The Dragon in the Sword (31 page)

“Then we can expect to find no allies here,” said von Bek soberly.

“Only the Lost Warriors,” said Sepiriz. “Those who wait on the Edge of Time. And their help can be called upon only once. And only then if you have no other recourse. Those warriors may fight once in a cycle of the multiverse. When they unsheathe their swords there are inevitable consequences. But you know this already, eh, Sir Champion?”

“I have heard the Lost Warriors,” I agreed. “They have spoken to me in my dreams. But I can remember little else.”

“How shall these warriors be summoned?” asked von Bek.

“By breaking the Actorios into fragments,” said Sepiriz.

“But the stone cannot be broken. It is virtually indestructible.” Alisaard’s voice rose in outrage. “You play tricks upon us, Lord Sepiriz!”

“The stone can be broken. By a blow from the Dragon Sword. That is what I know.”

And Sepiriz reached up and closed his helm.

Von Bek uttered a desperate laugh. “We are truly in Chaos. There’s a paradox for you! We can only summon allies when the Dragon Sword is already ours! When we have no need of them!”

“You will decide that when the time comes.” Sepiriz’s voice was hollow and distant, as if he faded from us, though his armour was as solid as ever. “Remember—your greatest weapons are your own courage and intelligence. Go swiftly through this wood. There is a path which the Actorios will show you. Follow it. Like all paths in Chaos it leads eventually to the place they call here The World’s Beginning…”

Now the armour began to dissipate, to fade, to join with the dancing motes of dust in the sunbeams.

“Swiftly, swiftly. Chaos gathers territory with every passing hour. And with that territory she gains a host of souls sworn to her service. Your worlds shall soon be little else but a memory unless you find the Dragon Sword…
”

The armour vanished entirely. All that remained of the Knight in Black and Yellow was an echo of a whisper. Then that, too, was gone.

I took out my Actorios and held it before me, turning this way and that.

Then, to my relief, I stopped. Very dimly at our feet there stretched, for a few yards only, a faintly shimmering ghost of a pathway.

We had found the road to the Dragon Sword.

Hither, hither, if you will
,

Drink instruction, or instil
,

Run the woods like vernal sap,

Crying, hail to luminousness! But have care.

In yourself may lurk the trap:

On conditions they caress.

Here you meet the light invoked

Here is never secret cloaked.

Doubt you with the monster’s fry

All his orbit may exclude;

Are you of the stiff, the dry
,

Cursing the not understood;

Grasp you with the monster’s claws;

Govern with his truncheon-saws;

Hate, the shadow of the grain;

You are lost in Westermain:

Earthward swoops a vulture sun,

Nighted upon carrion:

Straightway venom wine-cups shout

Toasts to One whose eyes are out:

Flowers along the reeling floor

Drip henbane and hellebore:

Beauty, of her tresses shorn
,

Shrieks as nature’s maniac:

Hideousness on hoof and horn

Tumbles, yapping in her track:

Haggard Wisdom, stately once
,

Leers fantastical and trips:

Allegory drums the sconce,

Impiousness nibblenips.

Imp that dances, imp that flits
,

Imp o’ the demon-growing girl,

Maddest! whirl with imp o’ the pits

Round you, and with them you whirl

Fast where pours the fountain-rout

Out of Him whose eyes are out;

Multitudes of multitudes
,

Drenched in wallowing deviltry:

And you ask where you may be, In what reek of a lair

Given to bones and ogre-broods: And they yell you Where.

Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare.

—George Meredith,
‘The Woods of Westermain’

1

W
E HAD GONE
perhaps five miles when the greenwood on all sides began to rustle urgently, as if threatened. We had only the shadow path to guide us. Steadfastly, in spite of the rapidly increasing agitation, we continued to go forward in single file. Alisaard was immediately behind me. She whispered: “It is as if the forest senses our presence and becomes alarmed.”

Then, one by one, the oak trees turned to stone, the stone became liquid and, in an instant, the entire landscape was transformed. The path remained visible, but we were surrounded by monstrous green stems and at the top of these stems, far above our heads, were the yellow bells of gigantic daffodils.

“Is this what lies behind the illusion?” said von Bek in awe.

“This is as much reality as it is illusion,” I told him. “Chaos has her moods and whims, that’s all. As I told you, she cannot remain stable. It is in her nature to be forever changing.”

“While it is in the nature of Law,” Alisaard explained, “to be forever fixed. The Balance is there to ensure that neither Law nor Chaos ever gain complete ascendancy, for the one offers sterility while the other offers only sensation.”

“And this struggle between the two, does it take place on every single realm of the multiverse?” von Bek wanted to know. He looked around him at the nodding flowers. Their scent was like a drug.

“Every plane, on some level or another, in some guise or another. It is the perpetual war. And there is a champion, they say, who is doomed to fight in every aspect of that war, for eternity…”

“Please, Lady Alisaard,” I interrupted, “I would rather not be reminded of the Eternal Champion’s fate!” I was not altogether joking.

Alisaard apologised. We continued in silence along the path for about another mile, until the landscape shuddered and changed for the second time. This time in place of giant daffodils were gibbets. On every gibbet swung a cage and in every cage was a scabrous, dying human creature, crying out for help.

I told them to ignore the prisoners and keep to the path. “And this? Is this mere illusion?” shouted von Bek from behind me. He was almost in tears.

“An invention, I promise you. It will vanish as the others vanished.”

Suddenly the prisoners were gone from their cages. In their place were huge finches squalling for food. Then the gibbets disappeared, the finches flew away, and we were surrounded by tall glass buildings for as far as the eye could see. These buildings were in a thousand different styles yet were unstable. Every few moments one of them would fall with a great crashing and tinkling, sometimes taking one or more of the neighbouring buildings with it. To follow the path, we were forced to wade through shards of broken glass which set up a great clatter as we advanced. Voices sounded now, from within the buildings, but we could see that the houses were empty. Shrieks of laughter, wails of pain. Horrible sobbing sounds. The moans of the tortured. The glass gradually began to melt and, as it melted, took the form of agonised faces. And those faces were still the size of buildings!

“Oh, this is surely Hell,” cried von Bek, “and these are the souls of the damned!”

The faces flowed up into the sky, turning into great metal blades in the form of fern leaves.

And still we made our way slowly along the shadow path. I forced myself to think only of our goal, of the Dragon Sword which could take the Eldren women to their homeland, which must not be allowed to fall into the hands of Chaos. I wondered what means Sharadim would use in trying to defeat us. For how long could she maintain a semblance of life in that corpse, my doppelgänger?

A wind howled through the metallic leaves. They clashed and jangled and set my teeth on edge. They offered us no direct danger, however. Chaos was not in herself malevolent. But her ambitions were inimical to the desires of both human and Eldren as well as all the other races of the multiverse.

Once, in that iron jungle, I thought I saw figures moving parallel to us. I lifted the Actorios. It could easily detect creatures of ordinary flesh and blood. But if someone had been trailing us, they were now too far away for the stone to find them.

In seconds the ferns became frozen snakes; then the snakes came to life. Next the living snakes began to devour one another. All around us was a great swaying and writhing and hissing. It was as if a tangled hedge of serpents lined both sides of the shadow path. I held tight to Alisaard’s trembling hand. “Remember, they will not attack us unless directed. They are hardly real.”

But though I reassured her, I knew that any of Chaos’s illusions were real enough to do harm in the short span of their existence.

But now the snakes had become country brambles and our path was a sandy lane leading towards the distant sea.

I began to feel a little more optimistic, in spite of knowing how false my security was, and had begun to whistle when I rounded a turn in the path and saw that our way was blocked by a mass of riders. At their head our old enemy Baron Captain Armiad of the
Frowning Shield.
His features had become even more bestial in the time since we had last seen him. His nostrils had widened so much that they now resembled the snout of a pig. There were tufts of hair sprouting from his face and neck and when he spoke I was reminded of the lowing of a cow.

These were Sharadim’s retainers. The same we had left behind when we dashed for the gateway into this realm. Evidently they had lost no time in following us.

We were still without weapons. We could not fight them. The bramble hedges were solid enough and blocked flight in that direction. If we wished to flee, we would have to run back the way we had come. And we would easily be ridden down by the horsemen.

“Where’s your mistress, Baron Porker?” I called, standing my ground. “Was she too cowardly to enter Chaos herself?”

Armiad’s already narrow eyes came closer together still. He grunted and sniffed. His nose and eyes seemed permanently wet.

“The Empress Sharadim has more important business than to chase after vermin when there is the greatest prey of all to hand.”

Armiad’s remark was greeted appreciatively by his fellows who gave forth a great chorus of snorts and grunts. All of them had faces and bodies transformed by their espousal of Chaos’s cause. I wondered if they had noticed these changes or if their brains were warped as thoroughly as their physical appearance. I could barely recognise some of them. Duke Perichost’s thin, unpleasant face now bore a distinct resemblance to a starved hamster. I wondered how long, in relative time, they had been here.

“And what’s the greatest prey of all?” von Bek asked him. Again we were talking in the hope that the next change in the landscape would be to our advantage.

“You know what it is!” shouted Armiad, his snout twitching with rage and turning red. “For you seek it yourself. You must do. You cannot deny it!”

“But do
you
know what it is, Baron Captain Armiad?” said Alisaard. “Has the Empress allowed you into her confidence? It seems unlikely when the last time she spoke of you she complained that you were poor material for her purposes. She said you would be disposed of when your turn was served. Is it served now, do you think, Lord Baron Captain? Or have you been given what you most desired? Are you respected by your peers at last? Do they cheer their King Admiral whenever his hull passes by? Or are they silent, because the
Frowning Shield
is as filthy and disgusting as ever, but is now one of the last hulls still rolling in the Maaschanheem?”

She mocked him. She goaded him. And all the time she was testing him. I could see that she was finding out what Sharadim’s instructions had been. And it was becoming plain, from Armiad’s restraint, that he had been ordered to take us alive.

His tiny eyes glared Murder, but his hands twitched on his saddle horn.