The Return of the Sword

by Roger Taylor

Despite their predicament, Usche was wide-eyed. ‘It’s like being at the centre of infinity,’ she said, spinning round and watching her myriad counterparts aping her.

  Andawyr grunted and fiddled with his nose. ‘I’m open to suggestions,’ he said.

  ‘Smash it. Smash it all.’

  Isloman’s harsh verdict drew all eyes to him.

  ‘I meant, what’s all this about?’ Andawyr remonstrated.

  ‘I know what you meant, but this isn’t the time for debate,’ Isloman retorted. ‘We don’t know how or why we came here – whether it’s chance or some devilment on Sumeral’s part – or whether we’re all dreaming, for that matter – but there’s nothing here I want to learn about any more than there’s anything I’d want to learn from murdering children in their beds. Smash it.’ He took his chisel back from Atelon and made to stand on one of the ridges, apparently with the intention of assaulting the baleful star.

  ‘No!’ Andawyr cried out urgently, seizing the big man’s arm and pulling him back.

  Isloman jerked his arm free angrily and seemed intent on arguing, but Andawyr did not give him the opportunity.

  ‘I told you – none of this is decoration,’ he said, seizing Isloman’s arm again. He pointed at the star. ‘That thing’s the centre of something – a terrible focus for everything here. Who knows what touching it might do?’ He looked questioningly at Oslang and Atelon.

  Both of them looked unhappy about what he appeared to be asking.

  ‘We’ll have to, I suppose,’ Oslang said. ‘But be careful – very careful.’

  Andawyr ushered everyone back into the doorway, then stood with Oslang and Atelon at either side of him.

  ‘I’m just going to touch that thing with the Power,’ he said. ‘Very quickly. See if I can learn anything about it.’ He turned to Usche and Ar-Billan. ‘Whatever happens to me – or to all three of us – don’t interfere. Do you understand?’

  They both nodded.

  Andawyr rubbed his hands together nervously, then wiped them down his rope. After a glance at his companions he closed his eyes and became very still. Instinctively, Isloman moved protectively in front of Usche and Ar-Billan.

  There was no sound and, whatever Andawyr did, Isloman saw nothing of it. But suddenly he was catching the little man as he was thrown violently backwards. The force of the impact sent both of them sprawling. Isloman rolled over, clutching his stomach, obviously winded, but Andawyr lay still. Oslang and Atelon, visibly shaken, were by his side immediately but as Oslang bent over to examine him, he became aware of Ar-Billan nervously clutching at his robe.

  Looking up, he saw that the chamber was no longer empty. Picking its way towards him over the jagged ridges with a repellent fastidiousness was a strange horse, bearing a helmed and armoured rider.

  * * * *

  Hawklan froze at the sound. It was a faint clicking. Was the Labyrinth awakening?

  Was this the presage of a tumult that would rise and rise until it dashed him to his death?

  The clicking grew louder. Hawklan could do no other than hold his breath, even though he knew that no sound was too slight for the Labyrinth to seize upon.

  ‘Hello,’ said a familiar voice in the darkness. Hawklan, senses heightened by fear, started violently at the unexpected sound.

  ‘Dar-volci,’ he gasped out in a mixture of anger and relief.

  ‘What are you doing here? What’s happened?’ asked the felci.

  ‘Where are Tarrian and Grayle?’ Hawklan asked in return.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ Dar-Volci replied. ‘I was trying to find my way back to the hall.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Gone. Just disappeared. They were running ahead of me, then everything went very peculiar and they weren’t there. Rather churlish, I thought, leaving me without a word.’

  The faint attempt at humour merely served to highlight a very uncharacteristic unease in the felci.

  Hawklan crouched in front of him. ‘What do you mean, everything went peculiar?’

  ‘Just that,’ came the unhelpful reply. ‘And there I was, on my own. Now everything seems to be changing all the time.’ He repeated his own question before Hawklan could press him further. ‘Anyway, what are you doing here?’

  Hawklan told him.

  Dar-volci let out a series of anxious whistles. He began twisting round as though slowly chasing his own tail. ‘All gone? Andawyr and the others – all gone? And the hall and the Armoury?’

  Hawklan had never seen him so disturbed.

  ‘And we’re lost?’

  ‘We’re lost.’

  Dar-volci stopped turning, chattered noisily to himself, then looked around.

  ‘Not good,’ he muttered. ‘And this place is still changing.’ Hawklan followed his gaze but could neither see nor sense anything untoward.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘Something’s happening, dear boy,’ Gavor said. ‘I’ve felt it in my pinions ever since we came in here, but don’t ask me what it is.’

  Hawklan knew that his companions were telling him all they could.

  ‘Very well,’ he said to Dar-volci. ‘Take us to where Tarrian and Grayle disappeared. Perhaps we’ll find something there.’

  ‘I can’t,’ the felci replied. ‘I told you, everything’s changing. It’s almost as though the Labyrinth is only real where we can see it – or where you are,’ he added as an afterthought.

  Hawklan frowned. ‘Go where your feet lead you, then,’ he said as encouragingly as he could. ‘We must keep searching. We can’t do nothing.’

  Dar-volci let out a final low whistle, then pattered off. Hawklan followed him.

  They walked for a long time through the unchanging landscape of the Labyrinth. Although there was no hint of a return of its death-dealing sounds Hawklan became increasingly aware of a sense of oppressiveness as they moved on. Whether it was something outside himself or just mounting despair he could not have said, but it grew relentlessly.

  Increasingly he found himself taking deep breaths and looking warily at the columns as if at any moment they might move together and enclose him like an insect gripped in a spider’s web.

  ‘Stop a moment,’ he gasped. He sat down and, leaning against one of the columns, closed his eyes. Gavor hopped down from his shoulder and stood next to Dar-volci. Both of them looked at him in silence.

  In the deeper darkness behind his eyes, Hawklan struggled to set aside the fears and anxieties that were clamouring ever louder. The worst of these was that he was going to die in this desolate limbo, though this was heavily fringed about with a sense of guilt that in some way he was betraying his friends – they needed him, they needed what he could do.

  But what could he do . . .?

  Fight? Heal?

  Yes, both. They were sides of the same coin. But what could he fight here? And what could he heal?

  He opened his eyes. Gavor and Dar-volci were still watching him patiently. This place was oppressive to him, but it must be truly dreadful for Gavor, he thought, a creature who soared joyously on the unseen, shifting pathways of the high mountain air. He reached out to the bird who clambered on to his hand.

  ‘I was going to say we’ve been in worse places. But we haven’t, have we?’ he said.

  ‘Afraid not, dear boy. Are you ready to move on?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  Hawklan lifted the raven on to his shoulder then placed his hand against the column he had been leaning on as though it were an injured limb.

  Turmoil filled him and he pulled his hand back quickly. How could that be? He was no carver. He had no sensitivity for cold stone. Isloman and the other Orthlundyn routinely twitted him about his rock-blindness.

  He placed both hands against the column. The turmoil was there still – it had not been a trick of his imagination – but this time he did not pull away. It was no new sensation for him. It was the disturbance he felt in any wound – a struggle between forces of disorder and
equilibrium – imbalance and balance.

  What could it be that would make this dead stonework respond thus?

  He remembered Usche and Andawyr. This conjunction that they feared stemmed from the place of infinite smallness where all things have a commonality – ‘These walls, these tables, everything, even ourselves,’ Usche had said.

  Now he could feel it.

  This he could fight – and heal.

  He touched the disturbance as he would any other wound, instinct guiding him.

  A tremor shook him. For an instant he thought that the Labyrinth was preparing to attack, but he thrust the fear from him and persisted with his healing touch.

  An incongruous ‘Ooh!’ from both Gavor and Dar-volci made him turn.

  The Labyrinth was lighter. His eyes were drawn upwards.

  Where before the columns had faded into low darkness, they now reached up much further, giving him the impression that he was standing in a great forest. Gavor glided down onto the floor and flapped his wings noisily.

  ‘Carry on,’ Hawklan said to Dar-volci.

  As they walked, Hawklan briefly touched some of the columns. It was no light-hearted healing, however. He knew that the pain he was feeling was beyond his curing. It was like walking alone across a battlefield strewn with mangled corpses and ringing with the terrible cries of the wounded. So, as on a battlefield, he did what he could, leaving the greater part of the field to the mercies of chance.

  Nevertheless, it gave him strength.

  Slowly, imperceptibly, the light around them changed and though the columns were too close to see any further ahead, they could see them rising higher and higher. Wherever they were, this was no construct in the bowels of Anderras Darion.

  He avoided dwelling on the thought. He would have no answers, he knew, and nothing was to be served by it.

  Usche had said that the place of infinite smallness was one where cause and effect, even time and distance, had little meaning.

  ‘It’s a disturbing place, but it is and it has to be accepted.’

  And if the coming conjunction had brought this disturbing nature here, then so be it. Hawklan accepted. He would do what he could – he would trust his healing.

  He glanced upwards, then screwed his eyes tight. As the columns tapered together, fading into the heights above, it seemed as though they were gently waving.

  * * * *

  ‘Not a movement. Not a word,’ Yatsu hissed as the high-pitched shrieking faded.

  It came again at irregular intervals, rising and falling in some unfathomable exchange. It was an awful sound that spoke to its hearers at depths far below their conscious understanding. Reaching into Yatsu it fanned the embers of his despair, threatening to ignite them into a consuming incandescence. Only the cold discipline that cruel experience had given him prevented it. That, and the trembling he could feel in Pinnatte lying by his side.

  ‘It’s a noise,’ he whispered to the others, breaking his own injunction. ‘Like fingernails on glass, maybe, but still only a noise.’

  Pinnatte’s trembling continued.

  The shrieking grew steadily louder and more intense until eventually it was reverberating all about the cave, seeming to come from every direction and surrounding the cowering group.

  Then, abruptly, it stopped. The sudden silence was like an impact.

  Pinnatte stiffened. He was no longer trembling.

  ‘Something’s different,’ he whispered urgently. ‘They’re . . .’

  Yatsu’s hand shot out and covered his mouth.

  Black against blue, the silhouettes of two riders appeared at the mouth of the cave. The heads of their steeds were swaying slowly, side to side, up and down, as they peered into the darkness.

  ‘Did you think to come here unnoticed?’

  The voice was hung about with the lingering echoes of the shrieking from which it seemed to have been woven. A mocking concern in it intensified its jarring dissonance.

  No one moved.

  The voice came again.

  ‘You mar the cleansing of this place with your presence. Come into the light. If service to Him whose return is nigh can be found, you may preserve those transient, trembling shadows you call your lives.’

  Abruptly and with unexpected swiftness, Pinnatte was on his feet and striding towards the entrance of the cave. Nimbly he avoided a frantic lunge by Yatsu who swore under his breath.

  ‘Come with me, all of you,’ Pinnatte said loudly.

  As he stepped out into the blue light to confront the two riders, he turned and repeated the command authoritatively, adding, ‘These are two of the three who are to be judged. Hurry, the time is near.’ Then he was addressing the riders. ‘And did your companion expect to escape judgement by fleeing?’

  Any possibility of either concealment or surprise having been lost, Yatsu signalled to the others to follow the lead that Pinnatte was setting. He was still addressing the riders as they emerged hesitantly.

  ‘Or did you think to blame him for your failure?’ Pinnatte’s voice was arrogant and taunting.

  Yatsu’s mind was racing. All that he had seen of Pinnatte was a tongue-tied and confused young man, apparently aware of what was happening around him but somehow locked away from it. He had learned from Atelon that he had been a successful thief in the harsh streets of Arash-Felloren before the Kyrosdyn had laid their hands on him, and he had learned from Vredech, and now from his own limited observation, that Pinnatte was a markedly different individual in this world. But what game was he playing? Some reckless bluff?

  Gulda had said that Pinnatte and Vredech could have been drawn to this world because Pinnatte might still have some residue of the apparently impossible ability both to move between worlds and use the Power. Could it be that this was coming to the fore here?

  Listen! Yatsu ordered himself. Listen. Watch.

  The latter, however, was not easy. The two riders were a fearful sight. Sumeral’s lieutenants, His Uhriel, made flesh again. Black-clad and livid in the blue light, sitting astride their evil-eyed and serpentine mounts that might once have been horses, they radiated a presence that defied description. Yatsu fidgeted casually, his hands and feet moving continually. The other Goraidin were doing the same. It was a device normally used to unsettle the concentration of a possible enemy, but here, Yatsu knew it was more to control the violent trembling that was shaking them all. His mouth was burningly dry.

  A helm was removed to reveal a woman’s face. Once it might have been, if not beautiful, then certainly striking, but now it was gaunt and drawn, with a sickly, pallid lustre. Lifeless eyes, black and watery, stared out of it. Dowinne, Yatsu presumed with a shiver he could barely restrain; Vredech’s erstwhile nemesis. Her rasping voice cut through his tumbling thoughts.

  ‘You would take His name in vain? Blessed be it. You would utter such profanity on the very world that will open the Great Way and bring us to His Heartworld?’

  Her voice and the sinuous writhing of her mount turned Yatsu’s stomach.

  But was there a hint of doubt in that challenge?

  ‘Something’s different,’ Pinnatte had said before Yatsu had stifled him.

  An Uhriel could have shrivelled all of them with the least effort, but one had fled and this one was debating . . .

  Pinnatte held out his hand, fingers extended, and made a slow, vertical, cutting action. At his fingertips a line of bright light appeared. It widened and Yatsu had a fleeting impression of a landscape within it, then Pinnatte clenched his fist and the light was gone.

  A dreadful life came into Dowinne’s blank eyes as she stared down at Pinnatte.

  ‘You are the one who came with Vredech,’ she hissed. ‘And you fled with him. Who are you?’

  ‘This is not how it should be,’ her companion interrupted. ‘Not now the fount of the Great Way is known to us. This is trickery by His enemies. We must destroy them. We must complete our work quickly or it will be less than perfect. The time is near.’

  Thou
gh the voice was shrill and jarring, like Dowinne’s, there was almost fear in it, and Marna started in recognition. She pushed her way through the Goraidin.

  ‘Rannick?’ she exclaimed.

  The rider looked at her for a long time.

  ‘More trickery,’ he said slowly. ‘You have the likeness of one I knew before I was born again. But that is not possible. You could not have come here.’

  ‘It is me, Rannick,’ Marna said, almost plaintively. ‘What’s happened to you? What’ve you become? What’ve you done here?’

  The rider let out a piercing cry and tore off his helm. Marna found herself staring into rancid white eyes set in a face, pale and gaunt like Dowinne’s, but drawn and desert-leached. White hair moved about his head as though stirred by a wind in another place.

  Marna stepped back in horror and whispered again, ‘Rannick, what in the name of pity’s happened to you?’

  The Uhriel leaned forward and stared at her.

  ‘Whatever you are, you cannot be here. All lesser Ways lead only to the fount. Where is the Gateway you used?’ Marna staggered as he shrieked at her, but Pinnatte stepped between them.

  ‘It is not for you to question my servants,’ he said, his voice unexpectedly powerful. ‘It is for you to be judged and to accept sentence.’

  He cut his hand downwards as he had before and a thin light hovered briefly in the blue air. ‘Here is a Gateway, doubter.’ Then he flicked his hand towards Rannick’s mount, which shied and let out a strange mewling cry. ‘And here is the Power.’ He turned to Dowinne. ‘I am the one who came with Vredech. The one you deemed flawed and imperfect. That was but to test your vision. And it was lacking!’

  The last words were filled with such menace and vehemence that both riders edged backwards. Yatsu looked at Pinnatte, suddenly even more fearful. Some strange attribute, hidden in their own world, was obviously available to him here. But had some darker trait come with it – something that the Kyrosdyn had seen in him? Were they now facing not two Uhriel, but three?

  Pinnatte’s contorted features were not reassuring. His eyes were wide and staring, and his mouth was drawn back to reveal teeth clenched with either rage or effort. Abruptly he moved between the two Uhriel, thrust his hands upwards, then cut violently downwards.