‘Very well, then,’ the little girl said to them. ‘We’re here to finish this, and we don’t have all that much time.’
‘Exactly what do you mean by “finish it”?’ Bevier asked her.
‘My family has agreed that we must put Bhelliom beyond the reach of men or Gods. No one must ever be able to find it or use it again. The others have given me one hour – and all of their power – to accomplish this. You may see some things that are impossible – you may even have noticed them already. Don’t concern yourselves about them, and don’t pester me with questions. We don’t have that much time. We were ten when we set out, and we’re the same ten now. It has to be that way.’
‘We’re going to throw it into the sea then?’ Kalten asked her.
She nodded.
‘Hasn’t that been tried before?’ Ulath asked her. ‘The Earl of Heid threw King Sarak’s crown into Lake Venne, as I recall, and Bhelliom still re-emerged.’
‘The sea is much deeper than Lake Venne,’ she told him, ‘and the water out there is much deeper than it is anywhere else in the world, and no one knows where this particular shoreline is.’
‘We do,’ Ulath disagreed.
‘Oh? Where is it? On which particular coast of which particular continent?’ She pointed upward at the dense cloud racing overhead. ‘And where’s the sun? Which way is east and which is west? All you can really say for sure is that you’re on a seacoast somewhere. You can tell anyone you like, and then every man who will ever live can start wading in the sea tomorrow, and they’ll never find Bhelliom, because they’ll never know exactly where to look.’
‘Then you want me to throw it into the sea?’ Sparhawk asked her as he dismounted.
‘Not quite yet, Sparhawk,’ she replied. ‘There’s something we have to do first. Would you get that sack I asked you to keep for me, Kurik?’
Kurik nodded, went back to his gelding and opened one of his saddlebags. Once again Sparhawk had that strong sense that something was wrong.
Kurik came back carrying a small canvas sack. He opened it and took out a small steel box with a hinged lid and a stout hasp. He held it out to the little girl. She shook her head and held her hands behind her. ‘I don’t want to touch it,’ she said. ‘I just want to look at it to make sure it’s right.’ She bent forward and examined the box closely. When Kurik opened the lid, Sparhawk saw that the interior of the box was lined with gold. ‘My brothers did well,’ she approved. ‘It’s perfect.’
‘Steel will rust in time, you know,’ Tynian told her.
‘No, dear one,’ Sephrenia told him. ‘That particular box will never rust.’
‘What about the Troll-Gods, Sephrenia,’ Bevier asked. ‘They’ve shown us that they can reach out to the minds of men. Won’t they be able to call someone and direct him to the place where the box lies hidden? I don’t think they’ll be happy lying at the bottom of the sea for all eternity.’
‘The Troll-Gods can’t reach out to men without the aid of Bhelliom,’ she explained, ‘and Bhelliom’s powerless as long as it’s locked in steel. It lay helpless in that iron deposit in Thalesia from the time this world was made until the day Ghwerig freed it. This may not be entirely foolproof, but it’s the best we can do, I think.’
‘Set the box down on the ground, Kurik,’ Flute instructed, ‘and open it. Sparhawk, take Bhelliom out of the pouch and tell it to sleep.’
‘Forever?’
‘I sort of doubt that. This world won’t last that long, and once it’s gone, Bhelliom will be free to continue its journey.’
Sparhawk took the pouch from his belt and untwisted the wire which held it closed. Then he upended the pouch and the Sapphire Rose fell out into his hand. He felt it shudder with a kind of relief as it was freed from its steel confinement. ‘Blue-Rose,’ he said calmly, ‘I am Sparhawk-from-Elenia. Do you know me?’
It glowed a deep, hard blue, neither hostile nor particularly friendly. The muted snarls he seemed to hear deep in his mind, however, told him that the Troll-Gods did not share that neutrality.
‘The time has come for you to sleep, Blue-Rose,’ Sparhawk said to the jewel. ‘There will be no pain, and when you awaken, you will be free.’
The jewel shuddered again, and its crystal glitter softened, almost as if in gratitude.
‘Sleep now, Blue-Rose,’ he said gently, holding the priceless thing in both hands. Then he placed it in the box and firmly closed the lid.
Wordlessly, Kurik handed him a small, cunningly-wrought lock. Sparhawk nodded and snapped the lock shut on the hasp, noting as he did that the lock had no keyhole. He looked questioningly at the Child-Goddess.
‘Throw it into the sea,’ she said, watching him intently.
A vast reluctance came over him. He knew that Bhelliom, confined as it was, could not be influencing him. The reluctance was his own. For a time, for a few short months, he had possessed something even more eternal than the stars, and he had somehow shared that just by touching it. It was that which made Bhelliom so infinitely precious. Its beauty, its perfection had never really had anything to do with it, though he yearned for just one last glimpse of it, one last touch of that soft blue glow on his hands. He knew that once he had cast it away, something very important would be gone from his life and that he would pass the remainder of his days with a vague sense of loss which might diminish with the passing of years, but would never wholly be gone.
He steeled himself, willing the pain of loss to come so that he might teach himself to endure it. Then he leaned back and threw the small steel object as far as he could out over the angry sea.
The hurtling steel box arched out over the crashing waves far below, and as it flew it began to glow, neither red nor blue nor any other colour, but rather sheer incandescent white. Far it went, further than any man could have thrown it, and then, like a shooting star, it fell in a long, graceful curve into the endlessly rolling sea.
‘That’s it then?’ Kalten asked. ‘That’s all we have to do?’
Flute nodded, her eyes filled with tears. ‘You can all go back now,’ she told them. She sat down beneath the tree and sadly took her pipes out from under her tunic.
‘Aren’t you coming with us?’ Talen asked her.
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll stay here for a while.’ Then she lifted her pipes and began to play a sad song of regret and loss.
They had only ridden a short distance with the sound of the pipes sadly following them when Sparhawk turned to look back. The tree was still there, of course, but Flute was gone. ‘She’s left us again,’ he told Sephrenia.
‘Yes, dear one,’ she sighed.
The wind picked up as they rode down from the promontory, and driven spray began to sting their faces. Sparhawk tried to pull the hood of his cloak forward to shield his face, but it was no use. No matter how hard he tried, the driving spray lashed at his cheeks and nose.
His face was still wet when he suddenly awoke and sat up. He mopped the salt brine away and reached inside his tunic.
Bhelliom was not there.
He knew that he would have to talk with Sephrenia, but there was something he wanted to find out first. He rose and went out of the house where they had set up their camp the previous day. Two doors down the street was the stable where they had put the cart in which Kurik lay. Sparhawk gently turned back the blanket and touched his friend’s cold face.
Kurik’s face was wet, and when Sparhawk touched his fingertip to his tongue, he could taste the salt brine of the sea. He sat for a long time, his mind reeling back from the immensity of what the Child-Goddess had so casually dismissed as mere ‘impossibilities’. The combined might of the Younger Gods of Styricum, it appeared, could accomplish anything. He decided at last not to even attempt a definition of what had happened. Dream or reality or something in between – what difference did it make? Bhelliom was safe now, and that was all that mattered.
They rode south to Korakach and on to Gaka Dorit, where they turned west towards Kadum on the Lamor
k border. Once they reached the lowlands, they began to encounter Zemoch soldiers fleeing to the east. There were no wounded with the soldiers, so there did not appear to have been a battle.
There was no sense of accomplishment or even of victory as they rode. The snow turned to rain as they came down out of the highlands, and the mournful dripping of the sky seemed to match their mood. There were no stories nor cheerful banter as they rode westward. They were all very tired, and all they really wanted to do was to go home.
King Wargun was at Kadum with a huge army. He was not moving, but sat firmly in place, waiting for the weather to break and for the ground to dry out. Sparhawk and the others were led to his headquarters, which, as might have been expected, were in a tavern.
‘Now there’s a real surprise,’ the half-drunk monarch of Thalesia said to the Patriarch Bergsten as Sparhawk and his friends entered. ‘I never thought I’d see them again. Ho, Sparhawk! come over by the fire. Have something to drink and tell us what you’ve been up to.’
Sparhawk removed his helmet and crossed the rushcovered tavern floor. ‘We went to the city of Zemoch, Your Majesty,’ he reported briefly. ‘As long as we were there anyway, we killed Otha and Azash. Then we started back.’
Wargun blinked. ‘That’s right to the point,’ he laughed. He looked around blearily. ‘You there!’ he bellowed at one of the guards at the door. ‘Go and find Lord Vanion. Tell him that his men have arrived. Did you find somewhere to lock up your prisoners, Sparhawk?’
‘We didn’t take any prisoners, Your Majesty.’
‘Now that’s the way to make war. Sarathi’s going to be cross with you, though. He really wanted Annias to stand trial.’
‘We’d have brought him, Wargun,’ Ulath told his king, ‘but he wasn’t very presentable.’
‘Which one of you killed him?’
‘Actually it was Azash, Your Majesty,’ Tynian explained. ‘The Zemoch God was very disappointed in Otha and Annias, so he did what seemed appropriate.’
‘How about Martel – and Princess Arissa – and the bastard Lycheas?’
‘Sparhawk killed Martel,’ Kalten told him. ‘Ulath chopped Lycheas’s head off, and Arissa took poison.’
‘Did she die?’
‘We assume so. She was doing a fairly good job of it when we left her.’
Then Vanion came in and went immediately to Sephrenia. Their secret, which wasn’t really a secret anyway, since everyone with eyes knew how they felt about each other, went out of the window as they embraced each other with a kind of fierceness uncharacteristic of either of them. Vanion kissed the cheek of the small woman he had loved for decades. ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said in a voice thick with emotion.
‘You know that I’ll never leave you, dear one,’ she said.
Sparhawk smiled faintly. That ‘dear one’ which she addressed to them all had rather neatly concealed the real ‘dear ones’ she directed to Vanion. There was a significant difference in the way she said it, he noticed.
Their recounting of what had taken place since they had left Zemoch was fairly complete. It was subdued, however, and it omitted a significant number of theological issues.
Then Wargun began a rambling and somewhat drink-slurred account of what had happened in Lamorkand and eastern Pelosia during the lengthy interval. The armies of the west, it appeared, had followed the strategy that had been worked out in Chyrellos before the campaign had begun, and the strategy seemed to have worked quite well.
‘And then,’ the tipsy monarch concluded, ‘just when we were ready to get down to some serious fighting, the cowards all turned tail and ran. Why won’t anyone stand and fight me?’ Wargun’s tone was plaintive. ‘Now I’m going to have to chase them all over the mountains of Zemoch to catch them.’
‘Why bother?’ Sephrenia asked him.
‘Why bother?’ he exclaimed. ‘To keep them from ever attacking us again, that’s why.’ Wargun was swaying in his seat, and he clumsily dipped another tankard of ale from the keg at his side.
‘Why waste the lives of your men?’ she asked. ‘Azash is dead. Otha is dead. The Zemochs will never come again.’
Wargun glared at her. Then he pounded his fist on the table. ‘I want to exterminate somebody!’ he roared. ‘You wouldn’t let me wipe out the Rendors! You called me to Chyrellos before I could finish up! But I’ll be a cross-eyed Troll if I’ll let you steal the Zemochs from me as well!’ Then his eyes glazed, and he slid slowly under the table and began to snore.
‘Your king has an amazing singleness of purpose, my friend,’ Tynian said to Ulath.
‘Wargun’s a simple man,’ Ulath shrugged. ‘There isn’t room in his head for more than one idea at a time.’
‘I’ll go with you to Chyrellos, Sparhawk,’ Vanion said. ‘I might be able to help you persuade Dolmant to pull Wargun up short.’ That, of course, was not Vanion’s real reason for accompanying them, but Sparhawk chose not to question his friend any more closely.
They left Kadum early the following morning. The knights had removed their armour and travelled in mail-shirts, tunics and heavy cloaks. That did not appreciably increase their speed, but it did make them more comfortable. The rain went on day after day, a dreary, foggy drizzle that seemed to wash out all signs of colour. They travelled through the sullen tag-end of winter, almost never really warm and certainly never wholly dry. They passed through Motera and rode on to Kadach, where they crossed the river and moved at a canter south towards Chyrellos. Finally, on a rainy afternoon they reached the top of a hill and looked down at the war-ravaged Holy City.
‘I think our first step is to find Dolmant,’ Vanion decided. ‘It’s going to take a while for a messenger to get back to Kadum to stop Wargun, and a break in the weather could start to dry out the fields in Zemoch.’ Vanion began to cough, a tearing kind of cough.
‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ Sparhawk asked him.
‘I think I’ve picked up a cold, that’s all.’
They did not enter Chyrellos as heroes. There were no parades, no fanfares, no cheering throngs throwing flowers. In point of fact, nobody even seemed to recognize them, and the only thing that was thrown was garbage from the windows of the upper floors of the houses they passed. Very little had been done in the way of repairs or reconstruction since Martel’s armies had been driven out, and the citizens of Chyrellos existed in squalor among the ruins.
They entered the Basilica still muddy and travel-worn and went directly up to the administrative offices on the second floor. ‘We have urgent news for the Archprelate,’ Vanion said to the black-robed Churchman who sat at an ornate desk shuffling papers and trying to look important.
‘I’m afraid that’s absolutely out of the question,’ the Churchman said, looking disdainfully at Vanion’s muddy clothing. ‘Sarathi’s meeting with a deputation of Cammorian Primates at the moment. It’s a very important conference, and it mustn’t be interrupted by some unimportant military dispatch. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?’
Vanion’s nostrils went white, and he thrust back his cloak to free his sword-arm. Before things had the chance to turn ugly, however, Emban came along the hall. ‘Vanion?’ he exclaimed, ‘and Sparhawk? When did you get back?’
‘We only just arrived, Your Grace,’ Vanion replied. ‘There seems to be some question about our credentials here.’
‘Not as far as I’m concerned. You’d better come inside.’
‘But, Your Grace,’ the Churchman objected, ‘Sarathi’s meeting with the Cammorian Patriarchs, and there are other deputations who have been waiting and are far more –’ He broke off as Emban slowly turned on him.
‘Who is this man?’ Emban seemed to direct the question at the ceiling. Then he looked at the man behind the desk. ‘Pack your things,’ he instructed. ‘You’ll be leaving Chyrellos first thing in the morning. Take plenty of warm clothing. The monastery at Husdal is in northern Thalesia, and it’s very cold there at this time of year.’
The Cammorian Primates
were summarily dismissed, and Emban ushered Sparhawk and the others into the room where Dolmant and Ortzel waited.
‘Why didn’t you send word?’ Dolmant demanded.
‘We thought Wargun was going to take care of that, Sarathi,’ Vanion told him.
‘You trusted Wargun with a message that important? All right, what happened?’
Sparhawk, with occasional help from the others, recounted the story of the trip to Zemoch and told them of what had happened there.
‘Kurik?’ Dolmant said in a stricken voice at one point in the narrative.
Sparhawk nodded.
Dolmant sighed and bowed his head in sorrow. ‘I imagine that one of you did something about that,’ he said, his voice almost savage.
‘His son did, Sarathi,’ Sparhawk replied.
Dolmant was aware of Talen’s irregular parentage. He looked at the boy with some surprise. ‘How did you manage to kill a warrior in full armour, Talen?’ he asked.
‘I stabbed him in the back, Sarathi,’ Talen replied in a flat tone of voice, ‘– right in the kidneys. Sparhawk had to help me drive the sword into him, though. I couldn’t get through his armour with it all by myself.’
‘And what will happen to you now, my boy?’ Dolmant sadly asked him.
‘We’re going to give him a few more years, Sarathi,’ Vanion said, ‘and then we’re going to enrol him as a novice in the Pandion order – along with Kurik’s other sons. Sparhawk made Kurik a promise.’
‘Isn’t anybody going to ask me about this?’ Talen demanded in an outraged tone.
‘No,’ Vanion told him, ‘as a matter of fact, we’re not.’
‘A knight?’ Talen protested. ‘Me? Have you people all taken leave of your senses?’
‘It’s not so bad, Talen,’ Berit grinned, ‘once you get used to it.’
Sparhawk continued with the story. A number of things had happened in Zemoch which Ortzel was theologically unprepared to accept, and as the story wound down, his eyes became glazed, and he sat in stupefied shock.