The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (35 page)

They both went forward, carefully, holding the torches high, eating away the webs … suddenly the giant blade snapped back the other way. They ducked. Broaditch held his ground as the next chop came overhand, squeaking, grinding, and Lohengrin threw his torch at it and in the brief flash they saw the jointed, naked figure that barred the passage and glimpsed the exit gaping behind it.

It was still again: a naked male carving holding that outrageous sword.

“There’s no room to pass it here,” Lohengrin noted. “Clumsy as it be, it’s quick enough.” Was amused. “Only the arm seems to move.”

“Aye,” agreed the other. “And only when we come in range.”

“We’ll have to go back,” Gobble said. “But then the first we passed will be living now as master’s spells spread …” He squatted down, panting, eyes wobbling restlessly.

Layla took another drink. She felt more than justified. What next? she wondered … She blurrily watched Broaditch and her son draped in phantom, fluttering robes.

“It’s a machine of some kind,” Broaditch asserted. “Like the toy knights at fairs.”

“We’ll have to charge it, I suppose,” Lohengrin said, grimly.

“Solid stone and steel? And then what?”

“One of us might pass the sword.”

“Unless the other arm decides to move as well.”

“Mnn,” Lohengrin grunted.

Layla had wobbled closer. With most of the webs cut, her torch clearly lit the deadly machine.

“Quite a fellow,” she remarked. “Look at that prong they gave him.”

“Stay a distance, mother.”

“Never fear,” she answered, “I have known enough like him, who might as well be stone, to keep away …” Giggled. “A pity that one part were not carved and unbending on a man and the rest …” She shrugged. “More soft …”

Broaditch had been studying the thing carefully.

I
should
be
used
to
this
sort
of
business
, he told himself. Because he saw it was another riddle. They had probably trained their warriors here, whoever
they
had been …
It
sees
nothing
yet
it
strikes
…
how
like
a
great
political
lord
… He was sure he had the answer. Measured the distance with his eye.
God
knows
,
if
I’m
right
,
our
retreat
was
cut
off
by
some
worse
mechanism
…

“Hold this, my lady,” he said, handing her his torch and setting down his spear. Then he took Gobble’s sword and scabbard, his expression brooking no argument. “As you don’t use them,” he said.

“What are you about?” Lohengrin asked.

“You’ll learn, if I live, my lord.” He took a good start and, holding the sheathed blade, charged past Lohengrin, and about ten feet from the statue he leaped, hung in the air, waiting for the grinding cut to take him, and then his heels hit and he careened into the thing’s smooth, hard body, banging his shoulder, panting. Layla thought the webs trailing from him had looked like wings as he jumped. She tentatively flapped her own arms, shaking the torchlight.

“Well done!” yelled Lohengrin. The statue hadn’t budged.

“Like a great moth, he flew,” she murmured.

Broaditch reached up, both hands gripping the sword and scabbard.

“It’s the floor there,” he called over, “sets it going. Take a step to make it move and then fall back.” Which done, Broaditch was almost stunned by the explosive rasping grind as the arm flailed stiff and terrific at the young knight, whose mother, he noted from the corner of his eye, seemed to be weaving forward into range. He leaned into it (feeling what must have been vast weights shifting and turning in the floor) and jammed the sword into the shoulder joint so that as the stone arm crunched back the steel was twisted. Before Lohengrin could grip her, his mother had taken an extra step and the blade chopped back and forth, back and forth, the arc restricted now so that she simply swayed past it, each backswing missing her waist by inches. She reached Broaditch, who still clung to the grinding, squeaking, naked, blank-eyed carving, and said:

“Just look at that outrage …” Gestured between the stone legs. “Do you think there’s a gear to make it move?”

The thick, oily smoke from whatever was burning had choked off every corridor, forcing Tungrim down from entrance to entrance, trying to break out of the twisting, sickening maze of insane fighting, naked children, black-robed killers, crazed dogs, thrashing, screaming runts …

Finally he was forced into the main passage. Torches guttered on the muddy floor among mangled bodies … and then, choking and battling, they all came flooding in, and he instantly was waist-deep in dwarves (who stank of fear, blood and bathlessness) as the smoke and fighting packed everyone together, bigger ones climbing, running a few steps over the others before being dragged down into the swarm that filled the hallway, tearing, frantic. He fought to keep upright because to fall was death. Then, as the mass spun him, he glimpsed Howtlande up ahead, mouth wide, as the flood of flesh poured around the next bend … on the following spin he saw the fat man gesticulating wildly, backing away, seeming to harangue the bearded, blackened and bloody crew retreating with him … and then the mass careened in a flopping, howling wall of madness. Tungrim was striking at everything, blood and flesh splashing from his short sword, his mind falling … falling far, far away … from this … himself too, and he didn’t hear Howtlande’s arguments blotted over by the howling of this feral horror that his own wordless, flat, ferocious cries melted into as clubs, hands, teeth, swords were shocked into one ravening heap that spewed like a burst bungplug, vomiting onto the steps, popping Howtlande first to roll and stagger and finally slide and sail past John (and his guiding shape), then the rest bursting down the sheer staircase to the depths. Tungrim, as he flailed desperately, saw his home, the hills … bright water … and Layla there, as in a dream … very clear and impossible …

Clinschor could see the dark geysering into the tremendous chamber as if this were the source of all blackness shot from the stomach of universal night, and he could see, somehow, the giant figures supporting the arched and jagged roof, saw the wondrously delicate but powerful stonework.

He moved straight towards the streaming, palpable beams of blackness, clenching his fist in spontaneous salute as he drew near the gigantic lip of the well.

He felt them gazing up at him, stirring in the lucent dark, eyes like the last red stain in a dying coal, aware, quickening … He knew they felt the beating light prisoned in his cramped left hand, which had been locked closed since yesterday. The speck that would free them as it fell, like the one touch of white artists drop into black, to make it the more rich …

Now he had even forgotten the massed army he imagined at his back, and he spoke only to those at the bottom of the frozen gulfs.

“I am come,” he announced, prancing forward to the raised well-like rim, and suddenly weariness dabbed at him like a dark sponge, and a rush of feverheat … he wobbled … felt himself dissolving, name, memories floating into cloudiness … floated over the chill gulfs, his body far, far away … he felt them, felt their dark, intimate words, and he understood his own meaning, understood that Clinschor had been one provisional word, for what was never twice the same … when did the raw, shapeless metal become “sword”? … in the partly beaten block, or in any rough shape along the way? or when an edge was first honed or polished … buffed … or when it was ultimately drawn and swung? Which was the sword? Which name meant it all? When it broke and lay rusting in ages to come or remelted to another and greater? Which was “Clinschor”?

Far from his ravaged, swaying body their souls reached to him, flowing on the dark beams …

“We are come,” he thought or said, feeling excitement and power lash the dimming clouds of himself. “We are come!” like thunder, as if the black air pumped through his thick throat without his will and formed the speaking itself …

Past the now crippled mechanical statue was an open space where darkness massed beyond the feeble spill of their torchfire. They all stood there, dabbed over by the misty, clinging webbing. Layla kept blinking, trying to focus.

“Now where, you stinking shitball?” Lohengrin asked Gobble, who rolled his restless gaze around.

“Shit,” muttered Layla. “Shit he surely was …”

“What, mother?”

“He was … Your father … Sir Part-of-Shit …” She giggled.

“Peace, mother. Peace.”

Gobble was moving into the open darkness, not too fast now.

“This way,” he said, hopefully, uncertain. “This way …”

Broaditch supported her arm as they followed. He assumed they were wandering in a curve but there was no way to tell yet. Thought he looked a strange, limping goblin, the pale shimmer floating around him.

“What do
you
think?” Layla was asking him.

“Eh?”

“Of my son here? He’s not like his father, is he? Hm? … I raised him to be nothing like … nothing …”

“Mayhap you did too well at that, madam,” her son responded.

“Do you care for him, sir?” she went on, plucking at Broaditch. The wine was strong on her breath.

“I am no ‘sir’ my lady,” he replied.

“Do you care?” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Not many did … Life among the great is a cold business …”

“Gobble,” raged the knight in question, “you rat fecality, your steps wander! Where in the Devil’s hind are we?”

“This is the great hall at the end of the spiderway,” was the reedy reply.

“That much I knew already. Have you ever seen this place?” “No.”

“I knew that too.”

“We’re a sad and broken family,” she was saying, lilting. “I took lovers … but that’s a great smoke and little fire …”

“Mother! Why not have a scribe write it all down as well?”

“Wait,” commanded Broaditch. “Hear that?”

Layla suddenly tugged free and staggered a few steps on her own, admiring how the gossamer flowed. The stuff clung stubbornly to everyone.

They listened to a booming, muffled pounding roar that seemed to be high above them and moving down …

“Christ, what now?” Lohengrin asked no one, rubbing his beaked nose through the faceplate.

“What then?” his mother commented, reaching over and patting Broaditch’s cheek above his grayed beard. Looked, serious and sad, into his clear eyes. “You’re a good fellow … you cannot fool me … none of them ever could …” Shook her head with sleepy violence. “Not a damned one, I tell you …”

XLIII

The awesome shining shape moved closer and enfolded John in its own ineffable vitality, as he went down the sheer stairs that angled straight into the darkness. The rich piglight now pulsed around him as the packed, knotted, struggling spill of slashed, crushed, unspeakably mutilated, rending, snapping beings came tumbling in a nearly solid plug down behind (Howtlande had just vanished far below, still accelerating), limbs and heads twisted and tangled together, blood dribbling, teeth gnashing, mouths gaping in indescribable suffering.

But John barely noticed. As the balled mass slammed and snapped him into itself he felt the warmth and porcine power embrace and protect him, murmuring maternal, tender promises. The torches and stairway spun as hands clutched and teeth bit. A bearded Trueman face, eyes running blood, rose and sank again into the churning. Mouths raved blood and foam, knives and swords glittered, as though the careening lump, gathering crushing speed, sprouted steel fangs to chew all before it, flowing down on the shattered bones and slick blood of itself. In the madness and reek where Tungrim still howled, clawed and tumbled with the rest, it caught and wadded, leaving a solid stain of blood and meat as shapeless pieces, once human, were torn away by mounting momentum — the bloody children and dwarfed, lost followers of Clinschor all squashed into a single bleeding. Truemen … Viking … indistinguishable, all one at last … John rested serene as volitionless hands clutched and tore, embraced in chaos and ultimate spasm; rested in the calm glory of his protector, the thrilling touch of the trotters around his tumbling body, the supernatural glare of the burning, ruby eyes …

The hard, darkly shining landscape passed smoothly as Parsival and Unlea floated towards the tremendous fortress. He sensed the thing behind the walls was trying to grind out the streaming glory that was singing and caressing him home …

Walls and towers suddenly loomed, filling the vast, opaque luster of ground and air, miles on miles high. Then the first spawn of the beast sped forward to meet them as he worked his gleaming wings, gathering the musical light as a butterfly would gather air. The prismatic rays poured through chinks in the stones and above the jagged walls, outlining the vast thing as it moved. Suddenly the part-blocked radiance dimmed and he sagged; the insectile forms swooped closer on waves of dim and dark, darting to avoid the golden-tinted beams. As the light faded he felt a shock as when a lover is found untrue, a sinking dread … then the flame was free again, the shadow drew back slightly as the first spike-winged creature (all smoothness, claw and whipping stingers) closed, cut at them …

Unlea staggered, bare feet torn by the rocky flooring, clutching him as he dragged her along through the total blackness of the cave.

“Please,” she kept protesting. “Please …”

He was half-running, crying out unshaped sounds, bounding and rebounding from unseen walls, rocks, stalagmites, tripping and dragging her down and up. When a rock edge caught her knee she screamed and he dragged her along a rough wall for a few steps and she screamed again.

“O God! He’s mad! He’s mad!”

And then they staggered in an open, echoing space, and when next she fell he stooped and lifted her and she pleaded as his voice now went on breathless and smooth too:

“Ah, what glory! What glory! Ah! Try this then, you crudwet fiend!” Struggling, whipping at the air and she sailed free, fell and heard him struggling on, shouting, grunting as if he fought palpable foes. In panic (because being lost alone here counted worse than being with Parsival mad) she crawled and groped after him, except his footsteps arced in wide circles as he yelled:

“Fiends! Foul fiends! Away! Away!” And then his triumphant laughter as she ran now, groping, desperate in the hollow space that seemed boundless to her, crying out:

“Parsival! Parsival … come back! O God! Help! Help me!”

He discovered how to bank his wings into the light as the hissing, rasping, dark-gleaming insects slashed at him with razor claws and stingers like jousting spears, blank, burning eyes more baleful than malice in their stony indifference. He soared, doubled and circled, wings breaking golden air into blaze — saw her on foot, far below on the cold, jagged plains.

Zooming near where a dark ray crossed close, the creature rasped like scraped iron and snapped the curved stinger into the light at him. This time Parsival caught it in his hand and wrenched and tore as if snapping a green stick. The thing shivered, and in desperation clawed into the bright beam where it found no support. He smashed his free fist into one opaque eye and watched the creature spin and drop, spraying smoking poison blood, then knew he’d hung still too long as others came straight down with terrific speed, tearing through the shifting light-rays, and even as he banked desperately one hooked into the translucent shine of his wing and he fell, spinning, from the sustaining gold above the gigantic, pitblack towers and outworks where obscure wheels and holes spun and sparked fire; where countless coal-gleaming wingless things toiled and great, spiked beams tilted on massive iron structures; where axblades revolved like windmills … spinning down flatly he glimpsed miles of walls and squatness … sensed the crawling fish down there somewhere, the monkeylike monster, others … immense constructions chugged along like beetles on hundreds of stubby, stiff metal legs. Gouts of flame burst from within as if they were animated furnaces. The workers here and there mounted into tremendous pyramidlike heaps. Vast masses toiled to raise the dark walls higher and higher around the central pit to close out the golden light that poured almost straight up to flash among the roiling mountains of fumes. It was poised on top, straddling the rising tower, iron feet gripping the mile-wide sides, clouds swirling around immense black limbs.

The armored creatures ripped near him as he fell faster, the light dying like a sunset. He saw he’d hit within the wall among the fires and shadow-machines and he had to reach the light, nothing else mattered … he shook with chill now because the light was still himself and he was parted from it, and if it went out he’d be lost here with the rest, pinned heavy and cold in this unutterable bleakness …

The sound mounted, echoed, seemed almost directly above them: clatter, ringing, crunching, raving, screeching. Layla suddenly lurched free of Broaditch again and weaved rapidly into the dimness beyond the rim of their torchlight, falling forward, legs barely catching her each time, shouting this and that …

“Eeeeeee!” she cried as the dimness reeled and the din increased. She wanted to fly. She was clear on that point. She ran and dipped and spun sidewise, holding her arms out and flapping them, webs flowing, beating, feeling the warm soothingness that seemed without as well as within, as if the dark air were wine too, that was soft and gentle and cushioning. “Eeeeee …” Thrashing her arms as Broaditch and Lohengrin cut and dodged to follow her fluttery movements, the flametipped sticks whooshing, dwindling to near nothing from the draughts.

“Mother, damn you!” her son shouted over the mounting roar. “Piss and fire!”

She leaped into the air like a child (stung Broaditch with a sudden memory); again … again … fell and kicked her legs up, laughing …

“Eeeeeee …”

The world tipped and swung as Gobble came up to them. The torches lit the bottom of a straight, sheer stair carved out of the dark immensity of stone. Broaditch glanced at the small, web-shrouded, wrenched figure who was saying, shrill:

“Tarry not! It is nigh too late!”

“You’re a vast help at need,” commented the big peasant, puffing up one red-chapped cheek.

And then it was coming down the stairs: splishing, crunching, battering, ringing, howling …

“Ai,” said Gobble. “The bottomless steps.”

“An exaggeration,” put in Lohengrin, “as life abounds with. Mother, I —” He had her half to her feet.

“Nay!” insisted the cripple, yelling above the mounting sound. “Leave her and haste! Or we be too late! The terror comes!”

His gesturing arm shook his ghostly covering. Broaditch peered up the steps, uneasy. Layla was singing.

“That’s my mother, you son-of-a-bitch!” Lohengrin snarled and, snatching the gesturing hand, whipcracked him into the stairs about a dozen feet away just as something came spinning at blurred speed, zipping past sprawled Gobble and spattering down with a loose, hollow, sickening crunch at bottom. Blood flew, Broaditch thought, as though a wineskin had burst under a mace blow. The raw bonelessness that no one could ever know had been Baron Howtlande of Bavaria lay still in its fabric shreds.

Gobble shrieked and twisted to his feet, staring up as new horror came flopping, grinding, spilling into the dim glow.

A
creature
, Broaditch’s mind said.

“Run,” said his mouth, though Lohengrin needed no urging, and Layla’s feet trailed behind as they dragged her away. Glancing back, Broaditch saw the carved sides of the staircase packed by a squishsquashing mass spewing gore where heads and limbs and shapelessness struggled and flopped and ground together, gnashing, clutching, and the last sight, as they drew the fireglow out of range, was the phantom shape of Gobble, dressed (he thought) for the part, lurch-limping, flailing and vanishing as the thing hit bottom with a
spatt!
That trembled the solid stone itself …

So Broaditch didn’t see, if he could have lightly borne the sight, some of the incredibly still living figures, cushioned by the churning mush, gradually pull free and struggle, some still clutching weapons, trying feebly to slay … some babbling unceasingly like Tungrim who crawled, directionless, through the bone-ragged slush, dragging his crushed limbs, moving like a hurt swimmer, whimpering, vacant …

But none like John who simply stood obliviously upright, and waded through the gradually settling spatter, ribs painful, body gouged, hands locked in praying position, half-smiling in the darkness among the terrible screams, blowings, bubblings … past weakly clinging fingers; aimless slashes as the monster seemed to die in fitful parts …

But the pig-glow still summoned and exalted him, preserved for his task. The red, penetrating eyes seemed his own now, the red thoughts his thoughts, as if the death-impact of that ruin of violence had sealed them together and the supernatural senses fused with his own. He could feel the blasphemer in the blackness ahead, and he squealed within himself with blind, savage, sudden needs. Rushed faster, absorbed, making little snorts and grunts aloud, on the track of the betrayer, the denier, the enemy, the thief. Then the
thing
was suddenly in his sight and speaking with excitement he passed dim, red-lit figures, ghostly glows (that he didn’t know were Lohengrin and the others), began to run, mouthing high-pitched rancor as fragments spun unrelated through his churned brain: images of himself as a young priest, praying alone, desperate for a movement, an echo in the cool, gray stone stillness where altar flames stood unwavering in banked rows, softly bathing the man-sized crucifix whose Christ seemed always about to move, to speak to him … nights he’d prayed until blood ran from his fingernails … another time, listening, poised, his father in his highbacked lord’s seat, fine white hair fluffy around his delicate wrinkles, sucking a ripe, red plum, lips dripping sweet juice and scorn … gritting his teeth, listening as if to the stone-gray sky above for God’s voice to break and send his father cowering to his tailored knees … later standing over the massed serfs in the fields, listening to the still sky as his raging words went out and were lost … listening through all the bitter years of injustice and lost causes and wasted deaths, tensed, fierce, pleading … pleading with quenchless rage … listening …

… now running faster … faster through a pitchy night that opened all its opaque mysteries to him … squealing …

As another buzzing horror hurtled at Parsival, all slashing and stinging, he closed with it (above the jet fortress where the dark constructions crawled and creaked, tilted blades and beams and fire into the solid sky) thinking:

If
you
cannot
ride
a
white
horse
try
a
dark
…

Parsival gripped, smote in a furious whirlwind, the stinging spike lashing viciously, hard, sharp-edged torso knotting, taloned wings rending his back with searing stripes. Then he flung himself across the jewelsmooth back, clenching the thin, snaky neck that thrummed and whipped like springsteel, the chill beam of dark penetrating him as he locked his legs, fully committed to riding the killing thing before the others, banking all around, struck or his fading vital light was spent … spread his own wings to cover the others’, his own head above the angled, terrible blank face and somehow matched his seeing and movements to the harsh coldness under him, superimposed his senses until there was a single fluidity and he saw darkness through dark sight, felt the power, the vast hollows of night, the safety of lightless holes, chilling magnificence of sawtoothed crags forlorn and lifeless; the excitement of sheer force pouring through whipsteel bodies clashing, soaring, tearing in stunning frays, ecstasy of wrenched forces; the vigorous beauty of hardness, sharpness forcing, ripping, shattering, leaving only stone. Felt himself sinking deeper into the edgeless simplicity and irresistible meshing of unyielding parts …