The Hammer of the Sun (49 page)

The walls were shaking around him now with the thunder of the earthfires, but he set his hammers as counterpoint against them. After a while, though, it came to him that the little chamber was growing hotter, not cooler. He paused in his hammering to risk a glance over his shoulder, saw the inner door too hot to touch, the layers of dross beneath it still aglow. He could guess what had happened. He had left the door open too long, and the earthfires had broken through whatever restraints the original builder had placed there. Now they must be welling up directly against the far side of the door; even as he looked on it began to change colour slightly, developing the dull bloom of heat. No matter; it would hold long enough. Longer than he, perhaps; every breath seemed to sear his lungs. He set his teeth, still humming his tune, varying it, broadening it and finding words for its sweeping coda.

Far from here bear me now,
Off to the smiling land of the spring,
Where what is lost I regain
And more than I was I become!

He hammered with redoubled urgency, shaping and forming metal uncannily obdurate for all its lightness into the last fine welds of a framework for a light corselet of mail. The crashing chime of his blows rang dizzyingly around the stone walls; would they hear it, out there upon the Great River, and look up to see the plumes of smoke, the red glow, atop the shadowed crest of Elan Gorhenyon? Would they pull their oars to that frantic hammering time as their king urged them on, threatening, promising, half crazy with his wrath? He could see them as the thought came, the galley leaping through the water, the wavelets hissing and booming beneath its bouncing hull, its bows stirring the shallows, growling hollowly as they clove through the gravelly sand of the beach. Nithaid now, leaping the gunwale into the shallows, his warriors at his heels, charging without pause up the slopes of the Sorcerers' Isle. And in that moment it came to Elof that he was seeing a truth, a vision that was happening, and even as the metal leaped and twisted beneath his hand he listened for the roar of voices, the thunder of feet on the floor above.

It came swiftly; Nithaid, for all his years and the bull's armour he bore, must have made an almost unhuman pace up that slope, borne along by the wrath that boiled in his brain. "
Vatant
!" he screamed, while he was yet some distance away. "
Come hither and be paid for the jewels you sent me! Volant! Volant
!" His voice had a shriek in it like that of a man racked to the tearing point; it froze Elof's heart. "
Come hither, you skulking slayer! Coward, come forth
!" Already he was nearer; he must be running like a man possessed -

Running. Running as once Elof could have, eight years past, on two strong legs. His teeth ground with fury. Eight long years of misery, loss and torment! He beat them out beneath his hand, with his last few strokes he hammered them away -

"
Valant, come forth
!" It was Nithaid's weight alone that crashed against the sun symbol on the door and tore the whole thing from its hinges. His onrush carried him stumbling into the forge, crashing over table and bench before he could stop, staring at the red-lit smokecloud that came boiling up into the empty room and swirled beneath the roof, as a rumble like unending thunder shook the walls. But against this sorcery he swung up his shield and shrieked "
Stay, fiend and fight! My hounds have a claim on your carcass
!"

Then out of the cloud, as it seemed, a voice answered him. His guards heard it, as they came running up behind him. And though it had seemed to them till then that no voice could be more terrible than Nithaid's in his torment, yet this one stopped them in their very stride as they came spilling into the forge. Where his was crazed, it echoed bleakly calm; where his screamed, it spoke in tones elegiac, dark and measured. But they quailed all alike at the pain it bore, and the judgement it pronounced remorseless, final as a passing bell.

Unworthy borrower of your name!
Oppressor of the land you rule!
King without honour, truth or shame!
The measure of your crimes is full!

Nithaid beheld, in that last instant, a dark shape rise amid the glowing centre of the cloud, shadowy, formless, unlike a man's. Then with a last deafening roar the floor before it split with a line of fire and collapsed, caved inward beneath him in a roar of incandescent smoke. Into the gap slid benches and tables, sweeping men with them. The wheels and engines, baked dry by long heat, burst into flames and toppled; the troughs split and the water blasted out into scalding steam. Tongues of flame roared against the roof and fired it. Great cracks raced up the walls, and they too sagged and split; before any in the forge could move those immense timbers of the roof shook free and dropped like the very props of the sky itself. Then toppled the upper walls, and with a crash and a roar the whole forge crumbled like a hollow coal and fell inward in a thunderous fountain of smoke and flame. All the soldiers outside sprang back, dragging with them comrades who had leaped free at the last moment, escaping with bruise and burn. But they knew their lord was within, and they did not flee. Not at once, not until one cried and pointed, and they saw the figure that rose out of that incandescent ruin.

In man's shape it was, yet more than man; for on immense wings, pinions of shining black shot with gleams of gold, anchored in harness set with glittering crystals, it arose radiant into the rich evening light. Most fled at the very sight of it; but some stayed to cast their spears or shoot, for they were brave men. But from one outstretched arm, sheathed in metal, a spear of fire sprang that blasted the grass before them. Then all who could turned and ran for their ship.

But Elof, rejoicing in the surge and power of wings once more, paid them no heed; for he was searching the wreckage, and called aloud the name "
Gorthawer!"
A gleam like a night of stars shone out in answer, and a faint, broken hail. Men, looking back, saw him glide down like a gigantic eagle, and they shuddered and ran on. But Elof came low, and hovered, and made out amid a great mass of rubble that shimmer of darkness, and not far from it Nithaid's tortured face. One side of it was crushed and eyeless, the heavy locks matted dark with ashes; yet he lived, and saw, and as the wind of the vast wings blew back the dust around him his lips moved.

"
Your
…
armour
...
was made well! Yet… your revenge
...
better! Leave… my people
…
lordless before the Ice
!"

Elof reached down among the rubble and plucked out the black sword, unmarked, unmarred; and the silver of the hilt poured a healing marshland coolness into his hands so sorely burned. "No, king!" he cried. "For better or for worse, I go now to bring them a worthier lord. Die in peace!

In the ashes there lie with your kin!
For them you fought
And schemed so long -
Now together you all may find rest!"

Slowly now he arose, higher and higher into the sky. And as he gained full mastery of the great work he had laboured on so long he turned as a bird turns, and flew off westwards, towards the setting of the sun.

Chapter Nine
- The Airs of Freedom

On and up the wings drove him, soaring towards the white clouds while the land plummeted away beneath and the airs of the heights streamed by, cool and exhilarating as new wine. The very power of their beat was intoxicating, awesome, for they felt almost like limbs of his own, and in those moments the maiming of his legs diminished in his mind, the shadow it had cast over him dispersed. In the face of such overwhelming strength and freedom it scarcely seemed to matter any more; what he had lost was made good a thousandfold. He shouted aloud and sang for the sheer joy of it; he had passed through the fires, and was made whole again. A soft air surged beneath him, rising from the sun-warmed land, and he spread his wings and rode it easily as any bird.

It came to him as an instinct; had he not worn bird's shape many a time? Few who had not could have mimicked their flight so closely, none controlled it, for the wings were made in every detail as he remembered them, able to move in the same complex patterns, to sweep and angle and shift their shape. He had modelled them on the feather Kara left him, even to the tiny barbs that link each frond of the quill into a single surface; his material the dark substance of the filament light yet strong, with traces of gold to line it that could bear the virtues he needed. Yet though he flew thus as he had flown before, it was different, better. Now he was not cramped by the helm's powers into the mask of another shape, nor did it tell upon his strength, save to guide the flight with slight shifts of shoulder and thigh; for not even his steely arms could have freed him so from the clutch of earth. It was the gems of the corselet, drinking in the radiance of the sun as they had the furnace glare, that through the subtle virtues of the gold caused the woven web to shift and stiffen, expanding and contracting as the thews of a living frame.

He was stronger and greater now than anything else that took the air, save a dragon or some other unnatural fosterling of the Ice. Even the eagles of the Nordenbergen, shadows across the moon in his childhood, even the condors of the Meneth Scahas that came drifting down like dark clouds upon the slain of many battles, had scarcely half that awesome span. The shadow he cast was huge, and looking down and back he saw it pass at an incredible speed over the darkening blue waters of the Great River, over golden shores and green fields and forests and brown walls of town and tower, as free as himself. He did not then notice, not consciously, the dark specks against the distant clouds that kept pace with him nonetheless.

That first night took him far from Elan Gorhenyon; how far, he had no idea. As the sun sank, so the power in his wings began to dwindle and the high airs grew colder; he had expected this, and looked for a place to settle. He chose at last to land on the outskirts of a lonely wood, far beyond the towns, on a narrow spot of riverbank protected by thorn thickets. Drink he had from the river, but he had not had time to bring any food; save for a few coins in his belt, he had carried off only his precious toolpack, the arm-ring and seal at his breast and Gorthawer at his side once more, and that seemed to him more than enough. Above all, he had his freedom. As darkness fell he folded his wings about him, and was surprised at how sheltering and warm they were. A great weariness took him then, and he slept.

Lulled by the soft ripple of the stream, the whisperings of the trees, he did not dream. Birdsong awoke him, and he laughed to find himself spreading wings of his own in the dim light; he washed swiftly and drank, finding his burns healing cleanly, and kindled a great fire with his flints to feed his wings. The gems drank it to dark ashes in minutes, and he sprang up with the sun, high into its first light. He felt hollow with hunger, light as a foam-bubble, and still did not notice the distant followers; what concerned him was food. When he saw two peasants breakfasting outside a cottage he swooped down to them, but they bolted like maddened horses in opposite directions. Fortunately they left their food; it was rough country fare, coarse bread, goat cheese and summer fruits, but to his heightened senses no less than a feast. He ate swiftly between gulps of rough wine, impatient to be aloft once more, and ere he rose again he threw down one of his gold coins in payment. It occurred to him, though the coin might have bought the cottage twice over, that for all their fright it might mean even more to them to have such a tale to tell.

It was then, beating up through the sky once more in a great spiral, that he first truly noticed the wings far off; but he thought no more of them all that day, so full was his mind of the joys of freedom, and of the heights. He tested his wings to the full, riding ever higher on the warm air-streams till he was among the clouds, sporting in and out of their chill contours as he might in water, and at last rising higher still, to where the sunlight grew sharper and the air thinner, till a tight band began to close about chest and temples, and his wings seemed to be losing their force. Then he plunged down, down in a long sweeping glide towards a swirling fountain of clouds, awaiting the moment when they would part like curtains before him and the great Vale of Kerys burst out like a bright banner beneath.

Suddenly he was in trouble. The sun was blotted out, and for a moment of horror he thought he had somehow fallen back into his crumbling forge. Sulphur boiled in his mouth and nose, hot ashes stung his eyes, cindery particles lit agonizingly upon flesh too recently raw; a vast exhalation seemed to fill the universe, louder than a stormwind but all too like the last breaths of a man half buried. He could have believed himself in the clutch of ghosts then, save that far beneath him there sounded a deafening explosion; the floating dust was blasted upward, branding his skin with new pain, and behind it the air filled with enormous masses whose passage he felt as much as saw, huge flowing gobbets the size of a house cutting the air with an eerie whistle, trailing a wake of red-hot turbulence that tumbled him madly down the sky. Another blast, and this time a shower of such gobbets almost smashed into his left wingtip. He knew now where he was, and that he must flee or die; he folded his wings and dived like a swimmer through the mirk. Another concussion, and a spraying bolt passed where he had been a tenth-second before, sent him spinning like the merest leaf away and out, out of the cloud and into clean sky. The air seemed to sing around him as he spread his wings and fought to brake his descent, the huge pinions lashing the air. Low over the waters of the Yskianas he swooped till it seemed he must be sent skipping across their crests as a boy will skim a stone, but at the last he managed to pull up, and take the sun on his shoulders once again. He looked back as he circled for height beneath the spreading ashcloud, riding on the very airs that had threatened his doom, and saw the fire-mountain blast again, spewing its glowing lava skyward. A volley of small stones passed beneath him, and he banked hurriedly across a glowing torrent of earthfire to ride the heat that rose from it. It was an eruption greater than any he had heard of before in those lands, as great as any he knew of in the Nordenbergen where he grew up. The ashcloud towered over the mountain, hanging as if motionless in the air, high enough to mask the sun from the lands beyond; its shadow lay far across them in the likeness of an arm, upraised and threatening. Around a widening spiral he flew, and was high enough now to catch a glimpse of startling contrast in the distance, the ramparts of the Ice glittering beneath the sun in all their deathly stillness.