by Ian Irvine
“Syrten,” said Grandys, extending Maloch out with the blade horizontal.
Syrten took hold of the keen blade and was pulled onto the land. He was as massive as a golem and looked like one. His skin had the texture of sandstone and his thighs were so monstrous that they made a grating sound as he moved, like one millstone grinding on another. His mouth hung open, his arms dangled limply, and his skin was not armoured with smooth opal, as Grandys’ was. Syrten’s skin was encrusted in clots, lumps and nodules of the precious mineral.
“G.r.a.n.d.y.s,” Syrten replied, articulating each letter. His rumbling voice reverberated across the Abysm.
“Lirriam,” said Grandys.
No greater contrast could be imagined. Lirriam was neither tall like Grandys nor massive like Syrten. She was average height for a woman, but so lushly built that she appeared to be bursting out of her gown, and the only part of her still black opal was her glorious, shimmering hair.
Lirriam did not take hold of the blade. She sprang up on it, the wind plastering her gown to her body and her opaline hair streaming out like a fan.
“What took you so long, Grandys?” Catching sight of Rix, she leapt down, her heavy bosom quivering, and favoured him with a long, tingling look.
Grandys growled in his throat.
Lirriam laughed. “Still as easily provoked as ever. Have two thousand years of crystal reflection taught you nothing?”
Grandys turned back to the Abysm, his jaw clenched. “Rufuss!”
Rufuss was enormously tall and thin – as tall as Arkyz Leatherhead had been, Rix thought, before he’d been deprived of his head – but spare to the point of stringiness. Rufuss’s mouth had a sour downturn, as though nothing gave him pleasure save denial. His eyes were opal, and his teeth and fingers, but otherwise he looked like a normal man. At least, any normal man who was utterly insane.
Rufuss waved the sword aside. He stalked across the air above the Abysm, his elongated limbs moving jerkily, and took his place on the other side of Grandys.
“Welcome, Rufuss,” said Grandys. “This is a good day.”
“Is it?” said Rufuss, biting each word off. “It’ll be the first, then.”
“Yulia,” said Grandys.
She was the most normal of them: tallish, slim, a long austere face, eyes that looked as though they had seen too much and wanted to see no more. Her golden skin was real skin; only her fingernails and toenails were opal. She touched Grandys’ blade with a fingertip and a path formed beneath her feet. She walked it to the edge and stood beside Lirriam.
“What is it, Yulia?” said Grandys. “You should be rejoicing in our freedom, yet you seem troubled.”
“Two thousand years I’ve been raking over our deeds,” said Yulia. “We did wrong, Grandys. Grave wrong.”
A spasm of annoyance crossed his face, but when he spoke it was clear he was deliberately misinterpreting her words. “Yes; we fell into the wrythen’s trap. But now we can put it right, Yulia. The Promised Realm!”
“You cannot know how I yearn for it, Axil,” she whispered. “Though I fear the price will be too high.”
“The price will be high for our enemies,” said Grandys. “Mount up and ride – we have an army to form.”
CHAPTER 71
Rix looked sideways at the man who was now his master, and shuddered.
No one would have called Axil Grandys handsome. He was a huge, fleshy man with a red, bloated face, lips as swollen as a burst blood plum, and fists the size of grapefruits. He was boastful, swaggering, supremely confident in everything he said and did. And, Rix had read in one of the books Swelt had given him, that Grandys’ appetites were prodigious. All of them.
A mile up the road from Glimmering he dragged Rix’s horse, and Rix, sixty yards to a rock platform that looked out over the lake. To the south-west, twenty-odd miles distant, the trio of volcanoes called the Vomits fumed and flowed. South-east only a handful of miles away, a scatter of lights were all that remained of the city of Caulderon, which Lyf’s armies and his Hightspaller slaves continued to tear down.
In every other direction, there were no lights.
Grandys took Rix by the throat, heaved him off his horse and forced him to his knees on the brink of the platform. It was several hundred feet down to the water.
“Swear to me, and me alone!” bellowed Grandys, putting Maloch to Rix’s throat. “Swear or die.”
The sword was quivering, Rix’s no longer. Grandys was its master and, no matter what loyalty it had offered to Rix before, no matter what protection it had cast over him, it would quench its blood thirst on him without a second’s thought.
He was so sickened at being forced to follow this brute that part of him wanted to take Grandys’ second alternative. A part of Rix had craved death ever since the chancellor had forced him to choose between loyalty to his country and betraying his parents. Death meant an end to pain, an end to torment.
Another part longed to be relieved of the burden of responsibility he felt so unsuited to, and simply follow a great leader. Grandys’ command spell found the conflict between the two and twisted the knife. Rix, in his turn, twisted to avoid it. What if he hurled himself at Grandys and dragged him over the edge?
The fall would certainly kill Rix, but would it kill a man who had been stone and was now a stone-armoured man? Rix wasn’t sure it would.
“Swear a binding oath to serve me, unto death,” said Grandys.
Reluctantly, but under his sorcerous thrall, Rix swore.
“What do you know about Lyf’s king-magery?” said Grandys that afternoon. They were still riding north up Nusidand Peninsula, which extended into Lake Fumerous for seven miles.
“I know little about any kind of magery,” said Rix thoughtlessly, “and want to know less.”
Grandys’ backhander lifted Rix out of the saddle and the impact with the ground drove the breath out of him.
“I’ve got to have it,” said Grandys. “Tell me all you know.”
Rix spat out blood. He’d bitten his tongue. “You rotten mongrel. I’m going to kill you for that!”
“You want to,” grinned Grandys. “But you never will. I control you, body and soul. Now speak!”
“The dying king has to go through the death rituals so the king-magery can be released and pass to his successor. But no Cythian knew what had happened to Lyf, or how he died, so he couldn’t be given the rituals, and the king-magery wasn’t passed on.”
“I know all that,” snapped Grandys. “What happened to it?”
“No one knows. It left Lyf when he died —”
“That’s why we walled him up to starve to death,” Grandys grated. “To get the king-magery when death released it. We had everything ready to catch it, but it vanished. Tell me about the ebony pearls. Where did they come from?”
“I don’t know,” said Rix.
Grandys stalked away, tore up an orange flower that had been foolish enough to emerge in winter, and shredded it in his hairy, sweating fists.
“I’ve got two ebony pearls,” he said, “and Lyf has two. Plus another, weaker kind of magery, some bastard leftover from the lost king-magery, I assume. But I’ve got Maloch. We’d be evenly matched, save that he commands vast armies, and all I have is you.” He raised a fist to the sky. “But I will have my army, and his black pearls too. Then I’ll hunt down king-magery and have it all.”
“Why do you want it… Lord Grandys?” said Rix, feigning politeness. He wanted to spit in Grandys’ face.
“It’s a higher order of magery, and the key to the land. With king-magery I can create the Promised Realm we came all this way to find. But first I must have allies.”
He dug the spurs into his mount’s bloody flanks and spurred off. Rix followed, hating his master more each time Grandys opened his mouth. What did he mean by create the Promised Realm? Tobry had told Rix dark tales about Grandys’ conquest of ancient Cythe, and could not bear to think about what he intended now.
They galloped
until Grandys’ horse fell dead under him. He dragged Rix off his mount, swung into the saddle and ordered him to run behind like a dog. Rix did so, for the command spell would not allow him to do otherwise, but every step of the way he imagined how good it would be to knock the brute off his horse, batter him senseless and choke him to death.
Hours later, at a town in the north, Grandys swaggered into the stables and came out leading six magnificent horses. He did not say how he had obtained them, but there was no outcry or pursuit. They mounted the strongest beasts and galloped into the mountains for hour upon hour, leading the others. Grandys had no map, nor needed one. He knew where he was going, but did not say.
On a windswept peak with a bare, flat top he slowed his headlong pace and began to pick his way between grey rocks. There was little snow; it had all been scoured away by the wind.
“Ah!” he said, spurring up a gentle rise in the moonlight.
An oval chasm yawned before him, a black abyss, but Grandys kept riding full tilt towards it, spurring his horse on even though it was tossing its head, right to the brink. The horse reared up on its back legs, whinnying in terror. Grandys stood up in the saddle, waving Maloch above his head and bellowing with laughter.
The horse dropped to four legs. The wind, which was whistling across the rocks, died away. Rix looked down into the hole, which was pure black even though the rocks it passed through were grey. It was the Abysm, though not the branch of it he had been to near Garramide.
Grandys extended Maloch down into the Abysm. Yellow flickered and shimmered around the blade.
Rix swallowed. He knew what was about to come, and prayed it would fail.
“My friends,” Grandys said, speaking downwards in a penetrating voice, “two thousand years ago, as a persecuted people, we took ship from Thanneron to sail to the far side of the world in search of our Promised Realm. We won a glorious realm for others, but we did not find the special place our Immortal Text had promised us. Now our time has come. Even as I stand on the brink of this Abysm, so too we stand within an arm’s reach of the home we’ve yearned for so long.”
Was that a tear running down Grandys’ coarse, bloated cheek? Rix could not credit it.
“Come forth!” Grandys cried. Fire blasted from Maloch’s tip, down the Abysm.
In the depths, Rix saw reflections in four places. The reflections twinkled and shimmered and grew until they became four stone figures, no, four people now, slowly rising.
Four Herovians, later renamed Four Heroes.
They reached the top, suspended there by Grandys’ magery. They did not look like heroes – not as the history books, the legends and tales of Hightspall had made them out to be.
“Syrten,” said Grandys, extending Maloch out with the blade horizontal.
Syrten took hold of the keen blade and was pulled onto the land. He was as massive as a golem and looked like one. His skin had the texture of sandstone and his thighs were so monstrous that they made a grating sound as he moved, like one millstone grinding on another. His mouth hung open, his arms dangled limply, and his skin was not armoured with smooth opal, as Grandys’ was. Syrten’s skin was encrusted in clots, lumps and nodules of the precious mineral.
“G.r.a.n.d.y.s,” Syrten replied, articulating each letter. His rumbling voice reverberated across the Abysm.
“Lirriam,” said Grandys.
No greater contrast could be imagined. Lirriam was neither tall like Grandys nor massive like Syrten. She was average height for a woman, but so lushly built that she appeared to be bursting out of her gown, and the only part of her still black opal was her glorious, shimmering hair.
Lirriam did not take hold of the blade. She sprang up on it, the wind plastering her gown to her body and her opaline hair streaming out like a fan.
“What took you so long, Grandys?” Catching sight of Rix, she leapt down, her heavy bosom quivering, and favoured him with a long, tingling look.
Grandys growled in his throat.
Lirriam laughed. “Still as easily provoked as ever. Have two thousand years of crystal reflection taught you nothing?”
Grandys turned back to the Abysm, his jaw clenched. “Rufuss!”
Rufuss was enormously tall and thin – as tall as Arkyz Leatherhead had been, Rix thought, before he’d been deprived of his head – but spare to the point of stringiness. Rufuss’s mouth had a sour downturn, as though nothing gave him pleasure save denial. His eyes were opal, and his teeth and fingers, but otherwise he looked like a normal man. At least, any normal man who was utterly insane.
Rufuss waved the sword aside. He stalked across the air above the Abysm, his elongated limbs moving jerkily, and took his place on the other side of Grandys.
“Welcome, Rufuss,” said Grandys. “This is a good day.”
“Is it?” said Rufuss, biting each word off. “It’ll be the first, then.”
“Yulia,” said Grandys.
She was the most normal of them: tallish, slim, a long austere face, eyes that looked as though they had seen too much and wanted to see no more. Her golden skin was real skin; only her fingernails and toenails were opal. She touched Grandys’ blade with a fingertip and a path formed beneath her feet. She walked it to the edge and stood beside Lirriam.
“What is it, Yulia?” said Grandys. “You should be rejoicing in our freedom, yet you seem troubled.”
“Two thousand years I’ve been raking over our deeds,” said Yulia. “We did wrong, Grandys. Grave wrong.”
A spasm of annoyance crossed his face, but when he spoke it was clear he was deliberately misinterpreting her words. “Yes; we fell into the wrythen’s trap. But now we can put it right, Yulia. The Promised Realm!”
“You cannot know how I yearn for it, Axil,” she whispered. “Though I fear the price will be too high.”
“The price will be high for our enemies,” said Grandys. “Mount up and ride – we have an army to form.”
CHAPTER 72
“How could he come back from petrifaction?” said Lyf. “It defies the very laws of nature.”
Grandys’ return from the dead, wielding the accursed sword, had almost unmanned him. And he’d lost two ebony pearls, a crippling blow now that magery was failing and weakening more every day.
Lyf wavered through the air, flying low across Lake Fumerous and trailing blood into the water, then across the city to his temple. He had to drag himself inside, for he had left his crutches behind at Glimmering, but he recoiled at the door. The stench in the temple was unbearable.
He dragged himself up through the heavy air to the top of the leaning tower that had formerly belonged to Rixium Ricinus, and clung to the wall, looking out over Caulderon and all he had won. Had all been in vain? Would it be lost just as quickly?
Grandys had crippled him before with that foul sword, and now he was doing it again. Lyf lay on the cold stone, closed his eyes and set to work to heal the wounds in his chest and shoulder.
They would not heal.
The kings of old Cythe had been masters of healing. It had been one of their three primary duties, and Lyf had been one of the most gifted. Even as a bodiless wrythen he had retained an ability to heal, and since he’d had a body back, imperfect though it was, he had healed hundreds of his wounded and ailing subjects.
Now he could not heal himself at all; not the tiniest bruise or graze. Was it because the injuries had been done with Maloch? He did not think so; he had healed other injuries made with that blade. All injuries save for his amputated feet; but they were a special case.
Lyf took to the air again. It was harder than before. With only two pearls, the powerful magery required to move his body through the air was almost beyond him. In his healery he passed down the lines of injured soldiers, laying his hands on one man, then another.
Nothing.
He could not heal anyone. His healing magery, as essential to him as breathing, was gone. Had Maloch done this to him, or was it Grandys’ foul magery? The brute had lusted after king-mage
ry from the moment he stepped ashore from the First Fleet. King-magery was why he had killed Lyf in the first place.
Again Lyf asked himself how Grandys could have come back to life. Then he had an even more chilling thought. What if he brought back the other four Herovians?
He had to act quickly. Lyf returned to his reeking temple, for it contained an ancient portal passage that could carry him instantly to his caverns under Precipitous Crag. Without telling anyone where he was going, he retreated to the flaskoid-shaped cavern, desperate for the security of his aeons-old wrythen home.
And answers.
Once there, he drifted up to the crack – a very different kind of portal – that allowed admittance to the Abysm. He was planning to hurl the other four Heroes down to the bottom and shatter them to a million bits. No one could come back from that.
But he could not gain entrance. The Abysm had been sealed against him. He was locked out of the most sacred place in the land, the place only he had the right to enter in life. This was monstrous.
Was it his punishment for perverting the healing magery; for corrupting what had been so pure and beautiful? Or for hurling his opalised enemies into so holy a place? He had to think so; had to blame himself.
Lyf sank to the floor. Had he been set up from the beginning? Had his enemies allowed him to turn them to opal so they could come back and undo all his achievements? Was it all a gigantic conspiracy, another planned betrayal by the despicable Herovians?
Despair overwhelmed him. After all he had done, to be brought down by an enemy he had thought he’d crushed. He had failed his people, given them a hope that could never be fulfilled.
But worse, far worse was the loss of his healing gift, the very foundation of king-magery. Even if he succeeded in his plan to restore the line of Cythian kings, without king-magery he would not be able to heal the troubled land. His disaster-prone land could not thrive, nor his people survive. They would become degradoes again, sliding towards annihilation.