“Someone else must have opened a gateway,” panted Taggert. “The Unreal’s broken through again.”
“Great,” said Jordan breathlessly. “That’s all we need. Who’s behind it this time? It can’t be Dominic.”
“I don’t know. This new one can’t have been open long, but each time a gateway is opened, it gets that much harder to close. Our best bet is to get you to the throne, so you can use the Stone to control the Unreal.”
Jordan was too short of breath to answer, so he just nodded and kept on running. Strange lights appeared on the air. Booming voices spoke in the earth beneath the castle. A burning man stood to one side, and laughed unpleasantly as his flesh was consumed by the flames. Visions flickered at the corners of everyone’s eyes, always just on the edge of becoming clear. Jordan stared straight ahead and ran on, refusing to stop for anything.
Finally they rounded a corner, and there were the huge double doors that led into the Great Hall. And standing before the doors were Prince Lewis, Ironheart, and a company of heavily armed guards. Jordan and his party came to a sudden halt, and for a moment the corridor was still and quiet, save for the gradually slowing breathing of the new arrivals. Lewis waited patiently for them to get their breath back before he began speaking.
“You took your time getting here, Viktor,” he said calmly. “As soon as I discovered you had Dad’s will, I knew it wouldn’t be long before you headed back here with the crown and the seal. You’re really very predictable, you know. Especially since I introduced a spy into your people.”
“Oh hell, not another one,” said Jordan. “Who is it this time?”
“No one important,” said Lewis. “But someone with access to everything that was going on. After all, no man keeps secrets from his wife, does he?” Lewis snapped his fingers, and two guards hustled forward the Lady Emma. Gawaine groaned softly.
“I had to do it,” said Emma defiantly. “Lewis knew so much already, and he had Ironheart and the Monk—you couldn’t hope to win. I had to go with the winner. He promised me he’d protect you, Gawaine, if I agreed to keep him informed of your plans. I did it for you, Gawaine.”
“Trusting little soul, isn’t she?” said Lewis. “Now then, Viktor, you let me have the crown and the seal, and I’ll let you live.”
“Do I look crazy?” said Jordan. “You want it, you come and take it. Or aren’t you as brave without your tame sorcerer to back you up? Where is the Monk, anyway? Run off and left you in the lurch, has he?”
“He’s around,” said Lewis. “Keeping busy. I’m afraid you don’t understand the realities of the situation, Viktor. Either you hand over the crown and the seal right now, or I’ll have my people kill the Lady Emma. Slowly and painfully, right before your eyes. You see, I’ve been studying you, Viktor. You got soft in exile. Now, do as you’re told. Or else.”
Jordan glanced quickly at Gawaine, but the knight was staring fixedly at Emma. Jordan scowled desperately, torn so many ways he didn’t know what to do for the best. But, of course, there was only one thing he could honorably do. He pulled the heavy gold ring off his finger and hefted it sadly in his hand. “The royal seal,” he said quietly. “It’s all yours, Lewis.”
He snapped back his hand and threw the ring with all his strength. It struck Lewis squarely in the left eye, and he lurched backward, screaming. Jordan and Taggert leapt forward almost as one and cut down the two guards holding the Lady Emma. And then Ironheart’s steel fist lashed out with murderous speed, and crushed the back of Emma’s skull. She fell limply to the ground and lay still. Taggert’s balefire sword swept crackling through the air and sliced clean through Ironheart’s gauntlet. The severed hand fell limply to the floor. No blood spurted from the armor-clad stump. Ironheart howled horribly, the sound echoing eerily in his featureless helm.
Lewis threw himself at Jordan, and sparks flew as their swords clashed and danced apart. Their guards milled around them, more interested in killing their enemies and settling old scores than in protecting their leaders. Sir Gawaine knelt beside his dead wife and held her hand, oblivious to anything else. Cord swung his mace with awesome strength and speed, but it was all he could do to dent Ironheart’s armor. The knight took even the most punishing blows with virtual indifference. But while Cord kept Ironheart busy, Taggert went to work on him with her balefire sword. The crackling white fire sliced into the dull steel, whittling away at Ironheart like a dull knife on a stubborn block of wood. Gaping rents appeared in the armor, but Ironheart took no hurt from them, and no blood ran. Taggert’s hackles rose as she hacked away at the stubbornly advancing knight, and wondered crazily if he could die. But finally one last cut severed Ironheart’s head from his body, and the suit of armor fell heavily to the floor, and never moved again.
Lewis’s guards lost their confidence as they saw their champion brought down, and when Cord and Taggert turned to join the fight against them, they dropped their weapons and surrendered. Only Lewis fought on, raining blows on the grimly defending Jordan. He continued to back away, and wished he had his flare pellets with him. Even a smoke pellet would have helped. Lewis was strong, fresh, and very experienced with a sword. Jordan was none of those things. So far he was holding his own, bar a few minor scratches, but he was tiring quickly, and Lewis knew it. Jordan kept backing away, his mind working furiously. All he had to do was say the word, and Taggert or Cord or any of his guards would rescue him. But if he did that, they’d lose all respect for him. It’s not enough for a future King to be brave and strong: he must be seen to be brave and strong. Unfortunately, right now Lewis was the stronger.
Jordan suddenly remembered an earlier fight, when Gawaine took on Dark John Sutton. Dark John had all the advantages, but Gawaine beat him anyway. He was a duelist, sire, and I am a soldier. Jordan grinned as he remembered Gawaine’s winning trick. He moved in closer, and spat right into Lewis’s face. Lewis’s blade faltered and he drew back instinctively, and Jordan ran him through. His sword punched out of Lewis’s back, and the prince was dead before he could draw in enough breath to scream. He fell to his knees, almost as though bowing to Jordan, and then he fell on his side and lay still. Jordan pulled his sword free, and spurned the body with his foot. There was an impressed murmur from the guards, and Jordan nodded to them tiredly. With a bit of luck, they’d all been too far away to see exactly how he beat Lewis. They probably assumed he’d beaten the prince by sheer strength of will, or something. He rooted among the-bodies of the fallen guards till he found the royal seal, and slipped the ring back on his finger.
“Pardon me, Your Highness,” said the Steward quietly, “but I think you ought to take a look at this.”
Jordan moved over to where she was kneeling beside Ironheart’s headless body. She showed him the head she’d found inside the featureless helm, and Jordan’s stomach heaved. The head looked as though it had been dead for some time. Half the face was already eaten away by decay. Taggert dropped the thing with a grimace, and wiped her fingers thoroughly on her robes.
“I doubt we’ll ever know the answer,” she said neutrally. “Lewis might have told us, but he’s dead.”
“There’s still the Monk,” said Jordan, helping her to her feet.
“Yes,” said Taggert. “There’s always the Monk.”
Jordan looked around him, and saw Gawaine was still kneeling beside the body of his dead wife. He walked over to the knight, and stood awkwardly beside him. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I thought I could save her. I did try, Gawaine.”
“It’s my own fault,” said Gawaine. “I shouldn’t have left her alone for so long. She was always easily led.” He got clumsily to his feet. “Let’s go, Viktor. You have a throne waiting for you.”
“Do you think I care about that now?”
“Yes!” said Gawaine. “You have to! Because if you don’t, Emma and everyone else who’s followed you will have died for nothing! Now go in there and take the throne, Viktor. It’s waiting for you.”
“Yes,” said Jo
rdan. “I suppose it is. There isn’t anyone left to stand between me and it any longer.”
From inside the hall came an explosion of light and sound, culminating in harsh, echoing laughter. Taggert looked at Jordan.
“The gateway, Viktor—we forgot about the bloody gateway.”
She stepped forward and threw open the double doors. Jordan stepped in beside her, and his stomach lurched sickly as he saw the new gateway. Midway between the doors and the throne, the Monk hung unsupported on the air. His robe was flung open, revealing a surging mass of light and color. There was no trace of a body within the robe, or that there ever had been. The Monk had become a living gateway, through which the Unreal could enter the Real world. Creatures out of a nightmare dripped in a steady stream from inside the Monk’s robe, like maggots from a rotting carcass. They fell to crawl, slide, and scuttle across the floor, and there were always more close behind. A gusting wind blew from the gateway, hot and prickly and rank with burning ammonia. And above it all, the Monk’s laughter rang on and on without ever a pause for breath.
Jordan stared in horror at the Unreal that had already taken root in the Great Hall. Horrid creatures scuttled up and down the walls, and clung upside down to the ceiling, feeding delicately on tiny morsels of fresh meat. Blood dripped from the ceiling in a steady stream. The floor was cracked and broken, and jets of flame shot up into the hall. The throne sat intact upon its dais, untouched by all the madness, but a barrier of seething thorns had grown up around the dais, sealing it off. Jordan looked helplessly at Taggert.
“I can’t do anything to stop this madness until I can get to the Stone, and I’d need an army at my back just to reach the damned throne. What am I going to do, Kate?”
“Only one thing we can do, Viktor,” said the steward evenly. “We’ll have to destroy the gateway. You did it once before.”
“That was different,” said Jordan. “This time the gateway’s aware and intelligent. And Unreal. The Monk’s got to be Unreal.”
“Right. I always thought he was, but I wasn’t even allowed to run tests on him as long as he was under Lewis’s protection. We’ve got to stop him, Viktor. If the balance here shifts too far, Castle Midnight will become one huge gateway through which the Unreal can run loose in the world.”
Jordan swallowed hard, and wished there was somewhere he could run to and still be safe. But as long as the gateway was open, nowhere would ever be really safe. He looked quickly around him. Roderik and the guards stood clustered at the main doors, their faces white with shock and horror; but Cord, Taggert, and Gawaine stood calm and ready to back him up. Their confidence gave him strength, and he nodded abruptly.
“All right, everyone, we’re going into the hall. You’ll have to try and hold off the Unreal while I make a dash for the Stone. Stay close together, watch each other’s backs, and if you get a chance at the Monk, take it. You might not get another.” He took a deep breath, and let it go. Keeping his voice calm and steady was one of his greatest acting triumphs, even if no one else appreciated it. “All right, my friends. Let’s do it.”
He moved forward into the hall, and the Unreal surged toward him in a monstrous tide. Misshapen creatures that had no place in the waking world boiled across the floor, and Jordan’s guards met them with flashing swords. The tide faltered and broke against the unflinching steel, and Jordan and his people pressed forward. Gawaine fought at Jordan’s left, his ax glowing bright as the sun. Taggert fought at his right, her balefire sword spitting and crackling as it hewed through flesh and bone alike. Behind them, Cord threw away his mace, and it vanished in midair. He pulled out of nowhere a huge and terrible war hammer, and swung it double-handed. The solid steel head alone had to weigh at least twenty pounds, and it was set on the end of five feet of polished oak. An ordinary man couldn’t even have hefted it, but Cord swung the hammer as though it was all but weightless. He was no more Real than the creatures he fought, but still his face twisted with loathing at the sight of what faced him. He might have been born of the darkness, but his heart and his loyalties lay with the light. And above them all, the Monk rotated slowly on the disturbed air, and madness surged through him into the world.
Things that looked horribly like men crawled up out of the cracks in the floor. Something huge and dark scuttled lightly down the wall and dropped onto a guard, crushing him to the floor. Gossamer strands of pink and purple drifted on the air and wrapped themselves around the fighters, tightening inexorably into glistening cocoons that devoured their contents. One whole wall became a vast inhuman face. A dozen men looked into its great golden eyes and went insane from what they saw there. And still Jordan and his people struggled ever closer to the throne.
Sir Gawaine fought tirelessly, his ax falling and rising with grim efficiency. He gave no thought to anything save the struggle, and blood ran down his face like tears. With Emma’s death, all his emotions had run out of him, save for a simple cold need for revenge. Nothing else mattered. Nothing mattered but killing the monstrous things that were responsible for all the evil in Castle Midnight. His ax rose and fell, rose and fell, and the creatures of the Unreal fell back before him. Gawaine cut them down and moved on to the next, feeling nothing, nothing at all.
Taggert fought at Prince Viktor’s side, and smiled savagely as her balefire sword sliced through every monstrosity that walked or crawled of flew within her reach. Nothing got past her to strike at Viktor, though many tried, and a slow steady pride burned within her. Even in the midst of blood and carnage, she still had time to find a small smile at how fast her feelings toward Viktor had changed. He’d not been a bad sort before his exile: just weak and easily led by the wrong people. She hadn’t cared much about him then, one way or the other. But the man who’d emerged from the chaos of King Malcolm’s death had been a much finer sort. A true prince of the Blood, worthy to be king. And a man Kate Taggert was growing increasingly fond of. She smiled again, and then put the thought firmly out of her mind. She’d think about that later. Assuming there was a later. She fought on, sweat running down her face, and soaking her chest and sides as a grinding fatigue grew slowly inside her. The balefire was a constant drain on her strength, but she didn’t dare give it up for an ordinary sword. It was the only advantage she had. She just hoped her magic would last long enough for Viktor to reach the Stone. If it didn’t, then perhaps everything they’d been through had been for nothing, after all. Taggert cut viciously about her with her shimmering sword. She wasn’t unhappy. She was doing what she’d been trained to do, in a cause she believed in, for someone she cared for. There were worse ways to die.
Cord swung his war hammer with murderous ease, and the Unreal fought each other for the privilege of dragging him down. Cord stood his ground and let them come to him. He felt no anger toward them. They were his brothers, in a way, born like him of random chaos and unreality, without mother or father, sprung adult and fully formed into a world that was forever alien to them. Cord looked like a man and felt like a man, but he had never made the mistake of believing himself to be a man. He was a whim made flesh and blood, a possibility given form and motion, nothing more. He was Unreal. And a traitor to his own kind, perhaps. But still he fought on, guarding the back of a man he’d come to admire, and a woman he might have loved, if he’d been Real.
Roderik cut and thrust with his sword, and wondered how everything could have gone so horribly wrong. His plan had seemed so perfect in the beginning, so simple and straightforward. Everyone had said so. But first the little things had got out of control, and then the bigger things, until finally he had come to realize that he was only a part in someone else’s plan. A bitter resignation was all that kept him going now: that, and a burning hatred for the vile creatures that swarmed around him. Whatever he might have been and done, the castle was his home, and always had been, and while he might not fight for a prince or a king, he’d fight to preserve his home from the foulness that threatened it.
Jordan swung his sword with an aching arm, s
tumbling and sliding on the blood-soaked floor. His blows were getting slower and weaker, and his lungs burned in his chest as he fought for air. He was an actor, not a soldier, and he knew he couldn’t last much longer. His will and determination were as strong as ever, but there was a limit beyond which even they couldn’t drive his failing body. He glanced about him as he fought, trying to see how the battle went, but the hall had become a confused mess of struggling bodies that defied any clear interpretation. There seemed no end to the Unreal, and no matter how many creatures fell, there were always more to take their place. His guards were fighting fiercely, but one by one they were falling beneath bloody fangs and claws, and not rising again. His colleagues around him were still fighting well, but he could see strain and fatigue stamped clearly on their faces. The throne on its dais stood safe and secure, and the throne barrier that surrounded it was only a few feet away, but it slowly occurred to Jordan that he might not have enough strength left to take him those last few feet. He worked his way over to Taggert, and they fought side by side.
“Kate, how much magic have you got left?”
“Not much, Viktor—I was trained as a steward, not a sorcerer.”
“Think you’ve got enough left for one good blast? Enough to clear me a path through the thorns to the dais?”
Taggert looked briefly at the gap between them and the throne. “Maybe. But that would take everything I’ve got. It’d be a hell of a risk. You’d only get one chance at the throne, and then the creatures would be all over you. You sure you want to risk that?”
“If you’ve got a better idea, I’d love to hear it.”
Blood and Honor (Forest Kingdom Novels) Page 33