Legacy of the Darksword (30 page)

It was up to me.

If I could have, I would have
shouted a warning to Eliza. I could not, however, and so, with an inarticulate
cry, I pointed toward Mosiah.

At the strange sound of my cry,
Eliza looked at me, alarmed and startled.

I pointed again, frantically.

She was just starting to turn
when Mosiah reached her. He grabbed hold of the Darksword.

Taken by surprise, she tried
valiantly to keep hold of the weapon, but Mosiah was strong and wrested it from
her with ease. Then, to my intense astonishment, he turned and, with all his
strength, flung the Darksword as far from him as he could manage. He flung it
directly into the gate.

The sword disappeared as if it
had become one with the darkness.

Gwendolyn reached out to seize
hold of Eliza.

Mosiah barreled into the woman,
knocking her heavily to the ground.

Eliza
screamed,
a scream that ended in a strangled gasp.

Gwendolyn vanished. Mosiah
wrestled with a being clad in short white robes, white boots, white gloves, and
a smiling skull mask beneath a white hood.

“An Interrogator!”
Scylla sucked in her breath.

“Run!” Mosiah cried, pinning the
white-robed person to the ground. “More will be coming!”

Indeed, we could see the silver
shimmer of the
D’karn-darah
surround us as they sprang up from the tall
grass and surged toward us.

“Run where?” Scylla demanded.

The
D’karn-darah
stood
between us and the air car. They were bearing down on us. Mosiah slammed the
head of the Interrogator into the ground. The skull mask lolled to one side,
lay quiet. Mosiah leapt to his feet and made a scrambling dash toward us.

“The gate!” he gasped. “Run for
it!”

The
D’karn-darah
had
formed a semicircle and
were
closing in on us, though
not very fast. It almost looked as if they were herding us toward the gate,
which was now the only retreat open to us.

Eliza stood numb with shock,
staring at the hideous being that had taken the form of her mother. I caught
hold of her hand, pulled her away,
nearly
dragged her
off her feet. Scylla took hold of her from the other side.

“Your Majesty, we must get you
safely away from these evil men,” Scylla said firmly.
“This
way!
Through the gate!”

Eliza nodded and started to run,
but she stumbled over her long skirts. Scylla and I helped her up and propelled
her toward the gate. By now, Mosiah had joined us. We were within a foot or two
of the gate, about to enter, when he gave a loud cry and held out his arms,
blocking our way. He pointed to what looked like a silver coin, shining on the
ground.

“Look out! It’s a stasis mine! Go
around! Don’t step on it!”

Glancing back, I saw the
D’karn-darah
increase their speed.

They had been expecting the
stasis mine to stop us. Seeing it had failed, they started to close in. But we
had already reached the gate.

What made me think that, once
inside the gate, we would be safe from our pursuers? For all I knew, they would
come in after us. The most we could hope for was to lose them in the forest’s
darkness, but they were so close behind that this hope seemed a forlorn one.

Of course, I now know what drew
me forward. A good thing I did not know then, I would never have believed it.
As it was, I had no chance to believe or disbelieve. I entered the Eastroad
Gate, entered the city of Zith-el , and I knew immediately that Scylla’s theory
was right.

Magic was very much alive on
Thimhallan.

Magic is the substance and
essence of Life
—
that
is the philosophy of this land and all who dwell here. Life and magic are one
and the same. They are inseparable and indistinguishable.

DARKSWORD
ADVENTURES

I
did not recall losing
consciousness, yet it seemed to me that I awoke from sleep. Then came a
frightening sensation of being compressed, the air squeezed from my lungs, as
if some force were trying to flatten me. That sensation ended almost before I
was fully aware of it. All I could see around me was a dreamlike shimmer of
color. I could hear only indistinct sounds.

I experienced a sickening feeling
of falling, as when one dreams of falling. The fall was gentle, however, and I
hit the ground running, fearful of pursuit. I almost immediately tripped over
the hem of a long robe.

I tumbled forward and landed
painfully on my hands and knees, scraping my knees against the cloth of the
robes and cutting my right hand on an exposed tree root.

The fall left me shaken. My
entrance through the gate left me more shaken still. I sat back on my heels,
drew a shivering breath, and looked around. My first thought was of Eliza: was
she safe? My second thought was in question marks and exclamation points: what
in the Almin’s name had happened to me?!

My blue jeans and sweater were
gone. In their place, I was wearing a long robe, made of cloth that was white
in color. The cloth was velvet, and very fine, soft and smooth. Though well
made, the robe was plain, devoid of any decoration save for a red band of trim
around the hem of the sleeves, and the skirt, which reached to my ankles.

Feeling an unusual coolness on my
head, I lifted my hand to discover that my long hair was gone, cut short, and
tonsured! Gingerly, and with a certain amount of horror, I felt the smooth
round bald spot on the top of my head, where my hair had been shaved, and now
grew in a ring that framed my face and just barely covered my ears.

The magic of the gate must have
done this, I realized confusedly, yet the information I had just read on
Zith-el indicated that the gate would change us into creatures of the Zoo. I had
never read that the people of Zith-el kept catalysts in their Zoo, yet that is
most certainly what I was dressed as—a catalyst in Thimhallan.

A catalyst in a Thimhallan which
no longer existed!

I pondered this amazing and
perplexing occurrence and wondered what I should do next. I was alone, so far
as I could tell, in a thick and shadowed forest. Had I not fallen over my
robes, I would have run headlong into a large oak tree. I was encircled by
trees—oaks, mostly, though here and there some pines and ferns grew, vying for
the meager sunlight which filtered through the oaks’ green foliage. I was just
noting in relief that I did not see the heart-shaped leaves of the Kij vine,
when it occurred to me that what I was seeing, I was seeing by the light of the
sun.

It had been near nightfall when
we ran into the gate.

Slowly I rose to my feet, the
white robe falling in soft folds around me. I could not call out to my
companions to let them know where I was, which was—on second thought—probably
just as well. I might have been discovered by our pursuers. I looked around,
trying to see some sign of my companions. Almost the moment I moved, I heard a
soft voice.

“Reuven?
Is that you? Over here.”

I heard at almost the same
instant another voice say worriedly, “Your Majesty! Are you all right?”

I stumbled through the
undergrowth toward the first voice, which I had recognized as Mosiah’s, and
emerged into a small clearing. He had his back to me, for he had turned at the
sound of the other voice. It resembled Scylla’s, though its accent was strange.

We heard the clink of metal and
the rattle of chain and a crashing in the brush and Scylla’s voice again
calling to Her Majesty.

I touched Mosiah on the arm to
attract his attention.

He turned and looked at me and
his eyebrows shot up, his mouth gaped, and his eyes widened. By that I knew
that the white robes and tonsured hair were not an illusion of my own making,
as I had been most desperately hoping.

“Reuven?”
He gasped out my name, and it
was more question than recognition.

“I think so,” I signed. “I’m not
sure. Do you know what is going on?”

“I have no idea!” he replied. His
words were heartfelt and uttered with such sincerity that I believed him. My
first thought was that he or the other
Duuk-tsarith
had been responsible
for this transformation. I knew now that was not the case.

A flash of sunlight glinting off
metal some distance away caught my eye.

A knight clad in silver-plate
armor worn over chain mail burst
through the forest cover, sword drawn. The knight bent over something on the
ground and quickly sheathed the sword.

“Your Majesty!” cried the knight.
“Are you hurt?”

“I am all right, Sir Knight.
Only a bruise here and there and those more to my dignity than my
person.”

“
Allow me to assist you, Your
Majesty.”

The knight reached out a gloved
hand.

A slender, delicate hand that
flashed with jewels reached up from the forest floor and grasped the knight’s
hand. A figure clad in the long, straight skirts of an old-fashioned riding
habit rose to her feet. It was Eliza, or rather it had been Eliza,
I
was not sure who she was now, any more than I was sure who
I was. The knight in plate and chain mail was undoubtedly Scylla.

“Blessed Almin,” whispered
Mosiah, and I would have echoed his prayer if I’d had the voice to do so.

“What is going on?” I signed to
Mosiah.

He made no answer, but he stared
hard at Scylla.

I tried again.
“The
Technomancers?
Did they follow us?”

He glanced around, shrugged, and
then shook his head. “If they have followed us, they’re nowhere in sight and
that’s not like them. The
D’karn-darah
don’t
deal in subtleties.”

By which I gathered that if they
had followed us we would be their captives by now. I breathed a little easier.
Some good had come out of this, it seemed, though the old saying about frying
pans and fires came into my mind.

The knight was respectfully
brushing dirt from Eliza’s gown, which was made of blue velvet, trimmed in
black. A golden crown gleamed in her black hair, jewels sparkled on her hands.
I realized in baffled amazement and with a sense of growing wonder that I
recognized her. This was the Eliza I had seen in that brief glimpse inside
another life. Her dress was different, but everything else about her was the
same: her hair, now intricately braided and coiffed, her stance, her bearing,
the jewels on her fingers.
Eliza was ruefully plucking twigs
from her hair and wiping the mud and grass stains from her hands, her every movement
graceful and regal.

“Where are our Enforcer and our
priest?” she asked worriedly, glancing around. “I hope they escaped the mob
safely.”

“I trust they did so, Your
Majesty. The catalyst was to my left when we entered the
gate,
the
Duuk-tsarith
was behind us. The mob was not that close. Most were at
the West Gate, trying to attack the carriage. Our ruse worked perfectly.
Everyone thought you were in the carriage, Your Majesty. It never occurred to
them that you would dare to enter the Eastroad Gate on foot.”

“My brave knights,” Eliza said
with a sigh. “We fear many have suffered grievous harm for our sake.”

“Their lives are pledged to Your
Majesty, as is my own.”

Mosiah started forward, slipping
silently through the undergrowth. I followed after him, trying to emulate his
stealth, but at my very first step my foot snapped a tree branch with a sound
like a gunshot.

Scylla raised her sword and moved
to stand protectively in front of her charge. Eliza looked curiously and
without fear in our direction as Mosiah and I walked into the light filtering
down from the oak leaves. I was expecting the same astonishment in their faces
which I had seen in Mosiah’s, even laughter at my expense, at the sight of my
odd haircut.

But the only expression on the
faces of both was relief and gladness, which emotions were echoed in Scylla’s
voice.

“Thank the Almin! You are safe!”
Scylla’s tone altered, becoming commanding. “Were any of the mob bold enough to
follow us through the gate, Enforcer?”

Mosiah glanced around. “Why ask
me? You can see as well as
I
.”

“Pardon, Enforcer,” Scylla
returned coolly, “but you
Duuk-tsarith
have magical means at your
disposal, means which I lack.”

“Pardon me, Sir Knight”—Mosiah’s
tone was sarcastic—”but have you forgotten that I am devoid of Life and cannot
work my magic?”

Scylla indicated me with a nod of
her head. “But you have a catalyst with you. He may be a house catalyst and not
trained to the specific needs of you warlocks, but he would do in an emergency,
I suppose.”