The Fatal Gate

by Ian Irvine

  “I could be a worthy partner to you,” he said softly.

  A barnyard boy! it sneered. A muck-shovelling hick!

  “A great man taught me how to use a sword.”

  Who?

  When Llian had copied out the booklet describing the seven basic strokes of sword fighting, he had written the author’s name at the end. Wilm had no idea who he was, though he must have been a great swordsman or a great teacher. “Fratince Loode, the author of The Seven Basic Strokes. They’re burned into my sword arm.”

  I knew Loode, though lewd would be a better name for the villain. But have you ever used me in combat?

  “Surely you know when you’ve been used?”

  I’ve only just woken from a very long sleep. I remember nothing lately.

  “I duelled Jundelix Rasper, an assassin sent by—”

  I met Rasper when he was young. You duelled him and lived?

  It was wrong to boast about killing another man, even such a wicked one as Rasper who had made his living from death; Wilm’s mother would have been ashamed of him. But he sensed he was close to the key now. The enchanted sword wanted a strong, determined master, one it could respect, and in the strange world it inhabited a strong man did not hide his achievements out of modesty.

  “I fought him to a standstill,” said Wilm, not boastfully. “Rasper was better than me—much better—but I held him off with the seven basic strokes until he weakened. I’d practised so much that my sword arm knew what to do. I suppose that was your doing.”

  Flatterer, said the sword, though Wilm did not sense that it was displeased.

  “He was better, but I was much fitter and stronger and younger, and in the end when his strength was failing, he panicked and I held firm.”

  The kill, was it clean? The sword sounded eager now.

  It wasn’t easy to think about. Killing a man had not hardened Wilm; on the contrary it had reminded him, not that he needed the reminder, how fragile life was and how easily ended. Dajaes, Dajaes, how I miss you.

  “Straight through the heart. He died instantly. Then I bent my head over him.” It was important to Wilm that he say this. “Rasper had been an evil man, but a human being nonetheless, and I honoured him for the life I had taken.”

  Nobly done, said the black sword. Tell me, Wilm—

  “I don’t have time,” Wilm said firmly. “Less than a mile away my people are outnumbered and surrounded; they can’t hold out much longer. Will you help me?”

  What good can four thousand unarmed Gwinians do?

  “I don’t know, but we’re determined to fight for all we hold dear.”

  Wilm sensed eagerness. It was a sword after all, and presumably it yearned to be used.

  And die for it?

  “If necessary.” Then, risking everything on intuition, he added, “Will you help me to win a fabulous victory, or should I prop you up in some dusty corner to be forgotten and find a more willing weapon on the battlefield?”

  Oh, all right! I’ll cast my protection over you and aid your sword arm—if I think you deserve it. But consider yourself on probation until you’ve proved yourself worthy.

  “Does your protection mean I can’t be harmed? Or killed?”

  Of course not, the black sword sneered. You can be killed in a hundred ways, in a deliberate attack or by accident. My protection gives you a small advantage—it’s up to you how you use it.

  “I’ll take it.” Wilm realised that he had been up here far too long and his men must be wondering about him. If they’d heard him talking they might think he was mad.

  He ran down the steps and stopped in front of his captains. Behind them, the great mass of the Gwinians was spread out along the wall, keeping to the shadows. Wilm drew the black sword and raised it high.

  “This is a famous blade, an enchanted blade that once belonged to the great Magister, Mendark, and now is mine. I’ve bargained with the sword, and it has offered me its protection in the coming battle.”

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, boy, said the sword. My protection is provisional.

  “We’re going to fight the Merdrun,” said Wilm, “and with our own strong hearts and unquenchable wills, and the aid of this mighty sword, we … will … win!”

  A sigh ran through the Gwinians. Wilm split them into two groups, one to attack the Merdrun up on the western side of the great camp, the other to the battle in the east, and swiftly gave his orders.

  “On the way you will come across many abandoned weapons,” he said. “Arm yourselves with whatever you can find.”

  He led the larger force, which consisted of more than two thousand Gwinians, mostly men but also a few hundred young women, up the slope and to the right towards the mound where the allied force had been encircled by the Merdrun. Above the smoking remains of the tents they passed through a battle zone littered with hundreds of bodies, and the smell of death—of blood and guts, meat and ordure—was so strong in the hot, humid night that he had to turn aside and throw up.

  He wiped his mouth and stood there in the dark, shivering while his Gwinians armed themselves with whatever weapons they could find. This will be us in a few minutes, he thought. Hacked, brutalised, dying in agony, hundreds of young lives wasted. Possibly all of us.

  Not as easy as you thought, said the sword.

  “I never thought it would be easy,” Wilm muttered. “What kind of a man thinks war is easy, good or noble?”

  A Merdrun man. Merdrun women too.

  Wilm led them up the slope, across boggy ground on either side of a stream flowing from the easternmost hill, then towards a low rise. The Gwinians’ dark skins made them almost invisible in the night, and he was so covered in mud and filth that he also blended into the darkness.

  He stopped a hundred yards down from the rear of the Merdrun force. He could hear the clash of weapons and smell the blood; his heart was thundering and he was breathing heavily. Panic swelled. How could they hope to beat the greatest fighters in the void?

  Stop it! He took a series of deep breaths. We’ll win because the alternative is unthinkable.

  “They don’t know we’re here,” he whispered to his captains. “We’ll creep to within twenty yards if we can, then charge.”

  As he headed up, Wilm realised that he had not seen Llian since killing the guards outside the gate of the slave camp, but he could not think about him now. They were only twenty yards from the rear of the encircling Merdrun.

  He drew the black sword and charged, felt a moment of panic when he thought he was on his own, then the Gwinians were behind him and he felt a surge of exhilaration. In a minute he might be dead but he would have done his best.

  He raised his sword and twenty-two hundred Gwinians roared as with one throat, their cry echoing back from the high stone wall a few hundred yards to the right. As the shocked Merdrun turned to face this new enemy, the charging Gwinians drove deep into the enemy formation.

  Then everything was a chaos of hand-to-hand fighting, with enemy coming at Wilm from all directions, hacking and thrusting. They were easily identifiable—both the men and women were bulkier than the slender Gwinians, and the glyph burned into every Merdrun forehead glowed a luminous silver in the semi-darkness.

  Wilm cut a man down, then another Merdrun who could have been man or woman—it was impossible to tell in the smoky gloom—without knowing where the sword had struck either time. An empty-handed Gwinian dived for the Merdrun’s fallen sword, came up with it in two hands but was killed before he could use it. Beside Wilm a second Gwinian died, spraying warm blood all over his left shoulder.

  Behind him someone was screaming, “My leg, my leg! Help me.”

  But there was no helping anyone. Wilm thrust, killed, thrust again. More Merdrun came at him, and he felt sure he was going to be slain a dozen times. He had taken four wounds already though none serious; he was even able to evade the most furious killing blows. He wasn’t such a fool as to think it was his doing—the sword was aiding him—and if someone ca
me at him from behind, unseen, or several of them at once, he would die as easily as the man to his left had just done.

  There was death everywhere Wilm looked, and it was awful, but there was no time to think about it, no time to think about anything save kill or be killed.

  Up on the fortress wall to his right someone set fire to a pile of oil-soaked timber and flames shot twenty feet into the air. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder and saw a wedge of bodies behind him, dead and dying. Most were Gwinians, though this part of the attack had killed at least a dozen Merdrun.

  “Forward!” he bellowed, and the couple of hundred Gwinians behind him charged again, driving through the Merdrun’s lines. Their circle was thinning now; could he break through to the trapped allies?

  A black-bearded fellow hacked at him. Wilm ducked just in time, struck back, and the man parried. They exchanged a dozen furious blows without penetrating the other’s defences. The Merdrun thrust; Wilm diverted the blow aside, putting his attacker off balance, but the Merdrun had been faking it. He struck hard, not at Wilm but at the blade of the black sword. Wilm, unable to get it out of the way in time, was sure his own blade would shatter, but the hilt twisted in his sweaty grip, turning the blade edge on to the Merdrun’s blow, and the black sword sheared through the enemy’s steel weapon in a shower of stinging sparks.

  The Merdrun dropped the hilt and his hand flashed for a knife in his belt, but the sword, moving of its own volition this time, delicately opened the jugular vein in his neck.

  So it went on, the blood, the screams, the horror that edged weapons can make of a human being, and the killing, the endless killing. Wilm had no idea how long he had been fighting. It might only have been ten minutes though it felt like a day, as though there had been nothing else in his life. He was utterly exhausted.

  Then the wedge of Gwinians cleaved through the last line of Merdrun to the trapped soldiers on the mound. The encirclement was broken. The Merdrun drew back and regrouped a hundred yards away across the slope.

  Wilm took stock. At least a hundred Gwinians had died behind him, and many times that number around the other parts of the circle, and he knew dozens of them; he had slaved beside them for weeks, heaving the massive stones of the fortress wall into place. They had been good people, people he had liked, now dead in an instant of violence. And he had led them to war, led them to their deaths. That was the hardest part of all.

  He guessed that a hundred Merdrun had died in the attack on the mound, though their reserves, waiting in their shadowed ranks on the two eastern hills, numbered so many that the losses were insignificant. Still, a hundred was more than he had expected, given their reputation for invincibility. They were supposed to be as tough and strong as Charon, and a hundred Charon—Rulke’s famous Hundred—had taken the world of Aachan.

  These Merdrun weren’t as fast as Wilm had been led to believe. He had killed a number of them, and he did not think it was all to do with the sword. There were times when it had definitely helped him, and other times when it had seemed like a lifeless piece of metal in his hands. It was … odd.

  He stretched and winced. He had taken a shallow gash in his left side, between the lower ribs, without realising it. His left shoulder was sore too—a small deep wound made by the tip of a sword. He had no memory of that either.

  The best of his strength was gone, and his empty belly was rattling, but he had no food, and there was no way out save by winning or dying.

  63

  NO MAN CAN BEAT GERGRIG

  Leaving Karan to locate the triplets, Tallia crept out across the camp, hoping to rally the allies’ remaining troops. Most of Janck’s senior officers were also dead because the Merdrun had targeted them from the beginning, and only Tallia’s mancery and the Faellem’s illusions had kept her alive.

  She heard renewed fighting to the right, up near the mound—the Merdrun’s encirclement had been broken! Through her night glasses she saw that they had been attacked by a silent horde of Gwinians. Llian must have got through to the slave camp after all.

  Karan would be desperate to hear this news but Tallia could not go back. She had to know the Gwinians’ numbers and their plans. She scurried up towards the mound. “Llian?” she yelled. “Are you here?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” said a tall, filthy, blood-covered young man Tallia had not seen before, though the black sword was identification enough. “I’m Wilm. I’m leading the Gwinians.”

  “Very well done,” said Tallia, shaking his hand. “Without you we could not have lasted this long, but the mission has failed.” She told him about the loss of the assassins, and her inability to contact Malien and get her to reopen the gate.

  “As a slave I learned to live minute by minute,” said Wilm. “I never expected to survive another day. Over the past couple of months every cause I’ve fought has seemed hopeless. I expect nothing, but I’ll keep hoping we can beat them.”

  “Good on you,” said Tallia, though she had no hope left. “Where’s Llian?”

  “Haven’t seen him since we escaped the slave camp.” Wilm reached out for the pair of night glasses she still held, forgotten, in her hand. “May I?”

  She gave them to him and he studied the conflict against the western wall, the silent formation of Merdrun a couple of hundred yards away, then the rest of the camp. He handed the glasses back.

  “Gergrig is the key,” he said. “If he can be killed …”

  “Surely you don’t think you can beat him,” said Tallia, unable to keep incredulity out of her voice.

  “I wouldn’t have a hope against so great a warrior, normally …”

  “But?” said Tallia.

  “Mendark’s enchanted sword protects me as long as I prove myself worthy …” Wilm paused, head cocked as if listening to a voice only he could hear.

  “No man can beat Gergrig in single combat,” said Tallia.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve been studying the way he fights. He’s always in the thickest fighting but few blows ever touch him. I think he’s protected too.”

  “By his sword?”

  “No, by the triplets. I believe they’re channelling power to him to make him seem invincible. If you attack him, it’ll be suicide.”

  “I’ve got to,” said Wilm, “because no one else has any chance. But I’m not planning to attack him on my own.” He checked on the enemy again. “I’m going back. Good luck.”

  “Good luck,” Tallia echoed. You’ll need it.

  64

  BRING THE BLOOD TORUS

  Llian was looking desperately around the camp when he noticed the fire coming from the northern hill. But it was no ordinary fire; it was a searing blue-white glow, shaped like the pupil of an eye. He looked down at the scrap of paper in his hand, then up again. Definitely not an eye. A cave with a magical fire inside.

  It was half a mile away. He raced up a muddy slope where all the grass had been worn away, passing in the darkness a couple of hundred yards to the right of the vicious battle raging against the north-western section of the wall, then splashing across a little stream, his boots sinking into spongy earth on the other side, then on and up the slope where it ramped up to the ridge on his left and the hill straight ahead. This part of the camp was empty, and the sounds of battle were just a distant clamour over the pounding of his boots and the thundering of his heart.

  His legs were going wobbly and there was a stitch in his left side but he could not stop. Sulien’s cry had been at least ten minutes ago. Karan might be dead already.

  The base of the cliff suddenly loomed up out of the darkness. Llian flung his arms forward to protect himself and thudded into the rock. He searched desperately to left and right and found a track leading up to the left, near the point where the stone wall of the camp met the cliff. He staggered up the steep, narrow path, slipping and skidding, until he must have been sixty feet above the floor of the camp. More than high enough to die if he fell.

  Where was the cave? The
mouth must be well across the cliff to his right, though from this angle it would be hard to see. He stood there for a second, gasping, then made out a blue-white reflected glimmer forty or fifty feet away.

  A crumbling two-foot-wide ledge was the only way to get to it. He had never been good with heights but there was no time to worry about that now. He freed his notched sword in its sheath and was about to head across when someone spoke inside the cave.

  “Mummy? Are you all right?”

  Llian staggered and almost fell. What was Sulien doing here? Was she all right? If the triplets were killing Karan, or had already killed her, Sulien would be next.

  Karan did not answer. She must be dead. He was Sulien’s only hope; he had to save her. He had to be careful but he also had to be quick.

  He was about to creep across the ledge and attack with his broken sword when a many-throated roar sounded from the battlefield below and a mile to the east. The triplets appeared at the mouth of the cave and one of them held up a small glassy object in one hand.

  “Gergrig’s not hurt, is he?” one of the triplets said in a ragged voice. “He’s not going to—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said the triplet holding the device. “While we strengthen him he cannot be defeated, much less killed. But the enemy have proved surprisingly determined. Bring the blood torus.”

  Llian crouched down in the shadows. He did not think they could see him here, and since he could not do mancery they probably could not sense him. But how was he supposed to take on three of them, all trained fighters as well as overwhelmingly powerful mancers?

  The middle of the three triplets now had the blood torus on her head. They chanted. “Jung sither garg, jung sither garg, jung sither GARG!”

  A narrow, rainbow-coloured ribbon of light burst forth from the object the end triplet held above her head, streaked across to the eastern side of the battlefield without spreading appreciably and touched someone there.

  “Gergrig!” said one of the triplets in a breathy sigh.

  Then, to Llian’s horror, the red outline of a huge trilithon appeared in the centre of the camp. So that’s what the triplets were up to in the cave—diverting power from the summon stone to reopen the gate from Cinnabar to Gwine and bring the rest of the Merdrun through. And by their satisfied looks, it was nearly done.