by Roger Taylor
For an unknowable, timeless age, the world became only a swirling, hacking, red-stained blaze of light, as the smith’s forging will and his terrible strength cut through all that stood before him.
Slowly, somewhere in the turmoil, the fluttering, inspiring mote that was Loman felt the currents about him change; heard the all-pervasive rumbling ground bass rise into a whining, fleeing scream.
But then a sudden silence fell; and Loman stood shoulder to shoulder with Yengar and Olvric, staring down an aisle of white-eyed Mandroc faces into the grim-helmed visages of Oklar, Creost and Dar-Hastuin.
Chapter 33
Andawyr laid a hand on Hawklan’s arm as he reached for his sword, but all the others drew theirs.
‘I should prefer not to kill you all,’ said the voice ahead of them. ‘But the choice is yours.’
A solitary figure emerged from the mist, sword in hand.
It was Aelang.
As he walked forward, swaying shadows in the mist behind him darkened and slowly took form to reveal his Mandroc patrol.
Yatsu and the others slowly closed in front of Hawk-lan and Andawyr, but Jaldaric pushed past his companions and strode forward to stand in front of the Mathidrin, his sword levelled.
Aelang made no move other than to incline his head quizzically. ‘Ah,’ he said after a moment, his tone contemptuous. ‘I remember you. The solitary twig from Eldric’s creaking tree. Stand aside, child, I’m in no mood for trifling with you as I did in Orthlund. Indeed I’m in no mood for trifling with any of you. We’ve been waiting for you for some time, and we’re missing the slaughter of your friends.’
Jaldaric continued to stare at his erstwhile captor. ‘Nor will I trifle with you, Aelang,’ he said in a tone that, though calm, made his companions look at one another uneasily. Tirke made to step forward but Hawklan put a hand on his shoulder.
‘In due course, you’ll be charged with other crimes,’ Jaldaric went on. ‘But now I’m arresting you in the Queen’s name for the crime that I witnessed: for the murders you committed at the village of Ledvrin. You’ll be taken to Vakloss where’ll you’ll be given the oppor-tunity for a full Accounting. I must ask you to surrender your sword.’
His manner was so authoritative that for a moment a flicker of doubt passed over Aelang’s face and he glanced uncertainly at the swords behind his accuser. Then his face became livid. ‘I see that blow to the head I gave you has addled what few wits you had,’ he snarled. ‘However, this one will end your confusion perma-nently.’
Without warning, he swung his sword round to beat Jaldaric’s blade down. It was a swift and sudden blow, but Jaldaric avoided it almost casually, and in turn beat Aelang’s blade down.
‘That was one more chance than was allowed to anyone at Ledvrin,’ Jaldaric said, a hint of his inner rage creeping into his voice. ‘You’ll have no other if you don’t surrender.’
For an instant disbelief, then fear, filled Aelang’s eyes as he stared into Jaldaric’s emotionless face. He stepped back a pace, uncertain again.
Hawklan’s hand tightened about Tirke’s shoulder in anxious anticipation.
Then Aelang spun round, the sword following him with a scything power that would surely cleave the young Helyadin in two, from neck to hip.
Aelang had risen through the Mathidrin ranks not only by cunning and ruthlessness but also by displaying a fearsome prowess in all manner of fighting tech-niques. He would have been a match even for the experienced Goraidin and as a swordsman he was far superior to Jaldaric.
But as Aelang had emerged out of the gloomy Narsindal mist, Jaldaric had recognized a terrible opportunity and knew that he must be prepared to accept death now if he was to be free of the doubts and guilt which lined the path of his life like mocking ghosts.
Thus it was with a deep inner stillness that Jaldaric entered the swirling maelstrom of Aelang’s attack. As the Mathidrin’s sword swept down, Jaldaric moved with the blow and stepping aside, drove his sword straight through his attacker.
‘Go stand for your Accounting before your victims, then, Commander, if that’s your wish,’ Jaldaric said as disbelief returned to Aelang’s eyes.
Jaldaric tugged at his sword, but the blade was wedged. Aelang made a strange noise and danced a brief, obscene dance. Gritting his teeth savagely, Jaldaric wrenched the sword free.
Aelang took a single step forward and stood for a moment like a stricken marionette. Then he dropped to his knees and slowly tumbled face forward onto the road.
His sword clattered noisily from his hand.
There was an eerie silence.
‘Close ranks and follow at the double!’ Yatsu’s command was soft, whispered almost, but its power galvanized the stunned watchers.
Then they were all running, Tirke seizing Jaldaric and dragging him forward, the others forming up around Hawklan and Andawyr.
Yatsu led them down and along the embankment past the Mandrocs who were standing bewildered by this sudden, unexpected happening.
Apart from his initial command, Yatsu made no sound as he ran, nor did any of the others, knowing that the silence would give them precious seconds where a roaring battle cry would soon bring their enemies to their senses.
Thus they were running back up on to the road before the Mandrocs began to respond.
‘Hawklan, Andawyr, go!’ Yatsu shouted. ‘We’ll hold them off.’
Hawklan hesitated briefly, but Andawyr grabbed his arm and dragged him forward along the road.
As the two men ran into the mist, the sound of des-perate fighting began to follow them. Hawklan clenched his teeth as part of him rebelled against this flight from his friends in need. But the other part of him drove him forward beside the Cadwanwr. His friends might die without his help, but they might die with it, and their deaths then would be one of utter futility. They were here, in this awful land, solely that he could flee now, to find and face his true enemy.
Gradually, the sounds of battle faded, to be replaced by the sound of their footsteps and gasping breaths.
Suddenly, Andawyr tripped and fell awkwardly, crying out in pain. Hawklan bent to pick him, but as he did so, figures came running out of the mist ahead.
They were Mandrocs, Aelang’s rearguard, Hawklan realized. Left here against the possibility of anyone escaping his trap.
One of them came charging forward, spear levelled. Another followed close behind. Hawklan reached for his sword, but a glimpse of Andawyr’s imploring face stopped him drawing it.
Instead, he twisted sideways and laid his hand on the shaft of the first spear as it passed by him. He pressed it downwards as it ran under his hand, and the sudden change in direction drove the point into the ground. The charging Mandroc ran into the butt end of the shaft with a grunt and then pivoted incongruously over it to fall heavily some distance away.
Even as the Mandroc was falling, Hawklan had swung the spear up and pushed it between the out-stretched arms of the second attacker. Stepping forward, he twisted the spear to entangle the arms and then turned to send the creature hurtling through the air to join its fellow.
A straight thrust drove the butt of the spear into the gaping mouth of another and as it fell to the ground choking, Hawklan impaled a fourth.
The destruction of all four had taken scarcely as many heartbeats and the remainder pulled back a little way, uncertainly. Hawklan yanked Andawyr to his feet, but the Cadwanwr cried out in anguish, and Hawklan winced as the healer in him felt the jagged pain of a damaged ankle.
The cry seemed to give the watching Mandrocs the heart they needed and they charged forward as one. Hawklan dropped Andawyr and stood astride him.
‘No!’ Andawyr shouted in despair, seeing his inten-tion. But no other path now lay before Hawklan. He drew Ethriss’s black sword and in one seamless flowing movement cut down the attackers as if they had been no more than the dank Narsindal mist itself.
The blade rang out, joyous and clear in the gloom, as if every glittering star in its hilt were sin
ging a hymn of triumph.
* * * *
In their ghastly armour and mounted on their dreadful steeds the Uhriel struck a chilling fear into even Loman’s burning anger and he felt his body become rigid.
Oklar raised a mailed hand towards him, and his eyes blazed blood red as if from some terrible inner fire. His mount pawed the ground with its clawed foot, its head swaying from side to side and staring at the smith.
Then the hand clenched in frustration and Loman felt hope bubbling up through the icy stillness that had descended on him.
He drove his sword into the ground, snatched up a fallen spear, and with a great roar hurled it at the apparition threatening him. Impelled by the smith’s great strength, the spear hissed as it cut through the rain-soaked air on its journey towards Oklar’s heart.
The Uhriel, however, brushed it aside almost casu-ally with a sweep of his arm. The force of the impact shattered the stout shaft.
Oklar urged his steed forward. The creature did not move at first, but its eyes shone with a deep malevolence and its mouth opened to emit a rasping snarl. Oklar drove great spurs into its scarred sides and with another snarl it began loping slowly forward, its movements angular and peculiarly unnatural.
With his heightened awareness, Loman saw, albeit dimly, the true nature of the Uhriel, rending its way into the reality of this time and this place.
‘Your old men protect you from our true wrath, for the moment, Orthlundyn, though they wilt and fade even as we speak.’ Oklar’s voice seemed to shake Loman’s soul. ‘But we are warrior kings whose empires spanned the world, even before we saw and knew the One True Light. Nothing can save you or your army from our swords when we deem it fit to draw them.’
As he spoke his actions imitated his words, and he drew a great sword. His steed let out a raucous cry of delight at the sound. Out of the corner of his eye Loman saw the watching Mandrocs moving back, some falling to their knees. He felt the two Goraidin involuntarily retreating from him.
But he could not move. His eyes were drawn to the Uhriel’s blade. It seemed to be alive, flickering red and yellow as though it were the mobile, changing heart of his own forge. The sight fascinated him as much as it terrified him and, for all he knew that it was to be his death, he wanted to touch and handle it in its glory; or use its power to make those transcendent creations that lay beyond the outer fringes of his great skill.
Yet even as these thoughts occurred, the image of Hawklan’s black sword formed, with its transcendent chorus of wonder beyond all words.
From somewhere inside him he found the courage to denounce Oklar’s work. ‘Is there no end to your corruption, creature?’ he said sadly.
Oklar’s steed craned its neck forward and bellowed at him, its foetid breath making him grimace.
He wrenched his sword out of the ground and lev-elled it at his approaching doom.
Oklar loomed tall and hideous in front of him, his sword suddenly blood red.
Loman felt his terror melt into raging anger and he gathered his mind and his body together for a strike that would cut down both horse and rider even as he died.
Suddenly, he felt a ringing song pass through him and the ominous form in front of him seemed to start in alarm. Its fearsome eyes dimmed a little and then blazed out anew, more terrible than ever. The foul steed too was affected; it twisted its serpentine neck to and fro, and then let out a high-pitched snarl as though it were being strangled.
Then Oklar turned to his two companions and with a great screeching cry dragged his steed about and charged from the field, trampling underfoot any too slow to avoid his awful charge.
Loman stood aghast as he listened to the terrible cry of rage that rose over the tumult of the battle even as it faded into the distance. Relief surged over him.
‘Strange fortunes look over you this day, smith.’
The voice brought Loman back to the heart of his terror again with its dark icy stillness. Oklar was gone, called by some strange event beyond this battle, but Creost and Dar Hastuin remained and it was Creost who had spoken.
So soon sentenced again after his reprieve, Loman was almost unmanned as he turned to face Sumeral’s two other terrible aides. Creost with his flaccid, mouldering, skin, and his black, empty, eyes; and Dar Hastuin, gaunt and blasted, whose empty white-eyed gaze exuded a malevolence quite equal to that from Creost’s dark pits and whose white hair writhed and twisted from under his helm like a mass of blind, venomous, snakes.
Creost’s mount, like Oklar’s, was a grotesque, preda-tory, caricature of a horse, but it was covered with scales, and it glistened with a clinging dampness that was not that from the teeming rain. Dar Hastuin rode Usgreckan.
Both carried swords whose wrongness bit into Lo-man’s soul as deeply as had Oklar’s, but they offered him no temptation now and he tried to watch the approaching figures as he might any other two oppo-nents.
As they neared, he noticed that both the Uhriel had newly healed and livid scars about their faces.
Gavor, he thought, finding strange solace in the sight. His trembling grip tightened on his sword.
He felt Yengar and Olvric come to his side again, swords raised, though neither affected anything other than terror in the face of the slowly advancing Uhriel.
‘If they’re men, they’ll die as men,’ Loman managed to say as he raised his sword to meet them, though he could not keep the tremor from his voice.
‘Indeed they will,’ said the voice behind him.
Loman started violently and looked quickly back over his shoulder.
A rider was there. For a moment he thought it was one of the Lords as he took in the red cloak and the white surcoat, emblazoned with the symbol of the Iron Ring, and covering a fine chain mail armour.
But the rider’s face was covered with a visor and he saw that though blood had oozed through great scars in the armour, and the cloak and surcoat were torn and bloodstained, the blood was old and long dried. He blinked to clear his vision, and as he did so, he heard the song of the metal that formed the mail coat and the simple undecorated sword that the figure carried. It was a lesser song than that of the black sword of Ethriss, but it was beyond any that he had ever made or taken from the Armoury at Anderras Darion.
And the horse was Serian.
‘Hawklan?’ Loman asked, knowing the answer.
‘These are my enemies before they are yours, smith,’ said the figure, its voice muffled by the visor. ‘Go to your true battle-it hangs in the balance, and will remain so no matter what the outcome here. It needs your heart, your will, your skill.’
Loman reached up and the figure took his hand briefly.
‘Light be with you, Loman,’ said the voice softly, then the figure saluted and eased Serian forward past the silent smith.
Loman stepped aside as the figure turned to face the Uhriel. ‘Lord Vanas ak Tyrion, son of Alvan, and king and betrayer of the long dead Menidai. Duke Irgoneth, patricide and usurper of the throne of drowned Akiron. I greet you.’
The two Uhriel stopped their advance as if they had been struck and Loman felt their terrible presence waver.
‘In Ethriss’s name I offer you redemption and re-lease from your torment, if you forsake His way now,’ the figure went on.
There was a long silence, then Dar Hastuin spoke, his voice hissing and shrieking like the winds he rode. ‘What creature are you to know such ancient names and to speak of the Great Heretic thus in our presence?’
‘No creature, Lords,’ the figure replied. Then slowly it reached up and raised the visor. Loman could not see the rider’s face.
‘I offer you redemption, my Lords-or death,’ the voice said. For a moment, Loman saw the two Uhriel become once again men; powerful men, ever seizing, ever fearing, but faced now with that which they had been ever fleeing.
Then the vision was gone.
Neither Uhriel spoke, but both suddenly raised their swords and charged towards the lone figure.
‘We were great warrior
kings… before.’
Oklar’s words returned to Loman vividly as he felt the ferocity and power of their charge. No man could stand against such force. He and his two companions would have been brushed aside like chaff for all his strength and their skills.
Usgreckan rose from the ground, shrieking, its huge wings throwing up clouds of spray. Creost’s steed crouched low like a great serpent.
Unexpectedly, Serian leapt forward to meet them. It was a seemingly reckless response to such an attack, but as the protagonists closed, Serian suddenly twisted to one side and the unknown rider struck Usgreckan a blow on the neck that half severed it.
With a terrible cry, the creature crashed into the ground sending its loathsome cargo tumbling among the heaps of dead and dying.
The fall, however, had little or no effect on the Uhriel, and as Serian turned, it was to the sight of Dar Hastuin clambering atop the bodies and shrieking as if the dying Usgreckan had entered his soul. His clawed hand reached out towards the rider who immediately dismounted and strode towards him.
Dar Hastuin screamed again at the approaching figure in some strange language, then he fell silent and the two were face to face, sword to sword-both quite motionless save for the whirling mass of Dar Hastuin’s clawing hair and the rain running from the rider’s armour.
The brief timeless stillness was filigreed about by the sounds of the battle around them and the clamour of Creost recovering control of his mount following Serian’s sudden avoidance. Loman watched, wide-eyed and intent. Then he started suddenly, as did Yengar and Olvric, though both were subtle and experienced swordsmen. They had seen scarcely any movement by either combatant, but now, without either threat or feint and in what seemed to be the flicker of an eye, Dar Hastuin was impaled on the rider’s sword.
His awful scream began, but petered out almost immediately, and the rider was lowering him to the ground amid the other dead, with a strange gentleness.
