by Anne Perry
“Yes.”
“Because it is a true principle that the servants of good will be warned so that the right may be served, no matter what power of evil is sent against them?”
Too late Parminiar saw the trap. He had already committed himself. There was only one answer he could give. The word was hoarse as if dragged from his throat. “Yes.”
“Thank you,” Ulciber said gently. “You are excused.”
Timon was called, and the respect for him was palpable. He took his place and told how messengers had come to him saying there was an armed force entering Lantrif from the east, and at their head was a great protagonist in the spiritual war. The shadow of conflict was already over them. The danger to the forces of good was so intense it was impossible to think of anything else.
Heads craned round to look at Tathea with reverence, and then at Ishrafeli with a terror controlled only by the majesty of Ulciber in the judge’s seat, and the long knowledge of the arts of Timon and the other Silver Lords. It seemed as they had promised: they had proved themselves stronger than all the plans of the enemy. Victory was within sight, whatever the danger had been.
Tathea was desperate. All control had slipped from her. There were only minutes left.
Of course Timon was warned of evil! Of course it was here; the malign passion of it could be felt like a suffocating in the heart now, this moment. How could she show them it was Ulciber, Timon, the Silver Lords—not Ishrafeli!
“Of course you’ve been betrayed!” she shouted. “But not by Kor-Assh! You knew him! Think of—” Before she could say more her guards pulled her back, and Timon’s voice drowned out everything else, commanding all attention. He told the court how he had felt the power of destruction drawing even closer, and had agreed that Parminiar should lead the Brotherhood out to meet it, even though he knew they were powerless. So he had sent Armerio, while he and the other Silver Lords remained in the City and gathered their strength so they might fight the last action here. They knew the arts of evil better than ordinary men, and could call on equal powers to combat them.
Tathea stood leaning forward over the ebony rails of her protected space, her body clenched tight, every muscle aching as if she were poised for a physical attack.
Timon hesitated, then pointed at Ishrafeli. “Our own Lord Kor-Assh is the betrayer, the servant of Asmodeus sent to destroy Tathea. Who better? In the purity of her heart, she trusted him.” He inclined his head towards her and smiled. “Only we were warned,” he went on. “Tathea herself knew of the evil to come, and she had the courage she has always had, the same fire that drove her in the beginning to dare the conflicts of eternity, and bring back the Word of God for us. She rode to meet him, as she has always done battle with the Enemy ... face to face.” He stopped.
The irony was overwhelming.
She must speak now or it would be too late. “The power of evil is the use of Asmodeus’ weapons!” she cried out suddenly. “Whatever we intend or imagine.”
Every face in the room turned towards her.
There was murmured agreement all round, not a word of contention anywhere. However, there was no shadow of understanding of what she meant, except in the eyes of Ulciber, who knew his own control of the court, and of Ishrafeli, who was even more helpless than Tathea to alter the tide which swept over them.
She tried again. “The evil we felt was not Kor-Assh!” she said passionately. “He has stood side by side with me against the Great Enemy since the days of heaven before the war began, and fought every battle as hard as I, and sustained as many injuries, and as deep!”
There was not a flicker in any of them. They stared at her with reverence, and total blindness.
She felt the panic rise inside her and knew her whole body was shaking as she plunged on. “Of course the evil was felt, but it was the power of sorcery, the presence of the enemy trying to delude us all!” Everything she said only supported their beliefs. They were in thrall to the Silver Lords, and saw only what the power of their own sorcery had created.
She went on arguing that the use of magic was not the gaining of power but the yielding of it to forces beyond their control. But even as she pleaded with them she knew it was useless. All around her like a sea was the art of the Silver Lords, and above all the mastery of Ulciber. That they should believe Ishrafeli to be corrupted was his final revenge, and it shone in his eyes and curved his lips into a perfect smile.
The verdict was delivered in a swift, shattering word. “Guilty.”
It was preposterous. Ishrafeli of all creatures on earth would never have harmed her, and he was to be put to death for the supreme crime of planning her murder. It was the ultimate betrayal. The sentence was that he be burned. Tathea heard it with a horror that scorched through her as if the fires consumed her own flesh.
She begged to be allowed a last moment with him. It was denied.
“We cannot permit it,” Timon said with oozing sorrow. He shook his great head and his shoulders lifted very slightly. “For your own protection, you understand.”
“He wouldn’t hurt me!” she protested with despair.
“It is the voice of your goodness speaking,” he answered, smiling at her. “You judge from your own heart, and you do not see the evil that is in another’s.”
“I see it very well ...” she began fiercely, but he was not listening. Nothing she said would make any difference. She might as well shout at the stones, except that by allowing him to see her pain she gave him a certain satisfaction. As suddenly as she had begun, she ceased to argue. “But I am not afraid of it!” she finished, meeting his eyes and seeing blindness and arrogance and spiritual death staring back at her.
“You have no need to be,” he answered smoothly, his eyes and his lips denying each other. “We shall protect you, my lady. We shall never allow the Enemy to touch you again.”
His words could have meant anything. Whose enemy? There was no purpose in speech. She turned and walked away, hiding her face from him, but keeping her back straight and her head high.
The execution was immediate. Ishrafeli was taken from the prison as soon as the wood had been gathered for the fires. He had known as he rode toward Lantrif that he would not return to Tyrn Vawr ever again. Only for a moment had he been surprised to find Tathea already there, then he realised why she had come, and how she had unwittingly played into the hands of the Silver Lords, who had then betrayed them both.
Ulciber had corrupted the City of the Fallen Kings, Ishrafeli’s own people. He had used Tathea herself and their knowledge of who she was to bring about this very moment. It was part of Asmodeus’ plan, but above all it was Ulciber’s own revenge for being denied a mortal body, that prize he had wanted above all, and which for a brief, soaring instant he had believed Ishrafeli could give him.
Ishrafeli climbed the steps to the heart of the wood and they lashed him to the stake. He saw them pile more brushwood around the bottom. He watched through the blackening smoke the exultation in Ulciber’s face, the moment of his supreme triumph. This was the revenge he had sworn in the dust of the road in Pera. Now it shone bright like a radiance inside him.
Ishrafeli turned to Tathea. She was standing in front of the crowd, her body rigid with inner pain, and so close the heat must scorch her skin and the dark smuts flying upward catch in her hair. He wanted her face to be the last thing he saw—in the end the only thing.
The fire was catching hold. The heat of it was sickening pain, filling his whole existence. His lungs were bursting. He concentrated all his strength on not crying out, not screaming. He could see nothing clearly any more, a red light, and then darkness and an agony beyond imagination. It lasted a moment, then rose and exploded, and became nothing. Radiance stretched to infinity with a sweetness that was the breath of God.
Tathea saw him slump forward and her heart knew the moment of his release and her own unutterable loss.
Was it her new and terrible aloneness, or did the air really shudder and a gasp go up from t
he earth as if it too were bereaved of its heart?
“Why?” The cry rose inside her, but even before it reached her lips, it faded away. There was no anger in her soul. This was unjust, it seemed the triumph of evil, and yet something spoke peace to her that was stronger than damnation. A voice whispered that all was well, all was still in the hand of God.
Dazed and scorched with the heat herself, empty to the core of her, she turned towards Ulciber, and saw with shattering unbelief that the skin on his hands was withering. It was like crepe, a hundred thin lines on it, fragile as paper.
He was looking at her, the triumph brilliant in his eyes. It was a moment lifted above and beyond time. She knew with perfect clarity, and he did not yet, but he would, soon: Ulciber the immortal was dissolving into oblivion. The flesh on his body was shrivelling even as she watched.
He saw something in her face. His look of triumph froze. They stared at each other through the smoke-filled air, past the Silver Lords as if they did not exist. Slowly Ulciber lowered his eyes to look at his hands, which were now ghastly as claws, the veins standing out like blue ropes, the nails buckled. The bones of his wrists protruded where the skin hung empty, splashed with dark blotches.
With horror of disbelief he felt his bowels perish and his belly cave in. His robes settled lower around the sharp edges of his shoulders. He opened his mouth and uttered a high, thin scream that tore the air and splintered glass in the high windows of the towers. Birds scattered in the air. In a language unknown to man, older than the spirits of the earth, he cursed Asmodeus who had deceived him from the time of the war in heaven.
In Erebus Asmodeus knew it. For an instant he savoured the exquisiteness of Tathea’s loss. Then the darkness around him grew troubled and the foundations shivered and cracked. It was not the headlong plunge of Ulciber from youth through senility to dissolution, it was the terrible, irreversible knowledge that the earth itself was dying. That was nothing to do with Ulciber, or the sorcery of the Silver Lords. It was not even anything to do with Tathea. It was Ishrafeli’s death which had freed it to lay down its burden of the ages and allow its spirit at last to give up the struggle against those who afflicted it, polluted its face and tortured its creatures.
For an instant Asmodeus was brushed by an overpowering fear. Victory or loss for ever were days away, perhaps hours! It was only just beyond his grasp, his hand could almost close on it, but one mistake, one chance not taken, and he could still lose!
And all the Lords of Sin were gone except Yaltabaoth. Even a year ago that had been inconceivable. But surely now, if ever since the daybreak of creation, this was a time when despair could walk the earth? This was the age of Yaltabaoth. How could any creature entertain hope of anything? The earth itself was beginning to taste death!
“Yaltabaoth!” He called only once; there was no need to repeat that dreadful name.
The stars dimmed, as if a shadow had fallen across them.
Yaltabaoth stood in front of Asmodeus, his face bone-white beneath his flying hair, his black cloak ragged as a feathered wing. He did not speak. He too had heard Ulciber’s fearful cry as eternity took hold of him, and he needed no man nor spirit to tell him what was wanted.
Asmodeus looked at his face and fear touched with a black hand that chilled the heart. “Destroy everything that is left,” he ordered. “Kill it all. Leave me nothing but the woman. I want Tathea.”
Yaltabaoth smiled, and it was like living death.
Asmodeus shuddered and turned away. He did not even see Yaltabaoth leave to begin his last walk upon the earth.
Chapter XXIII
ARMIES HAD SWAYED AND clashed across the ruin of empires and finally obliterated themselves, making the earth one vast charnel house. Only the Island at the Edge of the World was left, one small pool of light in an ever-growing darkness.
Alone and dazed with grief, Tathea went on foot from Lantrif of the River, and made her long way back through the rich fields of the Heartlands towards Tyrn Vawr. The golden Book of God was there, the only thing Asmodeus could not touch. The night was closing in, and she had one more meeting to keep.
On the plague-stricken battlefields there was no one left alive. The desert sand was dark with blood and a hundred million bones bleached in the sun, stripped bare and white. Now even the carrion birds starved.
In the cities that had once teemed with the great civilisations of men, the wind blew down deserted streets and the glories of the past sank into a slow decay. Here and there smoke darkened the horizon and the stench of burning soiled the air.
On the Shinabari battlefield Sadokhar knew there was nothing more he could do here in this vast charnel house. Everywhere it was the same. Scorching air blew out of the south as from a furnace, carrying torrents of whirlwinds of sand as if they had lifted the desert floor and spewed it into the sky. Valleys were scoured out and new mountains built. It blew for days and nights with a screaming that never ceased. Oases were buried. Cities vanished as if they had never been.
Sadokhar and Tornagrain travelled north on horseback, hoping to reach the sea, and eventually the Island. Their bodies bent forward, both they and their animals bound with cloths over head and face, covering all but their eyes. They carried water and dried fruit, and prayed for more as a man prays for life. They kept company with God in their thoughts, reciting, in the howling solitude of the storms around them, the pages of the Book committed to heart.
There was nothing to say, and no breath with which to say it. Both knew what must be done and were bent as with a single mind upon accomplishing it. In the destruction of the world there was still one last battle to be fought, and it would be on the Island at the Edge of the World, as Iszamber had foretold. With the protection of God to guide and keep them, they would be there.
In the north, near the sea in the shambles of what was once Tarra-Ghum, they came across fugitives fled from Irria-Kand, south through Pera, and were now driven into Shinabar. Around the campfire at night they cooked what little food remained, and told stories of wind and fire storms that had swept over the plains of their land. Lightning had blazed across the skies and forked to earth, igniting the dry grass until the flames, driven by hurricane winds, had devoured everything for hundreds of miles at a time, leaving a blackened earth behind and the charred bones of what had once been life.
Sadokhar and Tornagrain left in the morning, taking one of the abandoned ships lying in the harbour. They set out towards Tirilis. Clouds darkened the sky and sudden squalls drove them through white water. They were hurled forward at break-neck speed, battered and half-drowned with the force of waves thundering around them.
Three days and nights later they were washed up on the shore, exhausted, gasping for breath, their ship wrecked and floating half-submerged beyond the line of the breakers.
They dragged themselves up the sand and slept, too weary to care whether or not they were safe from roaming men or beasts.
By nightfall they were dry and awake enough to continue, always moving west towards the further coast that looked on the sea that bounded the world, and beyond which lay the Island, and the last battlefield.
Tirilis was devastated by disease. Rotting corpses lay in the streets, pustulant and terrible. No one was left alive, but there was more than sufficient fruit on the trees to sustain Sadokhar and Tornagrain as they walked. There were no beasts left to ride.
As they moved north towards the borders of Caeva, it grew steadily colder. When they crossed into the great forests a hard north wind blew almost unceasingly and the edge of it was like a knife on the skin.
Further north, travelling was even more difficult. They saw the devastation left by ice storms which had killed everything in their path, freezing plants and animals where they stood.
They stood side by side on a bitter ridge, the wind keening in their ears, and gazed around them at a world blinded by snow before and behind. It was piled high on the mountains to every side, valleys shrouded in white like the preparation for some gr
eat burial of the world.
Sadokhar was shaking with cold. He turned to Tornagrain beside him, his face grey, body huddled into his clothes. “Come on, we’ve got to keep moving!” he urged. “We’ll die if we stop.”
Tornagrain shot him a glance wry with black humour, and set off down the slope without replying.
By the time they reached the next rise it had begun to thaw a little, and three miles on again on the crest of a pass they turned as the entire side of the mountain behind them caved in and crashed down three thousand feet in a roaring, suffocating avalanche of snow. It obliterated the forest that had stood there minutes before and changed the face of the land until it was unrecognisable.
When at last it was still, a crushing silence filled the air. They stood side by side, appalled by the power of destruction and the terrible beauty of it. It was Tornagrain who turned first.
“It can happen again,” he said quietly. “We’d better move.”
Sadokhar bit his lip, beginning to shiver. “It could just as well happen ahead as behind,” he pointed out.
Tornagrain raised his eyebrows. “You want to go back?” he asked sarcastically.
Sadokhar slapped him on the shoulder, and they set off down the slope. The wind was behind them, the temperatures dropping sharply, the sky heavy and dark.
They moved on steadily towards the shore, conscious of the ever-advancing rivers of ice behind them, the broken forests and the drowning snow.
When they came to the last thicket of woods and emerged from it onto the cliff edge, they saw a sight that staggered the imagination. The entire shoreline was gone, as if the ocean had risen out of its bed and inundated the sand hills and the sea walls, the harbour and the town beyond. Everything was broken, spread out and half submerged in mud. It was impossible to conceive of the force which must have devastated it to leave such a wreckage behind.
“God in Heaven!” Tornagrain breathed, lifting his face to the sky. “What happened? What could have done this?” He turned to Sadokhar. “Is there anyone alive on earth, except us?”