The Sapphire Rose

by David Eddings

It was too far. Sparhawk saw that immediately. Adus was much closer to the arched entrance to the alcove than he and Kalten were, and there were already soldiers between him and his friend and the archway. He chopped a Zemoch out of his way. ‘Kurik!’ he shouted, ‘fall back!’

  But it was too late. Kurik had already engaged the ape-like Adus. His chain-mace whistled through the air, crunching into his opponent’s armoured shoulders and chest, but Adus was in the grip of a killing frenzy, and he ignored those dreadful blows. Again and again he smashed at Kurik’s shield with his war-axe.

  Kurik was undoubtedly one of the most skilled men in the world when close fighting was involved, but Adus appeared totally mad. He hacked and kicked and bulled his way at Kurik, pushing and flailing with his battle-axe. Kurik was forced to retreat, giving ground grudgingly step by step.

  Then Adus threw his shield aside, took his axe-handle in both hands and began to swing a rapid series of blows at Kurik’s head. Forced finally into one last defence, Kurik grasped his shield with both hands and raised it to protect his head from those massive blows. Roaring in triumph, Adus swung – not at Kurik’s head, but at his body. The brutal axe bit deep into the side of his chest, and blood gushed from his mouth and from the dreadful wound in his chest. ‘Sparhawk!’ he cried weakly, falling back against the side of the arch.

  Adus raised his axe again.

  ‘Adus!’ Kalten roared, killing another Zemoch.

  Adus checked the axe-blow he had aimed at Kurik’s unprotected head and half-turned. ‘Kalten!’ he bellowed back his challenge. He contemptuously kicked Sparhawk’s friend out of his way and shambled towards the blond Pandion, his piggish eyes burning insanely beneath his shaggy brows.

  Sparhawk and Kalten abandoned any semblance of swordsmanship and simply cut down anything in their paths, relying more on strength and fury than upon skill.

  Adus, totally insane now, also chopped his way through his own soldiers to reach them.

  Kurik stumbled out into the corridor, clutching at his bleeding chest and trying to shake out his chain-mace, but his legs faltered. He stumbled and fell. With enormous effort, he rose to his elbows and began to drag himself after the savage who had struck him down. Then his eyes went blank, and he fell onto his face.

  ‘Kurik!’ Sparhawk howled. The light seemed to fade from his eyes, and there was a deafening ringing in his ears. His sword suddenly appeared to have no weight. He cut down whatever appeared before him. At one point, he found himself chopping at the stones of the wall. It was the sparks somehow that returned him to his senses. Kurik would take him to task for damaging his sword-edge.

  Somehow Talen had reached his father’s side. He knelt, struggling to turn Kurik over. And then he wailed, a cry of unspeakable loss. ‘He’s dead, Sparhawk! My father’s dead!’

  The wrench of that cry nearly drove Sparhawk to his knees. He shook his head like some dumb animal. He hadn’t heard that cry. He could not have heard it. He absently killed another Zemoch. Dimly, he heard the sound of fighting behind him and knew that Tynian and Ulath were engaging the soldiers from the throne-room.

  Then Talen rose, sobbing and reaching down into his boot. His long, needle-pointed dirk came out gleaming in his fist, and he advanced on Adus from the rear, his soft-shod feet making no sound. Tears streamed down the boy’s face, but his teeth were clenched with hate.

  Sparhawk ran his sword through another Zemoch, even as Kalten sent another head rolling down the corridor.

  Adus brained one of his own soldiers, roaring like an enraged bull.

  The roar suddenly broke off. Adus gaped, his eyes bulging. His mismatched armour did not fit very well, and the back of his cuirass did not reach all the way to his hips. It was there, in that area covered only by chain-mail, that Talen had stabbed him. Chain-mail will ward off the blow of sword or axe, but it is no defence against a thrust. Talen’s dirk drove smoothly into the half-witted brute’s back just under the lower rim of the cuirass, seeking and finding Adus’s kidney. Talen jerked his dirk free and stabbed again, on the other side this time.

  Adus squealed like a stuck pig in a slaughter-house. He stumbled forward, one hand clutching at the small of his back and his face suddenly dead white with pain and shock.

  Talen drove his dirk into the back of the animal’s knee.

  Adus stumbled a few more steps, dropping his axe and grabbing at his back with both hands. Then he fell writhing to the floor.

  Sparhawk and Kalten cut down the remaining Zemoch soldiers, but Talen had already snatched up a fallen sword and, standing astride Adus’s body, he was chopping at the brute’s helmeted head. Then he reversed the sword and tried desperately to stab down through the breast-plate into Adus’s writhing body, but he did not have enough strength to make his weapon penetrate. ‘Help me!’ he cried. ‘Somebody help me!’

  Sparhawk stepped to the weeping boy’s side, his own eyes also streaming tears. He dropped his sword and reached out to take the hilt of the one which Talen was trying to drive into Adus. Then he took hold of the sword’s cross-piece with his other hand. ‘You do it like this, Talen,’ he said almost clinically, as if he were merely giving instructions on the practice field.

  Then, standing one on either side of the whimpering Adus, the boy and the man took hold of the sword, their hands touching on the hilt.

  ‘We don’t have to hurry, Sparhawk,’ Talen grated from between clenched teeth.

  ‘No,’ Sparhawk agreed. ‘Not really, if you don’t want to.’

  Adus shrieked as they slowly pushed the sword into him. The shriek broke off as a great fountain of blood gushed from his mouth. ‘Please!’ he gurgled.

  Sparhawk and Talen grimly twisted the sword.

  Adus shrieked again, banging his head on the floor and beating a rapid tattoo on the flagstones with his heels. He arched his quivering body, belched forth another gusher of blood and collapsed in an inert heap.

  Talen, weeping, sprawled across the body, clawing at the dead man’s staring eyes. Then Sparhawk bent, gently picked the boy up and carried him back to where Kurik lay.

  Chapter 29

  There was still fighting in the torchlit corridor, the clash of steel on steel, cries, shouts, groans. Sparhawk knew that he must go to the aid of his friends, but the enormity of what had just happened left him stunned, unable to move. Talen knelt beside Kurik’s lifeless body, weeping and pounding his fist on the flagstone floor.

  ‘I have to go,’ the big Pandion told the boy.

  Talen did not answer.

  ‘Berit,’ Sparhawk called, ‘come here.’

  The young apprentice came cautiously out of the alcove, his axe in his hands.

  ‘Help Talen,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Take Kurik back inside.’

  Berit was staring in disbelief at Kurik.

  ‘Move, boy!’ Sparhawk said sharply, ‘and take care of Sephrenia.’

  ‘Sparhawk!’ Kalten shouted. ‘There are more of them coming!’

  ‘On the way!’ Sparhawk looked at Talen. ‘I have to go,’ he told the boy again.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Talen replied. Then he looked up, his tear-streaked face savage. ‘Kill them all, Sparhawk,’ he said fiercely. ‘Kill them all.’

  Sparhawk nodded. That would help Talen a bit, he thought as he returned to retrieve his sword. Anger was a good remedy for grief. He picked up his sword and turned, feeling his own rage burning in his throat. He also pitied the Zemoch soldiers as he went to rejoin Kalten. ‘Fall back,’ he told his friend in a coldly level tone. ‘Get your breath.’

  ‘Is there any hope?’ Kalten asked, parrying a Zemoch spear-thrust.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sparhawk.’

  It was a small group of soldiers, no doubt one of the detachments that had been trying to lure the knights into side passages. Sparhawk went towards them purposefully. It was good to be fighting. Fighting demanded every bit of a man’s attention and pushed everything else from his mind. Sparhawk moved deftly against the half-dozen Zemochs.
There was a certain obscure justice working now. Kurik had taught him every move, every technical nuance he was bringing to bear, and those skills were supplemented by a towering rage over his friend’s death. In a very real sense, Kurik had made Sparhawk invincible. Even Kalten seemed shocked at his friend’s sheer savagery. It was the work of no more than a few moments to kill five of the soldiers facing him. The last turned to flee, but Sparhawk passed his sword quickly to his shield-hand, bent and picked up a Zemoch spear. ‘Take this with you,’ he called after the fleeing man. Then he made a long, practised cast. The spear took the soldier squarely between the shoulder blades.

  ‘Good throw,’ Kalten said.

  ‘Let’s go and help Tynian and Ulath.’ Sparhawk still felt a powerful need to kill people. He led his friend back towards the turn in the corridor where the Alcione Knight and his Genidian comrade were holding back the soldiers who had rushed into the maze from the throne-room in response to Adus’s bellowed command.

  ‘I’ll take care of this,’ Sparhawk said flatly.

  ‘Kurik?’ Ulath asked.

  Sparhawk shook his head and began killing Zemochs again. He waded on, leaving the maimed behind him for his companions to dispatch.

  ‘Sparhawk!’ Ulath shouted. ‘Stop! They’re running!’

  ‘Hurry!’ Sparhawk yelled back. ‘We can still catch them!’

  ‘Let them go!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You’re keeping Martel waiting, Sparhawk,’ Kalten said sharply. Kalten sometimes made a show of being stupid, but Sparhawk saw immediately just how smoothly his blond friend had brought him up short. Killing relatively innocent soldiers was no more than an idle pastime when compared to dealing once and for all with the white-haired renegade. He stopped. ‘All right,’ he panted, nearly exhausted from his exertions, ‘let’s go back. We’ve got to get past that sliding wall before the soldiers come back anyway.’

  ‘Are you feeling any better?’ Tynian asked as they started back towards the alcove.

  ‘Not really,’ Sparhawk said.

  They passed Adus’s body. ‘Go on ahead,’ Kalten told them. ‘I’ll be right along.’

  Berit and Bevier awaited them at the entrance to the alcove.

  ‘Did you chase them off?’ Bevier asked.

  ‘Sparhawk did,’ Ulath grunted. ‘He was very convincing.’

  ‘Aren’t they likely to gather reinforcements and come back?’

  ‘Not unless their officers have very large whips, they won’t.’

  Sephrenia had arranged Kurik’s body in a posture of repose. His cloak covered the dreadful wound which had spilled out his life. His eyes were closed and his face calm. Once again Sparhawk felt an unbearable grief. ‘Is there any way –?’ he began, even though he already knew the answer.

  Sephrenia shook her head. ‘No, dear one,’ she replied. ‘I’m sorry.’ She sat beside the body holding the weeping Talen in her arms.

  Sparhawk sighed. ‘We’re going to have to leave,’ he told them. ‘We have to get back to those stairs before anybody decides to follow us.’ He looked back over his shoulder. Kalten was hurrying to join them, and he was carrying something wrapped in a Zemoch cloak.

  ‘I’ll do this,’ Ulath said. He bent and picked Kurik up as if the powerful squire were no more than a child, and they retraced their steps to the foot of the stairs leading up into the dusty darkness above.

  ‘Slide that wall back in place,’ Sparhawk said, ‘and see if you can find some way to wedge it shut.’

  ‘We can do that from up above,’ Ulath said. ‘We’ll block the track it slides on.’

  Sparhawk grunted as he made some decisions. ‘Bevier,’ he said regretfully, ‘we’re going to have to leave you here, I’m afraid. You’re badly wounded, and I’ve already lost enough friends today.’

  Bevier started to object, but then changed his mind.

  ‘Talen,’ Sparhawk went on, ‘you stay here with Bevier and your father.’ He smiled a sad smile. ‘We want to kill Azash; we don’t want to steal Him.’

  Talen nodded.

  ‘And Berit –’

  ‘Please, Sparhawk,’ the young man said, his eyes filled with tears. ‘Please don’t make me stay behind. Sir Bevier and Talen are safe here, and I might be able to help when we get to the temple.’

  Sparhawk glanced at Sephrenia. She nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. He wanted to warn Berit to be careful, but that would have demeaned the apprentice, so he let it pass.

  ‘Give me your war-axe and shield, Berit,’ Bevier said, his voice weak. ‘Take these instead.’ He handed Berit his lochaber and his burnished shield.

  ‘I won’t dishonour them, Sir Bevier,’ Berit swore.

  Kalten had stepped towards the rear of the chamber. ‘There’s a space back here under the stairs, Bevier. It might be a good idea for you and Kurik and Talen to wait for us under there. If the soldiers manage to break through the wall, the three of you won’t be in plain sight.’

  Bevier nodded as Ulath took up Kurik’s body to conceal it behind the stairs.

  ‘There’s not much left to say, Bevier,’ Sparhawk told the Cyrinic Knight, taking his hand. ‘We’ll try to come back as soon as we can.’

  ‘I’ll pray for you, Sparhawk,’ Bevier said, ‘for all of you.’

  Sparhawk nodded, then knelt briefly at Kurik’s side and took his squire’s hand. ‘Sleep well, my friend,’ he murmured. Then he rose and started up the stairs without looking back.

  The stairs at the far end of that broad, straight pathway that stretched across the mole-tunnel mounds of the labyrinth below were very wide and sheathed with marble. There was no sliding wall to conceal a chamber at the foot of those stairs, and no maze led away from the temple. No maze was needed.

  ‘Wait here,’ Sparhawk whispered to his friends, ‘and put out those torches.’ He crept forward, pulled off his helmet and lay down at the top of the stairs. ‘Ulath,’ he murmured, ‘hold my ankles. I want to see what we’re getting into.’ With the huge Thalesian keeping him from tumbling in a steely clatter down the stairs, Sparhawk inched his way headfirst down the stairs until he could see out into the room beyond.

  The temple of Azash was a place of nightmare. It was, as the dome which roofed it implied, circular, and it was fully half a mile across. The curving, inwardly-sloping walls were of polished black onyx, as was the floor. It was much like looking into the very heart of night. The temple was not lighted by torches but by huge bonfires flaring and roaring in enormous iron basins set on girder-like legs. The vast chamber was encircled by tier upon tier of polished black terraces stepping down and down and down to a black floor far beneath.

  At evenly-spaced intervals along the top terrace were twenty-foot marble statues of things which were for the most part not human. Then Sparhawk saw a Styric form among them and somewhat further along an Elene one. He realized that the statues were representations of the servants of Azash, and that humanity played a very small and insignificant part in that assemblage. The other servants dwelt in places at once very far away and at the same time very, very close.

  Directly opposite the entrance through which he peered was the towering idol. Man’s efforts to visualize and to represent his Gods are never wholly satisfactory. A lion-headed God is really the image of a human body with the head of a lion tacked on for the sake of contrast. Mankind perceives the face as the seat of the soul; the body is largely irrelevant. The icon of a God is not meant to be representational, and the face of the icon is intended to suggest the spirit of the God rather than to be an accurate recreation of His real features. The face of the idol rearing high above the polished black temple contained the sum of human depravity. Lust was there certainly and greed and gluttony; but there were other attributes in that face as well, attributes for which there were no names in any human tongue. Azash, to judge from His face, craved – required – things beyond human comprehension. There was a haggard, unsatisfied look about that face. It was the face of a Being with overpowering desires which
would not – could not – be satisfied. The lips were twisted, the eyes brooding and cruel.

  Sparhawk wrenched his eyes from that face. To look too long at it was to lose one’s soul.

  The body was not fully formed. It was as if the sculptor had been so overwhelmed by that face and all that it implied that he no more than sketched in the remainder of the figure. There was a spidery-like profusion of arms that extended in clusters of tentacles from vast shoulders. The body leaned back somewhat with its hips thrust forward obscenely, but what would have been the focus of that suggestive pose was not there. Instead there was a smooth, unwrinkled surface, shiny and looking very much like a burn scar. Sparhawk remembered the words Sephrenia had cast into the God’s teeth during her confrontation with the Seeker at the north end of Lake Venne. Impotent, she had called Him, and emasculate. He preferred not to speculate on the means the Younger Gods may have used to mutilate their older relative. There was a pale greenish nimbus emanating from the idol, a glow much like that which had come from the face of the Seeker.

  There was a ceremony of some sort taking place on the circular black floor far below in the sickly green glow coming from the altar. Sparhawk’s mind recoiled from the notion of calling that ceremony a religious rite. The celebrants cavorted naked before the idol. Sparhawk was not some unworldly, cloistered monk. He was acquainted with the world, but the levels of perversion being demonstrated in that rite turned his stomach. The orgy which had so engrossed the primitive Elene Zemochs back in the mountains had been child-like, almost pure, by comparison. These celebrants appeared to be attempting to duplicate the perversions of non-humans, and their fixed stares and galvanic movements clearly showed that they would continue the ceremony until they died from sheer excess. The lower tiers of that huge, stair-stepped basin were packed with green-robed figures who raised a groaning discordant chant, an empty sound devoid of any thought or emotion.

  Then a slight movement caught Sparhawk’s eye, and he looked quickly towards his right. A group of people were gathered on the top terrace a hundred yards or more away beneath the leprous white statue of something that must have been dredged from the depths of madness. One of the figures had white hair.