The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (53 page)

Their progress gave us hope. The crude repair of ashlar that had
stood so long impounding its meager reservoir was swallowed up and
twice overtopped. Two hundred feet of the wound was seamlessly
closed in the glittery grey rock they lofted, shard by shard. For
to touch one of these boulders to the patch at any point was to
see it snatched into the reborn wall like water into a sponge—to
see the fragment meld with the broken rim, and the whole mend
incrementally rise.

And in their toil, it seemed the dead soldiers grew brighter, for
the stone they wrestled scoured the rusted greaves and corselets they
wore, such that their armor began to flash brazen and silver in the
blaze of moonlight, and their long-empty sockets seemed to gleam
with it too.

Those twice-dead warriors—tireless—ant-swarmed the boulders
upslope either side of the breach, like a V-shaped bucket brigade, but
of course the upper third of the crater’s great wound yawned widest
of all. Those skeletal conscripts twice resurrected by the witch—two
hundred years ago, and now—toiled like the heroes they were, but
we already saw that once arrived at the crater, the best we could do
against the ascending demons would be too little. If they reached the
breach in their thousands, they would usurp the crater’s repair.... We
apexed, and now we were plunging again

Even as we dove, we saw Hylanais overwhelmed. She was zigging
and zagging on her blur of wings, and retreating ever higher from her
army, because Gothol on his raft, and Zan-Kirk on his demon, flanked
her left and right, and flung bolt after bolt of raw thaumaturgic energy
at her, while her fierce dodges and deflections plainly cost her all the
strength she had. Even as we plunged to the crater’s rubble-slope, we
saw we’d land with but scant lead on the up-rushing hellspawn.

Yanîn’s great torqued mass—like a spring—somehow diminished
our impact with Rainbowl. Here was the rubble-slope much shrunk
by the energy of the dead heroes, yet it seemed a work that could not
be accomplished before the demons swarmed up from the trees.

Yanîn said, “Take arms against them when they come, my friend. I
must give myself to one task alone. Good luck.”

He lifted the boulder next to the one he stood on—it was as big as
a mail-coach!—and thrust it into the air. Astonished, I watched it arc
high, high up the cone, strike the patch, and melt into it.

A hellish din! Now five thousand demons erupted from the treeline
not many furlongs downslope from us, while bolts of crackling energy
split the sky between the three combatant wizards high above us.
Yanîn, in swift series, hurled three huge stones arcing a quarter-mile
through the air to merge with—and incrementally augment—the
stony poultice on great Rainbowl’s wound.

The demons poured from the trees, crossed the open slopes,
muscling and lurching and scrabbling through moonlight, clawing
and seething, gaunt-limbed and rasp-tongued and thorn-furred and
fungus-eyed they came, their unearthly stench—an almost solid
thing—welling forth from them like a kind of miasmic vanguard.

It was time to turn to. I had a good sword, though I sorely disliked
lacking a shield....

Here they came closing, closing—I had just time for another glance
behind me at Yanîn. There seemed to be two of him, so incessant
and swift were his workings. I saw no less than three huge boulders
strung through the air along the same trajectory, and he launched yet
a fourth along that same parabola just before the first of the series
impacted with the patch, and swelled it....

And here were the demons now. As I set my blade sweeping
through that thorny surf of claws and jaws, I saw with great relief
hundreds of the dead army leave off their relay of rocks, draw their
blades, and turn with us to hew this demon-flux.

Dead allies! I can see them still, sharp-etched in moonlight!
Though their gaunt jaws seemed to gnaw the air, though leather their
flesh and their limbs scarce more than bones—though they had mere
moonlight for eyes in their sockets—the smell that came off those
twice-dead warriors was not of the grave, not at all! Not of the tomb,
though they’d lain twice entombed. The smell that came off these
dead warriors was of ice and stone and midnight wind, all laced with
the lovely bitter smell of steel....

We lifted our blades and on came the demons. A beetle-backed
one with triple barbed bug-jaws had at me, and I blessed this chance
for a shield. I sheared off his up-reaching jaws with a cross-stroke,
sliced five of his legs out from under, and as he buckled down before
me, hacked out a great square of his leathery carapace, and ripped it
free of his back—a shield!

But no, Shag—I’ll spare you the details of my own small doings,
and show you the grand tides in flux here, the whole sea of war in its
surgings.

Full half of the twice-raised dead had come down off the crater
and—raising a skullish hiss, a windy war-cry from their leathery
lungs—swept down in a scything line that bagged the demon onslaught
in a vast net of bony, tireless limbs and whistling swordblades.

Up on the crater their twice-dead brethren in two chain-lines
passed wall-wrack back up to the wall. Aloft, Hylanais was blasted,
scorched and thunderbolted from two sides by her risen mate and
his subworld scion. Though scathed with blazing energies, the witch
remained impossibly aloft, her wings a blur, though her wearied
sorcery was all shield-work now, all incandescent hemispheres she
deployed left and right of her to contain and cancel her husband’s
and the Narn-son’s bolts and blazes.

While through it all Yanîn’s brute energy launched huge stones
moonward that plunged, plunged, plunged into the great wound, the
healed rock rising in the gap like pale wine in a goblet.

When you are sunk in combat on a grand scale, you can feel a
touch of the eternal. When did this all-engulfing turmoil start? How
could it ever end?

But end it did! It ended with the hurling of a single stone. Just
as my eye chanced to be turned that way, Yanîn launched a mighty
boulder, and I saw—astonished—that it was the final fragment of
Rainbowl’s collapse.

It arced up, up through the moonlight—big as a three-storey
manse it was!—and as it soared, dead silence fell upon that whole
infernal battlefield, for it soared up to an almost perfectly completed
crater, and fell into the one little notch of vacancy that remained,
high up upon the crater’s crown.

It seemed that Hylanais had never doubted this would come to
pass, for she had shot aloft, and already she hung there, centered high
above the bowl, as that last fragment found its niche.

And then quite leisurely—for an odd paralysis seemed to befall
both Zan-Kirk and his son—she stretched out her hand, and dropped
a tiny clot of light down into the high, gigantic basin.

What an audience we were in that moment! A true and single
audience, united by our sudden stillness and our rapt attention.
Furiously though the demon army and its generals had fought to
reach the crater and to kindle there the summons to the Sojourners,
we had beaten them.

And now every one of us—human, demon, dead and living—
raptly awaited what would answer the summons. A dire and various
audience we were, to be sure: claws, clubs, blades, and fangs all cocked
to rend and slay, but all our eyes, human and hellish, were in unison
now fixed aloft; a host of living warriors, hilts gripped, lifted axes
taking the moonlight; a host of dead warriors in a killing frenzy, to
whom this moment was the more apocalyptic for their having lain so
long in death before waking to possess it.... But all of these awaiting
the outcome, all now realizing that whatever would spring from the
witch’s spark, it would befall every one of us.

None in all that host but the airborne—none but the witch, and
the warlock, and the Narn-son—could see what that little clot of
radiance illuminated as it dropped inside the crater. But every one
of us reckoned—from the speed of its plunge—the rate of its unseen
journey to the imagined crater floor.

And such a concord was there in that monstrous throng’s silent
reckonings, that a single shudder moved across the whole grim host
of us upon the mountainside—every corpse, and demon, and every
living soul of us shuddered just one heartbeat before the crater
erupted.

It was the eruption, huge and silent, of a perfect inverted cone of
rose-red light up to the stars.

The full moon had somewhat declined from zenith, and the
rubescent beam, spreading as it rose, just nicked the lunar rim,
painting there a red ellipse like a bloody thumbprint....

Still that impossible stillness held us all. Rapt, our eyes or empty
sockets scanned aloft as that great chalice of light beamed up at the
stars...and as something began to
fill
that chalice.

Indistinct it was at first, a kind of granulation within the rosy
cup of radiance...until these contents began to seem more like the
substance of the cup itself.

Faces! Tier upon tier of them spiraling upwards and outwards, these
were the vast chalice’s substance! They were a towering tribunal—
rank on widening rank of faces rising toward the stars, every one of
them preternaturally distinct within their dizzying distances, and
every one of them gazing down on Lebanoi, upon her war-torn slopes,
her sprawling butchery of man and demon.

It froze us even stiller than before—every one of us it froze.
Something in the unearthly concord of those sky-borne gazes
unutterably diminished us, annihilated us with the sad austerity of
their ageless, alien regard.

Within their great cyclone of sentience they grieved, that sad
tribunal of the Sojourners. It was grief with a shudder in it they
showed us, as they gazed down on the wide, bleeding wreckage we’d
spread for their welcome.

That witnessing host roofed our world, and their sombre regard
showed us starkly the inferno that our bodies blazed in. My flesh felt
thin as a shadow sheathing my bones, while the eyes of the Sojourners
seemed to gaze down into a pit centuries deep, upon some holocaust
of remote antiquity.

Beheld by that tribunal, we felt ourselves to be the briefest of
echoes from some distant past, a rumor roaming the reverberant
corridors through which had thronged a great host long ago....

That high tribunal of skyborn faces! The gravity of them had
turned us to stone in mid-slaughter. Stunned we stood, sword-arms
hanging slack. It was among the strangest moments of my life, Shag!
To stand arms-length from demons and to think no more of them than
that they were residents like me on this strange earth! But in truth,
no more than that they seemed when this host—eyes immutable as
constellations—paved the night sky....

The sombre knowledge of that multitude! Knowing our future
as well as our past.... It seemed they had gathered to witness our
metamorphosis. To witness this strange crescendo our old world—
once theirs—was rising towards.

I felt it through my legs: whatever was to come of this, would not
be long in coming.

A true thought, that one. Yanîn leapt prodigiously aloft, and stood
astride the Flume just below its shattered terminus. Looking back
down upon the mingled army of demons just emerged from the trees,
and of dead still climbing from their fen, he bellowed, “Come up!
Climb up! Come see and be seen!”

Those demons in their homicidal fever required no prompting to
come up. That wry-framed giant with his equine eyes—had he sided
with the warlock? It was the witch had my allegiance from the first.
But did Hylanais’s son embrace the subworld?