Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn 3 The Iron Gate Read online

  ‘That’s what they said – the Raamba folk. They never knew such things before, but guessed what they must be. Ankhan, they said, died fighting – I can see him so. But Lisalya, and the other women, and the children, they took into the darkness.’ The boy’s voice failed him.

  The strangers’ fingers tightened on their knees. ‘Yet where are the surviving Raambas? We must learn more of this.’

  The boy swallowed and shook his head. ‘They’re gone,’ he said. ‘They went with Ghezbal Daan.’

  ‘Ghezbal Daan? Is he here?’

  ‘He took them away. In the lower hills, down by the merchants’ road, he met with them. They made a big camp, and shouted and roared so that it sounded like the rock-giants in winter, when they throw stones down at us. And leading them on was Ghezbal Daan.

  ‘They slaughtered all their goats and burned the meat over long fires, and wrapped it in the skins. And then they went away – yonder. Ghezbal Daan led them. My father’s brother saw them marching through the pass. They sang death-dirges for marching-songs, so old that half the words were nonsense. And the Yonder Folk closed behind them, all along the wall of Yron Ghadil. Ghezbal Daan had vowed a great public oath, that for his former lord’s death he would himself slay – Estar Kane. My father’s brother said the torches lit up all their eyes, so that they seemed almost like they belonged to that place they went.’

  The soldiers traded glances. The boy’s eyes were red and wet. He snuffled, and pawed his nose. Half he turned, as if to go. Then he turned back.

  ‘That was weeks ago, and none has seen them since. But it was not long after Ghezbal Daan went beyond the world’s end that the highland men say they saw great flaring of witchlights over the mountains. Then the lights died, and it has been silent since. There have been no raids since then.’

  ‘So was that his end?’ one of the strangers mused. ‘O captain, wheresoever you now may be, forgive my hasty words! For now I see it was not cowardice that kept you from Egland Downs.’

  ‘Please sirs,’ the lad said. ‘Don’t you want beer and cheese and meat? My folk make good beer and cheese. Wait, I’ll bring you some.’ He started off; stopped and turned back. ‘I’ll be quick,’ he said. The men looked at him like pale ghosts behind the owls in the pines. The lad scampered off, and cut at passing branches as he ran.

  The Peshtrians watched him. Slowly they twisted their thick, metalclad necks, looked one another in the eye, and away.

  One bent and raked his iron-gloved hand through the thick carpet of needles about his boots. The tindery needles sifted between his heavy fingers, and took again their time-wonted attitudes.

  ‘There passed a true soldier.’

  ‘Say rather a true lover. Did you not mark the carving on the lintel of his tower gate?’

  The leader had said nothing, but only stared after the wood-boy. He stood and looked upon the unspeaking icy peaks, bright against the dusky sky. He mounted his stallion.

  They rode around the bend in Yron Ghadil, once more up to ghostly Ul Raambar. And as they ascended in single file the red light of Goddess gleamed like fire from off their muddied, armored backs.

  Below the fastness walls they reined in their steeds. Some gazed up at the walls over them, and the gates, which were smashed and broken from the inside. But the youngest turned his horse about and looked back brightward.

  The leader drew his sword. He stared at the blade. The fingers wrenched apart, and the blade fell clattering on the stone-lined path.

  ‘By Goddess,’ he swore, ‘but I am sick with war, though all my life I have plied its trade. Our little Peshtria will buy her peace from Ara-Karn – if he will sell them peace, and not take their gold and slaughter them regardless. And yet I will not see her so despoiled – nor yet have I any great desire to cast away my life in vain stands or despair, as this Captain has done, or as they say Arstomenes of Vapio did long before the barbarians reached him, with vice and gluttonous pleasure. Rather let us leave the world, and all these things behind.’

  ‘Where shall we go, and how reach it? There are no lands beyond the vast Southern Ocean but paltry isles, unfit for life; and Ara-Karn lords it across the South and North.’

  ‘Where else,’ he answered, ‘but Darkbridge, and the world beyond?’

  The others sat silent a space. ‘Yet what if that be no more than fable?’

  ‘Why then, we shall meet with that same end which by now doubtless has overtaken Ghezbal Daan. Did we not say and make oath upon it, that we should follow him, even unto the Darklands?’

  And so they laid their hands along the shaft of a lance, and their leader said, slowly, mouthing each word,

  ‘I swear that I shall follow Darkbridge where it leads me, and there fashion out by strength and skill whatsoever life I may, or else perish.’

  ‘So swear we all,’ the others said.

  And they rode up through the shattered gates back into ghostly Ul Raambar.

  The mountain-lad came after them. He guessed where they must go. And he waited for the strangers for eight passes of dark God overhead, to share his beer and meat and cheese. But the Peshtrians nevermore returned.

  They found Darkbridge instead.

  The Iron Gate

  I

  The Hooded Man

  THE IMPERIAL GUARDSMEN ran up the battlements. Lances and man-high shields swarmed the parapet. Wheels turned, ropes strained, and massive blocks of stone were raised from the court below, swung out over space and cut free. The stones fell into thunder and screams.

  It was far from Yron Ghadil, where the fabled city Tarendahardil stood by Elna’s Sea. Over it stood the Renda, the jagged black stone on which the Citadel of Elna stood and gave defiance to the barbarians of Ara-Karn.

  Great Elna had chosen well when he had made of this mountain his Citadel and seat of strength. Five sides the mountain had, four to fall like glassy walls to the lower city, a hundred fathoms’ height and more, and only the fifth and narrowest faced the plateau of High Town. And here the basalt of the mountain rose in a black cowl, impenetrable and unclimbable, in which the Iron Gate was set.

  There each pass men fought and died.

  About the base of the Iron Gate swarmed the barbarians of Ara-Karn. They clambered up the mound of earth and timbers that bridged the delving coomb below Renda. With picks, hammers, pries and rams the barbarians hurled themselves against the Iron Gate. They screamed each time another massive block of masonry darkened the sky above their heads like the fist of God.

  Some mounted ladders upward toward the battlements, a full ten fathoms over them. From the square three hundred barbarian archers, the finest marksmen of their tribes, aimed death-birds at the battlements to drive the defenders back.

  Above and on either side of the battlements rose twin lance-towers, to the north and to the south. The northern lance-tower now was empty, but on the southern one man stood.

  He wore a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg. Under this the wind showed only a simple leather tunic with the trappings of Gerso, the first of the cities to fall to Ara-Karn. The Gerso stood into the winds, his cloak flaring from his back like a jade banner. His hood shaded his face. In his hands he held a strange instrument of curved wood whose two ends were joined by a taut length of gut string. Upon the wall beside him he laid out five of the arrows the barbarians called death-birds. The Gerso picked up the first arrow and drew it against the gut string, so the wood bent to his ear.

  The Gerso studied the battlement below. One barbarian champion reached the ladder’s peak, roared and leaped toward the battlement. He leaped but did not land – in midflight his body twisted in the air. An arrow sliced down from the lance-tower and drove into his neck. The barbarian champion clutched at his neck where the blood gouted and spat, and his leap fell short. His corpse struck the black stone and fell into the butcher’s-ground of the coomb.

  Another man mounted the ladder. He swung his war-
axe against the guardsmen’s man-tall shields, battering the metal and sending them staggering back.

  But the man upon the lance-tower took a second arrow, and shot the barbarian’s eye so that the iron beak of the arrow drove deep into his brains, and he fell without a death-cry, like a sack of meal to end his time in the light.

  Upon the mound of Earth and timbers the barbarian charge faltered. One old chieftain raised his arm and pointed.

  ‘The Hooded Man!’

  At that shout others raised their heads. The Gerso stood dark against the sky. The barbarian bowmen drew back on their bows until they felt the wood creak under their palms. But their arrows clattered harmless off the stone about the Iron Gate.

  On the lance-tower the Gerso took a third arrow, and fitted it to his bow. He pulled back smoothly, and shot the old chieftain in the mouth. The death-bird’s iron beak tore through the old man’s tongue and broke his jaw; his teeth spewed upon the ground. The chieftain fell back. Haln-Gaw he was named, of the Undains: a fierce old man whose sister’s-son Welo-Pharb fought with him in all the cities they had won. He took the arrow shaft in his hands, groaning, and wrenched it from his mouth with a spray of blood and a great tearing of his tongue. He staggered into the arms of his tribesmen, groaning; he would never speak again.

  ‘God, curse the Hooded Man atop the gate,’ said the barbarians. They feared and dreaded the Gerso more than any other man, for he knew the bow as well as their best.

  Some turned then to a tall man at the rear, Kal-Burm of the Vorisals, who was deemed one of the Three Great Bowmen. His bow, strong and double-curved, he had received from the hand of the Warlord himself, and Ara-Karn had made it with his own arts.

  ‘Why do you hang back, Kal-Burm?’ the warriors asked. ‘Our arrows fall short, but yours could reach the Hooded Man and topple him from his perch!’

  Kal-Burm squinted up at the peak of the southern lance-tower. But he shook his head to all their entreaties.

  ‘Once before I loosed an arrow at the Hooded Man,’ he said. ‘And it was one of the Warlord’s own, a true death-bird that had partaken of the tears of his blood and the icicles of his soul. Never before had that death-bird failed me. Never had it failed to strike what I aimed for; nor did it fail this time when I aimed for him. Never before had that death-bird failed to kill what it hit. But this time it failed. With his own hands, the Hooded Man plucked out the death-bird bloody from his heart, and brandished it at me. I tell you, I will not waste my arrows upon that demon!’

  Upon the lance-tower roof, the Gerso gathered back his gear. As ever, his quiver held one last arrow, one he never loosed. It was an arrow longer than the rest, of stout dark wood, straight and with an iron beak curiously and cruelly shaped. It was the death-bird of Kal-Burm, which had plunged into the Gerso’s heart, whence he had pulled it forth.

  He drew it from the quiver now, and played with it, twirling it idly between his fingers like a toy.

  ‘No,’ he murmured to it delicately, letting its sharp iron point caress his lips, ‘I’ll not let you go drink another life. If I send you down to them, they might send you back up to me with their hearty compliments! Twice now you have tasted my heart’s blood; let us not chance a third trial.’

  * * *

  And so on this pass, as on so many others, their charge ended and fell back. The Iron Gate had yielded to their hammers and rams not at all.

  From the sky above dark-winged gerlins swooped and lit among the fallen stones, and set to upon their grisly feast. In happier times the birds, bred from the prize stock of the Imperial Bordakasha house, had fed on table-scraps and the leavings of the nobly born. But since the barbarians laid waste to High Town, the birds had learned the taste of barbarian flesh.

  Atop the Iron Gate the guardsmen did off their heavy armor and lay upon the stone. Boys came with jugs of water, and the guardsmen slaked their thirst. Physicians tended the wounded. The dead were laid out reverently.

  Captain Berowne, however, would not have his men lose heart.

  ‘No, do not grieve them, lads, but look instead to the counts. For every man you see here, more than twenty barbarians were slaughtered this pass. My old dad would have called that a good trade. Now these men are free from tours of duty and owed pay.’

  ‘Do not forget my bounty,’ a calm voice said.

  The Hooded Man walked among the wounded men. The physicians nodded, and took care in withdrawing the arrows from the wounded and the dead. In a bloody bundle a water-boy offered them to Gerso. He took them with an odd smile.

  ‘Hail, Ennius Kandi!’ Captain Berowne said. ‘Your eye was excellent this pass, my friend.’

  ‘The men I miss this pass will fall to me on a later. And they deliver me their own deaths on these shafts of theirs.’ Placing one tip of the bow against his heel, he unstrung it with an easy motion.

  It would not be easy to guess the Gerso’s age. Lines of deep care had been worn about his mouth and eyes, and the set of his jaw was not that of a youth. And yet there upon the Iron Gate, helping in a doomed cause, it seemed the care-lines had been made smooth, so that he looked a young man reborn in an older man’s shape.

  ‘Never has it ceased to amaze and delight me, this excellence of yours with that damned weapon.’

  ‘I have your men to thank, that I was able to salvage this bow from the body of that barbarian. As for my skill, it takes but practice.’

  Another joined them now from the far end of the battlements. He was short and darkhaired, and wore the devices of the Rukorian provincial soldiery.

  ‘Greetings, Haspeth, fellow-captain,’ Berowne said. ‘And how did you enjoy the entertainments this waking?’

  The Rukorian sat stiff upon the step. Beside him his lieutenant stood at attention. ‘I killed three,’ Haspeth answered shortly. There was no humor in his eyes.

  ‘Ah – I was good only for two,’ Berowne said.

  Berowne, the last Captain of the Guards of the Black Citadel, was as broad and heavy as a lowland ox. His thighs were great as hams, and his fists like club-ends. ‘We captains must hang back from the thickest blows. Such is the price a man must pay for taking the command. Still, being captain has its points – did not Kiva say my armor was the finest she had ever seen?’

  ‘You are merry this pass, captain,’ Haspeth said.

  ‘And why not, my friend? Will you have me chew chorjai blossoms because of all of this? Smell the air, how it rises off the sea – look upon the heavens and on Goddess! How shall I withhold my laughter? – Especially now, when upon my last rest I felt the softness of my Kiva’s thighs, and she told me between kisses that there was none other who could take my place in her heart?’

  ‘No doubt she says the same to Ullerath even now.’

  ‘No victory is counted sweet without trials, my friend. And I should prove a poor captain indeed, if I let my own lieutenant steal a march on me!’

  From a pocket in the pouch on his belt the captain drew a length of pink and violet silk, and held it to his nostrils. After a long moment he released the breath from the broad cage of his ribs, his eyes half-closed.

  ‘The scent of my Kiva is like none other’s,’ he sighed, restoring the silk to its place. ‘She has it ground for her especially, by a Vapionil love-merchant. I can still recall the first time I inhaled it fully, four seasons ago – or was it five? I was no more than a common fightingman, not even a member of the guard. The dust of my father’s pottery-shop was still in my hair – even so Kiva accepted me among her private circle.’

  ‘Will we never sit or speak together, but you must sing the praises of this harlot of yours?’ Haspeth said. ‘Speak of war instead, or the state of our provisions.’ The Rukorian set one boot upon the parapet and gazed with tormented eyes upon the conquered city.

  ‘Your captain is in a sweet mood,’ Berowne said to the other Rukorian. ‘Usually he is milder when he’s had some fat barbarians a-bloody on his lance.’

  The lieutenant shook his head. He was thin, with lines
spread like bird-tracks from the corners of his eyes. Narrano Delcarn came from the Rukorian Isles, and seemed scarcely old enough to be a fightingman, let alone the lieutenant of Haspeth’s veterans. ‘During the longsleep,’ he said softly, ‘the captain had dreams of Rukor.’

  ‘I was marshaling the troops before the gates of Torvalinal,’ Haspeth growled. ‘I should be there even now, had I not disobeyed the commands the Empress gave me. Before the armies of the League departed for Egland Downs, she bade me give the command to another, and go myself to Rukor. But I thought that she did not trust my skills as a commander. I left Torvalinal the same pass I reached it, and then returned. I hoped at least to join the armies of the League when they chased Ara-Karn back into the North, and slaughtered to the last every child and sister of the barbarian breed.’

  He stamped the parapet. ‘And worst is that I cannot even win a single audience with her majesty to receive her punishment. Each time I go before the doors of the White Tower, I am forbidden entrance by her maidens.’

  Berowne sighed. ‘Her majesty has seen no one since her son, the Emperor Elnavis, returned – may his ka arrive at the Blessed Lands this time! Ever since then she has prisoned herself in the White Tower. She sees only her women now.’

  ‘Tell me about her,’ asked Narrano Delcarn.

  The captain’s smile broadened. ‘Oh, of her, lad, none of us lowly ones may speak.’

  ‘But you have served here in the Citadel many years now, and I have not so much as seen her!’

  The captain turned his head upon his thick neck, and looked beyond the rocky wall of the inner set of gates.

  Beyond the inner courtyards the Palace mounted dark against the sky, its black stones of the same volcanic basalt of the mountain upon which it had been built. Its the highest tower was of white stone, and upon its summit the Disk of Goddess shone back the blazing light of Goddess-sun. In those upper stories were the chambers of the Empress Allissál, Goddess-upon-earth. One small window broke the pure whiteness of the round wall near the summit. It was said that was the window of the Divine Queen’s own dimchamber, where she lay upon the softness of her couch each sleep.