The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3)

by Richard Monaco

  “No,” she said, “it will catch us first.”

  “What will?”

  She laughed, too high and light.

  “Oh, it will, it will,” she told him, staring. “It will.”

  “What’s that, mama?” Torky asked.

  They were nearly to the rim of the ravine now. She could see Pleeka ahead against the stars. She heard it too: a deep roaring above them, stormsound.

  “Wind, it would seem,” she told him. She could hear Pleeka still raging flatly, independent of listeners, as he clambered on.

  “… so … so … so,” he was saying, “all was betrayed and stained and let the great mouth swallow all except these I’ve pulled from the jaws … the jaws … I save food from the jaws … all will be eaten save these and let them be stones against the teeth! … so … so … so …”

  She was easing Tikla higher on the fairly easy incline they’d reached. Pleeka was just mounting over the top and the wind struck at the same moment, like a black wall blotting out the stars, and he seemed to hang, float free and dissolve as driven ashdust blotted him away and he passed over them, his sounds swallowed by the terrific, pounding howl that shook the cliff stones, and then soot was pouring down and she was desperately sliding and scraping with the children towards the far bottom, the dry choking stuff, that seemed the dryness of the dark precipitate, spilling down like rain in hell …

  Lohengrin realized one of them had kept pace with him as he ran ahead down the twisting channel that was now about an armspan wide. He had a fleeting fantasy it would end in a blank wall.

  He heard the other coming closer. Suddenly stopped and turned, skidding a little on the smooth pebbles, silently drawing and holding the blade straight out before him.

  The following foot impacts stopped.

  “Who are you, sirrah?” the knight demanded, then realized: “Ah. The big fellow.” Smiled invisibly. “You helped me. My memory’s back now.”

  “Does that content you, sir?” Broaditch wondered.

  “You’re a shrewd Jack,” Lohengrin decided. “How are you called?”

  “Broaditch of Nigh.”

  “You were nigh onto my back … Well, walk on with me. I mean you no hurt. All that’s run water …” They headed on, fast, though the big freeman kept a few cautious steps back. “Anyway, I think you did me a great service.”

  “Did I?”

  “You snapped the halter fate had round my neck. You broke my memory, I mean, fellow.” Sheathed his blade and kept one hand stretched out before him now. “Where there’s a top there’s a bottom,” he commented. “Beginning has an end.”

  “Must it, Lord Lohengrin?”

  “What did you throw at me?”

  “On the hilltop?”

  “Where else? I told you, my past is back with me. But what was it, nay, come out straight, I say.”

  “I cannot tell for certain.”

  “What?” Their pace had slowed as the walls closed in. They kept bumping and scraping around zigzag turns. “Your hurled that mystery well enough to break my head. I love you not for that part.”

  “Your sword was not idle, sir.”

  Well behind there was a sudden silence: the wagon obviously could go no further. The outhouse on wheels, was the gist of Broaditch’s thought. There were faint shouts.

  “They’re all mad to the pate,” Lohengrin declared.

  “I knew your father as a boy,” Broaditch told him.

  “Ah. Him …”

  “And his mother too, for all of that.”

  “If this narrows more …” They went sidewise now. “It’s good we’ve eaten little lately … You knew grandmother, did you? They claim she was queer of brain too. It follows the family. I don’t follow the family.” Glanced up and saw no stars at all now, a void … “I was the bad one. Blasphemous and so on. Well …”

  “You were none to meet in a lonely place, I think.”

  “What? Oh, I remember. I sought your life for a time.”

  “I pray it’s a habit you broke.”

  “Strangely enough, it ceased to matter after I became duke of now nonexistent lands.” Chuckled dryly. “Or lord general of an annihilated host.” Shrugged. “The past turned to ashes. What matter you saw me slay some long lost phantom?”

  “Unless it trouble your conscience.”

  “I dare not feed one at this late date. The bill would break me.” He groped along. “But why did you follow me?”

  “I didn’t.” Which was true, because he assumed Alienor and the family had enough start to be well ahead.

  And it’s not likely a dead end else I’d have met them coming back …

  “Hark,” commanded Lohengrin. There was a steady roaring.

  “If that be water,” Broaditch muttered as they worked their way, bumping and scraping, through the jagged zigzags, “we’ll shortly have more than we can drink.”

  “I think it be wind, Jack.”

  The sound was building, coming on as if flowing down the ravine behind, embellished now by screeching gusts.

  “Right enough,” Broaditch agreed, clawing around a bend. “What next?”

  “Trust the Devil,” said the panting knight, “he’ll provide.”

  Vordit was alone near the deserted wagon, sitting in the dark. The Truemen were gone and now he heard the Vikings coming behind but didn’t look up. “You’re free,” the big peasant had told him after the knight had cut them loose.

  “Free,” he now muttered. Listened to the storm building up behind the oncoming shouts of conversation. He rested his back on the rough wall and waited. “Free …” His mouth was too dry to spit or he would have. “I’ll just step home now and plant me crop … Freedom’s sweet …” Would have spat. Didn’t look up from his sullen contempt when the horned warriors charged past, torches whipping out in the sudden, black, strangling gusts of ashdust. Didn’t move as it flooded over him …

  Cursing, Clinschor popped out the door in a rush of fecal stench and was jumping up and down in the twisting torchlight, left hand clenched tightly around the metal fragment of what he was certain was the Holy Grail. He felt its force pulsing up his arm into his bony frame.

  The wagon was jammed tight between the walls. Hopelessly. As the thundering voice raged at the beasts and driver and finally at nature herself, John watched, in awe, the terrible, flashing, glow-eyed fury of the holy being that possessed him.

  “Use your powers,” he cried out in sudden ecstasy, “mighty one!”

  The mighty one paused in his raging and lifted one contorted hand as if to reach and rip the dark walls apart, then closed his fist.

  “Not yet,” he said. The torch flames phut-phutted in the first fingers of wind. “We are close … close …” And with surprising, spidery agility he clambered over the vehicle and down the far side. As the others followed, he raced and vanished into the lightlessness beyond. “Soon we are home … soon …” He saw the hall of the earthgods where power rose from the deepest foundations of the world, a vital darkness like flame that needed but the touch of the Grail … the touch … the wordless voice was explaining, showing him without images, teaching without precept, the voice within the bones of his head, intimate, infinite, hollow with chill force, made clear that he and the power would be one at last, the earth itself would be his body, subterranean fire his blood and stone his bones …

  Aiiii, he thought in trembling delight, yesyesyes … actually running now as the voice urged him on and he tripped and bounded off the narrowing sides, spinning and half-spinning, laughing … just one touch of the Grail and the hollow force … just one touch …

  And then the storm hit, blasting and sucking air, washing floods of ash (because there was no rain) down the streambed, the first invisible puff already among the rearmost, choking, eye-stinging …

  Alienor and the children, who were well behind even the Vikings, had crawled halfway down the slope and found a deep crevice in the rockface. They’d crept within, safe, as terrific gales puffed, billow
ed and snapped.

  They held one another in silence. She didn’t even pray. And the children didn’t cry. Just held each other …

  XLI

  Parsival and Unlea were right on the rim when the first blasts came ripping and crashing through the powdery forest They could hear the brittle trees snapping. The first spray of dawnlight was in their faces as they fled along, panting, not speaking, as if they ran to greet the sun.

  He sensed the fierce children still behind and parallel to them but the windstorm was already muffling any lesser sound from that direction and an instant later had blotted out sight as well in swirling, tortured clouds. Dead black tendrils coiled and uncoiled reaching ahead of them. He thought of a vast spidery thing clutching at the world. The air stung and puffed around them.

  The outline of a fortress jutted against the molten horizon at the edge of the ravine. He’d spotted it in the first light and planned to make a stand there one way or another.

  Half-supporting her he fled on hoping the poison in the water would wear off because he could still feel it, lambent, within him, his perceptions a shadowfall away from the other worlds … visions … whatever they were …

  “Were nearly there,” he reassured her, panting. “Hold the pace.”

  The black swirls hooked and clashed closer.

  “O Mary …” Cough. “O … Mary …” Cough.

  She stumbled to her knees on the broken bricks where the first wall lay shattered. As he lifted her he saw them taking shape out of the coil of jet dust, totally blackened figures, young people mixed with nightmarish shapes: a thing like an egg with a face racing upside down and backwards on stump legs beside the fearful monkeylike thing; birds with lush breasts above the walking fish with eyes like pits to utter, unreflecting nothingness … and now in the roaring masses of cyclonic soot he saw deeply into their world, a strange greenly glimmering landscape … and he saw, as he reached the outskirts of the castle grounds, lungs fire, limbs dead, a skeletal army of them massing and pouring forward towards where the glowing border seemed to shimmer within the stormdark, and he had a vague idea that the wind might drive them all through into this world.

  Illusion, he thought. But what did that mean? A feeble shield, for at these outskirts of reality visions had the weight of stone. And the storm seemed to be gathering and literally blowing from that green-dark world where strange fires flashed like lightning flares (he and Unlea reached the fallen inner wall and were scrambling up the loose blocks and firecrumbled rubble), revealing tall shapes, shadowy outlines that seemed to preside over those mounting forces.

  He set her down and turned on top of the pile. The brightening sun showed three of them charging up the loose slope, long knives drawn, long hair flying, eyes and teeth alone white as they rose from the bottom of the gusting blackness that was mounting, twisting, opening the other world everywhere now, the livid masses of horrors swelling forward as if borne by the contorted gale …

  Three teenagers came on, skidding, falling, clawing upward. Others appeared, staggering through the stifling gusts, and the empty-eyed fish and prancing monkeything were at their heels and seemed rock solid.

  “Unlea!” he shouted, “make for the castle! I’ll follow! Go! Go!” And saw her stagger down the far side of the shattered wall, and then the great, stinging cloud heaved vastly and blotted out the sun and they all reached Parsival at once and he drew his blade and something seemed to say in his thoughts:

  Hold back the darkness, Sir Parsival of the Grail.

  And the whole, incredible, mysterious landscape fell over him and he stood among the greenish glinting rocks and spectral hordes in raging stormfury, knives flashing and zipping at him from blurry shapes. He strained, blinded by the driving dust, swayed, ducked and twisted, reflexed as if the sword itself could see … struck … struck … felt a slash across his back mail … struck saw the fish raise its foreclaws, the monkey snatch at his face, terrible steel birds rip through the blasted air …

  “You’re all real!” he howled at them as the wind lifted (or was it the creatures) and drove him backwards. “Yet false!” as though it were a war cry or deadly incantation …

  Broaditch and Lohengrin were just ahead of the storm when the knight, as he’d feared and expected, crashed and rebounded with a muted groan from the inevitable dead end.

  “Christ!” muttered Lohengrin. “If your head hurts, why that’s the very part you hit.”

  Broaditch was already groping over the rocks, thinking:

  The water got through when there was water …

  “Always,” Lohengrin was sighing.

  “Here,” Broaditch said, on his knees. The soot was spilling over the high, narrow sides in semi-solid gouts, hissing around them. He’d found a low opening that seemed to dive into the belly of the earth.

  “A rat’s hole,” the knight said over the mounting windsound.

  Broaditch was already squeezing in because, he reasoned, if he hadn’t passed them yet why then they were ahead. These sides couldn’t be scaled so his logic was seamless and, as is often the case, safely enclosed no truth whatsoever.

  “Better to live a rat,” he called back, struggling in on elbows and knees.

  “Than die as anything better,” Lohengrin completed, creeping in behind. They could hear the dust piling up behind, filling the cleft like a snow of blackness.

  Clinschor was a few yards behind, prancing, following the contorted way as if it were bright-lit, long bare feet and bony shins swishing through the already calf-deep sootfall. He was tittering and chatting and coughing as the finer powder caught in his throat. The last time he’d entered his stronghold this way he’d had to wade through the water, but his memory on such points had become increasingly sketchy … normally you came in through the fortress above where Parsival and Unlea were struggling.

  Concentrating on what he was going to do with the power of the Grail, he’d totally forgotten the blind wall until he hit it, cracking his nose, and burst into a frenzy of curses-the wizards were blocking him out again; well, they’d soon see!

  “Still trying, you bastards!” he shouted into the drifting soot, swallowing the noseblood and coughing. Shook the Grail fist at the wall, prepared a spell to burst the rock asunder … then remembered, stooped and skittered under the overhang in a gush of ashes. Heading forward into the total blackness he resumed planning the great games he would institute where all in the empire would have to fight and prove their worthiness to exist … except, naturally, the slaves who would tend the gardens. The gardens were a major project, would cover countless acres with flowers of beaten gold as tall as men, trees of pure silver, hung with little bells shaking in the breezes … no night! He would banish night with a million candles lit from dusk till dawn. Nodded his head fiercely. Always music and light and the most beautiful people. He was walking upright in a space where Broaditch and Lohengrin were still creeping along on their knees, and they heard him going past, talking steadily.

  “We stay behind him,” whispered Lohengrin. Clinschor’s voice was booming in the obviously large space. “Of all men on earth he’s the easiest to follow.”

  “And gives the worst results, eh?”

  “More than true, but now is there choice?”

  “… the breeding will take place out of doors in the heavenly gardens,” the voice was elaborating. “Each male and female I select will bear a brand on the left arse cheek … an excellent idea, and those with corresponding marks will be allowed to mate! Excellent. Offspring will be examined and the fit will live and be sent to battle at the earliest possible age. Excellent. What warriors I’ll produce. Who will stand against the survivors of such training? the breeding will take place in certain beds and I will control the weather with my invocation …” And on and on …

  Broaditch knew that Alienor would keep silent and hoped that she’d hear and follow that voice too. There wasn’t much choice. The dark was solid enough to make the eyes flash as if trying to create their own light in comp
ensation.

  “Do you hear all that?” Lohengrin wondered quietly as they tried to stay directly behind. “That’s the kind of thing I used to have to listen to. Till your blow freed me, Jack.”

  The mule needed no urging. It jerked and plunged along. The ash was sucked into whirlwinds and torrents, dimly visible in the feeble dawnlight high above the ragged cliffs.

  Layla had pulled her scarf over her nose and mouth and was hacking and choking less than the Vikings behind her. She heard Tungrim shouting something, and then it was lost as the dying animal careened around the twisting way, all sound sucked away by the muffling sootfall and raw mutter of the wind …

  Howtlande heaved along in a massive panic, pushing ahead of Tungrim and the others, thinking:

  No … no … not like this …

  Rebounding off the rough walls, falling in the powder, lurching on, hands pressed across his mouth, sucking air that caught in his throat, eyes mad with fear of suffocation.

  No …

  Tungrim cupped his hands under his ample nose and went on steady and stocky, shouting for Layla as the black dust rose knee high and more …

  So by the time he reached the gully cave it was almost chest high and he believed he was doomed. The downpour showed in slight touches of glow that seeped through the great black gusts.

  He was startled when a great blackened head lifted from the drifts and turned a glazed and hopeless eye on him, and then he knew it was Layla’s mule. It was kneeling, up to its chin in the stuff.

  He kicked around to satisfy himself she was not actually under the surface.

  In something closer to panic than he’d ever experienced he sucked in a last dusty breath and ducked under because he knew she hadn’t climbed out. No one could have. And he half swam, half dug to the base of the cliff …