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Chapter Thirty-seven


Yet is every man his greatest enemy and, as it were,
  his own executioner.

Sir Thomas Browne
Religio Medici


Yardiff Bey bore down on the arch of Salamá’s entrance. One of the men on watch just found time to leap aside; the other, frozen in his tracks by surprise, was trampled under the hooves of the hellhorse, his flesh crumbled and scorched by its passing.

Yardiff Bey drew to a halt out on the plain. He turned his heightened, one-eyed gaze to the east, seeing farther and better than mortal sight. He descried the war-dray far off, throwing out a plume of dust. Its way led through low, gutted hills from which much stone had been quarried and cut for use in Salamá. Beyond those rose the bare little mount upon which the Lifetree could thrive.

He sensed an emanation he’d come across before; Calundronius, accursed gemstone of the deCourteneys, was there. No simple spell would stop his prey. And even with his infernal steed, Bey could not overhaul them in time; they’d gained a commanding lead. It would require extraordinary measures to halt them, or at least impede them until he could catch up.

He ordered his thoughts, sorting out the things he must invoke, flows he must tap, oaths to bind and vows to make. He used a forbidden tongue, his aristocratic hands darting through the passes of his Shaping. The hellhorse, scenting sorcery, reared high, beams of amber light arrowing from its eyes. Ears flattening to its skull, it screamed its excitement; not an equine sound, but rather the cry of a giant feline.

Van Duyn and Katya, having dropped far behind the main party as rearguard, heard that sound. They turned, and saw a horse and rider, tiny in the distance, coming at uncanny speed. They brought their horses around, the American unslinging the M-1, to do whatever they must to buy time for those riding with the Lifetree.


The main party thundered down into the lowest part of the valley, their horses lathered with sweat, flinging up the earth in clots. They passed striated cliffs and deserted stoneyards, catching sight of low-lying excavations where ground water had formed pools. That an open body of water could exist here proved their destination was close.

Springbuck’s heart was alive with hope; all victory seemed possible. Then Fireheel slowed, his senses sharper than his rider’s, testing the breeze, ears pricked forward, moving with quick, high steps, head swiveling. Springbuck scanned for danger, taking Calundronius from his chest and holding it by its chain. He saw nothing approaching from any direction, and the sky was vacant.

The brown earth jumped, like a horse’s shoulder-twitch; Yardiff Bey’s sorcery was taking hold, Shaping this most inert and difficult of the elements to his purpose. Rising in a mound, as if a baker kneaded dough, it folded and refolded, swelling. Here, where the earth had already been opened and raided, Yardiff Bey had found pliant material, receptive to his arts.

The earth-elemental found its feet like a drunkard, the problems of balance and motion altogether alien to it. It came from quiescent soil, used only to movements dictated by simple gravity and the patient adjustments of the substrata. It was twice as tall as the tallest of the humans, crudely wrought. Headless, it worked its arms and legs slowly, with a rain of dust and gravel, chance minerals and bits of rock.

To the right of the road was the valley’s side, and to the left, a jumble of stone blocks in the abandoned yards, leaving no room to go around. The eight bulky dray horses reared and neighed, kicking, threatening to break their cracking swingletrees. Gil and Hightower could do nothing but endure the rocking and jolting grimly.

Dunstan had himself braced in the curve of the driver’s waist-bar, fighting the reins. Fireheel had shied away from the apparition, but now Springbuck forced the gray close, holding Calundronius out. The thing sensed the gemstone and its power. It stomped clumsily, gathered more earth to it and flung it at the Ku-Mor-Mai. Sand, dirt and shale hit Springbuck like a wall. The stallion and his rider were blasted backward, falling; Fireheel whinnied in fright, and Calundronius was torn from the Protector-Suzerain’s fingers. Swan lofted a javelin that drove deep into the creature’s side, then began to slough out again without effect, telling her no mortal weapon would avail.

Dunstan and Ferrian were working together to back the neighing, bucking team. Reacher rode up to seize the right lead horse’s bridle.

Sorcery drew the elemental to the axe, guiding it in its only purpose, to stop the Lifetree. It lifted a boulder, hurled it at the dray. Its aim was off; docile earth, it was unused to something as bizarre as trajectory. The boulder missed the team, but smashed into the dray, snapping a wheel rim, crunching its spokes.

The elemental went to the wagon and, without sign of effort, it began to topple the vehicle over on its side. Dunstan clung to his place at the prow a moment, then the reins were dragged from his hands and the weakened hitch broke. The eight horses milled and reared. Ferrian, arms and legs gyrating, was tossed headlong. Reacher managed to break his fall by leaning far out of his saddle, but the King’s own horse, flinching in fright, robbed him of balance. Both went down. The team broke and ran blindly, and with them went Reacher’s horse. The King scrambled madly to pull Ferrian and himself from beneath the great hooves, but his leg was struck, and Reacher’s left leg hung useless, crushed and numb.

Inside the dray, men tumbled as wall changed place with ceiling and floor. Gil managed to catch himself by a handhold ring, igniting white agony in his side. Red Pilgrim lay nearby, having narrowly missed his head. Hightower’s restraints came loose, and he met the wood with a thud.

The earth-being began to pry at the dray bed, not understanding what it was, but only that the object it sought was within. Clumsily conceived arms hunted the chassis for purchase, to sounds of sliding soil and gravel. Its weight tilted the war-dray still more. Those inside struggled to the rear hatch, but its lock was jammed, and the prow had been crumpled in. There was a roof hatch but it, too, resisted them.

Swan was out of her saddle, helping dazed Springbuck dig himself out of the soil that half-covered him, hoping to find Calundronius, as the Shaping commenced tearing at the bed of the overturned dray. Tugging the limp Ku-Mor-Mai free, she found his fingers empty and condemned the luck; Calundronius was the one thing that would help now. She began scooping dirt furiously, looking for the negator.

Planks were torn away from the dray bed. The elemental began working its crude hands in for a new grip. Gil was helpless to aid Dunstan, who was throwing himself against the rear hatch.

There was a creaking from the roof. Inch by inch, the hatch there bent open, as the monster gradually pulled the floor away. The roof hatch parted further, and Gil saw the King of Freegate, Lord of the Just and Sudden Reach. His right foot was planted against the roof, back bowed in exertion. Now he threw his head back, face bracketed with strain. He’d peeled one corner back, and now the latch gave. The hatch popped open.

Reacher, asprawl, thrust his hands in, took Gil’s shoulders and yanked. The American was pulled to momentary safety with a shriek of pain. Dunstan came behind, dragging the bulk of Hightower in short, desperate tugs. Then Reacher seized the Warlord, hauling him out in one motion. The Warlord’s blood ran copiously from his mouth.

Half the dray’s bed came loose in the elemental’s hand. Dunstan, grabbing up Red Pilgrim, was last to rumble through the broken hatch. The Shaping broke off its efforts on the dray, pushing it aside, rolling the wagon over onto its roof. Reacher, with one leg numb, had to move quickly to keep Gil and Hightower from being trapped beneath.

Holding the greataxe, Dunstan ran for the nearest horse, Jeb Stuart. The elemental followed close after, and the horse shied and bolted from it. With nowhere else to hide, Dunstan made a frantic dash for the maze-work of quarries and stoneyards. The monster pursued.

Swan left Springbuck to dig for the negator. She plunged into the stoneyards to help Dunstan, pausing only to pick up a flake of rock with which to blaze her route through the jumble.

Reacher had already recognized that he couldn’t follow; he hopped and hobbled back to Ferrian. The Horseblooded sat holding a gash in his temple that had come close to his eye. The King began to tear his old companion’s vest into shreds for bandage. Gil lay back, wearily cursing the luck that had stopped them so near their objective.

The stoneyards were filled with unused pieces, from monolithic cubes the size of a house to keystones no bigger than a scent box. Lying where they’d been left, they formed a labyrinth terrain of roofless corridors and cul-de-sacs. Dunstan, weaving among them, Red Pilgrim clutched close to him, tried to quiet his own breathing, listening for sounds of the thing following him. He chose his path by guesswork, hoping he was moving the right way. The melancholy Horseblooded hoped the plan he’d conceived in transit, as it were, would work.

He heard the calls of Swan, but withheld any answer, unsure if the creature could hear. Then Dunstan heard scraping, tons of stone being moved by illimitable strength. The elemental was close, guided by the decrees of Yardiff Bey that had targeted it on the Lifetree.

He finally found what he’d sought, an excavation filled with murky ground water, surrounded by high blocks. Dunstan cudgeled his brain, twisting his sad face in thought. Which would be the best place to wait, one that would give his pursuer no long corridor of approach? He plotted the grating, grinding noise of dislodged stone, and positioned himself.

Swan’s voice, nearby, made him look up. She’d ascended a series of blocks to stand high above the rest of the maze, and seen his plan. “That way,” she called through cupped hands, then pointed. “It comes, no more than thirty paces!” She turned, jumped, vanished from sight. He stepped to a better location. There he waited, sweat beading his long features and staining his shirt, as the thing heaved stone tonnage aside to get at him.

Dunstan’s gaunt face worked urgently. He’d come with the vague idea of luring the monster into the water, but if he waited on the brink, might it not catch him first? He was of the High Ranges, and could barely swim, but if he dove into the water now, could the thing not kill him and bury the axe with stones flung from the land? He berated himself; hadn’t that lifetime-night of captivity in Salarna even taught him to think?

The block fronting him began to move, even as he heard Swan’s halloo. He hazarded a quick look over his shoulder and saw her there on the far side of the pool, a dozen paces from him, watching him expectantly. Her look brought home to him the fact that he was not in the Rage, that he’d thought and acted, under great pressure, and not yielded up control of himself. He was again Dunstan, and nevermore Berserker.

Then his mind became cool, his course of action clear, his arms steady and strong. He fired the terse order to Swan, “Stand ready, Red Pilgrim flies!”

As the last block was moved away and the earth-elemental lurched toward him, he took a two-handed grip at the end of the greataxe helve. He waited until the creature was nearly on him, a precise calculation. Then he heaved the weapon up, over his head, as high and as far as he could, and immediately threw himself between the elemental’s feet, curled in a tight ball.

The creature’s limited senses remained with Red Pilgrim, as the axe spun and glittered through the air over the pool. The thing moved after its prize, prodded by dim-witted singleness of purpose. It plunged off the lip of the excavation, into the water. The axe descended, clanging to the stone near Swan.

The water heaved and surged with earth and stone swirling through it as two antithetical elements met. Waves and foam pounded, a miniature hurricane in narrow confines. Dunstan got to his feet, brushing dirt from himself. The waves stilled, and the pool’s surface became as smooth as it had been before.


Yardiff Bey, a wraith of murderous intent, flew at Van Duyn and Katya; his horse’s hoofbeats left a trail of glowing prints in its wake.

The American had dismounted, to snuggle the butt of the Garand firmly at his shoulder. The hellhorse grew larger in his sight picture, cannonading the ground. The sorcerer was crouched behind the beast’s neck, clinging like a thistle in the whiplash banners of its mane. “You must wait until he is nigh, Edward,” the Snow Leopardess advised, “or he may distort what you see.”

He fixed his cheek to the rifle stock, steadied his sight blade. He fired carefully, as he did all things, leaning into the recoil. The first shot was high. The second kicked up dirt, an overcompensation, but the third hit. Bey’s eldritch mount gave its feline cry as it lost vaporous, foul-smelling blood from a wound in its left gaskin. Katya, seeing Bey could hide behind his steed’s neck, told Van Duyn to hold fire; her reckless courage had hold of her again.

Rowling her horse, she went at the Hand of Salamá, shield up, ironbound lance pointing the way. But Bey’s mount was demoniac in its speed and strength, and feared nothing. It swerved away from her lance like spindrift, its snapping, sulfur-smelling fangs barely missing her arm. Its enormous weight slammed her horse’s side, knocking the Snow Leopardess and her charger through the air, discards of battle.

The rifle came up again; Van Duyn fired with metronomic punctuality, one round per second. One whistled through the beast’s forelock, but others struck deep in its neck and chest. Though Bey was protected from the gunfire, Van Duyn stood his ground resolutely. It almost cost him his life; he just did manage to dive aside. The hellhorse swept by, its wounds fuming and sizzling.

As dust settled around him, Van Duyn climbed shakily to his feet. Katya was already picking herself up, throwing off her fall. “I am unscathed,” the Princess assured him, peering eastward after the vanished sorcerer, “but the day seems mapped for disaster.”


Springbuck, finding Calundronius, had raced for the stoneyards to rescue Dunstan and Swan, only to meet them as the two emerged. The Ku-Mor-Mai sighed his relief, shaking the lean Horseblooded by both shoulders.

The others were at the rear of the ruined dray. The King pointed toward Salamá; Springbuck couldn’t quite see, but the others described for him the horseman coming with supernatural speed.

“That’ll be Yardiff Bey,” grated Gil, certain. He was glassy-eyed, his skin blue with shortage of oxygen. Hightower was propped against the wagon, eyelids closed, yet they fluttered open at the name.

The Warlord spoke to the heart of matters in a quavering voice. “Time is short, and I see but one horse.” Fireheel stood waiting, the only one not driven or frightened away. “Ku-Mor-Mai, finish this ride.”

There was no counterargument. Springbuck took Red Pilgrim from Swan. “Fireheel is brawny,” he declared, gathering the gray’s reins, “and can bear one more beside.”

“Then, let it be Gil MacDonald,” the old man bade, words coming in a gargle of blood. “I am late in years, and have my death-wound.”

They hoisted Gil into the gray’s saddle and used the baldric of Ferrian’s scimitar to hold him to the high cantle, seeing he was half-fainting. Springbuck rode behind, carrying the axe and steadying his friend. Swan removed her gleaming, white-winged bascinet and wrapped its chin strap through Gil’s belt. “If you can fill this with the waters of the Tree and bear it back, Hightower’s life may still be saved. I will try to find a horse, and follow, if I can.”

Springbuck nodded, but doubted she had the time. He spoke to Fireheel gently, asking one last effort. The stallion complied. And so the two, the ruler of a mighty suzerainty and the displaced alien, became, of all the thousands who’d answered the Trailingsword, the ones to cover the final stretch.

The other four turned to await the sorcerer. Dunstan was still armed with Andre’s sword, and Swan had drawn hers, taking up Springbuck’s fallen shield. Ferrian brandished his flashing scimitar, and Reacher leaned against the dray, balancing on one foot, holding Swan’s javelin.

A fey calm settled over them. Soon, the salvoes of the hellhorse’s hoofbeats could be heard.

Fireheel churned to the summit of the steep, grassy slope. Springbuck, who’d barely been able to hold Gil in the saddle, slid off, unfastened the baldric, and eased his friend down. The American couldn’t stand, couldn’t breathe or speak. He lay on the ground, clawing at his throat, as the pressure in his chest choked life out of him. Springbuck, beyond knowledge and beyond prayer, took Red Pilgrim in a woodchopper’s grip, and with a broad stance, raised the axe.


When he sighted the four waiting for him in the road, the sorcerer recognized that his options were exhausted. The hellhorse was beginning to falter, and there was no time for spell-casting. He must unleash that weapon he wore where his left eye had been.

He’d lost the eye, long ago, in mortal combat beneath the earth. He’d wrenched from its socket the single Orb of his monstrous opponent, and made it his own in replacement. Now he leaned to one side of his mount’s neck and flipped open the ocular.

The Orb seemed to turn the whole world a harsh, unendurable white, abolishing all color. There were only outlines to be seen in its brilliance. The pain Bey felt, liberating those energies, threatened to rob him of consciousness. Dust swirled up, and the air was superheated. The four mortals fell away, covering themselves, seared and blistered.

But the Hand had already elevated his awful gaze up the mound. There, its venomous light caught Springbuck full in the back as he raised the greataxe. Calundronius didn’t protect him; the Orb was no enchantment, but a living property, like dragonfire. The Ku-Mor-Mai pitched forward, but brought the axe through its arc. The crescent bit dug deep into the earth. From that crease water gushed, to fountain and flow.

Bey had already clicked the ocular shut, clinging to his horse’s mane; the Orb was fueled by its user’s life, and a moment’s exposure had nearly cost the sorcerer his. He barreled past the dray and his downed opponents like Death, the Hunter. Near the top of the hill though, his steed came to the end of its unnatural endurance. As it sank to its knees with a resentful sibilance like a snake’s, he slipped clear and continued afoot.

At the summit he discovered Springbuck stretched out full length on the ground. Not far from him, Gil MacDonald’s body lay face down in the runoff from the hill’s mystic waters. But that runoff was becoming less and less; between the two forms, the Lifetree stood.

Angorman’s axe haft had awakened from the sleep of centuries and put forth roots, growing with preternatural speed, as if years were passing like minutes. Even now, it was less a helve than a sapling, knurled with the promise of limbs.

Yardiff Bey smiled; he was in time. The Tree was still young and vulnerable to his powers. His hands danced skillfully, calling sorcery to him, but without effect. Then it came to him that Springbuck still wore Calundronius. He started for the Ku-Mor-Mai, meaning to hurl the gemstone off the hill, but stopped dead. There was a gurgle, a watery snort, movement, a gust of exhalation.

Gil MacDonald rolled out of the runoff, shaking water from his eyes, spitting, coughing. He’d been healed, not drowned, by those rarest of waters.

The last thing he remembered was an unbearable light that had downed Springbuck; the first thing he saw was Yardiff Bey. He bounced to his feet, forgetting he’d been as good as dead, but recalling he was unarmed. Bey’s hand went to his ocular. He would risk its use one more time; Lifetree and enemy would both fall.


Gil concluded that the ocular was connected with whatever ray had struck the Ku-Mor-Mai; but too much distance separated him from the sorcerer.

“The episode ends well,” allowed the servant of Salamá, finding the catch of his ocular.

A white puff of feathers struck his cheek. He recoiled instinctively. Another streaked past, as several more hovered before his face. Suddenly, the air was alive with piping, swarming Birds of Accord, like a snowstorm of wings and song. Bey swatted them away, wildly angry, and made to unlatch his ocular.

Gil MacDonald was no longer there.

The Hand of Salamá spun, searching in the blinding, deafening blizzard as Birds blundered into him. Gil hit him blindside, taking advantage of the unseeing ocular. They grappled on the ground, the American’s punches and chops hardly hurting the sorcerer. Bey’s strength was immense; he struck away a groping attempt for a choke-hold on his throat, but Gil got his wrists, holding his enemy from behind in a leg-lock, moved not by Rage, but rather by outrage.

Still, this was Yardiff Bey. Irresistibly, his hands came to the ocular. It would serve him one more time, and win him all his desires.

Something pressed hard at Gil’s side as he wrestled; Swan’s helmet. He released his hold, and Bey’s hand flew to the ocular. Gil tore the helmet loose, grasping it by its white wings and, as the Orb shone forth, jammed the glittering bascinet down backward over the sorcerer’s head, holding it fast.

The Hand of Salamá arched backward, squealing in horror. Smoke, glaring white light and the crackle of mystic fire escaped around the helmet’s edges. Gil clung, literally, for his life. Then he had to yank his hands away, as the bascinet became too hot to touch.

It lasted only seconds. Bey slumped, paroxysms ended. The Orb, unpowered, went out. Gil worked up the meager energy to shove himself free.

As he did, a gale sprang up on the hillside. A chorus of gloating, gibbering voices came on it, invisible, circling the hill. Then there was a new voice, surrounded by ranting and wailing in the manner of the damned. Gil recognized it: Yardiff Bey’s. Sobbing, pleading to no effect, the sorcerer’s soul was borne away to pay unholy debts.

Then calm returned, and the Birds of Accord resumed their waiting.



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