Swords Against Darkness

by Paula Guran

  The giant leaned near. “Father, greet your bereaved son, un-orphaned now by your return.” He touched the mailed chest—which expanded—and the eye-sockets, in which two orange sparks kindled.

  The shrunk ribs heaved. With crackly, whistly labor, Zan-Kirk leaned forward and began to cough—slow, endless coughs that sounded like hammerblows fracturing ice. He wrenched his mummied jaws apart, and spat a black clot into the black waters.

  Then slowly, slowly the wizard raised his hand before his face, and higher yet, till he could fan his stark-boned fingers out against the zenithed moon, and thus he held them back-lit, gazing at them for many moments.

  He turned at last the glow of his empty orbits to his son’s eyes. His voice emerged in rusty gasps: “Plucked . . . like a root . . . from my sleep . . . How dare you . . . puppet me . . . like this?”

  “I wake you, Sire, to serve your own great Work, suspended by my step-dam’s sorcery. I wake you to enthrone you at my side, that we together might recall the Sojourners to their primeval home. That we together might embrace the gods that they have certainly become.”

  “Enthrone me!” hissed the lich. “Use me, rather . . . You want my army . . . What of Hylanais? . . . Does she live?” His long-drowned voice was all whispers and gasps, but when he spoke the name of Hylanais, it came out crackling like a blaze.

  I think I did not fully credit that this charnel thing had life, until I heard him speak the witch’s name, and heard his words come scorched from him, as in the furnace of that warlock’s wrath.

  The golden giant smiled sadly. “Father, I do not know. I only rejoice at your new life, and the work we shall do together.”

  “Life . . . These cold sparks . . . gnawing my dead bones? . . . Life?” And yet Zan-Kirk rose, and with a noise of wet wood crackling, strode stiffly left and right across the raft. Found—with a groan—enough strength in his arm-bones to wrench his rusted blade from its scabbard, and slice the air with it: stroke, and counter-stroke . . .

  When he spoke again, there was a bit more timbre, and more purpose in his voice, though still a hissing voice it was. “For my allegiance . . . two conditions . . . First . . . If we win . . . you and I . . . stand forth as equals . . . before the Sojourners . . . for their bounty . . .

  “Second . . . the demon-bitch . . . Hylanais, if she . . . walks the earth . . . I shall be free . . . be helped at need . . . to work her death . . . in agony . . . Do you accept . . . these terms?”

  “Great Sire,” the giant boomed, “your demands are branded on my heart-of-hearts, so inward to my purpose are they now.”

  Zan-Kirk nodded. The phosphorescence of his sockets flared. He walked to the raft’s rim and raised his sword. He flourished it, and its blade glowed red, as from a forge. Two-handed, he propelled it point-first down into the waters.

  The sword came ablaze as it dove, and burned a red track through the murk. It transfixed the muddy bottom and burned there still, revealing heaped on every side a bulky litter of uncanny forms, trunked and limbed and skulled in every bestial shape: his demon army, so long drowned.

  Now the entire swamp-floor came a-boil with movement. Clawed paws and spiny tentacles thrust upward amid smoky blooms of silt, while a smutty lambency of green and orange stole like fever-glow across the whole drowned grave.

  The raft rocked as the first shape erupted from the water: a huge one, its wide, black bat-wings drizzling mud as their labor held it poised upon the air. Submissively it offered Zan-Kirk back his sword, hilt first. Zan-Kirk seized the sword, and mounted the brute’s shoulders.

  Gothol swept his raft aloft again. The torch-bearing crowds on the Flume and on the rooftops of the town beneath it were crying aloud, all astir with movement that knew not yet where to flow. The Narn-son hovered high, the demon-borne wizard beside him, and suddenly my leafy perch began to tremor. There were deep movements of the muck my tree was rooted in. The whole swamp-floor began to quake.

  A noise of torn water and of muddy suction rose. Brute shapes erupted and lurched from the fen. They were demon-shapes in lumbering cavalcade that seemed to take form as they climbed, shedding the muck that blurred their vile bodies as they moved upslope.

  Gothol, aloft, sent his mellow voice down upon the terrified throngs on the Flume and the rooftops. “Look, beloved Lebanites! Behold, and fear not! See how submissive these monsters move! Hark! They go silent! See! They go docile! They are my father’s slaves and mine! They go to work a wonder for you all! They go up to Rainbowl, and there will abide, to heal her wound, and work your city’s weal! They go but to repair the Rainbowl’s wound!”

  Beloved Lebanites indeed! What could the citizens, those torch-clutching thousands do, after all? What but stand, and tremble where they stood?

  The dripping, malformed army trudged endlessly up from the fen. The swamp’s floor convulsed, as my tree tilted near to toppling, while other trees around me crashed into the water.

  Those mud-slick shapes moved in strange unison, their ascending column seemed cohesive as a fluid. From high on his broad-winged brute, Zan-Kirk bent down on them the eyeless fire of his gaze, while Gothol, like a captain who waves forth his troop, swept summit-ward his moon-bright blade . . .

  You know how much I’ve seen of the sub-Worlds, Shag. Demons are dire in the snarling seethe of their dissension. To see their eerie concord here, as they climbed dripping from the swamp, oh, worse than demonlike it was, this homicidal unison! Against such a tide, what could stand?

  I watched the very last of them lurch dripping from the fen, their line so long now: half a mile of greasy thew and burnished carapace, of drooling maw and spiky mandible, they toiled and rippled peak-ward past the Flume’s huge legs.

  Then, far up in the rubble-slope beneath the Rainbowl’s wound, something moved. A sharp noise echoed down of shifted stone. And there once more—the moonlight betrayed that something moved in that high rubble.

  Those stones were big as battle-chariots, as drayers’ vans, and suddenly one of them sprang hammering down half a furlong before it came again to rest.

  Yet . . . what was it which thrust that boulder free? It was something too small to see at first. Too small until it writhed up from the rubble and stood swaying in the moonlight, and was visible then only by its blackness amid the pallid boulders: it was a little human figure, gaunt and dark as some long-withered root.

  Such a paltry apparition! So slight a thing to rise, and stand, and face downslope as if to challenge the demon legion climbing up to meet it.

  Below my high perch in the branches, Yanîn emerged from his leafy covert. He pointed at the small far shape of darkness, and in a tone of awe and joy he said, “You see her there, Nifft? Hylanais, my most precious mother! Two hundred years of burial she’s endured! Alas! I could not choose but leave her lie! I was not yet grown strong enough to face the war of the Dead with the Demons!”

  Then that far, high, moon-bleached landslide moved again, and three more boulders tipped from their lodgements. Two came soon to rest, the third went banging farther down, and three—then four, five, six more lean dark forms stood up with Hylanais.

  One of these shapes pulled what looked to be an ancient pike out of the rubble. The others heaved against more stones which, though they seemed propelled by such slight force, all lurched like mighty hammers down, in their turn displacing further stones.

  Now scores of these black, crooked shapes stood toiling in the rubble of great Rainbowl’s wall, all of them shifting other boulders, till the crack and bang of tumbled stone rose to an unremitting roar, rose like a noise of war, like the clang and clash of gathered shields colliding, while the gaunt shapes standing up from the rubble suddenly numbered in the hundreds.

  I watched these meager figures sprouting like weeds from that lofty rock-slide—all looking so frail amidst the mighty stones they moved—and then I regarded the demon horde already half a mile upslope of us, a single viscous mass it seemed of sinew, scale and talon, of fang, beak, spike and claw . . .r />
  I asked Yanîn, “Do you think the witch’s risen dead—those troops twice killed already—can stand against this demon mass? Or against Gothol and Zan-Kirk, who marshal them?”

  He aimed his eyes up at me—as nearly as his wrenched frame could manage this. “Stand against these demons? Stand against Zan-Kirk and his Narn-son? Why certainly! But they will not do so! Our dead allies have more urgent work to do!”

  “What work’s more urgent than killing those demons?”

  “Why, the Rainbowl’s repair of course!”

  “Repair? How repair?”

  “By restoring the broken stone to the cleft.”

  “But first things first! These demons!”

  “Who repairs the Bell can sound it—no one else!”

  I gazed up disbelieving at the gigantic rubble of those stones, and chose to ask a more urgent question. “But who then will oppose these demons, and the two great mages that command them?”

  “Who? Why, you and I!”

  “You and I?”

  “We’ll have some help, of course.”

  “ . . . I rejoice to hear it.”

  “Now I must take the liberty of asking you to come down and, ah, sit astride my shoulders.”

  “Hmm. It would seem in that case that I am to be the one taking the liberty . . . ”

  Yet before I descended, I could not help but pause, an awe-struck witness. For already the dark, shrunken dead, so slight and frail on their far height, were in fact hoisting those great stones—in pairs and threes—and bringing them up to the great cleft. This mere work of portage, like the labor of ants, had the impact of a witnessed wonder.

  But even more miraculous was the laying of each stone in contact with the ruptured wall. As each boulder touched the stone it had been part of, it flowed like a liquid into that substance and extended it. Already the ashlar patch was half masked by restored native granite. The antlike dead touched boulder after boulder to the base of the patch, and reborn rock rose like poured fluid in a conic cup.

  “My friend!” called Yanîn from below me. “Look where the Narn-son and Zan-Kirk fly to the witch to work her harm! Make haste!”

  And there indeed were Gothol on his blazing raft, and the wizard on his wide-winged brute, sweeping up in advance of their monstrous troops. They were less than two miles below the witch and her lichfield of gaunt laborers. The moonlight glinted on the Narn-son’s blade, while the warlock’s brightest feature were the blazing coals that were his eyes . . .

  I swung down from my tree. Yanîn crouched before me and I mounted his shoulders. “All I can do in aid is yours—forgive the liberty,” I said.

  “You’re light as a leaf. Grip the collar of my jerkin.”

  I did so. “And, ahem, exactly how are we to—”

  “Aerially,” he said. And leapt straight into the sky.

  IV

  “Leapt,” while accurate, is too weak a term. Such was the speed of our ascent my frame seemed to contract to half its volume, my ribcage too compressed to allow the intake of a breath.

  At our apex, and the start of our descent, I could breathe again, had breath and awe to spare for what stretched out below us: the dark might of the demon army toiling upslope. An army they truly seemed; despite their multiplicity of shape, the mute unison of their movement was sinister in the extreme.

  Within the wind-rush of our plunge (whose angle I anxiously gauged, fearing we might not come down far enough in advance of that dire vanguard) Yanîn’s rumbled words rose plain to me:

  “You may doubt that we’ll have help. Be comforted! I have many friends in this forest.”

  I rejoiced to hear it, but scanning the wooded slopes, could see no sign of any allies amid those trees. Here came the treetops, and hard earth beneath.

  “Hold tight,” Yanîn gritted.

  Twigs whipped my head and shoulders, and the arse-and-spine-numbing impact was reduced by a second, lesser leap skyward, one that just cleared the crests of several trees, and plunged us again to the mountainside some furlongs higher upslope.

  And as soon as I had dismounted his shoulders, and shaken the numbness from my legs and arse, I could feel through my footsoles the tramp of the ascending demon columns climbing towards us.

  Yanîn seized my right shoulder in his huge hand, and an icy rill went through my bone and sinew—the pulse of sorcery.

  “Thus I endow your touch with power. We must run zig and zag across the front of their advance! Strike every trunk with the flat of your hand and say: Root and branch! Arise! Advance!”

  This will not seem much to do—the pair of us running crosswise to the slope, striking tree after tree and crying the words aloud. And indeed, I was awed to wake so much power so quickly. Each skorse, as we struck and invoked it, shuddered and shook its great crest like a brandished lance. Tore out its roots from the soil and rock and stood upon them.

  Every skorse sinks a tripod of taproots. Each one we woke writhed and wrenched them free, and with a gigantic, staggery strength surged down toward the demon-horde.

  In truth they were titans, but lurching and lumbering ones. To strike, they must make a stand on their roots, and make great lateral strokes with their lower and largest boughs. The demons they connected with, they bashed to bloody tatters, but such was their weighty momentum, recovery from each stroke was slow. Meanwhile demons, of course, are agile as lizards or rats. Demons are limber as maggots in meat.

  The head of their up-rushing column was compacted at first, and thus at the outset, the slaughter those timber titans wrought was grand and glorious: neighboring trees, with opposing strokes of their branches, scissored whole streams of demon-meat between them . . .

  It could not last. Zan-Kirk—though flown far peak-wards to engage his hated spouse—wheeled back astride his winged brute, and with a gesture caused his demons to disperse in a hundred branching paths upslope.

  Now, they were flooding upwards in a swath a quarter-mile broad, and from a column, had become a rising inundation.

  “We must defend the crater—hold tight!” I mounted his shoulders again and once more Yanîn leapt into the sky. Our arc was flatter, would bring us down on the rubble-slope where Hylanais toiled. The witch’s work was stunningly advanced. She was airborne on wings she’d conjured, transparent and invisible in their vibration as a dragonfly’s. Her dead were an ant-swarm, dwarfed by the boulders that they hoisted, up from the diminishing rubble-slope and onto the steep pitch of the crater wall—twin streams of these great stones, balanced on their bone-lean shoulders, they carried up the rupture’s either side.

  Their progress gave us hope. The crude repair of ashlar that had stood so long impounding its meager reservoir was swallowed up and twice overtopped. Two hundred feet of the wound was seamlessly closed in the glittery gray rock they lofted, shard by shard. For to touch one of these boulders to the patch at any point was to see it snatched into the reborn wall like water into a sponge—to see the fragment meld with the broken rim, and the whole mend incrementally rise.

  And in their toil, it seemed the dead soldiers grew brighter, for the stone they wrestled scoured the rusted greaves and corselets they wore, such that their armor began to flash brazen and silver in the blaze of moonlight, and their long-empty sockets seemed to gleam with it too.

  Those twice-dead warriors—tireless—ant-swarmed the boulders upslope either side of the breach, like a V-shaped bucket brigade, but of course the upper third of the crater’s great wound yawned widest of all. Those skeletal conscripts twice resurrected by the witch—two hundred years ago, and now—toiled like the heroes they were, but we already saw that once arrived at the crater, the best we could do against the ascending demons would be too little. If they reached the breach in their thousands, they would usurp the crater’s repair . . . We apexed, and now we were plunging again

  Even as we dove, we saw Hylanais overwhelmed. She was zigging and zagging on her blur of wings, and retreating ever higher from her army, because Gothol on his raft,
and Zan-Kirk on his demon, flanked her left and right, and flung bolt after bolt of raw thaumaturgic energy at her, while her fierce dodges and deflections plainly cost her all the strength she had. Even as we plunged to the crater’s rubble-slope, we saw we’d land with but scant lead on the up-rushing hellspawn.

  Yanîn’s great torqued mass—like a spring—somehow diminished our impact with Rainbowl. Here was the rubble-slope much shrunk by the energy of the dead heroes, yet it seemed a work that could not be accomplished before the demons swarmed up from the trees.

  Yanîn said, “Take arms against them when they come, my friend. I must give myself to one task alone. Good luck.”

  He lifted the boulder next to the one he stood on—it was as big as a mail-coach!—and thrust it into the air. Astonished, I watched it arc high, high up the cone, strike the patch, and melt into it.

  A hellish din! Now five thousand demons erupted from the treeline not many furlongs downslope from us, while bolts of crackling energy split the sky between the three combatant wizards high above us. Yanîn, in swift series, hurled three huge stones arcing a quarter-mile through the air to merge with—and incrementally augment—the stony poultice on great Rainbowl’s wound.

  The demons poured from the trees, crossed the open slopes, muscling and lurching and scrabbling through moonlight, clawing and seething, gaunt-limbed and rasp-tongued and thorn-furred and fungus-eyed they came, their unearthly stench—an almost solid thing—welling forth from them like a kind of miasmic vanguard.

  It was time to turn to. I had a good sword, though I sorely disliked lacking a shield . . .

  Here they came closing, closing—I had just time for another glance behind me at Yanîn. There seemed to be two of him, so incessant and swift were his workings. I saw no less than three huge boulders strung through the air along the same trajectory, and he launched yet a fourth along that same parabola just before the first of the series impacted with the patch, and swelled it . . .