*
Karmalaine watched the wretches sink to their knees and reluctantly followed suit. Too much time had already been lost pandering to the bizarre rituals surrounding entry to Torabane and the seat of Rokumung. The Prince knew that this was where Balg-Miur had been heading, for the giants believed that to lay outside Torabane in death was a misfortune that would blight their family and for certain Balg-Miur knew that he was dying given the pace with which they'd moved.
Despite Balg-Miur having covered over half the journey after leaving the basin of Snowdell it had taken the Prince weeks to get here. He'd drunk from the rivers and the streams, he'd hunted his own food and he'd had to defend himself against numerous wild dreams on the journey but finally he'd arrived.
Torabane itself was the largest mountain in all Avalen. It was the only piece of physical geography which was the same height as the Dreamstone Wall. This was another of the many places in Avalen which the Prince had only read about in books. Though he told himself in advance that anywhere designed to house beings as large as giants was going to be big he was still astounded by Torabane which came into sight when he was still hundreds of leagues away from it.
The closer he got the more of the horizon was filled by the mountain until eventually Torabane had become the horizon. The sides of the mountain were lost beyond his ability to see and its heights stretched up into the clouds and beyond. Though the Palace of Fenngaard was the largest structure in Avalen it would have looked like a toy model if placed next to the sire of all mountains.
To get to the home of the giants it was necessary to pass beneath the gaze of a number of forts occupied by the people known as the Red Demkin. They had an appalling reputation as a people who betrayed their own in order to feed them to the giants and be spared themselves. But such was history and the Prince had found the current Red Demkin occupying the forts to be a fussy bureaucratic people more concerned with making sure that he was dressed properly rather than serving him up as dinner.
Torabane was surrounded by a range of mountains and hills, all of which looked up in envy at the one who towered above them. The forts of the Red Demkin were linked by a wall which ran across all the hills and mountains. They patrolled it around the clock despite there not having been a threat to the giants in centuries. It would have been impractical and impossible for the Prince to have gotten across the wall without being noticed, so he'd submitted to a suspicious group of Red Demkin led by the one who identified himself as Ashal.
Though the Prince had been keen to see Rokumung as soon as possible truth be told he was relieved for the respite which Ashal had insisted upon. The bath in the unnamed fort had been deep and hot and the chirurgeon had patched up his wounds with indelicate but effective skill. Then he'd been dressed in the thick, heavy and soft rouge robes of the Red Demkin and led to the infamous Gate of Skulls. Ashal had been very insistent that Prince Karmalaine not make eye contact with any of the giants. The Prince recalled having made eye contact with Balg-Miur many times and the giant had never taken offence, he could only assume that this was a regional custom observed in Torabane and not in the wider world.
The scale of the Gate of Skulls was a taste for the Prince of giant architecture. What to the giants was a modestly large doorway was to the 'small people' an archway worthy of entrance into the heavens. It was much larger than the doors leading to the Palace of Fenngaard through which the giants had to stoop upon entering. A number of giants standing on each others’ shoulders could have walked through the Gate of Skulls with room to spare.
Beyond the gate was a wide paved area several leagues across. It was dotted here and there with giant statues showing a variety of giants standing in victorious poses. Had he walked around the foot of the mountain, a journey which would have taken months, he would have seen that Torabane was ringed by the statues of long dead giants who'd once shaken the world with their footsteps. But it was not the dead giants Karmalaine was here to see. The one who'd been guarding the gate had stepped aside without a word when Ashal had announced him. The Red Demkin led the way past the giant and into the plaza of statues.
As they walked it started to rain, the water forming tears on the faces of the giant statues they passed. The weather which had afflicted Avalen in the wake of the dreamer’s presence persisted in all quarters. The Prince could not recall the last time he'd seen a blue sky, or felt the pure natural light of the world shining on his skin. The red garments were thick enough to keep most of the rain off, the tail ends became sodden, however, dragged as they were through the many puddles on the plaza. The Gate of Skulls had been formed between two natural mountain peaks which held the path to Torabane. As they neared the mountain the Prince saw alterations made to the base of the peak that dwarfed even the Gate of Skulls.
The base of the mountain had been transformed into a huge colonnade which stretched as far as the Prince could see. Leading up to the columns was a series of steps. They were giant steps for a majority but here and there between those steps, which Karmalaine would have needed a ladder to climb, small culverts with 'small people' steps had been carved. The Gate of Skulls, though impressive in its magnitude, was a crudely built misshapen structure. The colonnade, the steps and the lintel above were flawless, fitting together with a neatness that gave the impression that it was all one piece, that the foot of the mountain had simply grown this way.
They made their way up to the platform beneath the overhanging lintel that merged into the mountain. In front of them Karmalaine saw a huge arched entrance with no door. Either side of it stood two more giants brandishing clubs big enough to level a small town. They gave the Red Demkin no quarrel and the group passed beneath the arch into the mountain proper. What he saw next stunned the Prince to an abrupt standstill causing the Red Demkin behind him to almost walk into his back. What he was seeing was simply not possible. The mountain was hollow. It was one large cavern, the walls of which were lined with an ascending spiral staircase which went up for miles to the peak of Torabane.
What struck the Prince was just how much like Fenngaard the concept of Torabane was. Many walkways led from the spiral staircase into smaller caverns built into the mountain wall, but the central space was hollowed out to make a hall which Fenngaard could have fit into ten times over.
“Come”, said Ashal in a hushed voice. The Prince followed haltingly, blown away by the scale of the hall of giants. Lanterns hung around the hollow mountain, so large that they would have put torch to whole villages with a single swipe. The fires which crackled in them did so with such volume that to the Prince it sounded more like thunder rumbling that fire burning.
The centrepiece of the hall towards which they headed was another statue, larger than the rest by several times. It was of a giant sitting on a throne, a colossus to dwarf the colossi; this must have been a statue to the father of the giants surely? Then it moved. Just slightly shifting in its throne, the ground rumbled and Prince Karmalaine’s heart beat in his chest so hard he thought it might burst. The snow-bear which the occupants of Snowdell had conjured had been bigger, but unnatural and made just from ice and snow, there was little of substance to it. The thing sitting on the throne was flesh and bone.
So grey and stony was its skin that the Prince had thought it could be nothing but a statue. Indeed there was little to differentiate it from the throne on which it sat and in places they seemed to have become one and the same, to have merged into one. Some distance from the throne they stopped and the Red Demkin fell to their knees once more. The Prince followed suit, overawed by what he was seeing. Ashal was silent and the Prince wondered whether or not it had fallen to him to speak. He was considering doing so when he on the throne did so.
“Speak”, he rumbled in a voice so deep and powerful that it echoed off the walls for many moments before descending the distance to their ears. It was a voice which spoke from far away, so high was the giant’s head from where they knelt.
Ashal responded without lifting his head. “Rokum
ung, God-giant of Torabane, we found this dream wondering before the red line, it sought an audience with your greatness.”
“What is its name?” came the long words of Rokumung back to them.
“It is called Prince Karmalaine, son of Fenn Corul Geddon, heir to the Kingdom of Avalen.”
Rokumung seemed to think about that for a time before answering. “Arise, little Prince”, said the giant, adopting the same frame of speech as his son had used. “What brings you to my hall?” he bellowed. The prince did not know if the giant was bellowing but his voice was so loud that it seemed that way though it might have been a whisper spoken to one of his own kind.
So the Prince recounted his tale. He started with the gathering of champions and detailed the quest they'd journeyed on to find the dreamer. Rokumung listened without interruption. The Prince told them of how they'd picked up the trail, the journey to Snowdell and the battle with the ice giant. He told him everything, the betrayal of Bloodren and Archaven, the death of Cyra, the battle over the valley of the snow people and the arrival of the grey knights.
Prince Karmalaine recited the incident with the dreamer in the snow mountain and his subsequent escape with the jackals, he told him of the arrival of the sky-ship fleet, the treachery of Vulthian and the yet to be confirmed news of his father’s fall in Fenngaard. He told him of all this and then he told of how he and Balg-Miur had fled and raced north to Torabane. At this point he stopped and hesitated. He was not sure how to recount the next bit of his tale or how it would be received by the one which his people referred to as the God-giant.
Rokumung picked up on his hesitation. “Where is my son?” he rumbled in a tone low and ominous even for a giant.
“He died of his wounds. His body lays some week’s travel south-west of here, resting against the side of a mountain. He saved my life”, finished the Prince.
Rokumung closed his eyes and then he started to tremble. When they opened again they were filled with bulging red veins which pulsed with anger and the giant’s fists began to clench. The arms of the throne on which he sat started to shake, then giant cracks appeared. The Red Demkin who had stayed kneeling got up and started to retreat, Prince Karmalaine went with them.
“You should have told me”, hissed Ashal, grabbing him by the arm.
“It was not your place to know before his father”, said the Prince wrenching his arm away.
As they moved away the trembling increased as Rokumung shook in his throne. Then suddenly there came an enormous crack signalling the release of force. The God-giant stood and the throne which they said he'd never leave broke and crumbled into a pile of rubble behind him. Much of it still clung to him where it had fused with his skin but he did not seem to notice. As he stood a low roar started in his throat which grew louder and louder as he lifted his head and bellowed his rage to the top of Mount Torabane.
From the cave openings which decked the inner wall of the mountain Prince Karmalaine saw hundreds, no thousands, more giants appearing to join the shout. They started to stamp and thump their hands against their chests and then they started to make their way down the spiral steps to the central chamber. Prince Karmalaine watched dumbfounded as the giants gathered. All the while the God-giant’s roar continued, it shook the ground, it shook the mountain and it would shake the world. The giants were going to war.
Beyond the Dream Page 49