EXILED Defenders of Ar

by Jack Lovejoy

  “Two questions, one answer,” said Shimsham, who was beginning to recover both his health and his impudence. “Meanest tangletides I ever seen, around the big island. There was a nice quiet cove, but with the water rushing this way and that, I never thought we’d get snug inside. How we did it, I don’t know exactly. You see, they kept me working below decks most of the time. It was a well-run ship.”

  “Must have been, if they kept you below decks. Now what’s the one answer to my two questions?”

  “When the moons focus, then so do the tides. Round and round the island they go, like they was trying to swallow it in a giant whirlpool. No more tangletides then, just this one big swirl. Only lasts a few hours, though. Just like whatever you’re after on the island. Glad I wasn’t ashore that night, cause most of those who were never came back to tell the tale. Turns out I was lucky, too, in being marooned. Maybe you heard about what happened to those who made it back to Namakhazar?”

  “We won’t talk about that now.” Severakh gave him a meaningful look. “And we won’t talk about that later. Understand? All right, then. It’s time you started pulling your own weight. I’ m assigning you to the night watch on the steering crew. Tomorrow night or the next the moons will focus. So tell the lieutenant about the tides and anything else you remember about navigating the waters around Shadow Island. Now move!”

  Severakh’s next interview was with Branwe. He knew there was nothing more he could do to help the young mrem. He had taught him all the sword technique he could; he had never drilled anyone with more inborn talent, so willing to learn, so determined to be a warrior. But how could any swordsmrem truly be prepared to fight shadows?

  Severakh himself was now more and more oppressed by a sense of futility. He was an old soldier, and did his duty, although he felt that he too had been sent off to fight shadows. A lifetime of martial experience frittered away, not as a commanding general of armies, but as the led captain of magicians, whom he had always distrusted in any case. There was something distastefully reptilian about magic....

  “So far, so good, lad.” He clapped Branwe encouragingly on the shoulder. “We know that these legendary islands really exist. We must assume that the rest of the legend is also true: You’re not less a warrior than your father was. You know how much depends on your success, and you know how much Srana depends on you. Do your duty, lad. I can’t say more than that.”

  “Will it be tomorrow night, sir?” asked Branwe.

  “Yes, or the night after, at the very latest.” Severakh examined him, and he knew he was no longer looking at a kit. He could hardly imagine the terrors that concentrated upon Shadow Island at the focus of the moons, but his martial instincts assured him that, if they could be overcome at all, this resolute young warrior standing before him could do it.

  Every couple of hours throughout the night, Severakh summoned Shimsham down from the afterdeck to quiz him further about their destination, and to assure himself that the three moons in the sky had not yet triangulated. Sometimes they seemed to form a perfect equilateral triangle; sometimes it was obvious that one of the legs was out of alignment. Shimsham found all these questions trivial, even annoying. The third time he was summoned he actually cheeked Severakh—but he never did it again.

  “Land ho!” cried the lookout, about an hour after dawn. Once again Shimsham, who was now thinking fondly about a nice hot breakfast and crawling into his nice soft bunk, found himself summoned down from the afterdeck. His ears still rang from the last interview, and he was very careful not to make any more impertinent remarks.

  “That’s it, sir,” he swore. “Not a doubt about it. Shadow Island, if I ever laid eyes on it. I remember like it was yesterday, coming up from below decks—”

  “Get below decks again,” Severakh growled at him, and he was gone. “You’d better get some rest too, lad,” he said more gently to Branwe. “I don’t know if the moons will focus tonight, but we have to be ready if they do.”

  By nightfall the Zanira was coasting the shores of a dark, barren island, whose towering cliffs had been undercut by violent wave action, whose offshore pillars of rock pointed like giant fingers toward the direction from which the waves attacked them. They were not under attack now; the rolling swell washed barely halfway up the small pebbly beaches at the foot of the cliffs.

  Everything began to change after sunset. The first moon rose, and with it the tides, tides that became more complex with the rising of the second moon. Then the third and largest moon appeared in the night sky, and the tangletides so rushed and leaped and plummeted along the coast that Severakh ordered his helmsmrem to draw farther out to sea.

  “There it is!” Shimsham cried the moment he popped out of the hatch. “The cove. You’re going to pass it. Then you’ll have to sail clear around the island—if tonight’s the night.” He studied the alignment of the moons. “We’ll know in a couple of hours.”

  Meanwhile Severakh reversed course, tacking back in the direction pointed to by the offshore stacks, never far from the sheltered cove, which seemed in the silvery moonlight to have been bitten from the cliffs around it by giant teeth. The scalene triangle of moons gradually became obtuse, then more and more symmetrical, until the naked eye could judge no variation in the length of its legs.

  “The tide’s turning!” cried the lookout from aloft. “Then so are we!” Severakh ordered his helmsmrem.

  The great steering oar was shifted, the sails reset, and once more the Zanira reversed course. By the time it came around again the waters offshore were swirling like a millrace, round and round the island.

  “Fetch your sword, lad,” cried Severakh. “Things are moving fast.” He wanted to say more, but knew that words no longer mattered; his or anybody else’s. Sword technique, courage, and—luck. One lone kit pitted against an evil dimension for supremacy over an entire planet. What words would now avail him?

  Sending mrem aloft to tie down the last unreefed sails, dispatching five of his brawniest soldiers to throw their weight against the steering oar, he brought the Zanira through the swirling current and into the sheltered cove.

  Beetling cliffs overhung its northern shore; down the southern slopes, like ribbons of silver, wound a trellis of streams. The threefold moonlight was eerie and unreal, like the twilight of a dying world.

  “Looks like the moons have nearly focused, lad,” said Severakh, clambering into the longboat as briskly as any of his mrem, despite his age. “Nothing but rock, as far as I can see. Not even ruins. If there’s a temple here, like the old wizard said, I can’t see it.”

  Branwe stood beside him in the bow, the Demon Sword clutched firmly in his right hand. The spectral shapes he saw looming in the distance may have been an effect of the eerie moonlight. Whatever they were, he did not mention them. No one else could see them, and he knew he had to face them alone.

  “Well be waiting for you, lad,” said Severakh, as two of his mrem beached the longboat. “No matter what. I know that my words are unimportant. I can only repeat what a certain lovely young she-mrem would have told you now: ‘The All-Mother guide and protect you, Branwe. I’m depending on you.’”

  If Branwe’s hand tightened on his sword, if his jaw muscles set firmer with determination, no one noticed. Springing agilely over the bow without looking back, he picked his way up the trellis of glistening streams to the top of the slope.

  Wiry shrubs and a scattering of low trees, windswept and nearly bereft of foliage; it was a weird symmetry, as if the barren landscape was arrayed artificially—or had been thousands of years ago. The spectral shapes, which he alone saw, loomed some two or three miles inland; they seemed more real now, and he headed directly toward them.

  Everything in fact seemed more real now—except reality itself. Branwe glanced back toward the cove. The slopes screened him from the waiting longboat, but the Zanira now seemed to him like a ghost ship, hazy and insubstantial. He followe
d a narrow road inland—or a leveling that had once been a road—and he suddenly had the feeling that he had seen this all before, that he had once walked this very road, in this same eldritch moonlight. The shapes looming in the distance were no longer spectral.

  If it was a temple, it was that of no god or goddess he knew. Its architecture was crude and repulsive; its single opening like a giant liskash eye, aglow with ruby light. He could not determine yet whether it had a roof or lay open to the skies. As he approached, he became aware of other shapes looming out of the weird twilight, living shapes, and he sensed that they were also aware of him. Some appeared to bear weapons, and began to range themselves between him and the temple entrance.

  Branwe did not hesitate. The threefold moons now trained on him like the light through a magnifying glass. All of time—past, present, and future—seemed to focus on this very moment. He could now distinguish the three figures that barred his way. They wore dark robes emblazoned with occult figures and designs; the swords they brandished appeared now more ornamental than military, and they did not know how to wield them with effect. Their greenish-white faces were gauntly reptilian: hideous and evil.

  Thrust, parry, thrust, parry, slash, parry, parry, and thrust again. A minute, no more than two, and it was all over. Wiping his sword on the robe of one of the loathsome carcasses sprawled in the road, the young warrior continued resolutely forward. The ruby glow before him seemed to watch his every movement.

  Glancing back, he was surprised to find that nothing now lay in the road behind him. However, more and more reptilian figures, robed and unrobed, armed and unarmed, but all of demonic hideousness, seemed to be drawn from nothingness by the power of the focused moonlight.

  Branwe entered the crude, repulsive temple, and again had the feeling he had been here before. There was indeed no roof, and yet the moonlight did not penetrate to the slime-encrusted floor, as if the ruby glow somehow repelled its beams with a light pressure of its own.

  Pillars of dark stone, crudely engraved with the same occult figures and designs as adorned the robes of the guardians he had slain outside—Had he in fact slain them? Did they die in any true sense of the word?—rose before him in ponderous files, as if supporting a roof that did not exist, in this dimension at least. Warily, sword in hand, he strode between them toward the source of the ruby light.

  A foreboding of evil weighed down upon him, impalpable and unseen and yet with as powerful a force as that which repelled the threefold moonlight. His steps began to lag; he seemed now to be pushing against some current of repulsion, as if wading through an invisible sea. Heavier and heavier weighed the burden of evil, the sense of foreboding.

  Parry, slip, parry, and thrust. The hideous robed figure had leapt out at him from behind a pillar without warning. Warily, sword poised for another attack, Branwe stepped over the sprawled body. The moons overhead were now barely visible, as if he looked up at them from the bottom of the sea, as if the conjunction of the evil dimension with his world was becoming ever more substantial, more real, as if more and more of the hideous robed guardians were now gaining the power to materialize around him.

  He had the uncanny feeling of something creeping up on him from behind, and glanced over his shoulder. But there was nothing. Not even a body sprawled on the floor.

  The next attack was more determined, the odds more formidable. The sword technique he had mastered under the exacting eye of Severakh now served him well—up to a point. No drill had ever pitted him against three antagonists at once, much less the six he now faced. Quickness and agility were here more valuable than technique. Dodge, parry, leap, thrust; then duck and spin out of the way. They tried clumsily to surround him, to corner him against a pillar; but instead he used that very pillar to his own advantage, circling behind it and reemerging on the other side, decapitating two enemies before they were aware he had reappeared.

  Without the Demon Sword, his attackers might not have been visible to him; no ordinary weapon could have killed them. Or did its power just drive them back into the evil dimension whence they sprang? A last thrust at the last of the robed figures, and Branwe broke free and waded onward against the repulsion of the ruby light.

  It was too late now for caution. More robed figures, along with still more sinister creatures, naked in all their demonic hideousness, were now pouring through the entrance into the temple. He had seen them incorporating out of nothingness in the moonlight outside. He now saw them in all their liskash evil, surging after him; their angry cries were like the hissing of vipers. They realized now why he had come.

  Every step closer to the ruby light called for more effort, more resolve, ,as if he were now wading through invisible quick sands, as if the light itself knew why he had come, and was exerting all its evil brilliance to drive him back. He did not have the strength to run; mere walking exhausted him; the angry reptilian horde, surging through the temple entrance, seemed actually to be gaining on him. Step by wearying step, the young warrior drove himself forward.

  Nothing could discourage him now; no power in this dimension or any other could daunt him, no force drive him back. Too much was at stake: the great city of Ar, the very survival of his race, Srana. Clutching the Demon Sword, his, jaws clenched determinedly with the strain, Branwe continued to slog his way against the invisible pressure into the innermost recesses of the temple.

  So intense became the ruby light as he approached it that he was nearly blinded. Its source was now directly ahead, and he squinted his eyes against the painful brilliance. Then all at once he seemed to remember things about the Khavala that no one had ever told him, things unknown about his father’s incursion here. He had the uncanny feeling that this was not the first time he had penetrated the crude temple, or fought its hideous guardians.

  Ever more brilliant became the light, ever more painful to his eyes. Whether he actually saw the stone altar first, or through some uncanny remembrance just knew it would be there, he was suddenly cognizant of what lay directly ahead. For the first time Branwe truly appreciated the epic magnitude of his quest, and the awe of what he had undertaken, more than any sense of dread, momentarily disoriented him.

  Recovering, he slogged his way the last few feet to the stone altar. Everything was just as he remembered it would be. The Khavala protruded from the altar like the naval of an entire world: a world alien to the one he knew. Its ruby phosphorescence glowed like a sentient light, as if the very elements from which it had crystallized were alien to his known world. It was the size of a clenched fist; one corner was scarred by an old wound.

  This reminded Branwe of the most disturbing thing he had been told about the first incursion here: how his father was so pressed by the demon guardians that, in the midst of fighting for his life, he had time enough only to hack a few fragments off a corner of the mystic stone—and that his sword had shattered.

  Still awed by what he was doing, Branwe tried to use his own sword to pry the stone loose.

  Escape from the evil horde now rushing toward him would be a challenge even to one wielding the Demon Sword; without it he would never leave this evil dimension alive. How his father, the legendary Shadow Warrior, had escaped this very temple with a shattered sword, Branwe did not know. Perhaps its stub retained enough magic? More likely there were not so many reptile-demons on guard here then, and the Shadow Warrior’s incursion had taken those few by surprise.

  The liskash were prepared now for any second incursion, scores of them, perhaps hundreds. How many more were still incorporating in the eerie moonlight outside, Branwe could not know. All his mind and soul were concentrated on prying loose the Khavala. But it was no use. The horde of reptile demons were almost upon him. He might battle his way through them, even escape back to the ship. Then what? Return home in disgrace, confess his failure to Srana, and together wait for the Eastern Lords—or the Evil One himself—to come and get them? Better to die right here, if he must.
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  Gripping the Demon Sword in both hands, he measured his strength, and hacked down at the mystic stone with all his might. If he could not abscond with it himself, he might at least damage it, lessen its power for wreaking evil; perhaps destroy it utterly. The shock jolted his entire body. His hands were numb, his arms and shoulders tingled, but the Demon Sword was still intact, its magic—concentrated by fragments of the Khavala itself—greater than that imbued into his father’s sword by the Evil One.

  Ruby phosphorescence glistened all around him. He had cleft the mystic stone in twain, but was still unable to pry the larger half from its setting, and now had more urgent use for his sword. Pocketing the loosened half, he dodged around the crude altar, leapt past the onrushing horde, and doubled back through the flanking rows of pillars. A guttural shriek rent the air as the hideous robed guardians discovered the sacrilege to their precious Khavala. No moonlight at all now penetrated from above, and their cries of fury resounded through the crimson gloom.

  But not all the fury of an evil dimension could compensate for their reptilian slowness, and Branwe—dodging where he could, fighting when he had to—doubled back again through the occult pillars toward the entrance, ahead of the returning horde. The ruby light was dimmer now, so dim that when he at last fought his way back out into the open, he was momentarily blinded by the threefold moonlight.

  Reptile-demons seemed to be everywhere, but whatever evil magic they assailed him with, it was neutralized by the Demon Sword.

  They at last realized this themselves, and began to run, slither, lope, scuttle—no two were alike in their liskash hideousness, nor in their means of locomotion—toward him. Nothing could better have served his purposes, and he lingered near the temple entrance until just before the raging horde inside burst through it in pursuit. The only hope of those outside was to cut him off from the waiting longboat, but for the moment at least he had them all moving in the wrong direction.