The Wanderer's Tale (25 page)

They looked at their leader in astonishment and awe, wondering how, even with his redoubtable skills, he had managed to drive off their terrible pursuers whilst he was still trapped beneath his warhorse. But Nibulus kept his silence; this was the stuff legends were made of, and he was not about to cheat the skalds of their chance to sing his praises.

Appa set about trying to retrieve the shaman through his magic, while Finwald went over to the Peladane.

‘Nibulus,’ he said urgently, ‘we’ve got to get going. Bolldhe says that Methuselech was heading straight into another pack of wolves up ahead.’

‘
Another
pack?’

‘Yes,’ Bolldhe interjected. ‘They must have split up earlier—’

By now Nibulus was already limping along the path towards Paulus’s mare, grabbing his Greatsword as he went. ‘Come on, you lot,’ he shouted. ‘We’ve got work to do! Appa, bring Wodeman with you as soon as he’s ready, and Flatulus, stop messing about and get your backside over here!’

But Paulus was not going anywhere for the time being. Already his one good eye was bulging feverishly. This was going to be a bad one . . .

Leaving Appa, Wodeman and Paulus behind, they came upon the second pack almost immediately, trotting down the path towards them. Without a second’s delay, Nibulus charged straight at them. Now released from the influence of the Leucrota, the wolves did not seem quite so bold, and when they saw the howling warrior charging towards them they simply turned round and scarpered the way they had come. This had been a bad couple of days, and quite frankly they had had enough.

‘Ha!’ cried Nibulus, reining his horse in. He cast a look back at his followers as if to say, ‘See, told you I was good.’

At first they all feared the worst for Methuselech, expecting to come upon a pool of blood and their companion torn apart. But as they searched frantically, it became obvious that there had been no such encounter. Had the horse and rider careered over the edge? Had Methuselech managed somehow to scramble his horse up some high place the wolves could not follow? They searched and they searched, and called out his name.

Then a shout from Finwald brought them running. The priest was now concentrating on a part of the cliff with a worried look on his brow. There a dark and narrow cleft broke the rock-face, a corridor deep down into the mountains, out of which whistled a dank, evil-smelling wind. As the others crowded round, he held up a finger to quieten them.

‘Listen,’ he said softly. ‘Can you hear it?’

They listened intently and, faint now but growing louder, there could be heard the approaching sound of stumbling hoofbeats echoing out of the darkness, like some form of horse-riding wraith coming out of the earth itself, maybe from a time long past and best forgotten. And then, carried on the eerie currents of air, rose a terrified whinnying.

Far down into the cleft had Whitehorse gone, the frightened and confused animal descending ever deeper into the very core of the mountain. Far above, a thin ribbon of daylight filtered down, but only enough to hint at shapes and to play tricks on the mind.

Whitehorse stumbled on down the rocky slide while his rider seemed totally unaware of anything around him. There had never been a time that the poor horse could remember feeling so completely alone, so utterly beyond the reassuring guidance of his master’s hands. Where was that warm safety and control he had known all his life?

He snorted in alarm and stared wild-eyed into the darkness ahead. There were
things
around him now, things that his dull horse brain did not understand but that his instincts detected. They floated towards him, forming out of the frigid, eddying mist to weave cobwebs of fear about him. Nasty, evil, sharp-pointed things that wanted not him but his master.

He wished his master would wake up.

But Methuselech
had
awoken, though he did not yet realize it.

Moments earlier his tormented conscience had risen out of its insensibility into the new world about him. He had been dreaming of great, black, loping hell-hounds with teeth that glowed and gaping jaws that belched fire.

And those
hideous eyes
!

They were chasing him, and he was running for his life through a bewildering maze of rocks that spewed magma and turned into the faces of his companions, grisly, leering faces that spat at him as he passed. There was Finwald, wrapped in a cocoon of leathery bat-wings, his black hair flying about him in the frenzied demon-wind that howled around him, with hollow black eyes piercing into Methuselech’s brain. There was Appa, a brittle skeleton covered with tight-stretched, yellowing skin, a horrible dead thing that should have withered away long ago. There was Radnar, a despicable little imp holding a pair of sharp, gleaming blades that dripped Methuselech’s own life-blood. There was Wodeman, a snarling werewolf from the darkest recesses of night, ready to leap out and tear his heart from its shattered ribcage. There was Paulus, a howling, gibbering obscenity, melting in his fury. There was even Nibulus, his own friend, now a stone giant in rusted iron armour, who reached down for him with massive hands, taloned fingers twitching uncontrollably in anticipation.

Then he saw Bolldhe, who looked back at him and smiled wickedly. Bolldhe turned and beckoned a second figure, who moved over to stand directly in Methuselech’s path.

Methuselech stared at this newcomer. It shimmered like a white shroud, and he could see right through it. He looked back imploringly at Bolldhe, but the traveller had now vanished. All that remained was the shade directly in his path. When it raised its hood, Methuselech gasped. The face of the ghost was his own.

‘Methuselech Xilvafloese’ – its voice resonated like a funeral bell being tolled deep underground – ‘I am Sluagh. I am your death.’

Then he awoke with a start to find himself lying face down on something warm and familiar. Was he in bed? Yes, surely, for it was dark enough . . .

But, no, he could not be awake. In his mind he was still riding Whitehorse, riding him down a narrow, stony passage . . . and why was it so . . .
terrible
here? So dreamlike?

No, he must still be asleep.

Still not aware of it, Methuselech was fully awake, yet in this place, for all he could tell, he was still trapped in his nightmare. Had he known for sure that this was reality, he might have sat up and reined his steed about and headed back to find the others.

Instead he just lay there across the horse’s neck and waited for the nightmare to run its course.

Run its course it did. Right to the end.

Sounds that were only half heard, half imagined, drifted up through the cleft on the poisonous air. They were like the voices of the dead, voices from the past, voices full of a brooding hatred fuelled by the passing of centuries. Methuselech kept his head down and tried to hold on to his courage; surely the night would soon be over and he would awake from this evil reverie.

The voices, however, seemed so real that eventually Methuselech looked up through reddened eyes. Every slimy, dripping rock surface seemed to take on the shape of a snarling muzzle, flesh-ripping and dire. Every wispy growth of vegetation trailed lazily in the air currents like a dead man’s beard. And where pale patches of slime-encrusted rock showed through the ancient layers of moss that clung to it, Methuselech could see only the bones of mangled warriors.

A denser mist crawled out to meet him from somewhere down below where the passage ended. Spilling up out of the shadows ahead it approached him like some primordial phantom of terror till he felt he was travelling down into the darkest, most fearful pit of his subconscious.

Ah, if only it were just that!

He could sense it now rolling towards him in a tidal wave of blackness. Something down there was waiting for him, lurking like a malignant, bloated spider. But still he could not turn back, even though he knew it would always claim its victim in the end.

For it was Death that lurked down there: Sluagh, the final truth; the baring of his soul.

Then, even through the fear that numbed his senses, Methuselech suddenly realized that he had ridden out of the confines of the cleft and they were now out in an open space. His horse finally stopped, as if unable to continue, and the cold wrapped itself around them like a moist cadaver’s glove.

He looked about. On all sides rose great cliffs of jagged black rock, trickling with water and hung with glistening cobwebs, which soared up hundreds of feet to the distant sky above. Below them, scant inches to their left, the ground fell away into some kind of vast pit. Methuselech rubbed droplets of condensing mist from his eyes and peered over the edge.

It was from here the mist emerged. He could see it slowly curling out of the pit like steam from a cauldron, washing past him on either side to disappear up the narrow cleft that led to the outside world. Beyond that he could see absolutely nothing, for whatever scant vestiges of light fell from above were simply swallowed up.

He shuddered, in a sudden chilling spasm. It did not seem quite so dream-like any more. The thought that this might be real after all began to intrude into his mind.

He leaned further over the edge, straining to hear. There was something else down there. In some distant place in his mind, he could detect a strange sound. It was like a chorus of lamenting voices singing a dirge for the dead – for themselves maybe, a last soliloquy for the Lost. He heard it not with his ears, but in the silence he could feel it, reverberating in his mind, reaching down into his soul. To his surprise, he found himself sobbing.

What
was
down there?

Then he gasped, for he now knew beyond all doubt that this truly was not a dream. He really was here, hell only knew how, and his companions were nowhere to be seen. He did not even know how long he had been separated from them. He felt more alone now than he had ever thought possible, so alone that he might as well be standing on the remotest planet in the universe, beyond even the distant stars. And still the cries of the Lost were ringing in his mind.

Then there was a change in the air that caused Methuselech to shudder. The pathos of those cries had transformed into malice, as if something down there, something not of this world, was hungry for him and wanted to steal his mind. He could sense it rising out of the pit to claim him, rising with the mist that shrouded it. Panic gripped him, but he could not move. Whitehorse sensed it too, and stamped about the ledge in terror.

Then came the cry: an ululating wailing of such demonic insanity and diabolic evil that every drop of blood was frozen inside Methuselech’s veins.

It was the keening of Sluagh.

Whitehorse screamed in response, and reared up high. With a cry of total despair, Methuselech was launched off the saddle. Arms flailing uselessly, he plunged into the blackness of the pit that gaped open to swallow him up.

The horse, no more use now, bolted in a frenzy as fast as he could gallop, with Methuselech’s final cry echoing in his ears.

When they had finally managed to calm down the terrified animal, Bolldhe and the others wasted no time in entering the cleft themselves. Whitehorse would not be dragged back inside for anything, so was left stamping and whinnying on the cliff path outside.

‘Just what
happened
down there to scare the horse so much?’ said Finwald.

‘And what’s happened to Methuselech?’ Nibulus wondered.

None of them actually heard the keening, but just before Whitehorse re-emerged an inexplicable disquiet had suddenly settled on them all.

Nibulus led the way, the only one among them who really wanted to venture down into this place. Though extremely wary, he led them down without hesitation in his urge to reach Xilva.

What they all felt in the damp and gloomy rock fissure perturbed them but it was nothing to what they felt as they drew near the pit itself, and heard the keening from close up.

As one they all froze, faces blanching in horror. As that terrible cry hung in the air, there was not one among them who would not have turned and fled all the way back to Nordwas, had their horses not also been rooted to the spot. No one now spared a thought for Methuselech or the quest. The fear they felt transcended anything they would ever have believed possible in this world.

Then the howl ended, trailing off into a forlorn sob of such devastation that the travellers felt as if their life-force was going with it, drifting into eternity upon a black wind of endless despair.

Finwald gaped ahead of him with his face prematurely old. In a voice numbed with death-fear he gasped: ‘What in hell was that!?’

‘I don’t know,’ stammered Nibulus, ‘and I’ve no intention of finding out.’

All of them turned tail and fled for their lives back up through the cleft. If Methuselech was down in that pit, then there was nothing they or any other power in the world of Man could do to help him.

With his own last wail of utter despair still ringing in his ears, Methuselech lay, gasping for breath, in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the pit. Broken and bleeding, he was not so much fighting for life as fighting for death.

His eyes were open, but he could see nothing in this pitch blackness, could not see what place this was in which he had finally met his end, could not even see the carnage that had been wrought upon his flesh.

It was a mercy, for had he been able to behold the travesty that his body had become he would have been reminded of all those tortured and mutilated corpses he had witnessed during the sacking of the cities of the South. He was coughing gouts of blood from his smashed torso, and his right leg stuck out at an insane angle, he could tell without being able to see, the splintered bone protruding in several places.

As for the rest of him . . . He was dying, that much he was certain. Already the coldness of death was creeping over him. How much more of this agony must he endure before his life winked out?

Now he lay, far beyond the help of his lost companions and totally at the mercy of whatever agent of darkness it was that had made that dreadful keening noise. Tears welled in his eyes, at the devastating loneliness he felt now that he had fallen away from the world.