by Anne Perry
“I can’t help you,” Ishrafeli said desperately. “Not even God can make you what you don’t want to be! I can only tell you the truth. Go to the ravine, and free yourselves from each other, then choose again. Put away the hate and the lies and the cowardice.”
Rage flashed in Mabeluz’ little eyes, and a brilliant flare of cunning.
Ishrafeli stepped back as if he had been struck, sickened by it. For a moment there had been hope, and the darkness was the more intense because of it. Despair washed over him. He felt his own strength drain away until he was dizzy. This was pointless. He should leave Mabeluz to his damnation. He had tried! Surely that was enough?
“Going?” Mabeluz asked with a bitter ring of triumph, as if being abandoned were some kind of victory for him.
Ishrafeli jerked his head up. “No, I’m not going!” he said savagely. “I’ll stay until you have the courage to face the truth! It’s your only escape. That—or stay locked together for ever. This is your chance, it won’t wait. Time is short—but you know that! You all know it, perhaps better than I do.”
“And if I go to Mount Sorah the earth will free us?” Mabeluz implored. “You swear? Why would it, after what I’ve done to it?”
A score of thoughts rushed through Ishrafeli’s mind, memories of glory and destruction, wonder at the mercy of God. “Yes,” he agreed gently. “It will.”
The silence was thick.
At last Mabeluz rose stiffly to his feet, knocking over the small, wooden table behind him. “I’ll go. You said all of us?”
“Yes.” Ishrafeli felt hope surge up inside him, and tried to repress it, not daring to let it overtake him, knowing the darkness was so close.
“What about Balour, Accolon and Indeg?” Mabeluz asked. “How will you bring them?”
“The same way I brought you ... with the truth.”
Mabeluz turned and blundered out of the door, reeling as if his legs were weak and his mind befuddled.
Ishrafeli left the army camp escorted by soldiers, and walked steadily westwards in the wake of where the battle had been fiercest. There was no doubt in him that Mabeluz would go to the ravine below Mount Sorah. He could leave him behind and go forward to search for the others with a peace within him, a certainty of the spirit. The sun still scorched his face, his clothes stuck to him, the sand abraded his skin raw, but he knew God would provide the strength to do all he had to.
Weary to the heart he began the journey back through the trail of destruction and famine left behind the armies across Pera into Shinabar, searching for Indeg. The sparse trees became even fewer. Farms and small villages had been looted and the dead lay where they had fallen. Some were stripped by wild dogs, others Ishrafeli saw with churning stomach had been cleaned of flesh by the skill of a human-held knife.
In the oases he saw famine where men and women stood skeletal thin with bloated bellies and hollow eyes. He could do nothing to help them.
At each place he asked after Indeg, and finally found him in the foetid alleys of Tarra-Ghum, standing over a pile of refuse buzzing with flies.
He jerked up as Ishrafeli approached. The putrid core of him was already bursting through into his flesh till it shone with a strange iridescence like gangrene. He was among those walking and living dead, racked with disease, skins blotched, ulcerated, their bodies exhausted with fever and flux, lurching towards a merciful oblivion.
Indeg stared at him with exploding rage as if he had long known he would come, and had waited for him in ever-increasing hatred.
“Well?” he demanded, his voice high and shrill with accusation. “What do you want, then?” He flung his arm out, gesturing obscenely at the ruin around them, and the stench arising from disease and death.
“I want to be clean,” Ishrafeli said wearily. It was a cry from the heart. He ached for relief from the filth and heat and abrasion of the moment, and for the depth of freedom from the anger and despair, the self-deceit, and the cruelty of the soul.
Indeg started to laugh, a wild, braying sound. Then he stopped abruptly. “Here?” he said incredulously. “They’ve got plague! Can’t you see that? Haven’t you got eyes? Can’t you smell them? They’re rotting where they lie!”
Ishrafeli hurt as if his very soul were bruised. “I know. I can’t help them. It’s too late. But I can help you.”
Indeg’s face was dark with contempt. He did not need to find words for his derision.
“I can free the best of you from the worst,” Ishrafeli went on. “As I shall do for all of you. At Mount Sorah the earth will break open your prisons.” He wished passionately that he could force Indeg to go. He was exhausted with having to argue and persuade. But again there was the struggle, the self-disgust, the knowledge in Indeg of his own lies which made him think evil of everyone else. He argued and cursed while Ishrafeli repeated over and over again, like a chant, words to comfort himself because he needed to believe for his spirit to survive.
“Why should you?” Indeg demanded shrilly. “What do you care whether I have a chance or not? You despise me! Don’t lie ... you hypocrite! Stand there and tell me you don’t hate me, you wouldn’t get pleasure from seeing me damned!”
“God help me,” Ishrafeli replied. “I look at you and see the cruelty and the filth and it frightens me. I feel as if I shall never be clean again.” The challenge not to lie cut deep like a razor. “But I get no pleasure from seeing anyone damned. Though if I did ... it would be you!” he added.
A leer of triumph lit Indeg’s frightened face, as if he had won some moral victory.
Ishrafeli turned away and moved a few steps. He stared at the horizon. The sky was clear high above them, pure enamel blue spread with the faint patina of gold from the fading sun.
Beneath it the whole passionate, subtle and beautiful world was stained with a fatal disease.
He turned back to Indeg. “Judgement is coming,” he said, staring at him as if he would crawl inside the tumult of minds in his head. “It will be soon now, and it will be final for those of us who had a chance. If the least foul in you would be free of the most, go to the ravine below Mount Sorah. If not, then it really doesn’t matter where you are ...”
Then he saw with a flash like a spark of fire, that Indeg believed. “I can’t!” he shouted. “I carry the plague!” It was terror and triumph in him at once, rage and hope boiling inside him, making his skin bulge and tear. “Say it doesn’t matter!” He brayed with laughter. “It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter!”
“I’ll take you by sea!” Ishrafeli shouted back at him. “Stop that noise! I can sail! I’ll find a small boat and take you by sea.”
Indeg was astounded. “You’ll come with me? You’ll take us?”
Ishrafeli swallowed his revulsion, feeling his stomach twist. It was all he could do to stop retching. He had to wait several minutes before he could move again and make himself lead the way towards the harbour, hearing Indeg’s shuffling, squelching footsteps behind him.
He found a boat and with Indeg’s help, lifted the dead bodies of the owners out of it and laid them under one of the sails on the quayside. Then with what clean water Ishrafeli could find, and a bag of diced dates, he ordered Indeg to sit still, and unaided he lifted the sails and set out to sea.
It was the worst voyage of his life. It was only a matter of days, but it seemed like weeks. Indeg did not need to eat, but for himself Ishrafeli caught fish. He did not dare sleep properly, only doze in the stern of the ship, always aware of the creature who sat only feet away, alternately moaning and cursing as one part within him became dominant, then another.
He set Indeg ashore within sight of Mount Sorah, and then put to sea again to go on eastward to the other barbarian army and seek Balour.
He followed a trail of mineheads and craters where the earth had been flung aside and mounds of acid chemical waste lay spread wide, its poison staining the water, the land, even the air. Nothing lived, and the reek of fumes stung his throat and made his eyes water.
> After the pale, stinking hills and valleys he moved on to the grasslands which had once teemed with life, and here he found the few remnants of armies still alive, both Peran and barbarian occasionally fighting each other, even now driven by reflex of hate.
There, screaming abuse at men who refused to dig or to labour any more, he found Balour. He looked smaller, thinner, and even more ratlike than in the City. The dead and dying lay around him, and he fed on their misery as others grasped at food.
Ishrafeli thought he was prepared for the horror he would see when he looked within Balour, but he was not. Each sin and its misery was different, catching him in an unguarded place, showing him new pain. He was bruised and weary with it, because it had no end. His strength was bleeding away even as he stood in the withered land and argued with the wretched creatures in Balour promising release, trying to make them see the final blessing of one more chance to choose. The weight of cowardice, of apathy of the spirit, was suffocating. He had not known such will to death existed and the touch of it nearly paralysed him. It was strong enough to eat away all life.
But if he once let Balour see his vulnerability, he would fasten on to it, and the rodent in his soul would never loose hold. So he kept his eyes level and prayed for the power to sustain him through all the arguments again, and offer the hope.
When at last he left, Balour was trotting in his strange, jerking gait towards the west and Mount Sorah on the horizon. Now there was only Accolon to find.
Ishrafeli went eastward again, his spirit poured out to exhaustion, driven only by will. And in the slaughter of the last battlefield where the ground was dark with the murdered bodies of the dead, Peran, Shinabari and barbarian alike, where carrion birds tore out eyes and pulled the flesh off faces, he found Accolon, leading the robbers of the fallen.
He stood up suddenly from behind a heap of the dead. His face was haggard, his eyes bloodshot, his long white hands grimed with dirt.
Ishrafeli let out an involuntary cry of horror and stumbled backwards.
He scrambled to his hands and knees, gasping for air, then looked up to see Accolon grinning, great white teeth sharp and square, like those of a horse.
Ishrafeli had no weapons but his faith and the strength of his mind. He dared not think of Tathea, but the words of the Book came slowly to his heart and a peace shone inside him again. It spread until he could catch his breath and stop shaking. God asked of no man more than he could accomplish. There was no pain or terror or grief He did not know and share. Above all He loved, with passion and courage and wisdom beyond mortal dreams to imagine. There was nothing secret from Him, and still He loved.
Ishrafeli focused his vision and stared into the eyes of Accolon. He saw in them pride and the lust for praise, the need to be adored for any and every reason. He saw the vanity that will not learn, and the crowding guilt that will never dare look inward for dread of what it will find. He saw endless self-justification, argument, anger. He searched, and he did not find one unselfish act or one offence forgiven.
He spoke to Accolon as he had to them all. “I can tell you where to find freedom from each other ...”
The same argument back and forth ensued, the same dregs of bitterness to be drained to the last drop, before Accolon grasped at hope and, trailed by that filthy thing with its long hands and horse-teeth, Ishrafeli set out on his own final terrible journey to Mount Sorah.
They passed scenes of hideous defilement, the ground smashed and broken, the crushed bones of animals picked clean by men or carrion bird. Time after time Ishrafeli swung round on Accolon, burning with rage to lash back at him for what he had done, longing to break him as he had broken the earth. And each time he saw the pathetic face and was brushed, slight as a butterfly wing, with pity. Then he saw the leering eyes and his anger returned.
They floundered in dust, soft as mud. Ishrafeli found himself weeping with frustration, close to despair.
Only the words in the Book, repeated over and over, enabled him to dredge up the strength to fight his way out. As if it were a voice within himself, he heard Asmodeus speak: “What of man then in the day of my power, when his work has crashed about his ears and there is death and despair on every side?”
He turned and reached out his hand to the obscene thing drowning behind him, and hauled it out.
And the answer of God came like the birth of light in darkness: “In tribulation he will find his greatest strength and his utmost nobility. There will be those in flight from a monstrous foe, who will still return to the very jaws of destruction to rescue the weaker and the slower, though they know Him not, who will comfort the terrified and the grieving without thought of self. Where there is starvation there will be those who will give their last morsel to feed the stranger, or nurse the dying, though the plague afflict them also.”
On and on they struggled, fell and rose again, until at last ahead of them the harsh outline of Mount Sorah stood stark against the sky. Then finally Accolon slithered down to the other Lords of the Undead, and Ishrafeli looked from the cliff edge into the ravine and saw them all standing on the rock, staring up at him, waiting.
He could deliver them only this far. Now it rested with them, and with God. He was too weary to think.
He fell to his knees. “Father, I have brought them here, as You asked me. Do with them according to Thy will, but please ... please give the earth a beginning of peace! Let her rest ...”
He had barely finished speaking when there was a roar in the distance, a trembling deep in the core of the mountain and in the ground under his knees. If he had had any energy, even any coherent thought, he should have been terrified, desperate for any way to escape it. But it filled him with a strange, sweet sense of peace, as if the being of the earth had spoken to him.
The shuddering of the ground grew fiercer and the noise was almost deafening. On the far side of the ravine huge boulders crashed down the cliff edge and shattered like glass.
Mount Sorah seemed to shimmer in the air and move against the purple and sulphur-yellow blaze of the sky, caused by the wind in the clouds, an illusion of the light.
Another roar split the silence, a screaming, tearing like the fabric of the earth being ripped apart. Halfway up towards the peak, a gout of flame shot a thousand feet high, staining the arch of heaven with streamers of black smoke.
The noise came again, and was followed by molten rock, white-hot magma from the core of the world spewing into the air and raining down on to newly gouged valleys. It poured into the old ravine, hissing and roaring until the rocks exploded, shooting into the air, cannonfire of the breaking and rending of worlds. Lava crashed against the walls till the ground screamed and juddered, gaping open in crevasses a thousand feet deep, and more steam and rocks shot into the air.
The Lords of the Undead stared around, stunned and amazed, even as they were swallowed beneath seas of boiling rock, consumed for ever. But as Ishrafeli watched, clinging to the ground, almost choked with heat and fumes, he saw the dark shadows of their souls fly upwards, free at last for one final choice, one spark of the light to seize ... or to let go.
He must leave. Sulphur was thick in the air. He could not ask to be preserved much longer. His mission was not over yet. A voice spoke in his heart and in the thunder of the earth. He must return to Lantrif and face the Silver Lords, the last betrayal, and the freedom for his beloved earth to yield its mortal life into the hands of God.
Chapter XXI
TATHEA WAS STILL IN Camassia, leading what was left of the resistance as it re-formed a government after the shambles of Cassiodorus’ death and Balour’s flight to the battlefront in Pera, when she heard the news of Sardriel’s death. It was Gallimir, one of the Knights of the Western Shore, who brought it to her. Ythiel had heard it from a Lost Lands mariner, and sent word immediately.
Gallimir was waiting for her as she left the Hall of Justice, and they stood together in the sun where it splashed over the ancient pavements patterned in the warm colours of sand and
rose. He told the story simply but his words were so vivid she could see it as if she were there, and feel both the glory, and the grief. And with it came the certainty that time was very short.
But she had known that before Ishrafeli went to seek the Lords of the Undead. Those last few days together had been a final gift, a golden evening before the night of battle which was already on the horizon.
Now she looked at Gallimir’s face and saw in his eyes that he had more yet to tell.
“What is it?” she asked.
Gallimir looked at her steadily and his sadness frightened her.
“The old evils have arisen again in Lantrif,” he answered. “We send embassies there regularly, and they come back as soft as a silken web, too subtle to tell the lies from the truth.”
She should not have been surprised. In the end the masks would be stripped from all. The Book had promised from the beginning that there was no middle ground: everyone was either for God, or for Asmodeus.
“What do you know of it, for certain?” she asked.
“That the Silver Lords no longer hide their power,” he answered, his face grim. “They have uncovered their ancient arts again that would climb the stairs by magic, not by labour. They would aspire to the omnipotence of God by their own skill, without the humility to love the universe or keep its laws.”
She saw him shiver in the sun, and felt the coldness touch her as if the light had gone, though it was still as bright, but empty now, a brittleness to it.
“Legend says it was so on other worlds,” he continued softly, “before God washed them clean of the sins which cannot be forgotten, once the knowledge is in the heart. It is folly to destruction to steal the arts we have not the wisdom of the soul to use. The Silver Lords did that in the beginning, and now they have dug them up again out of their secret places, and are using sorcery to prepare for the last battle. We knew it from the old allies we had who have disappeared from office, and from the nature of the men who have replaced them, and word has come of ancient creatures of darkness that have been seen again—the Lamia, the hell-kites over the River, stripping the flesh off dead men’s bones.”