “Was he invited?” Sardriel asked, keeping the anger from his voice with difficulty.

  “Invited?” Farramon frowned. “I suppose so. I can’t remember. Anyway, what does it matter? He has come with great gifts for us, and naturally we offer him our hospitality. What else would you have us do?”

  Sard
riel swallowed. Doubt and unreason seemed to be in the room like a creeping chill. “What gifts did he bring?” he asked.

  “All sorts of things!” Farramon replied. “Bales of silk, wool, hides from the north, jasper and malachite, good wine, grain, honey. Can’t you see?” He pointed to the bare walls of the room, then to a stack of wood by the door.

  Sardriel could not force himself to answer.

  He stayed overnight, sleeping in the room Farramon’s wife offered him with pride. He found it cold, stale and uncomfortable. In the morning he left and walked slowly, miserable and confused, up into the town of Orimiasse. The steep streets with their winding steps were long familiar. This was his home, where he had been a child and a young man. This bright harbour, with Siriom’s ship lying at anchor, was where he had set sail to learn the mystery, the power and the harvest of the sea. He had climbed the hill behind him times beyond number, and stood on the great cliffs at the edge of all known land. The remembrances of his father’s father lay in the shell garden in the hollow that looked on eternity.

  He stood in the sun and stared around him, unnoticed by passers-by. There were a score of subtle differences. The dark nets were spread across the narrow streets, but dry, as if they had not been used. The soft colours of the houses were faded, not with the sharp light, or the salt wind, but with lack of care. There was none of the sense of urgency he remembered so keenly. People were idle as if there were nothing worth the effort of doing. He looked in vain for anger or grief. There was not even the sullen helplessness of a conquered people.

  If anyone recognised him they gave no sign. Yet, with his high cheekbones, his level stare and passionate mouth, they surely knew him? Were they silent for fear of betraying him?

  A few yards away a woman sat on a low wall eating a loaf of stale bread, crumbling it in her fingers and putting it into her mouth. She smiled as if it were delicious to her, her eyes far away, full of dreams.

  The longer Sardriel looked, the more people he saw going about purposeless tasks, apparently absorbed in them. He enquired what they were doing, feeling foolish, half expecting to be told the obvious. The answers chilled him more than ice on the wind could have done, because they made no sense. He saw a man banging nails into chunks of wood as if he believed he had built something fine. With a sense of dazed unreality he walked past three old men sitting on upturned boxes, staring across the harbour at the idle ships at anchor.