Again Stryke detailed the band to separate targets. With swords, pikes and axes the Wolverines felt much happier about attacking a large force. Even so it was a bloody struggle. The Sluagh came at them with claws and webs of agony. Serapheim and Sanara edged round the walls, trying to get behind the monsters. When they did, their glass tubes began to glow eerily. Bolts of light shot from them. There was a deafening explosion and suddenly it was raining Sluagh blood. Then it was all over.
“Useful weapon,” Coilla remarked admiringly.
Jup had been right. The doors formed a circle set deep into the rock. Once again, there was no obvious handle but ten little dimples were set into the frosty metal. It was Sanara who matched her fingertips to the depressions and pushed.
The doors swung back. Ducking, Serapheim led them inside. They found themselves in a doorway that must have burrowed ten feet through the rock.
Inside was the portal.
It stood, a platform canopied in granite, within a ring of standing stones. Here and there jewels winked in spiral patterns on the floor of the dais. Others glimmered from all the stones but one, which looked somehow dead. Some of the gems were the size of a pigeon’s egg.
Haskeer bent down to caress a huge sapphire but recoiled, a look of confusion on his features as coloured lights swirled up into the musty air.
There was no hint of what the portal might do, but Stryke shivered all the same.
Coilla stopped. “What the hell is that?”
Serapheim said absently, “Something that’s stood here for a long time.”
The last of the warband crowded into the room. “Secure these doors,” Stryke ordered.
It took five grunts to do it. When the doors slammed shut a hollow boom shook the ground. Now the only light was the rainbow flicker from the jewels.
When it was done, Stryke turned to the man, who stood with his arm around the Queen’s shoulders. “All right, Serapheim. It’s time you explained things.”
Serapheim nodded. He and Sanara sat on the edge of the jewel-encrusted platform. “Think of this world as being just one of many others,” he began. “An infinite number. Many of them would be more or less like this one. Many more would be unimaginably different. Now picture all these worlds existing side by side, stretching out forever. As though they had been laid out on an endless plain.” He checked the faces of his audience to see if they were following. “Long ago, something fractured this plain. It left a gap, if you like, a corridor that beings could use, like mice between the walls of a house. This portal is one entrance to that corridor.”
“So it was made by mice then?” Haskeer piped up.
The brighter ones took a moment to explain it to him in a more basic way. Finally he seemed to understand.
“Who found the portal, I don’t know,” Serapheim continued. “Nor who might have adorned it in this way. That was long ago, too. But the sorceress Vermegram, mother of Sanara here, and Jennesta and Adpar, rediscovered it in more recent times. She also discovered that with the aid of her magic she could actually see some of the other plains, as Stryke unwittingly has.”
“What do you mean?” Stryke said.
“Your dreams.”
“How did you know I’ve been having dreams?”
“Let’s just say that I am attuned to the energies of the earth, and knew you had made that connection.”
Stryke was speechless.
“The point is that they were not dreams. They were glimpses of another place. A place of orcs.”
“I had another dream recently,” Stryke confessed. “It wasn’t about the . . . orc world. I was in a tunnel at the start, then I broke out of that into a strange landscape. Mobbs was there.” By way of explanation he added, “A gremlin scholar we met.”
All this was news to the Wolverines, and Stryke could see he’d have some explaining to do later.
“That dream would have been inspired by the instrumentalities’ power too,” Serapheim ventured. “The tunnel represents death and rebirth.”
Stryke didn’t know about that. He only hoped Mobbs would find peace.
“But the point is that this portal has been here since before the ice came,” Serapheim went on. “The Sluagh’s numbers have been dwindling since the climate changed. They have tried in vain to activate the portal in order to return to their world.”
“And you want to stop them getting away?” Coilla said.
“I want to stop them having control of the portal. It would enable them to send conquering hordes into untold other worlds. That’s unthinkable.”
“This is a load of horse-shit,” Haskeer sneered. “You said you’d show us something.”
“That’s why I brought you to the portal,” Serapheim replied. “Without the stars, I can’t activate it. But the vortex within can be made to give a view of the parallel worlds.” He moved to it and did something at one of the stones. They couldn’t see what.
Stryke’s jaw dropped. There were gasps and exclamations.
A picture that moved, like a window on to a landscape, had appeared in the air. The scene it showed was unmistakably the world of Stryke’s dreams. The verdant hills and valleys, mighty full-leafed forests and sparkling blue seas. There were hundreds of orcs battling in the sort of raid that blooded young warriors. Then views of orcs in rough-gamed carousing before roaring fires.
Stryke’s strongest thought was that he wasn’t insane. What he had been seeing was a vision of . . . home.
The picture dissolved in a glitter of golden motes and was gone.
“Now do you see?” Serapheim said. “All the elder races have their own worlds.” He stared straight into Jup’s eyes. “And that includes dwarfs.”
Now the scene showed orc hatchlings laughing as they practised with their first wooden swords, their birth-mothers looking on proudly from the doors of longhouses.
“In the beginning the portal was just a kind of window that let Vermegram see as you are seeing. But as she observed the orc world, she conceived the idea of using your naturally militaristic race for her own ends. At last she . . . found a way to bring a number of your race through the portal, activating it with magic. She wanted to establish an army of super warriors she could control by sorcery.” He paused. “The next part you might not favour. Something went wrong and the orcs she transported were altered in the process. They remained just as warlike but their intelligence was diminished, a defect that continued through subsequent generations.”
Haskeer thrust his jaw out belligerently. “You saying we’re stupid?”
“No, no. You’re . . . as you should be. The one who is a throwback is you, Stryke. A sport. You’re the closest to the orcs on your race’s home world.”
“If orcs were . . . changed going through that thing in the first place,” Alfray pointed out, “what’s to stop it happening again? Is it safe?”
“Quite safe. The accident, shall we call it, happened because of Vermegram’s inexperience with the portal. The instrumentalities prevent it occurring again.”
Suddenly they heard a heavy pounding on the door.
“It will take time for even them to get through that,” he judged. “Let me finish quickly. Vermegram meant only to bring orcs into this world. But activating the portal meant that beings in other worlds who had access to their own portals could also come here. I suspect that for most it was an accident. In its natural state, an invisible cleft in space and time, a portal, is often impossible to detect. It would be easy to be swept into one unawares.”
“Just a minute,” Coilla interrupted. “Vermegram was a nyadd, wasn’t she? So how could she be here before the —”
“No, she wasn’t a nyadd. She was human.”
“But everybody says . . .” She cast an eye at Sanara. “Her offspring. They’re symbiotes, aren’t they? Where did they get their nyadd blood?”
“When they were in her womb. A nyadd colony had been established here by then.”
“I don’t understand.”
�
�She found a way to insert nyadd seed into the forming child she was carrying.”
“Why would she do such a thing?”
“What interested her was the fact that nyadds always give birth to triplets. She wanted that too, and thought she had isolated the tiny particle of nyadd matter that caused it. Shortly after, the sole child she carried mutated into a triple birth. This was done as much in a spirit of curiosity as out of a desire for three offspring.” He gave Sanara a sympathetic smile.
“She sounds a charmer,” Jup said.
“What did she want orc warriors for?” Stryke asked.
“To help her defeat a warlock called Tentarr Arngrim. He had watched power corrupt her, make her cruel and meddlesome. When he tried to stop her, she turned on him. The irony was that Vermegram and Tentarr Arngrim had once been lovers. They even had a child together before she became evil.” He pulled Sanara into an embrace. “This child. My daughter.”
There was general uproar.
“This is too fucking much,” Haskeer complained.
“You’re asking us to swallow a lot, Serapheim,” Alfray told him.
Serapheim held up his hands for silence, and got it. “I am Tentarr Arngrim, once a mighty sorcerer, now much reduced.” The sheer force of his words held them. “It was I who made the instrumentalities, who fashioned them from alchemy and tempered them with magic when the power was full in me.”
“Why?”
“To make it possible for the elder races to return to their home worlds, should they so choose. For that I needed control, and in essence the instrumentalities were a key. I brought them here. But Vermegram had her warriors steal them and hide them away. That led to war between us. She died with only a fraction of her powers, but I was depleted too. By the time my body had recovered from its wounds, the instrumentalities were scattered, the magic all but lost. The stars became stuff of myth, and I was never able to make any more. I have waited aeons for them all to be found. But I knew they would be. I knew when the right beings came they would hear the music of the stars.”
There was a renewed clamour at the door. They hardly noticed.
“I told you they were singing to me!” Haskeer exclaimed.
“If they were,” Serapheim told him, “then you must have a brain . . . something like your captain’s. There’s a bit of sport in you too, Sergeant.”
Haskeer grinned, full of himself.
“That could be the most amazing thing you’ve told us,” Coilla remarked dryly.
“I don’t say your comrade has as highly sharpened a mind as Stryke —”
“No,” Jup said, “he’s a dolt.”
Haskeer gave him a lemon-suck look.
“Unpolished diamond might be a better description,” the wizard concluded diplomatically.
Again the Sluagh assaulted the door. Thick as it was, a tiny crack appeared between its two halves. “Now we must move for the other stars and activate the portal.” He could see that doubts still lingered. “What is there for you here? You must accept that this world belongs to my kind, whatever their faults or virtues.”
“And leave humans to wallow in their own shit after all the destruction they’ve wrought?” Coilla remarked.
“Perhaps it won’t be that way forever. Things just might improve.”
“You’ll understand we find that hard to believe.”
Thin, worm-like tentacles began to creep through the gap in the doors. Sanara aimed her weapon at them. The bulb of the tube filled with light, then shot out in a beam of golden power. A shriek echoed through the warband’s minds. The worms had turned to smoking shreds.
“Some of you will need to stay and guard the portal,” Serapheim suggested, “while the rest go after the instrumentalities.”
Haskeer liked the sound of that. “Now you’re talking. All this jaw-wagging’s doing my head in.”
Stryke picked the grunts to stay with the portal, along with Sanara and Serapheim, and added, “You’ll be here too, Alfray.”
“Leaving the oldest out of the action again, is that it?”
Stryke drew him aside. “That’s why I want you here. We daren’t lose the portal. It’s too important. I need somebody experienced to steady this crew. You can see how jumpy some of them are.”
Alfray seemed to accept that.
Sanara joined them. “Hear me on this, Stryke. I know you won’t like the idea, but you should leave the one star you have with me.” She headed off his protest. “It will help me draw power from the portal to keep your men safe. Besides, now you’re attuned to the song of the stars the Sluagh will not be able to hide them from you. But they could if your mind was filled with this one’s presence.”
She was right, he didn’t like it, but it made sense. He took the star from his jerkin and handed it to her.
As the raiding party formed up, Coilla and Serapheim found themselves standing apart from the others. Something was troubling her. “You talked about redeeming yourself. But from what you’ve said, this whole mess was Vermegram’s fault.”
“Not all of it. You see . . . Well . . . you were loyal to Jennesta at the time and . . .”
“Spit it out.”
“I commissioned the kobolds to snatch the first instrumentality from you,” he confessed.
“You devious bastard,” she hissed.
“As I said, you were loyal to my daughter then. Or at least I thought you were. I’d just made the decision to try re-gathering the stars and —”
“And using the kobolds seemed a good idea. But they double-crossed you, right?”
He nodded.
“So you got us into this in the first place. Well, you and our own lack of discipline after the raid on Homefield.” She glanced at the band. “I can imagine their reaction to that piece of news. But I won’t tell them until we’re through this. If we do get through. We’ve got enough on our plates.”
He quietly thanked her.
At that moment, the door gave. Serapheim hurried towards it. Sanara joined him. They levelled their glass weapons at the mass of Sluagh trying to get in. Blasts of searing yellow light sliced into the creatures. There were hideous shrieks. A stink of burning flesh filled the air.
“That’s the last of these,” Serapheim announced, throwing his glass tube aside, “they’re drained. You’re on your own now, Wolverines.”
“If we get separated, meet back here,” Stryke instructed them. “Now move!”
The band set out, wading through the mass of pulpy bodies.
Stryke wasn’t aware of the strange mental tug that called him back to the star he’d left below until it faded. By that time they were on their way out of the cellar’s labyrinth.
But as they ran up yet another flight of steps, he was aware of the first notes of a celestial song somewhere above. Seconds later, they reached another dimly lit corridor, with a large open chamber in front of them.
It was filled with demons.
Something like a triumphal chord crashed into his mind as Stryke led the charge.
The Sluagh never knew what hit them. They seemed deaf and blind to all but the joined stars, sitting on a table in their midst. Spears sliced the air, lancing through demons hanging down from the ceiling. Jup’s axe bit deep into a shaggy grey back while Coilla decapitated another Sluagh with a frenzy of hacking.
Now the monsters began to fight back. Perhaps a dozen of them turned, their limbs flowing into new and deadly shapes. One, a serpent, instantly formed a dragonlike maw and whipped round, its hideous jaws salivating. Once again the Sluagh began to pour their foul acid pain into the orcs’ minds. Some of the grunts toppled, hands battened to their ears, but the rest fought grimly on.
At last the remaining Sluagh gave way before the Wolverines’ onslaught. Most of the demons were bleeding darkly on the floor. Scattered limbs were still twitching. The last two monsters had been pushed back towards the far wall. In one last desperate welter of claws and fangs they tried to get back to the stars, but half the Wolverines were betwee
n them and their goal. Defeated, dripping ichor from a score of wounds, they turned and fled, undulating rapidly down through an open stairwell.
As they disappeared, so did their gift of pain. The Wolverines pulled themselves together, astonished to find themselves alive. Haskeer turned to scoop the stars from the table.
They weren’t there. Neither was Stryke.
In the mêlée, he had seen a Sluagh snatch the stars and scurry to an open balcony with them. Dextrously, the creature began climbing the outside of the palace. Now Stryke was bounding up a staircase, a spear in his hand, hoping to catch up with it.
Above him the stairs split, leading off in two different directions. And there was the Sluagh, spidering downwards on the farther side, not twenty paces from him. With all his strength he hurled the spear. The creature dropped like a stone.
It was wounded, not dead. Pushing out a claw to the stars it had dropped, it tried to pull them closer. Stryke dashed forward and sliced its limb clean through. But the Sluagh wasn’t finished. It shot out a blade-like appendage and gashed his shoulder. Stryke quickly retreated, clutching the wound, and watched the thing die. Then he grabbed the stars and ran.
As he reached the point where the stairs branched he heard sounds of combat. He threw himself into the shadows. A pack of Sluagh slithered into sight, and they were retreating from a greater force. He blinked through the gloom, trying to make out who. Then he saw them.
Humans and orcs.
Manis.
Stryke was almost shockproof after recent revelations, but this new twist took some beating. The only comfort he could take was that, although he had no idea what they were doing here, the Manis would put more pressure on the Sluagh. Allies, but not necessarily friends. In a moment they would reach the joining of the stairways and block his downward flight. Tucking the stars into his jerkin, he took the only course open to him and went up.
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