Alium, page 24
There was a loud wrenching and grating, and a sickening crunch. The shield folded round the knight as his cuirass fractured like an eggshell in the fist of a child. As soon as he felt the bloody yolk on his skin, Ogwold gasping dropped the suddenly far too limp knight and staggered backwards, falling on his rear in a great puddle. The knight’s face contorted with pain, and his breath spat out over the puddles of water in which his face was pressed. It was clear that he meant to scream, but he was able only to twitch and grind his teeth, blood trickling faintly over the flagstones.
“I only meant to… I’m sorry!” Ogwold cried through the rain.
The two knights by the barracks moved slowly forward, shields drawn, spears readied at their hips. “It’s an ogre,” called one of the two approaching from their posts at the mouth of the cavern.
“It’ll be slow; keep your range!”
Ogwold raised his right arm instinctively. Swelling and flattening into a hard disc it consumed both spearheads as they came. Fine tendrils whirled out from the green flesh and helixed along the shafts of the spears, quickly overtaking the arms of their wielders. “No!” Ogwold shouted. “Please stop!” A shudder ran down the great plant so evolved, and it paused, slowly began to retreat. “Please,” said Ogwold, reaching out in his thoughts.
The white mass of Videre replaced the nearest guard, hanging now as though hours dead from her rain-streaming jaws stained red. The other backed away quickly in horror, still reeling from the writhing mass of root and vine that had gripped his arm like sudden-hardening cement. Videre dropping her prey leapt towards the next target, slamming her front paws into his shield, raised at the last moment. He skidded far back along the wet stone, recovering from the reverberations, yelled half for courage yet as much for the falling of his comrade, and now lunged forward with his spear.
But Ogwold had stood, and he caught the shaft in his grey hand before it could reach Videre. The spear shattered in his grip; the knight drew his sword and swung up and out, but it stuck fast in Ogwold’s blocking green forearm, which had resumed its shielding shape. “Videre, wait,” he said as she prepared to lunge anew.
Realizing his sword was inextricably embedded, the knight released his grip, retreating towards the remaining two who seemed all the more wary, considerably slowed in their advance from the cavern mouth. Videre stepped in front of her charge, eyes blacker and deeper than ever. Her hair stood all on end, and Ogwold could tell that every muscle in her body had steeled. His head pounded. Thunder ripped through his chest, reliving the breaking knight’s body, and his eyes fell upon the man who still seemed to be conscious. “Listen, knights of Occultash. Let us pass into Shadith and we needn’t fight! Save this man while you can!”
A shadow passed through the plaza. From within the retreating knight, a pale blade flashed upward as a crackle of high lightning churned the black clouds. Spinning halves of torso and shorn limb fell in the rain. Over the fallen body stood a figure hard to see in the dark. His cloak shook in the wind, blooded broadsword conducted the light of the storm.
Dashing with astonishing celerity the stranger swung down upon the next guard who had dashed to meet him. The knight’s blocking shield split clean in two as his head was hewn in the same stroke, carrying on vertically through the trunk of the body. Yanking the weapon free, dark gouts of viscera slathered the stranger in gore. His opponent fell eerily to the dead clanking of metal, collapsed forward. Shaking behind his shield, the other knight reached his breaking point, and bolted into the darkness of an alley.
Hoisting the broadsword over his shoulder, bloody rainwater streaming from its edge, the stranger watched him go. The rain splattered hard and loud. Thunder boomed. “Coward,” rasped a surprisingly youthful, male voice. The lightning struck again all about the man, several cords diverging and spitting into the market stalls along the left side, which burst into flame. The plaza lit up blinding and white, now glowing low and orange with the raging flames quickly dampening in the rain. The stranger wore a black cloak, the hood shading his scruffy face as it turned. Tattered leather greaves and gauntlets caught the firelight beneath the blustering fabric.
“You… why?” Ogwold stammered.
The man seemed to stare back out of the black void of his face. “Nice sword,” he said. “Use it, next time.” Sheathing his own blade, the stranger turned and strode for the yawning tunnel into Shadith.
For all its weight, Ogwold had nearly forgotten Ogdof’s enormous sword across his back. Still, he knew he could not draw it against another living creature. Even the accident of crushing the first knight had broken his heart. He shuddered with a sudden heat from the sphere, which pressed against his waist through its place in his pocket, then burst from his cloak and swept through the rain after the stranger, its pale light arcing and vanishing into the darkness like a stray, tiny bolt of lightning.
Videre followed, disappearing into the shadows, which was well, thought Ogwold, sloshing instinctively after her, for word would travel with the escaped knight, or perhaps the killing had been heard in the balconied chamber. But he stopped suddenly, shivered with a thought, and ran to the man he had hurt, scooping him up in his great arms, and rushing him to the covered doorstep of the house where the lightning-stricken other was presumably being mended. “You’ll… They’ll help you… I’m sorry, sir,” he said, laying the knight carefully on the dry stone step. Standing up and taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door softly as he could, though, as he’d suspected, the noise was booming. Then he ran.
*
The cavern was surprisingly warm and dry. Its rugose ceiling curved high above, dimly shadowed by the glowing stones embedded in the rocky wall. The roaring rain now sounded distant and comforting. Here in the sharply inclining road were the familiar wagon-wheel grooves and hoof prints of the desert caravans. But there was no time to linger, for Videre was yet far ahead of Ogwold, and the hum of the sphere had all but vanished. His tremendous footfalls echoed through the ridged roof. The smooth dirt felt soft and kind in the bones of his legs.
In time, he staggered round a great bend in the tunnel, and a distant semi-sphere of starry navy blue appeared, growing now in size as he went. Cool wind touched his high, wet cheeks, and the sound of rain, though far gentler than it had been in Occultash, reached his hairy ears. When he stepped out into the night once again, the deep yellow, enormous yet most distant Moon of Power, Potengrav, was slowly revealed in the parting storm-clouds.
The rain seemed to lighten and stop even as he walked out into the tall, wet grass. Videre waited for him in a pleasant valley thick with pale yellow flowers and smoothly swaying brush. Small night birds peeped in the calm. The dirt path led up a stony pass enshrined with seemingly natural arches of rock interlacing. Under these strode the gaunt figure of the strange man like a shade.
“Wait!” Ogwold called, snatching the sphere out of the air where it hovered beside the mouth of the tunnel. The man stopped, but did not turn. “Do you know this trail?”
The man said nothing.
Ogwold took out the pouch of silver coins that Nubes had given him. “I must reach Zenidow.”
“I don’t know the trail.” The man seemed only slightly to perk at the mention of Zenidow, but still he was like an implacable shadow.
Despite the insistent drone of the sphere, Ogwold himself greatly desired the protection the stranger’s skill could provide. He knew now he could not fight, let alone kill. Though he abhorred the way this man had slain the knights so easily and without affect, he knew that it would be unrealistic not to fear armed combat on the trail ahead. Surely this master of that art would be of invaluable service then, even if he was a killer.
“Why shouldn’t we travel together for some time? It’s better than being alone when neither of us knows the way.” Ogwold held out the pouch cautiously. “I can pay you, as a guide.”
“No.”
“At least let me pay you for saving me.”
Ignoring this, the man began walking again. But at a distance Ogwold followed him as naturally as did Videre.
The path narrowed until it was about the width of a single wagon, and declined steeply into a succession of rock-strewn foothills. Realizing that it should have taken much longer to pass straight through Shadith, Ogwold turned round and looked back up the way they’d come. The cave-mouth from which the path had led was visible some ways up, and now leaning back he took in the enormity of Shadith above and to his left massing for unseeable distances up and out. The road had taken them superficially through a stretch of the skin of its vast base, up onto a small shoulder. Over its lower slopes below he could see Occultash sprawling out to the east; and thereon was the awful desert, somewhere far away Epherem and the sea. He stood for a little while looking down the way, wondering what his father was doing. Then came the inevitable nudge from Videre.
First the tall compounds and high city wall, and then the white expanse of desert disappeared behind the bulk of Shadith as they continued downward along its side. When the stranger at last sat to eat and drink atop a low, flat rock beside the road, Ogwold came up to him and sat too, across the way in the grass. So large was his stature that still he was at eye level with the man, who paid him no mind.
“Let us go with you and find some way to help you. I’m certain you’ll have less trouble on the road with me and Videre along. And, listen… I don’t know the first thing about swordplay. You slew those men like it was your nature. If you teach me to use my own blade I bet I’ll make a good watch for your back.”
“You couldn’t have finished that knight if he was your worst enemy,” said the man. He had spoken critically, but not necessarily out of malice, and it seemed that his shoulders had softened in their rigid posture. The sphere, which had grown more and more hot as Ogwold passed through the tunnel, as the man made to go about his own way, now suddenly cooled, and its humming took a sweetness to it.
“So,” said Ogwold, “you think that he survived?”
“Your ego is admirable, but he merely lost his wind.”
“I hope so. It was awful the way he stopped resisting.”
The man sighed, and was silent for a time. “Look,” he grunted, “I don’t mind sharing the road. I can see you mean no harm. And… I have a map.”
“Of what?”
“The mountains, roughly. I’m not sure how to read it. I suppose another eye on it would help.” He glared across the path. “If you can keep up with my pace during the day, we can share a night-watch as well. But know this,” he said gravely. “Where I go there is ever hurt and suffering.”
“What do you mean?”
A single green eye flashed in the moonlight. “I’m hunting an evil sorcerer; he is hunting Zenidow, as you are.”
The ogre smiled so broadly that the stranger looked away, down the path. “I am Ogwold,” he said almost as if speaking for the little orb chiming in, “and this is Videre.” Videre chuffed and blinked her enormous black eyes before burying her face in her great paws. “We promise to be of help to you, sir. Even someone of your skill could use some company.”
The man again seemed unaffected. “I’m Byron,” he grunted, folding his arms. With one look, it seemed, at Ogwold’s sword where it was laid in the grass, he closed his eye and appeared for the rest of the night to sleep, seated upright on the stone.
Chapter XV
To Listen
The invisible leashes of Xirell, Xelv, and Feox unspooled to distances near banishment from the lean shadow of Zelor advancing, hands clasped behind his back. Darkness and spilling white locks obscured his hooded face but for a gaunt scowl. Mute tails slid freezing in the snow. Not a single word had he uttered since their departure from Quiflum, and it seemed to Elts that he cared little whether she followed. Yet not so far behind the solemn company she looked back on the fog-shrouded village while its last thatched roofs disappeared into the slurry.
Gradually the roaring mists and earthy scent of the river faded into backcountry serenity. An alpine wood thickened about them. Still there were the occasional monoliths of azure stone, though the steep, steely ice in which they were sealed gradually swelled with unmolested humps and blankets of powder, swallowing in time all but the tallest trees. By the freeze of evening, the snow grew unpassably deep. Feox swung his battleaxe in flaming sickle swathes to harvest the path, and Xelv pressed through the great melt to find where they might sow the seeds of their feet. Were it still loyal, Xirell should have sent forth his septry familiar to scout ahead. Yet visible enough through the ceiling of icy branches was their dizzying destination, the black towers of Ardua sprouting like obsidian fungus from the sheer cliff-face high above the wood.
Darkness fell. They camped on a broad, stone plate cleared dry round Feox’s surging axe wedged in a great crack. The Zefloz collapsed like abandoned puppets. Zelor wandered off into the black spaces between the trees. Sleepless under the stars that trickled through the snow-decked boughs, Elts felt the awful absence of her master, lying corpse-like, like a dormant technology set by the fire to dry. If the real Xirell was somewhere trapped within that evil-yoked body, perhaps he wished for death, being before so free and luminous a being. It would be simple and merciful enough to escape the wind of his lungs, silence his throes in the latest hours. She would bury him in an honourable snow drift beneath a noble tree and bless his voyage to Xeléd.
Yet whether some part of her believed that her old friend might still be freed from his horrific catatonia, or simply because she was terrified of the truth, she could not bring herself to do it. Even as the pale dawn painted the net of black branches, she envisioned still Xirell’s dead face and lightless green eyes, wondering if that expression would even change when the blood among its brain tissue ceased to pump. Feox took up and sheathed his axe. Xelv rose impassive to their snow-caked robes. Invisible strings exhumed Xirell from his grave. Wordlessly, Zelor appeared, eyes focused inward, pressing them forward from his presence with commands insensible. Elts followed only when she could no longer hear their progress through the frosted brush, shivering with her distance from Feox’s heat, but calmed by her solitude.
Morning dissolved as they climbed an old stone staircase up towards the base of the mountain. The snow grew more densely packed and traversable as the chance corners and strange proportions of ancient stone ruins reappeared even where Feox’s flames did not reach. A lone, rugose column leaned cracked and eroded against the fat burl of an ancient tree. Remarkably preserved statues of nameless queens loomed eerily from steep hills. Fragments of silver railing stuck up out of the ice. At last the great white wall of vertical rock became clear beyond the bleary trees. So blindingly radiant with the noon sun was it that the shape of Ardua high above was impossible to determine, yet Zelor stood at the foot of the wall staring straight up at his goal, tails long motionless slightly turning in the frost.
Xelv like a blue ghost appeared among the thick foliage clustered against the rock face, and fading led the company back to the mouth of a dark shaft teething with icicles. From its slabby entrance the faint contour of a vast highway spilled through the snow down towards Quiflum. Into the darkness they dragged their frozen feet, and the road became more manageable, though its harsh grade inspired wonder at the pack animals—presumably the strange goat-beasts of the village—that must have drawn wagons up to Ardua, or even those which must so carefully have descended this way to the village.
Like a smooth spiral core was the old road, ratcheting up through the mountain, glowing sparsely with veins of the luminous blue ore which characterized so much rock in this part of the range. The pulsing, lambent medium seeped into cracks and fissures in the tumultuous ceiling. They rested long and late that first night in that dim azure light, pressing on only when Zelor, who appeared more exhausted than any, felt that they must. There was no command; he merely stood, turned towards the inclining darkness, and walked. And certainly Feox and Xelv needed as little instruction as Zelor’s own legs, for they had risen and gone far sooner.
Such morbid loss of affect and other signs of physical weakness Elts began more easily to notice in the Silver Zefloz, and somewhere in her heart were the beginnings of remorse. Perhaps it was the loss of Fexest and all companionship, or did she sympathize with the bent tragic shape so unlike the Zelor of the past, once tall and proud, because she saw too clearly now how the sorcerer was manipulated by the cosmic will of Duxmortul? Dark patches bruised his fatless flesh, and his red-rimmed eyes were blasted dry by endless nightmares. Even at times she swore she saw writhing tentacles mingling in his crooked shadow, or when he lifted his arm to lean against the cavern wall, it was as though a great brooding mass attached itself to his back, feeding and whispering.
During the long hours of night he spent far from company, staring as into a foundering abyss—Elts stealthily discovered—at the bag containing the idol unabashedly, it seemed now that such bleeding wounds of subjugation had always been there. The deeds and aura of the possessed had blinded all around it. What she had mistaken for a conqueror’s wrath was the fear of a tortured animal. Fozlest had not muzzled pride, but helpless fealty. The one Xirell had called evil, the very thing which enslaved him now was not Zelor, not here, not of Altum. Yet however horrible his curse, Zelor still was presumably the wretched soul to grant Duxmortul this form of incarnation, so it was not pity that touched Elts.
It was rather his alleged intention to destroy the Alium—against the will of Fozlest—that touched her heart already so turned against the Empress. To her who lived to defy the Empire, who had worked too long now under its law, and only for the sake of Xirell, it was a noble deed to keep from Fozlest a power meant only for gods, and perhaps not even gods, for surely there was a reason none seemed to know of it. Yet, honourable as Zelor’s mutiny seemed, she did not believe he had taken up the awful power of Duxmortul for this sole purpose. Only a wicked heart would be drawn to such darkness in the first. So she set aside these feelings of honour, and returned his silence with a coldness of her own, waiting to see how flagrant were his lies.
