Pilgrim

“What is it, my friend?” Drago said, squatting by the lizard and stroking its feathers. “What is this …”

He dropped his hand to the crusty stuff, and made a sound of disgust as his fingers touched it. Dried blood! Drago screwed up his face and stood, rubbing his fingers free of the crumbling flakes.

His fingers stilled, and he bent down again, scraped up a handful of the blood and dropped it into his sack.

His other hand momentarily tightened about the rosewood staff, and without thinking, Drago lifted the staff forward and scraped away a part of the blood.

He fell motionless, and looked awhile, and the lizard raised its eyes and studied Drago curiously.

“I think,” Drago said tonelessly, “that we have reached our destination.”

Underneath the dried blood was a trapdoor.

Grimacing, Drago bent down and swept away as much of the blood as he could. Then he lifted the door, revealing a well of steps circling down into darkness.

Much as, had Drago but known it, steps had once led from each of the Ancient Barrows into the Chamber of the Star Gate.

“Well,” Drago began, speaking to the lizard, but he got no further, for the lizard had leapt into the stairwell and was already slithering and sliding his way down.

Drago smiled, and stepped after him.

He did not walk very far down the narrow, twisting staircase before it opened into a corridor that stretched some fifty paces, ending in a circular door. The lizard was snuffling about its hinges.

Drago stepped onto the smooth, grey metallic floor of the corridor, and paused to study it. The floor was slightly levelled out, but only about the width of an arm, otherwise the passageway was completely circular, rising to a point about half an arm’s length above his head. The roof of the corridor was lit by gently-glowing circles, each a pace apart down its entire length. The walls were cool to the touch, but vibrated very gently.

As if they were alive.

A line of inscriptions ran at shoulder height down the walls. Drago stared at them, then lifted his staff and compared the inscriptions set there with those on the wall. They were the same, the strange black circles with feathered handles rising from their backs, running in a dancing, weaving line.

“These ancients,” Drago said to the lizard, “had a strange script indeed.”

Then he walked down to the door and inspected it.

There was no handle, although one side had hinges. Obviously it opened. But how?

Drago pushed, but with no success. He frowned, his fingers tapping gently against the door. On the wall by the door was a recessed rectangular section, filled with nine slightly raised knobs of the same cool, grey material as door and corridor.

Drago stared at them, then slowly raised his hand and rested his fingers on the raised knobs.

Instantly his mind flooded with an extraordinary vision.

Two old men, one short and squat, the other tall and thin, had marched down this very corridor once.

Drago’s frown deepened. Who? One of the men turned and spoke to his companion, and Drago recognised the voice instantly. They were the Sentinels, Ogden and Veremund, and this was the doorway by which they had accessed the Repository.

He watched as the vision unwound itself.

The Sentinels walked to the spot he now stood, and the tall one, Veremund, lifted his hand and placed it as Drago now had his placed.

Then he had hummed a fragment of melody, and his fingers had danced accordingly.

The memory faded, although the short melody lingered; it was a part of the same tune the Sentinels had taught him before he’d been dragged back through the Star Gate.

Drago stood, almost as if in a trance, replaying the vision over and over. Then, in a flash of inspiration, Drago realised that Veremund had transferred the melody into a pattern, and had then transferred the pattern onto the raised knobs.

Drago ran the tune through his head, translating it from melody to pattern almost without thought. He transferred the pattern onto the rows of knobs with his fingers.

Instantly the door swung inwards with a soft hiss.

The lizard gave a soft cry and scampered through.

But Drago stood still, his head bowed, thinking. Something very, very important had just happened, and he struggled to understand it. He … he …

“Damn it!” Drago whispered. “What did I just do?”

He had used the pattern of melody to accomplish a purpose.

Is that not what Icarii Enchanters did?

And yet there was no Star Dance, no power, no magic. No enchantment left.

Drago shuddered, and the grip of his left hand tightened about his staff. He had not only opened a door, he had also just been taught something.

Ah! Frustrated, feeling that the answer danced just beyond the reaches of his mind, Drago put the problem to one side and stepped through the door.

It swung shut behind him.

Drago paid it no heed. Before him stretched yet another corridor, similar to the last with the pattern of feathered circles on the walls, but curving into a left-hand bend some twenty paces ahead.

Beyond the bend the corridor branched into two. Drago took the left-hand fork without hesitation and then, when it again branched, took the right-hand fork. It led into a flight of steep steps leading to a higher level, and Drago grinned as he imagined how the two Sentinels would have grumbled about climbing them. Somehow, their presence was still very much here.

There was a large rectangular room at the top of the steps. The walls were literally smothered with the feather-backed circles. Metallic racks stood in three ranks, almost empty, save for half a dozen glass jars.

They were empty.

Drago looked about. There were three doors, rectangular now, in the far wall, each of them open. Which one?

From the door on the far right came the faint hum of vast power, but Drago understood he should not take that one.

He walked through the middle doorway instead. Before him stretched yet another corridor, but very short, and ending in yet another doorway through which … through which Drago thought he could see stars.

Stars?

Hesitant now, Drago walked down the corridor to the door, took a deep breath, and stepped through.

He stood in a strange room. The walls, ceiling, benches and even parts of the floor were covered with metal plates, and these plates were studded with knobs and bright jewel-like lights. Before him were the high backs of several chairs, facing enormous windows that looked out upon the universe.

One of the chairs before him swivelled, revealing a silver-haired man in its depths. He wore a uniform made of a leathery black material; gold braid hung at his shoulders and encircled the cuffs of his sleeves, and in his first glance Drago saw a black, peaked cap, gold braid about its brim, sitting on the bench behind him.

But it was the man’s face underneath his silvery hair which riveted Drago’s attention.

It was lined with care … and more. Agonising pain had scored a network of deep lines into the man’s skin. His right hand clenched spasmodically in the tunic over his chest, and he breathed erratically, great deep breaths that tore through his throat.

A slight movement distracted Drago’s attention momentarily. The blue-feathered lizard sat to one side under an empty chair, his black eyes unblinking on the man in the chair.

“Drago,” said the man, and Drago looked back to him.

“You are Faraday’s Noah,” he said, and then stepped forward to touch Noah’s shoulder. “What is wrong?”

Noah’s mouth twisted. “I am suffering the ill-effects of redundancy,” he said. “No, no, that is wrong. I am simply being recycled.”

“I don’t understand,” Drago said. He touched Noah’s shoulder again, leaving his hand resting there this time. “What can I do to help?”

Noah lifted his own hand to pat Drago’s. “First of all, you can sit down. Then you can listen and accept.”

“I meant,” Drago said softly, “what can I do to aid you?”

“Me?” Noah raised tortured brown eyes and looked into Drago’s violet gaze. “You can do nothing to help me. I am dying. After all this time, I am finally, finally dying.”

Then he grunted with pain, doubling over in the chair.

Drago dropped his staff and grabbed him, wanting to help, but not knowing what to do. In the end he just knelt by the chair and held Noah, trying to give some measure of comfort.

Noah managed to straighten. His face was slick with sweat.

“We have all been waiting too long,” he whispered harshly, “for me to die before I tell you what you must know.”

“All?” Drago said.

Noah lifted a trembling hand and pointed to the window filled with the tens of thousands of stars beyond.

“All of us,” he repeated. “The Stars.”

14 In the Chamber of the Enemy

Noah looked at one of the empty chairs, as if considering asking Drago to sit in it, then gave a tired sigh and took Drago’s hand in his. He glanced at the newly-healed scar on Drago’s neck, but said nothing.

Drago settled on the floor, moving the staff to one side as the lizard crept over and curled up against his legs.

“Tell me,” Drago said, and Noah nodded, raised his head, and searched the panels under the window.

“Will you press the copper knob on the panel?” Noah asked, and Drago leaned over, hesitated, then firmly pressed a glowing knob.

Instantly the view from the forward window changed. The stars disappeared, and Drago found himself looking out on a world filled with mountains and valleys, plains and oceans.

He frowned. “I have not seen this place before.”

“Nay. This is not Tencendor, although it is much like it. It is my world. My home.”

Drago looked at Noah. Beneath his pain, the man’s face was lined with memory and regret.

“And its name?” he said.

Noah’s hand clenched a little more deeply into the black leather of his tunic. “Not important. For all I know it no longer exists. It has been hundreds of thousands of years since I have seen it.”

The view altered. There were the same mountains and valleys, plains and oceans, but all had changed.

Now they were a wasteland of pain and despair, of tempest, pestilence and starvation. Maddened people and animals roamed, tearing at their own bodies and at the bodies of any who ventured near them. Their eyes were blank save for their madness, and ropes of saliva hung from their mouths. All the people were naked, their bodies emaciated and covered with boils and streaks of rot. They lived, but in a hell that Drago could barely comprehend.

“The same world,” Noah rasped into the silence, “after the TimeKeeper Demons had come to ravage. Drago, listen to this my story.”

The view in the window shifted again, back to the stars.

“We do not know from where they came. We simply woke one morning to find half our world gone mad with hunger, and the pain continued through the day, and then into the night.”

Drago remembered how the TimeKeepers had leapt from world to world. No doubt they’d found some other poor soul to drain in order to enter Noah’s world.

“Hunger, then such tempest as we’d never before endured, and then midday — oh God! Midday!” Noah shuddered violently, struggled to control himself, then continued, his voice hoarse with the remembered horror.

“Midday is too terrible to even speak about — thank every god you pray to, Drago, that Tencendor has not yet been subjected to Qeteb’s malice!”

Yet. The word echoed about the spaces between them.

Drago studied Noah’s face. The man seemed in more pain than when Drago had first entered. “But you found a way to trap him.”

“It took us forty years, Drago.”

“Forty years?”

“Can you imagine,” he whispered, “what those forty years were like?”

“How did your people survive?”

“In caves and tunnels and basements, mostly. Drago, your first lesson, and one Faraday already understands, is that the Demons, even Qeteb, cannot touch any who rest under shade. They cannot work their evil in shade. For some reason, the mere fact of shade protects the mind and soul from their touch.”

There was more, but Noah was in too much pain to be bothered explaining it to Drago. The man would discover it soon enough, in any case.

“Ah, thus the forest keeps myself, Zared and his army,” Drago slid a glance towards the feathered lizard, “and all the fey creatures safe.”

“Until the Demons gain enough power to strip the leaves, yes.”

“And Qeteb? How did you manage to capture him?”

“With mirrors. We trapped him inside a chamber that was completely mirrored. He could not escape, and any power he used was turned back against him.”

“Mirrors? How could they —”

Noah grunted, and his face paled even more than it was already. He took several deep breaths, and then spoke rapidly, as if he knew he had not much longer.

“Mirrors … we mirrored him back to himself, we mirrored his hate back to himself. But …” Noah suppressed a groan, and momentarily closed his eyes, “unfortunately you will not have the same success now. The TimeKeepers are somewhat wary of mirrors and reflections.”

“And so you —”

“And so we — or those who had the skill among us, for not all among us commanded the strength — dismembered him. They took his breath and warmth and movement and soul and separated them.”

“His body?”

Noah shrugged. “It was useless. I think we burned it, although I am not sure.”

And thus the need for a new body to house Qeteb, thought Drago.

“No-one initially knew what to do with these life components,” Noah continued. His voice and breath were easier now, as if his pain had levelled out. “In themselves they were still horrendously dangerous. We tried to destroy them, but found we could not. The other TimeKeepers were doing their best to steal them back from us — and they were powerful. Too powerful for us to hold out against for very long.”

“So you decided to flee through the universe with them.”

“Yes. It was the best we could do. I volunteered to lead the fleet of craft —”

“Craft?”

Noah looked up at the chamber. “We sit in the command chamber of the command craft. The craft are, ah, like ships that sail the seas, but these sail the universe.”

Drago nodded hesitantly, struggling to come to grips with the concept.

“We set sail with four craft, one for each of Qeteb’s life components, for we dared not store them in the same place. It was a mission that all of us —”

“Us?”

Noah’s mouth thinned at the constant interruption — could the man not see he was in pain? “We had twelve crew members in each of the craft. Well, anyway, it was a mission that we all doubted we could return from.”

“You knew you would never go home again. Noah … who did you leave behind?”

Tears slid down Noah’s cheeks. “A daughter — my wife was dead. Her name is … was … Katie. It was … it was hard, but I went knowing she would live in a better world for my flight.”

Drago placed a hand on Noah’s knee. “I am sorry, Noah.”

“I know you are. Thank you. Well, we fled through the universe. For many thousands of years.”

Drago frowned, noting Noah’s deteriorating state. “You are immortal? How else could you survive a journey of so long?”

Noah gave a harsh bark of laughter. “Immortal? Nay, obviously not! Our craft were equipped with … sleeping chambers, I guess you can call them, and in these we spent most of our time. The craft were set with self-guidance systems, and we generally slept, trusting in them to do their best.”

Noah paused. “As a race, we had travelled parts of the universe before, but never so far or for so long as our fleet did. We did not realise what such lengthy travel through the stars would do to our craft.”

Noah paused, remembering, and this time Drago did not bother him with a question.

“Our craft were woken by the music of the stars,” Noah eventually continued. “And from that music they learned.”

“Learned?”

Noah did not speak for some minutes, and when he finally did, his voice was soft with wonder. “Drago, your Icarii race speak of the Star Dance, the music that the stars make as they dance through the universe. While we slept, the music of the Star Dance infiltrated the craft, changing them, creating an awareness that was not there previously.

“They changed, and were filled with a purpose of their own. They changed,” he repeated, as if still trying to understand it himself.

“Periodically we woke from our sleep to make sure the craft were operating normally. On one memorable occasion,” Noah actually managed a smile, as he remembered the shock of his crew, “we woke to find that the craft would no longer obey our instructions. We found ourselves passengers, as much cargo as Qeteb’s life parts.

“The craft altered course, heading for a different part of the universe than that which we intended to go.”

Noah paused, his face emptying of all expression. “Gradually, I became ‘aware’ of the craft, and of the music that filtered through the stars. No-one else among us did. I was the only one graced.”

“You were the only one picked.”

Noah’s mouth twitched. “Aye, Drago, you are right. I was the only one picked. I learned that the craft headed for a world — this world. I was appalled. Infect another world with what we carried? And with the other TimeKeepers?

“We knew,” he added, “that the five remaining TimeKeepers would follow us as best they could, hunting down Qeteb’s life parts. It was one of the reasons we fled through the universe, knowing that in doing so we would rid our own world of all the TimeKeepers.”

“And so you brought them to this world.”

Noah turned his head and stared out the windows. Faint starlight illuminated the scores of lines about his forehead and reflected the pain in his eyes.

“The craft brought them to this world,” he said softly, still not looking at Drago. “Not I. Not my race.”

“You thought only to flee, not thinking of the eventual consequences.”

Noah turned his eyes back to Drago. “Do not condemn us, Drago. Not you.”

Now Drago dropped his eyes. “Then why did the craft bring them here?”

“It has taken me a long time to come to this understanding, Drago. Let me speak, and do not interrupt me. What you hear will be hard.”

Noah swivelled his chair back to the windows. “Behold what will happen to your world when the TimeKeepers reconstitute Qeteb.”

When, not if? But the view in the window shifted before Drago had a chance to ask the question.

As Drago had seen the Demons ravaging Noah’s home world, now he saw them ravage Tencendor. Wasteland. Insanity. Deserts. People with no hope, nowhere to go. All beauty, love, hope and enchantment destroyed.

Drifting ashes where once had been forest.

Bones littering dust-swept streets where once had been cities.

Maddened animals ravening at will.

Horror.

Hopelessness.

“Tell me how to stop this!” Drago said.

The lizard stirred from its doze, lifted its head, stared at the image in the window, and then at Drago. Then it momentarily locked eyes with Noah.

Drago was too appalled by the vision of a devastated Tencendor to notice.

“I asked you to remain quiet,” Noah said, a note of command ringing through the pain in his voice. “What you will hear will be hard, and you must hear it all before you speak again.”

Drago jerked his head, apparently in acceptance. His violet eyes were very dark, and very hard.

Noah looked at him, and then waved a hand. The image of the devastated Tencendor was once more replaced with the tens of thousands of stars.

Drago relaxed very slightly.

“The craft brought Qeteb’s life parts to Tencendor,” Noah said, “because, drifting through the universe, they had come to the understanding that here, and here only, could Qeteb and his fellow demons finally be destroyed.”

Noah sighed. “Drago, you must allow the TimeKeepers to reconstitute Qeteb. Allow them to destroy Tencendor.”

“No!”

Noah did not chastise Drago for the outburst. He had the right.

“It is the only way to defeat him, Drago. Listen to me. We tried to destroy his life parts, and could not. But a whole Qeteb can be destroyed. This land is steeped in magic, although you — as so many of your brethren — are completely blind to it. Once Qeteb walks again, then, yes, Tencendor will become a true wasteland. The Demons will completely destroy it. Nothing will be left.”

Nothing save the existence it will gain through death, thought Noah, but knew he did not have the time to explain that to Drago. It was a knowledge better learned than told. “Nothing but its inherent magic,” Noah said. “And nothing but you.”

“Me? I came back through the Star Gate to aid Tencendor, Noah! To aid Tencendor and Caelum. Yet now you ask that I allow it to be destroyed.” Drago gave a bitter laugh. “Yet what else could be expected of Drago the treacherous, Drago the malevolent? No wonder all hate me.”

“Few truly hate you, Drago, although most are puzzled by you.”

“How will allowing Qeteb to rise again help? How can allowing Tencendor to be devastated —”

“Qeteb must be defeated this time, Drago. He must be dealt to death.”

Drago’s face was tight and tense, a muscle flickering uncertainly in his lower jaw. “How?”

“Listen,” Noah said, and he spoke for a very long time, his voice soft and desperate, his words tumbling over each other, and this time Drago did not interrupt at all.

When he finished Drago sat motionless, his own face almost as ashen as Noah’s, his eyes despairing. “No.”

“Yes. You have always known it.”

“No.”

“You knew it as an infant, it was instinctive knowledge! You acted badly, but you cannot be blamed for what you believed.”

“No!”

“You know it now. Why else that sack that hangs from your belt?”

Drago fingered it. “I … I just thought it …”

“Yes,” Noah said softly, and finally sat back down. “You just ‘thought’. Instinctively you knew it was necessary. Drago, from your parents you have inherited the magic of the stars and of this land. From … elsewhere … you have inherited the magic of this craft. You have been born and you have been made exclusively for this task. Qeteb will be defeated only by a combination of these craft — which are now entirely star music — and Tencendor’s enchantment.”

Drago shook his head slowly, trying desperately to deny what Noah had told him. “I cannot do this to Caelum again. I cannot.”

“You must.”

“I have already destroyed his life!” Drago cried. He scrambled to his feet and stared at Noah huddled in his chair. “Now you would have me feed him to the Lord of Darkness all over again?”

Drago took a deep breath. “He is the StarSon, Noah, and I will not again deprive him of that right!”

“I think you will find he may insist,” Noah said somewhat dryly.

“No,” Drago said in a very quiet and almost threatening tone. “Caelum is the StarSon. Caelum will meet Qeteb, and I will do everything in my power to aid him in that quest. I will not betray him again.”

“You have very much to accept,” Noah said quietly. “Very much.”

“I−”

“But if you want to do your best to aid Caelum and Tencendor, then do this. Go north, north to Gorkenfort. Seek your mother.”

“Azhure?”

“Nay,” Noah said, and smiled with such love that he unsettled Drago. “Your true mother. Your ancestral mother. Listen to her if you will not listen to me.”

And ignore her if you dare.

Drago stared at him, then slowly sank down to the floor before the dying man.