The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (32 page)

“Christ,” was all Broaditch could say, lifting his mace and leading them towards the archway.

“Had they fairer forms,” Lohengrin declared, “I might be tempted.”

Suddenly falling was suspended, the darkness gone, and Parsival was sure he floated on a soft cushion or was supported by gentle, unseen hands. Unlea was gone again … he felt himself rising as a feather on a draught … and then he was in a place he knew, a hall with thin, slanted lines of light fanning in from high up, past dim pennants unstirring in the still, cool air. He moved up the hall and saw, with a tremor, the woman on the highbacked wooden throne, pale light washing her form into the stone dimness. Her head suddenly tilted back and he heard her say something he thought had his name in it, but he couldn’t quite make it out and heard his own voice:

“Mother … Mother … What did you say, mother? … Can you see me?”

Her extended hand went stiff into a violent clench and he knew she’d just died.

“Help me, mother … tell me … tell me …”

And then mud and water rained down as his lungs sucked for air, and he heard Unlea’s outcries in the total blackness clamping in around them as they clutched and scrambled into the muddy edge of an invisible pond or sluggish stream …

“Stop!” Clinschor shouted, holding up his arm. They’d just entered a chamber where shriveled carcasses of what might have been goats or sheep hung swaying in chains over low fires. They were obviously being smoked. At the far end of the room was a low wooden door. “What wizard’s work be this?”

Gobble shrugged and took a deep breath, grateful for the rest. His leg was almost numbed.

“We must have circled back,” he offered. “I know this place.”

“Thus you’ve been the more deceived!” his leader thundered. “This chamber is enchanted. These are the bodies of the heroes before me who tried to do away with the lies and stupidities and corruptions of men! This was their fate. Endless torment!”

Gobble rolled his restless gaze around, unsatisfied.

“But —”

“Silence, Goppa,” insisted Clinschor, watching the colorforms that menaced him, wizard things to seize his soul; forms of soft butterfly confusion, cloudy purpose … shifting shapes hinted wonders of light and peace … He forced his eyes to the pure dark shadows. “They tempt me still,” he muttered to Gobble, who was just watching now and massaging his cramped, crippled leg. Clinschor stared at the swaying meat and began a muttering drumroll of incantation.

“I will burst the spell that seals the door,” he said.

“Master,” Gobble put in, “I can open it, I …”

“Make ready, men,” Clinschor said. Gobble wondered which men he meant. Looked around at the smoky, dim chamber and saw none.

“But …” Gobble began and then was checked by the smouldering, pale, hypnotic eyes.

“There are powers here, Globa, you cannot imagine, whose lightest touch would shrivel your bones to dust.” Gobble nodded, locked to the strangely vacant stare. Felt the threats around them now, the nameless shapelessness of unfocused terror. Clinschor could see them pressing against the door, fluttering, soft, stupid touchings, like women’s hands ready to stroke, sap, lull him to weakness … “Once we pass this barrier nothing will stop me!” He flung this challenge at all of them and advanced on the exit, incanting under his breath, his vassal tilting along uncertainly in his wake. “The corruptions gather against me. The cowards who fear the prisoned king chained below. I’ll free him and woe to you all! You weaklings who cannot bear greatness will pass away forever!” the soft, tender cloudiness rose up before him like a cloying perfume … he thought of his mother for some reason … “Behold, I smite!” He roared and lunged at the door, struck it with the Grail fist and it sagged and wobbled open effortlessly outward and he stood facing the terrific, chaotic frenzy. “Behold them put to rout!” Where his dark lightnings flayed the rose-soft, cloying sweetnesses and amorous, dying tones to whimpering shreds …

Gobble stared, tried to see something in the musty dimness beyond the doorframe. Saw musty dimness.

“Follow me, men!” his leader cried. “To final victory!”

What
men?
he still wondered, following …

Now they were sloshing on, clinging together, groping calf deep in the slimy spill that Parsival realized must be draining somewhere ahead as it flowed steadily over their feet.

She seemed strangely calm now, he noticed. She’d passed hysteria. Realized she’d given up and so would be all right for a time … until her hopes returned …

The visions seemed to have ended again. His eyes beat hopelessly into the blank wall of absolute lightlessness and wondered where this would ultimately empty … in any case, as ever, there wasn’t any choice.

* * *

Tungrim batted his eyes.

“What’s this?” he muttered.

They’d come out in a high-roofed, cathedral-like hall lit by hundreds of candles.

“I know not,” Howtlande said. He was depressed. They’d lost Clinschor’s trail a few corridors back and had circled uselessly since.

There was something like an altar in the center of the floor, where more of the stunted people were gathered in seeming worship. A massive, unshaped chunk of rock lay tilted on the pedestal. Several of what looked like priests (in robes that dragged behind the diminutive forms) stooped, knelt and appeared to place small objects around the stone. He squinted as they went past. Some of the congregation wore fragments of black armor with tarnished silver trim; some wore what he took for masks until he realized he was looking at helmets with hideous silver faces. The little priests (if that was what they were) chanted out of phase.

Howtlande was tugging at him.

“Here’s a way,” he said.

And they hurried away into this new descent.

“What a place,” Tungrim muttered.

“Determination is everything,” the huge man meditated aloud. “All things fall to the determined man. He never surrenders to adversity. That’s the key to greatness. Not being so smart and great of wit, who cares? Eh? Who cares for genius? Eh? Better to sink in your teeth and hold on to the end … determination …”

Determination
, the Viking thought,
yes
,
by
Thor’s
eyes
.
I’ll
crawl
through
all
this
stinking
pit
until
I
find
her
…

The sex-maddened little people were following at a distance as Broaditch, Lohengrin and Layla went on quickly through the fetid passages, each with a weak torch. The knight would suddenly turn and catch flashes of their eyes as they fell back and waited for him to go on.

“They just creep and crawl and cling at you,” he muttered at his mother’s slender back. “How can you even kill them? They don’t really fight.”

“Being both men,” she suddenly said, “you no doubt need no counsel from a woman.”

“Much less a lady and mother,” said Broaditch from the lead, thinking:

I
began
in
this
family
s
service
and
mayhap
I’ll
end
at
the
start
…
I
feel
it
…
I’m
not
free
yet
…
I’m
being
forced
into
something
again
…
the
tide
and
waves
still
bear
me
on
… (remembering how the sea had once gently borne him through a tremendous storm, past fanged, dripping reef-rocks, restored his life as a gift and a debt to the invisible, less than a year ago … and from that moment he’d known no one is ever free)
but
on
to
what? I
would
ask
were
I
still
babe
enough
for
asking
…

So he accepted he wouldn’t find his family again (they — or it, or he — always withheld them like stakes in a gamble) until he’d done whatever it was the invisible demanded …

“Mother,” the knight was saying, “I, for myself, am eager for any help I can get.” He glanced back, hearing a shuffling scrape. “Keep from my reach, you shrunken sodomites,” he called into the ambiguous blackness. “I’ve been changed, mother. I had no choice in the matter.”

“Have you, Lohen?” she said, not untenderly.

“Something caught in my brain,” he ironically explained, “and let the old things run out and much new come in. Him, that burly, aging rogue who pants before us, he’ll testify a piece of something holy laid me low.”

“With what holy, pray?” she asked.

She was vaguely worried, reminded of his father. Was he going to flip full over and cross-kiss like the rest of that uneasy line? Better if one of them could find some solid footing in the middle …

“A piece of the Grail, mayhap,” Broaditch said, and she couldn’t tell how seriously.

“O great God of spiders and windmills,” she cried, one hand reaching inside her soiled robes and touching the flask that jogged and sloshed there. Because even as Broaditch was jerking her free from the pale, stunted seducers, she’d been able to snatch it from a heap of their things. Touching it took the tremble out of her sudden fears. “Not that,” she said.

“We know not what for certain,” Lohengrin said.

“Just like your father and mad grandam,” she said.

“Mother, please. Spare —”

“What advice?” Broaditch put in as they moved across a deserted chamber, unlit, where the torchflickers showed a giant erection scratched into the wall and decorated with smokestains.

“A question,” she said, “merely: what gain is there in going ever deeper into this maze?”

“Or,” put in Lohengrin, “what happens when these sketchy flames go out?”

“We walk in the dark,” said Broaditch, “noble folk.” Smiled. “Or light these others I’ve thrust under my beltcord.”

We
all
saved
something
, she thought.

Lohengrin made a slight, sudden rush backwards and was rewarded by seeing a few of the leaders scurrying away.

“Still hopeful, eh, rats?” Laughed. “If we die of weariness at least they won’t devour us. Guard your nether eye, big ruffian, if you fall.”

“Wherein have you changed?” his mother wanted to know. “You still laugh at things unfunny.”

Her hand closed around the firm neck of the leathern flask that rocked against her thighs.

“That’s a private matter, my lady,” said Broaditch, “as to what’s funny.”

“Never say ‘Grail’ to me, by Christ. The Grail swallowed my marriage without chewing! Gulped your mad father down.”

They were following down a tight spiral now, unmarked, monotonous walls passing, a dank smell rising.

“Hm,” grunted her son.

“He, whose mother was daft, and Christ knows how far back ran the taint.”

How
like
my
Alienor
, Broaditch thought.
Noble
or
plain
,
a
wife is the same
…

“Everything has a bottom, my lady,” he called back up half a turn. “Babies, holes, even griefs …”

“Did God swear it was so?” Lohengrin added, a full twist above. None of them was in sight of the other as they descended.

“If not we’ll soon prove it,” Broaditch answered.

He couldn’t stop in time, because the turning was too steep and tight, so he flung wide both arms, dimming the torch, just as his legs and belly hit the stooped, strangely bent, hollow-faced creature (so it seemed in a winkflash) and he knew he was going over and down, crying out in shock, anticipating claws at the very least, the flame going out entirely as he sailed into the blackness and tumbled around the following bend, trying to kick himself clear of the thing behind him (seeing burning light as his skull cracked into rock), hearing, as from far off, a screeching that at first he took for the woman, then the creature except it was saying (Lohengrin coming, metal jingling, passing his mother), raving:

“Aiii! Aiii! Slay me not! Pity! Pity!”

And then he righted himself as Lohengrin’s torchlight flashed on his drawn sword and outlined the grotesquely twisted figure Broaditch had fallen over …

John’s head still hurt from Gobble’s blow. He followed the glow of the pig through a dim and dark complex of chambers and ways. The giant form moved before him smooth as floating. The reddish eye-glare was like a torch to John, who was filled with calm. His soul was washed clean and polished smooth and there was no need to think, fret, plan, hope or fear: the Master would make it plain … the other one was false, and had sinned in the sight of the pig and sought even now to take the pig’s holy power for himself in his foul blasphemy. The voiceless voice explained it in deep, rushing clarities within his brain. He laughed out loud, though by the end it had become a kind of moaning, and then he spoke, shrill, harsh: