The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (28 page)

XLI

Parsival and Unlea were right on the rim when the first blasts came ripping and crashing through the powdery forest They could hear the brittle trees snapping. The first spray of dawnlight was in their faces as they fled along, panting, not speaking, as if they ran to greet the sun.

He sensed the fierce children still behind and parallel to them but the windstorm was already muffling any lesser sound from that direction and an instant later had blotted out sight as well in swirling, tortured clouds. Dead black tendrils coiled and uncoiled reaching ahead of them. He thought of a vast spidery thing clutching at the world. The air stung and puffed around them.

The outline of a fortress jutted against the molten horizon at the edge of the ravine. He’d spotted it in the first light and planned to make a stand there one way or another.

Half-supporting her he fled on hoping the poison in the water would wear off because he could still feel it, lambent, within him, his perceptions a shadowfall away from the other worlds … visions … whatever they were …

“Were nearly there,” he reassured her, panting. “Hold the pace.”

The black swirls hooked and clashed closer.

“O Mary …” Cough. “O … Mary …” Cough.

She stumbled to her knees on the broken bricks where the first wall lay shattered. As he lifted her he saw them taking shape out of the coil of jet dust, totally blackened figures, young people mixed with nightmarish shapes: a thing like an egg with a face racing upside down and backwards on stump legs beside the fearful monkeylike thing; birds with lush breasts above the walking fish with eyes like pits to utter, unreflecting nothingness … and now in the roaring masses of cyclonic soot he saw deeply into their world, a strange greenly glimmering landscape … and he saw, as he reached the outskirts of the castle grounds, lungs fire, limbs dead, a skeletal army of them massing and pouring forward towards where the glowing border seemed to shimmer within the stormdark, and he had a vague idea that the wind might drive them all through into this world.

Illusion
, he thought. But what did that mean? A feeble shield, for at these outskirts of reality visions had the weight of stone. And the storm seemed to be gathering and literally blowing from that green-dark world where strange fires flashed like lightning flares (he and Unlea reached the fallen inner wall and were scrambling up the loose blocks and firecrumbled rubble), revealing tall shapes, shadowy outlines that seemed to preside over those mounting forces.

He set her down and turned on top of the pile. The brightening sun showed three of them charging up the loose slope, long knives drawn, long hair flying, eyes and teeth alone white as they rose from the bottom of the gusting blackness that was mounting, twisting, opening the other world everywhere now, the livid masses of horrors swelling forward as if borne by the contorted gale …

Three teenagers came on, skidding, falling, clawing upward. Others appeared, staggering through the stifling gusts, and the empty-eyed fish and prancing monkeything were at their heels and seemed rock solid.

“Unlea!” he shouted, “make for the castle! I’ll follow! Go! Go!” And saw her stagger down the far side of the shattered wall, and then the great, stinging cloud heaved vastly and blotted out the sun and they all reached Parsival at once and he drew his blade and something seemed to say in his thoughts:

Hold
back
the
darkness
,
Sir
Parsival
of the
Grail
.

And the whole, incredible, mysterious landscape fell over him and he stood among the greenish glinting rocks and spectral hordes in raging stormfury, knives flashing and zipping at him from blurry shapes. He strained, blinded by the driving dust, swayed, ducked and twisted, reflexed as if the sword itself could see … struck … struck … felt a slash across his back mail … struck saw the fish raise its foreclaws, the monkey snatch at his face, terrible steel birds rip through the blasted air …

“You’re all real!” he howled at them as the wind lifted (or was it the creatures) and drove him backwards. “Yet false!” as though it were a war cry or deadly incantation …

Broaditch and Lohengrin were just ahead of the storm when the knight, as he’d feared and expected, crashed and rebounded with a muted groan from the inevitable dead end.

“Christ!” muttered Lohengrin. “If your head hurts, why that’s the very part you hit.”

Broaditch was already groping over the rocks, thinking:

The
water
got
through
when
there
was
water
…

“Always,” Lohengrin was sighing.

“Here,” Broaditch said, on his knees. The soot was spilling over the high, narrow sides in semi-solid gouts, hissing around them. He’d found a low opening that seemed to dive into the belly of the earth.

“A rat’s hole,” the knight said over the mounting windsound.

Broaditch was already squeezing in because, he reasoned, if he hadn’t passed them yet why then they were ahead. These sides couldn’t be scaled so his logic was seamless and, as is often the case, safely enclosed no truth whatsoever.

“Better to live a rat,” he called back, struggling in on elbows and knees.

“Than die as anything better,” Lohengrin completed, creeping in behind. They could hear the dust piling up behind, filling the cleft like a snow of blackness.

Clinschor was a few yards behind, prancing, following the contorted way as if it were bright-lit, long bare feet and bony shins swishing through the already calf-deep sootfall. He was tittering and chatting and coughing as the finer powder caught in his throat. The last time he’d entered his stronghold this way he’d had to wade through the water, but his memory on such points had become increasingly sketchy … normally you came in through the fortress above where Parsival and Unlea were struggling.

Concentrating on what he was going to do with the power of the Grail, he’d totally forgotten the blind wall until he hit it, cracking his nose, and burst into a frenzy of curses-the wizards were blocking him out again; well, they’d soon see!

“Still trying, you bastards!” he shouted into the drifting soot, swallowing the noseblood and coughing. Shook the Grail fist at the wall, prepared a spell to burst the rock asunder … then remembered, stooped and skittered under the overhang in a gush of ashes. Heading forward into the total blackness he resumed planning the great games he would institute where all in the empire would have to fight and prove their worthiness to exist … except, naturally, the slaves who would tend the gardens. The gardens were a major project, would cover countless acres with flowers of beaten gold as tall as men, trees of pure silver, hung with little bells shaking in the breezes … no night! He would banish night with a million candles lit from dusk till dawn. Nodded his head fiercely. Always music and light and the most beautiful people. He was walking upright in a space where Broaditch and Lohengrin were still creeping along on their knees, and they heard him going past, talking steadily.

“We stay behind him,” whispered Lohengrin. Clinschor’s voice was booming in the obviously large space. “Of all men on earth he’s the easiest to follow.”

“And gives the worst results, eh?”

“More than true, but now is there choice?”

“… the breeding will take place out of doors in the heavenly gardens,” the voice was elaborating. “Each male and female I select will bear a brand on the left arse cheek … an excellent idea, and those with corresponding marks will be allowed to mate! Excellent. Offspring will be examined and the fit will live and be sent to battle at the earliest possible age. Excellent. What warriors I’ll produce. Who will stand against the survivors of such training? the breeding will take place in certain beds and I will control the weather with my invocation …” And on and on …

Broaditch knew that Alienor would keep silent and hoped that she’d hear and follow that voice too. There wasn’t much choice. The dark was solid enough to make the eyes flash as if trying to create their own light in compensation.

“Do you hear all that?” Lohengrin wondered quietly as they tried to stay directly behind. “That’s the kind of thing I used to have to listen to. Till your blow freed me, Jack.”

The mule needed no urging. It jerked and plunged along. The ash was sucked into whirlwinds and torrents, dimly visible in the feeble dawnlight high above the ragged cliffs.

Layla had pulled her scarf over her nose and mouth and was hacking and choking less than the Vikings behind her. She heard Tungrim shouting something, and then it was lost as the dying animal careened around the twisting way, all sound sucked away by the muffling sootfall and raw mutter of the wind …

Howtlande heaved along in a massive panic, pushing ahead of Tungrim and the others, thinking:

No
…
no
…
not
like
this
…

Rebounding off the rough walls, falling in the powder, lurching on, hands pressed across his mouth, sucking air that caught in his throat, eyes mad with fear of suffocation.

No
…

Tungrim cupped his hands under his ample nose and went on steady and stocky, shouting for Layla as the black dust rose knee high and more …

So by the time he reached the gully cave it was almost chest high and he believed he was doomed. The downpour showed in slight touches of glow that seeped through the great black gusts.

He was startled when a great blackened head lifted from the drifts and turned a glazed and hopeless eye on him, and then he knew it was Layla’s mule. It was kneeling, up to its chin in the stuff.

He kicked around to satisfy himself she was not actually under the surface.

In something closer to panic than he’d ever experienced he sucked in a last dusty breath and ducked under because he knew she hadn’t climbed out. No one could have. And he half swam, half dug to the base of the cliff …

When
you
cannot
retrace
,
why
you
go
on
, he said to himself.

Down into the indescribable black, as if the core of all darkness had precipitated into dry substance …

He dug, clawed, scraped along the rockedge, felt nails rip and peel away, head butt-butting. His brain flashed and flickered like a stifled torch, and he saw a bronze shape that his mind named Odin swinging wide a massive iron gate set in a towering wall in a cloudy violence of sky among wailing, melting voices and the voice like bronze:

“Strip off thy flesh-armor. Put aside all goods. Remove thy remembering and enter here cleansed of every yesterday.”

No
, he thought,
not
now
,
not
yet
,
hold
off
I
pray!
Hold
off!

His limbs scraped and groped far, far away from his seeing mind and sensed the two about to snap apart forever … and then he was somehow through the gate into an unending softness grayly soothing and draining him away into soft darkness, draining the last scenes: flashes of sea, rocky hills, women and playing children and shocks of season among huts in thin sunlight … his life drained, whirled out into the bottomless sidelessness …

He didn’t know he’d broken through and was rolling inside the cliff, lungs flattened, body thrashing volitionless.

Parsival got up, leaning against the wrenching gales that tore at him, fluttered his light mail shirt, staggered him in the last livid streaks of lost sun, the air screaming as the flapping children and fiends reeled as if dancing the maypole (he glimpsed Unlea crawling up the steps to the fortress gate), the quick, bearded male leader shouting in glee words that were sucked away at his lips, falling, rolling as the knight braced and cut at them with furious disgust; the other, livid green glowing landscape fading in and out around him, the hideous army pouring through flanked by many-headed flying things that seemed all jaws and ruby claws and leathery, crashing wingbeats …

A naked girl danced, shrieking at him, dagger whizzing, and the wind veered her beyond his sword’s point, her own slash a mere symbol … Two others crept towards him as if imagining they were invisible. They wriggled up the stones, knives in their teeth. Their actions, he strangely perceived, were like words, a scatter of messages …

And the leader shrieked, choking and hoarse:

“… seal … seal … opened! …”

The great fish leered and tilted, the monkeyform capered on the crumbling walls as the other things flapped and crept and hopped …

The leader tried to handstand and was blown over. Parsival turned, ghostly troops, blurred, glow-eyed, gathered between him and where he could dimly see Unlea pushing inside, the door suddenly flinging inward in the terrific draught. She was gone as the killer children wriggled and plunged hopelessly at him and he just ran now through the fiend army, the shimmer and whirlwind of biting, blinding ashes. For a heartgripping fraction he was totally there in the harsh chill green world and felt terrible hands and claws pluck at his body and fall away like charred twigs … and he charged into the welcome stillness and lightlessness of the castle, yelling: