The Last Guardian of Everness (War of the Dreaming 1) (6 page)

It was the same red and bloodstained robe Galen had despoiled from the corpse of the Red Knight.

Now a soft voice came from the hood. Galen could not tell if it were a man’s voice or a woman’s. “I see into the World of Judgment even as you see into the World of Dreams, and you cannot hide your crimes from me, any more than I can hide my dreams from you.”

Galen said, “Who are you?”

The voice replied: “I and my race are appointed to guard against traffic from dishonest Nastrond even as Everness is set to stand watch against the invasion of nightmarish Acheron. Yet, my race was here before there was a city of Tirion, for all this place was created to hold one single traitor damned by Oberon. All those imprisoned afterward were given to us only because this prison already existed. That prisoner also is of the House of Everness. Also a traitor.”

“I’m not a traitor,” said Galen.

“If I wished, these stone statues would rise to life and rend you limb from limb. Yet I will not hinder you. You go forward to a doom far worse that any to which my justice would condemn you. Go! All which you have done shall return to you, and your guardianship invaded by one who wears your cloak, even as you, by wearing my son’s cloak, came into mine.”

The cloak fell to the ground in a heap, empty. Perhaps it had never been full.

“Wait!” cried out Galen. “Guardian of Tirion, listen to me! I fought only because I was attacked! I came here only because I was summoned! I am loyal to the cause of Light!”

But he was only calling into empty air. He looked left and right, but there was nothing to be seen. Galen prodded the cloak with the tip of his spear, but there was no reaction, and the voice did not come again.

Galen said the words he had been taught to mitigate curses. But the words came dull and slow to his lips, and he did not know if there were any effect. Should he continue onward? There seemed no reason to delay. Uncertainly, he walked back along the stone bridge.

Where the stone brink of the bridge he stood upon fell away to open air, three dozen rings or more, each a dozen feet in diameter, held huge
links, as large as any Galen had ever seen or dreamed, curving away down into the dark, giant chains gleaming in the starlight. From the very central ring, one chain dropped down larger and straighter, farther into the gloom below, than any of the others.

He had passed over the brink of the cliff of the world’s edge without realizing it; this half-bridge was cantilevered over the abyss. Underfoot was only air.

This was not a good sign. When had he passed beyond the world’s edge? When the Guardian of Tirion had cursed him? Before? This was a bad place to be. Things here, even a few feet beyond the world’s boundary, were not bound by worldly rules. The Powers and Dominions to which he prayed might not be in range to hear him now, and ordinary objects might not recall their true names. His prayer meant to deflect the curse might have been meaningless.

And yet there was no reason to wait.

He knelt at the edge of the half-bridge he stood on, put his feet on the huge links of the long central chain he found there, and swung himself over the edge.

V

With no memory of an arduous climb, Galen next found himself to be standing, balanced like a wire walker on the links of a great chain, leading to a ring embedded in the icicles and ice stalactites of a frozen waterfall. Depending from that ring, entwined and half buried in thick icicles, hung a grisly cage all made of spikes and needles.

To either side and high above were other iron cages of the Unforgiven, hanging still and silent in midair or caught midswing and frozen in the ice. Nine broad avenues of ice ran down the titanic cliffside on which Galen found himself. The place was like a bay embracing an abyss, for to his left and right Galen could see the tremendous cliffs, larger than mountains,
which thrust rocky spurs out into midair, with, here and there, small shelves or crevasses in which blown seeds had planted wiry grass or isolated trees.

Underfoot were a few solitary clouds, a scattering of stars, and, below them, unending darkness.

Nearer at hand, however, and above him, were many bloodstained cages; it was on the chain of the lowest and longest-chained of all the cages that he stood. The cage had been at the apex of its swing when it had been caught in the evening snows, and had become embedded in the walls of the waterfall.

A little water still trickled from the icicles to drool upon the black figure crouched within the cage. A drop splattered noisily upon the bowed head, and, at that, the figure stirred and raised his head. He was bent over within the cage, which was not large enough to permit him to stand.

Through tangled strands of hair peered eyes dark and kingly, though made hollow by long suffering; the nose was hooked, the lips cruel and set, the whole expression, bitter, pitiless, and stern. He wore the tattered rags of some once-festive lacy garments, as if he had been arrested during a festival and not allowed to change. His skin was crisscrossed with many scars and puncture wounds, and blackened with frostbite and ugly burns.

“I am Azrael de Gray Waylock,” said the man, his voice solemn and low. And he reached through the bars to put his hand on the chain. “You, who dare to interrupt my meditations here, know, that should I wish it, a convulsion of my hand can topple you into the unbottomed dark, beyond the scope of dreaming; nor will your flesh on earth wake evermore. Now, speak, and persuade me to hold my hand unmoving.” And blood ran down his arm and hand, for he had torn his flesh on the hooks and iron claws of the cage’s bars.

Galen watched with wide eyes as drops of falling blood flew down out of sight into the wide darkness underfoot, perhaps turning to ice, perhaps to fall forever.

Cold dread was in Galen. He knew what he did next could not be undone.

4

Death
and
Deathlessness

I

“Walk before me, Raven, son of Raven,” commanded the icy voice. “No one in the chamber will behold you. My robe of many mists blinds them.”

Raven walked out of the closet and between several of the interns, who neither turned nor spoke to him.

He stepped out into the hallway. He heard a quiet footstep scrape the floor tiles behind him.

Once, when he was a boy in northern Greece, after his and his father’s escape from the Soviet Union, Raven was playing in a graveyard at night, behind the local Greek Orthodox church, which had been a temple to pagan gods in its youth. He came suddenly upon a wolf tearing up a corpse from
the soft earth between the gravestones. The lean and famished wolf had looked up, growling, a shadow with eyes like green flame. For a moment, Raven could smell the hot breath of the beast, thick with the stench of its grisly feast. Then the wolf turned and fled.

Raven never forgot that smell as it touched his face. Now, in the hospital, from behind him, he smelled that same smell again, the odor of a carrion beast.

Raven turned.

Behind him, taller and thinner than a man, the black shape rose up so that the bones of his crown brushed the ceiling. Above flowing robes of smoke and darkness, the kingly phantom wore armor made of knitted bones.

Up from his crown jutted a circle of skeletal hands, their fingers pointing upwards, with long gray nails still growing from their pointed ends. The cheek plates of his helmet were made of dead men’s opened jawbones; overlapping shoulderbones fanned out from his crown to protect his neck; his epaulettes were made of severed kneecaps; the chain-mail at the armor joints was made of layered yellow teeth; greaves and gauntlets were made of tibia and ulna; interlocking rib cages covered his breastplate. His sleeves and skirts and wide black cloak were made of tattered shadows.

The creature’s face was thin and famished, with sunken gray cheeks drawn tight over high cheekbones. Under the shadow of his heavy brows could be seen no eyes at all, but only two pale glints like stars hovering in the eyesockets. When he opened his mouth to speak, there were neither teeth nor tongue visible, only an empty darkness.

“Choose,” the creature intoned.

“What? Choose what?” said Raven slowly.

The creature raised one hand and gestured widely up and down the corridor of the terminally ill ward, pointing at the doors.

“You mean to choose who should die in my wife’s place?” said Raven. “No. This was not our bargain. You said it would be a stranger. No one I knew!”

“Very well,” the cold voice breathed. “The Law allows, when men forbear to choose, the choice will fall to my kind. Come.”

With a slither of smoky robes, the creature began to drift down the corridor. Raven took a few steps to follow, then halted.

“Stop!” he called.

The creature paused, looking over its bone-encrusted shoulder with eyes like flickers of marsh gas.

Raven said, “What are you?! You must tell.”

“Walk in my footsteps, and you will know me,” intoned the creature, and began once more to glide away down the corridor, the bones of its crowned helmet scratching against the panels of the ceiling.

“Why can’t the other people see you?” asked Raven. They walked into a corridor outside the intensive care ward, and even though it was crowded with rushing nurses and shouting people, the men all stepped or stood aside for the passage of the tall, lean entity, their eyes momentarily blank.

The creature sighed, “Men oft forget their nightmares when they wake.”

“But I can see you?”

“You are not afraid.”

“What are you? Why does no one know of things like you? Surely someone nowadays, in America, someone must know there are things like you! They are advanced people! Scientific people!”

“Even the wise are silenced by the endless mystery of night; starlight cannot be brought into the cold and open glare of day for their inspection.”

“Tell me your name!”

At the door to the intensive care room, the creature paused, looking backward, looming in Raven’s vision. “You know me.”

Raven remembered a name from old Russian fairytales. “You are Koschei the Deathless.”

“That is one of my names.”

“In the fable, they found where you had hid your heart and killed you.”

“What does not live cannot die, but only be banished for a time,”
Koschei said. He spoke with his hand touching the glass windows of the intensive care room doorway. “I am the first herald of the Emperor of Dreams, who soon will rule your world as well. For me, the sea-bell tolls but once, as my power, in this world, is small.”

“What is your power?”

“I know in what part of them men carry their deaths. I have taken that part out of me and shed my humanity as a snake sheds its skin. No one can drive me off except that they understand what is at my heart.”

Raven spoke like a man in a daze, who can only focus on one thought: “Then you can save my wife?”

“I will take her death from where it hides and give it to another.”

Raven realized that Koschei meant to kill whoever lay behind this door; the patient upon whom, he guessed, the doctors and nurses beyond were so frantically working. He could hear them hurrying, calling out in tense, flat voices, sudden curses of triumph or despair.

“Take the sword from my baldric, Raven, son of Raven. It is bound in its scabbard with a knot I may not untie. Holding the sword before you, step into the chamber here. Then you must drop to your knees and recite all those things you most love about your wife, whom you are so soon to lose. An invisible power will undo the knot. When this happens, draw the sword and hand it to me. No more will be asked of you.”

Raven took the scabbard from where it hung off the figure’s long sash. His fingers were numbed with terrible cold when he touched it.

Raven opened the door. A putrid smell, mingled with disinfectants, greeted him. Inside, he could see a cluster of doctors and nurses bent over a half-naked young man on a table. One medic pumped oxygen into the young man’s mouth. Another had electrodes in his hands, which he was rubbing together. This second nurse shouted, “Clear!” and touched the electrode paddles to the body.

The young man jumped and thrashed on the table for a moment. “We have the pulse again!” shouted a voice, and a steady beeping came from one of the machines in the room.

“No!” said Raven. “This was not our bargain! I did not say I would help you kill a man!”

“Yes. Yes, you did.”

Raven stood still, holding the scabbard. The icy numbness in his hand throbbed like fire, creeping toward his elbow.

Koschei said, “Choose. Shall it be this man, who is nothing to you? Or shall it be your wife, whom you claim to love?”

Raven squinted. “There is someone else in this room. Some power which keeps you away from the young boy, eh? You devils do not need mortal men to do your work unless there is trick involved.”

“Go to your knees. Pray for the salvation of your wife. Your prayer will be answered.”

“What is in this room?”

“Though you cannot see her, clever mortal, there is a unicorn in this room, standing guard over Galen Waylock. Each time my poisons reach the boy’s heart, she touches him lightly with her silver horn and works his cure. I cannot wound or drive her away, except with this, the one weapon to which she is vulnerable. It is a terrible weapon, and she must unknot the bindings herself to let it be drawn against her.”

Raven looked at the scabbard. The swordhilt was plain and black, and the scabbard itself was all of white leather. The scabbard was fitted and bound in rings of bone, which looked like spinal vertebrae. Through these rings ran white cords, which tied the hilt into the scabbard with a complex knot, all bows and loops and dangling tassels.

“What is the name of this sword?”

Koschei said softly, “My weapon is called Pity.”

Then Koschei said, “Step forward, Raven. If you keep Pity hidden in its sheath, no pity will be shown your dying wife.”

Raven stepped forward woodenly, his eyes wide and staring, his face slack with pain and indecision.