The dog was more trouble. Whining and anxious, feeling the tension about her, she wound between people’s legs and was eventually banished from the tent when she tripped Isphet over.
Boaz paced back and forth. “Damn!” he muttered as we heard a unit of mounted men clatter by, and he was out the tent flap before I could say or do anything.
“Tirzah!” Isphet shouted after me, but she was also too late, and I rushed outside into chaos.
Iraldur and his men already had a good idea of what it would take to defeat the stone-men, but they had been caught before their final preparations were completed. Now they rushed about, feverishly finding anything that might be used to trip thick, shuffling stone legs. Rope, leather reins, even girths from saddles. Many of the thousands of horses in camp were loose; others had been appropriated, but most men preferred to fight this battle on foot. No horse was going to remain calm in the face of a stone-man, and a mounted soldier would be too vulnerable to those flailing arms.
Twenty thousand flailing arms.
I had lost Boaz in the confusion, and I realised I’d wandered far from the tent myself. What was I doing? I was a fool.
Suddenly I realised that the stone ground was shaking beneath my feet.
The movement of all those about me, I tried to tell myself. But no human army or equine stampede could make the earth shudder as it did now.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
So close? So close? I trembled, then tried to reassure myself that twenty thousand stone legs could make a thump that might be felt a league away.
“My Lady!” Kiamet screamed behind me, then he seized me in strong arms and hauled me away.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
“What…?” I began, struggling to find my breath as I recovered from the shock of Kiamet’s assault. “What’s…?”
“Stone-men!” he gasped, and dragged me further into the darkness. “Everywhere!”
And, oh gods, yes, they were! I screamed as a stone figure lurched out of the gloom, its arms windmilling, its face twisted in desperate moaning. It struck Kiamet on the shoulder and we both fell, rolling away as a stone foot crashed not a hand’s breadth away from my face.
Despite his injury Kiamet hauled me to my feet and we ran, ducking and weaving through bodies, flesh and stone, two-legged and four.
There was nowhere to hide. Nowhere to shelter. Nothing but flatness to aid the stone-men. Boaz! Isphet!
Kiamet’s remaining good arm tightened around me again, and he pulled me to the left, and then we twisted to the right. A shape loomed before me, and we ducked and rolled, then rose and fled.
I was sobbing with terror, sure I was going to die. Stone-men were everywhere! Soldiers were among them, and many a stone-man tumbled to the ground…but there were thousands of them. So many…so many.
“They broke ranks before Zabrze could attack,” Kiamet explained, his eyes searching through the darkness for the next threat. “They ran amok…in every direction.”
“Oh gods, Kiamet! What can we do?”
“Nothing, save survive,” and we were off again, twisting, avoiding one stone arm only by a deep breath, another only through luck as my leg twisted and I dragged Kiamet down with me.
“What about Boaz? Isphet? There’s no-one…”
Thud, and we rolled away again and scrambled to our feet.
“Nothing I can do. I can save one of you and one only. And even that one…”
My leg was screaming, and I wondered if I’d broken it. I could hardly bear any weight on it, and I think Kiamet was virtually carrying me now.
We stopped, searching for escape, but there seemed to be none. There were more stone-men than soldiers, more traps than avenues of escape.
Then absolute horror reared before us.
Chad-Nezzar. Blackened and peeling skin ran from his face and body, but I knew who it was instantly. He had a scimitar, and he heaved it aloft with both hands. He opened his mouth and…and from it issued forth Nzame’s voice.
Which would you prefer, Tirzah? Death? Or Infinity in my embrace?
I screamed until I thought I would rupture my throat.
Kiamet hit me. Not strongly, but enough to stop my cries.
Which would you prefer, Tirzah? Death? Or Infinity in my embrace? Chad-Nezzar can deal whichever you choose. His body is mine now. Do you like it? Would you prefer that –
A blade whistled through the air behind the grotesque puppet and sliced its head from its shoulders.
Iraldur, blood seeping from a wound to his head and more from an injury to his shoulder. “Get her out of here, you fool!” he yelled to Kiamet. “Or I shall take your head as well!”
Kiamet took him at his word and dragged me away…but it was away into more confusion.
I was so terrified now I could neither cry nor scream, just cling to Kiamet. I was sure I was going to die, sure we were all going to die. There was nothing but flailing arms, nothing but to curl up and wait for –
Tirzah! Tirzah!
Now I did find the breath to sob. Oh, no! Not him! Not him again!
Tirzah! Tirzah!
“Tirzah!” Kiamet panted in my ear. “Look, curse you, look!”
I raised my head. Then blinked, sure I was hallucinating in my terror.
Avaldamon stood some thirty paces away, beckoning urgently. I blinked again. Yes, Avaldamon. Wraith-like to be sure, but undoubtedly Avaldamon.
Kiamet hauled me towards the spectre, and neither of us thought to duck or weave as we raced through the berserk arms of the stone-men.
Luck – perhaps something else – saved us, and we reached the spot where Avaldamon had been.
Had been. Now he was gone.
“Avaldamon!” I sobbed, then looked down. Fetizza sat huddled in a small cleft in the rock. She looked very, very angry.
Water was welling up about her.
I sank to my knees, then to my hands. What advantage would water give –
“Good girl,” Kiamet said softly, and sank down beside me, reaching out to stroke Fetizza on the head. “Good girl.”
I was soaking. I had never seen the water rise this fast before. It spread in a great pool about us, and Fetizza’s huge black eyes had lost none of their anger.
A stone-man lurched in our direction.
I cringed, knowing we were dead.
He slipped in the water. For an instant a look of almost comical surprise spread across the stone face, replacing the despair, then he was down, crashing with such a thud that it shook the stone about us.
The water was now cascading from the cleft.
There was another thud, then another, then several at once.
Fetizza burped.
Water pumped out of every crack about us. I had to hook my fingers into a fissure in the rock to prevent myself from being carried away.
The sound of stone bodies hitting stone ground was now almost deafening, yet still I could hear shouts of triumph rise above the crashing.
Fetizza croaked contentedly, and wriggled about in her rocky fissure.
Kiamet and I wandered for hours, searching for Boaz. Isphet we’d found fairly quickly. She had stayed with the tent, relatively safe from the stone-men. Only three had come her way, and they’d got so tangled in the tent ropes they’d fallen over and protected her from further incursions.
She’d not touched them until the danger was past.
Now we searched through a landscape littered with moans and impotently waving arms. Every one of the stone-men left on his feet when Fetizza had set the waters free had been felled by the slippery water. They had accidentally killed or maimed several dozen of our men in the process.
And scores of other men had been killed in the confused terror beforehand. The ten thousand running amok had created the havoc Nzame wished. Gods knew what would have happened if Fetizza hadn’t acted.
“Boaz?” I called softly into the night. “Boaz?”
Kiamet limped beside me. He was badly injured, and should have gone to the t
ents for treatment, but he insisted on staying with me.
“Boaz? Boaz?”
A figure loomed before me and I cried out, reaching out my arms.
But it was Zabrze, not Boaz, and while I was happy to see him alive, he was not my Boaz.
“Isphet?” he asked. “Isphet?”
“She’s at the tent where you left her. Zabrze –”
But he was gone, running through the night.
I turned, and stared into the face of Iraldur.
“Still alive, I see,” he grunted. “And we’ve won through, but at a cost I’d not expected.”
Then he was gone, and I was crying, for I was sure I would not see Boaz again.
“Come on, my Lady,” Kiamet muttered, “there’s no good to be done wandering about here during the night. There’s plenty you can fix in the morning. But for now –”
“For now I’ll take her, Kiamet. Get yourself over to Iraldur’s physicians’ tents, for you need fixing yourself.”
“Boaz!”
His arms wrapped about me, as tight as ever I could have wanted them, and we were crying and rocking together in the night, alone save for ten thousand stone-men lying on their backs and waving sadly to the uncaring moon above.
45
THE scene in the morning was almost unbelievable – and contained its own terrors. The water Fetizza had called forth had worked its magic overnight, and now edges of rock speared into the sky revealing new earth, and further tumbling helpless stone-men into piles of rocky wreckage.
“How,” Isphet said softly by my side, “are we going to cope?”
I linked my arm through hers, needing her support as much as she needed my comfort. Soldiers were wandering the field of battle, looking for any fallen comrades they may have missed in the darkness. They stepped carefully around the occasional stone hand that snatched reflexively at them.
Zabrze had told us this morning that one hundred and eighty of his men, and three hundred and four of Iraldur’s, had been killed. Half the horses had fled and were now presumably wandering the stone plains, too terrified to come back while the stone-men were still alive.
Boaz was already working in the stone landscape. He leaned down by one stone-man, then stood again as stone marbled into flesh. He did not wait to see whether the stone revealed man or woman, but moved on to the next.
“Come on,” I said. “He cannot do it all by himself.”
But neither could three. We worked through that day, then the next, and then halfway through the day after that, until Zabrze laid his hand on Boaz’s shoulder and said, “Enough.”
We had released perhaps six hundred in that time, and the effort had exhausted us. Isphet and Boaz looked like automatons themselves, skin waxen and grey, eyes sunken, and I’m sure I could not have looked much better.
“But what can we do?” I asked. “We cannot leave them here –”
“Yes, we can,” Zabrze said, and helped Boaz to his feet.
“We have won this field,” Zabrze continued, “but Nzame still rages within Threshold. I don’t want any of us trapped here, least of all you three. Perhaps that’s what Nzame wanted, to have you ensnared by your compassion for the souls these stone-men contain.”
“But –” Isphet said tiredly.
“They can lie here and moan until we have dealt with Nzame. I am sorry, Isphet, but they will remember nothing of it afterwards, and even if you could release these ten thousand over the next few days without killing yourself in the process I have no means of feeding or caring for them. They are best left here.”
Zabrze turned towards the west. “We head for Setkoth.”
I looked at Isphet. Were Zabrze’s children still in Setkoth? Had they been eaten? Or were they among this forest of stone still waving sadly at us?
We moved out the next day. Iraldur and several thousand of his men accompanied us; others remained behind to shepherd the Released towards shelter and land that could feed them.
Most of the horses had been recaptured in the days following the battle, and so many men had been killed or stayed behind that Iraldur had horses to spare.
Neither Zabrze nor Iraldur thought we would have much need of an army where we were going. Small groups of stone-men might still be wandering about, but they would be easily dealt with.
I shifted uncomfortably on my mare. I had never ridden before, and I clung to the pommel of the saddle, wishing I had the grace of even the oldest and stoutest of Iraldur’s soldiers.
Boaz rode with the skill and grace born of long hours spent in the saddle as a child. Fetizza rode with him, slung about his back in a moistened blanket, and though they should have been a ridiculous sight, somehow the frog and the man radiated only dignity and assurance.
Setkoth lay directly to the east, and Zabrze led us hard and fast toward it. I crawled from the saddle each evening – generally either Kiamet or Boaz had to help me – and sank silently to the hard stony ground. Holdat, who had assigned himself as general cook and servant to our group, would brew a reviving tea, then pass around steamed grain and meat, with a piece of fruit each to sweeten our palates afterwards.
Once she had been freed from her blanket, Fetizza would worry at Holdat until he threw some grain and meat her way, then she would hop off to the nearest crack in the stone, eye it carefully, then somehow, impossibly, squeeze herself into it.
As soon as Fetizza had chosen her crack for the night, the entire camp would rearrange itself so that we lay to the north and east of her. No-one wanted to wake up in the midst of a cold river.
Behind us stretched reawakening land, before us and to our flanks stretched the stone, relieved only by the representations of Threshold. The eyes still watched, and sometimes I thought they winked.
Nzame did not bother me on this ride to Setkoth. Perhaps because I was so exhausted and unresponsive each night – both from the effects of the day’s ride and the lingering exhaustion of our attempts to reawaken so many stone-men. So as soon as I closed my eyes I slipped into a deep sleep, awakening only when Boaz laid a hand on my shoulder and told me I had to rise.
Yet if I slept well, Boaz often had dark shadows under his eyes, and I wondered if Nzame disturbed his sleep now instead. But I did not ask. Boaz would only tell me that he slept well, and that he would prevail against the demon when he confronted him in the Infinity Chamber.
I did not like to have Boaz lie to me, so I did not probe.
We rode for twelve days until we reached the Lhyl River. It wound its peaceful way through the barren landscape, surrounded by reed banks of stone.
“Why can’t Nzame alter the water?” I asked Boaz as we reined in beside it late one afternoon.
“Probably because it is descended from the tears of the Soulenai,” he answered. “It has too much magic.”
Fetizza wriggled behind him, and he twisted about and lowered her to the ground.
She bounded through the stone reeds and leapt into the water with a huge splash.
“Look!” I cried. Wherever droplets of water had splashed, stone had turned to green.
I grinned at Boaz. “I think nothing can compete with the magic of Fetizza, and she was all your creation, beloved.”
He smiled back. “Our creation, for she was born of your goblet.”
We camped by the river that night. Setkoth was a day’s ride away, and we all made a determined effort to be cheerful for this night. Who knew what horrors Setkoth would contain.
We bathed and splashed – even the horses were pleased to see such an expanse of water, and they rolled about in its edges.
And wherever water splashed, so green spread. By the time the evening meal was cooked, the riverbanks on either side of the Lhyl were green and fragrant for a hundred paces above and below the camp.
Holdat waved us to the campfire, but instead of handing out plates of food, he held a bucket and tipped its contents before Isphet, Boaz and myself.
Hundreds of tiny, stone frogs.
“I spent the eveni
ng wandering the banks, looking for these,” he said. “Fetizza’s efforts have produced the reeds. Now we need the song to serenade us to sleep.”
Iraldur, who had sat down with Zabrze, stared as the three of us, laughing, transformed the frogs one by one. They were far easier to transform than people. Not only were they smaller than a stone-man, but their life force was much stronger.
“Will you have to do that to every creature within Ashdod?” Iraldur asked.
Isphet and I sighed, and left it for Boaz to answer.
“I hope not, Iraldur. I surely hope not. Once Nzame is gone, then I pray the land and all its creatures will return to life.”
I dropped my eyes and let the last frog bound away into the dusk. For me, at least, the evening had lost its cheer.
Setkoth was a stone grave.
I remembered a city that was awash with colour and almost indecent with vibrant life. It had spread both sides of the river, glistening in the sun, banners and washing fluttering in the breeze, streets crowded with the businesses of trade and crime, brown faces and arms leaning from windows and balconies, bright eyes laughing at the passage of life.
Now all was stone. The buildings, the streets, the life, the hopes.
Tears ran down Zabrze’s face. I had never seen him so openly emotional; not even Neuf’s death had touched him so deeply. This had been his city, his home. Now it was a tomb.
And we trailed silently through that damned city like mourners come to acknowledge the dead.
We could see no-one, flesh or stone. No dogs, no mules, no people.
The city was empty.
“If they were alive,” Boaz said, “they would have fled. Everything, everyone.”
“Where?” Zabrze asked, his voice harsh. “Where?”
“They would have followed the river, Zabrze. North perhaps, thinking to get to En-Dor. They were our major trading partner.”
“We had a few hundred come through to Darsis,” Iraldur called from his chariot. “But as Boaz said, most would have chosen to follow the river north.”