The Dragon Revenant (47 page)

“Pachela, you may go now. I see that Nevyn’s worked my revenge for me.” He took the first long swallow of wine. “The Hawkmaster is—was—a very stupid man, good with knives, no doubt, but not with his wits.”

As he sipped the second dose, he looked round to note the details of this early spring day: the view of the mountain peaks far away, pure and shining in the warm sun, Pachela herself, once a beautiful girl with ensnaring dark eyes instead of this thick-waisted matron with gray hair, who was walking slowly, with dignity, down the hill toward the burning ruin of the only life she’d ever known. No doubt she was glad that he was dying. Here in the soft sun, with the wind picking up cool and flower-scented, he couldn’t begrudge it to her.

“Everything changes,” he mumbled. “It’s the curse of the world: everything changes. But I—I go beyond all that.”

Although his hand responded slowly and trembled all the way, he got the goblet to his mouth and gulped down the last of the wine. A dribble ran from the corner of his mouth, but when he automatically tried to wipe it away, his hand spasmed, tossing the glass against the earth to shatter there.

“It is time.”

His eyes shut of their own will, but he stayed conscious, his mind alert within the dying lump of flesh. Even though his body of light would be useless in a few minutes, he summoned it as a bridge to the etheric and transferred his consciousness over to the simple thought-form, a slender man in a plain tunic. The relief of finally being free of his huge and deformed body was so great that he swooped up to the sky and fluttered once round the hilltop. He could see Pachela, a dim shape inside her pale aura, making her slow, proud way along through the waist-high waves of grass. When he flew off to the north, he glanced back to see that the silver cord joining him to his body was growing very thin and pale. It was time to change levels while he was still somewhat alive and in firm command of his mind.

He pictured a circle divided into quarters, each a different color: olive, russet, citrine, and, in the bottom quadrant, black. He held the image in his mind until it stayed clear and solid, then slid it out so that the circle seemed to hang like a vast curtain before him. Just then, he felt the silver cord snap. Like pieces of unstitched cloth, chunks of his body of light slithered and fell away, leaving him a naked bluish form hovering amid the billowing energy waves of the etheric plane. He bent all his concentration to the circle, which now changed from a painted-looking figure to a solid disk. The blackness was swirling within its bounds like trapped smoke. In thought only, the Old One called out the names of the Lords of Husks and Rinds, but there at the gate between worlds the thoughts seemed to boom like gongs. On that quiver and rage of sound he slid forward into and through the swirling blackness into the Earth of Earth, the lowest point of the world that knows the Light.

He felt it more as a smell than as a space, a thick mustiness of decay, yet perfectly benign, like leaves crumbling to enrich good soil, perhaps. As he burrowed his way deeper in, he felt pressure, as if the earth grasped him with firm hands. It became harder and harder to move, even though he was now pure mind scrabbling molelike into the astral plane. A desire filled his being, a lust for sleep, for resting there forever in the clingy dark, but he had trained his will for a hundred years in preparation for this exact moment. As he clawed onward, he envisioned himself going down, pictured in his mind that he was digging his way through to a darkness that lay below the universe and that touched it only at this one point. Earth of Earth began to fight him, as if its King had somehow discovered his evil intent. The dark turned crystalline and hard, gleamed briefly with an oily copper light, formed into vague faces and hands that clutched him and whispered with voices that all cried, “Go back! Go back to the Light!” Yet raging and cursing he smashed his way on, hammering at the faces and crushing the little hands with the huge steel clubs he visualized for weapons.

With one last howl of rage he broke through. Since his mind was still bound by earthly concepts, he saw everything very concretely. He was a tiny naked human figure clinging by its fingers to the bottom of a vast black sphere. Below, storm-tossed and infinite, spread a black sea. There were no stars, only currents of greater darkness, no true forms, only shifting pale images that alternately beckoned and menaced. The Old One felt his terror like a biting cold, smelt it as an acrid stink. This was the gate to the Dark of Darkness, the world of Husks and Rinds. Here, if he could claw and fight his way to power, he would exist forever as a separate soul, beyond all judgment of the Great Ones, beyond death though beyond all life as well. During every moment of his unnaturally long life, he had trained and planned and longed for this moment, but now he hesitated, stunned by the loathing that welled up within him.

For those moments beyond time he wanted to turn back. Earth of Earth would receive him; even as he had the thought, he felt his grip upon the sphere grow more secure, as if something had reached out and caught his wrists to steady him. Yet turn back to what? Nevyn? That meeting, perhaps, he could have faced, but behind the barbarian dweomermaster stood the Great Ones and their ultimate threat: the utter annihilation of a soul as unclean as his. Besides, he had a certain stubborn dark honor of his own. All his life he had longed for the manhood stolen from him by the slaver’s knife, longed for power to replace it and longed, too, for vengeance. What was he to do now? Crawl back to Nevyn like a whimpering puppy and grovel before the Lords of Light?

“Never! I swore that from evil I would forge my good, and I hold myself to that vow!”

He let go the sphere and dropped. Yet, even as great black waves lapped up to receive him, he saw, plunging out of the storm-tossed sky a figure of shining light, and as it plunged, it threw before it a gigantic shimmering net. With a howl of rage the Old One tried to dodge to one side, but too late. The net caught him, spread out, and wrapped him round. In the gust of triumph that echoed over the sea, he recognized the touch of Nevyn’s mind. Sea, storms, the sphere itself—they all vanished in a blaze of light as he felt himself swung round and round then slung clear of the net in an arc like a cry of triumph. On and on he tumbled through the silvery billows of the astral light to fetch up at last in some uncertain place.

He stood at night on a strangely familiar hilltop and looked out over a misty valley. A full moon hung overhead, but it was bloated to an enormous size and burned with an eye-slashing silver glare. The moon was watching him. He was sure of it, suddenly, that it had turned into a single malignant eye. His terror made his flash of loathing at the Dark of Darkness seem like a child’s pleasurable shudder over a ghost tale. He was doomed. Nevyn had anticipated him, gone to meet him, trapped him, and now turned him back into the world where there was no escape from the Great Ones. He would have no endless life of working evil as he crept through the dark. He would have no life at all.

In a spasm of screaming panic he wrenched himself around and saw, looming nearby, his magical Temple of Time, but now everything lay in moonlight, not half in sun. He ran or rather flew toward the white tower, and as he swooped into the open door he saw all his symbolic figures lying smashed and broken. He rushed for the staircase, raced up and up, pausing at each floor only to see the same chaos, his work smashed and reduced to strewn rubble. At the top floor he had his greatest shock, because it was empty—not so much as a splinter left—except for the statue of Nevyn, gazing out the window where he’d left it. The Old One stood at the top of the staircase and tried to steady himself, because in his mind he still had a body of sorts, while he wondered about the significance of this one last symbol. When Nevyn turned from the window and smiled at him, he screamed.

“I’ve been waiting for you. Ask for mercy, and you shall have it.”

With another scream the Old One flung himself down the stairs, tumbling and swooping out the tower door just as the temple collapsed with a silent—utterly silent—shimmer of destruction. He rushed down the hill and staggered into the mists, but although he tried to run, he merely drifted this way and that. He realized then just how far gone in dying he was. With one last spasm of strength, he seemed to rise up and catch a draught or current in the light, and slowly it bore him up and away. It seemed to him that he was a boy again, a young slave in training for the clerkship. Ahead of him stood the school, built round a pleasant stucco scriptorium in the midst of gardens. He’d been happy there, well-fed and well-treated for the first time in his life, good at the work, praised by his master, courted by the other boys. He saw, then, the scriptorium, the arched doorway leading into the long, white room, all glowing with little oil lamps.

In the slender form of an adolescent boy, the Old One skipped toward the doors. He could feel his sandals slapping on the tiles and smell the scented oil. Once he reached those doors, he would be safe. Master Kinna would never let anyone harm his best pupil. He faded through the doors and out into the long room, where plain little writing desks stood in tidy rows and oil lamps flickered golden against the rising dark. Up on the dais someone was standing at the lectern and contemplating a draped scroll.

“Master Kinna! It’s Tondalo. I’m back.”

The figure raised his head and pushed back the hood of its robe: Nevyn. The scriptorium vanished. They stood face-to-face in the white mist.

“Tired of running?” The sculpted face of Nevyn’s thought-form wore no expression at all, not a snarl, not a smile, nothing. “Go where you will, but every road will lead back here to me.”

The Old One felt as if he still had a body and was slowly sinking to his knees. The room spun in a swimmy blur, a whirlpool, a murky vortex of gold-shot white light.

“You have one last chance.” Nevyn’s voice spun round the vortex to reach him. “Forswear the Dark and submit to the Light.”

“Curse you! Curse you and all your wretched kin!”

Nevyn vanished. The Old One knew only movement, felt himself to be one tiny point of consciousness that was swirling, rising, caught now in the whirlpool, choking, spinning, fading, always spinning—

Then nothing at all.

“You want to know what happened to the Old One?” Nevyn said. “Where does a candle flame go when you blow it out?”

When he realized that he understood, Salamander shuddered in his very heart. By then the flames were swarming and swirling over the entire villa and the compound around it, the greasy smoke spreading through the sky and staining the light into a hellish parody of sunset. Yawning and sighing like any old man waking from a nap, Nevyn sat up, stretched his arms over his head, then clambered to his feet.

“Let’s find the others and get on the road. When those slaves reach town, the archon will send men out to investigate. I’m in no mood to be arrested just yet.”

“Quite so, oh exalted master. Ye gods, you gave me a turn in there! I honestly thought you were going to die to save our miserable and unworthy lives.”

“You’re not the only one who can put on a good show for the marketplace. Look—there’s Gwin and the warband riding for us. No doubt they’ve been a bit worried. But—oh by the Goddess herself! Where are Jill and Rhodry?”

Salamander swore and went cold all over again as he counted up the riders and realized that his brother and his pupil were nowhere among them. Without even thinking he began running toward the black and flaming ruins of the villa. Cursing a steady stream under his breath, Nevyn followed.

When Jill and Rhodry rushed out of the house into the garden, they found the wooden ancestor statues already burning, licked with leaping flame like huge logs in some giant’s hearth. Smoke poured around them and billowed down from the blazing shake roof in a swirl of darkness while the heat parched and trembled the living trees and flowers. Through the crackle and roar of burning Jill could hear men screaming, trapped in the upper rooms of the villa. Choking and coughing she dashed for the gates in the outer wall only to realize that she’d lost Rhodry. She spun around to see him turning round the corner of the house and racing down the narrow passage between it and the outer wall on his right.

“Rhoddo! Stop! Come back!”

“He went this way!” Rhodry kept running. “I heard his chain clanking.”

For the briefest of moments she stood crippled with fear. With the roar of a thousand demons a plume of fire burst free from the roof and towered in a spew of golden sparks.

“Rhodry!”

Cursing him in her mind Jill ran after him. Dodging sparks, choking on smoke, stumbling at times and leaping over a clot of burning debris at others she raced down the passage and burst free just barely in time into the clutter of sheds behind the house. Already roofs were smoking and charring as the Wildfolk swept among them in an orgy of ruin. Through the smoke she could just make out Rhodry, hesitating by the back wall.

“Come on!” she screamed at him. “Out the back gates!”

“Won’t. He can’t be far.” Rhodry suddenly burst out laughing, his old berserker’s howl of harrowing delight. “Baruma! Remember my promise!”

Wailing in joy he took off again, racing round a shed and heading away from the back gates and safety. In an unthinking rage Jill dashed after. Behind her the empty stables collapsed with a rush of fire and spewed embers out across the yard. A shed caught in a shriek of dweomer-wind. Blackness shot with burning filled the yard. Still Rhodry ran on, with Jill right behind him, screaming curses and begging him to come back. Finally, as she put on a last burst of speed, she saw Baruma up ahead, panting and blowing as he tried to run with his heavy chain. With a banshee howl Rhodry took out after him just as Baruma ducked through a little gate. Although Rhodry plunged right after him, Jill hesitated and looked back. The plastered walls on the far side of the compound were collapsing in a pour of smoke as their supporting timbers caught from the sheer heat in the yard.

“Rhodry! Come back!”

Her only answer was a swirl of smoke and fire as the roof of the house fell in. She turned and ran after him, batting at the drift of sparks with both hands as she charged into a walled garden. Already fire crept through the parched flowers that edged it, and in the far corner a tree blazed like a torch. Heat danced and shimmered along the soot-stained walls; she could feel heat grabbing her face like a clawing animal. Ahead in the smoke Baruma crouched at bay, his only weapon the heavy chain that he swung in both hands, back and forth in a desperate arc to keep Rhodry and his sword out of reach. There was no time to let Rhodry wear him down with fancy footwork. Jill drew her silver dagger, caught it by the point, aimed, and threw. As straight as an elven arrow it sailed home and bit into Baruma’s right eye. Screaming and blind he dropped the chain and staggered back as Rhodry pounced and struck, slashing his throat open in a howl of laughter.