The Dark Lord's Demise

by John White

  Kurt crawled out from under the sword. Human feet and horse feet stamped all around him. Dominicus yelled, "They must not escape!" Something went thud, and Andron howled, "My arm!" Metal struck stone. Closer now, Dominicus called, "Did you slay him? Did you slay him?" Kurt puzzled over the metallic sound. Then he knew-Andron had hit the tree with his arm and sent his sword flying!

  Lisa and Wes collided with each other and held on. "Don't say anything!" Wes whispered fiercely. Lisa whispered back, "Where's Kurt?" Wes's hand grabbed the hilt of the Sword of Geburah. In the darkness how could he dare use it? He might kill Kurt instead of Andron!

  Kurt scrambled toward the spot where he thought he had heard the metallic sound. He felt around on the wet grass left and right. A few feet away Andron cursed softly as he frantically searched for his weapon. Kurt's hand touched a sharp edge and jerked away. He reached more carefully. The sword blade! He felt along it. No, that was the point. There, the handle! Kurt grabbed the sword and stood up so fast he was dizzy. He shouted, "I've got Andron's sword!"

  In triumph Wes called, "And I have the Sword of Geburah!" He remembered that when he drew the sword, rays of brilliant blue light shot out from it. By that light he could see his enemies. Wes tugged on the hilt of the great sword. It did not move. He pulled again. Again it would not come free. Cold sweat broke out all over him. The sword was stuck in its scabbard as surely as if it had rusted there for a hundred years. He thought, The soldiers don't know! They can't see! "I have the Sword of Geburah!" he called again, but his voice shook.

  Dominicus shouted, "You idiot! You have failed!"

  "The darkness fights against me!" Andron roared.

  Kurt slashed toward Andron's voice. Then came an angry horse squeal, a whack and a yell of pain. A heavy body hit the ground. Lisa held back a cheer. She cheered in her heart. Philo must have kicked Dominicus and sent him sprawling. The forest echoed with a confusion of neighs and shouts.

  Andron's voice shouted, "We must flee! Two swords against one! They have the sword of magic!" Brush crashed, he cursed, and more brush crackled and smashed.

  "How did you lose your sword?" Dominicus demanded. "How were you so stupid?"

  Andron lashed back, "And you, you gave up your sword to a girl!" Heavy feet splashed through water. Dominicus's voice was desperate. "We dare not go back! We have our orders!" From across the stream Andron's voice, muffled now, called, "Shall we stay here and die?" No answer came. Andiron shouted, "Stay then, you fool!"

  "Wait!" Dominicus cried.

  The Friesens heard rapid splashes, breaking brush and the violent curses of two men. The crashes and voices faded into the distance. Then only the sound of the stream as it burbled happily through the dark.

  Kurt sat down hard. He was flushed from exertion, cold with sweat, out of breath, shaking and deliriously happy.

  Lisa and Wes, however, were still in the dark-literally-about how Kurt was or where he was. When she was sure the soldiers were gone, Lisa asked quietly, "Kurt? Are you all right? Where are you?"

  "Here," he managed to say. Lisa left Wes and stepped carefully forward until she found him. She collapsed next to him and held her brother close. They laughed and cried at the same time. Wes stumbled forward until his shins bumped into them. Quickly he sat, but the scabbard of the Sword of Geburah stabbed into the ground and threw him off balance. He hated the thing! He wanted to unbuckle it and throw it into the darkness, but he was too afraid. He adjusted the sword so he could sit cross-legged on the ground.

  "We did it!" Kurt rejoiced. "Falk about teamwork! We didn't make a sound, and they didn't know where we were. Lisa, if you'd had a sword too, you'd have waded right into them!"

  Violent ripping and grinding noises came from a few feet away. Kurt shut up and gripped Andron's sword. Wes automatically grabbed for the hilt of the Sword of Geburah. His heart sank as he knew it would do no good.

  "Hey! What are you doing?" Lisa scolded.

  Kurt and Wes both thought Lisa meant them. "Shh!" they breathed.

  A deeper voice calmly said, "Grzing. Nice dew on th' grss. Lk nighttm."

  "Grazing!" Lisa shrieked. "How can you graze after what just happened?"

  "No rsn to pass up gd grss smply 'cause some pepl are idiots. Gd riddnc, I say."

  Kurt and Wes were terrified and confused. What new voice was this? Wes hissed, "Lisa! Who are you talking to?"

  "Oh, sorry, we've been so busy I forgot to tell you. Philo can talk. He tends to talk with his mouth full. The result of constant grazing."

  The boys relaxed. Talking animals were nothing new to them, at least, not in Anthropos. Kurt said to the horse, "That's fine, go ahead and graze all you want. Oh, and thanks for kicking Dominicus or whatever you did. It helped."

  Philo swallowed his grass and said, "Thank you. Horses are glad to be of service, if we are treated with simple decency. Say, did Dominicus leave his pack behind?"

  "Probably," said Lisa absently. Something bothered her about the fight. She wanted to ask Wes about it.

  Kurt tested the weight of Andron's sword in his hand. It felt good. He said, "Wes, you were right that we couldn't trust the soldiers. They were under orders to kill us! And I'll bet I know where those orders came from. Her majesty, Queen Hisschi!"

  "Then this whole honey-gathering mission is a fake," said Lisa. "She doesn't care if Tiqvah gets well. She'd rather he died! She only sent us on this trip so we'd get ambushed. By the way, Wes, I've got to ask you something."

  Wes dreaded Lisa's question. He knew what it would be. He was glad when they heard the ping of breaking tent ropes and the whoomp of collapsing tents, followed by a disorderly racket of something large rummaging through piles of cloth. Lisa called, "Philo! What are you doing?" The disturbance stopped. It was replaced by rhythmic grinding. The horse had found what he wanted. Lisa ordered him, "Get out of that pack! That grain's for the return trip!"

  "Yng lady, if I am not sufficntly fed, thr may not be any rtrn trp."

  "Okay, you can eat some of it, but if you're not careful, you'll eat yourself sick."

  Wes hoped Lisa had forgotten her question, but she hadn't. She asked, "Wes, why didn't you use the Sword of Geburah?"

  He fumbled for words. "Well, we didn't need it. Kurt was doing fine on his own. Kurt, that was brilliant how you found Andron's sword in the dark!"

  Kurt laughed. "Brilliant? I'd say desperate was more like it. He was feeling around for it as frantically as I was, and only a few feet from me. I didn't have time to wonder why you didn't draw the Sword of Geburah. Now that I think of it, it would have come in handy."

  "Not in this darkness," Wes said quickly. "I couldn't see. I might have cut your head off. Or Lisa's."

  Lisa reminded him, "The sword shoots out blue light when you draw it. You could have seen exactly where to strike."

  "Of course it shoots out blue light! We didn't want light, remember? Dominicus still had his own sword."

  "But the Sword of Geburah is more powerful than anything," Kurt protested. He didn't understand his brother's odd excuses.

  "Maybe you needed to win this one by yourself, Kurt. To build confidence," Wes suggested. As his arguments got weaker, his throat hurt and his face went hot with shame. Why couldn't they drop the subject?

  "Wes? What's wrong?" Lisa asked, her voice carrying genuine concern.

  Wes ran out of excuses. Now he was glad for the dark so his brother and sister couldn't see his face. "The truth is, I-I couldn't. I tried to draw it, but it wouldn't come out of the scabbard." He wondered if they understood the full implications of what he said.

  Kurt remarked in a flat, low voice, "You don't mean you weren't strong enough."

  Wes's fear exploded into anger. "Of course I don't mean I wasn't strong enough! You know what Uncle John told us! The Sword of Geburah can't be drawn by one who is not in the service of Gaal! And I couldn't-I couldn't!"

  No one replied. Even the noise of Philo's big teeth stopped. The stream's chatter filled what would have been te
rrible silence. Lisa asked tentatively, "How could you not be in the service of Gaal? Gaal told us to go on this journey. We know the queen is up to no good, but Gaal still told us to go."

  "It's not the journey," Wes moaned. "It's me. I've acted like a little dictator this whole trip. Like I have to be in charge. That isn't how Gaal and the Changer have taught us to do things. We're supposed to help each other, not order each other around. I may be the oldest, but that doesn't make me the boss."

  In the wet grass a cricket chirped. Kurt was about to strongly agree with Wes and add a few examples of his bossiness. Embarrassment stopped his words. He recalled some of his own behavior on the trail. "Wes, it's not just you. I bragged about how I finished off that ogre, when you'd already done the worst part."

  "Only because of the pigeon," Wes said. Near the stream some tree frogs made a hesitant start at their chorus.

  "And I was mad that you guys didn't make a fuss over me," Lisa said. "I mean when I stole Dominicus's sword and poked the ogre in the feet."

  "That was awfully brave," said Wes. "By the way, shouldn't youwell, never mind."

  "What? Oh, I know what you started to say. That I should thank you for saving my life when that thing dangled me about ten feet off the ground."

  Wes laughed. "Kurt sure helped in that department too. Lisa, I don't think you saw what he did. He didn't have a weapon, but he ran up and kicked that thing in two of its heads."

  Lisa giggled in nervous relief. "I was kind of busy right then."

  "I kicked it in three heads," Kurt corrected Wes. He was laughing too. Off in the woods a bird gave a short trill. Two or three others answered with lilting whistles. A breeze rustled the trees around the campsite. Some small animal, perhaps a field mouse or chipmunk, disturbed the leaves on the ground as it scampered by.

  "Hey!" Wes said. "You hear that? It's like nature decided to wake up and act normal!"

  As if in agreement, Philo started to grind his grain again. Lisa stumbled over a collapsed tent to grab his halter and turn him around. The horse grumbled only it little. "I was about to go get a nice drink from the stream anyway."

  "Go ahead. If I lead you there, you probably won't drink. In our world we have a proverb about that-Look out!" The horse jerked Lisa's arm and almost pulled her down. She let go of the halter and stepped quickly back from the rolling and thrashing of a large body.

  Philo grunted, "Itchy ... itchy. "

  "It's those growths on your back again, isn't it," Lisa said with sympathy.

  "He won't have to carry the honey bottles anymore," Wes commented. "We don't need to take them any further. That is, if we get any further in this darkness."

  "Do you think Vulcanus will come back?" Kurt wondered. He glanced upward. No huge bird shape loomed in the treetops. Only a lacework of bare branches was superimposed against sky. Kurt blinked, looked away and looked again. He could see the branches! They were little more than gray on black, or perhaps black on darker black, but he could see them. He yelled, "I can see trees! It's getting light again!" Lisa and Wes looked up and joined Kurt's celebration: "Trees! I can see trees!" "The light's coming back!"

  For a long breathless moment they watched the sky shift from black to the deepest of deep blue. The branches stood out more sharply. Beside the stream a misty white form materialized. It moved and became more solid. Philo himself emerged from the dark as he rose from his luxurious roll. Three shapeless brown lumps became the collapsed tents. The ground went from black to greenish gray. A green glow spread across the grass of the clearing. A few sparkles danced from the stream. Then the sky flashed the brilliant blue of midday. Light flooded the forest, so bright and sudden that it hurt their eyes. The children shut their eyes against it but quickly opened them and drank in the glorious sunlight.

  "I didn't know how much I'd missed it," Lisa said. They all blinked back tears that were only partly from the sudden brightness. She pointed to the edge of the woods. "Look. There's the path that leads on toward Lake Nachash." A clear trail climbed away from the campsite into the forest, which now resounded with birdcalls and the rat-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers.

  "But what was that darkness?" Kurt asked. "Was it a spell? If it was a spell, what broke it? Or was it just some weird kind of weather? Or an eclipse?"

  "Even a total eclipse doesn't make it totally dark," Wes answered. "At least not in our world. Of course, this is Anthropos and some things work differently. But I don't think it was weather or an eclipse. It lifted when ... well, it lifted when we all gave up our big ideas of ourselves."

  "And it came last night when we were still at odds with each other," Lisa said.

  "It came because of our own stuck-up pride," Kurt suggested. "You notice I didn't say your stuck-tip pride. I'm including myself."

  "It didn't just affect us. It affected the soldiers, the animals, the woods, everything. Nobody could see what was real," Wes said slowly. "We couldn't see each other. Or ourselves."

  "Or who was about to sneak up on us and cut our throats," Kurt said with his eyes wide. Nobody laughed. "If Gaal hadn't protected me, I'd be dead. Probably all of us would be (lead. Hey, I just thought of something. Wes, I'll bet you can draw the sword now!"

  Wes reached for the Sword of Geburah. He felt the chill of anxiety. Would it come free this time? Or would it be as frozen in place as before? As his hand closed over the leather grip, calm flooded into him as surely as the sunlight flooded the clearing. "I won't draw it now," he said quietly. "We don't need it now. I know the next time I have to use it, it'll be there for us. As long as I remember who's boss. Now come on. We've still got to get to the island and enter the Garden Room. If it's light here, maybe Dominicus and Andron have light too, and they'll come back after us."

  "Should we still go to the lodge on the south shore like we planned or go straight to the north side?" Kurt asked. "The north shore is a lot closer. Our only reason to go to the lodge was that Tiqvah said we'll find boats there."

  "That's still a good reason to go," Wes answered as he began to go through the soldiers' backpacks. "We have to get across the lake somehow. Let's get something to eat and get moving."

  They raided the backpacks for food, ate a hurried breakfast, filled their water bottles and repacked their own packs. They decided to leave the tents. They also discarded the leather honey bottles, except for two, which they filled with water.

  Wes looked over the wrecked camp. He mused, "All this chaos may work in our favor. If those guys come back, they may think somebody else attacked us and dragged us away, even killed us." He shook his head. "No, they'll figure out that we went on."

  Kurt kicked at a collapsed tent. "Yeah, and they'll be even more determined to get us. The queen won't give them another chance. Unless they lose their nerve again, they'll follow us."

  "We should hide that pile of honey bottles," Lisa said. "It just screams that we changed our plans. Let's stash them in the woods. We should make the camp look like we went on with our original mission." Quickly they gathered up the leather bottles, carried them a few yards into the woods and stashed them under leaves behind a fallen log.

  Philo's load was now much less than before. They decided to take turns riding him. Lisa went first. She settled herself behind the panniers and avoided the growths on his back. They were definitely larger than they had been only yesterday morning. She scratched them, and Philo stretched out his long neck with pleasure.

  Wes was anxious to be on the move. He shrugged into his backpack, looked everything over quickly and started up the trail.

  "Shall we not wait for Vulcanus%" Philo asked.

  Wes sighed. "No. We don't have time. Anyway, we don't need him. Who knows where he went or when he'll be back?"

  "Good," said Philo with a swish of his long silky tail. "He who follows an eagle will only arrive at a carcass."

  Lisa said, "Wow, Philo, (lid you make that up?"

  "It is a popular saying among horses," he replied and started up the trail after Wes and Kurt.

>   The trail snaked through a forest of elm, ash, oak, fir, spruce and maple. The children could only imagine its depth on either side. Here and there the undergrowth cleared to let them see far into the dappled reaches of the woods. Through the forest canopy, blue sky showed in patches with occasional fluffy white clouds. The clay would have been ideal for a hike-or a ride, for whoever was on Philo's back. The threat of the soldiers' possible pursuit and uncertainty ahead stole the pleasure from the journey.

  Their route was mostly level with low hills and some gullies. The denseness of the woods made them guess about what lay ahead. Philo was no help. He said he knew of the royal lodge only by hearsay; the king had never ridden him there.

  "Then I wonder if Tiqvah was right about the boats," Lisa wondered aloud. The boys had each taken a turn on the horse, and she was on his back again. Wes and Kurt walked a little ahead.

  "We'll have to trust Gaal about that," Wes replied. "If we need a boat, there'll be a boat." He sounded confident, but in his mind he saw a desolate, empty dock with no sign of a boat, or perhaps one turned upside down on shore with a jagged hole in its hull. He pushed the images from his mind. He couldn't let fearful thoughts crowd in on him. Right now he felt like everything crowded in on him. The Sword of Geburah was strapped to his left side. Kurt walked on his right with Andron's sword (which he now thought of as his own) stuck into his belt. Kurt crowded Wes so the scabbard of the Sword of Geburah knocked against trees and snagged on brush. Wes tried to reclaim his rightful half of the trail, only to have Kurt's sword (without a scabbard) poke him. He snapped, "Move over! Don't hog the whole path."

  "You're the one who's hogging the whole path, Wes! You've shoved me into three or four trees already."

  "I didn't shove you. I barely have room to walk. What if I have to draw the sword in a hurry and it's hung up on brush?"

  "Well, I don't much like getting pushed into brush either!"