Lyrec (35 page)

“I regret it isn’t all that simple,” Lyrec answered. “We won’t be moving through normal space, and I haven’t the
crex
enough for more than a few of you. Your powers would be useful to me, adding weight to my own. Might I instead call upon you to unify and direct them if necessary? Only if necessary.”

“Of course. Gladly.”

“Don’t agree so casually, Malchavik. You might die from this. You might all die from this.”

“What?” said Grohd.

Malchavik smiled ironically. “We recognized that before I answered. None of us would prefer to die, but we will not turn our backs on an avatar when he asks us to stand, for we want to join our own in the high places of Mordun, not in the pits.”

“Avatar?” asked Grohd.

“As you choose,” Lyrec answered the Kobachs, then turned to Grohd. “About your payment, my friend —”

“No, no.” He hadn’t considered before that Lyrec might have been sent by the gods. And that weapon — who but a god could wield such a thing? “Lyrec, dear fellow. When you come back, we’ll talk about it.” He could not quite believe he had said this, but added, “And I’ll give you drinks in celebration of your … whatever it is you’re going to do.”

Borregad gave Grohd a dreamy smile.

“You heard what he said, Borregad—when we get back.”

The cat looked the room over. “I detest long good-byes and this one has been going on for centuries. Let’s go.” He leaped into Lyrec’s arms.

The
crex
quivered in its sheath. Defying gravity, it poured up his side, breaking into hundreds of webs that spun around his body so fast that no eye could follow. The cat, too, began changing color as the webs spun to him. His fur flattened. Mercury-silver spread over him.

The two figures became a statue of living polished silver. Lyrec’s eyes opened. They glowed a deep blue, like the tip of a flame. Then the air rushed past the Kobachs, tugging at their clothes and hair, and Lyrec and Borregad vanished. The tavern shook in a thunderclap that knocked people off their feet and split one table down the middle. One ceiling beam cracked along its entire length.

Holding onto the bar, Grohd took stock of the damage. Then he shook one fist at the air and shouted, “God or no god, I expect you to pay for that!”

Chapter 25.

It began with a with a gentle flutter of the curtain at the back of the room. A wind blew around the dark unadorned chamber. Dust on the floor swirled up in a spiral, then burst away from the center as a thunderclap shook Castle Ladoman to its foundations.

Soldiers drilling in the yard below looked up and wondered briefly if this were yet another omen. Their faces were set, their minds simmering in anticipation of their leader’s appearance. She had left them to drill. They wanted war, wanted it so desperately that they forgot the omens in their fury. The thunder clapped again, but the soldiers had ceased to pay it any mind.

In the room high above, Lyrec and Borregad arrived.

Lyrec opened his eyes. In front of him stood the black tripod as Borregad had described it—three legs ending in a single hand that cupped a silver globe. Now they had only to find Ladomirus and force him to summon “Chagri.”

Behind him, something pattered forward. Lyrec swung about in a crouch, hands up to ward off a blow. Seeing who it was, he said, “You!” and found that she, Talenyecis, had said it at the same moment. She held her sword drawn, but had not struck. Lowering the weapon, her hands shook, but she spoke with great self-control, calmly, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. “I can’t say why, but I did expect you would return, although not like this—like some silver idol stolen from a shrine.”

“Excuse our appearance—it’s necessary.” He glanced down at Borregad; the cat concentrated on the woman, content for once to observe a situation without climbing into it. “Why are you up here?” Lyrec asked.

“Why, indeed?” She studied the tip of her sword. “What if I told you it was to kill you?”

“Is it?”

“What are you?”

“The only hope you have against a power you can’t even imagine.”

“You aren’t the robed one, then.”

“No. We’re his enemies,” Lyrec said. “Long-standing enemies.”

Talenyecis relaxed. She leaned forward on her sword, her head bowed against her hands as if in prayer. “I’d thought myself capable of defeating anything that stood in my way. Any soldier, any king. Any force at all.” She turned her head to see him askance; terror was in her eyes. “Gods, but this is beyond me. It has no care for life. Nothing. It came to me and promised me everything if I led the soldiers to battle: that I would never die;
 
that all of Secamelan would be mine.”

“He was lying.”

“Oh, I know. I knew it as he said it. But he—you say ‘he’—believed what Ladomirus believed: that I was power hungry. As well, he knew how much I doubted those barbarians Ladomirus hired. He
knew
. I thought they would scatter and he told me I thought it. He caused a mist to rise in the yard. Every one of them was seized by such ferocity I thought their hearts would burst. ‘They are yours,’ he promised. ‘Yours to command. They will fight until the life has gone out of them.’ Then he—he laughed as if at some private joke and added that they could even fight beyond death, but that he would gain nothing if he let himself influence them that much.

“I thought Ladomirus insane with his secret trips to this room, his conversations with nothing and no one. Hearing voices, always running to ask the gods for advice. All madness—what god would ever side with him?”

“Where
is
Ladomirus?”

She pointed at the curtain. “In the other room—look …” She could not finish.

Borregad pattered across the floor and beneath the curtain.

Lyrec trusted Talenyecis, but he wanted to know one more thing. “With all he promised, why are you here and not out there marshaling the army?”

She laughed humorlessly. “I’m here to kill him, what else? I’ve been standing here in the dimness awaiting his reappearance so I could split open his head.”

“Possibly we can accommodate one another. He would destroy you, alone. He’ll know your thoughts before he even appears. He’ll know you wait.”

She stared morosely into the blue fires of his eyes. “He will destroy me anyway. I’m neither foolish enough nor greedy enough to be blinded by his promises of things to come. No one with him wins. Ladomir—”

“Lyrec!” cried Borregad from the other room. “Quickly!”

Talenyecis stood her ground, eyes downcast. Lyrec ran through the dark passage into the next room.

Borregad stood rooted to the center of an otherwise empty chamber. Lyrec saw nothing to warrant the cat’s horror. A few tapestries hung flat against the walls. He said, “Where? What?” Borregad’s answer was to glance to the circular window, and just as quickly to turn back.

From where he stood, Lyrec could see nothing unusual outside the window. He crossed past the silver cat. The point of a conical roof and the base of a flagpole came into view. He strode nearer, his curiosity building. More of the flagpole appeared, and something … he had to bend down to see. He stopped dead still.

Flying from the flagpole was a thing so grotesque he could never have imagined it. A human skin, empty of bone and muscle and fat, flapped out almost horizontally on the breeze. Distorted empty eye-sockets glared reproachfully and a crumpled hole of a mouth seemed to howl at him. He looked away from the window. “Come on, Borregad, we’ll have to think of another way to get Miradomon here.”

Back in the dim room, he found Talenyecis with her sword raised to strike above the black tripod. “No!” he shouted. “It’s our only remaining link.”

She answered without daring to take her eyes from the tripod. “But it is
shrinking.”

Lyrec raced forward. The silver globe had dwindled to half its original size. “Borregad, hurry up, he’s withdrawing, he’s forcing us to chase him.”

The cat charged back into the room and scrambled to a stop beside Lyrec.

“Let me come, too,” said Talenyecis.

“Not wise. If we fail then someone must survive who knows about him. And you might still have your chance to kill him here. When we met, you gambled on trusting me—now it’s I who must trust you.”

She understood. Then, quite suddenly, she smiled.

Borregad smiled back.

“A cat that grins and talks,” she said.

“It’s a gift,” replied Borregad.

From the center of Lyrec’s chest, a thin thread of silver shot out and attached to the shrinking globe. A harsh cold wind buffeted Talenyecis, stinging tears into her eyes. She squeezed them shut, and then heard the cat call out as if from a great distance: “We could still change our minds about this!” She rubbed her eyes and looked, but the two silver figures had disappeared.

Down below a wild roar rose up—the madmen she was supposed to command had caught first sight of the approaching enemy.

Talenyecis leaned on her sword, crouched down, and waited.

*****

At first he thought he must not have made the transition out of Ladoman because a dimness like that in the swamps surrounded him still; but Lyrec waved his hand and the dimness swirled—thick mist or cloud that had in some way been drawn to him as he arrived. He swished the air with both hands. The heavy cloud breezed apart, letting in a red light like none he had ever seen. With utmost caution he stepped out of the cloud.

A red forest enclosed him. Ugly swollen leaves sagged on black branches as if no wind had ever cooled them. They dripped a gelatinous fluid that had coated the ground under each tree in a translucent mound. Overhead, the same leaves blotted out any view of the sky and what light there was filtered through them. The layer of mist around his feet, the occasional patches of dark ground, even his uniform had taken on the color like a layer of rust. Everything smelled of moist decay.

Dispersing most of the thick cloud with his movement, Lyrec turned around and came up against a black wall. The wall was shiny, reflecting him; its heights rose above the trees, out of sight. In inspecting how it had pushed out of the ground, he realized suddenly that Borregad was nowhere to be seen. Lyrec circled through the mist.
 
He imagined the cat arriving in a cloud and scurrying off blindly in a panic. He considered calling out, but stopped himself. What if Miradomon was nearby? If this was where the silver globe had brought
him
, it held that Miradomon might enter his world at the same spot. He dared not call—neither out-loud nor mentally. He and the cat would have to find each other as chance allowed.

Keeping close to the wall, he set off—the silver of him reflected in the uneven, faceted black wall; the warped through a series of grotesque parodies, almost as if the fundamental substance of the place belittled him.

At one point he came upon an opening in the dense foliage overhead, which granted him a rare view of the sky. As red as the forest, the sky was spattered with hazy black blotches. The view was troubling, but he could not say why until he took another step and, still looking up, saw the black marks change shape and size in a way he understood. The arrangement of red and black was actually the forest, the wall, and the ground where it showed through the leaves. Like a speculum glass, the sky reflected a distorted view of everything below it, and Lyrec understood that it could be nothing other than the inner surface of Miradomon’s
crex.
 
He was inside Miradomon.

Miradomon had become a world.

More fervently than before he hoped that Borregad had not come to any harm, and he hurried faster along the wall. In this place any law might be called natural: the ground might sense his weight upon it and the pendulous leaves might even now be watching him like a thousand blood-drenched eyes. Lyrec did his best to ignore the wild speculations and concentrated on finding a way through the wall. Unknowingly, he was following the path of a dead king called Dekür.

The wall became an archway topped by a rude gargoyle face. On the hill beyond the arch, a castle squatted like a charred black tree planted upside down—a body that was a bulbous, misshapen trunk, its gnarled and twisted spires looking like bare roots. No doors or windows graced the unwholesome heights.

As he came nearer, he saw that it was not of the same material as the wall. Nothing reflected off it; in fact, the wall of the castle was depthless, like the far side of a line separating day from night. He acted on instinct and walked straight at and then into the wall. It swallowed him up.

Everything became black. Absolute silence enclosed him. Breathing became difficult because the nothingness exerted some pressure. It was, he thought, like a congealed shadow.

With great, heavy strides as if he were walking in the deepest trench of an ocean, Lyrec passed through the wall. He exited so suddenly that the release sent him stumbling across the other side.

The place was a nightmare of conflicting perspectives. From where he stood regaining his equilibrium, a floor sloped down to an off-center low point, then climbed back up again into another wall. The tiles composing the floor had been stretched out of shape toward the lowest spot. Some of them contained great jagged holes and Lyrec looked up to see a ceiling high above that dripped steaming stalactites. Knobs in the ceiling suggested that some of the stalactites had broken away.
 
That accounted for the holes in the floor.

He continued to look around, but could find no source for the illumination that allowed him to see the chamber in such detail. Nor were there doorways or exits of any kind. He sensed that the chamber concealed treacheries for intruders, and he chose instead to retreat into the wall of darkness again.

He emerged on a wide ramp. It curved out of sight both above and below him. Again there was no obvious source of light. Unearthly cries echoed along the ramp from far away—cries of unimaginable birds or reptiles. Lyrec hesitated, debating which way to go. A king or a tyrant would normally, inevitably, place himself at the pinnacle of the castle so that he could lord over everything. It seemed likely then that Miradomon would dwell in the deepest bowels of the castle and leave something deadly at the top.