The Girl and the Guardian

by Peter Harris

  The march back along the Avenue of Despair to the Hill of the Skull was long and weary. Hithrax kept stopping to make Korman look at the corpses and the living dead, lecturing him, urging him to give in to despair. As he stumbled from horror to horror, forced to turn his head and look into the faces of the enthorned, Korman began to fear he would go mad before they reached the end. At last the dark archway of Zaghrabnah the Mother Thorn loomed overhead, and they led him inside just as the sun sank in blood-red splendour behind the Hill of the Skull. And further west, the same sun turned to crimson the Harbour of Black Ships, where the Nered factories ground on into the night.

  Shelley had gone up into her tree again before dark to look out over the lake and see the sunset, and she had seen the dark clouds appear over the thorns and the lightning stab down. She felt that something terrible was happening. ‘Korman!’ she cried out, and hardly dared to look. She saw a group of Aghmaath marching up the avenue with a prisoner towards the gaping maw of the Hill of the Skull, but she could not bring herself to use the spyglass to see whether or not the prisoner was Korman.

  She was plunged into doubt and fear as night fell: fear of the black snake creature, doubt whether she would see Korman alive again, fear at the thought of having to cross Lake Deadwater alone, where perhaps the snake hunted; and despair at the thought of the thorn wall on the other side, where people and corpses hung enthorned. Bootnip hid gloomily in Korman’s pack where it lay in the cupola.

  So the third night came, bringing fear more inescapable than the night before. And towards dawn, nerves in tatters, she thought she saw the black snake sliding over the courtyard in the waning moonlight. But by then she was drifting in and out of sleep, and she wondered if it was only a dream.

  The third day dawned. It was midsummer’s day, when in ancient Aeden joyful festivals were held. It was bright and cool, and the chorus of cicadas in the trees welcomed the sun, and so did Shelley, relieved that the darkness had fled. Then she nodded off again, exhausted. But soon the air was shimmering with the heat and, waking up again, she longed to plunge into the well to cool down. But the well now held the menace of the black snake, and she was afraid to put a foot in it, though she cautiously went down to fill her flask with its refreshing water.

  Sleepless, in the dead of night, Korman had been led into the Dark Labyrinth, where once he had learned the wisdom of the Makers, before the enemy had perverted it to the service of the Void, and now he was to be taught the doctrine of utter despair. Driven by thorny spearpoints into its coils, he had at last reached the black centre. They had shut the iron-bound doors on him, leaving him there on the edge of the pit into nothingness. There in the despair-whispering depths, in the depths of a vortex of fear which killed all thoughts of hope, the black Void had opened up to mercifully engulf his tortured life and possess him forever.

  But even as the Void sucked him in, out of its black depths had stepped a lovely figure clad in diaphanous blue and gold. It was the Lady as Korman remembered her from the days long ago, before the thorns. ‘We can never be separated,’ her eyes said. ‘Our love has overcome their hatred, and turned even the Void into our meeting place. Fear not the Void; it is the Womb of Worlds. Fear not the thorns; they purify the spirit. Fear nothing any more, Korman. The story we have written together will be fulfilled, and the thorns engulfing Aeden will turn into roses.’

  And a radiance enveloped them so that for Korman the dark depths of the Labyrinth shone with the joy of Creation, and he rejoiced and laughed aloud.

  ‘But what of Shelley?’ he asked at last. ‘I did not know when we chose this path that it would mean that I, a Guardian, should leave my charge in the Valley of Death.’

  ‘Is she not on my sacred island? By your enthornment she will be empowered, and passing through the valley of the shadow of death, will become the Kortana, the Jewel-Caller, if she does not turn back from the path laid before her.’

  Then the vision faded. Korman, full of joy, knowing himself to be one with the Lady, did what no other living soul had ever dreamed of doing in that place since the Aghmaath had taken it: he wrote a poem to Life on the walls of the central chamber of Death, reaching up and scratching onto the pale rock in large bold letters with charcoal from past sacrificial fires. There was no light in that place, but he saw that his hand faintly lit up the wall as if by the burning glow of his own life-energy. And he wrote:

  ‘Here was once the centre of the Labyrinth of Life. Here I, Korman, will write a poem to Life: