Triumph of the Darksword (46 page)

“Gwen?” he called fearfully, looking up the stairs toward the Temple. Her name died on his lips. The portico of the Temple was smashed, the mangled fragments of the silver strike ship gleamed from among the broken stones. The body of the ship’s pilot hung at a grotesque angle from the crushed cockpit. The dragon’s twisted corpse lay huddled nearby.

“Gwen!” Joram shouted. Rising to his feet, fear giving him strength, he made his way up the rubble-strewn stairs, calling out his wife’s name. There was no answer. Reaching the porch, he tried to shove aside a piece of wreckage to reach her in case she was trapped inside. Sudden dizziness and a wrenching pain in his arm reminded him of his injury. He staggered, almost falling.

The distant sound of an explosion, like a muffled thud, caught his attention, penetrating his despair. Turning, Joram looked out from the top of the mountain onto the plains below. Sunlight glinted off hundreds of metallic surfaces—tanks crawling around Merilon. White flashes of laser fire bombarded the magical dome. He thought he saw—though it might have been his imagination from this distance—one of the gleaming crystal spires of the Palace topple.

Everything, everyone around him was dead. Now Merilon was dying. The Prophecy was coming to fulfillment.

“Why didn’t I die?” Joram cried in anguish. Bitter tears stung his eyes. Then, suddenly, blinking them back, he looked out again across the plains. “Perhaps that’s why …” he murmured.

He would die, but not here. He would die in Merilon, fighting. The Prophecy
wasn’t
fulfilled. Not yet.

Looking hastily around, Joram caught a glimpse of dark metal almost buried beneath the crushed stone. Setting his teeth against the agony that each move caused, he made his way through the wreckage, back down the stairs. The Darksword lay near the body of the Executioner. One of the dead warlock’s hands was stretched out, almost touching it.

Joram leaned down to lift the sword. His legs gave way and he ended up falling to his knees beside it. Reaching out his hand, he hesitated. “I can save them,” he said, “but for what? For this?” Lifting his head, he looked on nothing but death.

He will hold in his hand the destruction of the world—

Joram looked back at the Darksword. The sun shone bright upon it, but it did not reflect the light. Its metal, dark and cold as death….

And Joram understood.

Going to Merilon, dealing death to its foes.
That
fulfilled the Prophecy. This war would end, but there would come another and another. Fear and mistrust would grow. Each world sealing itself off from the other. At the end, each would believe that the only way to survive was to destroy the other totally, never realizing that, in so doing, it would destroy itself.

“Open the window. Set the Life free,” came a clear, sweet voice behind him.

Turning, he saw Gwendolyn sitting calmly amid the wreckage at the top of the Temple stairs. Her bright blue eyes were on her husband. There was no sign of recognition, yet she was speaking to him.

“How?” Joram cried out from where he knelt beside the sword. Raising his arms to the heavens, he shouted in frustration. “How do I stop this? Tell me how.”

His voice came echoing back. Bounding off the columns of the Temple, reverberating from the mountainside, it cried louder and louder, “How?” Thousands of dead voices took up the cry, each voice softer than the softest whisper. “How?”

Gwendolyn motioned for silence and the echoes hushed. Everything in the world hushed, waiting….

Clasping her hands around her knees, Gwendolyn regarded her husband with a serene smile that pierced him to the heart, for he saw that she still did not know him.

“Return to the world that which you took from it,” she said.

Return to the world that which you took from it. He looked at the weapon. In his hand. The Darksword, of course. He had made it of the stone of the world. But how to return it? He had no forge fire to melt it. He might cast it off the mountain peak, but it would only fall to the rocks below and he there until someone else found it.

His eyes went to the altar stone. Looking at it closely for the first time, he realized what Menju had suspected earlier—it was made of darkstone.

Turning back to Gwen, he saw her smiling at him.

“What will happen?” he asked.

“The end,” she said. “Then the beginning.”

He nodded, thinking he understood. Lifting the sword, he walked over to Saryon. Kneeling down beside the catalyst, he kissed the mild, gentle face.

“Good-bye, my friend … my father,” he whispered.

He noticed that, strangely, his weakness was gone, the pain had disappeared. Rising to his feet, he walked to the altar stone with firm, unfaltering steps.

He raised the sword as he drew near the altar, and the blade began to burn with blue flame. The altar stone responded, the symbols of the Nine Mysteries starting to shine with a white-blue light. He touched each symbol carved into the rock, tracing them with his fingers: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water Time, Spirit, and Shadow Life. Death.

Turning to his wife, he held out his hand “Will you come stand beside me?”

He might have asked her to dance. “Of course!” she answered with a laugh. Jumping to her feet, she ran lightly down the stairs, her gown trailing in the blood.

Drawing near her husband, he saw her gaze curiously at his injured arm. Her blue eyes glanced at Saryon, then at the dead Executioner, then at Simkin’s body, and an expression of sad, puzzled wonder shadowed her face. Looking back at Joram, she reached out and touched his blood-soaked sleeve with the tips of her fingers. He flinched, and she drew her hand away quickly, putting it behind her, staring at him shyly.

“You did not hurt me. Not my arm, at least,” he amended, for he knew she must have seen the pain on his face. “I was remembering … long ago, when you first touched me like that.” He gazed at her searchingly “Have they truly found peace in death? Are they happy?”

“They will be, when you free them,” she answered.

That was not the answer he wanted, but then, he realized, he had not asked the question that was in his heart.
Will I find peace in death? Will I find you once again?
He could never ask that question, he realized, for it would have no meaning for her.

She was watching him expectantly. “They are waiting,” she said, a touch of impatience in her clear voice.

Waiting…. It seemed the whole world was waiting, had waited, perhaps, ever since the moment of his birth.

Turning from her, Joram grasped the hilt of the Darksword with both hands. Lifting the weapon high over his head, he braced his feet firmly in the soil of the dead Garden. He drew in a deep breath, then—with all his strength and might—he plunged the Darksword straight into the heart of the altar stone.

The sword entered the rock easily, so easily that it astonished him. The altar stone flared a brilliant white-blue and shivered. He felt the tremor beneath his hands, as though he had thrust the sword through living flesh. The tremor extended out from the stone, traveling farther and farther.

Beneath his feet, the mountain itself shuddered. The ground quivered and heaved like a live thing, splitting apart. The Temple tottered on its foundations; cracks split the walls; the roof caved in. Joram lost his footing and fell to his hands and knees. Gwendolyn crouched near him, staring around her, wide-eyed and fascinated.

Then, suddenly, the shaking ceased. Everything was still and quiet once more. The flaming light of the altar stone faded. Nothing about the stone appeared changed, except that the sword had vanished. No trace of it remained.

Joram tried to stand, but he was too weak. It was as if the sword—taking its last victim—had drained the life from his body. Leaning wearily against the altar stone, he looked out across the plains, wondering vaguely why it was beginning to grow dark when it was still noonday.

Perhaps it was his own sight failing, the first shadows of death. Joram blinked rapidly, and the shadows did not diminish. Staring at the sky more intently, he realized that it was not his failing vision. It was truly growing darker.

But such an odd, eerie darkness. It came from the ground, rising up over the land like a fast-flowing tide, fighting the sun that still lit the land from above. In this strange battle of darkness and light, objects stood out with unnatural clarity, every line sharply delineated and defined. Each dead plant stalk was touched with a radiance that made it seem almost alive. Tiny drops of blood upon the pavement glistened a brilliant red. The gray hairs on the catalyst’s head, the lines on his face, the broken fingers of his hands were so clear in Joram’s sight that he knew they must be visible from the heavens.

So, too, must heaven see the flaring lights of the attacking tanks, the jagged lightning bolts of the defending wizards. As the darkness continued to deepen and the wind began to rise, Joram watched the battle around Merilon rage ever more furiously.

Glancing up into the heavens to see if Anyone was watching, he saw the reason for the darkness. The sun was disappearing. A solar eclipse. He had seen them before. Saryon had explained their cause. The moon, passing between Thimhallan and the sun, cast its shadow on the world. But Joram had never seen an eclipse like this. The moon was sweeping across the sun, devouring it. Not content with nibbling at it a small bite at a time, the moon was feasting on entire chunks, leaving no crumb or scrap behind.

The darkness grew deeper. At the edges of the world, along the horizon, it was night. Stars appeared, flashing into life for a brief instant, then vanishing as another darkness,
deeper than night, engulfed them. The edges of this darkness flickered with lightning, and thunder rolled across the land.

The sky grew darker and darker. The shadows rose up slowly around Joram. It was still light upon the mountain peak—a tiny fragment of sun shone down on them, desperately clinging to life. Watching the darkness rise up from the land below, Joram had the strange feeling that he and Gwen were adrift on an ocean of night.

Eventually, however, the darkness must overtake them as well, the storm-tossed seas capsizing their fragile craft. Part of him was afraid, part begged him to find shelter from the coming storm. He knew he should, but he couldn’t move. It was like the paralysis of deep sleep; he watched what was happening as in a dream. His pain was gone, and he no longer had feeling in his arm. His right hand might have belonged to someone else’s body.

The wind grew stronger, lashing at him from all directions. Stinging bits of rock bit into his flesh. Gwendolyn’s golden hair enveloped her in a bright cloud.

Joram drew his wife near, and she huddled beside him in the shelter of the altar stone. She was not afraid but stared eagerly into the approaching storm; her eyes reflecting the jagged lightning, her lips parted to drink the wind.

And because she was not afraid, Joram’s last fears left him. He could no longer see Merilon now. The fragment of sun shone down on the mountain peak alone; the rest of the world was dark.

The dying light gleamed softly on Saryon’s peaceful face, touching him like a benediction. Then the darkness covered him. A last tiny ray formed a halo around Gwendolyn’s hair, and Joram kept his eyes fixed upon her. He would take this vision of her with him from this world and keep it, he knew, in the next. There she would recognize him. There she would call him by name.

The darkness surged closer. Joram could see only Gwen, her bright eyes on the storm. And he noticed, studying her face, that it had changed. Her expression was calm, there was no fear. But before it had been the calm of madness. Now it was the calm, beautiful face of the woman who had looked into his eyes once, so long ago, when he had supposed himself alone and nameless. The calm, beautiful face of the
woman who had stretched out her hand to him in love and trust.

“Come with me.” He murmured the words he had spoken to her then.

Gwendolyn turned her blue eyes upon him. The darkness gathered thickly about him. The sun, it seemed, shone only in her eyes.

“I will, Joram,” she said, smiling at him through her tears. “I will, my husband, for I am free now—as the dead are free, as the magic is finally free!” Reaching out, she took him in her arms and held him tightly, cradling his head against her breast. With her gentle hand, she smoothed his hair, her soft lips touched his forehead.

His eyes closed, and she bent over him, shielding him.

The sun vanished, darkness covered them, and the terrible storm broke over the world.

O
ne by one, blown down by the blasting winds, the Watchers on the Border toppled. The spell holding them prisoner—some for centuries—broke apart like their own stone bodies. The very last to fall, the one that withstood the fury of the storm to the end, was the statue with the clenched hand.

Long after the oldest oaks had been uprooted and tumbled across the land like twigs, long after the tidal waves had smashed upon the shores, long after city walls were crushed and burning and the armies of the battling forces of Merilon scattered in all directions, this one statue braved the storm, and—had anyone been near—they might have heard hollow laughter.