Roger Taylor - The Return of the Sword

‘That’s what happened when Antyr entered your dream,’ Oslang whispered. He repeated the stern warnings that Antyr had given about leaving him undisturbed but, with the memory of the touch of the wolves’ wild natures fresh in his mind, Andawyr needed little convincing.

The two men looked at one another helplessly.

‘I suppose all we can do is wait,’ Andawyr said eventually, reluctantly voicing their common thought. Nevertheless, he leaned forward carefully and looked intently at Antyr, seeking for any signs of distress in the motionless body. One of Tarrian’s eyelids moved slightly to reveal a sharp, thin yellow line. Unnecessarily, Oslang reached out to prevent his friend from moving any further.

‘He just seems to be asleep,’ Andawyr said softly as he responded to this restraint.

Oslang nodded, but his attention now was on the Beacon. Though it was making no sound, the symbols and arrays of numbers surrounding it were changing – changing so quickly that they were little more than a blur.

All was darkness. Antyr stood very still. He was whole. And, too, he was aware of his body lying motionless in Andawyr’s study, guarded by his Earth Holders. As he was there, so he was here. It had always been thus at such times. For, wherever he might be, he was not in someone’s dream. This place was real. That he knew. Somehow, and without any sense of transition or conscious effort on his part, he had been drawn through a Gateway just as he had been in his desperate struggles with Ivaroth and the blind man.

He was afraid. And afraid in many different ways. Primitive fears: what dangers were there here, what knives, what strangling ropes, what malice lay in the darkness? Then more rational ones: how had he come here? Had it been at some unwitting bidding of his own? Had it been at the will of some other agency and, if so, who, or what, and not least, why? Perhaps most frightening of all, had it been at the whim of mere chance – as a falling roof tile might strike one man and miss his companion? And tumbling in the wake of these, the question, how could he escape this place?

He was trembling.

When he had finally faced the blind man and all his terrible power in that place beyond all places, the voices of the others imprisoned there had rung out in triumph, calling him Adept. Yet, too, at the same time, they had despised him. He was ‘Scarce an apprentice.’

He had little doubt that whatever the former meant, the latter was true. All he knew was that somewhere Tarrian and Grayle would be searching for him, and searching frantically, their predatory natures hunting through the ringing, turbulent spaces between the worlds, through tides of chaos and change, in places beyond his imagining; beyond any imagining.

Tarrian, Grayle, he cried out silently.

Fleetingly, there was a hint of distant howling.

To me! To me!

You are guarded in all places by a great and ancient strength. Silently he mouthed the ritual reassurance that all Dream Finders gave to their clients. Its emptiness heightened his sense of futility. Panic curled into the fringes of his mind but he managed to hold it at bay with a battery of carefully ordered reasons. Had he not always returned from such translations? Had not some inner resource carried him through the direst of threats both in his own world and in the worlds beyond? And was it probable that he would succumb now, after the terrible enemies who had sought to destroy or enslave him had been destroyed? And when he had finally reached the Cadwanen, the goal of his journey? A place that, even with his limited knowledge of it, he could see was full of hope and inquiry and that used the light of the past and the present to illuminate the future. Nothing save hard walking, bad weather and seasickness had threatened him since he had left his home; surely nothing could threaten him now?

Nor did anything… that he could sense.

But…

His reassurances to himself had a wan and feeble air about them.

The panic threatened to return but again he held it back. Above all, he must maintain control over whatever he could. In the absence of knowing what he should do, he could only await events.

To me! To me!

Nothing.

Where was this place?

The darkness and the silence were so total that surely he could not be outside. There, by now, his eyes must have searched out a hint of lightness in the sky, or his ears would have heard a faint sound – a night insect, a scuttling rodent, the rushing wings of a hunting bird. But there was nothing. Not even the hint of shifting night air on his face.

A thought came to him, almost incongruous in its practicality. Yatsu had given him a small radiant stone lantern with the injunction that, along with many other small, innocuous items, he should always have it with him. Experience and the quiet, moment-by-moment discipline of journeying through the mountains had instilled the rightness of this advice into him, but older habits – a soft bed, a hasty awakening to serve the needs of a client – had taken command and the pouch that should have hung from his belt was, along with the belt itself, draped over a chair in his room.

He denounced himself a fool, though not, somewhat to his surprise, without a degree of dark humour. Some Adept, you! Some Warrior of the White Way! To be suddenly carried into an alien place at least had the dignity of being profoundly mysterious. To forget to bring a light was bumbling incompetence of the first order.

A sober resolution formed within him. As much through good fortune as any ability on his part he had survived a great ordeal and discovered within himself a strange, perhaps precious gift. He must bring to the questions that came from these events the utmost dedication and effort at all times. He must strive to become like Yatsu and Jaldaric; to attain that peculiar awareness of the nature and value of the moment, of the extraordinary in the ordinary, that they possessed. A warrior’s mind, they had called it, though they laughed at its portentous ring. But they laughed easily and at many things, these most serious of men. And they had the clarity of vision, a quietness of spirit, that he could only aspire to. It was in their every movement.

The resolution was not a new one and he clenched his fists violently, driving his nails into his palms to punish himself for his folly in having to make it again.

He let out a faint breath.

The action was relaxing, the sound reassuring.

But as it drifted away, the darkness around him was suddenly alive with a myriad of such sighs. So soft was it that he was scarcely aware of the sound. Then, with almost imperceptible slowness, it began to wash to and fro. At first it was no more than the sound of the sea lapping against a distant shoreline, but with each retreat and advance it grew louder and stranger.

His concentration wrapped tight about it as he searched for some clue that might tell him where he was, Antyr began to feel the shifting sound reaching deep inside him. As it did so, he felt it touching ancient, unspoken fears – stirring them up to cloud his mind, to obscure his thoughts. They grew and resonated with the sound itself.

Then, not knowing how it had come about, he could no longer tell which clamour was outside him and which within, so awful was the noise – if noise it was by now, for there was a malevolence in it, rising and falling, pounding him from every side.

He felt a scream forming. A scream that the sound had been searching for. A scream that it would feed on. A scream that it would drown and smash him with, until he was at one with this choking darkness.

Yet still a spark of his awareness flickered.

He was who he was. He had faced cruel and powerful enemies before and prevailed.