Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn 4 Darkbridge Read online

  * * *

  Now the fifth army fought on the ladders, but they no more than the tribes of the fourth army were able to gain the battlements.

  Not even Roguil Arn could get them there. He was young, and lacked Gorn-Tal’s cunning. And he was weary, and sweat ran from his face, and his strokes had no strength to them. So at last even he gave off and went down the rope ladders. He staggered down over the red rocks in the coomb and in his shelter was bathed and fed by his slaves, pretty girls who had won his heart in the camp long before. They led him to the dim place and sang to him. So, soothed, the champion of the Vorisals fell into a sleep as deep as a stone’s, and knew no more of battle or of strife.

  Coming into the midst of the tents stretched between the blackened walls, Avli-Oan leaped from his horse and rushed to his chief.

  Nam-Rog nodded to hear the words of his follower. Age and care fenced in the old chieftain’s eyes, but he held his beard firmly in his grasp.

  ‘I have won from the other chieftains the right to command one more assault upon the Iron Gate,’ he said. ‘They like it no better than we do, to be defeated here by one Southron. But it is to be the last assault, and only those who choose shall do battle. Maybe the sight of this thing will hearten them and swell our ranks. Only the finest will mount the ladders with us. Dark Lord and Lady, heed our wish, and I vow that the blood of one half of all the slaves we take here shall be given to you both!’

  * * *

  When the messengers of the guardsmen gave their appeal in the underground halls of the Palace slaves, they found few who would follow them. The many faces, dull and ignorant as those of animals, did not change in hearing the guardsmen’s words of the barbarians and the peril. After the guardsmen left, the slaves turned to one another. Some burst into furtive laughter; others scowled. Angry words passed among them, not without cause.

  Ever had they done what was demanded of them, and for this long year they had seen to the needs of not just the many in the Palace but of the thousands of refugees as well. Now they were asked to man the Iron Gate as well! Could the guardsmen not do their job? And what of those in the high stories of the Palace? Let them go shed noble blood in defense of all their privileges. So the slaves muttered among themselves, sullenly.

  But Iocantris went back to his family’s alcove with a heavy heart.

  He sat down on the little bed, and let his eyes wander over the polished armor in the storage-niches. Iocantris they all called him here, Little Doughty. It had been months now since he had last heard spoken his tribal name, Kuln-Holn.

  Now Kuln-Holn bent over the crib and with great gentleness bore up Bornin. He had become wise in the ways of infants now; his son did little more than gurgle.

  Salizh issued out of the gloom. When their eyes caught each other, Kuln-Holn and his wife grew still. Unspoken words passed between them. Then Salizh took the baby from Kuln-Holn.

  ‘I came to feed him,’ she said. She sat on the bed and drew down her robes, baring the breasts. Little Bornin became excited at this. Greedily he began to suck. Kuln-Holn turned and began to take out the pieces of armor.

  It was then that the young woman reached out and caught at Kuln-Holn’s arm.

  ‘Husband,’ she said, and at the hearing of that word Kuln-Holn shuddered as if wounded. ‘Husband, you will not go. I will not let you.’

  Kuln-Holn neither looked at her nor spoke. He pulled on the padded linen tunic. He went on drawing out the shining tools of death.

  ‘Husband, are you afraid to look at me? Berrin was afraid. That was why, when he would follow you away to the barricades in High Town and his death, he only left me a note. But you, Iocantris, I see you now, you cannot escape my voice.’

  ‘Salizh,’ he said, ‘I am going.’ But he spoke it so lowly and chokingly into the depths of his beard it was doubtful she could hear.

  ‘Husband. Husband! One man I lost to all this, when he left me pregnant and alone. Must I lose another? What have I done to anger Goddess so? Are you the new weapon of Her vengeance, Iocantris?’

  At this Kuln-Holn started. A deep blood-color spread across his face. But he went on girding the armor about him.

  ‘Husband, look at me. See my eyes. I tell you, I will not let you go. Have any of the others gone? Then why should you? Leave this to the soldiers, whose job it is. Why must you go?’ Tears were dripping from her eyes. ‘Is it your master who commands this?’

  Kuln-Holn shook his head. He felt compassion at the suffering of his wife, but he did not embrace her. Had he done so, perhaps then he could not go.

  ‘Salizh,’ he said thickly, and repeated the word, louder so that she might hear his words above her sobs. The sobs were racking her body so that the baby had turned away from the swollen nipple. The shiny metal attracted his little eyes, and he stretched his little hand out toward the bright blue Raamba sword.

  ‘Salizh, do you think I want to go?’ Now Kuln-Holn was weeping too, and in his voice was terror. ‘Do you think I have become again the man I was on the barricades? He died on the steps of the Brown Temple. They are my people on both sides of the battlements: can I rightly lift a sword against either? One master I served, then forsook him to join the service of the Divine Queen. But it was she who commanded the torment of Gundoen. Now I serve neither.

  ‘The noise of the battle turns my stomach so I cannot eat or sleep; the thought brings sweat to my hands. I do not want to fight. I am frightened, I have never been so frightened. But I must. It is no order of the great ones. It is no wish of Goddess. It is not even my doom, for that is a part of an unmeasured weave, while this thing stands apart.

  ‘Listen. Just now I stood among the others, and they said why they would not fight to save their lives. This is not a thing the women and children of the tribes would say. Even if fear later drove them away, they would first go and do all their courage allowed, for the sake of their village and their tribe. So I was thinking as I returned here, all unaware of what was awaiting me. But I saw the armor, and I knew. There is something I will see there, something I will do.

  ‘Maybe I will see you again, maybe not. I have no sense of the doom. But need has taken hold, and it will drive me to the Iron Gate no matter what Kuln-Holn might want or choose. So I obey. With Her Sign I bless you both, Salizh and Bornin. May She smile on all you do. Farewell – I love you.’

  ‘Iocantris, husband,’ she moaned, ‘I am carrying another child. This one is yours.’

  Kuln-Holn opened his mouth, but did not speak. There was a hardness about his face such as was strange and new to his wife. In the far North, the tribesmen did not stay at home merely because their wives or concubines were full once more.

  His loud steps sounded hollowly down the underground passages. Many faces turned his way. After twenty paces he turned back for one last look at his wife and son. But Salizh had dashed out the tallow candle and the alcove was lost in darkness. Kuln-Holn sighed. Even there beneath the earth he felt the burden and unanswerable power of the immortal sky-borne gods, and he felt, too, how little and how weak a thing he was.

  * * *

  Now a doleful cry arose behind the shield-wall. Guardsmen recoiled from the parapet, pointing above their great shields. The shield-wall sundered.

  The warriors on the ladders, however, took no advantage of the opening. They too broke off fighting and turned. The clash of swords died away along the Iron Gate. The tribes watching from the square called up to their fellows, wonderingly.

  ‘What goes on up there, hey? Why did you stop fighting?’

  There was no answer from the men upon the ladders. The men in the square climbed on the disks of the fallen pillar. Then they all came to see it, from Ampeánor and his officers to the slaves standing among the shelters.

  Dark against the burning jade sky, at first glance it seemed to be some building like the Brown Temple, which had somehow escaped unscathed the fires which had raged that way. But for a year now they had fought here and had not noticed it.

  And
then they saw it moved.

  In confusion the men on the ladders descended, but in the square messengers went from the Durbars to the chieftains. In the absence of battle, an untoward silence consumed the scene. With awe in their hearts the barbarians watched the ominous structure inch up the slope; the guardsmen watched with fear. So slowly did it move that it seemed rather to grow. Its shadow stretched across the long lines of men and beasts laboring to draw it on. The noise of that labor grew – grunting and cursing of men, whinny and bellow of beasts, creak of the rope lines, squeals and thunder of huge wheels.

  In the square a chant began to issue from a thousand savage throats. Weary, wounded and defeated, the tribesmen raised spears, swords, axes and bows and chanted out the name. The chant swelled, resounding off the Iron Gate into the ears of the defenders. They too had seen the black device on the forefront of the tower.

  ‘Ara-Karn, Ara-Karn, Ara-Karn!’

  Thousands of mercenaries descended from the square. They surrounded the huge wooden base and bent their backs against it. They, more than the barbarians, knew the value of this thing and felt their hearts cheered. With shoulders and beams of wood they drove the tower into the square. Others ran ahead and began to clear the massive stone disks out of the way. Step by step, the thousands pushed the tower to the lip of the square. First to reach it were the horses; then the lines of horses and oxen were unhooked from the tower and driven back into High Town.

  Gradually the gap closed between the tower and the blood-streaked Iron Gate. The square ended where the Imperial engineers had torn down the ancient bridge to the stronghold. Now the heap of stones filling the coomb began there. The stones fell into the shadow of the structure.

  Then, at last, it halted.

  The wide wheels could not surmount those stones. The mercenaries could impel the thing no farther. They took huge hammers as big as themselves and pounded blocks of wood beneath the wheels, fixing the tower in place some fifty steps from the face of the Iron Gate.

  So, drawn on by his thousands, did Erion Sedeg make his appearance at the battle.

  The sea-breeze filled his black robes. High above the square he stood, the lone inhabitant on the tower’s crown, worshiped, as it were, by the thousands chanting below him. Pleased, he rested his hands on the bull’s-hides and looked upon the defenders across the gap below him. From where he stood he could see over the rows of shields and helms to the rearward parapet of the battlements, even to a small brass door within the inner gates.

  * * *

  Now it was as Nam-Rog had foreseen, and the tribes flocked round, clamoring join this new attack. The prize of victory reared again before their eyes with the Darkbeast-tooth of Ara-Karn. The old chief smiled grimly, choosing out those men he thought the best fighters. The chosen ones laughed and rushed to their shelters to gird on armor and pick out their finest blades.

  Roguil Arn pushed through the crowds and shouted, ‘Old chieftain, no man here among us doubts your valor, but you are greater with your counsel than a spear. Give me the center.’

  When it was heard the Vorisal would lead them, the warriors cheered. But Nam-Rog answered, ‘Three armies now you have led against the Iron Gate, Roguil Arn. You have fought for hours without rest. Are you now taken with the same sickness that took Gorn-Tal?’

  ‘No, no madness dances in my veins,’ the champion answered, laughing. Young and eager as a boy he seemed before the chief of the Durbars. ‘I have slept deep since I last fought. And there is a man there on that Iron Gate, a warrior after my own heart. Three times now I have gone in search of him – each time the luck of battle parted us, but I have seen him fight. It was no whim of dark God that he slew Poran-Dilg. Now the need is upon me. I must match my strength against his! And then you will see a fight such as no man will soon forget!’

  Nam-Rog lowered his head, giving his assent. ‘And may dark God take your side, Roguil Arn. For if you kill that one, then surely you will be deemed the greatest among us, and the man deserving of the hero’s share of what we take.’

  ‘For Poran-Dilg I will kill him,’ the Vorisal promised. ‘Now that he is dead I confess I begin to miss the Eldar’s boastful tongue. I never fought so strongly as I did to prove myself his better; now I will be hard-pressed to do so well.’

  So Roguil Arn made his way through the crowds, cheered by the hundreds girding themselves for war. Proudly he accepted their praise, glorying in the awareness that now no man denied Roguil Arn first place among the champions. There was some sadness, too – for where among all the others would he find one even to rival him?

  In front of his shelter the Vorisal chief found a man waiting for him. It was the bastard-born Pes-Thos chieftain, Estar-Brin.

  The Pes-Tho stepped in Roguil Arn’s way. The man’s eyes burned like flames, and the growl of the wolf ran in his voice. ‘Vorisal,’ he said, ‘the word among the tribes is that you have been promised great treasure if you slay the Southron Elna-Ana, and that you have won from Nam-Rog the right to take the center line, where the Southron will stand.’

  ‘It is so,’ said Roguil Arn.

  ‘Vorisal, that man slew Aln-Brin-Daln my brother. Now I claim the sacred right of blood-vengeance. Give to me and my brother the center, and keep away from the Southron until either he or we lie dead.’

  With knife-eyes the Vorisal appraised the older man. ‘Yes, I know you brothers of Brin,’ he said. ‘Aln-Brin-Daln was by far the best of you. Never did any of you fight alone against any man of strength. You two by yourselves have not the greatness to kill this Southron. He will kill you instead, if you have the luck to find him. I know myself that to go in search of Elna-Ana is not always to find him.’

  ‘That will fall with the pleasure of dark God,’ answered Estar-Brin. ‘But Vorisal, we bore down the body of our brother from battle. He still lived but had no mastery over his limbs and his body was deformed. How then could we pass our years if we were not the ones to kill his slayer? He would have reproached us rightly. Even now I would have gone to the old Durbar and claimed from him the right of the center, but he is as hateful to me as the Southron himself.’

  The tall champion threw back his gleaming hair. ‘Estar-Brin, that was well spoken. Take what you want. I will go to the right end in your place. Nor will I seek the Southron – but if it falls out that he and I come face to face, then to the Darklands with my promises! I will lay on then with all my strength. See that you manage to kill him before his path crosses mine.’

  ‘That is well,’ growled the Pes-Thos. ‘Roguil Arn, when I have slain the Southron, I will make you a present of the spoils. The armor I will strip from his corpse, for that is vowed to my dead brother. But the wondrous sword he wields I will give to you.’

  Roguil Arn nodded, and entered his shelter smiling. ‘There is more greatness in Estar-Brin’s little body than I guessed,’ he said. ‘Have I found myself another Poran-Dilg, and so soon? Well: battle, and Elna-Ana, will tell. If the Pes-Tho wins, all to the good! – and if he falls, then I will meet the Southron yet. The treasures are owed me now, for I led the fourth and fifth armies as I vowed – so whatever the cast, it shall be Roguil Arn who wins!’

  But the Pes-Tho went back to his little shelter deeper among the ruins. Grimly and unspeaking he entered to behold his brother bent over the corpse of Aln-Brin-Daln and weeping.

  From the heap of arms and armor by the tent-wall Estar-Brin picked up the heavy iron helmet of his brother and let it fall with a clangor on the stones by Kan-Brin’s feet. ‘Get up and gird yourself for battle. You have not moved since I left. Will all the army wait for us, do you think? And stop sniveling. Shed not tears but blood for Aln-Brin-Daln.’

  Kan-Brin did not take his eyes from the face of his dead brother. ‘Go on and fight as you must, nor fear that there will be none to see to your voyaging. But I will fight no more.’

  ‘What you are saying? Will you not avenge him?’

  ‘No, I will not go. When we last strove against the wall of shields and the So
uthron fought Gorn-Tal on the parapet, then I looked into the Southron’s face and saw there, in the bright helm’s shade, the face not of a man but of a woman – the Gray Priestess! Even as she swung in the fiery ruins of Gerso, I saw her. You remember her face, for we three were among the Warlord’s guard that pass, and we all refused his order to murder her. Even so her death runs clutching after us. And after me most of all, for as we bound her wrists, I stole a gold ring off her finger. I never told this to you or Aln, but it has burned in my heart ever since. The ring I got rid of long ago. I threw it into a lake in the North, and gave lambs and golden bowls to Goddess with the promise of more. But my offerings were answered here in this accursed city, when I saw her face again. Now fear has taken me, and I do not have the heart to go into battle lest I perish unforgiven, and my bones roll forever on the floor of the Ocean of the Dead.’

  ‘Brother, this is a new thing you tell me.’ Estar-Brin spoke the words with a slow and heavy tongue. ‘The anger of Goddess is no little thing. But it is an old saying indeed, that no man can flee his doom. It is only by facing it that a man gains honor – only by laughing in its face that he wins glory. Come now with me, and if you die I will give you a voyaging that would do Ara-Karn himself justice. I will give Goddess so many offerings out of our treasures that She will have to guide your spirit to the world beyond.’

  ‘It may be so, that I will die here in spite of all I do,’ Kan-Brin groaned, miserably, ‘but I only know surely that if I face again the Southron I will die. And brother, I am afraid. Fear, fear – what do you know of it? Go on, and may you triumph! But I would be no help to you.’

  The other gazed out onto the square. ‘They are gathering, soon they will be ready,’ he growled. ‘Brother, why snivel like a child? Do you want them all to have the proof that our father was a Gerso? We were called three, but that was a lie. We were one hand, one heart, one face. Can I go up alone now, and face the killer of Aln-Brin-Daln all by myself? Will you drive me to that shame?’

  So once more Estar-Brin labored to win his brother’s heart to battle; but Kan-Brin, shaking with shame and fear, still would not go. With a thoughtless curse Estar-Brin left him – nor did either of them think that this would prove their final parting.