Angus Wells - The God Wars 03 (55 page)

           
Cennaire nodded, and together they
fought their way to where Bracht and Katya stood, barely able to hold the
furious beasts at bay.

           
The very numbers of the creatures,
and their sheer ferocity, afforded some slight advantage, for they made no
effort to attack in concert, but sought individually to confront the questers,
jostling one another, even lashing at their fellows in their eagerness to reach
their prey. Numerous shaggy bodies littered the snow, but it seemed that for
each one that fell, the darkness birthed more to augment those already
contesting entry to the gate.

           
It seemed a hopeless battle. That
the quest must end here, atop the Borrhun-maj, and Rhythamun escape to raise
his fell master. The guardians were too many; they were too strong. They might
be slain, but ere long they must overcome the questers by sheer weight of
numbers alone: Calandryll roared, "Together! Back to back, and find the
gate!"

           
He acted on his own words, spurred
by fear of Rhythamun's victory, hacking with a terrible vigor at the howling
creatures that yet stood betwixt him and the portal. Limbs fell sundered; all
around the snow grew dark with spilled blood. He knew Cennaire fought at his
side, trusted that Bracht and Katya stood behind as he sought to carve a way
through. The guardians shrieked furiously, more and more emerged from the night.
Oh, Dera,
he thought,
shall we die here! Does it all end heret
And
then, as bloodied steel clove a skull, he saw the gate, clear, the path a
moment open. He yelled, “Now! Swift! I'll hold them off."

           
He swung the straightsword in a wide
arc as the guardians ran to block the way, moving aside that the others might
go by him into the gate. He heard Bracht shout, “Together, or not at all!"
and then gasp. He turned his head, fearing the Kern slain, and saw Cennaire
move past him, dragging Bracht and Katya bodily with her.

           
She halted a bare handspan before
the portal, screaming, “Calandryll, now!"

           
He answered, “Aye!“ and hacked at an
angry, bestial face, cut a thrusting paw, felt another scrape his chest, and
flung himself back, against them, propelling them all into the gate.

           
Now they were leaves blown down the
avenues of time,- flotsam on the winds of eternity. They floated weightless,
noumenal in the vacancy between tellurian and aethyric hyles. There was only
quiddity, as if flesh were stripped painless from bone and bone dissolved in
the instant of entrance. They were pure motes of ego, no longer carnal but
become atmans, incorporeal: they existed now only as pneuma.

           
As sparks rising from a god-built
fire they drifted in absence. Sensation no longer existed, nor senses: there
was only
being
. And in Calandryll a
sudden realization that it was toward this end Ochen had tutored him so
fervently. The cantrips and the gramaryes the wazir had taught him had been but
exercises—useful enough in that substantial world they had quit, but
meaningless in this everlasting
now
—designed
to prepare his atman, his pneuma, for this exigency, to shift the pattern of
his thinking, the very fabric of his mind, toward that level that should allow
him control, the hope of survival, in this nullity.

           
He had not the least idea how he did
it: thought was pure here, a thing of itself, less the outcome of ratiocination
than the fact of whatever existence he now inhabited. Perhaps it was that power
sorcerers and spaewives discerned in him,* perhaps it was some gift of the
Younger Gods. The source mattered no more than the cause—only the affect held
meaning. He willed it, and it was: they emerged in the realm of the aethyr.

           
They stood upon a greensward,
beneath a sky of gentle azure, cumulus drifting majestic on a soft breeze, the
sun benign on their faces. A
hurst
of splendid oaks rustled softly at their
backs and before them ran a river painted all blue and darting silver by the
sun. Little flowers, cerulean and saffron, sprinkled the grass,- birds sang.
Across the river, hazy in the distance, stood an edifice of white and gold,
splendid. Calandryll looked toward it, and knew Rhythamun was there, and
dreaming Tharn. And that save he held this plenum extant, it should dissolve
and become another thing, a thing of Rhythamun's creation, or Tharn's, or
perhaps of the First Gods. He turned to his companions.

           
They stood befuddled, staring about
as if untrusting of their eyes, their senses, as if they anticipated the
dissolution of the solidity beneath their feet, a return to that state of
unbeing, or to the ice wastes of the Borrhun-maj.

           
"Where are we?" Bracht
asked. "What place is this? Another Tezin-dar?"

           
Cennaire drew close as he answered:
"This is the aethyr—limbo. Tharn rests there." He pointed across the
river, to the mausoleum. "And Rhythamun."

           
"This seems"—Katya
stooped, plucked a flower, and held it to her nose—"entirely substantial.
I had thought limbo should be . . . different."

           
"Limbo is ..." Calandryll
struggled for the words that might rationally explain concepts he did not
rationally understand, then shrugged. "Limbo is nothing, nonmaterial ... A
concept, and so may be shaped to what you will. Ochen should explain it better
than I."

           
The Vanu woman studied him awhile,
frowning. Then: "Do you say this world is your mind's making?"

           
"This
world, what we see"—he gestured around— "aye. I know not how, only
that I was able."

           
"That power in you," she
said softly, awed.

           
Bracht, blunter, said, "You
create all this?"

           
And Calandryll answered as best he
could. "Not create it, I think, but impose my will upon the matter of
creation."

           
"Ahrd," the Kern said
softly, almost reverentially. "Are you become a god then?"

           
"No." Calandryll shook his
head, smiling. "Were I that, I'd find it simpler to deny our enemy. I've
that power in me, I suppose—what Ochen saw, and the spaewives—and that combines
with Ochen's teaching, that I can better comprehend the stuff of limbo, of the
aethyr, and so shape it to my wishes. To Rhythamun this is likely a very
different place."

           
"To Rhythamun . . . aye,"
Bracht murmured. "I wonder what he sees."

           
"Likely his sight is shaped by
his pneuma," Calandryll said.

           
"Then to him, this likely a
poisonous place," Bracht returned. "You say he's there?" His
gaze moved past Calandryll to the marbled splendor in the distance.

           
"Aye." Calandryll nodded,
certainty in his voice. "The Mad God lies there, dreaming of
resurrection."

           
"Then do we go there?"
Bracht demanded. "And halt his dreaming?"

           
Calandryll thought it should likely
not be so easy. Whatever power lay in him he thought must be equaled or
outweighed by that knowledge Rhythamun possessed. The warlock had lived long
ages, accumulated the ill wisdom of centuries, and now—so close to his fell
goal—he should not readily concede the battle. But he said, "Aye,"
confidently, and began to walk toward the river, aware of Cennaire's eyes on
him, admiring, almost worshipping.

           
Bracht stepped out as if devoid of
doubt; as if, at last come close to their quarry, he foresaw only victory. It
was Katya who echoed Calandryll's uncertainty. "How came he here?"
she wondered. "Seven wazir-narimasu it took, to open the first gate, yet
Rhythamun went through solitary. And alone, he survived the Borrhun-maj to
reach this place."

           
"He's powerful,"
Calandryll said. "He commands great magicks."

           
Katya nodded, falling silent, a
cloud passing over her face. Her grey eyes flashed stormy, but she said no
more.

           
"Shall honest steel prove sound
here?" demanded Bracht.

           
Calandryll frowned, unsure of the
answer. At length he said, "I think it likely. We're fleshed, no?

           
We feel the breeze, the ground
beneath our feet— so likely solidity becomes imposed on the insubstantial, and
our blades own the same reality as we."

           
"Ahrd! A simple aye or nay
would have sufficed." Bracht chuckled, as if he reveled in the prospect of
the final confrontation. "I've no head for these metaphysics. Be all this
of your making, then only hold my blade secure and sharp-edged, and I'll give
you Rhythamun's head."

           
Calandryll smiled and took
Cennaire's hand, reassuring himself that she and he were, indeed, substantial.
He felt less confident of success than Bracht, and wondered if that was the
Kern's function in the gestalt Ochen had spoken of, Bracht's foreordained part
in the quest: to furnish them with optimism, to bring them on when fainter
souls might falter, careless of danger.
And
were that so,
he mused as they hurried toward the river,
what role does Katya play! What Cennaire!
What is my part!

           
That question he could not readily
answer, and cursed himself for it: they came ever closer to their goal, and
that evasive knowledge should likely prove vital to their success—or their
failure. He gnawed at the problem, dredging conversations with Ochen, the
pronouncements of Kyama and the other spaewives, from his memory. Those last,
hurried words of the wazir's came clearest, but still fragmented . . .

           
One
may, unwitting, aid you . . .

           
That
power one of you commands, and that another holds . . .

           
Perhaps
the one might be turned against the other . . .

           
A notion, nebulous as yet, began to
form. He turned to Cennaire.

           
"When Anomius ensorcelled the
horse you rode across Cuan na'For . . . Did you not tell me he looked out from
the mirror? Worked his gramarye even from
Kandahar
?"

           
"Aye," she answered,
confused. "He had me hold up the mirror, that he might see the horse.
Why?"

           
"Perhaps . . ." He shook
his head. "No, it's nothing. A thought only."

           
It was akin to the remembrance of a
dream, or its telling to another, as difficult to pin down, to voice.

           
He set it aside as Bracht spoke.
"Do you give some thought to the fording of this river?"

           
He stared at the burn. Burn? From
across the sward it had seemed little more than a brook, likely shallow, easily
crossed. Now he saw it wider, turbulent, the water raging angry over
threatening stones, too deep to wade, too fierce to swim.

           
"It changes!"

           
Katya's voice was warning, alarmed.
He stared about, seeing the gentle pasture across the barrier had become a
wasteland, desolate, all bleak and rocky, scattered with sad, twisted trees.
The sky changed hue, the placid azure replaced with ominous lividity, the
softly billowing clouds shaping black anvils now, on which lightning was struck
by the hammer of grumbling thunder, the wrack driven by a whistling wind.

           
"Rhythamun!" he gasped.
"He shapes this."

           
"And bleak as his cursed
soul," Bracht said. "What do we do? Shall the Ahrd-damned gharan-
evur halt us now?"

           
The Kern's voice was angry, his blue
eyes cold as they stared at the torrent, beyond to the mausoleum, that yet
grand, the marble shining under the louring sky. He fingered his falchion's
hilt as if he would draw the sword and contest with the elements. There was
only wrath and frustration in his stance. Calandryll thought that did no other
course present itself, then likely Bracht would plunge into the torrent,
rejecting the obstacle: he drew strength from that.

           
"No!" He stared at the
water, at the miserable vista beyond, and inside himself, instinctively, he
found the power of creation, triggered by Bracht's anger, fueled by his own
determination. "No, he shall not."

           
A bridge imposed itself across the
flood, solid stone that rose in a sweeping, elegant arch, wide enough they
might all four go side by side. Katya gasped; Cennaire started in amazement.
Bracht said, "Well spelled," approvingly, as if he took for granted
occult powers he had once viewed with consummate suspicion. Calandryll stared,
wondering at his own abilities. ,