Then, immediately to his front and blasting away from the face of the sun, there appeared an enormous ribbon of fire, symmetrical in form. Billowing like a sail in a stout wind, it erupted from the surface and came toward the disc. Aram instinctively hunched against the collision with this storm of flame.
As it impacted the disc and swept past, the disc lurched like a small craft on a turbulent and stormy ocean. A terrible humming arose around the bubble that protected him. The sound throbbed right into him, vibrating the depths of his being. It was as if ten thousand angry hornets had been unleashed inside his head and were careening off the inner bone of his skull. His head ached and his muscles throbbed with the passage of the horrendous energy that surged about them. Then the ribbon of fire passed behind and gradually the Four succeeded in stabilizing their tiny craft.
But there was more to come. As they neared the surface of the sun, storm after storm erupted and hummed past, pitching them about like a fragile leaf on a violent wind. One in particular, a vast expanding ribbon of sizzling fire, rocked them so terribly that Aram lost his footing and fell to the deck of the disc where he decided to stay. Nausea rose in his throat from the awful turbulence and threatened to choke him. He felt as if they were lost in a living sea of fire and that they could not possibly survive. Despite the strength of the Four, death was surely imminent in this hellish place.
But the Four did not retreat in the face of the fiery onslaught and even though Aram was terrified and confused, no flame touched him. The air inside the bubble created by the Four remained relatively cool and breathable. And still they went on, deeper into the flaming turbulence. Storm after storm, ribbons of howling vehemence, were blasted from the fiery surface of the sun and blew past them in raging tempests.
Still they went on, into the fire, until they were completely immersed. Aram wondered how the Four could know what direction they should take in the seething cauldron. The disc pitched and yawed and it was all Aram could do to remain near its center. He began to think that it was all folly. No one, not even the mighty Astra, could withstand the horrific conditions surrounding them.
Then, all at once, they were through the turbulent atmosphere of the star and the disc passed into a reasonably clear zone beneath the storms. To their front was the brilliant face of the sun, yellow, orange, red, and, in places, black. Rising from the brighter areas, and sliding across the sun’s surface to sink into other bright areas, were humming, semi-circular columns of shimmering fire which the Four carefully avoided. When one passed near the disc it rolled and pitched terribly. A ferocious wind howled at them, coming straight from the surface and Aram could feel the Four straining to make headway against it.
Slowly but surely, as they hurtled inward, he realized that the Four were piloting the disc toward one of the dark spots in the wall of fire before them. The dark spot was a place where the boiling flame on the surface folded back inward and fell toward the depths.
And then they were inside the body of the star, rushing inward on the strength of a descending column of dark, flaming wind. The disc moved more smoothly now and rapidly gained speed until they were moving at a dizzying rate. Looking ahead was like gazing into a deep well of glowing, turbulent darkness surrounded by living fire. As he stared into this gleaming pipe, Aram could see, far away, a small point of brilliant gold light that grew incrementally larger as they rushed toward it.
He sat up, but did not stand, and looked to the sides. They were moving at the speed of the fiery masses that comprised the wall of the well, also rushing inward. The well was nearly perfectly round – and huge, he suddenly realized. As he stared about him, he was stunned as he comprehended the fact that the walls of dark fire he looked at were probably miles – perhaps hundreds of miles – away from him on all sides.
Turning his head, he gazed behind them. The bright storms beyond the well had been reduced by the rapidly increasing distance to a brilliant pinpoint of golden light, far, far away. He was astonished to realize that they had probably traveled thousands of miles in the last few minutes. They were now very deep inside the body of the sun.
To his front, the brilliant area of gold at the end of the tunnel grew, and Aram thought after a while that he could detect movement in it. As the aperture grew larger, he realized that it was true. He was looking at the moving wall of a solid golden mass that was spinning from his left to his right, rapidly.
He was gazing at the heart of a star.
His star. The sun that looked down every day upon the surface of his world. And he was approaching its living heart.
And then they exited the fiery tube into another clear area and the disc lurched violently to the right as they entered the winds of the sun’s interior region.
“You must stand up, Aram, and make ready.” There was an undertone of intense strain in the voices of the Four as they struggled to make headway against the howling wind.
He rolled onto his hands and knees and then stood up, spreading his feet wide apart. Even through the protective eyepieces of his armor, the intense brightness caused his eyes to ache. The spinning wall of the sun’s heart was dense and brilliantly gold. As he gazed at it, Aram found it horribly disorienting to his senses, rendering him dizzy and nauseous.
Though he had lost all sense of tangible motion as it related to his body, he realized that the Four were moving the disc in all directions, searching the moving wall of fire. Though he couldn’t be sure, he thought that they moved up, then down and to the side, then up again. He could hear nothing except for the screaming of the ferocious, flaming wind but he was certain that the Four were communicating with one another as the disc moved here and there across the golden wall.
Then, the disc dipped and moved closer to the wall. The voices came, and they were the voices of beings under great duress.
“Make ready, Aram – move to the front of the disc. Position yourself between Ligurian and Tiberion.”
Aram complied, easing step by step toward the forward edge of the disc, beneath the touching wingtips of the two guardians whose tenuous bodies glowed, diffused with intense light by the sea of fire around them.
“Lay the sheath upon the disc, pointing back toward the rear with the opening for the blade toward you.”
This he did as well, laying the strap out to the side. Instinctively, he positioned the sheath so that the wide metal lip where the strap attached was on the bottom.
The disc moved closer to the moving wall of flame, until it almost touched the spinning heart of the star.
“Look to your left. It comes.”
Aram looked left along the vertical, rapidly moving mass but could see nothing. He felt his heart constrict. “I cannot see it.”
“Do not fear, Aram, it comes. You will see it momentarily. The grip of the weapon extrudes a hand width from the wall of fire. You must lay hold of it on this pass – it will not return to this side of the star for the space of another day. We will attempt to match its motion while you extract it. When it comes, put forth your hand and pull it out of the fire and into the carrier.”
Aram strained to peer along the wall but its motion made him dizzy and he felt lost in the brilliance that surrounded him. Still he could make out nothing that protruded from the wall.
“It comes, Aram.” The Four sounded exhausted and frighteningly close to collapse, their voices readily betraying the great strain upon their bodies. “Make ready.”
Terrified that he would miss his chance, Aram squinted to his left and held his right hand up near his chest, ready to plunge it through the bubble toward the grip of the weapon when it appeared.
And then he saw it – a small brilliant speck, brighter even than the golden wall in which it was imbedded, rushing toward him at violent speed. The Four began to move the disc in the same direction in an attempt to match the speed of the onrushing object. Every muscle tensing, Aram focused all his attention on the approaching hilt of the weapon. His gauntleted right hand closed into a fist, unclenched, and then c
losed again.
And then it was there. A polished length of shining metal, tipped with a simple, ovoid ball of the same material, with a double-pronged hand guard where it entered the wall of flame, it protruded about ten or twelve inches from the brilliant spinning wall. He reached under the outstretched wings of the guardians and grasped it. Pain shot up the length of his arm as he made contact and he was yanked to the right by the force of the moving grip. Gasping under the sudden strain, he grasped his right hand with his left and pulled with his might. Nothing happened. The sword did not come free.
Now they were speeding along with it; the Four struggling to keep pace with the rushing wall of fire.
Aram gripped with his might and leaned backward toward the center of the disc. Still, it did not move. The sword did not want to leave the bosom of its matrix. Into his mind, unbidden, came Kelven’s words – if you are man enough to grasp it.
Terrified that the doubt inherent in those words might prove devastatingly true, Aram focused all his will on the hilt of the weapon. Straining with every fiber of his being, he leaned his weight into the struggle. And finally it moved.
Slowly at first, a little at a time, it came toward him. Inch by inch, as he strained and gasped, the sword came out of its fiery home and into the protective bubble of the disc. His muscles convulsed with the effort.
At last it was free, and fully inside the circumference of the disc, but still it pulled toward the star, trying to return, its blade glowing as brightly as the fires from which it was extracted. The Four moved the disc away from the spinning wall but the pressure on Aram did not lessen.
The tendons that tied his knotted muscles to his bones bunched and jumped with the strain of pulling the sword inward and turning it toward the sheath. The sword fought against his efforts with incredible force. It was as if he wrestled an unseen giant, much more powerful and determined than he, for control of the blade.
His chest ached. His heart pounded erratically as blood roared in his ears. All his muscles burned, he felt them twitching, weakening toward failure. But then, at last, he had the sword turned inward and pointed toward the sheath. He went slowly to his knees, pushing against the blade, aiming it toward the sheath even as it swerved and bucked and tried to turn back toward its home inside the dense heart of the sun. The blade flashed gold and white flame as it struggled against him.
Then the tip of the sword was there, near the lip of the sheath; still it fought him in its attempt to turn back. Aram was coming to the end. He could feel it – his strength was failing, his will to continue the struggle ebbing – in a minute more, the sword would win.
And then the tip was inside the lip of the sheath. With a mighty effort, he shoved it forward. The sword began to slip inside and with every inch of it that disappeared, the strain lessened.
Finally, it was all in; the double-pronged hand guard of the hilt touched the lip of the sheath.
The sword lay quietly in the center of the disc.
Aram stared at the now peaceful blade, gasping for breath, and then went to his hands and knees. He had a strong need to vomit but was afraid to remove the hood in this place. Swallowing hard against the urge, he managed to keep the contents of his stomach down but felt himself teeter on the edge of unconsciousness. His insides heaved and churned and his quivering arms struggled vainly to support his weight – and failed. Ashamed of his weakness, he nonetheless collapsed, lying prone alongside the sword. He was utterly spent; all of his muscles burned and spasmed and writhed from the length and the intensity of the exertion. He closed his eyes and did not care what happened next.
He felt that the disc moved further away from the wall and could sense that the Four were fighting an intense battle with the pull of the star’s heart and the winds that swept around it. Too exhausted from the struggle with the sword to give much thought to their troubles, he just lay still, breathing shallowly and willing his tattered muscles to relax.
Sometime later he opened his eyes and looked to the side. He still did not have the strength to stand. The disc was inside a bright, swirling column of rising fire, rushing upward and outward toward the surface. The Four had succeeded in finding egress from the interior regions and were using the natural currents in the body of the sun to make good their escape.
Then they were out and once again into the storms of fire that raged in the atmosphere above the surface of the star. Instinctively, Aram pulled the sword beneath his body, closed his eyes and lay prone while the craft pitched and rolled through the turbulent fires. The violent passage through the storms of the sun seemed to last for the longest time. Aram curled his legs up next to his body and fought wave after wave of nausea.
Finally, the movement of the disc became smoother. After a few moments, Aram opened his eyes and looked to the side across the flat surface of the disc. Beyond, outside the bubble, the sky was black. The shimmering bodies of the Four still reflected the brilliant light of the nearby sun but they were free of it and pulling away.
Eventually, Aram felt well enough to sit up and look around. The disc was flying in the rich blackness of the heavens between the sun and the world and the world was approaching. It was no longer a black circle against the stars but was fully lit, for the sun was now directly behind them.
It had been the first hour of night on Kelven’s mountain when they left; now it was the first hour of morning there. At the top of the globe, Aram could see the mass of Kelven’s mountain rising above the edge of the world, the tip of its peak colored with the light of the morning sun.
Before him was a world in full daylight.
To his left, far to the south, the broad, deeply blue waters of the ocean, dotted with islands of land, swept away out of sight over the curve of the world. There was one particularly large island that caught and held his attention for a moment, a dark, hulking mass, iron-black on the rim of the world. Heavily wooded perhaps, it swallowed the sunlight, reflecting none back as did its brighter companions.
The other way, toward the north, the earth became increasingly white with its covering of snow that lay across the rugged northern ranges and over the smooth ice at the top of the world.
Immediately below the transit of the disc as it rose across the face of the earth toward the Kelven’s mountain, south of the snow-covered mountains on the north, there was a broad, richly hued land of browns and tans and grays, and southward as it went toward the ocean, there were rich greens as well, especially along curves of lower ground between ranges of hills that marked the courses of rivers.
This was the earth east of Kelven’s mountain, lands that he had never seen except for distant glimpses as he’d climbed the mountain earlier. He thought that here and there in this strange country he could make out signs of human habitation, but he couldn’t be sure that it was not simply his imagination.
Waves of fire erupted at the front of the disc again as they dipped toward the earth and smoke trailed out behind them as if they were a flaming arrow shot from the sky. Kelven’s mountain was still at the very top of the arc of the world. They were coming in very low from the east. Considering it, Aram understood. The Four did not want Manon to look through the glass in his distant tower and see them returning from their secret mission.
They swept in low over the broken, dry country just to the east of Kelven’s mountain. Higher peaks, scattered here and there, were frosted with snow, but it was mostly desert, though there were patches of green on some northern slopes. There were also winding ribbons of green marking watercourses at the center of some valleys, but not many.
The enormous mass of Kelven’s mountain was directly to their front and slightly higher than the trajectory of their flight. The rim of the crater passed beneath them; the wide, barren plain between it and the mountain was still buried in shadow. The disc slowed and then eased up the steep slope, skimming the tops of trees, green and vibrant in the morning sun.
Then they passed into the tube that went through the mountain wall and moments later th
e disc came to rest in the three-sided room. Aram was back on earth. He lay there for a moment as the Four folded their wings to release the shield and realized that his ancient friend Florm would be pleased indeed. Another line of the riddle had been answered.
Six
Using the sheathed sword like a crutch, Aram got to his feet and looked around to thank the four great lords but to his astonishment, they were already gone. He was alone on the disc and the room was empty.
“Terro and Firezza have moved on to other tasks,” Kelven stated from the shadows of the passageway. “They are some of the Makers most trusted servants and their duties range far and wide, I understand. Ligurian and Tiberion are still present but have returned to their places as Guardians of he who bears the Call – and now the Sword.”
Aram turned to see him standing with his arms folded across his chest, the expression on his face bland. When the god’s eyes dropped to the sheathed sword that Aram held in his right hand, and lingered for a moment, Aram casually slipped the strap over his shoulder so that the sword hung down his back with the hilt just above his left shoulder.
Kelven raised his eyes to meet Aram’s, holding his gaze for a moment; then he turned away. “Come – you must be hungry and tired. Sera has made breakfast.”
Both assertions were true. In fact, Aram felt that he might be too weary to eat but he followed Kelven into the hall and sat at his accustomed place. The god sat at the far end of the table, leaning on the polished surface as if he, too, had suffered the brunt of the night’s exertions.
Aram ate in silence, his eyes lowered to his plate. Once he got going, he realized that he was, in fact, ravenous, and he shoveled Sera’s good food in as quickly as he could. Kelven watched without speaking. Once, when Aram looked up, the god had his head turned and was gazing into the fire that had been started in the fireplace.
Kelven's Riddle Book Two Page 8
