Samples from books that we have published at Eartherean Books.
This is another in a series from the fourth book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: Darkbridge.
© 2009 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
The Final Flight
HE DREAMED he saw a forest’s edge, and from it a lonely rider broke and entered on the fringes of a vast and withered range. And in the dream he was himself the rider.
He rode a horse that once had been a noble beast, yet now its eyes were glazed and its coat befouled, and it bore him with a rolling, stuporous gait. And his own looks, beneath the tangle of his ragged hair and dirty garments, were those of one gently born – gently born, but fallen now from grace. His eyes were hollows, his mouth a whip-welt, his hands gripped the reins too tightly.
He looked not behind him, nor too far before. Alone upon that stark expanse, he rode as if all the hordes of bloodletting God rode at his tail, pursuing him or following his lead. Off to the right the blazing Goddess-sun sat like a fattened blood-beetle, half a fist above the horizon. Somewhat above Her the faint green God-moon was rising.
Sometime later he raised his head and looked about. The range spread to all sides, stopped only by sky. His horse’s gait was not so measured now. He drew back on the reins; and gratefully the horse slowed to a walk. Between his legs the stiff-ribbed barrel chest heaved and strove. With an effort he let fall the reins, and the horse stopped and swayed as if it might fall. He clambered to the ground, pulling after him his bags of food and drink.
He made an end to a brief meal and lay back on the harsh cushion of the grass.
He watched himself there. He had in the dream the look of a young man, but the lines of his face bore too many accounts unpaid-for.
Of a sudden he sat up and cried aloud a word. Convulsively his hands sought the sword that hung still beside the saddle. The range grew away from him, infinite and void. Dark against the moveless sun, the horse looked mournfully into his eyes.
He plucked stick-burrs from his cloak and urged the horse onwards. He held Goddess-sun firmly to his right hand side. Impassive and still She sat, far away, unmoved by the travails of tiny men.
Slowly he wended his way down the range. The verdure grew rarer; the air drier, choked with pungent dust. He found the track of an extinct river and followed it, deeper into the desert.
When his horse died he gathered the wood the river had left and cooked one of the haunches. The meat was acrid and left him thirstier. He tied the bags to his back and wandered on. Perched atop the bags, his heavy, bloody shortsword swung and gleamed. Behind him the desert carrion gathered, and nicely cleaned the bones.
A river fell out of the mountains far ahead, cold and bitter with the ceaseless darkness beyond; and at a bend in the river a small city rose. He stumbled down into the city, into air that was sweet with water.
He found an inn, and drank and ate. Then at last he seemed to slough off the last vestments of the desert, and looked about him at the others there, as if he were a man among men. In a voice unused to speaking, he asked if any of them knew the way to the city of Zaproll on the Sea.
‘That is no hard task,’ answered the innkeeper. ‘This river Somois is your road. Follow it to where it meets the sea and you will find what you seek.’
He strewed some coins across the table, took his bags and left. The men looked after him.
‘A queer sort,’ remarked the man at table. ‘But then, did you not say he came out of the desert?’
‘I marked me well his trappings,’ said the innkeeper. ‘Even so foul I knew them for the mark of the charanti of Gerso.’
‘Gerso,’ murmured the innkeeper’s winegirl, compassion on her pretty brown face. ‘That is a world away, on the border of the cold wilderness where they say Elna caged the barbarians. How has he come so far?’
‘How has Ara-Karn?’ answered her master.
§
SOUTH the Somois ran, down along the mountains, away from the moveless Sun. It broadened at its delta where, soft as columns of smoke against the dark-bright water beyond, rose the towers of the city of Zaproll on the Sea.
Shyly the Gerso entered the city, asking the way of those he passed. So at length he came to a great house by the vineyards and knocked upon its door. A slave admitted him. Then was it just past the time of the fifth meal, and the wealthy master and his family reclined on couches on the stoa, taking herb and enjoying the fine weather. Wordless he stood before them, then he cast down his bags and sank on his knees. Great tears welled from his eyes and fell upon the stone walk, dark as ink.
Three times he essayed to speak to them, but each time his voice choked in his throat.
‘O sir,’ he managed to say at last, ‘you will not know me now, but we are of a family, and once you loved my father. And once, when I was very young, my father sent me here to take a winter. And I slept in a chamber the color of pink sea-coral and played with your daughter, whom you called Asta.’
Thereat the master’s wife arose and exclaimed, ‘Look, my husband: it is none other than your kinsman’s only son from Gerso in the North.’
And the master nodded, and raised the youth to his feet. ‘Even had you stood in the crowds of Tarendahardil should I have known you,’ he said.
They bade him lie on a couch in the cool of the stoa, and they spoke of old family matters, tales of folk he had not seen in years. And the faces of his family grew dim before his eyes, and he ceased to move or smile.
Through the garden a young woman came, lovely in her grace. ‘They are bringing in the catch,’ she began; then beheld him on the couch. ‘But what man is this?’
‘Hush, Asta,’ said her mother. ‘This is one you should know well. Yet for now let him rest.’
So the slaves laid the Gerso to rest in the dimchamber for guests, whose walls were the color of pink sea-coral.
§
THE LONG STONE QUAYS of the city of Zaproll on the Sea smelled of salt and fish-heads beneath the clustering birds. On the hillsides above the city the work of the wine went on, and the laborers bent over the grain, mowing with sickles and scythes the year’s second harvest. Below the city the many boats entered the harbor laden with shining fish. Asta walked with him along the stone ways above the boats.
She asked him with a pretty pouting, ‘Why do you draw away from me?’
He answered, ‘You would hate me, if you knew all I have done.’
‘What then?’ she teased.
He looked at her with a desolate humor, worse than pain, showing on his countenance. ‘Oh, I am not the same one you knew when we were both young, Asta. Then I was a little boy, but now I am a man and have had the best of tutors, and learned my lessons well. In Gerso he tutored me, among the burning ruins, on the art of hate and sorrow. Now I am a traitor to my kind, and the blood of thousands stains my hands.’ Seeing her look he laughed a laugh that ended too suddenly. He stood over her, and something terrible and fierce blazed out of his eyes, so that unthinkingly she turned away.
‘No,’ he said harshly, ‘there is no forgetfulness for me, not even here – of all places, not here! None of it might have been at but a single word from me. One word! And well I know the speaking of that word now. Tell me what you have heard of the fastness of Ul Raambar. Tell me, pretty Asta, have you not heard fair words of Ul Raambar? – Yet perhaps not the final word. Why did I not speak out, there or in Tarendahardil, in the garden of the Empress? What demon was it that seized my tongue in fear? Was it him? And yet I hate as much as he said I would – even more. All, all that he said was true!’
‘Who is this you speak of?’
‘Who? Who?’ he shouted. He flung wide his arms, sweeping them over sky and earth and sea. ‘Him! Him!’
Silently they returned to the great house. All the fury drained from him. The master and his wife, seeing his resignation, thought him almost well.
Before the fourth meal of the following pass he went down to the quays again. He walked the stone moles, and watched the ships pass in and out of harbor. Swirling in the sky above, the many sea-birds culled and cawed. The great, warm Southern Ocean glittered in the light of moveless Goddess, taunting him within its glitter. I am the end, it seemed to murmur. There shall be no flight beyond me, but one.
Against a shed leaned a low-slung boat, agleam with black and yellow paint. He looked upon it. That was a death-barge, which bears men’s corpses over the bright waves Goddess-ward where, upon the blessed shores of the far side of the world, poor men rise again as princes, and every drab is beauteous.
He looked to sea again where the currents ran, where the sky was a curtain of darkness. He closed his eyes. Then he took oars into the death-barge and laid it in the water. The shipwright, who had paused in his labors to drink a cup and let the paint dry, emerged and called for the thief to stop; but the Gerso heard him not.
§
ONLY THE EYE-GULLS kept him company, wheeling in the pallid sky. Beneath the little barge the warm currents drew him on, deeper toward the darkness. Already Goddess sat half-quenched in the distant sea. And in Her light the clouds above were coppery, and his chest blood-red.
All at once She was no more, and his heart quailed, to be beneath a desolate darkling sky. He threw back the oars, lay in the bottom of the barge and slept. And still the currents drew him on.
He slept not long in the gloom. His head turned, his chest strove, the sweat stood on his brows and cheeks; and then his eyes were open. He heard the water beyond the sides of the barge, but saw only the sky. A deep violet green it was, smudged here and there with other colors, singular, miraculous, unworldly colors. He had never seen their like before. He lay enraptured by the sight. Throned high in splendor, changeful God passed mocking by, leading him on.
He opened his mouth. In his heart he felt such painful wonder, it was as if he lived now and had known only death or drugged dreams before. Darker grew the sky, darker. And out of it appeared between the clouds innumerable flecks of fire, monstrous and strange.
Then in the wonder of his heart an enormous knowledge burgeoned. He strove to raise himself, but there was no more strength within his limbs. His lips began to move, as if he would give voice to that boundless knowledge. But his lips said only a word, the word he had uttered in the burning wastelands, the word which broke his every sleep, the word as he had heard it from the lips of others, in curses, in horror, in despair and worshipful exaltation – the word – the name.
The pitiful sounds were one with the slapping of the waves. The darkness was complete. The death-barge was no more, and he himself was no more. But at times, such was the trick of the waves that they seemed to echo the hoarsely whispered words that were all that remained of him. It was as if thousands dimly chanted them:
‘Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn!’
§
HE WAS HIMSELF once more in the dream. The currents bore him on toward the bottom of the world, the center of the Dark Seas opposite to Goddess. From there the light of Her rose faintly all along the ring-like rim of the sea like a corona of fire.
In front of his death-barge, a little flat rock broke from the sea.
A human figure stood waiting on the rock. He looked upon her and saw that she was Alastaphele, clad in her barge-raiment even as he had last seen her on the Ocean of Death.
‘Is it not beautiful?’ she asked.
All about her the flickering stars wheeled on unseen spheres, and the great funnel of dark-stained air within the rising lights pressed down about them both. In answer to that pressure the swells ran outward from the rock in ever-widening rings, each within and without the rest. But of all this he was scarcely aware. He was looking at her.
He knew again the sweet curve of her neck, the way she held her fingers over her breast, and the way the breezes lifted the strands of hair about her visage. These and other sights, so well known and so long lost, pierced him with longing. He wanted to step forward upon the rock and hold her. But he could not.
‘No,’ she said softly, ‘you may not yet join me upon this land. But we may speak; that much has been granted. Tell me then, and say truly, why have you done all these things so unlike you?
‘It was for you.’ Even as he said it he knew it was a lie.
She smiled. ‘You followed, and have found me. But my love, I do not blame you. And now you may tell me, where is Kar Belthus, and what has become of him?’
He looked from the glory of her eyes, in which he could see the starry sky, to the hem of her robe where it shuddered and caressed the wet round rim of the sea. He found he knew the answer to her question.
‘He is dead, and lives no more,’ he answered. ‘All his ambitions won him nothing but a violent end. Even as he reached for the power he craved, that influence and strength he had before was cut from him as by a scythe.’
She nodded gravely. ‘And do you love her very much?’
‘You and she,’ he answered, ‘you are the same.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but no. You yourself said it, to the old priests in the caves. “The flesh is the woman.” How then could we be the same? You know better.’
‘Yes.’ He bent his head.
‘Return now. We shall not see each other more. Be happy and at peace, my love. It was not you who caused my death.’
Tears burst like blood from his eyes, and the hairs upon his head pricked up from the scalp. He knew the truth then, and the cause of all this, and the blame. And it was taken from his body suddenly, like something physical: he knew the release of it and the loss. She turned and walked beyond the island. But before the last radiance burned out in the air, he called after her.
‘Farewell, Gold,’ he called. His voice was shaking and faint.
‘Farewell. Farewell.’
And she was gone, finally and forever.
He turned about, and beheld rising above him the Tower of God, which was jade and iron and a black, black stone. It spanned in its girth an area as great as the city of Tarendahardil whole. It rose into the wind and rain, the rain that never stopped from falling here in the black world. It rose into the clouds and faded from sight, and he felt dizzy to look at it, for he guessed at what illimitable heights that tower climbed, like a handle to the Earth. And he sensed somewhere in the utter reaches of his soul, how at the topmost reaches of that tower something reached out into the void above. And it called, and the Green Star came, that star that the gods had named the Second Lodestar.
And his were the first mortal eyes to behold the Green Star since the Sixth Fall of the World. For none might see it now unless they stood far within the dark side of the world, near to this midmost point, where no mortal might walk and live.
And he saw then three stars that hung about the Jade Tower in the clouds, and each of those globes of light shone with a different hue and brightness. There were souls within those stars, strange hearts with nothing human about them, and they spoke to him, straight into his soul so that his heart smote in him and the blood hammered his skull, and he wanted to scream out for pain and fear.
‘You have done well,’ the stars said. But they spoke in no tongue he had ever heard or learned, and how it was he knew what they said, he could never fathom. But it was a dream and in dream impossible things are true. ‘All is accomplished but the end. We free you of your bonds.’
And something wrenched and tore inside him, like a great pressure, or a twisting and straining of mighty hands – and then it broke.
The hardness about his heart shattered away and the needs upon him, that he was only dimly aware of all those years, were gone. Ara-Karn staggered. It was like a death-blow, like the final stroke of pity and release, and he knew he now was dead.
But in the dream, upon that lost nameless isle dead in the center of the raging black sunless seas of God, at the root of His dark tower of jade, the former king fell upon his knees and wept. And his pain was such he would have welcomed death and an end to it all. And in that hour, his most wretched and last, he was foredone, and only the faint echo of a lost dear voice upheld him. He heard Alastaphele call his name, his true name, the name he had known from his birth, and the name he took when his first crown was set upon his brow. And her voice, and nothing else, stretched to him like a comforting hand, and held him, and drew him back to the world. Or was it another’s voice that called?
§
IN THE DIMPLACE in the White Tower, the body of the King of Kings slumped on the dais by the bed. Thereafter the body lay still. There was no further movement.
