The Dragon in the Sword (26 page)

Jermays the Crooked lit a brand and by means of the light from this he bent and with his long-fingered hands pulled on a chain set into the damp floor. He had opened a manhole. Misty light now came from below. Jermays disappeared down the hole, having signed for us to follow.

Morandi Pag said: “Go first. It will take me longer because of my age and my bulk.”

I saw von Bek hesitate. He suspected a trick. But Alisaard urged him forward. I followed her down the somewhat slippery ladder.

The ladder descended directly into a cave which was actually a hollow pinnacle of rock. We stood on a long slab overlooking a swirling and foaming pool of water formed by rushing streamers which poured from what looked almost like windows set at fairly regular intervals above us. The water seemed to leave by an unseen series of vents at the bottom. It was a marvelous natural sight and we looked at it in silence for some while, wondering where we could possibly go from here.

I felt the bear’s paw upon my shoulder. Turning, I saw that his eyes were melancholy. “Too much knowledge,” he said. “It will happen to you, unless you take action. Our minds are finite in their capacity to accept information. Yes?”

“I suppose so, Prince Morandi Pag. Is the sword likely to do me harm?”

“Not yet. The harm it has done you and the harm it will do are not part of your current destiny, I think. But actions can change courses, naturally. I am not sure…” He cleared his throat. “But you would see the sword, eh? Then you must look down there, into that pool.”

“They’ll not see it, Prince Pag,” said Jermays the Crooked, speaking loudly over the sound of the ocean. “Not without your incantation.”

“Ah, yes.” Morandi Pag looked disturbed. He scratched at his white chest. He patted reassuringly at my arm. “Never fear. It is a peculiarly complicated arrangement of logic. A mental equation I must form. It helps me if I sing something. You’ll forgive me?” And he raised his snout and gave vent to a singular kind of wailing and grunting, a musical howling and a series of sharp barks.

“Has he gone crazy again?” asked von Bek.

Jermays pushed at his back. “Go to the edge. To the edge. Look into the waters. Think of nothing. Quickly. He is making the incantation!”

Now all four of us stood at the very end of the slab, peering through the spray into the swirling grey-green water as it poured relentlessly into the pool. The water had an hypnotic effect. It almost immediately captured our attention and held it. I felt myself swaying, felt little Jermays reach out and steady me. “You must not fear falling,” he said. “Simply concentrate on the pool.”

With some trepidation I did as he ordered. I could hear Morandi Pag’s voice blending with the sound of the sea and the sound seemed to form an image, something substantial. Gradually the waters began to glow with a crimson lustre. Outside the tower the wind howled and the sea continued to assault the rocks. But within the spray was hardening, turning to tiny fragments of quartz fixed in space, and the crimson ocean had become an entire chamber of crystal. And suddenly I no longer heard Morandi Pag’s voice. I no longer heard the natural sounds beyond those walls. A mighty stillness had fallen.

Now we looked through the crimson crystal to where something green and black seemed frozen, embedded deep within the rock, like a fly in amber.

“It is the Dragon Sword,” murmured Alisaard. “It is exactly as it was in our visions!”

Black blade, green hilt, the Dragon Sword seemed almost to writhe in its prison of crystal. And I thought I saw a tiny yellow flame moving deep within the blade, as if something else were imprisoned in the sword, just as the sword was imprisoned in the crystal.

“Can you let me hold it, Morandi Pag?” asked Alisaard in a whisper. “I know the spell to release the dragon. I must bear it back to Gheestenheem.”

The Ursine Prince was as rapt as the rest of us. He seemed not to have heard her. “It is a thing of great beauty, I think. But so dangerous.”

“Let us take it, Morandi Pag,” begged von Bek. “We can make good come out of it. They say the sword is only as evil as the one who bears it…”

“Aye, but you forget. They say it instills evil into whoever takes hold of it. Besides, it is not for me to say if you should or should not have the Dragon Sword. It is not mine to give.”

“But it is in your cave. Surely it is in your possession?” Alisaard began to look suspicious.

“I can summon it to this cave, because of our location. Or what do I mean? I mean that I can bring the shadow…”

Quite suddenly Morandi Pag slid down onto the stone and seemed to fall into a peaceful sleep.

“Is he unwell?” said Alisaard in alarm.

“He is tired.” Jermays stood over his friend. He placed a hand on the bear’s wrinkled head, another near his heart. “Simply tired. He is these days in the habit of sleeping more than half the day as well as the night. He is naturally nocturnal.”

Von Bek shouted urgently. “The sword! The sword is fading. The crystal wall is disappearing!”

“You said you wanted to see it,” said Jermays, standing upright as best he could. “And see it you did. What else?”

“We need to release the dragon from the sword,” Alisaard told him. “Before the blade can be forced to serve Chaos. The dragon seeks only her homeland. Keep it there, Jermays. Give us time to break it free of its prison! Please!”

“But I cannot. Neither could Prince Pag.” Jermays seemed genuinely baffled. “What you saw was an illusion—or rather a vision of the Dragon Sword itself. The wall of crimson crystal is not in this cave any more than the sword can be found here.”

The crimson glow had faded. The spray had become ordinary moisture again. The sea thumped and pounded and roared. Jermays begged us to help him get Morandi Pag to his feet. The old bear began to revive as we helped him as far as the ladder.

“But we had understood from you that it was physically here.” Von Bek spoke in an aggrieved tone. “Morandi Pag said it was here.”

Alisaard corrected him. For a moment there was a sardonic smile on her features. “He said we could see it,” she told von Bek. “That was all. Well, that’s better than nothing. Now perhaps, when he revives, he’ll tell us where we must go to find it.”

Morandi Pag mumbled something as Jermays put his shoulder under the bear’s rump and tried to push him up the ladder. Quickly I climbed up on the other side, then swung over so that I could take the old prince’s paw and haul him from above. Eventually we got him back into the chamber, by which time he seemed to have grown alert again. He it was who seized the flambeau and led the way up the stairs. “Here!” he cried. “Follow me. This is where we go.”

When we had all rejoined him in his main chamber he had already reached his armchair, fallen into it and was sleeping, as if he had never left.

Jermays looked down at him affectionately. “He’ll sleep for a whole day now, I think.”

“Shall we have to wait that long before we can continue with our search?” I asked.

“It depends what you want,” Jermays said reasonably.

“You told us we had been granted a vision of the sword. But where is the crimson crystal wall? How can we get to it?” Alisaard wanted to know.

“I think we had assumed you knew the whereabouts of the sword,” said Jermays. “And that you had decided not to pursue it.”

“We had not the merest clue,” Alisaard told him. “We do not even know which realm it is in.”

“Ah,” said Jermays, apparently illuminated by this information. “That explains much. What if I were to tell you that the Dragon Sword is held in the Nightmare Marches, that it has been there almost as long as the Gheestenheemers have dwelled here? Would that alter your intention of seeking it out?”

Alisaard put her head in her hands. The news had not merely confounded her. Temporarily, at any rate, it had robbed her of her resolve. “What chance have three mortals of finding anything there? And what chance have we of surviving?”

“Very little,” said Jermays in a matter-of-fact tone. “Unless, of course, you had an Actorios. Even then it would be extremely dangerous. You are welcome to remain here with us. For my own part I would be glad of the additional company. There are few interesting card games for two players. And Morandi Pag tends to lose attention these days, even in a game of Snap.”

“Why should the possession of an Actorios stone give us an advantage in the Nightmare Marches?” I asked him. Even as I spoke I was reaching into my belt pouch and touching the warm, fleshlike stone of the Actorios which had been given me by the Announcer Elect Phalizaarn in Gheestenheem and whose destiny, according to Sepiriz, was intimately linked with mine.

“It shares something in common with a runestaff,” Jermays said to me. “It can have an effect on its surroundings. To some slight extent, of course, compared with other more powerful artifacts. It will stabilise that which Chaos has touched. Moreover it has a certain affinity with those swords. It could help lead you to the blade you want…” He shrugged his crooked back. “But what good would that do you? None, I suspect. And since it will be a good few ticks of the cosmic pendulum before you have an Actorios in your possession, Champion, there’s no real point to this discussion.”

I took out the pulsing, writhing stone and showed it to him on the flat of my palm.

He stared at it in silence for a while. He seemed suddenly subdued, almost frightened.

“Well,” he said after a bit, “so you do have such a stone. Aha.”

“Does that alter your estimate of our chance in the so-called Nightmare Marches, Master Jermays?” asked von Bek.

Jermays the Crooked darted a look at me that was oddly sympathetic. He turned around, pretending to interest himself in Morandi Pag’s collection of alchemical glass. “I could do with a pear,” he said. “I get a craving. Or a good apple would do at a pinch. Fresh food’s scarce here. Unless you like fish. I have a feeling I’ll be able to pick something for myself soon. The Balance is wavering. The gods wake up. And when they begin their play, I shall be tossed about as usual. Here and there. But what will become of Morandi Pag?”

“There is an army on its way,” said Alisaard. “It plans either to torture information from him or to destroy him, we are not absolutely sure. Princess Sharadim will lead the army.”

“Sharadim?” Again Jermays looked directly at me. He had turned round in a flash. “Your sister, Champion?”

“Of sorts. Jermays, how can we enter the Nightmare Marches?”

He waved his unnaturally long arms and went to stand beside the sleeping Ursine Prince. “Nobody’s stopping you,” he told us. “It is not usually a question of the Nightmare Marches refusing visitors. Most visitors to those Marches are to say the least unwilling. The place is ruled by Chaos. It is where Chaos was exiled in the old battles of the Wheel, so many centuries ago that almost everyone has forgotten. It could have been at the very beginning of this cycle. I can’t remember. The Nightmare Marches lie at the very hub of the Wheel contained by the self-same forces which maintain the Six Realms, almost as if compressed by a kind of gravity. Is it not Sharadim who will seek to release those forces? Who will attempt to free the ruler of the Nightmare Marches, Archduke Balarizaaf? Why go to him? Soon he could come to you.” And Jermays shuddered.

“You know of Sharadim’s movements?” asked Alisaard eagerly. “You can predict what she will do?”

“My predictions are never accurate,” Jermays said. “They are useless to anyone. I dart from place to place. I see a little of this, a little of that. But I haven’t the mind or the temperament to fit anything together. That could be why the gods permit me to travel as I do. I am a shadow-creature, lady, for the most part. You see me at present in one of my most solid rôles. And it cannot last too long. Sharadim has huge and evil ambitions, I know. But nothing I can say will help you counter this. The pattern, such as it is, could already be set. She seeks the Dragon Sword, eh? And by means of it will bring the Chaos Lord to his fullest power, perhaps. Aye…”

Then suddenly Morandi Pag was grunting in his sleep, shaking his huge head, fluffing his whiskers and, lastly, opening wide, intelligent eyes. “Princess Sharadim leads an army against my kind. That is what you have to tell me, eh? She threatens what? Adelstane? The other realms? Chaos involved? I can hear her. Where is she? –
Now, Flamadin, my false brother, you shall not defeat me. My power increases by natural momentum as yours declines.
Does she believe me still in Adelstane? It seems so. She’ll storm our gates. Will she break through? Who knows? My sisters are there! My brother. My old friend Groaffer Rolm is there! Did they send you to find me?”

“They sent a message, Prince Morandi Pag, that they are concerned for you. And that they are in danger and need your help. Mabden attack them. More Mabden than they know.”

“Not you?”

“For better or worse, Prince, we are your allies against a common enemy.”

“Then I must think what to do.”

And he had closed his eyes and was asleep again.

“You know how we can reach the Nightmare Marches, Jermays?” von Bek asked. “Will you tell us?”

Jermays the Crooked nodded absently and rummaged about on Morandi Pag’s bench. Then he went under the bench and began to throw old pieces of parchment about, willy-nilly. Then he crawled across the floor and opened a chest. Within the chest were dozens of neatly rolled parchments, numbered as far as I could tell. He looked down on these and beamed. Then, very delicately, he selected one, being careful not to disturb the others. “These are Morandi Pag’s charts. Charts of so many realms. So many configurations and complexes, conjunctions and eclipses.” He unrolled the parchment. “This is the table I hoped to find.” He began to run his finger down it. “Aye. It seems there’s a gateway about to open in the north-west. Near the Goradyn Mountain. You could go that way. It will take you into the Maaschanheem. From there you would have to travel to The Wounded Crayfish and wait for the gateway which will take you into the Realm of the Red Weepers. Good. From there, within the volcano they call Tortacanuzoo, you will find a direct route into the Nightmare Marches. Or so I believe. However, if you wish to wait five days, seven hours and twelve seconds, you could go from near Adelstane itself, into Draachenheem, through Fluugensheem, and still be near The Wounded Crayfish at almost the same time you arrived from Goradyn. Or you could return to the upper mountains, wait for the Sedulous Urban Eclipse, which is rare enough anyway and worth experiencing, then go directly to Rootsenheem by that method.”