The Dragon in the Sword (39 page)

I began to run then, trying to reach the blade before she could dismount. But with a great billowing of her cloak she was off the back of the snorting beast and had reached down to wrest the Dragon Sword from her brother’s deathgrip.

As she took hold of the Dragon Sword, she gasped with pain. She was not meant to hold it. Only by an effort of will did she lift it. Yet lift it she did, and she maintained her hold upon it.

I continued to be struck by her extraordinary beauty. As she carried the Dragon Sword back towards her horse, apparently unconscious of any who observed her, I thought she resembled more than any woman I had ever seen the goddess it was her ambition to become.

I stepped forward. “Princess Sharadim! That sword is not yours to carry!”

She had reached her horse now. She looked round slowly, frowning in irritation. “What?”

“It is mine,” I said.

She put her lovely head on one side and stared at me. “What?”

“You must not take the Dragon Sword. Only I have the right to bear it now.”

She began to climb into her saddle.

I could think of no other action but to take out the Actorios and hold it up before me. Its pulsing, writhing light made my hand glow black, red and purple. “In the name of the Balance, I claim the Dragon Sword!” I told her.

Her face clouded. Her eyes blazed. “You are dead,” she said slowly, through gritted teeth.

“I am not. Give me the Dragon Sword.”

“I have earned this blade and all it stands for,” she told me, pale with rage. “It is mine by right. I have served Chaos. I have given the Six Realms to Lord Balarizaaf to do with as he will. At any moment he and all his kind will come riding through the gateway I, by my actions, created. And I shall receive my reward. I shall be made a Sword Ruler with dominion over my own realms. I shall be immortal. And as an Immortal I shall hold this sword as the sign of my power.”

“You will die,” I said simply. “Balarizaaf will kill you. The Lords of Chaos do not keep their promises. It is against their nature to do so.”

“You are lying, Champion. Go away from me. I have no use for you as yet.”

“You must give me that sword, Sharadim.”

The Actorios pulsed with stronger light. It was almost wholly organic as it sat in the palm of my hand.

I stood beside her now. She clasped the blade to her. I could tell that everywhere it touched it gave her intense pain, but she ignored the pain, believing that soon she would never experience physical agony again.

I could see the little yellow flame flickering back behind the runes carved into the black metal.

The Actorios began to sing. It sang in a small, beautiful voice. It sang to the Dragon Sword.

And the Dragon Sword murmured a response. That murmur became a strong, powerful moan, almost a shout.

“No! No! No!” cried Sharadim. Her skin, too, reflected the peculiar, writhing light. “Look! Look, Champion! Chaos comes! Chaos comes!” And laughing she swept the blade round so that the Actorios was struck cleanly from my hand. I dived towards it, but she was swifter. She had raised the blade, yelling in her pain as it burned her hands.

She meant to destroy the Actorios.

My first instinct was to dash forward and save it at all costs, and then I remembered something Sepiriz had told me. I stepped back.

She grinned at me, the loveliest wolf in the world. “Now you realise there is no defeating me,” she said.

She brought down the blade with incredible ferocity, striking accurately at the shining stone which lay there, pulsing like a living heart.

She screamed as the blade connected with the Actorios. It was a scream of complete triumph which turned, all in the space of a second, to bafflement and then to anger and then to nothing but agony.

The Actorios was shattered. It burst into fragments. It exploded in all directions.

And each fragment now contained an image of Sharadim!

Each fragment of the Actorios was bearing part of Sharadim away into limbo. She had thought to make herself all things to all people. Now it was as if each persona had separated and was imprisoned in a splinter of that peculiar stone. Yet Sharadim herself still stood there, frozen in her final act of destruction. Gradually her expression of enraged pain changed to one of terror. She began to shiver. The Dragon Sword moaned and wailed in her hands. Her flesh seemed to boil on her bones. All that astonishing beauty was vanishing.

Von Bek, Bellanda and Alisaard made their way towards me but I gestured for them to go back. “There is great danger still to come,” I shouted. “You must go to Adelstane. Tell the Eldren and the Ursine Princes what is happening here. Tell them they must wait and watch.”

“But Chaos comes!” said Alisaard. “Look!”

The figures I had seen in the redness were larger than before. Grotesque riders led by Balarizaaf himself. The Lords of Hell were riding to claim their new kingdom.

“To Adelstane. Hurry!” I told them.

“But what will you do, Herr Daker?” asked von Bek. His face was full of concern for me.

“What I must. What has become my duty.” I thought he would understand those words.

Von Bek inclined his head. “We shall await your presence in Adelstane.” It was clear that all three of them thought themselves as good as dead.

The huge rent in the cosmic fabric was growing wider still. And the black riders waited patiently for it to become large enough to admit them.

I stopped and picked up the Dragon Sword. It made a small, sweet sound, as if recognising a kinsman.

All around the blade the fragments of the Actorios were whirling, like planets around a sun. In some of those fragments as they went by, I saw one of Sharadim’s many faces staring out, with the same expression of horror she had worn just before her body collapsed.

I looked down at her shrivelled corpse. It lay across that of her brother. One had represented the evil of the world, the other the good. Yet both had been defeated by pride, by ambition, by a promise of immortality.

I watched as von Bek, Alisaard and Bellanda disappeared over the side of the hull. The camps of Sharadim’s army were in confusion now. They seemed to be awaiting their leader’s command. There was a fair chance that my friends could reach Adelstane unhindered. They had to go there. They could not, I knew, survive what was yet to come.

Now I lifted up the sword and I set my mind into a particular pattern. I remembered Sepiriz telling me what I must do when the Actorios was shattered, what power I could call upon. I could hear them chanting in the back of my brain. I could hear their despairing voices as I had heard them a thousand times in my dreams.

“
We are the lost, we are the last, we are the unkind. We are the Warriors at the Edge of Time. And we’re tired. We’re tired. We’re tired of making love…
”

“NOW I RELEASE YOU! WARRIORS, I RELEASE YOU! YOUR MOMENT HAS COME AGAIN. BY THE POWER OF THE SWORD, BY THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ACTORIOS, BY THE WILL OF THE BALANCE, BY THE NEED OF HUMANKIND, I SUMMON YOU. CHAOS THREATENS. CHAOS SHALL CONQUER. YOU ARE NEEDED!”

Now, on the far side of the cavern, above the wonderful white city of Adelstane, I saw a cliff. And on that cliff was lined rank upon rank of men. Some rode horses. Some were on foot. All were armed. All were armoured. All stared fixedly towards me as if in sleep.

“
We are the shards of your illusions. The remains of your hopes. We are the Warriors at the Edge of Time…
”

“WARRIORS! YOUR TIME HAS COME. YOU MAY FIGHT AGAIN. ONE MORE BATTLE. ONE MORE CYCLE! COME! CHAOS RIDES AGAINST US!”

I ran to Sharadim’s stallion, which panted and snorted near the corpse of its mistress. It did not resist when I climbed into the saddle. It seemed glad of a rider. I turned it towards the rail of the hull and galloped forward, leapt clear over the side of the vessel and landed on the rocky floor of the cave where Sharadim’s soldiers came forward in a flood of flesh and metal to cheer me. I had thought them my enemies. I was baffled for a moment until I realised with a kind of ironic delight that they knew only of Flamadin and Sharadim. They thought me their Empress’s brother and consort! They were waiting for me to lead them against Adelstane in the name of Chaos.

I looked backward. The huge crimson wound was swelling larger and larger. The grotesque black shapes were growing.

I looked towards Adelstane.

“Warriors!” I cried. “Warriors, to me!”

The Warriors at the Edge of Time had awakened. They were pouring down from the cliffs above Adelstane, running along invisible paths towards me.

“Warriors! Warriors! Chaos comes!”

There was a wind howling now. A crimson wind. It blew upon us all.

“Warriors! Warriors of the Edge! To me! To me!”

The stallion reared under me, hoofs flailing. It uttered a great snort of pleasure as if it awaited this moment, as if it lived only to gallop into battle. The Dragon Sword was alive in my right hand. It sang and it glowed with that dark radiance I had known so many times before, in so many different guises. And yet it still seemed to me that there was a quality in it which was not quite the same as any I had known before.

“Warriors! To me!”

They came in their thousands. In all manner of war-gear. With every strange weapon it was possible to conceive. They marched and they rode and their faces had come to life, as if they, too, like the stallion, understood only battle.

I felt that I, too, was never more truly alive than when I bore my blade in war. I was the Eternal Champion. I had led vast armies. I had slaughtered whole races. I was the very epitome of bloody conflict. I had brought it nobility, poetry, justification. I had brought it heroic dignity…

Yet within me a voice insisted that this must be the last such fight. I was John Daker. I did not wish to kill in any cause. I wished merely to live, to love and to know peace.

The Warriors of the Edge were forming ranks around me. They had unsheathed their many weapons. They were yelling and animated. They knew joy. And I wondered if each of these had once been like me. Were they all aspects of heroic warriors? All aspects, even of the Eternal Champion? Certainly many of their faces had a certain familiarity for me, so much that I dared not look at them too closely.

The Princess Sharadim’s soldiers were now in confusion. The Warriors of the Edge turned hard, killers’ eyes upon them, yet they did nothing. They awaited my orders.

Now one of Sharadim’s generals came riding through the ranks. He was very fine in his dark blue armour, his plumes, his spiked helm, his full, black beard.

“My lord Emperor! The allies you promised us. Are they all assembled?” His face was bathed in crimson light. “Does Chaos come to aid us in our destruction? Is that our sign?”

I drew a breath and then I sighed, poising my sword. “Here is your sign,” I said. I swung the blade in a single movement which sheared off his head so that it fell with a heavy clanking to the ground. Then I cried out to the assembled army which Sharadim had raised to conquer the Six Realms.

“There is your enemy! In fighting Chaos you stand some small chance of salvation. If you stand against us, you will perish!”

I heard a babble of questions but I ignored them. I turned my black stallion towards the widening crimson wound. I lifted my sword in a sign to all who would follow me.

And then I was charging at full gallop towards the Lords of Chaos!

There was a sound behind me. A mighty yell which could have been a single voice. It was the battle-shout of the Warriors at the Edge of Time. It was an exultation. They had come to life. They had come to the only life they knew.

Now through the crimson gateway the massive black figures rode in. I saw Balarizaaf, powerful in armour which flowed about his body like mercury. I saw a creature with the head of a stag, another which resembled a tiger, while many others bore no likeness at all to anything which had ever walked or crept upon any realm I had visited. And from them came a peculiar stink. It was both pleasant and horrible. It was both warm and cold. It had an animal quality about it, yet it could also have been the smell of vegetation. It was the pure stink of Chaos, the odour which legends said rose always out of Hell.

Balarizaaf reined in his scaly steed as he saw me. He was stern. His voice was kindly. He shook his huge head and when he spoke his voice was a booming reverberation. “Little mortal, the game is over. The game is over, and Chaos has won. Do you still not understand? Ride with us. Ride with us, and I will feed you. I will let you have creatures to play with. I will let you remain alive.”

“You must go back to Chaos,” I said. “It is where you and your kind belong. You have no business here, Archduke Balarizaaf. And she who made a bargain with you is dead.”

“Dead?” Balarizaaf was disbelieving. “You killed her?”

“She killed herself. Now all the different women who were Sharadim, who deceived so many of her kind, are scattered through limbo for ever. It is a harsh fate. But it is deserved. There is no-one left to welcome you, Archduke Balarizaaf. If you enter this realm now, you disobey the Law of the Balance.”

“How do you see that?”

“You know it is true. You must be called, whether there be a gateway or no.”

Archduke Balarizaaf made a noise in his huge chest. He put a hand the size of a house to his face. He scratched his nose. “But if I enter, what can stop me? The invitation was there. A mortal prepared the gateway. Those realms are mine.”

“I have an army,” I said. “And I wield the Dragon Sword.”

“You spoke of the Balance? It is a fine point, I think. I do not recognise your logic. And I believe that the Balance would not recognise it. What does it matter to me if you have raised an army? Look at what I bring against you.” And he swept his monstrous arm to show not only his immediate liegemen, lesser nobles of Chaos, but a seething tide which could have been animals or humans or neither, for their form was hardly constant. “This is Chaos, little Champion. And there is more.”

“You are forbidden to cross into our realm,” I said firmly. “I have summoned the Warriors of the Edge. And I wield the Dragon Sword.”