The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (52 page)

Now the entire swamp-floor came a-boil with movement. Clawed
paws and spiny tentacles thrust upward amid smoky blooms of silt,
while a smutty lambency of green and orange stole like fever-glow
across the whole drowned grave.

The raft rocked as the first shape erupted from the water: a huge
one, its wide, black bat-wings drizzling mud as their labor held it poised
upon the air. Submissively it offered Zan-Kirk back his sword, hilt
first. Zan-Kirk seized the sword, and mounted the brute’s shoulders.

Gothol swept his raft aloft again. The torch-bearing crowds on the
Flume and on the rooftops of the town beneath it were crying aloud,
all astir with movement that knew not yet where to flow. The Narn-
son hovered high, the demon-borne wizard beside him, and suddenly
my leafy perch began to tremor. There were deep movements of the
muck my tree was rooted in. The whole swamp-floor began to quake.

A noise of torn water and of muddy suction rose. Brute shapes
erupted and lurched from the fen. They were demon-shapes in
lumbering cavalcade that seemed to take form as they climbed,
shedding the muck that blurred their vile bodies as they moved
upslope.

Gothol, aloft, sent his mellow voice down upon the terrified throngs
on the Flume and the rooftops. “Look, beloved Lebanites! Behold,
and fear not! See how submissive these monsters move! Hark! They
go silent! See! They go docile! They are my father’s slaves and mine!
They go to work a wonder for you all! They go up to Rainbowl, and
there will abide, to heal her wound, and work your city’s weal! They
go but to repair the Rainbowl’s wound!”

Beloved Lebanites indeed! What could the citizens, those torch-
clutching thousands
do
, after all? What but stand, and tremble where
they stood?

The dripping, malformed army trudged endlessly up from the fen.
The swamp’s floor convulsed, as my tree tilted near to toppling, while
other trees around me crashed into the water.

Those mud-slick shapes moved in strange unison, their ascending
column seemed cohesive as a fluid. From high on his broad-winged
brute, Zan-Kirk bent down on them the eyeless fire of his gaze, while
Gothol, like a captain who waves forth his troop, swept summit-ward
his moon-bright blade....

You know how much I’ve seen of the sub-Worlds, Shag. Demons
are dire in the snarling seethe of their dissension. To see their eerie
concord here, as they climbed dripping from the swamp, oh,
worse
than demonlike it was, this homicidal unison! Against such a tide,
what could stand?

I watched the very last of them lurch dripping from the fen, their
line so long now: half a mile of greasy thew and burnished carapace,
of drooling maw and spiky mandible, they toiled and rippled peak-
ward past the Flume’s huge legs.

Then, far up in the rubble-slope beneath the Rainbowl’s wound,
something
moved
. A sharp noise echoed down of shifted stone. And
there once more—the moonlight betrayed that something moved in
that high rubble.

Those stones were big as battle-chariots, as drayers’ vans, and
suddenly one of them sprang hammering down half a furlong before
it came again to rest.

Yet...what
was
it which thrust that boulder free? It was something
too small to see at first. Too small until it writhed up from the rubble
and stood swaying in the moonlight, and was visible then only by its
blackness amid the pallid boulders: it was a little human figure, gaunt
and dark as some long-withered root.

Such a paltry apparition! So slight a thing to rise, and stand, and
face downslope as if to challenge the demon legion climbing up to
meet it.

Below my high perch in the branches, Yanîn emerged from his
leafy covert. He pointed at the small far shape of darkness, and in a
tone of awe and joy he said, “You see her there, Nifft? Hylanais, my
most precious mother! Two hundred years of burial she’s endured!
Alas! I could not choose but leave her lie! I was not yet grown strong
enough to face the war of the Dead with the Demons!”

Then that far, high, moon-bleached landslide moved again, and
three more boulders tipped from their lodgements. Two came soon to
rest, the third went banging farther down, and three—then four, five,
six more lean dark forms stood up with Hylanais.

One of these shapes pulled what looked to be an ancient pike out
of the rubble. The others heaved against more stones which, though
they seemed propelled by such slight force, all lurched like mighty
hammers down, in their turn displacing further stones.

Now scores of these black, crooked shapes stood toiling in the
rubble of great Rainbowl’s wall, all of them shifting other boulders,
till the crack and bang of tumbled stone rose to an unremitting roar,
rose like a noise of war, like the clang and clash of gathered shields
colliding, while the gaunt shapes standing up from the rubble suddenly
numbered in the hundreds.

I watched these meager figures sprouting like weeds from that
lofty rock-slide—all looking so frail amidst the mighty stones they
moved—and then I regarded the demon horde already half a mile
upslope of us, a single viscous mass it seemed of sinew, scale and
talon, of fang, beak, spike and claw....

I asked Yanîn, “Do you think the witch’s risen dead—those troops
twice
killed already—can stand against this demon mass? Or against
Gothol and Zan-Kirk, who marshal them?”

He aimed his eyes up at me—as nearly as his wrenched frame
could manage this. “Stand against these demons? Stand against Zan-
Kirk and his Narn-son? Why certainly! But they will not do so! Our
dead allies have more urgent work to do!”

“What work’s more urgent than killing those demons?”

“Why, the Rainbowl’s repair of course!”

“Repair?
How
repair?”

“By restoring the broken stone to the cleft.”

“But first things first! These demons!”

“Who repairs the Bell can sound it—no one else!”

I gazed up disbelieving at the gigantic rubble of those stones, and
chose to ask a more urgent question. “But who then will oppose these
demons, and the two great mages that command them?”

“Who? Why, you and I!”

“You and I?”

“We’ll have some help, of course.”

“...I rejoice to hear it.”

“Now I must take the liberty of asking you to come down and, ah,
sit astride my shoulders.”

“Hmm. It would seem in that case that
I
am to be the one taking
the liberty...”

Yet before I descended, I could not help but pause, an awe-struck
witness. For already the dark, shrunken dead, so slight and frail on
their far height, were in fact hoisting those great stones—in pairs and
threes—and bringing them up to the great cleft. This mere work of
portage, like the labor of ants, had the impact of a witnessed wonder.

But even more miraculous was the laying of each stone in contact
with the ruptured wall. As each boulder touched the stone it had
been part of, it flowed like a liquid into that substance and extended
it. Already the ashlar patch was half masked by restored native
granite. The antlike dead touched boulder after boulder to the base
of the patch, and reborn rock rose like poured fluid in a conic cup.

“My friend!” called Yanîn from below me. “Look where the Narn-
son and Zan-Kirk fly to the witch to work her harm! Make haste!”

And there indeed were Gothol on his blazing raft, and the wizard
on his wide-winged brute, sweeping up in advance of their monstrous
troops. They were less than two miles below the witch and her
lichfield of gaunt laborers. The moonlight glinted on the Narn-son’s
blade, while the warlock’s brightest feature were the blazing coals
that were his eyes....

I swung down from my tree. Yanîn crouched before me and I
mounted his shoulders. “All I can do in aid is yours—forgive the
liberty,” I said.

“You’re light as a leaf. Grip the collar of my jerkin.”

I did so. “And, ahem, exactly how are we to—”

“Aerially,” he said. And leapt straight into the sky.

IV

“Leapt,” while accurate, is too weak a term. Such was the speed of
our ascent my frame seemed to contract to half its volume, my ribcage
too compressed to allow the intake of a breath.

At our apex, and the start of our descent, I could breathe again,
had breath and awe to spare for what stretched out below us: the
dark might of the demon army toiling upslope. An army they truly
seemed; despite their multiplicity of shape, the mute unison of their
movement was sinister in the extreme.

Within the wind-rush of our plunge (whose angle I anxiously
gauged, fearing we might not come down far enough in advance of
that dire vanguard) Yanîn’s rumbled words rose plain to me:

“You may doubt that we’ll have help. Be comforted! I have many
friends in this forest.”

I rejoiced to hear it, but scanning the wooded slopes, could see no
sign of any allies amid those trees. Here came the treetops, and hard
earth beneath.

“Hold tight,” Yanîn gritted.

Twigs whipped my head and shoulders, and the arse-and-spine-
numbing impact was reduced by a second, lesser leap skyward, one
that just cleared the crests of several trees, and plunged us again to
the mountainside some furlongs higher upslope.

And as soon as I had dismounted his shoulders, and shaken the
numbness from my legs and arse, I could feel through my footsoles
the tramp of the ascending demon columns climbing towards us.

Yanîn seized my right shoulder in his huge hand, and an icy rill
went through my bone and sinew—the pulse of sorcery.

“Thus I endow your touch with power. We must run zig and zag
across the front of their advance! Strike every trunk with the flat of
your hand and say:
Root and branch! Arise! Advance!
”

This will not seem much to do—the pair of us running crosswise
to the slope, striking tree after tree and crying the words aloud. And
indeed, I was awed to wake so much power so quickly. Each skorse, as
we struck and invoked it, shuddered and shook its great crest like a
brandished lance. Tore out its roots from the soil and rock and stood
upon them.

Every skorse sinks a tripod of taproots. Each one we woke writhed
and wrenched them free, and with a gigantic, staggery strength surged
down toward the demon-horde.

In truth they were titans, but lurching and lumbering ones. To
strike, they must make a stand on their roots, and make great lateral
strokes with their lower and largest boughs. The demons they con
nected with, they bashed to bloody tatters, but such was their weighty
momentum, recovery from each stroke was slow. Meanwhile demons,
of course, are agile as lizards or rats. Demons are limber as maggots
in meat.

The head of their up-rushing column was compacted at first, and
thus at the outset, the slaughter those timber titans wrought was
grand and glorious: neighboring trees, with opposing strokes of their
branches, scissored whole streams of demon-meat between them....

It could not last. Zan-Kirk—though flown far peak-wards to
engage his hated spouse—wheeled back astride his winged brute, and
with a gesture caused his demons to disperse in a hundred branching
paths upslope.

Now, they were flooding upwards in a swath a quarter-mile broad,
and from a column, had become a rising inundation.

“We must defend the crater—hold tight!” I mounted his shoulders
again and once more Yanîn leapt into the sky. Our arc was flatter,
would bring us down on the rubble-slope where Hylanais toiled. The
witch’s work was stunningly advanced. She was airborne on wings
she’d conjured, transparent and invisible in their vibration as a
dragonfly’s. Her dead were an ant-swarm, dwarfed by the boulders
that they hoisted, up from the diminishing rubble-slope and onto the
steep pitch of the crater wall—twin streams of these great stones,
balanced on their bone-lean shoulders, they carried up the rupture’s
either side.