Crusader Read online

He walked over to Katie’s corpse—the floor of the mausoleum was slick with her blood—and he squatted down beside it.

  “We thank you and honour you, Katie,” he said, and, wiping the fingers of his right hand through her blood, marked his forehead and breast with it as Raum had once marked Faraday.

  “Who was she?” Faraday whispered.

  DragonStar looked over at her, still sitting by the column. “She was Tencendor’s lifeblood,” he said. “The land’s soul.”

  “Why did she need to die?”

  “So the land can move through death, and live again,” DragonStar said, “and so the land could repay you for all you have done and sacrificed for it.”

  He rose and walked over to Faraday, bending down to give her a brief but passionate kiss. “You and I,” he whispered, “are given the task of re-creating the land free of the discord and evil which once stalked it…which once stalked all of Creation.

  “But for the moment—” he straightened “—I have a small task to accomplish, the Hunt to complete.”

  And, smiling gently, he left her.

  Raspu walked over, balancing very carefully on one hand a tray with a silver pot, and a cream porcelain milk jug, sugar bowl, and cup and saucer. “Would ma’am like some tea?” he asked.

  Faraday blinked, and then decided not to try to make sense of any of it. “That would be very nice,” she said. “Thank you.”

  The Butler poured her cup of tea, painstakingly added sugar and milk in their proper proportions, and held the cup out to Faraday.

  “Ma’am.”

  She accepted it without a word, but her eyes widened in surprise as she tasted the tea. “It is very good.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Raspu shifted slightly, as if embarrassed. “Ma’am, I regret that I shall have to leave you for a moment or two. Sir has asked me to take care of one or two small tasks for him.”

  “Of course,” Faraday said, and Raspu gave her a small bow, and tucked under his arm a large account book he’d apparently obtained from thin air. Then, without further ado, he disappeared.

  Strangely, Faraday did not feel lonely or vulnerable at all. The tea was very good indeed.

  DragonStar strode through the door into the Maze, and the Star Stallion lifted his head and screamed as the Alaunt milled about and bayed.

  DragonStar leapt on Belaguez’s back, and drew the lily sword.

  The Alaunt broke into clamour.

  “Hunt!” DragonStar said.

  And so it began.

  DragonStar was his mother’s son. As Azhure had once hunted Artor, so now DragonStar hunted Qeteb and his remaining companions. But this was the real hunt, the Hunt that the Star Dance had been engineering for hundreds of thousands of years.

  This was the moment, and this was the StarSon.

  The Hunter.

  Qeteb fled through the Maze. The millions of demented creatures that had once throbbed and pulsed and muttered as one, now fled before him, desperately seeking escape themselves.

  Beyond the walls of the Maze the trees stepped forward, and buried roots and branch tips into the tiny cracks of the Maze’s walls.

  Ur, standing slightly back, screeched with laughter.

  Cracks spread screaming, and masonry fell. Within heartbeats of the trees’ attack the walls of the Maze had been broached in a hundred places.

  Creatures poured through, intent on escaping the Hunter.

  They were all devoured by the trees.

  Qeteb knew nothing of the destruction being wreaked on the outer skin of the Maze. He fled as Caelum had once fled in nightmares, through infinitely barren corridors and passageways, all ending in such hopelessness that they forced the Demons and his companions to turn back and desperately seek another way before the Hunter found them.

  Behind them rose a clamour of such frightfulness that their hearts quailed, and sometimes the hot breath of the hounds grew so close it scorched their skin.

  From some unknown where, a bell tolled.

  Qeteb ran, and his remaining three Demons raced desperately to keep up with him, their outstretched hands clutching at the protuberances of his armour, their voices screeching at him to not leave them behind…don’t leave them behind, think of everything they had done for him, remember how loyal they had been, the sacrifices they had made for him, the adoration they had given, so don’t leave them behind, please, please, don’t leave them behind…

  Qeteb left them behind.

  Mot, Barzula and Sheol cried out, lost. Where had Qeteb gone? One instant he had been but a pace in front of them, now he was nowhere to be seen or sensed.

  Instead they were faced only with the twisting, blank walls of the Maze, its stone floor slowly rising through twist after twist and bend after bend.

  Slowly rising?

  The Demons slackened their pace, terror being replaced by puzzlement and anger. The walls of the Maze were altering, the narrowness of the passage which trapped them abating, the entire face of the Maze changing.

  “What is happening?” Sheol hissed, clutching at Barzula.

  “We are being toyed with!” said Mot, pressing as close as he could to the other two.

  The Maze had funnelled them into the twisting, narrow streets of a grey and dead city. Ash drifted down from the broken skyline of the city’s tenement buildings: some of their walls rose burned and blackened into the sky, while others lay in tumbled, pathetic heaps of masonry.

  Shattered window glass crunched under the Demons’ feet.

  This was the ruins of a city twisted and murdered within the flames of a massive conflagration.

  “Carlon!” whispered a shadowy voice.

  The Demons hissed, and turned to stare down a gloomy alleyway.

  A small red-headed boy walked forth, one bloody hand clutched over the ruins of his belly.

  A small male two-legs.

  Tears ran down his face. “This was Carlon,” he said. “This was my home.”

  Sheol growled, and made to snatch at the boy.

  No, said a voice in her mind—in all of the Demons’ minds—you may not touch this boy. You may only move forward.

  The sound of a horse’s hooves rattled on the cobblestones behind them.

  Sheol whipped about her head.

  DragonStar!

  Move forward.

  And so they moved forward, with unwillingness. But they had no choice, for Sheol and her two companions found their feet controlled by another, and their traitor feet moved them further into the city, and deeper into its mangled ruins.

  As the Demons passed, gibbering and cursing, grey and saddened people stepped from every doorway, and from every side street and alley. All were disfigured in some manner or the other.

  They were the hopeless hundreds of thousands who had either died amid the chaos of the Demons’ physical attacks on Tencendor, or who’d had their minds snatched by the Demons and who had died at their own hands, or at the hands, teeth and claws of their demented companions of the wasteland.

  As the Demons passed, the dead stared silently, tears trickling down their faces. Sometimes they turned away, unable to look.

  The Demons snarled, defiant yet terrified, determined to somehow escape, yet unable to turn their feet from the road which twisted before them. Their forms blurred and changed, trying different guises and frames to see if they could fly out as a gryphon, or muscle their way out as an ox, or wriggle their way out as a worm of the earth.

  Nothing worked, and the Hunter’s magic drew them inexorably on, further and deeper into the ruined city.

  Fifteen paces behind them the Star Stallion pranced, keeping pace with the Demons. He held his head high, snorting his indignation that he was not allowed to run to the clamour of the Hunt. Behind him stalked the Alaunt, their limbs stiff with impatience.

  “Soon,” whispered DragonStar, a calming hand on the stallion’s neck, his voice also reaching and embracing his hounds. “Soon.”

  “And us?” cried the people as DragonStar passed
by them. “And us?”

  And to them DragonStar smiled, and said. “Soon.”

  As he passed, the weeping people silently fell into step behind the hounds, so that DragonStar eventually found himself at the head of a long column of the desolate and dispossessed dead.

  “Soon,” he whispered.

  Elsewhere, Qeteb still ran through the Maze. He could hear the thunderous hooves of the Hunter’s stallion behind him, hear the tightening of the string of the bow, and hear the clamour of the hounds.

  He howled and screeched and babbled in fury and fear, his mind embracing possible escapes with one breath, and then discarding them as useless with the next.

  He would not allow himself to be destroyed. Not after all this time. Not after all this effort.

  He had been tested before, and he had always won.

  Evil always ultimately won. It was one of the given truths of the universe.

  Besides, his Demons had won three to two against DragonStar’s witches.

  Hadn’t they?

  Just as Qeteb thought that, he ran directly into a blank wall.

  A blank wall with a doorway in it.

  Qeteb’s eyes bulged with triumph. He could smell the enchantment that bound that doorway, and knew that once he passed through, it would disappear forever.

  DragonStar could not come after him.

  Roaring his victory, Qeteb flung open the door, and stepped through.

  As the door closed behind him, a butler stepped out from nowhere, placed an ornate brass key in the lock, and turned it.

  As the locks clunked into place, the Butler withdrew the key and the door faded into the stonework of the wall.

  The Butler smiled in satisfaction, pencilled an annotation in the account book he held, and disappeared again.

  Suddenly the Demons halted. Their feet had carried them into a narrower street, and a wooden cart blocked their way forward.

  Get in.

  “No!” the Demons cried.

  Get in.

  They got in, bellowing with rage and frustration that they could not control the movement of their own limbs.

  An old man appeared, bent and grey and dressed in an enveloping shabby coat with a large book in one pocket. He positioned himself between the shafts of the cart, grasping them in his gnarled hands. He grunted, strained, and the cart jolted forward.

  The Demons howled, their hands clutching at the sides of the cart, but they could not gain enough purchase to pull themselves out, and their bodies felt as if they had lead boulders grating to and fro within them. They could not heave themselves off the tray of the cart.

  The splinters of the tray dug and worked themselves deep into their flesh.

  DragonStar smiled slightly, then composed himself, and continued to ride some fifteen paces behind the cart.

  Behind him were strung the many hundreds of thousands, perhaps the many millions, of those who had died amid demonic destruction. They walked silently, some wringing their hands, others trying in vain to wipe away the tears that stained their cheeks, still others clinging to children or babes in arms.

  The cart, and the column it led, wound deeper and deeper into the twisted city.

  Eventually the cart lumbered into a huge market square. In the centre of the square stood a shoulder-high wooden platform, and on that platform had been built a scaffold.

  Three rope nooses hung down, patiently swinging in a non-existent breeze.

  The Demons wriggled and writhed, moaned and wept, turning their voices from defiance to piteousness.

  Why them? Hadn’t they been acting under orders from His Ghastliness himself? What else could they have done? They’d been terrified, certain in fact, that if they’d gone against his wishes, Qeteb would have done them a messy murder. No, no, they’d only been acting to save their own lives, and had always meant to somehow undergo some form of penance for the deeds they’d been forced to do. Not that they were admitting guilt, of course, but they were pitiful creatures, and felt that it might do someone some good if perhaps they said they were sorry.

  “Oh, shut up,” said DragonStar, and pulled the Star Stallion up as the cart rumbled to a halt before the scaffold.

  Behind DragonStar streamed the uncountable dead, moving out to encircle the scaffold until the crowd was a thousand deep.

  They filled the square, and only when their masses had come to a full halt did DragonStar nod at the old man still standing between the shafts of the cart.

  Grunting slightly with the effort, the old man bent down and rested the shafts on the cobbles. Then he shuffled around to the back of the cart.

  DragonStar rode closer, and, leaning one hand behind him, took an arrow from the quiver strung against his back.

  “Here,” he said, and handed it to the old man.

  The man nodded, and, tucking the arrow under one arm for the moment, took hold of Barzula’s left ankle and dragged him over the lip of the cart.

  Barzula gave a formless scream as he thudded painfully to the cobbles, and raised his arms as if to protect his face.

  “Ta muchly,” said the old man, and, taking the now curiously pliable arrow, wound it about the Demon’s wrists, binding them tight.

  Then the man grabbed hold of the loose skin of Barzula’s neck, and dragged him effortlessly around the cart over the cobbles to the stand, up the scratchy, splintery steps of the wooden platform, and across to the first noose. There he deposited him in a heap, gave him a painful kick in his ribs, and turned about and shuffled down the steps and towards the cart again.

  DragonStar drew another arrow, and handed it to the old man as he came back around the cart.

  In turn, the old man hauled Mot and the Sheol out of the cart, bound their wrists with an arrow, and then dragged them over the cobbles, up onto the platform, and deposited them before each of the remaining two nooses.

  And each time he delivered a parting kick to their ribs.

  Finally the old man came back down, hobbled over to the cart, and clambered up into the driver’s seat. There he sat, staring at the platform and the three Demons, each kneeling before a noose, and grinned toothlessly.

  The crowd shuffled closer.

  As the door slammed shut behind him, Qeteb stopped…

  What had he done?

  Before him stretched an endless ploughed field, barren of life.

  He turned around.

  The wall and the doorway had vanished. Behind him the ploughed field stretched into infinity.

  Cursing, Qeteb took a step forward.

  He sank into the soft earth to the top of his ankle.

  He took another step, and he sank yet further, weighed down by the amount of metal he carried.

  From somewhere very, very far away came the baying of hounds.

  Qeteb growled, and began to tear off his armour. It fell away, sinking into the earth.

  He stood naked and exposed. He was DragonStar warped and warted. His flesh, humped into the strange lumps needed to fill his armour, was pale and bluish, pockmarked with corruption. His belly was soft and flabby, his legs thin and knobbly, his arms disproportionately muscled and weighty.

  He had no neck or chin, and his lumpish face seemed to grow directly from his white, hairless chest.

  Beautiful coppery curls fell from his head over his shoulders and down his back, merging finally with the feathers of his black and mouldy wings.

  Qeteb was a sad mockery of life, and the saddest thing of all was that he did not realise it.

  He grinned, and started forward across the field.

  “We have here before us,” announced DragonStar to the crowd, “the Demons of Hunger, Tempest, and Despair.”

  His voice was quiet, but beautifully modulated, and it reached every ear in the square.

  “Their times,” DragonStar continued, “are dawn, mid-morning and mid-afternoon.”

  He paused, and looked out over the crowd. “You represent the end result of their crimes, which stretch backwards through an eternity t
o the time of original Creation. They have ransacked the universe, and ravaged the souls of the very stars themselves.”

  The crowd murmured, its sound a rising swell, and DragonStar gave them a few moments in which to voice their despair.

  When he resumed speaking, his voice had the tone and authority of a tolling bell. “Here they kneel, and now is their time. What are we to do with them?”

  Again there was a swell of formless sound from the thronging masses. It surged and billowed forth, engulfing both DragonStar and the Demons.

  The Demons cringed. DragonStar grinned.

  And the murmuring died. A decision had been reached.

  From the crowd stepped three people. An emaciated man, with a distended, lumpish belly. A woman, her eyes roiling with some unknown turbulence. Another woman, dragging behind her a washing line. At the end of the washing line bounced the still form of a toddling girl-child, the line wrapped tight about her plump throat.

  The Demons suddenly screamed. Not from the sight of the three people, but because each of the arrows about their wrists had suddenly flamed into life, burning into their flesh.

  “Retribution,” whispered DragonStar.

  The man and the two women slowly climbed the steps onto the platform.

  The emaciated man stood before Mot, the woman with the maddened eyes before Barzula, and before Sheol stood the woman who had the body of her daughter dangling strangled on the washing line.

  “Your time has come,” said DragonStar, and with one motion every person in the crowd raised their right arm and held it high, the palms of their hands turned towards the platform.

  There was no sound.

  The emaciated man stepped up to Mot, who was still writhing and moaning from the pain of the burning arrow.

  The man stared, then reached up, took hold of the noose, and pulled it down until he could drape it about Mot’s neck.

  “I ate of stones,” the man said in a curiously toneless voice, “until my stomach burst, and the stones ravaged through my belly until I shat stones. Now you shall know your own time.”