OrbSoul (Book 6) (5 page)

   Anzejarl nodded.
'At my signal. Those terms were established months ago.'

   'There must be no mistake, Anzejarl.'

   The Karai prince shook his head. 'Even without them I have sufficient forces to ensure victory -
provided I am permitted to strike at the proper time, not before.'

   She absorbed this, chewing intently. 'What of these attacks we have suffered? Will they continue?'

   Anzejarl considered. Recently his supply lines had come under attack from a highly mobile force commanded, he assumed, by one of Leth's generals. It had hidden itself somewhere deep within the forest. Four days ago it had even attacked the trolls as they slept. Seven trolls had died, and more than a score of Karai warriors. The enemy force had melted quickly back into the forest without a single loss of life. Anzejarl had been unable to determine the size of the force. A couple of hundred, perhaps. Not enough to present a serious threat, but an irritant nonetheless. Its presence demanded reinforcement of the supply lines and extra vigilance around the trolls and slooths.

   'Whoever he is, I will find him and eliminate him.'

   'Why haven’t you done so already?'

   'He is cunning, elusive, and has no permanent base. He shifts at will around the forest and is a native of this land. He knows it better than we. But do not fear. He commands a very limited force. He cannot harm us, and soon I will catch up with him.'

   Olmana eyed him haughtily, but said nothing more.

   Anzejarl, overcoming hesitation, moved to her. He looked into her eyes, inhaling the scent of her. He raised a hand to caress her cheek. 'Olmana, we have not loved for some days.'

   She half-smiled, and her voice softened. 'It is true, my Prince. My Champion. My Hero. Do you hunger?'

   'I do. Oh, how I do.' He slid an arm around her waist and drew her against him. She upturned her face to his and he bent to kiss her lips.

   As they kissed he felt her body change. Beneath her light clothing something formed. He opened his eyes - and drew back in horror.

   Olmana cackled in perverse delight. 'Here I am! Have me! I am yours.' She pulled aside her blouse.
'Ha, Prince of the Karai! Is this what you seek? Come! Come! Take me now!'

   Anzejarl staggered back, utterly repelled.

   And then, within a moment, she was Olmana once more. She stood before him, her marvellous breasts bared, hands upon her hips. Anzejarl breathed hard, questioned whether what he had seen had been hallucination, or madness.

   Olmana smiled, tilting her head. 'Do your job, my Champion. You have your rewards.'

ii

   With the following morning there came a part-answer to a mystery. A Karai warrior, tired and travel-stained after days of hard journeying through the forest, rode into Willowmere Manor. Upon the utterance of certain passwords he was brought directly into the presence of Prince Anzejarl.

   'I am instructed by Commander Urorj to report directly to you, Sire.'

   'Urorj?' Anzejarl was immediately attentive. Urorj was the commander of the one-hundred strong force that he had dispatched to investigate the secret camp, from which the injured sloths had returned earlier.

   Olmana, standing at the window, turned around and fixed the warrior with gimlet eyes.

   'Speak on,' commanded Anzejarl.

   The warrior stood stiffly, his jade and blue eyes focused upon the wall above and beyond Prince Anzejarl's head. 'Sire, two days before we reached the camp we met members of the forward unit that had been based there. They had a disturbing tale to tell. They had gone out from the camp to raid and take slaves, as were your orders. When they returned, after an absence of several days, they found the camp in ruins, burned to the ground, and the remainder of its garrison slain. Their bodies were found in a shallow pit dug in the work compound. Nearby another grave was discovered, containing the bodies of several, but not all, of the human slaves. The other slaves had vanished.'

   Anzejarl's brow darkened. 'An uprising? Overthrown by their own slaves?'

   The soldier swallowed. 'The survivors were unable to say. They elected to slay the prisoners they had taken and leave the camp and return to report to you. They were making their way back when we met them. Commander Urorj questioned their captain at some length,
then ordered them to continue, believing you would wish to speak to them.'

   Prince Anzejarl frowned. These men had not returned. Had they been found and slain by Leth's troops? Or, if they had made for Giswel Holt, could they be travelling north to join him now? He gave his attention back to the warrior. 'And at the camp, what did you find?'

   'It was as they had said, the place had been torched and largely razed. We found the mutilated corpses of several slooths.'

   'And beneath the ground?' interrupted Olmana with impatience. 'What there?'

   'I was about to speak of that, my lady. We found an inner chamber, which had been opened. By the survivors' account it was not they who had opened it. Indeed, they reported its entrance barred - they did not know by whom. But their orders had been specific from you, Sire: once the secret chamber was constructed they were not to enter.'

   'Correct,' said Anzejarl. 'But Commander Urorj had orders to investigate in full.'

   'This he did, Sire. I was at his side when he entered the chamber. Within was a fabulous glowing orb. Something quite indescribable, like nothing I have ever seen. It seemed almost alive, for it pulsed as if with its own life. Commander Urorj ordered three of our warriors to investigate this orb. They stepped close. At first nothing happened. Commander Urorj told them to step into the orb itself, at which they vanished.'

   Anzejarl turned a questioning look to Olmana. Her eyes, narrow and bright, did not leave the warrior's face. 'And then?'

   'We waited. Nothing happened. They did not return. Commander Urorj then ordered four more of us to enter. I was one of the four. That is why he has sent me to you, that I might report precisely what I experienced.'

   'And what was that?'

   'We were transported somewhere. I cannot say where. Everything happened very quickly. We found ourselves in a chamber, but were contained within some sort of transparent membrane. We could not break through it. I glimpsed our three warriors lying dead upon the floor. There were six other persons in the chamber: a human soldier wearing the colours of Enchantment's Reach; a young human female, who also carried a sword; a strange, non-human figure, clad in a mass of rags, and finally three small white-haired children of almost identical appearance.'

   Olmana strode forward. 'You saw them?'

   'Exactly as I have described, my lady.'

   'And then what?'

   'Very briefly the three children spoke, questioning what should be done with us as we stood there before them. Then one of them motioned with its hand and we found ourselves back in the underground chamber of the camp.'

   Olmana wheeled away, grimacing as if with a spasm of pain. 'Triune!' she spat. 'And
Orbelon. . . Orbelon . . . Orbelon . . . I do not know how, but it can only be Orbelon.'

   'Did Commander Urorj make any further attempt to investigate the orb?' demanded Anzejarl of the warrior.

   'He asked us what had happened, then commanded us to step into it again. We did so, willingly, but nothing further happened. Following this, Commander Urorj made the decision to abandon the chamber and have it placed under guard. An hour later I was on my way here, with instructions to relate everything I had seen to you. Captain Urorj requests your orders, Sire.'

   Anzejarl turned to Olmana.
' What does this mean?'

   Her glance flickered across the soldier. 'Out!' she said.

   The soldier glanced with some uncertainty to his Prince.

   Anzejarl nodded. 'Wait downstairs.'

   When he had gone Anzejarl spoked again to Olmana. 'Will you tell me anything of what this means to us, here?'

   'Triune was not lying,' she rasped, half to herself, turning away.

   'About what?'

   She turned on him, her face a mask of fury. 'I have told you, Anzejarl, do not question me!'

   'I must know whether what we have just heard affects our situation here,' persisted Anzejarl. 'I do not consider that an unreasonable request.'

   Olmana spared him barely a glance. 'It was to bring Reach Riders here.
The underground chamber. It contains a portal via which they might come.'

  
'Reach Riders?'

  
'Powerful allies. They could destroy King Leth's defences almost without effort.'

   'And now your enemy has seized the portal?'

   She grimaced. 'Triune. And it seems, Orbelon too. They have ensnared the first Reach Rider and prevented its passage. Gah!' She spat, and her hands formed into claws. 'Triune!'

   Anzejarl paused for a moment,
then said, 'How does this affect us here? Can you free the Reach Rider? Bring forth others?'

   'It was my intention to bring forth many,' she said, with renewed wrath. She did not disclose to him the effect the Reach Riders would have upon the land over which they passed. Nor did she reveal what it would mean for its inhabitants, be they animal, human or
Karai. 'Our task here would be over in days.'

  
'And now?'

   'We proceed without them.
But quickly. When we are done here, then I can bring my full concentration to bear upon Triune and Orbelon. At that time they will no longer be able to withstand me.' She looked hard at Anzejarl. 'There can be no delay now. You must put everything you have against Enchantment's Reach.'

   'That I am doing.'

   'It is not enough!'

   'You know I cannot proceed with any greater haste.'

   'Just be certain, Anzejarl.'

   'You have made no mention of the Child.'

   Her look became scalding. 'Leave the Child to me.' She turned away as if to leave, then stopped and looked back at him, a bitter twist on her mouth. 'There is more than the Child here, be sure of that.'

T
HREE

i

   'How long can you contain this monster?' asked Leth, staring aghast, his skin sweating and prickling in the weirdly-charged
air.

   The three Triune children stood close beside him, their hands linked,
identical small meaningless smiles upon their lips. Six fulgent blue eyes were focused on Leth, whereas Leth's were fixed upon the gigantic formless thing that thrashed in ceaseless, soundless fury behind its restricting mesh.

   'This is not known to us,' Triune replied. 'Every moment demands effort. Every instant is one of struggle and uncertainty. And we are not strong. Strymnia is diverted just now. She is prevented by her other endeavours from applying all her resources to liberating the beast. That is our greatest defence, but it’s for a limited time. She is essentially far stronger than Triune, and that will continue for as long as Triune is Three and not One.'

   Beside Leth stood Orbelon and Shenwolf. Their gaze was likewise on the captive Reach Rider. Issul waited in another chamber with Prince Galry and Jace. She and Leth, with Orbelon's agreement, had felt it unwise and unnecessary to subject the children to the sight of the Reach Rider, for fear that it would terrify them.

   Leth, for his part, was outraged and near-speechless, having just been told what the Reach Rider could do were it unleashed upon his land. 'And you have told Issul that you are prepared to release it if Strymnia meets your terms.'

   'We seek Union. We seek our Soul.'

   Issul had already made plain to him the futility of trying to reason with the three children. She had told Leth, too, that she did not believe that Triune acted with malice. Rather, Triune, even more than Orbelon, was a being whose entire thought processes were simply alien to their own. But appealing to the tri-partite god-children on compassionate grounds was, she believed, a waste of time. Triune had no understanding of such entreaties. She required the return of her Soul, and there was the end of it.

  
Two Souls!
Leth sighed at the impossible burden that had been laid upon him.

   'Still, not all is as it was,' said Triune.

   'What do you mean?'

   'Things are known now
that were not known before. And you have been within the Orb and returned. But let us for now consider Strymnia, who hangs behind all of this like a colossal succubus.'

   Again and again the Reach Rider was hurling its substanceless substance against the green mesh. It was tireless, barely pausing. Features of a kind formed and were torn apart almost before they were seen. Limbs sprouted and withered; claws grasped and shook the mesh, then melted away; visceral organs evolved, blistered, were blasted apart by some internal force, re-merged into distorted, short-lived demonic faces; a baleful sepia eye glared for an instant at the little party gathered before it, then liquefied. Then the thing was convulsed in another sudden attack upon the mesh, its rage all but palpable.
And all of this in total, eerie silence.

   Despite
himself Leth took an involuntary step back as the mesh bellied dangerously into the chamber.

   'Is it Strymnia who is our true enemy?' he asked.
'Strymnia who directs the Karai against Enchantment's Reach; Strymnia who we must defeat? Are we certain of this?'

   'We are certain. But you will not destroy her, Leth,' Orbelon cautioned. 'Put such thoughts from your head. I have told you
before, as far as you are concerned she is indestructible. Nor do we of Enchantment truly desire the destruction of one of our own, no matter that she pits herself against us. You know the reason for that.'

   'Still, she may be overcome.'

   'Outwitted, perhaps. Even dissuaded from pursuing her present course.'

   'Dissuaded?'

   'Were she to understand that we who stand against her are once again as strong as she.'

   'But you are not.'

   Again, two Souls! Lost, hidden, who knew where? Leth gritted his teeth. To have come so far, through so much, and still be no closer to locating the Soul of the Orb - and now to learn that a second Soul must also be found.

   Orbelon shifted. 'No. But perhaps . . .'

   He let the thought trail off, but Leth turned on him enquiringly. 'Orbelon?'

   'We must talk, Leth.' Orbelon twisted his ragged bulk towards Triune. As one the three children nodded. The air seemed to shift. Leth found his vision blurred. He felt a momentary loss of orientation,
then he was with Orbelon in another chamber. Startled, he glanced quickly around him, seeking his bearings. The chamber was near featureless and devoid of furnishings of any kind. A single smooth stone wall encircled the two of them. For an instant Leth was reminded of the vast, towering, distant wall of the Orb that had enclosed the empty blue domain inside the casket, where he had first met with Orbelon and subsequently wandered alone with Galry and Jace. But that wall had moved as he had moved, remaining the same distance from him, no matter how far he travelled. This one, so he judged, was fixed and stable.

   'You have been within me, Leth,' Orbelon said. 'And our roles have now become in some part reversed. I have been your teacher and have given
you what I knew of your world and mine. Now you have been where I have not. You possess Mystery, Leth.  Tell me of my world, then. Tell me of the Orb.'

   Leth took a breath. 'I will say in the first instance that it is - it was - a troubled land, bleak and unhappy, a nightmare world in which children may not even hope or dream.' He recoiled from the memory. 'It is populated by desperate, fearful folk who enact rituals shocking and extreme in the belief that their Creator may come and deliver them from their suffering. It is a strange and in many ways a quite terrible place, Orbelon.'

   'And I am their Creator.' Orbelon said heavily. He was settling himself cross-legged upon the floor. He motioned for Leth to do the same, and laid his staff across his thighs. 'Do they know it?'

   'They believe,' replied Leth.
'Many things. And they know they are created. But of the true nature or identity of their Creator, they are ignorant.'

   'It is not so unlike this world, then.'

   Leth made no comment.

   'Tell me everything, Leth. You must omit nothing. It is vital that I know.'

   Leth, seated, bowed his head in recollection. Then he began, at the beginning, the point where he had wandered fearfully with Galry and Jace in the walled blue void. He told of finally, weak and almost starving, seeing the glimmering arch and stepping through to find himself before Summoner and his chanting followers. Leth told how Summoner had presented him with the Sword of the Orb, and then made off; how, at the same moment, Prince Galry and Princess Jace had been abducted. Then he went on to speak of his first encounter with Lakewander in the subterranean chamber of the
ools
, of her father, Master Protector, and their home, Orbia, whose walls were inhabited by the ghosts of the dead.

   'They believed me to be a god, Orbelon. They believed I had come in answer to their prayers, that my coming was pre-ordained. In essence they thought I was you, or your emissary, though they do not know who you are. To their minds I had been among them before, and in their eyes there was no one but I who could save them from the scourge that was destroying their lives. I denied all of this, vehemently. I had come from
no 'Godworld'; my arrival among them was sheer happenstance. But they would have nothing of it. I could wield the Sword, which no other could. Hence I was the Saviour they had so long awaited.' Leth shook his head from side to side. 'In the end, though I know in myself that it was not so, they were proven right. I travelled across their world - your world - and I slew the creature that was devouring it and devouring the dreams of children, stealing any future it might have. How can this be, Orbelon? How?'

   'We should not look to explain things in ordinary terms,' said Orbelon softly. 'Did I not tell you before, Leth, that for you who have lived your entire life within the Reach the time had come to step over, to enter Mystery? There is much here that even I cannot account for. But continue, Leth.
Before analysis, the whole story.'

   Leth spoke of his feelings when he had first set eyes upon the bright Orb of the Godworld and the World's Agony in the night sky of the Orb. He described his journey with Lakewander: the Sufferer at the roadside, the Plain of Imprisoned Souls, the End of the World, and his hallucinatory experience on the Shore of Nothing which culminated in his first encounter with the Noeticist, the former 'god' of Enchantment, Urch-Malmain, in the Tower of Glancing Memory.

   Orbelon quizzed him here, keen to settle in his own mind all he could regarding Urch-Malmain. Then Leth told of his final nightmare journey into the Death Abyss. He described his descent in the dubious company of Harg, Rasgul and their murderous companions; told of the wolfhearts, the Meadows of Dreaming, the curious death of Cerb Two-Heads. Finally he recounted his experience in the Fortress of the Dark Flame and his battle with the evil Ascaria, the Kancanitrix, who by some indefinable alchemy transformed the thoughts, hopes and dreams of children into a dreadful corruption that devoured Orbelon's World.

   'Then she is gone?' enquired Orbelon when Leth had done.

   'Aye, she is. Whatever she was, she is that no more.'

   'I felt it, I believe. A lightening, as though something dark and unwholesome within me had been removed. And I believed that it was you who had done it.'

   'Were you aware of me, Orbelon?'

   'In a sense I was. And I strove to make you aware of me.'

   Leth nodded to himself. 'I believe I sensed you at times, though to begin with I knew only anger. I could not explain how or why you had put us into your world and abandoned us there. I believed we would perish, or at best be stranded forever, until we died. Yet as the days passed I seemed to become more conscious of your presence, as if you were somewhere beyond, trying to make me aware of you.'

   'That is how it was. It was not by my conscious doing that you were cast into my world, but had it not occurred then it is true to say that I could not have gained the knowledge of myself that I now have. Nor would Ascaria have been destroyed. You have brought light to my world, Leth, and to me. Was it then 'accident and chance', or is there some process in place of which even I know nothing? Is there something greater than we, which cast you into the world in order that I might become fully aware of the creation of which I knew so little?'

  Leth stared long and hard and the shrouded figure, wondering, by no means for the first time, what lay beneath those concealing rags.  'Is that the purpose of all life, Orbelon? Simply to become aware, to make its Creator aware of what it has unknowingly created?'

   'I have no answer,’ Orbelon replied solemnly. ‘But we are linked, Leth, you and I. Very certainly. I believed that might be so when you first came to me. There had been many before you, but when you came it was a time of such extraordinary change. And now you are no longer the baffled student who sits before me. Now you inform me, which is how it should be. It is ironic, but even my enemy, Urch-Malmain, served in his own way to help you. Had he not sent you on where you were reluctant to go, where you believed you had no destiny, Ascaria might yet have destroyed my world.'

   'And what then of you, Orbelon?' Leth asked.

   'She devoured me from within, you say. Taking the world and leaving nothing in its place. Ultimately, then, she could have been the agent of my destruction, as well as her own. I think that is so; again, I have no sure answer.'

   An unsettling thought came to Leth. 'Orbelon, it was the Orbsword that slew Ascaria. It drew her into itself and holds her there now. It is possible, then, that she is not slain but merely imprisoned. Urch-Malmain himself implied that her escape might not be impossible.'

   'Where is the Orbsword now?'

   'Urch-Malmain took it.'

   Orbelon sank into silence. Leth waited uneasily. Presently Orbelon said, 'Ascaria reduced the world to
Nothing, you say.'

  
'A void, an end of all things. I would have said I can think of nothing with which to compare it but . . . such thoughts become absurd. It is incomprehensible, it cannot be grasped or imagined. Even now I feel that what I experienced, or did not experience, has somehow taken a place within me, and I am deeply disquieted by its presence.'

   'Then Nothing cannot truly be said to be Nothing,' declared Orbelon. 'It gives us cause for wonder and even fear. It is therefore an agency or energy of some kind. I will reflect upon it, in
sofar as I can.'

   Orbelon began to rise,
then stopped. Leth felt himself to be under intense scrutiny. 'Leth, there is a change in you, or about you. I feel that you have brought something with you from my world, I feel it very strongly. Are you aware of anything? Think carefully now.'