The Masks of Sentinel Chapter Six (part 2 of 2)

  
          Commander Bralud, having completed his self-administered physicking, wandered through the largely deserted corridors of the castle.
          He remained somewhat dazed after his encounter with the doomspore and its fiery nemesis. His last vivid memory was of the door to the battlements - so impregnated by this time with virulent life that it was impossible to tell whether any wood or metal remained - being burned to nothing by a (mercifully transient) bolt of peacock-coloured flame.
          Bralud had no way of knowing that he possessed the last light-lance in existence. Nothing special was required to maintain the weapon: its energy source was a crystal rod, which needed only to be exposed to the sun for an hour to restore full power. Had Bralud appreciated his position, he could perhaps have made himself master of Erastor.
          The opportunity, even had he been aware of it, was to prove short- lived.
          In a corridor leading to the heart of the castle, a lone armoured figure made final preparations for battle. As Bralud entered the passage, the warrior hailed him. The commander froze in startled recognition: it was the Lady Kaihima.
          She advanced towards him, her flexible chain-mail and plain helm gleaming. "If the enemy reacts to me as you have done, soldier, then the fighting will be no more than distasteful butchery."
          Bralud doffed his headgear and saluted as she drew near.
          "Report, Commander."
          Crisply and concisely, Bralud related all that had occurred, in his own experience, since the outbreak of the war. Only when he came to the part dealing with his flight from the doomspore did he falter.
          Kaihima smiled encouragingly. "You acted exactly as I would have." (This, of course, was almost literally true.)
          From the outset, Kaihima had realized the importance of Bralud's light-lance. She had gathered, from various reports, that all of them had been destroyed. Its nearness was tantalizing.
          "You have done well." Her green eyes, level with his, were almost hypnotic. "As you can see, I'm prepared for battle. Your light-lance would assist me ... greatly."
          Bralud's grip on the metal tube tightened. "Your pardon, lady, but the king gave this to me with his own hand, and only back to his hand may I deliver it."
          "But surely," she said sweetly, "the stranger Falk had temporary use of it?"
          Bralud stiffened. "Temporary, yes. But I repeat, only to the king - "
          "Your loyalty does you credit. I see now that there is only one way to break it."
          Bralud said quickly, "Is the king dead?"
          "In a manner of speaking. The one you serve is an imposter. Xaltoran lies buried with his brother Jethuran in the royal vaults."
          "If that is so, my lady, then I will serve the true successor. Without proof, however - "
          Kaihima's eyes flashed. "Enough!"
          Hearing a footfall behind him, Bralud turned sharply, brandishing the lance. But he was too late. A rat's skull rose and fell.
          The blow was perfectly calculated.
          As Bralud sank to the floor, eyes red as fire-rubies gazed at him from a grey velvet mist.
          Then a black wave of unconsciousness flowed over him.

          Starkad's voice cut through the roar of battle: "If you prevail against Baleorth, Falk, which I doubt, then come and cross swords with me." And he laughed as he severed yet another warrior from the chains of life.
          Laughing, too, was the berserker Baleorth. The northlander raised his bloodied arms and scraped the blades of his sword against the edge of his axe, mimicking the action of a kitchen thrall about to hack into a carcass of meat. Then he spread his arms wide and lumbered forward.
          As he closed the distance, Baleorth swung his weapons towards each other with great force, seeking to catch Falk between them.
          The words hammer and anvil collided in Falk's mind.
          He caught the sword upon his shield. His arm would have snapped beneath the blow had he not given way as soon as steel met wood. The axe glanced off his own sword, though Thief shivered and sang at the stoke.
          Breathing heavily, Falk managed to taunt his opponent: "The simple is not always effective."
          "A bell needs to peal more than once," was the grunted reply.
          Proving the point, Baleorth repeated the tactic again and again, with relentless fury, causing Falk to constantly give way, leaving him no opportunity to move into the attack. His lack of battle experience was beginning to show. The incessant blows took their toll of his strength and endurance. The other seemed never to tire.
          Sword and axe cut gleaming, interwoven paths. Beyond this twisting band of steel and light shone the cold, implaccable gaze of the berserker. Falk's mind clouded, his limbs grew heavy and slow.
          Four golden eyes - two in the air, two on the ground - glimpsed a crucial possibility. A warrior was about to fall against the berserker. Inevitably, at the moment of collision, Baleorth's fine thread of concentration would snap. For a crucial instant, the pattern of stroke and counter-stroke would be broken.
          Self-preservation overruled automatically Falk's need to prove himself as a man alone. The extrapolation proving true, he lunged at Baleorth ... and succeeded in cutting a long, shallow wound across his body, from left nipple to right thigh. Fresh blood sprang out, bright against the dried crust of earlier wounds.
          It was not enough.
          The berserker thrust the warrior from him as a child might cast aside a wooden toy. He held his sword points forward to protect himself, then ran the flat of the axe-blade over his stomach, smearing the newly shed blood, dulling the steel.
          "My name is Death," he growled.
          "Greetings, O Death," Falk mocked. "I always wondered what you'd look like. Life is full of disappointments."
          "Worry not." The berserker struck, his axe leaping forward like something alive. "Your scope for further disappointments is limited."
          Falk lifted his shield and took the full impact. The disk of leather-covered wood split clean down the middle, and the shield fell in twain; only the iron boss fronting the grip prevented the deadly curve from slicing through his hand.
          Again the axe lifted, fell, whined as it clove the air. Falk tried to deflect the cut with the edge of his sword. The blade caught the stroke, but the shock of it numbed his hand and arm. Thief fell from his grasp.
          Falk tasted fear, sharp upon his tongue.
          The blade swooped at him yet again, seeming to materialize out of a crimson mist. Bright as the edge of a wave it came ... and caught with a brain-jarring blow the good steel of his helmet.
          Then he saw a titanic shadow with one shining blue limb close with the huge red shape that bulked like a sunset cloud before him: saw the shining limb drink like an insect's tongue of the redness: saw the cloud shrivel and fall.
          Falk swayed, stumbled. The earth rushed up to meet him. Somehow, he was far from surprised when the ground itself gave way.
          The whirlpool of awareness that contained and connected the three suffered momentary disruption, then flowed back to form adjusted cycles and patterns. But Falk, the man, tumbled headlong into a world far beneath and deep within.

          Starkad, being caught up in the matter of his own survival, had not witnessed the berserker's fate. Neither had Ulainn; but soon after the event, she glimpsed, through the jungle of skirmishers, the recumbent shapes of Falk and the giant - and a copper blur edging between them.
          "Baleorth has fallen," Ulainn shouted to the king.
          Starkad cursed; but no diversion was sufficient to cause his swordplay to falter. "And Falk?"
          "I suspect he lives."
          "Investigate," Starkad commanded. "Avenge Baleorth if need be ... he's earned the right."
          Under different circumstances, Ulainn might have argued; but she knew that this was no time to cross the man who was not only her brother, but also her liege-lord.
          The princess fought her way free of the place of the eagle, then proceeded through the thick of the tumult. She went as quickly as she could, sidestepping confrontation where possible.
          At one point, a shadow falling on her face caused her to glance up. Something flickered birdlike in the sun. She grimaced, thinking it to be a gorcrow. But it was Hawk, tracking her progress.
          Ulainn reached Baleorth first. The berserker was clearly dead. She raised her sword in final salute.
          Falk, on the other side of the giant, was just as obviously alive. His limbs moved as though in response to the wild dictates of a nightmare; his jaws ground together, holding back whatever words or sounds visibly jostled in his throat.
          With grim purpose, Ulainn walked around the berserker's lifeless body. She found it hard to believe that all of the man's vitality and cunning, demonstrated in a hundred skald-remembered battles, was gone into the dust.
          As she neared her goal, a tawny shape rose from the ground and barred her way.
          Wolf.
          Ulainn realized immediately that she faced one of Falk's two guardians. She stopped dead: the power of the beast, even when only contemplated, was numbing as a body blow. And there was physical proof of the danger: blood on the muzzle, and a dead northlander at Falk's feet whose face had been destroyed by no man-made weapon.
          Yet it was Wolf's eyes that caused Ulainn to hold back. They were like twin stars in a sky that held no other light. She found herself staring into them as she would into her own mirror. She fought the sensation; but the trance-state was never to be denied, even in the midst of battle.
          Images swam up from golden seas wider than the heavens, from golden gulfs deeper then the past ....

          Following the crest of a high ridge, the road twisted over a level black plain that stretched otherwise unbroken to a flat horizon.
          The sky was smouldering red, sunless, featureless.
          Shapes of grey mist drifted over the dark, silent land.
          At the heart of the plain, the road ran straight as a rule through a place of monoliths. The unadorned pillars were arranged in two lines, one on either side of the elevated path. Rooted in the sable rock, they towered into the crimson sky.
          Falk walked towards them.
          He had been following the road since the beginning of time.
          As he drew level with the first of the standing-stones, tongues of red flame lashed from the sky, struck like lightning the black pillars.
          The fire-storm was brief; in its aftermath, the monoliths quivered, then split like ripe cocoons.
          Scraps of darkness fell away, dissolved into trails of smoke, vanished into the half-light.
          Gigantic images loomed in place of the standing-stones.
          Falk advanced between the ranks of the colossi. Their faces were golden, proud, alien; their jewelled eyes seemed to follow him as he passed. They were garbed in whimsical armour and nebulous robes: lights like stars flashed from metal surfaces, drifted within shadowy folds.
          As he left the last of them behind, he turned to look back, and saw their glory fade. Metals tarnished and jewels lost fire. Darkness seeped up from the plain. Faces and limbs became crusted with black stone.
          The monoliths returned.
          And opposite Falk, at the other end of the avenue of pillars, a man had appeared.
          The man laughed.
          He raised his hands before his face.
          They shone and flowed like quicksilver.
          Falk screamed, "No .... "

          Ulainn pulled free of the vision burning in the molten gold of Wolf's eyes. She swayed as though about to fall; then, remembering where she was, she struggled back to full reality.
          The first stark fact to hit the Skarnyr princess was that her sword had fallen unheeded to the ground. She was surprised that no enemy had taken advantage of her while she had been in the grip of the trance. It occurred to her that perhaps the mere presence of Wolf and Hawk was sufficient to keep attackers at bay.
          Concentrating on Falk, Ulainn noted that his body was no longer in the grip of the nightmare. His lips trembled, grew still. A mask of peace settled over his face.
          As Ulainn dispiritedly reached down to retrieve her weapon, she saw that a single word had been clawed into the quartz-seeded earth beside it; even though the runes were unfamiliar, she somehow understood its meaning:
          No ....
          Ulainn drew upright, paused for a moment, turned and walked away.

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