The Wanderer's Tale (43 page)

All three magic-users had cast spells over it, and all three were in no doubt that it was in some way enchanted. It was only Finwald, however, who was convinced that it was just the sort of magic weapon that they needed against Drauglir. He was very excited about the whole affair, even going so far as to claim that with such a sword their battle might already be won.

They had all studied the weapon with great curiosity. It was strange indeed. None of them could put an age to it or hazard a guess at its origin, for the style was totally bizarre. The hilt, large and heavy, was wire-bound and blackened with age. The cross-guard was straight and unadorned, much in the manner of the ancient swords of the Northmen before their decline. And the blade was like none any of the company had ever seen before: snaking out from the cross-guard, it was razor-sharp, double-edged, and undulated like the backbone of a serpent. It was almost beautiful in its craftsmanship.

‘It looks like the kind of sword we used to call “flamberge”,’ Nibulus had announced, ‘a firebrand – a tongue of fire.’

‘Yes,’ Finwald had added enthusiastically, ‘a flame to fight the fires of hell! You could even name it Flametongue . . .’

Bolldhe stared at the object doubtfully as it lay on the table where the mage-priest had placed it for him. But he took it up anyway and, as he held it in his hands for the first time, a clear image had suddenly popped into his head. No, stronger than an image; this was more like a
vision
:

It involved a heath, a desolate and forsaken place of sparse, yellowing tussocks of grass that bent in an unquiet wind. Beneath a grey sky it lay, a sky heavy with stormclouds. At the far end of this heath, a great drop – a cliff that looked out over a troubled sea. And standing right at the edge of this cliff, a figure. This figure was too distant for any precise details to be made out, but there was a familiarity about it that Bolldhe could not quite put his finger on . . .

Puzzled, Bolldhe carefully laid the flamberge back on the table. Perhaps he was turning into a genuine oracle after all.

It was probably from that moment that his depression had set in. He was increasingly troubled by a nagging feeling that would not leave him, and it grew worse with every hour that passed. Maybe it was caused by the Beast? None of them had any clear idea what had attacked them, though an Ogre, a Jutul and even a Kobold like they had seen in Nym-Cadog’s realm, were suggested. But whatever it was, it did seem very strange to Bolldhe that a monster like that should wield any weapon at all. That creature had been one of tooth and talon, and surely a savage beast like that had no need of any man-made weapon. The sword had slowed it down, made it clumsy, and in the end perhaps lost it the fight. Had it not been thus encumbered, it would have doubtless made short work of Nibulus and the rest of them, yet it had held on tight to the flamberge like an old friend – or a new toy.

Bolldhe wondered. Again, that nagging thought at the back of his mind . . .

Each time he studied Flametongue his depression grew worse. A bitter taste clung in his mouth, and a gripe had settled in his stomach. Each night he lay awake for hours that seemed to have no end, and each morning the warm sunlight mocked him in his melancholy.

Whatever the Beast had been, it had brought home to Bolldhe his own fragility and mortality far more than any other encounter he had suffered on this journey so far. The road ahead now seemed a never-ending, futile folly, fraught with dangers along its entire length.

And at the end of that road, if he arrived there at all, waited only Death.

Bolldhe had taken to brooding all day over such black, morbid thoughts. He shunned his companions, and they in turn shunned him.

In the days leading up to the company’s departure from Myst-Hakel, it was not only Bolldhe who was in a black mood. Paulus, too, appeared to have something on his mind, something which was turning his customary dourness into something even more acerbic. He looked constantly haggard and drawn, and while the others in the party were trying to complete all the final preparations before they set off, the Nahovian spent his days wandering about like a zombie.

On the eve of setting off, he lay awake all night in the temple hall, staring up at the ceiling. A chill mist had crept in through the windows, and his companions slept fitfully, huddled under the warmth of their furs. But Paulus had cast his covers aside, long ago having given up the idea of sleep. His one good eye wide open, he gazed up into the darkness above him and ruminated.

Sleep had similarly abandoned him for the past few nights. Always he would lie there awake while his mind buzzed with thoughts; each night dragged endlessly as he tossed and turned, grumbling irritably and constantly readjusting his covers. His body yearned for the sleep he so badly needed, but his brain would not allow it. Then, after an eternity of fidgeting restlessly, the sound of birdsong would filter through the windows, followed by the first hints of dawn’s cold, grey light. Outside, early risers would shuffle past, coughing and mumbling as they carried their tin basins and slabs of soap down to the jetties. Whereupon Paulus would curse and fidget some more, but still sleep would not come to him. It was only when the temple hall was lit by the brighter glare of early morning and the townspeople were all up and about their daily business that he would finally feel a merciful heaviness descend on his surviving eyelid, and sleep would soon follow.

In this way the mercenary had managed perhaps two or three hours of sleep each morning, and later he would wander about looking pale, drained and lethargic, only half-alive. This night – their last in Myst-Hakel – was no better. In fact if anything, it was worse. They had to be up early the following morning, and Paulus knew that this would cheat him of even this brief chance of sleep. The thought of the coming day’s hard trek across the remainder of the Rainflats to Fron-Wudu, in his current state of exhaustion, agitated him even more.

He lay awake in the damp, marsh-scented mist that rolled in from outside, and pondered the reason for his recent insomnia. It was due to the incident at the mine, of course. But it had nothing to do with the Beast itself. No, he had seen nothing whatsoever of that terrible adversary, having been too far back down the passage when it was encountered.

Being rearguard had its advantages. It meant he could unobtrusively hang back a little, and explore the tunnel much more thoroughly than his companions, just in case there were any discarded valuables they had overlooked.

So while they had gone ahead in search of Bolldhe’s axe, Paulus had lagged behind to do some searching around of his own.

But it was not treasure that he had found. No silver, no precious uncut stones, no interesting baubles. Nothing valuable at all, in fact. But he
had
found something that had interested him.

It was a little shutter set in the wall, about head-height – old and rusted, but not so rusted that his powerful fingers could not prise it open.

And out of that open shutter emerged a cold blast of air from what had to be a vast empty space behind; an icy wind that chilled his face and stung his eye, and brought with it rumours of far-off, running water. Rumours of a splashing, gurgling, thundering current . . .

. . . and, barely audible above the rush of water, the forlorn wailing of a voice.

Is anyone there? – Please, let there be somebody there! – I’m so cold . . .

Paulus had promply snapped the shutter closed, cutting off both the icy blast and the ghostly voice it had carried.

But it was not fear that had made him do so. It was gratification. For there was a certain grim satisfaction in ignoring that voice and its desperate, hopeless plea for salvation. He relished the thought that he had sealed its owner’s fate forever. It somehow assuaged all the bitterness he had felt at the Kjellermann, the dire loathing he had felt that night for all those happy, pretty people who had laughed at him as he sat there on his own.

Now that voice, with all its lamentable pitifulness, its terror and its despair, repeated itself over and over in his mind.

Gapp Radnar’s voice.

Days later, out on the moors, a low sobbing rose into the night. Deep and bestial, it echoed long and far from its pit, reaching out across the swamp-waters, through the tall reeds and bulrushes that whispered amongst themselves in nocturnal secrecy, and drifted over the creaking shackleboards towards the sleeping shanty town. By the time it filtered through the shuttered windows and barred doors of the stilt-huts, it could hardly be heard, sounding no more than a low wind that moans from afar. Scant heed was paid to it by the townsfolk, huddled within their gritty and mist-dampened blankets against the terrors that rose from the swamp and into their dreams.

Again the lament rose, forlorn as the crake’s cry, distant as the last glimpse of the waning moon that lay reflected upon the wind-rippled surface of the marsh-pools, and as hopeless as the hearts of the moonrakers who dredged their waters.

Then the Beast emerged from the mineshaft and revealed itself. A gigantic, lumbering monstrosity with swinging arms, curving fangs, and filthy black hair that had grown uncontrollably from the mean little top-knot it had possessed when first the company had encountered it many miles to the south.

Wodeman had guessed right; this whole region was indeed riddled with caves, a vast subterranean network of water-carved and interconnected tunnels that honeycombed the rock beneath the Rainflats. And it was by negotiating these troglodyte paths that the Beast had arrived at the silver mine, escaping the entombment of Nym-Cadog’s collapsed barrow. All that way it had forced a passage, howling its madness, pain and hatred in the dark confines of the earth, driven by an unholy lust for vengeance, and swelling in size as its wounds worked their abhorrent transmutations.

For such was the way of the Afanc. Bastard child of Incubus and priestess of Yeggeth-Dziggetai, it was neither huldre nor human, belonging to neither world yet forever trapped between. Though terrible had been its injuries sustained at the hands of the company from Nordwas, it could not be so easily destroyed. Not even the stroke of Unferth that had cloven its head could put this hybrid beneath the turf. For with every wound it received, Afanc was not dimished but
enlarged
– after a period of dormancy – its body distending from within as foul fluids pulsed through it to swell its stricken organs.

Swell, not heal, for the Afanc bore with it forever any hurts it might receive, now engorged with poison, and befouled beyond belief. What with the hacking it had received during the battle at Nym’s, and the burning from Bolldhe’s oil-flask just days earlier, its charred and gashed hide now appeared like a blackened landscape of gorge-riven magma-crust, weeping rivers of pus.

Never was there one so hideous as the Afanc. Despised by all for its repulsiveness, the Beast’s funds of hatred and stupidity were untrammelled by mortal limitations. Beheld openly by torchlight, it could strike terror deep into the very essence of a man’s soul, so much so that forever after he would question Life itself, and wonder how this world could suffer such a blasphemous abomination to walk upon its surface. Beheld by the light of the full moon, just a sight of this apparition from the darker regions of Man’s most awful nightmare was sufficient to kill on the spot. By day, fortunately, it must perforce remain within the earth, lest it perish in the cleansing light of the sun.

And yet, mere yards from the Afanc, stood a dark figure that might have been a man. His kirtle hung from broad shoulders, and twin fires burned from behind the veil of hair surrounding his face. Though it could not see the stranger, the Afanc sensed his presence. It sniffed the night air through its clogged-up, funnel-like nostrils, and swung its great head this way and that, but it could not locate him. With its rake-like claws it then thrashed the invisible aura that surrounded the stranger, and gurgled in malice like a cauldron of boiling blood.

Eventually it stopped and whimpered in defeat. There was nothing in the world that this fey-spawned obscenity feared, but the presence it now sensed was not of this world. Still whimpering, it retreated back down into its lair.

‘Ah, loathely Denizen of Darkness,’ the red-eyed stranger whispered, ‘you alone who can perceive my presence, need you arise from your pit to trouble an already darkening world with your malodorous being? Go back to your lair. This game has no role for you. The Flame has already risen to take
its
part, and even now my servant walks blindly with it to his doom –
our
Doom.’

But despite the power evident in that sibilant voice, there was pleading, and sadness. Pleading for the Beast he knew could not obey him, and sadness for a race that was almost lost.

S
EVERAL HOURS AFTER HE
had fallen down the well, Gapp began to wake up, but consciousness did not come easily.

Out of the blackness of non-existence, the occasional fleeting thought would appear, mere sparks in the void of his senselessness. Eventually these tiny pulses of mind-stuff began to increase both in frequency and in duration. Before long they had joined up, strung together into a dream, a horrendous nightmare of nausea, pain and mortality; human,
living
feelings that, in a vague, removed part of his mind, he had considered mercifully behind him.