Hugh Cook - The wizards and the warriors

'Good morning,' said Miphon, entering the chamber. He held a collection of little sacs.

'More perfume?' said Hearst.

'Yes,' said Miphon. 'For those who don't want to be eaten.'

'What's there for us to eat, while we're on the subject?'

This,' said Blackwood, coming into the chamber and dropping an armful of eggs. They bounced.

Hearst, picking one up, found the skin hard and flexible.

'These are keflo eggs,' said Miphon. 'Properly nourished, they develop into the embryos we killed last night and that I've been killing this morning. I think -'

He was interrupted by an explosion which set the chamber shaking. To the north-west, steam was rising, not just from the ocean, but from Drangsturm itself.

'There's a breach from the ocean into Drangsturm,' said Miphon quietly.

When the sea entered a small flame trench like the 'steamer' on the southern border of Estar, the water seethed and boiled. But, when hitting the superheated rock of Drangsturm, cold seawater exploded instantly into steam.

Another explosion shook the world.

Hairline cracks crazed the transparent surface of the keflo chamber. Out on the plain, the foraging keflos stood quite still. High in the sky, flung by the explosion, huge chunks of rock turned lazily in the sunlight. A massive rock, big as a house, crashed to earth near the minar. The floor shook.

'The end of the world,' said Blackwood quietly.

'Maybe,' said Hearst, cutting open one of the keflo eggs. 'But let's not die hungry. Dig in.'

So they breakfasted on raw keflo eggs – which were a thick dark rubbery green, hard work for the jaws. As they ate, the ground near Drangsturm split open. Cracks extended for a league north and south. Flame surged into the cracks as the walls of the flame trench began to collapse.

'Look,' said Blackwood.

They saw, dimly through the crazed walls, a Neversh 489 wheeling high in the sky in the distance, circling the area of devastation. An updraft from the flame trench caught it and flung it upwards, out of sight.

'The Skull of the Deep South will know,' said Miphon. 'The Swarms will start to march. Soon. Today. They'll forge around through the sea – or their legions will labour rocks to bridge the ruins of Drangsturm.'

There was no stopping it.

They would march north. All of them. Stalkers, keflos, Engulfers, Wings, tunnellers, green centipedes, the Neversh, the blue ants and the others. Hell-creatures from the worlds of nightmare, smashing their way through human civilizations, hunting, catching, killing, eating.

'We have to stop them!' said Hearst. 'If we can get a death-stone, we can stop them!'

'Could we?' said Miphon. 'Remember the effective radius. Two leagues. That's not much. There's few places we could stop them before… well, before Estar. We could halt them there, at the Southern Border.'

'Then that's what we'll do,' said Hearst. 'Now how do we get our death-stone?'

'We don't!' said Blackwood. 'After all this time trying to lock away that horror for good and forever – '

'Yesterday was another world,' said Hearst, cutting him off.

'But he's got a point,' said Miphon. 'To let loose that power -'

'That power is loose already,' said Hearst. 'We won't be the only ones making for the Dry Pit. It may bring the world to destruction – but the world will be destroyed in any case, unless we halt the Swarms.'

'From here, it's a fair stretch to the Dry Pit,' said Miphon. 'If we go east, eighty leagues takes us to the Inner Waters. Then another two hundred leagues or so takes us to the Stepping Stone Islands. Then, if we can contact a Southsearcher patrol, we might get passage north to the Chameleon's Tongue.'

'And then?'

'Sand,' said Miphon. 'A long beach runs about three hundred leagues east to the Elbow, then about two hundred leagues north to the mountains at the end of the Chameleon's Tongue. There's a harbour there: Hartzaven. If we can get passage to the northern coast from there, we'll still have to march about a hundred leagues inland to reach the Dry Pit.'

'Another journey…' said Blackwood.

'You sound 'Weary,' said Blackwood. 'Leagues of wind and rain. Foraging for meals. Travelling by night, waking to foreign suns. Lurking, hiding, skulking, stealing. After all this time…'

'I know,' said Hearst. 'We all want to rest.'

'And we tried so hard,' said Blackwood. 'For what? Our best wasn't good enough to stop this… this ending.'

'We're not dead yet,' said Hearst, though he did not fancy their chances for survival. 'Come on, man! Maybe it's at the Dry Pit that you'll find your destiny.'

Blackwood shook his head.

He no longer believed in destiny.

Back in the castle, in the moments of combat, the fate of the whole world had been resolved by the timing of a knife-thrust. If Blackwood had managed to kill Garash just a little sooner, Miphon would never have used the word Segenarith; the death-stone would have fallen harmlessly to the floor, leaving the way open for the future to be resolved by diplomacy between wizards.

Instead: disaster.

It was true: chance did attend to all things. The fate of the world could be changed by the tiniest hesitation at a critical moment.

'We're dice,' said Blackwood. 'And we're rolling. How we fall is not up to us.'

'The will is free,' said Hearst. 'We can act as we choose.'

'No,' said Blackwood, heavily. 'Chance settles everything. There's no such thing as free will.'

Hearst smashed him across the face with the back of his hand. Blackwood staggered backwards.

'Draw on me if you like,' said Hearst, his voice cool. 'Kill me if you like. I'll accept the punishment. I performed an act of unadulterated free will. On the other hand, since you don't believe in such a thing, what's your motive for punishing me?'

Blackwood hesitated.

Hearst drew a blade.

'Enough!' roared Miphon, startling himself with his own ferocity. 'We'll go to the Dry Pit. We'll get a death-stone. We'll try. It's our only chance.'

'So you think chance comes into it, too,' said Blackwood, rubbing his smarting face. 'So is the will free or not free?'

'If someone had clouted me over the face, that's the last question I'd be asking,' said Miphon. 'But the answer, since you wonder, is both yes and no. Let me explain.'

It was later in the day. Miphon was still lecturing on the nature of free will; Hearst, bored beyond belief, reminded himself never again to raise philosophical problems in the presence of a wizard.

Hearst watched another Neversh high in the sky. Scanning. Scouting. On the ground, the keflos were moving north, picking their way over the shattered landscape.

It was starting already. The Swarms were moving north for the first time in four thousand years. And, his own faith in free will steadily eroding, he thought:

– We are prisoners of history.

An odd thought for a Rovac warrior. Not bitter, but melancholy. Almost philosophical. Almost. He would have to snap out of this mood. He would have to unlearn some of his painfully-acquired wisdom, and think himself back into being a hero, for that was what the age demanded: a man prepared to dare all in a desperate race to the Dry Pit to gain a weapon powerful enough to contend against the Swarms.

Despite himself, he recalled his many failures. He did his best to suppress them, but one memory still surfaced. It dated back to the time at Ep Pass. Durnwold had worked his way behind the wizard Heenmor, had stood at the top of a cliff, had raised a rock… had died.

Should Hearst blame himself for that death? Alish had thought up the attack plan, but should Hearst have accepted it? Maybe there had been a better way to do it. The fact was, a man had died, trusting Morgan Hearst. So many men had died trusting him.