“Your hero,” he cried in that bleak, dead voice of his, “has returned.”
Even as I worked my way towards him I could not help but see him as a telling parody of what I myself had become. I did not like the picture. I continued, while I crawled along a spar over the heads of the gathered warriors, to remind myself that I was John Daker. I had been a painter of some description, I seemed to recall, and had had a studio overlooking the Thames.
Flamadin sensed me even as I made to drop down on him. His corpse’s eyes looked up. He had the appearance of a startled child whose new toy was about to be taken from him.
“Please,” he said softly. “Let me keep it a little while. Sharadim wants it, too.”
“There’s no time,” I said.
I let myself go. I dropped beside him. Holding the Actorios before me I reached for the Dragon Sword. I could see the yellow flame flickering at its heart, behind the runes.
“Please,” begged Flamadin.
“In the name of what you once were, Prince Flamadin, give me that blade,” I said.
He winced away from the Actorios.
I heard a commotion below. It was Armiad. “There are two of them. Two the same! Which is ours?”
My hand closed on his wrist. He was far weaker now than he had been. The Sword’s strength no longer filled him. Indeed, it was as if the blade called back its energy and took what was left of Flamadin’s also.
“This sword is not evil,” he said. “Sharadim told me it is not evil. It can be used for good…”
“It is a sword,” I told him. “It is a weapon. It was made to kill.”
A crooked, miserable smile came on his corrupted features. “Then how can it ever do good…”
“When it is broken,” I said. And I turned his wrist.
And the Dragon Sword fell free.
Armiad and his men were climbing up the rigging. All were heavily armed. I think they understood at last what was happening. I looked back into the cavern. Sharadim was almost at the hull and there was an army following her.
A peculiar sobbing sound came from Flamadin as he watched me retrieve the Dragon Sword. “She promised me my soul back, if I bore the blade for Chaos. But it was not my soul, was it?”
“No,” I said, “it was mine. That was why she kept you alive. In that manner you deceived the Dragon Sword.”
“Can I die now?”
“Soon,” I promised.
I swung around. Armiad’s men had reached the platform. The Dragon Sword was shouting in my two hands. In spite of all I had gone through, all I had decided for myself, I found that I was joining in its song, that I was filled with a wonderful wild glee.
I lifted the blade. I sheared through the necks of the first two raiders. Their headless bodies fell onto others below them and all tumbled down to the distant deck in a tangle of gouting blood and jerking limbs.
With the sword in one hand I reached for a trailing rope and swung out over my antagonists, slashing at them as I went. I slid down to the deck, behind Armiad, who had been one of the last into the rigging.
“I believe you wished to settle an account with me,” I told him, laughing.
He looked in horror at my sword, at my face. He mouthed something as he shrank back against the mast. I stepped forward, then placed the tip of the Dragon Sword into the wood of the deck. “I am here, Baron Captain. Settlement is due, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Reluctantly, his pig snout twitching, he returned to the deck. All his men were watching now. Their bestial faces were intent on the scene.
Suddenly there was a monstrous roar from behind me. I glanced over my left shoulder. The crimson light was flaring still brighter. The gap was growing wider. I saw movement behind it: huge grotesque figures mounted on even stranger steeds. Then I had to return my gaze to Armiad.
Sword in hand, he reluctantly advanced. I thought I could hear a kind of whimpering coming from his fluttering snout.
“I’ll kill you quickly,” I promised him. “But kill you I must, my lord.”
And then I felt a heavy weight land squarely on my back. I fell sprawling, the Dragon Sword flying from my grasp. I struggled to get up. I heard Armiad give a great snort of startled glee. I felt cold lips on my neck. I smelled foetid breath.
Looking up I saw Armiad and his men begin to close around me. I tried to reach the Dragon Sword but someone kicked it away.
And Flamadin, still straddling my back, said through rotting lips: “Now I shall feed again. And you, John Daker, will die. I shall be the only hero of the Six Realms.”
4
ON FLAMADIN’S ORDERS, Armiad and his men seized me. With his strange, awkward movements my doppelgänger walked towards the Dragon Sword and picked it up again.
“The Sword will drink your soul,” he said, “and then it will in turn invigorate me. I and the Sword shall be one. Immortal and invincible. I shall know the admiration of the Six Realms once more!”
He seemed to wince as he grasped the blade, staring at me almost with regret. It was impossible for me to understand what terrible, cold fragments of a soul still moved him, how much of the original darling of the Worlds of the Wheel remained. His sister had been able to stay the progress of his body’s corruption, but now he was disintegrating before my eyes. Yet he hoped for life. He hoped for my life.
Armiad grunted with pleasure. His clammy hands now held my arm. “Kill him, Prince Flamadin. I have so longed to be witness to his death, ever since he first impersonated you and brought upon me the mockery of my fellow captains. Kill him, my lord!”
On the other side of me was something I dimly recognised as Mopher Gorb, Armiad’s Binkeeper. Now his nose had elongated and his eyes had grown closer together so that he resembled some kind of dog. His grip on my arm was tight. Saliva flecked his muzzle. He, too, was enjoying my anticipated death.
Flamadin drew back his arm until the point of the Dragon Sword was a few inches from my heart. Then, with a kind of sob, he made to thrust.
The entire cavern was a mass of noise and moving warriors, all bathed in that same crimson light. Yet I heard one sound above the others. A sharp, precise crack.
Flamadin grunted and paused. There was an inflamed hole in his forehead. From it oozed a substance which might once have been blood. He lowered the Dragon Sword. He turned to look behind him.
There stood Ulric von Bek, Count of Saxony, with a smoking Walther PPK .38 in his hand.
Flamadin tried to stagger towards this new assailant, the Dragon Sword still half raised. Then he had fallen to the deck and I knew the final vestiges of life had deserted him.
Yet Armiad and his men still held me. Mopher Gorb produced a long knife, plainly intending to slit my throat. He gave a strange little grunt and dropped the knife. Another wound blossomed, this time in the side of Mopher Gorb’s head.
Armiad dropped his hold on my arm. The rest of the ghastly crew began to back away. But now Alisaard had leapt forward, snatching up Mopher Gorb’s sword, and she was thrusting, thrusting at the Baron Captain, who defended himself both ferociously and well against the Ghost Woman, but was no match either for her grace or her skill with a sword. She had pierced his porcine heart in moments, then turned her attention on the others. I, too, fought with a borrowed sword. There were too many between me and Flamadin’s corpse. I fought as best I could, trying to reach it. And von Bek, too, had a sword. The three of us were at last standing together.
“Bellanda kept your gun for you, I see!” I cried to von Bek.
He grinned. “I now don’t regret asking her to look after it. I thought I’d never see it again! Unfortunately, there were only two shells left.”
“Well used,” I said gratefully.
Suddenly we realised that we were surrounded entirely by dead men. All Armiad’s disgusting crew were defeated. A few wounded crawled here and there, attempting to escape. Von Bek uttered a cheerful yell of triumph, but this was swiftly cut short by a scream from Bellanda for, making an impossible leap
on her great black stallion, there came the figure of Sharadim, landing full on the central deck, the hoofs pounding like battle-drums above the corpse of her brother, the Dragon Sword still in his hand.
I began to run then, trying to reach the blade before she could dismount. But with a great billowing of her cloak she was off the back of the snorting beast and had reached down to wrest the Dragon Sword from her brother’s deathgrip.
As she took hold of the Dragon Sword, she gasped with pain. She was not meant to hold it. Only by an effort of will did she lift it. Yet lift it she did, and she maintained her hold upon it.
I continued to be struck by her extraordinary beauty. As she carried the Dragon Sword back towards her horse, apparently unconscious of any who observed her, I thought she resembled more than any woman I had ever seen the goddess it was her ambition to become.
I stepped forward. “Princess Sharadim! That sword is not yours to carry!”
She had reached her horse now. She looked round slowly, frowning in irritation. “What?”
“It is mine,” I said.
She put her lovely head on one side and stared at me. “What?”
“You must not take the Dragon Sword. Only I have the right to bear it now.”
She began to climb into her saddle.
I could think of no other action but to take out the Actorios and hold it up before me. Its pulsing, writhing light made my hand glow black, red and purple. “In the name of the Balance, I claim the Dragon Sword!” I told her.
Her face clouded. Her eyes blazed. “You are dead,” she said slowly, through gritted teeth.
“I am not. Give me the Dragon Sword.”
“I have earned this blade and all it stands for,” she told me, pale with rage. “It is mine by right. I have served Chaos. I have given the Six Realms to Lord Balarizaaf to do with as he will. At any moment he and all his kind will come riding through the gateway I, by my actions, created. And I shall receive my reward. I shall be made a Sword Ruler with dominion over my own realms. I shall be immortal. And as an Immortal I shall hold this sword as the sign of my power.”
“You will die,” I said simply. “Balarizaaf will kill you. The Lords of Chaos do not keep their promises. It is against their nature to do so.”
“You are lying, Champion. Go away from me. I have no use for you as yet.”
“You must give me that sword, Sharadim.”
The Actorios pulsed with stronger light. It was almost wholly organic as it sat in the palm of my hand.
I stood beside her now. She clasped the blade to her. I could tell that everywhere it touched it gave her intense pain, but she ignored the pain, believing that soon she would never experience physical agony again.
I could see the little yellow flame flickering back behind the runes carved into the black metal.
The Actorios began to sing. It sang in a small, beautiful voice. It sang to the Dragon Sword.
And the Dragon Sword murmured a response. That murmur became a strong, powerful moan, almost a shout.
“No! No! No!” cried Sharadim. Her skin, too, reflected the peculiar, writhing light. “Look! Look, Champion! Chaos comes! Chaos comes!” And laughing she swept the blade round so that the Actorios was struck cleanly from my hand. I dived towards it, but she was swifter. She had raised the blade, yelling in her pain as it burned her hands.
She meant to destroy the Actorios.
My first instinct was to dash forward and save it at all costs, and then I remembered something Sepiriz had told me. I stepped back.
She grinned at me, the loveliest wolf in the world. “Now you realise there is no defeating me,” she said.
She brought down the blade with incredible ferocity, striking accurately at the shining stone which lay there, pulsing like a living heart.
She screamed as the blade connected with the Actorios. It was a scream of complete triumph which turned, all in the space of a second, to bafflement and then to anger and then to nothing but agony.
The Actorios was shattered. It burst into fragments. It exploded in all directions.
And each fragment now contained an image of Sharadim!
Each fragment of the Actorios was bearing part of Sharadim away into limbo. She had thought to make herself all things to all people. Now it was as if each persona had separated and was imprisoned in a splinter of that peculiar stone. Yet Sharadim herself still stood there, frozen in her final act of destruction. Gradually her expression of enraged pain changed to one of terror. She began to shiver. The Dragon Sword moaned and wailed in her hands. Her flesh seemed to boil on her bones. All that astonishing beauty was vanishing.
Von Bek, Bellanda and Alisaard made their way towards me but I gestured for them to go back. “There is great danger still to come,” I shouted. “You must go to Adelstane. Tell the Eldren and the Ursine Princes what is happening here. Tell them they must wait and watch.”
“But Chaos comes!” said Alisaard. “Look!”
The figures I had seen in the redness were larger than before. Grotesque riders led by Balarizaaf himself. The Lords of Hell were riding to claim their new kingdom.
“To Adelstane. Hurry!” I told them.
“But what will you do, Herr Daker?” asked von Bek. His face was full of concern for me.
“What I must. What has become my duty.” I thought he would understand those words.
Von Bek inclined his head. “We shall await your presence in Adelstane.” It was clear that all three of them thought themselves as good as dead.
The huge rent in the cosmic fabric was growing wider still. And the black riders waited patiently for it to become large enough to admit them.
I stopped and picked up the Dragon Sword. It made a small, sweet sound, as if recognising a kinsman.
All around the blade the fragments of the Actorios were whirling, like planets around a sun. In some of those fragments as they went by, I saw one of Sharadim’s many faces staring out, with the same expression of horror she had worn just before her body collapsed.
I looked down at her shrivelled corpse. It lay across that of her brother. One had represented the evil of the world, the other the good. Yet both had been defeated by pride, by ambition, by a promise of immortality.
I watched as von Bek, Alisaard and Bellanda disappeared over the side of the hull. The camps of Sharadim’s army were in confusion now. They seemed to be awaiting their leader’s command. There was a fair chance that my friends could reach Adelstane unhindered. They had to go there. They could not, I knew, survive what was yet to come.
Now I lifted up the sword and I set my mind into a particular pattern. I remembered Sepiriz telling me what I must do when the Actorios was shattered, what power I could call upon. I could hear them chanting in the back of my brain. I could hear their despairing voices as I had heard them a thousand times in my dreams.
“We are the lost, we are the last, we are the unkind. We are the Warriors at the Edge of Time. And we’re tired. We’re tired. We’re tired of making love…”
“NOW I RELEASE YOU! WARRIORS, I RELEASE YOU! YOUR MOMENT HAS COME AGAIN. BY THE POWER OF THE SWORD, BY THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ACTORIOS, BY THE WILL OF THE BALANCE, BY THE NEED OF HUMANKIND, I SUMMON YOU. CHAOS THREATENS. CHAOS SHALL CONQUER. YOU ARE NEEDED!”
Now, on the far side of the cavern, above the wonderful white city of Adelstane, I saw a cliff. And on that cliff was lined rank upon rank of men. Some rode horses. Some were on foot. All were armed. All were armoured. All stared fixedly towards me as if in sleep.
“We are the shards of your illusions. The remains of your hopes. We are the Warriors at the Edge of Time…”
“WARRIORS! YOUR TIME HAS COME. YOU MAY FIGHT AGAIN. ONE MORE BATTLE. ONE MORE CYCLE! COME! CHAOS RIDES AGAINST US!”
I ran to Sharadim’s stallion, which panted and snorted near the corpse of its mistress. It did not resist when I climbed into the saddle. It seemed glad of a rider. I turned it towards the rail of the hull and galloped forward, leapt clear over the s
ide of the vessel and landed on the rocky floor of the cave where Sharadim’s soldiers came forward in a flood of flesh and metal to cheer me. I had thought them my enemies. I was baffled for a moment until I realised with a kind of ironic delight that they knew only of Flamadin and Sharadim. They thought me their Empress’s brother and consort! They were waiting for me to lead them against Adelstane in the name of Chaos.
I looked backward. The huge crimson wound was swelling larger and larger. The grotesque black shapes were growing.
I looked towards Adelstane.
“Warriors!” I cried. “Warriors, to me!”
The Warriors at the Edge of Time had awakened. They were pouring down from the cliffs above Adelstane, running along invisible paths towards me.
“Warriors! Warriors! Chaos comes!”
There was a wind howling now. A crimson wind. It blew upon us all.
“Warriors! Warriors of the Edge! To me! To me!”
The stallion reared under me, hoofs flailing. It uttered a great snort of pleasure as if it awaited this moment, as if it lived only to gallop into battle. The Dragon Sword was alive in my right hand. It sang and it glowed with that dark radiance I had known so many times before, in so many different guises. And yet it still seemed to me that there was a quality in it which was not quite the same as any I had known before.
“Warriors! To me!”
They came in their thousands. In all manner of war-gear. With every strange weapon it was possible to conceive. They marched and they rode and their faces had come to life, as if they, too, like the stallion, understood only battle.
I felt that I, too, was never more truly alive than when I bore my blade in war. I was the Eternal Champion. I had led vast armies. I had slaughtered whole races. I was the very epitome of bloody conflict. I had brought it nobility, poetry, justification. I had brought it heroic dignity…
Yet within me a voice insisted that this must be the last such fight. I was John Daker. I did not wish to kill in any cause. I wished merely to live, to love and to know peace.
The Warriors of the Edge were forming ranks around me. They had unsheathed their many weapons. They were yelling and animated. They knew joy. And I wondered if each of these had once been like me. Were they all aspects of heroic warriors? All aspects, even of the Eternal Champion? Certainly many of their faces had a certain familiarity for me, so much that I dared not look at them too closely.