Roger Taylor - The Return of the Sword

‘What are you doing here? What’s happened?’ asked the felci.

‘Where are Tarrian and Grayle?’ Hawklan asked in return.

‘They’ve gone,’ Dar-Volci replied. ‘I was trying to find my way back to the hall.’

‘Gone?’

‘Gone. Just disappeared. They were running ahead of me, then everything went very peculiar and they weren’t there. Rather churlish, I thought, leaving me without a word.’

The faint attempt at humour merely served to highlight a very uncharacteristic unease in the felci.

Hawklan crouched in front of him. ‘What do you mean, everything went peculiar?’

‘Just that,’ came the unhelpful reply. ‘And there I was, on my own. Now everything seems to be changing all the time.’ He repeated his own question before Hawklan could press him further. ‘Anyway, what are you doing here?’

Hawklan told him.

Dar-volci let out a series of anxious whistles. He began twisting round as though slowly chasing his own tail. ‘All gone? Andawyr and the others – all gone? And the hall and the Armoury?’

Hawklan had never seen him so disturbed.

‘And we’re lost?’

‘We’re lost.’

Dar-volci stopped turning, chattered noisily to himself, then looked around.

‘Not good,’ he muttered. ‘And this place is still changing.’ Hawklan followed his gaze but could neither see nor sense anything untoward.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘Something’s happening, dear boy,’ Gavor said. ‘I’ve felt it in my pinions ever since we came in here, but don’t ask me what it is.’

Hawklan knew that his companions were telling him all they could.

‘Very well,’ he said to Dar-volci. ‘Take us to where Tarrian and Grayle disappeared. Perhaps we’ll find something there.’

‘I can’t,’ the felci replied. ‘I told you, everything’s changing. It’s almost as though the Labyrinth is only real where we can see it – or where you are,’ he added as an afterthought.

Hawklan frowned. ‘Go where your feet lead you, then,’ he said as encouragingly as he could. ‘We must keep searching. We can’t do nothing.’

Dar-volci let out a final low whistle, then pattered off. Hawklan followed him.

They walked for a long time through the unchanging landscape of the Labyrinth. Although there was no hint of a return of its death-dealing sounds Hawklan became increasingly aware of a sense of oppressiveness as they moved on. Whether it was something outside himself or just mounting despair he could not have said, but it grew relentlessly.

Increasingly he found himself taking deep breaths and looking warily at the columns as if at any moment they might move together and enclose him like an insect gripped in a spider’s web.

‘Stop a moment,’ he gasped. He sat down and, leaning against one of the columns, closed his eyes. Gavor hopped down from his shoulder and stood next to Dar-volci. Both of them looked at him in silence.

In the deeper darkness behind his eyes, Hawklan struggled to set aside the fears and anxieties that were clamouring ever louder. The worst of these was that he was going to die in this desolate limbo, though this was heavily fringed about with a sense of guilt that in some way he was betraying his friends – they needed him, they needed what he could do.

But what could he do…?

Fight? Heal?

Yes, both. They were sides of the same coin. But what could he fight here? And what could he heal?

He opened his eyes. Gavor and Dar-volci were still watching him patiently. This place was oppressive to him, but it must be truly dreadful for Gavor, he thought, a creature who soared joyously on the unseen, shifting pathways of the high mountain air. He reached out to the bird who clambered on to his hand.

‘I was going to say we’ve been in worse places. But we haven’t, have we?’ he said.

‘Afraid not, dear boy. Are you ready to move on?’

‘Yes and no.’

Hawklan lifted the raven on to his shoulder then placed his hand against the column he had been leaning on as though it were an injured limb.

Turmoil filled him and he pulled his hand back quickly. How could that be? He was no carver. He had no sensitivity for cold stone. Isloman and the other Orthlundyn routinely twitted him about his rock-blindness.

He placed both hands against the column. The turmoil was there still – it had not been a trick of his imagination – but this time he did not pull away. It was no new sensation for him. It was the disturbance he felt in any wound – a struggle between forces of disorder and equilibrium – imbalance and balance.

What could it be that would make this dead stonework respond thus?

He remembered Usche and Andawyr. This conjunction that they feared stemmed from the place of infinite smallness where all things have a commonality – ‘These walls, these tables, everything, even ourselves,’ Usche had said.

Now he could feel it.

This he could fight - and heal.

He touched the disturbance as he would any other wound, instinct guiding him.

A tremor shook him. For an instant he thought that the Labyrinth was preparing to attack, but he thrust the fear from him and persisted with his healing touch.

An incongruous ‘Ooh!’ from both Gavor and Dar-volci made him turn.

The Labyrinth was lighter. His eyes were drawn upwards.

Where before the columns had faded into low darkness, they now reached up much further, giving him the impression that he was standing in a great forest. Gavor glided down onto the floor and flapped his wings noisily.

‘Carry on,’ Hawklan said to Dar-volci.

As they walked, Hawklan briefly touched some of the columns. It was no light-hearted healing, however. He knew that the pain he was feeling was beyond his curing. It was like walking alone across a battlefield strewn with mangled corpses and ringing with the terrible cries of the wounded. So, as on a battlefield, he did what he could, leaving the greater part of the field to the mercies of chance.

Nevertheless, it gave him strength.

Slowly, imperceptibly, the light around them changed and though the columns were too close to see any further ahead, they could see them rising higher and higher. Wherever they were, this was no construct in the bowels of Anderras Darion.

He avoided dwelling on the thought. He would have no answers, he knew, and nothing was to be served by it.

Usche had said that the place of infinite smallness was one where cause and effect, even time and distance, had little meaning.

‘It’s a disturbing place, but it is and it has to be accepted.’

And if the coming conjunction had brought this disturbing nature here, then so be it. Hawklan accepted. He would do what he could – he would trust his healing.

He glanced upwards, then screwed his eyes tight. As the columns tapered together, fading into the heights above, it seemed as though they were gently waving.

‘Not a movement. Not a word,’ Yatsu hissed as the high-pitched shrieking faded.

It came again at irregular intervals, rising and falling in some unfathomable exchange. It was an awful sound that spoke to its hearers at depths far below their conscious understanding. Reaching into Yatsu it fanned the embers of his despair, threatening to ignite them into a consuming incandescence. Only the cold discipline that cruel experience had given him prevented it. That, and the trembling he could feel in Pinnatte lying by his side.

‘It’s a noise,’ he whispered to the others, breaking his own injunction. ‘Like fingernails on glass, maybe, but still only a noise.’

Pinnatte’s trembling continued.

The shrieking grew steadily louder and more intense until eventually it was reverberating all about the cave, seeming to come from every direction and surrounding the cowering group.