The Skrayling Tree (39 page)

I said that I understood Kakatanawa to mean ‘People of the Circle’. Why did he say “tree”?

He smiled. “The tree is in the circle. Time is the circle, and the tree is the multiverse. The circle is the sphere in which
all exists. Space is but a dimension of this sphere.”

“Space is a dimension of time?”

“Exactly.” Lobkowitz beamed. “It explains so much when you realize that.”

I was saved from any further contemplation of this bewildering notion by a sharp wailing sound. With sinking heart, I rushed
to the nearest balcony. I saw dark clouds drawing in on the jagged horizon, gathering around one of the tallest peaks and
writhing and twisting as if in an agonized effort to assume some living form. The clouds were making one huge figure, drawn
by all the winds now in thrall to Lord Shoashooan. A long streamer of cloud sped from the central mass, across the ice, over
the walls of the great fortress city, and lashed at our flesh like a whip, then retreated before we could respond.

Even Sepiriz bore a thin welt across his neck where the cloud had caught him. I imagined I saw a flash of fear in his eyes,
but when I looked again he was smiling. “Your old friends march against us,” Lobkowitz said. “That is the first taste of their
power. From this
moment on, we shall never know peace. And if Gaynor the Damned is successful, we shall know agony for eternity.”

I raised an eyebrow at this. Lobkowitz was serious. “Once the Balance is destroyed, time as we know it is also destroyed.
And that means we are frozen, conscious but inanimate, at the very moment before oblivion, living that death forever.”

I must admit I had begun to close my ears to Lobkowitz’s existential litany. A future without Oona was bleak enough to contemplate.

Food forgotten, we watched the blue-black bruise of cloud forming and re-forming around the peaks of the mountains. A shout
from another part of the gallery and we could see over the great gateway to the city, to the half-faded path which Ayanawatta
had created with his flute. It now spread like dissipating mercury across the ice with men moving through it, leaping from
patch to patch. The figures were tiny. They were not Kakatanawa. I thought at first they were Inuit, bulky in their furs,
but then I realized that the leader had no face. Instead the light reflected from a mirrored helmet which was all too familiar
to me. Another man strode beside him, one whose gait I recognized, and on the other side of him a smaller man, also familiar.
But they were too far away for me to see their faces. They were without doubt his warriors.

The same Vikings who had tried to stop us reaching the fortress.

“Time is malleable,” said Lobkowitz, anticipating my question. “Gaynor is now Gunnar the Damned. Merely a fraction of movement
sideways through the multiverse.
He has gathered himself together, but he dare not live now without that helmet—for all his faces exist at once. Otherwise
he is here in your twelfth century, as indeed is this city and much else…”

I turned to look at him. “Does Gunnar still seek the Grail?”

Lobkowitz shrugged. “It is Klosterheim who longs for the Grail. In his warped way he seeks reconciliation. Gunnar seeks death
the way others seek treasure. But not merely
his
death. He seeks the death of everything. For only by achieving that will he justify his own self-murder.”

“He is my first cousin, yet you seem to know him better than I do.” I was fighting off a creeping sense of dread. “Did you
know him in Budapest or Vienna?”

“He is an eternal, as you are an eternal. As you have alter egos, fellow avatars of the same archetype, so he takes many names
and several guises. But the relative you know as Gaynor von Minct will always be the criminal Knight of the Balance, who challenged
its power and failed. And who challenges it again and again.”

“Lucifer?”

“Oh, all peoples have their particular versions of that fellow, you know.”

“And does he always fail in his challenges?”

“I wish that were so,” said Lobkowitz. “Sometimes, I must say, he understands his folly and seeks to correct his actions.
But there is no such hope here, my dear Count. Come, we must confer. Lord Shoashooan gathers strength again.” He paused to
glance out of another opening in the great wall winding up the ziggurat.
“Gaynor and his friends bring considerable sorcery to this realm.”

“How shall we resist them?” I looked around at the little party, the black giant, Prince Lobkowitz, the sachem Ayanawatta
and White Crow. “How can we possibly fight so many? We are outnumbered and virtually unarmed. Lord Shoashooan gathers strength
while we have nothing to fight him with. Where’s my sword?”

Sepiriz looked to Lobkowitz, who looked to Ayanawatta and White Crow. Both men said nothing. Sepiriz shrugged. “The sword
was left on the ice. We cannot get the third until…”

“Third?” I said.

Ayanawatta pointed behind him. “White Crow left his own blade down there with Bes. His shield is there, too. But again, we
lack the necessary third object of power. There is no hope now, I think, of waking the Phoorn guardian. He dies. And with
him the tree. And with the tree, the Balance…” He sighed hopelessly.

The silence of the city was suddenly cut by a squealing shriek, like metal cutting metal, and something took shape above the
ice directly behind where Gaynor and his men were moving cautiously along the dissipating trail.

I was sure we could defeat the warriors alone, but I dreaded whatever it was I saw forming behind them.

It shrieked again.

The sound was full of greedy, anticipatory mockery. Lord Shoashooan, of course, had returned. No doubt, too, Gaynor had helped
him increase his strength.

White Crow turned away from the scene. He was
deeply troubled. “I sought my father on the island, in my crow form. I thought he would help us. That he would be the third.
But Klosterheim was waiting for me and captured me. At first I thought that you were him, my father. If you had not been near…
The Kakatanawa came to rescue me after Klosterheim went away. They released me and found you. My father is, after all, elsewhere.
He followed his dream and was swallowed by a monster. I thought he had returned to the Dragon Throne, but if he did, he has
come back for some reason. This must not be.” He lowered his voice, troubled. “If that man is who I am sure it is, I must
not fight him. I cannot fight my own father.”

I frowned. “Elric is your father?”

He laughed. “Of course not. How could that be? Sadric is my father.”

Ayanawatta touched his friend’s arm. “Sadric is dead. You said so. Swallowed by the
kenabik.”

White Crow was genuinely puzzled. “I said he was swallowed. Not that he was killed.”

Pour the beer and light the feasting fires,

Bring you in the tall Yule trees,

Without, let Father Frost and Brother Death reside

Let Mother Famine fly to farther fields,

Raise high the trees and high the ale-cup lift,

Let good will rule and to ill will all folk give short shrift.

O
LD
M
OORSDALE
S
ONG

L
ord Shoashooan did not merely take shape above the fading causeway. He drew strength from the surrounding mountains. Storm
clouds boiled in from north, south and west, masses of dark grey and black shot through with points of white, tumbling swiftly
towards us.

Shale and rocks began to fly towards his spinning form, and from within that bizarre body his grotesque face laughed and raved
in its greedy rage, utterly deranged. He was now more powerful than when either
Oona or I had fought him. His size increased by the moment. Pieces of ice flew up from the lake to join the whirlwind’s heavy
debris. And when I looked deep into it, I saw the twisting bodies of men and beasts, heard their cries mingled with the vicious
shriek of the cruel Warlord of Winds.

Realizing suddenly what he faced, White Crow frowned, murmured something to himself, then turned and began to run back down
the long, curving roadway between the tiers. Sepiriz and Ayanawatta both cried out to him, but he ignored them. He flung some
cryptic remark over his shoulder and then disappeared from sight. Was he deserting us? Where was Oona? Did he go to her? Was
she safe? And who did he think his father was? Gaynor? How did White Crow hope to avoid conflict?

Questions were impossible. Even Sepiriz seemed flustered by the speed with which Lord Shoashooan was manifesting himself.
The maddened Lord of Winds was already ten times more powerful than when he had sought to block our way across the ice.

Prince Lobkowitz was grim as he hurried up the ramps. Higher and higher we climbed, and the tornado rose to match our height.
The causeways grew tighter and narrower as we neared the top of the city, and the wind licked and tasted us, playing with
us, to let us know there was no escaping its horrible intelligence, its vast destructive power.

As we neared the top, heavy pieces of earth and stone flew against the walls of Kakatanawa, chipping at surfaces, slashing
into foliage. A large rock narrowly
missed me, and Sepiriz shook twice as he was hit. Part of an outer wall fell. Through the gap I saw the tiny figures of the
Vikings on the ice moving in closer, but we were momentarily safe from any immediate confrontation with them. We had no way
to resist the invader even if we could engage him. Lord Sepiriz carried no sword. Save for Ayanawatta’s bow and Prince Lobkowitz’s
cutlass, we had no weapons.

We had reached a broad-based tower with dark red walls and a deep blue ceiling and floor; a central spiral staircase led like
a cord of silver up to a platform and what was clearly an experimental laboratory. An alchemical study, perhaps? Certainly
Prince Lobkowitz had expected to find it there. He began at once to climb the stairs.

“Let’s have a better look at our enemies,” he murmured.

We followed him up. Here was an assortment of large, chunky machinery, mostly constructed of stone, like an old mill with
huge granite cogwheels and smaller ones of beaten gold and platinum. Apparently this people, too, had no notion of smelting
iron. The strange, bulky cogs and levers worked a series of lenses and mirrors. There was something familiar about all this.

Of course. My father had experimented with a smaller version at Bek before the first war. I realized we were looking at a
rare form of camera obscura, which, by means of mirrors, could show scenes of the surface around the city. It was not entirely
mechanical in nature. There were other forces involved in its construction, more common to Melniboné than Munich. Indeed,
when Lord Sepiriz joined the stocky prince, he easily made parts move by a murmured command and a gesture. Gradually the two
men brought the scene outside the gates into view.

I had been right. Gaynor the Damned led them. Near him was his turncoat lieutenant Klosterheim. The third man also wore a
helmet, which obscured most of his face, but his eyes were shockingly familiar. He had an edgy, wolfish air, as did all the
Vikings, but his was of a different quality. There was something fundamentally self-contained about the figure, and I feared
him more than the others.

The Vikings did not look as if they had slept or eaten well for some time. Their journey here had clearly not been an easy
one. I had rarely seen a hungrier bunch of cutthroats. They watched the Wind Demon with considerable wariness and did not
look happy to be of Gaynor’s party now. They were almost as nervous of the huge whirlwind as we were! Only the stranger in
the black helmet seemed to be in a different mood. His eyes in shadow, his pale lips half-hidden by the upwardly thrusting
chin-guard, the man was smiling. Like his eyes, his smile was one I recognized and feared.

Still larger rocks smashed into the walls, leaving deep gashes. Sepiriz was furious, muttering about the age of the place
and what it had meant for so many millennia.

I think he had believed us safe, at least temporarily, in the remote fortress city, but these events were proving far more
dangerous and whimsical than he had expected.
He realized he may have underestimated the danger. The developing situation appeared to have defeated his imagination.

A gritty wind howled into the tall camera and whistled around the complicated confection of copper wires and polished mirrors,
the worn granite cogwheels and brass pivots, the pools of mercury. There was a busy humming, a rattling and buzzing as the
wind touched the delicate, half-supernatural instruments. Polished glass flashed and blinded me. Thin tubes rattled and hissed
and scraped together.

Lord Shoashooan’s voice whispered through the tall rooms, finding strange, ugly echoes. “Mortals and immortals both, you face
your end without dignity or grace. Accept the fact that the Balance is finished. Its central staff has been lost, its scales
discarded. Soon the tree itself will die. The regulator of the multiverse has failed you. Law triumphs. The steady calm of
complete stability awaits you. Time is abolished, and you can anticipate, as do I, a new order.”

“The order you promise is the stasis of death,” Lord Sepiriz replied contemptuously. “You it is, Lord Shoashooan, who dishonors
your own name. You it is who lacks both dignity and grace. You are a busy noise surrounding a vacuum. To destroy is your only
effect. Otherwise you are less than a bird’s dying breath.”

A groan of anger. The walls rattled and cracked as the whirlwind’s strength increased still more. Outside another great crash
as masonry loosened and tumbled.

Lord Sepiriz’s hands played over the strange instruments. His shoulders were hunched with the
urgency of his actions. His eyes flashed from one point to another as if he sought a weakness somewhere.

He was reading signals within the mirrors, frowning over swirling glasses and tubes.

The chamber shook. It was like a heavy earthquake. My companions looked at one another. Clearly they had never anticipated
such a force. Though outwardly artificial, this city had once been a wild mountain. Within she was
still
a living mountain. And Lord Shoashooan had the power to challenge this mountain, to threaten its destruction!