‘Zemochs are odd people,’ she told him. ‘Actually there is some degree of separation, but you have to go through the palace to reach the temple. The temple itself doesn’t have any outside entrances.’
‘Then all we have to do is to ride to the palace and knock on the door,’ Kalten said.
‘No,’ Kurik disagreed firmly. ‘We walk to the palace, and we’ll talk about knocking when we get there.’
‘Walk?’ Kalten sounded injured.
‘Horses make too much noise on paved streets, and they’re a little hard to hide when you need to take cover.’
‘Walking any distance in full armour isn’t much fun, Kurik.’
‘You wanted to be a knight. As I remember it, you and Sparhawk even volunteered.’
‘Could you sort of whistle up that invisibility spell Sparhawk told us about?’ Kalten asked Sephrenia, ‘– the one Flute used to play on her pipes?’
She shook her head.
‘Why not?’
She hummed a short musical phrase. ‘Do you recognize that melody?’ she asked him.
He frowned. ‘I can’t say that I do.’
‘That was the traditional Pandion hymn. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. Does that answer your question?’
‘Oh. Music isn’t one of your strong points, I see.’
‘What would happen if you tried it and hit the wrong notes?’ Talen asked curiously.
She shuddered. ‘Please don’t ask.’
‘We skulk then,’ Kalten said. ‘So let’s get to skulking.’
‘Just as soon as it gets dark,’ Sparhawk said.
It was a mile or more across a flat, dusty plain to the grim walls of Zemoch, and the armoured knights were all sweating profusely by the time they reached the west gate.
‘Muggy,’ Kalten said quietly, wiping his streaming face. ‘Isn’t there anything normal about Zemoch? It shouldn’t be this sticky at this time of year.’
‘There’s definitely some unusual weather coming in,’ Kurik agreed. The distant rumble of thunder and the pale flickers of lightning illuminating the cloudbanks lying to the east confirmed their observations.
‘Maybe we could appeal to Otha for shelter from the storm,’ Tynian said. ‘What are the Zemoch views on hospitality?’
‘Undependable,’ Sephrenia replied.
‘We’ll want to be as quiet as we can once we’re in the city,’ Sparhawk cautioned.
Sephrenia lifted her head and looked off to the east, her pale face scarcely visible in the sultry darkness. ‘Let’s wait a bit,’ she suggested. ‘That storm’s moving this way. Thunder would cover a great deal of incidental clinking.’
They waited, leaning against the basalt walls of the city as the crack and tearing roar of the thunder marched inexorably towards them.
‘That should cover any noise we make,’ Sparhawk said after about ten minutes. ‘Let’s get inside before the rain comes.’
The gate itself was made of crudely squared-off logs bound with iron, and it stood slightly ajar. Sparhawk and his companions drew their weapons and slipped through one by one.
There was a strange smell to the city, an odour that seemed to have no counterpart in any place Sparhawk had ever visited. It was an odour neither fair nor foul, but one which was more than anything peculiarly alien. There were no torches to provide illumination, of course, and they were forced to rely upon the intermittent flickers of lightning staining the purple cloudbanks rolling in from the east. The streets revealed by those flashes were narrow, and their paving-stones had been worn smooth by centuries of shuffling feet. The houses were tall and narrow, and their windows were small and for the most part barred. The perpetual dust storms which scoured the city had rubbed the stones of the houses quite smooth. The same gritty dust had gathered in corners and along the doorsills of the houses to give the city, which could not have been deserted for much more than a few months, the air of a ruin abandoned for eons.
Talen slipped up behind Sparhawk and rapped on his armour.
‘Don’t do that, Talen.’
‘It got your attention, didn’t it? I’ve got an idea. Are you going to argue with me about it?’
‘I don’t think so. What was it you wanted to argue about?’
‘I have certain talents that are rather unique in this group, you know.’
‘I doubt that you’ll find very many purses to slit open, Talen. I don’t see all that many people about.’
‘Ha,’ Talen said flatly. ‘Ha. Ha. Ha. Now that you’re past that, are you ready to listen?’
‘I’m sorry. Go ahead.’
‘None of the rest of you could really sneak through a graveyard without waking up half the occupants, right?’
‘I wouldn’t go quite that far.’
‘I would. I’ll go on ahead – not too far, but just far enough. I’ll be able to come back and tell you about anybody coming – or hiding in ambush.’
Sparhawk didn’t wait this time. He made a grab for the boy, but Talen slipped out of his reach quite easily. ‘Don’t do that, Sparhawk. You just make yourself look foolish.’ He ran off a few feet, then stopped and slid his hand down into one boot. From its place of concealment he drew a long needle-pointed dirk. Then he vanished up the dark, narrow street.
Sparhawk swore.
‘What’s the matter?’ Kurik asked from not far behind him.
‘Talen just ran off.’
‘He did what?’
‘He says he’s going to scout on ahead. I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t catch him.’
From somewhere off in the maze of twisting streets there came a deep, mindless kind of howling.
‘What’s that?’ Bevier asked, taking a tighter grip on his long-handled lochaber axe.
‘The wind maybe?’ Tynian replied without much conviction.
‘The wind isn’t blowing.’
‘I know, but I think I prefer to believe that’s what’s causing the noise anyway. I don’t like the alternatives.’
They moved on, staying close to the sides of the houses and freezing involuntarily in their tracks with each flash of lightning and crack of thunder.
Talen came back, running on silent feet. ‘There’s a patrol coming,’ he said, staying just back out of reach. ‘Would you believe they’re carrying torches? They’re not trying to find anybody; they’re trying to make sure they don’t.’
‘How many?’ Ulath asked.
‘A dozen or so.’
‘Hardly enough to worry about then.’
‘Why not just cut over to the next street through this alley? Then you won’t even have to look at them, much less worry.’ The boy darted into an alleyway and disappeared again.
‘The next time we choose a leader, I think I’ll vote for him,’ Ulath murmured.
They moved on through the narrow, twisting streets. With Talen probing ahead of them, they were easily able to avoid the sporadic Zemoch patrols. As they worked their way nearer to the centre of the city, however, they reached a quarter where the houses were more imposing and the streets were wider. The next time Talen came back, a momentary flash of ghostly lightning revealed a disgusted expression on his face. ‘There’s another patrol just ahead,’ he reported. ‘The only trouble is that they’re not patrolling. It looks as if they broke into a wine shop. They’re sitting in the middle of the street drinking.’
Ulath shrugged. ‘We’ll just slip around them through the alleys again.’
‘We can’t,’ Talen said. ‘There aren’t any alleys leading off this street. I haven’t found any way to get around them, and we have to use this street. As nearly as I can tell, it’s the only one in the district that leads to the palace. This town doesn’t make any sense at all. None of the streets go where they’re supposed to.’
‘How many of these revellers do we have to contend with?’ Bevier asked him.
‘Five or six.’
‘And they have torches?’
Talen nodded. ‘They’re just around this next turn in the st
reet.’
‘With the torches flaring right in their eyes, they won’t be able to see in the dark very well.’ Bevier flexed his arm, swinging his axe suggestively.
‘What do you think?’ Kalten asked Sparhawk.
‘We might as well,’ Sparhawk said. ‘It doesn’t sound as if they’ll volunteer to get out of our way.’
It was more in the nature of simple murder than a fight. The carouse of the Zemoch patrol had advanced to the point where they were aggressively inattentive. The Church Knights simply walked up to them and cut them down. One of them cried out briefly, but his surprised shout was lost in a tearing crash of thunder.
Without a word the knights dragged the inert bodies to nearby doorways and concealed them. Then they gathered protectively around Sephrenia and continued along that wide, lightning-illuminated street towards the sea of smoky torches that appeared to be encircling Otha’s palace.
Once again they heard that howling sound, a sound devoid of any semblance of humanity. Talen returned, making no effort to evade them this time. ‘The palace isn’t far ahead,’ he said, speaking quietly despite the now almost continuous thunder. ‘There are guards out front. They’re wearing armour of some kind. It’s got all kinds of steel points sticking out of it. They look like hedgehogs.’
‘How many?’ Kalten asked.
‘More than I had time to count. Do you hear that wailing noise?’
‘I’ve been trying not to.’
‘I think you’d better get used to it. The guards are the ones making it.’
Otha’s palace was larger than the Basilica in Chyrellos, but it had no architectural grace. Otha had begun his life as a goatherd, and the principle which seemed to guide his sense of taste could best be summed up in the single word, ‘large’. So far as Otha was concerned, bigger was better. His palace had been constructed of fractured, rusty-black basalt rock. Because of its flat sides, basalt is easy for masons to work, but it offers little in the way of beauty. It lends itself to massive construction and not much else.
The palace reared like a mountain in the centre of Zemoch. There were towers, of course. Palaces always have towers, but the rough black spires clawing at the air above the main building had no grace, no balance and in most cases no evident purpose. Many of them had been started centuries before and then never finished. They jutted into the air, half-completed and surrounded by the rotting remains of crude scaffolding. The palace did not exude so much a sense of evil as it did of madness, of a kind of frenzied but purposeless effort.
Beyond the palace Sparhawk could see the swelling dome of the temple of Azash, a perfect rusty-black hemisphere constructed of huge, rigidly symmetrical hexagonal blocks of basalt which gave it the appearance of the nest of some enormous insect or some vast infected wound.
The area surrounding the palace and the adjoining temple was a kind of paved dead zone where there were no buildings nor trees nor monuments. It was simply a flat place extending out perhaps two hundred yards from the walls. It was lighted on this darkest of nights by thousands of torches thrust at random into the cracks between the flagstones to form what almost appeared to be a knee-high field of tossing fire.
The broad avenue which the knights were following appeared to continue directly across the fiery plaza to the main portal of the house of Otha, where it entered with undiminished breadth through the widest and highest pair of arched doors Sparhawk had ever seen. Those doors stood ominously open.
The guards stood in the space between the walls and that broad grain-field of torches. They were armoured, but their armour was more fantastic than any Sparhawk had ever seen. Their helmets had been wrought into the shape of skulls, and they were surmounted by branching steel antlers. The various joints – shoulder and elbow, hip and knee – were decorated with long spikes and flaring protrusions. Their forearms were studded with hooks, and the weapons they grasped were not so much weapons of death but of pain, with saw-tooth edges and razor-like barbs. Their shields were large and hideously painted.
Sir Tynian was Deiran, and Deirans from time immemorial have been the world’s experts on armour. ‘Now that’s the most idiotic display of pure childishness I’ve ever seen in my life,’ he said contemptuously to the others during a momentary lull in the thunder.
‘Oh?’ Kalten said.
‘Their armour’s almost useless. Good armour is supposed to protect the man wearing it but to give him a certain freedom of movement. There’s not much point in turning yourself into a turtle.’
‘It looks sort of intimidating, though.’
‘That’s all it really is – something worn for its appearance. All those spikes and hooks are useless, and worse yet, they’ll just guide an opponent’s weapon to vulnerable points. What were their armourers thinking of?’
‘It’s a legacy from the last war,’ Sephrenia explained. ‘The Zemochs were overwhelmed by the appearance of the Church Knights. They didn’t understand the actual purpose of armour – only its frightening appearance, so their armourers concentrated on appearance rather than utility. Zemochs don’t wear armour to protect themselves; they wear it to frighten their opponents.’
‘I’m not the least bit frightened, little mother,’ Tynian said gaily. ‘This is going to be almost too easy.’
Then at some signal only Otha’s hideously-garbed warriors could perceive, they all broke into that mindless wailing, a kind of gibbering howl devoid of any meaning.
‘Is that supposed to be some kind of war-cry?’ Berit asked nervously.
‘It’s about the best they can manage,’ Sephrenia told him. ‘Zemoch culture is basically Styric, and Styrics don’t know anything about war. Elenes shout when they go to war. Those guards are just trying to imitate the sound.’
‘Why don’t you take out the Bhelliom and erase them, Sparhawk?’ Talen suggested.
‘No!’ Sephrenia said sharply. ‘The Troll-Gods are confined now. Let’s not turn them loose again until we’re in the presence of Azash. There’s not too much point in unleashing Bhelliom on common soldiers and risking what we came here to do.’
‘She has a point,’ Tynian conceded.
‘They aren’t moving,’ Ulath said, looking at the guards. ‘I’m sure they can see us, but they aren’t making any effort to form up and protect that doorway. If we can smash through to the door, go inside and close it behind us, we won’t have to worry about them any more.’
‘Now that may just be the most inept plan I’ve ever heard,’ Kalten scoffed.
‘Can you think of a better one?’
‘No, as a matter of fact, I can’t.’
‘Well then?’
The knights formed up in their customary wedge formation and strode rapidly towards the gaping portal of Otha’s palace. As they approached through that fiery field, an oddly familiar reek came momentarily to Sparhawk’s nostrils.
As quickly as it had begun, the meaningless howling broke off, and the guards in their skull-faced armour stood motionless. They did not brandish their weapons or even attempt to gather more force before the portal. They simply stood.
Again there came that penetrating reek, but it was quickly swept away by a sudden wind. The lightning redoubled its fury and began to blast great chunks from nearby buildings with deafening crashes. The air about them seemed suddenly tinglingly alive.
‘Down!’ Kurik barked sharply. ‘Everybody get down on the ground!’
They did not understand, but they all immediately obeyed, diving for the ground with a great clattering of their armour.
The reason for Kurik’s alarmed shout became immediately apparent. Two of the grotesquely armoured guards to the left of the massive doors were suddenly engulfed in a brilliant ball of bluish fire and were quite literally blasted to pieces. Their fellows did not move or even turn to look as scorched bits and pieces of armour showered upon them.
‘It’s the armour!’ Kurik shouted over the crashing thunder. ‘Steel attracts lightning! Stay down!’
The lightning co
ntinued to blast down into the metalclad ranks of the skull-faced guardsmen, and the smell of burning flesh and hair gusted back across the broad plaza as the sudden wind swirled and rebounded from the high basalt walls of the palace.
‘They’re not even moving!’ Kalten exclaimed. ‘Nobody’s that disciplined.’
Then as the storm continued its ponderous march, the sudden flurry of lightning moved on to shatter deserted houses instead of steel-clad men.
‘Is it all right now?’ Sparhawk demanded of his squire.
‘I don’t know for certain,’ Kurik told him. ‘If you start to feel any kind of tingling, get down immediately.’
They rose warily to their feet. ‘Was that Azash?’ Tynian asked Sephrenia.
‘I don’t think so. If Azash had thrown the lightning, I don’t think he’d have missed us. It might have been Otha, though. Until we get to the temple, we’re more likely to encounter Otha’s work than anything conjured up by Azash.’
‘Otha? Is he really that skilled?’
‘Skilled probably isn’t the right word,’ she replied. ‘Otha has great power, but he’s clumsy. He’s too lazy to practise.’
They continued their menacing advance, but the men awaiting them in that grotesque armour still made no move either to attack or even to reinforce those of their number barring the door.
When Sparhawk reached the first of the guards, he raised his sword, and the previously motionless man howled at him and clumsily raised a broad-bladed axe embellished with useless spikes and barbs. Sparhawk slapped the axe aside and struck with his sword. The dreadful-looking armour was even less useful than Tynian had suggested. It was scarcely thicker than paper, and Sparhawk’s sword-stroke slashed down into the guard’s body as if it had met no resistance whatsoever. Even had he struck at a totally unprotected man, his sword should not have cut so deeply into the body.
Then the man he had just slaughtered collapsed, and his gashed armour gaped open. Sparhawk recoiled in sudden revulsion. The body inside the armour had not been the body of a living man. It appeared to be no more than blackened, slimy bones with a few shreds of rotting flesh clinging to them. A dreadful stink suddenly boiled out of the armour.