Roger Taylor - The Return of the Sword

And what was he doing, fleeing, deserting them? Had he himself been plunged into madness brought on by his own fears and doubts?

He forced himself to stop and lean on one of the columns. Its touch, real and solid, steadied him. As too did the weight of a silent Gavor on his shoulder. He risked a glimpse backwards. There were only the gloomy columns.

Whatever had happened, it wasn’t the end – surely? – it couldn’t be. While he was alive he must have a role to play…? But there was a ringing hollowness to this assurance. What could he do, a solitary figure scurrying through the darkness – or just hiding in it? Where was he going? The Armoury? There was nowhere else to go – the path led only there and to leave the path was to die. But what did he hope to find there? The black sword? That had just been Gulda speculating. And even if by some bizarre happenstance it was there, what use would it be? There was no great army laying waste the villages and farms of Orthlund, or beating at the gates of Anderras Darion. Still less was there an army to lead out against them. There were forces moving now of which he had but the barest comprehension. True, there was a quality in the Sword that had struck Isloman and Loman, carver and smith, almost speechless as they had touched its carved hilt and black glinting blade. And, too, he knew that it – or he and it together – had a strength that he did not understand. How else could it have protected him from Oklar’s wild unleashing of the Power? But it was not enough. Should he find it, what more would he be, without true knowledge, than a lost and solitary soldier leaning on his futile weapon at the edge of a conflict that was meaningless to him?

He set off again, no wiser and still afraid.

Then he noted something.

A deep silence.

He stopped.

Normally the Labyrinth was awash with strange noises that snuffled and scuttered at the edges of the path like invisible predators waiting to rend apart those unwary enough to misstep.

But now there was nothing.

It was as if the Labyrinth itself was holding its breath… As if it had caught the scent of an even fiercer predator drifting through the darkness.

Scarcely a dozen paces would take him to the hallway of the Armoury and the bright sunlit images of the Orthlundyn countryside carried there by Anderras Darion’s intricate maze of mirror stones. From thence, through the now ever-open wicket door, he would enter the Armoury itself to be amongst the cornfield rows of points and edges glittering in that same sunlight.

If Orthlund was still there.

He dashed the thought aside and pressed on quickly, counting his footsteps and striving to ignore the deafening silence.

But at the last turn, where light should have greeted and embraced him, there stood only columns, watching, waiting, in the Labyrinth’s dull twilight.

He heard a rasping, terrified breath as his body responded to the sight. Gavor slapped his wings. Both sounds fell dead in the leaden air.

‘I… I made no mistake, surely?’ Hawklan stammered as the pounding of his heart threatened to overwhelm him.

‘Not that I noticed, dear boy,’ Gavor replied, equally unsteadily.

Despair came in the wake of the initial shock, washing over him in full flood now, black and choking. Andawyr had thought him near the heart of what was happening. So had many others, not least Sumeral Himself. But what was he now? A dismal fugitive lost in this dreadful place where the least sound could be woven into a shrieking that would leave a man mindless, or into an avalanche roaring that would break him as surely as falling rocks themselves.

He could not move.

He had made no error, he was sure. He couldn’t have. His deeper nature held the Labyrinth in too great awe to allow any confusion of the mind to so mislead him.

‘Change,’ Gavor said.

Hawklan started at the sound.

‘The Traveller said that to use the pathways of the Labyrinth is to change them.’

Hawklan grasped at Gavor’s words.

‘Not the path to the Armoury, though,’ he said, struggling to recall Gulda’s account of her meeting with the Traveller. ‘At least, not perceptibly. What did he say? It changes like the mountains, mote by mote?’

‘For all we know, the mountains have vanished like the Labyrinth hall,’ Gavor retorted flatly. ‘And he did say there was a great turbulence in the Labyrinth.’

Despite the implications of what Gavor was saying, Hawklan felt their exchange steadying him.

‘There are other paths, he said.’

‘He also said that most of them change like the trembling of a leaf in the wind.’

Hawklan looked again at where the entrance to the Armoury should have been.

Nothing.

Just the blank, ominous columns, their presence sensed as much as seen in the gloom that pervaded the Labyrinth. He knew that, whichever way he looked, this would be what greeted him. His despair returned, undiminished. He had faced dangers before, dangers that might have seen him killed and that he would only too willingly have avoided, but dangers that he was nevertheless prepared to accept by virtue of the role he had accepted – the role his skills best suited him for: healer, protector. But there was a futility here that bore down on him like the weight of the castle itself looming high above this grim place. Dying in the course of opposing a greater power was a bitter enough prospect, but to die here – to drown in his own screams – for nothing – while…

While what?

While the world and everything – everyone – in it plunged into some nameless cataclysm that perhaps some action on his part might have prevented.

That was bitter beyond any swallowing.

He realized that he was clenching and unclenching his hand painfully. He could feel again the black sword slipping from his grip and tumbling into the darkness. His arm twitched as he tried to recover it.

Could so slight a thing – the loss of a single weapon, however fine – be so significant now?

Yes, his instinct told him, even though the links of cause and effect that would make it so were neither foreseeable then, nor calculable by hindsight now.

‘I think we’d better do something, dear boy,’ Gavor said, fidgeting nervously. ‘We can’t just stand here.’

Hawklan opened his hand and gently rubbed it with the other as if to reassure it that it bore no guilt in the loss of the sword. Values deeply imbued in him and rehearsed constantly since his coming to this time began to reassert themselves.

He was alive.

He might be dead very soon, but then he might not be, and to cloud the present certainty with a future uncertainty was not only to mar the present but might bring about that feared future.

‘Yes,’ he replied, straightening up and carefully turning round.

The scene was as he had expected. Identical in all directions.

Well, whatever had happened to the hall hadn’t happened to the Labyrinth, he thought bleakly. And it was still silent.

Almost as though challenging it, Hawklan clapped his hands. The sound was dull and lifeless.

‘Which way?’ he asked.

Gavor inclined his head round to look at him. ‘Dear boy, don’t ask me. It was your idea to come in here. How am I supposed to know. There’s not a breath of wind in here. There never is.’

With a final glance at where the Armoury should have been, Hawklan held out a hand, indicating the way back to the hall.

‘This way?’

Gavor clucked to himself twice, then nodded.

As he set off, Hawklan found that his legs were shaking.

He moved cautiously, every sense alert for the lingering echo of a footfall that might presage a reawakening of the Labyrinth. So many fears tugged at him that for much of the time he was able to keep any one of them from rising to dominate. Nevertheless, when he reached the place where the hall should have been and found himself facing the same array of gloomy columns that lay before him in every other direction, he felt an unspoken hope dying. For a moment, panic screamed at him from the edges of his mind, but he held it at bay. It would remain close, though.