Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 2 - Metamorphosis

Some time later, we entered the open doorway of the longhouse. I can remember looking up and seeing that the walls were higher than I had judged from above, and that two tall wooden doors hung limply and drunkenly from sagging rope hinges. We passed into the dim interior, and I saw open patches high above, where great holes in the thatch admitted beams of daylight. I smelled thick woodsmoke, and then I felt myself being lowered to the ground, and the heat of flames radiating against my face.

I opened my eyes again and found myself close by a large fire that had been built beneath a roofless section of the longhouse. Turoc was wrapping the folds of his big cloak tightly about me, and I heard voices all around me, and Turoc's voice repeating yet again the tale of my misfortune. He had known me for years, he swore, and had stumbled upon me this morning by accident and good fortune, since had he not found me, I might have died, and I bore messages for Carthac from Ironhair. I had survived a camp blasted by Merlyn's Vengeance, down on the plain, he told his listeners, and I had purged myself of most of the poison on the way up here from below. Now all I needed was to regain my strength, and since Carthac had not yet returned to camp, the best thing for me to do was sleep until he came. There came a chorus of mutterings, and, wonder of wonders, I slept, lulled by the sounds and the warmth of the fire.

"Carthac! Carthac! Carthac! Carthac! Carthac!"

At first it was the fabric of my dream, but as the volume swelled and grew into a roar of voices chanting in unison, I opened my eyes to find myself surrounded by a forest of legs. The demigod had returned to his worshippers.

Slowly, cautiously, I rose to. my feet, pulling my cloak about me and tugging its hood down over my face. I was caught up in the pandemonium, but my mind was clear enough to know, immediately, that here might be the best chance I would ever have of coming close to my quarry. In the midst of this capering throng of wild, enthusiastic men, I should easily be able to win close enough to him to strike. I knew that I would die immediately thereafter, but I had long since come to terms with that. I had no wish to live on as a leper, and I considered that my life would be well spent in ridding the world of this particular pestilence called Carthac at the same time as I rid it of my own.

Although I had not yet seen him, I knew from the chaos of shouts that he was here, in the longhouse, and as I stood there swaying, looking about me for an avenue to go to him, I saw the fire in front of me, separated from me only by several bodies. There lay the answer to the question of how I might reach him without arousing suspicion by a headlong approach. As soon as I located him, I would throw some of my fire powder into the fire, creating a distraction and, I hoped, some panic. Then, while everyone was disoriented by the noise and smoke, I would strike.

I moved slightly to my right, then, and saw him. He was a gargoyle, hideous and immense, a leering Cyclops, bald on one side of his head above the awful disfigurement that marred him and marked him as inhuman. He had no left eye, and the place where it should have been was a ruined, indented mass of twisted flesh. His head was misshapen, flattened and distorted at his birth, and it bulged enormously at the top on the right side. Then, when he was a boy, a kick from a horse had added diabolical refinements to his lifelong ugliness. The one eye that remained to him, however, was large and bright blue, offering a tragic but fleeting suggestion of how he might have looked had Nature not decided to make sport of him. That single, flashing, bright blue eye was the first thing I saw, before the ruin of the rest of his awful head eclipsed it.

And then I truly saw the size of him. He towered over everyone about him, hulking and huge, his shoulders leviathan and his great, deep, hairless chest unarmoured. He wore only a sleeveless vest, of some kind of animal pelt, long haired and shaggy, and a pair of breeches made from the same skins. Heavy boots covered his feet and lower legs and a broad belt with a golden buckle circled his waist. His arms, as big as many a man's thighs, shone as though oiled, and the biceps were wound in what looked like copper bracelets.

My hands were busy beneath my cloak, opening the drawstring of the leather bag that held the last remnants of my fire powder, perhaps two large handfuls. I reached inside and scooped a generous pinch into my right hand, and then I saw the sword he held in his. He gave a wild laugh and swung it around his head, sending his followers leaping back in fear for their lives, one of them gouting blood from a slash across the chest. Three times he swung the sword, and then he stood alone in the space he had cleared, laughing in a high, thin, chilling voice as though defying anyone to come against him.

The noise in the longhouse died almost completely away as the realization sank slowly home to me that somehow, impossibly, he had come into possession of my sword. I knew it was impossible, because I had left my sword at home, in my little valley, since it would have been too ostentatious for the task I had at hand. Yet there it was, in Carthac's enormous fist.

As I stared at it, incredulous, his insane laugh turned into a defiant, triumphant scream. He raised his left arm and brandished something above his head. I looked at it; I saw it; and my mind refused to accept what I was seeing. He screamed again, this time my name, "Merlyyyn!" and threw the thing. My brother's head. Ambrose's head.

It flew through the air towards me, and I watched it turning as though time had slowed to almost nothing. The fine, blue eyes were wide, staring and glazed in death; the thick, yellow locks were stained with blood. I even saw that he had grown a beard on this campaign, a grizzled beard, just like my own. And then it landed in the fire, thumping heavily among the coals, and I forgot everything in the urge to save my brother from the flames. I lunged forward, a strangled scream knotting in my throat, and my shoulder struck the man in front of me as my foot came down on the inside hem of my cloak, tripping me. As I fell, my outstretched hands released the open bag I had been holding and the fire powder fell into the heart of the fire.

A gigantic ball of flame roared from the pit with a concussive, deafening sound that sucked all the air in the room, it seemed, into its heart, then belched it out again in a terrifying rain of sparks and embers and great, whirling clouds of choking smoke. I had squeezed my eyes tight shut, but the brightness of the fireball seared right through my closed lids as I ripped away my cloak, casting it aside. Keening now with rage, I fumbled to pull my dagger from its sheath and clutched the hilt so hard that it pained my hand. Then, oblivious to the chaos swirling around me, I pushed myself up and ran though the smoke and the fire towards Carthac.

I found him rooted to the spot where I had last seen him, gaping open mouthed at me as I approached, making no effort to avoid me, and before he could my dagger found his breast and plunged between his ribs. He made a strange, mewling sound and his only defence was to thrust me away from him, with both hands, one of which still gripped the sword I now knew was my brother's. Demented with grief and disbelief and hatred, I tore my blade free again and raked it towards his one, blue eye, but he turned his head away before I could plunge the point into his brain and I succeeded only in blinding him, the knife's blade striking against the bone of his eye socket. Then he picked me up easily with one huge hand, and threw me back into the firepit.

I was burning—my left hand, which had plunged elbow deep into a bed of embers, my arms, my feet, my legs— and I scrambled, screaming in agony, until I was free of the pit. I threw myself against the wall and cowered there, striking off the glowing coals that stuck to my cringing flesh and tearing off the smouldering remnants of the tunic that was my only garment. When I was naked and all the coals were off me, I lay there, shuddering in pain, incapable of coherent thought.