Worms' Ending: Book Eight (The Longsword Chronicles 8)

by GJ Kelly

  Even Gawain began to feel the rising sense of loss which had so afflicted Allazar. This place had once thrived, and been filled with people. Wizards, yes, the cursed whitebeards Gawain so keenly despised, but people nevertheless, people who had fallen to the dreadful touch of a creature very far removed from any of nature’s making.

  On they went, until, in the middle of the third avenue and thus facing the fourth cloistered quadrangle, Allazar stopped in the centre of the white-stone away and sniffed the air about him. Gawain and the others repeated the action, and an involuntary shudder wracked his spine. Fire. There had been a conflagration nearby, wood burning, leaving nothing now but charred remains dampened by rains.

  No signs of any such conflagration became apparent until they stepped out of the gloom of a narrow path and onto the final avenue facing the Cloister of Sek, the last of the five quadrangles before the central broad courtyard where Allazar had said they would find the Fountain of Zaine.

  “It is another Calhaneth,” Gawain sighed, and blinked.

  The Cloister of Sek, where once reposed the great libraries and halls of learning for the most advanced of students working towards the coveted honorific Master of D’ith Sek, was blackened and scorched. Great tongues of fire had licked from windows in the rooms and apartments above the scorched columns, leaving the once-proud and twinkling mica-flecked white-stone grubby, soot-stained, and mournful. Smoke had roiled from the ground floor windows, billowing, coating the columns and exposed stone facades above them black with soot. Here and there, where the blaze had been most intense, pillars and walls were cracked, though none had tumbled.

  Gawain, Allazar, and Ognorm gaped, understanding that this perhaps had been how much of Calhaneth might have appeared after the firestorm, before nature had begun the long and inevitable process of reclaiming the land, trees tumbling walls and toppling columns. Here, though, there were no statues pointing cracked and blackened fingers, no silent admonishments from stone-carved figures and their blank accusing stares. The entire quadrangle, they had no doubt, had been gutted. Only the skill of the ancient builders had ensured that the stone shell remained intact, though for how long it would remain thus, none could say.

  In the final courtyard where once the students and masters of Sek had ambled in the sunshine, they found the Fountain of Zaine. No water flowed there, no crystal-clear flow cascaded in unbroken sheets from the five great circular dishes into the empty pool below. The dishes were cracked and blackened, the courtyard, likewise.

  “Oh, my lord!” Cherris gasped, catching her breath, holding her hand to her mouth and pointing with her shortsword at Gawain’s feet.

  Here and there, pale shapes could be seen dotted around the blackened ground, the stone less scorched in those places. Gawain was standing in the middle of one such spot, the stone paving a pale brown rather than the darker burnt ochre of the surrounds. With a sudden sense of dismay and the cold burning of anger deep within, he understood the reason for the look of horror on the lady Rider’s face.

  The pale shape he was standing in was the shape of a man.

  He stepped back onto the darker stone, and with the others, gazed around the courtyard, while Allazar at first blinked and then gave up the attempt at stemming the tears which rolled silently down his cheeks.

  oOo

  12. The Last Sardor

  How long they stood gaping and blinking at their surrounds in the fountain courtyard none could say, mere minutes felt like an age. Gawain had unconsciously begun counting the shadows on the ground but gave up when he realised what he’d been doing, it had been a large number when he’d stopped and seeing Allazar weeping with sorrow and rage beside him made him glad he hadn’t counted out loud.

  “Does this rage ever die, Gawain?” Allazar suddenly hissed through clenched teeth. “Will I ever know relief from this fury?”

  Gawain, of course, understood at once. The Hallencloister. Calhaneth. Raheen.

  “Sometimes,” he replied softly. “Sometimes there are brief moments when the fire dies to embers, smouldering soft and awaiting a breeze to fan them once more into flame.”

  There was a long silence then, the wizard’s teeth clenched against the primal scream Gawain knew Allazar was struggling to contain.

  “I don’t understand, melord,” Ognorm whispered, blinking and shaking his head in sorrow at the emptiness of the broken courtyard. “We done for the Orb. We chucked it in the Sea of Hope. What could’ve done this? What else could’ve done this?”

  Gawain sighed. “We came here looking for an answer to the question, why? Why did the D’ith abandon the world at Far-gor? Now we know, and now we have other questions that need answering. Perhaps we will find answers to those, here, too.”

  Cherris let out a shuddering sob, and wiped her eyes, and just as she began to speak, through the silence and from the north came a single, clear and high-pitched peal of a bell.

  “Allazar?” Gawain whispered.

  The wizard blinked, slack-jawed, and gazed up at the tower in the north.

  “The Sardorian Bell! Someone yet lives and has rung the Sardorian Bell in the North Tower!”

  “Ven?”

  But Allazar was already striding, almost running, across the scorched courtyard, completely ignoring the shapes burned into the paving.

  “Nothing, miThal…”

  “Dwarfspit, come on! Allazar, wait for us! Allazar!”

  They hurried, weapons still in hand, desperate to catch up with the wizard, robes flying as he sped through passages and alleyways, staff held before him and shining a bright Light of Aemon as though it were a visible manifestation of his earlier scream at the east gate: Eyem D’ith! Allazar held the White Staff, Gawain knew, the way he himself had held aloft the Sword of Justice in the circles in his father’s hall the day he had found Raheen nothing but ashes.

  Through the smoke-blackened ruin of the Cloister of Sek, across the broad avenue beyond, onward Allazar plunged, all caution thrown to the wind, the wizard almost dazzling to look at so bright was the Light he cast about him. Gawain understood. Gawain knew. Woe unto anyone or anything foolish enough to stand between the wizard and the North Tower this day.

  And so Gawain held his peace, his eyes darting this way and that, scanning frantically for signs of a trap, for movement, for the lunge of a shadow-creature, for anything which Allazar himself in the grip of fury and desperate hope might not perceive in his haste to attain the tower.

  At the last avenue, Allazar stopped in the centre of the broad expanse and gazed up at the apartments in the North Tower. Nothing, no movement, no sign of life. Broken windows, shards of glass scattered on the ground around the base of the keep, and a wide open door, arched and low, designed so that anyone entering the home of the Sardor of the North would have to stoop, head bowed, to cross the threshold.

  “Allazar.”

  “Here is where dwelled Eljon Meritus, Master of Sek and Sardorian of D’ith Hallencloister. There,” he nodded upwards, “There is where we shall find the Sardorian Bell. Stay behind me.”

  And with that, and without waiting for a reply, Allazar strode to the open door, and without hesitation, stooped, and entered the gloom of the interior.

  “Dwarfspit and Elves’ Blood he’ll get his vakin head cut off!” Gawain gasped, and hurried after the wizard. “Oggy, rearguard! Ven?”

  “A light, I think miThal, though very dim!”

  “Where?”

  “High up!”

  “Dwarfspit!”

  In through the portal, sword held high to defend against anything which might come crashing down, but nothing did. Glowstones dim in ornate lamps set in sconces around the walls, wreckage of furniture, and books, what had been many books, some scorched, all mouldering. An impossibly cantilevered stone staircase ran around the inside wall of the tower, Allazar already disappearing through the landing to the first floor above them.

  Gawain took the steps two at a time, his comrades following suit. The first floor, debris s
cattered, doors to inner chambers shattered. Up to the second floor, and more of the same, though clearly here the furnishings had been much more opulent, rich fabrics torn and shredded as if by swarms of enraged cats, stuffing exposed and soiled. Tapestries and curtains torn down, mouldering and damp and exposed to the elements thanks to the shattered windows.

  Halfway up the stairs to the third and final floor and Gawain heard Allazar give a cry, though it seemed to be a cry of hope and despair mingled rather than alarm or pain.

  Gawain, like the wizard before him, saw the reason why when he and his comrades rushed through the opening and into the single large room where Allazar stood breathing hard, almost sobbing, leaning on his Dymendin for all the support he could muster from the ancient iron-hard wood.

  There, sitting behind a great gold-inlaid marble desk on which stood a small silver bell, the only furniture unbroken in the tower, sat an old man, wisps of white hair lank, and locks of it fallen out and strewn across the floor, marking the path taken when the unknown wretch had dragged himself up all those steps to occupy the stone seat behind the great slab. It must’ve taken hours for the enfeebled ruin to have dragged himself so far.

  An oozing boil glowed a painful red on the ancient wizard’s right cheek. Rags had been bound around his gnarled hands, and as they approached closer they could see those rags were wet with blood and corruption. His breath wheezed and rattled, his eyes scarcely slits where lids had swollen with tears of pain and misery. A bag of bones, in grubby robes, dying slowly, open sores weeping.

  “Ah… ah…” the old man wheezed, and his voice seemed impossibly strong for such wreckage as he. “Allazar… I thought it might be you… I hoped it might be you… Once, long ago when you stood here a boy, I suspected…” and he coughed, “…I suspected it might be you.”

  Allazar’s voice broke when he spoke, and he clutched the staff so tightly his knuckles cracked. “Sardor Eljon! Sardor Eljon…”

  “I waited Allazar… for the thunder and the lighting. I waited for your coming so long…”

  “Sardor…” Allazar sobbed again.

  From behind him, Gawain heard Cherris give a shuddering sob of pity for the spectacle before them. The wizard Allazar, clutching the White Staff in such desperation it seemed all lives everywhere depended on the firmness of his grip. The ancient and dying old man, once the Sardor of D’ith, the highest-ranking wizard of all, clinging now to life as though all lives everywhere depended on the fastness of his failing grasp.

  “These are yours now, Allazar,” the Sardor pushed the only other objects on the table towards the wizard. One, a slender tome of gold, smaller than Allazar’s notebook, small enough for a pocket. The other, a golden key on a chain.

  A key, Gawain noted, which looked identical to the one hanging around the scrawny and blistered neck of the wretched remains of Eljon Meritus.

  “Sardor!” Allazar croaked again. “No…”

  “Yes, Allazar. It will be clear, when you read the book. Read it, Allazar. You came, in thunder, and in lightning... You came, just as old Benithet said you would. I waited, Allazar, I waited. I hid, in the crystal chamber below. They came too, who ended the world…”

  “Who did this!” Allazar cried, tears streaming, “Who did this!”

  “We knew you had a destiny you know… when you came before us here so young… the youngest ever summoned by Morloch to his dreaming tower. The youngest ever to resist him. Do you remember, Allazar? You were so small as a boy, standing there before us. So full of nightmares, so full of potential. Now you shine so! Take them! Take them, Allazar! Please…”

  Again, the Sardor’s feeble and rough-bandaged hand nudged the book and the key.

  Allazar blinked back his tears, and stepped forward, hesitantly, loath to release his grip on the staff.

  “Please…” the Sardor asked again, the plea pitiful.

  Gawain and the others watched as Allazar’s right hand finally let go of the White Staff, and inched forward, trembling, hovering over the great marble slab, and finally took the book, and the key on the chain.

  “Put it on!” the old man twitched a finger, trying to point to the key on the chain and Allazar’s neck.

  “Sardor!” Allazar begged, and the others finally understood something of the events taking place before their astonished eyes.

  “Please Allazar, let me go…”

  Fresh tears streaming, Allazar pocketed the book, and then clumsily, refusing to relinquish his grip on the staff, dragged the key on its chain over his head. When it was hanging in clear sight, the old man heaved a wheezing, trembling sigh.

  “You came, in thunder and in lightning, Allazar Meritus, Last Sardor of the D’ith… you came as old Benithet said you would…”

  “Who did this!” Allazar cried. “Who did this!”

  Eljon slumped in his seat, seeming to wither, slowly releasing his grip on life.

  “Who? Elves, of course… just as old Benithet said they would… They have gone now, taking their fire and shadow with them. I will go now, too, Allazar. The Last Sardor is come, and I shall go with our brethren…”

  “Wait…” Allazar cried, his voice trembling. “The vaults! The library!”

  “All gone… all gone. They destroyed it all. But not the crystal chamber below! No, they couldn’t get in there… not even their shadow could get in there! I stayed there, Allazar, waiting… too long, in all that bright light, too long…”

  “The Book of Thangar…” Allazar sighed.

  “Thangar? Ah! Of course! The final panel! It now makes sense! Clever Allazar! We knew, you know… knew you had a destiny.”

  “The final panel, Sardor, the final panel, what did it depict! I cannot remember, it was too long ago!”

  “All gone now. Everything gone. The world is ended, just as old Benithet said it would. I will go now too, Allazar… I will go now too.”

  “Wait. Please.” Allazar whispered, and the awful loneliness in that desperate plea brought a lump even to Gawain’s throat.

  But Eljon’s lips moved, his fingers traced a tremulous pattern, his head tilted back and with a sigh, a glow began to spread in the air around him, growing brighter, so bright none could bear to look until the light faded and was gone, leaving nothing behind of Sardor Eljon Meritus but ash upon the cold gold-inlaid marble of the once-imposing desk where Allazar, Last Sardor of the D’ith, once stood in fear and trembling, and now stood weeping for his world’s ending.

  oOo

  13. The Book of Sardor

  Outside in the fresh air and with two hours of overcast daylight left in the day, Ognorm and the others gazed nervously at the silent wizard, and flicked concerned glances towards Gawain. Out of respect for Allazar’s loss they had acceded to the wizard’s request that he be allowed to examine the vaults under the North Tower alone. Since he’d emerged from below, dusty and bereft, Allazar had simply sat upon the step at the entrance to the North Tower, his staff canted over his left shoulder, his head in his hands.

  Finally, Gawain relented to the pressure of the glances from his comrades, and crossed the small distance to where Allazar sat.

  “We’re all nervous, Allazar. It’ll be night, soon. Do we quit this place? Do you believe the shadow-creature is gone?”

  “It is gone, Gawain. It is all gone. The great libraries burned in the cloister of Sek. The vaults rifled and their contents stolen or destroyed. Only the crystal chamber sealed by Eljon remains untouched.”

  “Then let’s leave here, Allazar. We’ve a couple of hours yet, we can ride down the hill, make a night-camp. Maybe even bag a rabbit or two. Let’s leave this place.”

  Allazar sighed, and nodded, and made to stand. Gawain held out his hand, and the wizard glanced up at him first with surprise in his eyes, and then with such immense gratitude for the gesture that both had to struggle against emotions pricking their eyes afresh.

  The walk to the open east gate was made in haste, and in silence. Venderrian swung his gaze, in spite of the de
ceased Sardor’s assertion that the shadow creature was gone, and when finally they passed through the gate and out into the open air beyond, Gawain could not chide his comrades for their sighs of relief. His own mingled with theirs, though Allazar either did not notice in his grief, or pretended not to.

  “East and beyond the old ‘weed field,” Gawain ordered when they’d mounted up, and so they rode, five riderless horses following them.

  Beyond the band of almost extinct Flagellweed they made a hasty camp, though Allazar declined the offer of a fire and cooked rabbit, claiming he had no appetite. Gawain remembered Raheen, and so they ate dry rations, frak for the most part. While they were eating, sitting in a close circle on their blankets and bedrolls, Ognorm suddenly produced a bundle, and offered it to Allazar.

  “Found it on a peg by them stairs in the tower,” the dwarf said quietly. “Thought you might have a need of it.”

  Allazar took the bundle, and unrolled it. It was a cloak, charcoal-grey, of some warm-looking but lightweight material. It even possessed a cowl, though it was plain and unadorned.

  “Thank you, master dwarf,” the wizard sighed, fingering the material, and then deftly cast it about his shoulders and wrapped himself in it.

  As if at this very signal, clouds parted for the first time that day, revealing a bright moon barely a week from full low and to the east of south.

  “Dry night,” Dirs declared.

  “And for the next two days at least,” Cherris agreed.

  “Arr,” Ognorm announced, “For which I reckon we’ll all be glad.”

  Another silence fell then, attempts at simple conversation failing. The weight of their discovery in the Hallencloister was too great to ignore through such simple topics of discussion as the weather for the time of year.