The Return of the Sword Read online

  When . . .?

  Time was nothing here . . .

  It changed. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ it said, insistently. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  A familiarity seeped into it . . .

  Antyr!

  Vredech knew himself, and his awareness wrapped itself about the intrusion like a drowning man about his rescuer.

  But the Dream Finder’s will sustained them both.

  ‘We’re entering a dream nexus,’ he said. ‘You’ve done this before, with me, remember?’

  Memories of the training he had received from Antyr since his arrival at Anderras Darion were unfurling, steadying him. It had been limited but it had been enough for Vredech to recognize the truth of what he was being told. Nevertheless . . .

  ‘That was with Tarrian and Grayle holding me. This is . . .’

  ‘Different. Yes. But not so different. You can feel your body, can’t you? With Nertha tending us.’

  ‘Yes, but . . . everything’s wrong. She’s alone, and afraid . . . this is fearful, Antyr, for pity’s sake help me. I . . .’

  For a moment, his panic threatened to return and overwhelm both of them. But Antyr cruelly crushed it.

  ‘No! Quieten yourself. I don’t know what’s happened any more than you do, but whatever’s drawn us here has drawn us together and left Nertha guarding us. You know her worth better than I do, so cling to it – just as I’m clinging to the knowledge that wherever Tarrian and Grayle are they’ll be seeking to protect us.’

  ‘But without them . . .’

  ‘Without them, we’ll be guided by our deeper natures – our deepest natures. We are the elite, remember? We must trust ourselves.’

  Ironically, it was the honest uncertainty in Antyr’s repetition of his final injunction in the Labyrinth hall that helped Vredech finally take some semblance of command of himself. As he did so, a question came to him about the nexus that he and Antyr were caught in. As he touched Antyr’s mind with it, he found it was already being asked.

  ‘Who is the dreamer?’

  * * * *

  The darkness rang and echoed with cries.

  Andawyr rooted frantically through the junk in his pockets until he found the small radiant-stone lantern. He struck it and the cries changed in character, becoming the accompaniment to a confusion of dancing shadows.

  Another lantern was struck.

  ‘Where in the name of pity is this?’

  Isloman’s voice overtopped the noise. He was staring at the glistening walls of what appeared to be a large tunnel. His face looked haggard in the unsteady lantern light.

  Other voices were asking other questions.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Where are we?’

  Andawyr held up his lantern to identify the speakers.

  Oslang and Atelon were there, as well as Usche and Ar-Billan.

  ‘No good place, for sure.’ It was Isloman again. The babble of questions grew louder.

  ‘Quiet!’ Andawyr shouted. ‘Just be quiet for a moment. All of you. Let me think.’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘I said, be quiet!’

  The second command had the desired effect and a shuffling and uneasy silence descended on the group. Andawyr looked around both at his bewildered companions and at the strange place they found themselves in. He focused his lantern to a tight beam but it merely confirmed that they were in a tunnel before the darkness swallowed its light.

  The silence he had demanded, however, brought him neither stillness of mind nor clarity. The unspoken questions written on every face were the same as his own.

  What had happened? And where were the Goraidin and the others who had been in the Labyrinth hall?

  The only answer he could find to the first question was that this was certainly not the culmination of the conjunction that had been foreseen. Whatever form that might take it was unlikely that any of them would survive it. But this must be an ominous presage of it. A tremor before an earthquake. Insofar as they had any grasp on events, how much longer would they have before they were torn away completely?

  An unreasoned insight came to him.

  ‘It’s that damned Labyrinth,’ he said angrily. ‘Anderras Darion might be Ethriss’s castle of light, but that place has always been a dark secret at the heart of it. If I were given to wagering I’d say it was the place where this all began. Part of a battle centre of some kind for the monstrous conflict that brought this about. Perhaps Ethriss was telling us something he himself was unaware of when he put the Armoury within it.’

  ‘Or built the Labyrinth around it,’ Oslang said.

  Andawyr shrugged. ‘It’s all irrelevant, anyway,’ he said, unconvincingly brisk. ‘Whatever’s happened I suppose we’d better try to find a way out of here.’

  This appeal to common sense prompted another inspection of the tunnel. The walls were perfectly smooth and curved round in a high circle until they intersected the level floor which was as smooth as the walls and apparently of the same material. At its crown the tunnel was some four or five times the height of Isloman.

  ‘I can’t imagine how this has been built,’ the carver said. ‘No honest chisel’s ever been near it – there’s not a mark to be seen.’ He looked pained as he ran his hand down the wall. ‘This rock’s been tortured, not worked,’ he said softly.

  ‘The floor slopes a little,’ Usche said. She looked significantly at Andawyr. In common with most of the older Cadwanwr, Andawyr’s years of living and working in the Cadwanen caves had given him a remarkable instinct for navigating below ground. An inclination of her head asked the question, ‘Up or down?’

  Andawyr, however, had nothing to offer. Too many questions were vying for attention for such subtleties to make themselves heard.

  ‘Upwards is presumably out of here, but downwards may go to the heart of something,’ he said eventually. ‘Perhaps to whatever’s brought us here.’

  ‘It might be no more than chance that’s done that,’ Oslang said.

  ‘Possibly,’ Andawyr conceded. ‘As the conjunction grows nearer, extreme probabilities will come to pass, including more of Usche’s “cracks in the building”. I presume we’ve just tumbled through one. But why us and not the others, I’ve no idea.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Somewhere there’s consciousness at work here, reaching down into the depths.’

  ‘Whose, for mercy’s sake?’ Oslang demanded impatiently. ‘Mine? Yours? Sumeral’s?’

  ‘I don’t know, damn it,’ Andawyr retorted. ‘Maybe all of us. But I keep hearing Antyr shouting as that greyness swept over us. We must trust ourselves; we’re stronger than we know.’ He took Oslang’s arm and shook him. ‘Whatever caused all this, unravelled things to their very roots and whatever our thoughts are they both stem from and go to those roots – affected by and affecting what happens there. Antyr hasn’t a fraction of our knowledge but he worked that out for himself.’

  ‘Which leaves us where?’ Oslang pressed.

  ‘Here, wherever here is,’ Andawyr replied, shaking him again. He looked at the others. ‘Scared, but not scared witless yet. And while we’re alive and in full possession of those wits, we’d better use them.’ He clenched his teeth and hissed out, ‘Just keeping the will to fight might be as important as the way we fight.’ He pointed along the tunnel.

  ‘I’m for going down. Let’s see what’s brought us here.’

  Chapter 33

  The journey to the Armoury, short though it was, was never easy. The path through the Labyrinth defied all marking and the echoing columns that lay beyond it both lured and deceived with a song that reached into the darkest reaches of the soul. The guiding of people through it to fetch weapons for the hastily levied Orthlundyn army during the war had cost more than a few of them nightmare-troubled sleep for many months afterwards.

  Hawklan stumbled along it, not daring to turn for fear that the consuming greyness would be at his back. Driving him forward, too, was the fear that the greyness had been drawn h
ere by him, that his friends had been swept into nothingness because of his presence.

  Questions formed slowly in his tumbling thoughts. Was this the fearful conjunction that had been so exercising Andawyr and the Cadwanol – everything lost in a bleak and desolate emptiness?

  And what was he doing, fleeing, deserting them? Had he himself been plunged into madness brought on by his own fears and doubts?

  He forced himself to stop and lean on one of the columns. Its touch, real and solid, steadied him. As too did the weight of a silent Gavor on his shoulder. He risked a glimpse backwards. There were only the gloomy columns.

  Whatever had happened, it wasn’t the end – surely? – it couldn’t be. While he was alive he must have a role to play . . .? But there was a ringing hollowness to this assurance. What could he do, a solitary figure scurrying through the darkness – or just hiding in it? Where was he going? The Armoury? There was nowhere else to go – the path led only there and to leave the path was to die. But what did he hope to find there? The black sword? That had just been Gulda speculating. And even if by some bizarre happenstance it was there, what use would it be? There was no great army laying waste the villages and farms of Orthlund, or beating at the gates of Anderras Darion. Still less was there an army to lead out against them. There were forces moving now of which he had but the barest comprehension. True, there was a quality in the Sword that had struck Isloman and Loman, carver and smith, almost speechless as they had touched its carved hilt and black glinting blade. And, too, he knew that it – or he and it together – had a strength that he did not understand. How else could it have protected him from Oklar’s wild unleashing of the Power? But it was not enough. Should he find it, what more would he be, without true knowledge, than a lost and solitary soldier leaning on his futile weapon at the edge of a conflict that was meaningless to him?

  He set off again, no wiser and still afraid.

  Then he noted something.

  A deep silence.

  He stopped.

  Normally the Labyrinth was awash with strange noises that snuffled and scuttered at the edges of the path like invisible predators waiting to rend apart those unwary enough to misstep.

  But now there was nothing.

  It was as if the Labyrinth itself was holding its breath . . . As if it had caught the scent of an even fiercer predator drifting through the darkness.

  Scarcely a dozen paces would take him to the hallway of the Armoury and the bright sunlit images of the Orthlundyn countryside carried there by Anderras Darion’s intricate maze of mirror stones. From thence, through the now ever-open wicket door, he would enter the Armoury itself to be amongst the cornfield rows of points and edges glittering in that same sunlight.

  If Orthlund was still there.

  He dashed the thought aside and pressed on quickly, counting his footsteps and striving to ignore the deafening silence.

  But at the last turn, where light should have greeted and embraced him, there stood only columns, watching, waiting, in the Labyrinth’s dull twilight.

  He heard a rasping, terrified breath as his body responded to the sight. Gavor slapped his wings. Both sounds fell dead in the leaden air.

  ‘I . . . I made no mistake, surely?’ Hawklan stammered as the pounding of his heart threatened to overwhelm him.

  ‘Not that I noticed, dear boy,’ Gavor replied, equally unsteadily.

  Despair came in the wake of the initial shock, washing over him in full flood now, black and choking. Andawyr had thought him near the heart of what was happening. So had many others, not least Sumeral Himself. But what was he now? A dismal fugitive lost in this dreadful place where the least sound could be woven into a shrieking that would leave a man mindless, or into an avalanche roaring that would break him as surely as falling rocks themselves.

  He could not move.

  He had made no error, he was sure. He couldn’t have. His deeper nature held the Labyrinth in too great awe to allow any confusion of the mind to so mislead him.

  ‘Change,’ Gavor said.

  Hawklan started at the sound.

  ‘The Traveller said that to use the pathways of the Labyrinth is to change them.’

  Hawklan grasped at Gavor’s words.

  ‘Not the path to the Armoury, though,’ he said, struggling to recall Gulda’s account of her meeting with the Traveller. ‘At least, not perceptibly. What did he say? It changes like the mountains, mote by mote?’

  ‘For all we know, the mountains have vanished like the Labyrinth hall,’ Gavor retorted flatly. ‘And he did say there was a great turbulence in the Labyrinth.’

  Despite the implications of what Gavor was saying, Hawklan felt their exchange steadying him.

  ‘There are other paths, he said.’

  ‘He also said that most of them change like the trembling of a leaf in the wind.’

  Hawklan looked again at where the entrance to the Armoury should have been.

  Nothing.

  Just the blank, ominous columns, their presence sensed as much as seen in the gloom that pervaded the Labyrinth. He knew that, whichever way he looked, this would be what greeted him. His despair returned, undiminished. He had faced dangers before, dangers that might have seen him killed and that he would only too willingly have avoided, but dangers that he was nevertheless prepared to accept by virtue of the role he had accepted – the role his skills best suited him for: healer, protector. But there was a futility here that bore down on him like the weight of the castle itself looming high above this grim place. Dying in the course of opposing a greater power was a bitter enough prospect, but to die here – to drown in his own screams – for nothing – while . . .

  While what?

  While the world and everything – everyone – in it plunged into some nameless cataclysm that perhaps some action on his part might have prevented.

  That was bitter beyond any swallowing.

  He realized that he was clenching and unclenching his hand painfully. He could feel again the black sword slipping from his grip and tumbling into the darkness. His arm twitched as he tried to recover it.

  Could so slight a thing – the loss of a single weapon, however fine – be so significant now?

  Yes, his instinct told him, even though the links of cause and effect that would make it so were neither foreseeable then, nor calculable by hindsight now.

  ‘I think we’d better do something, dear boy,’ Gavor said, fidgeting nervously. ‘We can’t just stand here.’

  Hawklan opened his hand and gently rubbed it with the other as if to reassure it that it bore no guilt in the loss of the sword. Values deeply imbued in him and rehearsed constantly since his coming to this time began to reassert themselves.

  He was alive.

  He might be dead very soon, but then he might not be, and to cloud the present certainty with a future uncertainty was not only to mar the present but might bring about that feared future.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, straightening up and carefully turning round.

  The scene was as he had expected. Identical in all directions.

  Well, whatever had happened to the hall hadn’t happened to the Labyrinth, he thought bleakly. And it was still silent.

  Almost as though challenging it, Hawklan clapped his hands. The sound was dull and lifeless.

  ‘Which way?’ he asked.

  Gavor inclined his head round to look at him. ‘Dear boy, don’t ask me. It was your idea to come in here. How am I supposed to know. There’s not a breath of wind in here. There never is.’

  With a final glance at where the Armoury should have been, Hawklan held out a hand, indicating the way back to the hall.

  ‘This way?’

  Gavor clucked to himself twice, then nodded.

  As he set off, Hawklan found that his legs were shaking.

  He moved cautiously, every sense alert for the lingering echo of a footfall that might presage a reawakening of the Labyrinth. So many fears tugged at him that for much of the time he was abl
e to keep any one of them from rising to dominate. Nevertheless, when he reached the place where the hall should have been and found himself facing the same array of gloomy columns that lay before him in every other direction, he felt an unspoken hope dying. For a moment, panic screamed at him from the edges of his mind, but he held it at bay. It would remain close, though.

  Gavor did not speak, but shifted his weight uneasily.

  ‘Alphraan, do you hear me?’ Hawklan said.

  There was no reply.

  ‘Not that I’m normally inclined to think about such things, but I’d have imagined a bolder end for myself than this,’ Gavor said laconically.

  ‘Yes,’ Hawklan said. Gavor had been his companion since his mysterious arrival in Orthlund and it was more consolation than he cared to voice to have him still there.

  Then, out of the darkness, came a sound.

  * * * *

  Yatsu and Dacu crawled to Olvric’s side. He made no sound, but an inclination of his head drew them to a rock from the side of which they could look along the plain between the mountains without being seen. It took both of them a little time to adjust to the eerie perspective that the unchanging blueness brought to the plain, but gradually they made out the approaching riders.

  As they watched, there was a brief flicker of light, thin and vertical, on another part of the plain.

  ‘What was that?’ Yatsu whispered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Olvric replied. ‘I’ve seen a few of them, in different places. They’re never there long enough to look at properly and there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to them. If they’re signal lights they’re like none I’ve ever seen. Just a single flash, then gone.’

  ‘There’s another,’ Dacu hissed, instinctively ducking back behind the rock.

  ‘Never mind,’ Yatsu said. ‘We’ve enough to worry about without fretting over mysterious lights. How long before those three get here?’

  ‘Impossible to say,’ Dacu replied, squinting at the riders. ‘There’s nothing to gauge anything by.’

  Yatsu scowled. ‘If they’re who we think they are, we can’t possibly fight them. We’ll have to hide – buy some time to find out more about this place.’ No one argued. ‘Keep watching,’ he said to Olvric and Yengar.