Samples from books that we have published under the Eartherean Press imprint.
This is another in a series from the second book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: The Divine Queen.
© 1982 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Ara-Karn, at Last
ABOVE THE ROCKY COOMB the Imperial engineers and their slaves worked on, finishing their task. With picks and iron pries, they dug out the last stones of the bridgeway to the double gates, loading them in great wooden baskets hanging from the battlements far above. The high, black gates were shut fast now, not to be opened save by bloody, fearsome force.
Below, about the fringes of the square, some barbarians could be seen riding by. They were fewer now, for the smoke of the fires was choking in the streets. Only a few wretched survivors, driven from their holes by fire and smoke, slipped through the patrols and staggered across the square, and begged to be brought across the coomb.
But the engineers and their slaves worked on. The temporary wooden bridges now were not long enough to cross the widening gap, and had been taken up. The last survivors wailed piteously, but the engineers had little choice: they had their own skins to think of. The survivors clambered down into the coomb among the bloody bodies of the Emperor’s last followers. From there they would have climbed up to where the engineers worked; yet that was a climb beyond their skill and strength. One after another they fell back. At length, they lay at the bottom of the coomb, weeping and praying for merciful death.
Hoofbeats rang on the ashen stones of the square. A lone rider broke from the burning stony wilderness of High Town and rode up toward the Gates looming large and dark above him. The rider wore a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg; the hood masked his features. He did not pause but drove his wearied horse on – it leapt from the end of the square and, scrambling, fell with a crash against the little lip of rock on which the engineers worked. The rider was thrown from the saddle by the impact, but the horse, neighing fearfully, its chest broken and red, fell to its death.
Cursing, the engineers assailed the rider. ‘Fellow,’ they shouted, ‘dark God alone could care whether you will kill yourself, but must you murder us while you are about it?’
The newcomer disdained to answer. Up close, the engineers could see within the hood that this was a young-looking man with dark hair and a short beard, whose muddied, torn cloak and tunic bespoke a long, difficult journey. Tugging the line of the basket, he brought forth a guardsman above, who took up the full basket and lowered it again unloaded. From the engineers’ equipment the rider took a length of rope and let it down to those huddled wretches in the coomb. Looping the rope around his middle, the stranger drew the wretches up one at a time. The last of them took up the stranger’s saddle-pouches from the twitching carcass of the horse.
As men and women escaped living from the embalmers, the wretches wept and clamored at the rider’s knees, thanking and hailing him. ‘For what you have done, how may words or deeds repay? May Goddess bless and guard you, sir. You are our savior.’
The man smiled as he helped them into the basket. He had ever been one to appreciate a jest.
When the last of the cityfolk were safely aloft, the rider turned to the engineers. ‘Your work is finished now,’ he told them. ‘This should be enough.’
They, eying the smoke and the barbarians below, were not of a mind to quarrel with him. The engineers were taken up, and then their slaves. The stranger would not go up until the last of the others were secure. Only then did he himself step into the basket. Far above, the slaves pulled at the ropes, and the wheels turned; and the swaying basket rose.
The plain of the city slowly lowered itself before the view of the man in the basket. The lower quarters were no more than a cindery waste, to the north and south and the bright horizon. Yet High Town burned and smoldered still. The air was sick with the stench of the burning dead and the bones of Tarendahardil. Faintly on the winds rose the cries of the slaughtered and the hoofbeats of the conquerors.
Yet they were fading, as the City was slowly emptied, and her death-throes ended.
From the shadow of one of the huge disks of the Pillar of Victory, brawny arms raised on high a bow. It was a great bow with a double-curve, better-made than most, and likely to have been one of those the Warlord himself had fashioned with his own arts for those archers he deemed among the finest. And the arrow the arms pulled back against the gut string was dark and true, like those arrows the Warlord had said were the true death-birds. Those arrows never failed to hit their mark, and never failed to kill what they hit.
The bowman aimed the arrow at the hooded man in the basket, and let fly.
True the death-bird lanced through the air; it struck the man full in the breast about the heart. A cheer rose from the lips of the tribesmen gathered about, and the archer smiled and turned to make his boast, when his lips turned down, and words failed him.
In the basket, the man in the dark green hooded hunting-cloak took the shaft of the death-bird and drew it bloody from his heart. He held the arrow before him and touched the brow of his hood with it, saluting the man who had killed him.
The barbarians drew back in superstitious fear. Never before had one of their Warlord’s matchless death-birds failed to kill.
The basket lurched and stopped. After a moment, the hooded man turned from his contemplation of the destroyed city and stepped upon the steady stones of the parapet of the battlements. With a careless, weary gesture, he dropped his saddle-pouches on the stone beside his boots. The arrow he held onto, turning it idly in his fingers like a toy.
Before him the battlements rose in three broad low steps. Through the smaller inner gates the grounds of the Citadel might be seen, filled with the huddled, wretched survivors of Tarendahardil. There were outbuildings, stables, sheds, workhouses and shrines. Above them were the high black walls of the Imperial Palace itself, a huge, thousand-eyed edifice built up of the same perdurable volcanic stone of the mountain itself.
Leaping aloft against the dark horizon, the highest tower commanded attention, both because it alone was built not of the black but of white, smoothly chiseled stone, as well as for the gleaming golden mirror set upon its high roof like a beacon, which they called the Disk of Goddess. The upper reaches of that tower had but a single narrow window to mar the gleam of the stones, where the private dimchamber of the Empress of the South was said to be.
The many lines of battlements and buildings stretched flatly to either side, a fieldlike ending to the sheer loft of the mountain. Only the dark outlines of the man standing on the parapet and that lonely tower the color of bone stood upright to break the monotony.
The mountainous billows of smoke and ash wheeled about the mountaintop, filled with predatory birds, so that it seemed almost as if it were the very earth that convulsed in revulsion at what she had been forced to witness; but the white tower was still, and so, for that moment at least, was the stranger.
He stopped. He looked from the tower to the arrow yet bloody in his hand.
‘I have changed my mind,’ he called hoarsely to the guardsmen. ‘Surely your supplies here must be limited, and you need no more mouths to feed. Lower me down again, and I will return whence I came, and trouble you no more.’
‘But the barbarians,’ the guardsmen protested. ‘You cannot hope to evade them, or oppose them all by yourself.’
‘Will you joke with me? I tell you, let me down!’
‘Calm yourself, man,’ said one.
‘We know, we all have felt your sickness and fury at what Ara-Karn has done,’ another added. ‘But such despair is only another weapon in his bloody hands.’
‘And then think you, there is her majesty, the Empress. She will need all such brave and skillful defenders as you if she is to be spared the ravages of the barbarian. And she will wish to reward you for your services.’
‘Yes,’ the man said, ‘there is that…’
‘But what are we to call you? Have you but now come from Egland Downs?’
He looked at them for a moment as if he were minded to tell them. Within the hollow circles of his eyes were darkness and space and the sparks of an echoing horror – the black darkness of the Darklands, where Estar Kane led the savage Madpriests – the unbounded space of the desolate Marches this side of the knife-edged border – the fiery horror of the ruins of this, the finest city known to man. Half he had opened his lips, but then he shut them and shook his head.
He stepped down off the parapet and mounted the steps of the battlements, easily, like a man long seasons absent, returned at last to a home he scarcely knows; he looks about him puzzled, making the effort to marry his memories with what his eyes perceive. So this one, as he answered the guardsmen’s question quietly, in sadness and disgust and a deep, pitiless weariness.
‘I am Ennius Kandi, Charan of Elsvar in Gerso and of Danel in Ul Raambar.’
So it was that Ara-Karn returned to the Citadel of Elna, as he had promised his mistress that he would.
