Crusader (63 page)

DragonStar raised himself in his saddle and screamed. The Wolven was now slung over his back. He drew forth the lily sword and thrust it into the sky.

At his signal, the Alaunt surged forward, past Hunter and Star Stallion, and towards the distant figure struggling through the field.

The Hunt was on!

Qeteb turned once more—

—
always turning, turning, turning, lost and confused in the field—

—and faced the hounds. He snarled, and raised his massive forearms, thrusting his fists into the sky. His mouth moved, as if to form words, but he was incapable of any lucid speech, and so incoherence and spittle dribbled forth in equal amounts from his thick, rubbery lips.

The Alaunt approached, but they did not attack immediately. Instead they encircled him, pacing slowly, their bodies close to the ground, their vicious snouts turned towards him.

DragonStar pulled the Star Stallion to a dancing halt several paces away. Directly behind the stallion, and out of Qeteb’s direct sight, the bear cub lumbered to a halt, then plonked himself down on the earth, rolled over onto his side and swatted playfully at the stallion’s tail.

Qeteb did not see the cub at all.

DragonStar slowly dismounted. “My hounds hunger for your blood,” he said.

“They shall not have me!” Qeteb said. “I am more than a match for these foolish dogs.”

DragonStar made a small gesture with one of his hands, and the Alaunt stopped their relentless encirclement of the Demon, and sat down, their heads cocked curiously towards DragonStar.

“My hounds hunger for your blood,” he said again, “but I shall not set them to you.”

“Why not?” Qeteb said. “Scared I might tear them apart?”

“I shall not set them to you because,” DragonStar paused, and smiled, “because I love you.”

Qeteb stared unbelievingly at the StarSon. “No!”

“I offer you love,” DragonStar said, “and love shall be your destruction.”

And as Qeteb screamed, StarSon DragonStar stepped forward, the hounds parting before him, and plunged the lily sword deep into Qeteb’s belly, driving the Demon back until he lay impaled upon the ploughed field.

Then he stepped back.

Qeteb writhed about the sword, like a spider mounted for a live display…and laughed.

“Weapons will not hurt me,” he said, still chortling. “You have learned nothing!”

Qeteb wrapped his hands about the hilt of the sword, as if to wrench it out.

Then he stopped, and stared, and screamed in horror. From behind DragonStar lumbered a small, dark cheerful shape.

The bear cub.

Qeteb shrieked, and lifted his hands away from the sword, holding them out before him as if to ward himself from the personification of all he feared most in the universe.

Love.

Qeteb’s skewered body jerked about the sword so violently he twisted about in a full circle, his heels digging into the earth, his hips and shoulders contorting in the effort to somehow free himself from the pin which held him.

Love, in the guise of the bear cub, padded forward. The cub stopped just short of Qeteb’s feet, and he lowered his snout and sniffed curiously.

Qeteb kicked at the cub.

The cub snapped, and Qeteb shrieked yet again.

One of his feet had gone.

The cub chewed, crunched, chewed some more, and then swallowed.

It licked its lips, and made a happy, mewling sound.

Every one of the Alaunt licked their lips, and shifted hungrily.

“No,” said DragonStar, “this is a meal only Love can consume.”

The cub’s head darted forward again, and took Qeteb’s other foot, as well half the leg beneath his knee.

Qeteb wailed and moaned and shrieked, waving his amputated lower limbs about wildly, splattering blood about him in a frenzied arc.

The bear cub swallowed, growled and leaped forward, his head darting between Qeteb’s legs to the Demon’s genitals.

DragonStar stood watching the bear cub eat the Midday Demon mouthful by mouthful, and yet seeing nothing.

He was remembering.

Remembering how Axis had plunged the Rainbow Sceptre into Gorgrael until the Destroyer had literally disintegrated about it.

And yet Axis had not truly destroyed the evil that was Gorgrael, had he? It had simply festered, causing fatal cancers within Tencendorian society, as well Axis’ own family.

Many years after Gorgrael’s death the Sceptre had called to Drago, pulling him beyond the Star Gate, and eventually transforming, first into the purse, then into the staff, and finally into the lily sword.

Which DragonStar, in turn, had plunged into the evil that was Qeteb.

Yet, finally, it was not the weapon that was destroying the personification of mad, vindictive evil.

It was Love. Love had allowed Faraday to escape, and had sacrificed itself for her, and Love was now consuming the evil of Qeteb.

This was not an evil which would re-emerge in some unthought of place.

This was an evil which, finally, was being consumed into nothingness.

The bear cub swallowed the last tasty morsel, licked up a few stray drops of blood, and then raised its head and looked at DragonStar.

DragonStar smiled, his eyes brimming with tears, and he nodded his thanks to the cub.

His job done, the cub began to shape-change back to its true form.

The blue-feathered lizard. Love and Light, together within the one form.

“Go,” DragonStar whispered, and the lizard grinned happily and trotted off, back to the Field and the butterflies and his myriad of friends.

DragonStar looked back to where Qeteb had been. The Alaunt were sniffing about curiously, but there was nothing there. The bear cub had, in the course of consuming Qeteb, also consumed the lily sword.

Both evil, and the weapon needed to fight it, were gone.

The ploughed field faded, and once again DragonStar found himself standing within the bleak walls of the Maze.

Behind him came a vast roaring sound, as if a sea had gone mad.

DragonStar did not look.

Forty-two thousand trees ran riot through the Maze, using root and branch to tear it apart.

The darkness that had consumed the wasteland now began to invade the Maze, and, as each stone fell, its influence grew more profound.

As the last stone in the Maze crashed into dust, an eternal night fell, and the trees fell silent, and still.

They waited.

T
he Corolean fishing fleet was sailing west from the Barrow Islands, heading for its home port on the northern coastline of Coroleas, when the cataclysm occurred.

One moment the sea had been calm, if sullen, under an overcast sky, the next it was rolling so madly the crews of the five vessels all thought they were moments away from death.

And the next moment, it was calm again.

One of the seamen, a man called El’habain, was clinging to the railing about the prow of the leading vessel where he’d been standing watching for seals. He was soaked through, and frightened as he had never before been in his arrogant life.

He raised his head, shaking it from side to side to clear the salty water from his eyes and ears, and looked for someone to curse and blame for his fright and his soaking.

In the end El’habain said nothing. He merely stared into the distance, towards where the Tencendorian cliffs lined Widewall Bay.

They were crumbling. Great rocks toppled into the ocean and, as El’habain stared, the length of the cliffs as far as he could see fell beneath the ocean waves.

There was nothing left but the rolling waves.

Tencendor had gone.

T
here was a blackness, and an unknowingness, during which all creation ceased to exist. There was simply nothing.

Save, as far as Axis was concerned, the harsh and fearful sound of his breathing.

“Is anyone else there?” he said, and a being shifted under him, and he realised that Pretty Brown Sal also existed.

“Yes,” whispered a voice across the void, and Axis recognised it as Zared’s, and then a hundred other whispers reached him, and Axis realised that somehow the convoy still stretched out behind him.

“Axis?”

A faint voice, unsure.

“Azhure!”
Gods! He’d thought to have lost her forever.

There was an unseen movement at his side, and Axis felt a hand groping along Sal’s shoulder.

“Azhure! Here!” He reached down a hand and grabbed hers, and at his touch and warmth Azhure burst into sobs.

He hauled her up into the saddle and hugged her tight. “SpikeFeather? Katie?” he eventually said.

“Katie has gone,” said a voice somewhere to one side, and Axis recognised it as SpikeFeather’s. “But Urbeth’s daughters are still with us—”

And somehow Axis had the distinct impression, although
he could not see a thing, that the two women stood to either side of SpikeFeather, each holding one of his hands.

“—as is…”

“As is…
I
,” said a chilling voice, and Axis jumped, knowing the voice instantly.

The GateKeeper laughed, a grating, dry sound. “We meet again, Axis.”

“Why aren’t you at your Gate?” Axis said.

There was a silence, and when the GateKeeper answered, her voice was puzzled and unsure.

“I sat at my table,” the GateKeeper said, “when, just then, just now, a moment ago it seems to me, the soul of a beautiful girl child drifted up. Before she went through the Gate, she turned to me and she said, ‘Rejoice, GateKeeper, for your task is done. Time is ended, and the Gate must close.’

“And then she stepped through the Gate. And then…then it imploded, and I had seized the birdman and your wife and Urbeth’s two girls and brought them here.”

“Then I thank you for that—” Axis began.

“Oh, I did not think of you when I returned your wife and companions,” the GateKeeper said. “It was merely convenient that I brought them with me.”

“Then
why
did you come here?” said Axis.

“Because of Her,” said the GateKeeper. “The Child.”

And Axis nodded, and understood. Not Katie at all, but Leagh’s Child.

They waited.

“Has ma’am finished?” said Raspu, returning from wherever he had been, and Faraday put her cup back into its saucer and extended it into the dark. The mausoleum had completely vanished, and now there was only a nothingness.

“Yes. Thank you.” Faraday was not perturbed by the dark and the nothingness, nor by the fact that she currently shared the void with a former Demon.

All would be well as it eventuated.

They waited.

DragonStar rode his Star Stallion through the void, his pale hounds fanning out behind him in a comet’s tail.

There was something he should do, but for the moment he did not care. There was only the wild ride, the freedom, and the void.

Nothing else mattered.

The stallion snorted, and shook his head.

Sicarius bayed, and the Alaunt clamoured.

DragonStar sighed.

“Faraday,” he said.

She heard him before she saw him. The faint fall of a horse’s hooves, the snuffling of a pack of hounds.

Slowly Faraday rose to her feet, accepting Raspu’s hand on her elbow.

Then, suddenly, there was a presence, and the faintest of luminescence, and there was DragonStar, sitting his stallion, his hounds milling about him.

“Come,” he said. “We have a Garden to plant.”

Raspu watched as DragonStar helped Faraday mount behind him, and then, as they rode away and the darkness closed in again, he waited.

The Star Stallion stopped, and DragonStar turned slightly.

“Faraday? Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?” she said. What had he meant, plant the Garden?

She felt, rather than saw, him smile. “You have something of mine,” DragonStar said. “Something you have kept for a very long time. Will you now give it back to me?”

Faraday frowned, and then jumped slightly in surprise as she remembered what it was. “Oh!”

When DragonStar had worked the enchantment to ensnare the twenty thousand crazed people in the Western Ranges, he had shot the enchantment into the sky with an arrow.

After the arrow had done its work, it had fallen to the ground at Faraday’s feet, and, eventually, she’d wound it into the rainbow band that the Mother had given her.

Together with the sapling.

Her hands trembling, Faraday leaned back very slightly from DragonStar’s warmth, and unwound the band.

She took the arrow, the sapling still safely coiled about it, into her hands.

And then Faraday gasped, for the arrow had been strangely supple all this time it rested so close about her waist. Now, in the space of one heartbeat, it solidified into strength again.

The sapling still wound its way about its length.

“Faraday?”

She took the arrow, and passed it to DragonStar.

He held it briefly, then lifted the Wolven from his shoulder and fitted the arrow to it.

He paused, and Faraday could tell he was crying, then in one fluid movement, DragonStar lifted the bow and shot the arrow high into the darkness.

T
he arrow rose into the darkness, and the hopelessness, and the void. It rose until it could rise no more, and then it fell.

It fell, and fell, and fell until it reached impossible speeds.

And then, when it could fall no more, it struck a resistance, and its head buried itself within the resistance.

Somewhere far, far away, the Star Stallion screamed, and reared and plunged, and stars fell in their millions from his mane and tail.

A great wind consumed the blackness, and it swept the stars high and higher.

There was an explosion of light and sound from the point where the arrow struck.

It washed out in great rippling waves, engulfing all those who waited within the darkness.

It caught the stars, and twisted them high, and higher, feeding their fire, so that they grew a million-fold in intensity, and then the wind swept them higher still.