The journey to the Armoury, short though it was, was never easy. The path through the Labyrinth defied all marking and the echoing columns that lay beyond it both lured and deceived with a song that reached into the darkest reaches of the soul. The guiding of people through it to fetch weapons for the hastily levied Orthlundyn army during the war had cost more than a few of them nightmare-troubled sleep for many months afterwards.
Hawklan stumbled along it, not daring to turn for fear that the consuming greyness would be at his back. Driving him forward, too, was the fear that the greyness had been drawn here by him, that his friends had been swept into nothingness because of his presence.
Questions formed slowly in his tumbling thoughts. Was this the fearful conjunction that had been so exercising Andawyr and the Cadwanol – everything lost in a bleak and desolate emptiness?
And what was he doing, fleeing, deserting them? Had he himself been plunged into madness brought on by his own fears and doubts?
He forced himself to stop and lean on one of the columns. Its touch, real and solid, steadied him. As too did the weight of a silent Gavor on his shoulder. He risked a glimpse backwards. There were only the gloomy columns.
Whatever had happened, it wasn’t the end – surely? – it couldn’t be. While he was alive he must have a role to play…? But there was a ringing hollowness to this assurance. What could he do, a solitary figure scurrying through the darkness – or just hiding in it? Where was he going? The Armoury? There was nowhere else to go – the path led only there and to leave the path was to die. But what did he hope to find there? The black sword? That had just been Gulda speculating. And even if by some bizarre happenstance it was there, what use would it be? There was no great army laying waste the villages and farms of Orthlund, or beating at the gates of Anderras Darion. Still less was there an army to lead out against them. There were forces moving now of which he had but the barest comprehension. True, there was a quality in the Sword that had struck Isloman and Loman, carver and smith, almost speechless as they had touched its carved hilt and black glinting blade. And, too, he knew that it – or he and it together – had a strength that he did not understand. How else could it have protected him from Oklar’s wild unleashing of the Power? But it was not enough. Should he find it, what more would he be, without true knowledge, than a lost and solitary soldier leaning on his futile weapon at the edge of a conflict that was meaningless to him?
He set off again, no wiser and still afraid.
Then he noted something.
A deep silence.
He stopped.
Normally the Labyrinth was awash with strange noises that snuffled and scuttered at the edges of the path like invisible predators waiting to rend apart those unwary enough to misstep.
But now there was nothing.
It was as if the Labyrinth itself was holding its breath… As if it had caught the scent of an even fiercer predator drifting through the darkness.
Scarcely a dozen paces would take him to the hallway of the Armoury and the bright sunlit images of the Orthlundyn countryside carried there by Anderras Darion’s intricate maze of mirror stones. From thence, through the now ever-open wicket door, he would enter the Armoury itself to be amongst the cornfield rows of points and edges glittering in that same sunlight.
If Orthlund was still there.
He dashed the thought aside and pressed on quickly, counting his footsteps and striving to ignore the deafening silence.
But at the last turn, where light should have greeted and embraced him, there stood only columns, watching, waiting, in the Labyrinth’s dull twilight.
He heard a rasping, terrified breath as his body responded to the sight. Gavor slapped his wings. Both sounds fell dead in the leaden air.
‘I… I made no mistake, surely?’ Hawklan stammered as the pounding of his heart threatened to overwhelm him.
‘Not that I noticed, dear boy,’ Gavor replied, equally unsteadily.
Despair came in the wake of the initial shock, washing over him in full flood now, black and choking. Andawyr had thought him near the heart of what was happening. So had many others, not least Sumeral Himself. But what was he now? A dismal fugitive lost in this dreadful place where the least sound could be woven into a shrieking that would leave a man mindless, or into an avalanche roaring that would break him as surely as falling rocks themselves.
He could not move.
He had made no error, he was sure. He couldn’t have. His deeper nature held the Labyrinth in too great awe to allow any confusion of the mind to so mislead him.
‘Change,’ Gavor said.
Hawklan started at the sound.
‘The Traveller said that to use the pathways of the Labyrinth is to change them.’
Hawklan grasped at Gavor’s words.
‘Not the path to the Armoury, though,’ he said, struggling to recall Gulda’s account of her meeting with the Traveller. ‘At least, not perceptibly. What did he say? It changes like the mountains, mote by mote?’
‘For all we know, the mountains have vanished like the Labyrinth hall,’ Gavor retorted flatly. ‘And he did say there was a great turbulence in the Labyrinth.’
Despite the implications of what Gavor was saying, Hawklan felt their exchange steadying him.
‘There are other paths, he said.’
‘He also said that most of them change like the trembling of a leaf in the wind.’
Hawklan looked again at where the entrance to the Armoury should have been.
Nothing.
Just the blank, ominous columns, their presence sensed as much as seen in the gloom that pervaded the Labyrinth. He knew that, whichever way he looked, this would be what greeted him. His despair returned, undiminished. He had faced dangers before, dangers that might have seen him killed and that he would only too willingly have avoided, but dangers that he was nevertheless prepared to accept by virtue of the role he had accepted – the role his skills best suited him for: healer, protector. But there was a futility here that bore down on him like the weight of the castle itself looming high above this grim place. Dying in the course of opposing a greater power was a bitter enough prospect, but to die here – to drown in his own screams – for nothing – while…
While what?
While the world and everything – everyone – in it plunged into some nameless cataclysm that perhaps some action on his part might have prevented.
That was bitter beyond any swallowing.
He realized that he was clenching and unclenching his hand painfully. He could feel again the black sword slipping from his grip and tumbling into the darkness. His arm twitched as he tried to recover it.
Could so slight a thing – the loss of a single weapon, however fine – be so significant now?
Yes, his instinct told him, even though the links of cause and effect that would make it so were neither foreseeable then, nor calculable by hindsight now.
‘I think we’d better do something, dear boy,’ Gavor said, fidgeting nervously. ‘We can’t just stand here.’
Hawklan opened his hand and gently rubbed it with the other as if to reassure it that it bore no guilt in the loss of the sword. Values deeply imbued in him and rehearsed constantly since his coming to this time began to reassert themselves.
He was alive.
He might be dead very soon, but then he might not be, and to cloud the present certainty with a future uncertainty was not only to mar the present but might bring about that feared future.
‘Yes,’ he replied, straightening up and carefully turning round.
The scene was as he had expected. Identical in all directions.
Well, whatever had happened to the hall hadn’t happened to the Labyrinth, he thought bleakly. And it was still silent.
Almost as though challenging it, Hawklan clapped his hands. The sound was dull and lifeless.
‘Which way?’ he asked.
Gavor inclined his head round to look at him. ‘Dear boy, don’t ask me. It was your idea to come in here. How am I supposed to know. There’s not a breath of wind in here. There never is.’
With a final glance at where the Armoury should have been, Hawklan held out a hand, indicating the way back to the hall.
‘This way?’
Gavor clucked to himself twice, then nodded.
As he set off, Hawklan found that his legs were shaking.
He moved cautiously, every sense alert for the lingering echo of a footfall that might presage a reawakening of the Labyrinth. So many fears tugged at him that for much of the time he was able to keep any one of them from rising to dominate. Nevertheless, when he reached the place where the hall should have been and found himself facing the same array of gloomy columns that lay before him in every other direction, he felt an unspoken hope dying. For a moment, panic screamed at him from the edges of his mind, but he held it at bay. It would remain close, though.
Gavor did not speak, but shifted his weight uneasily.
‘Alphraan, do you hear me?’ Hawklan said.
There was no reply.
‘Not that I’m normally inclined to think about such things, but I’d have imagined a bolder end for myself than this,’ Gavor said laconically.
‘Yes,’ Hawklan said. Gavor had been his companion since his mysterious arrival in Orthlund and it was more consolation than he cared to voice to have him still there.
Then, out of the darkness, came a sound.
Yatsu and Dacu crawled to Olvric’s side. He made no sound, but an inclination of his head drew them to a rock from the side of which they could look along the plain between the mountains without being seen. It took both of them a little time to adjust to the eerie perspective that the unchanging blueness brought to the plain, but gradually they made out the approaching riders.
As they watched, there was a brief flicker of light, thin and vertical, on another part of the plain.
‘What was that?’ Yatsu whispered.
‘I don’t know,’ Olvric replied. ‘I’ve seen a few of them, in different places. They’re never there long enough to look at properly and there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to them. If they’re signal lights they’re like none I’ve ever seen. Just a single flash, then gone.’
‘There’s another,’ Dacu hissed, instinctively ducking back behind the rock.
‘Never mind,’ Yatsu said. ‘We’ve enough to worry about without fretting over mysterious lights. How long before those three get here?’
‘Impossible to say,’ Dacu replied, squinting at the riders. ‘There’s nothing to gauge anything by.’
Yatsu scowled. ‘If they’re who we think they are, we can’t possibly fight them. We’ll have to hide – buy some time to find out more about this place.’ No one argued. ‘Keep watching,’ he said to Olvric and Yengar.
He broke the news to the others bluntly. ‘We’ll have to assume they’re the Uhriel. That means the only thing we can do is hide and hope they pass by.’
‘They came straight to Vredech and me when we were here,’ Pinnatte said. ‘It was almost as if the mountains were telling them where we were.’
‘That’s a comfort,’ Marna said caustically, but Yatsu motioned her to be quiet.
‘It’s relevant,’ he said. ‘Everything that happened to him is relevant.’ He looked around. ‘Maybe if this area hasn’t been changed yet they won’t be able to do that.’
‘We could ambush them,’ Marna suggested. ‘Gentren injured one of them.’
Yatsu shook his head. ‘Maybe, if we’d absolutely no other alternative, but until then we hide.’ He did not totally dismiss the idea, however.
‘Did you see any trees nearby?’ he asked Yrain.
‘There’s woodland within an hour’s walk.’ Gentren said, before she could answer. ‘But I don’t know what state it’s in.’
‘Good. If we can, that’s where we’ll go afterwards. There’ll be better shelter there, and more chance of finding food and something to drink. We can also make some bows and spears just in case we do have to ambush them. Not to mention a few snares.’
Yengar was with them again, his eyes wide.
‘One of them’s disappeared,’ he said. Yatsu made him repeat the news.
‘Just vanished into one of those lights,’ Yengar amplified. ‘One moment he was there, then he was gone.’ He snapped his fingers softly.
Yatsu looked at Pinnatte who shrugged.
‘None of them vanished when we were here, more’s the pity,’ he said sourly.
‘What about the others?’ Yatsu asked Yengar after a brief and bewildered pause.
‘They just carried on. We heard a faint shrieking noise like Vredech told us about.’ He grimaced. ‘It’s not a nice sound, even at a distance, but I suppose it confirms who they are.’
‘One down, two to go,’ Yrain said.
‘No, it’s eleven to go unless we keep our wits about us,’ Yatsu retorted curtly. ‘Don’t forget, none of us would have dreamt of attacking one of the old Uhriel and if the Memsa’s correct, which she usually is, these… creatures… are many times more powerful. Furthermore, I need hardly add, this is their world. We don’t even know whether this vanishing is to our advantage or not, yet.’ He looked across the blue-tainted countryside. ‘It’s very open. Precious little cover if we go as a group and not much more if we split up.’
‘We should stay here if we can – near the Gateway – wherever it is,’ Dacu said, reiterating his earlier concern.
Yatsu nodded. ‘How far does this cave go back?’
‘Not far,’ Jaldaric said. ‘Twenty, thirty paces and nowhere to hide except amongst the rocks on the ground.’ He held out his hand. It was dirty. ‘No water I’m afraid, but there’s a damp patch at the back,’ he said, wiping the dirt from his hand across his face. ‘At least we can make ourselves less conspicuous.
Yatsu was grim as he returned to Olvric and Yengar. The two riders were conspicuously closer, though it was still not possible to judge how far away they were. Apart from two more brief flashes of light, nothing else had happened since the disappearance – other than the remaining riders’ relentless progress.
‘Time to hide,’ Olvric said, very softly.
A hand signal dispatched the Goraidin into the cave, but Yatsu whispered stern instructions to the others. ‘Do exactly as you’re told. Keep your faces to the ground – they’ll be visible in the dark if you look up. Don’t move. Don’t speak. If any fighting breaks out, keep out of it.’ He nodded towards the cave. ‘We know one another, and we know how to fight together. You’ll certainly hinder us and you might well get cut down by accident. Do you understand?’ Gentren and Pinnatte gave a reluctant ‘Yes’ in the face of this cold-eyed ultimatum but Marna was obviously considering defiance.
Yatsu’s hands flicked out. One tapped her lightly on the cheek while the other took a knife from her belt. Even as she was flinching from the blow the knife was at her throat. ‘That’s an order, cadet,’ he said, unexpectedly gently, as he returned her knife. ‘Your courage isn’t in doubt, but you’re not good enough yet. Not for what might have to be done here.’ Then, to all three. ‘But if the worst comes to the worst, do what you have to do to survive.’
Inside the cave he checked everyone’s positions and whispered a few instructions to the Goraidin before lowering himself into the deep shadow of the rock-strewn floor. Within moments, Yengar and Olvric, crouching low, slipped silently into the cave and vanished from sight.
This would be the testing time, Yatsu knew. Waiting always was. It was what the Goraidin were supremely good at but it tested the calibre as much as any combat. In silent stillness the mind wandered, making sounds and images out of nothing to torment and delude, while the body cried out for movement. And here, who could say what deep shock waves the terrifying disappearance of the Labyrinth hall and their mysterious translation to this place might yet release? Even he was having difficulty setting aside the voice inside him clamouring that perhaps all he had ever known had been swept into oblivion and that he was going to die futilely, cursing an invincible enemy in the blue-tainted darkness on this benighted and ruined world.
Gradually, he became aware of a sound – distant, but high-pitched and flesh-crawling.
Nertha continued to quieten her frantic thoughts by methodically checking the pulse and the breathing of each of the four unconscious men at regular intervals. She did this with deliberate slowness, using her own pulse as a guide to the passage of time. This was easily done. While the pulses of her involuntary charges were normal, hers was fast and urgent. It needed no careful seeking with delicate fingers. It pounded hollowly in her chest and ears.
Who is the dreamer?
Awash in a swirling confusion of sounds, shapeless colours and a myriad elusive, evocative scents, the diamond-sharp awareness that was Antyr shied away from the question.
In its eddying wake he was suddenly whole and as real as the body that he could feel a fearful Nertha tending. By him was Vredech, present but not visible, as he would be to him.
‘This is the Nexus,’ he said. It was the place into which leaked fragments of all the dreams that the dreamer had ever created. But here, he was lost. Here, it was the spirits of Tarrian and Grayle who would carry him to where the Dreamer’s need was. But Tarrian and Grayle were gone on a hunt of their own.
He wanted to reassure Vredech, but he could not. There were too many questions.
Had they both come here to fulfil a purpose determined by a knowledge hidden in the depths of their minds…?
Or had it been an instinctive response as the encroaching greyness had overwhelmed the Labyrinth hall? Sheer panic? Vredech would not have abandoned Nertha, surely, but…?
Or had they been drawn here by some other power?
And Vredech’s awful question returned.
Who is the dreamer?
Who was the creator of the chaos dancing all about them?
Then, as was the way in moving from the Nexus to the dream, without any seeming change, they were the dreamer.
The five Cadwanwr and Isloman had been walking steadily for some time. There were no features within the tunnel from which they might learn anything about where they were or even gauge their progress – though, from time to time, Atelon marked the wall with a small chisel he had borrowed from Isloman.
The sound of their footsteps was oddly dull and the nervous jostling of the shadows cast by the solitary lantern they were using added to their already considerable unease. Though they were not reduced to whispering, such conversation as they had was both sparse and subdued.
‘We can’t carry on like this,’ Usche complained at one point, prompting a sharp, ‘What else can we do?’ from Andawyr.
She was on the verge of plucking up courage to complain again when Andawyr stopped and held up his hand, unnecessarily, for silence.
‘I thought I heard something,’ he said.
‘Felt something, more like,’ Oslang rejoined. ‘Like someone using the Power, but quite a distance away.’
‘Yes, you’re right. Come on.’ And, without any pause for debate, Andawyr was striding out.
‘Do you think this is wise?’ Oslang asked as he caught up with him.
‘At the moment I’m trying not to think,’ Andawyr replied. ‘In the absence of any indication about where we are or what’s happened there’s not much point, is there? We’ll have to settle for travelling by instinct.’
‘There’s a light ahead.’ It was Isloman. He moved past Andawyr and covered the lantern with his big hand. The group bumped to an awkward halt as he peered intently into the darkness.
‘Yes,’ he decided. ‘Definitely – light ahead.’ He released the lantern.
‘You and your Orthlundyn eyes,’ Andawyr said, blinking. ‘I can’t see anything.’
Isloman did not reply but took the lead.
Very soon the tunnel walls were tinted with a dim blue haze that grew in intensity until the lantern was no longer needed.
‘This place is very bad,’ Isloman said, as much to himself as the others. ‘The rock cries out.’
‘And it stinks of the Power being misused,’ Andawyr added, giving voice to what he could see the other Cadwanwr were feeling.
‘It stinks ofconsiderable Power being misused,’ Oslang said emphatically. ‘We must be careful.’
The source of the light came into view. It was an opening in the side of the tunnel, identical in shape and size to the tunnel itself. As the group stopped to one side of it, the blue light pouring through it gave a ghastly hue to their anxious faces.
Cautiously, Andawyr peered round the edge. Then, motioning the others to follow, he stepped into the opening. It proved to be not a branch tunnel but a doorway. A few paces brought them on to a wide balcony that ran round a vast circular chamber.
In the far wall was a row of what appeared to be windows and it was through these that the blue light which filled the chamber was coming. The walls rose up to disappear into a dark blue gloom. Atelon moved towards the edge of the balcony, then dropped on to his knees to look over it – it had no balustrade.
‘It’s a long way down,’ he said, reaching back with one hand to warn the others against approaching too quickly.
There were two other balconies beneath them, apparently deserted. As was the floor of the chamber. This was decorated with a single star at its centre. It had a silver sheen that cut through the blue light, and fine rays shone from it, dividing the floor into equal segments. Some way from the centre, and also symmetrically spaced, secondary rays continued the pattern.
‘A bad symbol,’ Atelon said grimly.
Andawyr nodded. ‘We might have expected it.’ He indicated the windows on the far side. ‘Let’s see where we are.’
The windows proved to be nothing more than holes cut through the wall. They reached down to the floor of the balcony and had no glazing. Hugging the wall and holding on to Isloman, Andawyr stepped inside one and edged tentatively forward.
Where the view down into the well of the chamber had been disconcerting, the view through the window was terrifying. His hold on Isloman tightening so hard that the big carver grimaced, Andawyr found himself looking down the giddying perspective of a curved wall that was many times higher than the highest towers of Anderras Darion. Radiating from it ran great saw-toothed ridges, their peaks rising and falling in elaborate curves all the way to the horizon – and, presumably, beyond – like frozen waves. Away from the base of the building, and spaced between these at regular intervals, other similar ridges began, the whole giving the impression of patterns within patterns, great complexity built from simplicity. But there was an obsessive, diseased quality to the scene, heightened by the fact that everything was blue. Even the air, Andawyr thought, as he blinked into the disturbing distance.
Isloman’s grip tightened on him suddenly as, too engrossed in the scene, he leaned forward and his toe eased over the edge of the wall. He acknowledged the carver’s urging but did not move.
Where was this place? And how could such a landscape have come about?
Answers came immediately and without deliberation. Even without the symbol of the single silver star, this building, everything he could see, was obviously Sumeral’s work. It must be Gentren’s world – a world transformed by Sumeral’s new-found Uhriel for who could say what purpose? But the Power that must have been used was beyond imagining. Not the entire resources of a hundred times the Cadwanol could undo such work. Andawyr’s spirit suddenly quailed and a suffocating blackness rose up within him. There was nothing anyone could do against such an enemy. All his learning, all his experience, was worthless. He felt an urge to pull himself free of Isloman’s sustaining hold and hurl himself into this jagged blue nightmare – to end it all. His mind teetered and his world filled with the sound of his rasping, indecisive breathing.
He could do it. Isloman’s grip was not so tight.
But it was there. Quietly purposeful. Jump he might, but trip he wouldn’t.
The blackness shifted.
To go that way would not end it all, would it? Such an act would merely abandon his immediate charges to whatever lay in this place, burdened even more. Their shocked and accusing faces swam into his mind, especially those of Usche and Ar-Billan – in many ways the innocents of the group. And, too, it would abandon everything he had ever worked for and valued – and the work and sacrifice of countless others who had opposed Sumeral in His many different guises.
As suddenly as it had come the blackness vanished. The prospect ahead was no less daunting but he realized that he had accepted the Goraidin’s way at its deepest level. He could do no less than direct his every skill towards defeating Sumeral, futile or not. He might well die in the process, but he would not die either willingly or quietly.
Antyr’s words, shouted as the greyness had engulfed them all, came back to him.
‘Our minds reach into the very heart of this.’
Antyr’s intuition about the workings of the mind had led him to a place that the Cadwanol’s sophisticated reasoning and experimenting had hardly dared point towards. And, too, he reproached himself, though his own work on the pending conjunction had foundered because the stern and ordered thinking that had foreseen it could not cope with the infinity of events that might occur in a single moment, that same thinking told him that the smallest of actions at that moment might shift the balance and determine the outcome – the very smallest.
Who could say which action would prove to be pivotal?
Pivotal.
The word took him back to the stream near the Cadwanen where he had lain, seeking inspiration in its sun-dancing ripples.
How long ago had that been…?
Two weeks? Three weeks? He could not remember exactly, but it seemed like a lifetime ago, so many things had happened so quickly.
As he knew they must.
They would happen even faster now.
‘We’re stronger than we know,’ he said, echoing Antyr as he turned away from Gentren’s ruined world and back to his friends.
‘Let’s see what we can find out about this place.’