The Queen of Swords Read online

  “The Ghanh has come back!” Polib-Bav shouted in triumph. “Oh, lovely Ghanh, thou hast returned to us!”

  The Chaos pack had seized Corum again, but now he was smiling as, with a tortured screech, the Ghanh’s great body engulfed a nearby chariot and its strange wings wrapped themselves around the whole thing and began to crush the occupants to death.

  So astonished were the Chaos beasts holding Corum that he was able to tug himself free. They came after him but he turned and the Hand of Kwll smashed into the face of one, cracked another’s collarbone. He raced for Polib-Bav’s chariot. The leader of the beasts had left his chariot and stood beside it, his huge, horse’s eyes fixed on what was happening to his companions. Before he had really noticed Corum, the Prince in the Scarlet Robe had grabbed his sword from the pile on the floor of the chariot and aimed a blow at Polib-Bav. The horse-thing jumped back, drawing his own sword. But his movements were dazed and clumsy. He parried, tried to stab, missed as Corum dodged aside, and received the Vadhagh metal in his throat. Choking, he died.

  Quickly Corum cut the bonds of his friends and they, too, retrieved their swords, ready to fight the Chaos creatures. But the pack, recovering from its initial horror, was fleeing. Its chariots raced hither and yon through the pale, sickly trees as the Ghanh left its first victims and pursued some more. Corum bent and stripped the corpse of Polib-Bav, taking his water bottle and the pouch of coarse bread at his belt. Soon the Chaos pack had disappeared and they were left alone on the road through the forest.

  Corum inspected the chariot. The reptiles seemed passive enough.

  “Could we drive this, do you think, King Noreg-Dan?” he asked.

  The King Without a Country shook his head dubiously. “I am not sure. Perhaps…”

  “I think I could drive it,” Jhary told them. “I’ve had a little experience of such chariots and the creatures which pull them.” His sack bouncing at his belt, the wide brim of his hat waving, he jumped into the chariot, taking up the reins. He turned and grinned at them. “Where would you go? Still to Xiombarg’s palace?”

  Corum laughed. “Not yet, I think. She’ll send for us when she learns what became of her pack. We’ll take that direction, I think.” He pointed away through the trees. He helped Rhalina into the chariot, then waited while King Noreg-Dan climbed aboard. Finally, he got in himself. Jhary shook the reins, turned the chariot and soon it had bounced through the leprous forest and was rolling down a hill towards a valley full of what seemed to be upright, slender stones.

  5

  THE FROZEN ARMY

  THEY WERE NOT stones.

  They were men.

  Each man a warrior—each warrior frozen like a statue, his weapons in his hands.

  “This,” said Noreg-Dan in quiet awe, “is the Frozen Army. The last army to take arms against Chaos…”

  “Was this its punishment?” Corum asked.

  “Aye.”

  Jhary, gripping the reins, said, “They live? Is that so? They know that we pass through their ranks?”

  “Aye. I heard that Queen Xiombarg said that since they supported Law so wholeheartedly they should have a taste of what Law aimed for—they should know the ultimate in tranquility,” Noreg-Dan said.

  Rhalina shivered. “Is this really what Law comes to?”

  “So Chaos would have us believe,” Jhary said. “But it matters not, for the Cosmic Balance requires equilibrium—something of Chaos, something of Law—so that each stabilizes the other. The difference is that Law acknowledges the authority of the Balance, while Chaos would deny it. But Chaos cannot deny that authority completely for its adherents know that to disobey some things is to be destroyed. Thus Queen Xiombarg dare not enter the realm of another Great Old God and, as in the case of your realm, must work through others. She, like the rest, must also watch her dealings with mortals, for they cannot be destroyed by her willy-nilly—there are rules…”

  “But no rules to protect these poor creatures,” Rhalina said.

  “Some. They have not died. She has not killed them.”

  Corum remembered the tower where he had found Arioch’s heart. There, too, had been frozen men.

  “Unless directly attacked,” Jhary explained, “Xiombarg cannot kill mortals. But she can use those loyal to her to kill other mortals, do you see, and she can suspend the lives of warriors like these.”

  “So we are safe from Queen Xiombarg,” Corum said.

  “If you choose to think so.” Jhary smiled. “You are by no means safe from her minions and, as you have seen, she has many of those.”

  “Aye,” said the King Without a Country feelingly. “Aye. Many.”

  Holding his reins in one hand Jhary dusted at his clothes. They were tattered and bloodstained from the various flesh wounds he had sustained in the battle with the Chaos pack. “I would give much for a new suit,” he murmured. “I’d make a bargain with Xiombarg herself…”

  “We mention that name too often,” King Noreg-Dan said nervously as he clung to the side of the jolting chariot. “We shall bring her down on us if we are not more discreet.”

  Then the sky laughed.

  Golden light began to dapple the clouds. A brilliant orange aura sprang up in the distance ahead and cast giant shadows for the frozen warriors.

  Jhary jerked the chariot to a halt, his face suddenly pale.

  Purple brilliance came from the sky in fragments the size of raindrops.

  And the laughter went on and on.

  “What is it?” Rhalina’s hand went to her sword.

  The King Without a Country put his haggard face in his hands and his shoulders slumped. “It is she. I warned you. It is she.”

  “Xiombarg?” Corum drew his own sword. “Is it Xiombarg, Noreg-Dan?”

  “Aye, it is she.”

  The ground shook with the laughter. Several of the frozen warriors toppled and fell, still in the same positions. Corum looked about for the source of the laughter. Was it in the aura? Or in the golden light? Or the purple rain?

  “Where are you, Queen Xiombarg!” He brandished his sword. His mortal eye flashed his defiance. “Where are you, Creature of Evil?”

  “I AM EVERYWHERE!” answered a huge, sweet voice. “I AM THIS REALM AND THIS REALM IS XIOMBARG OF CHAOS!”

  “We are surely doomed,” stuttered the King Without a Country.

  “You said she could not attack us,” Corum said to Jhary-a-Conel.

  “I said she could not directly attack us. But see…”

  Corum looked. Over the valley now came hopping things. They hopped on several legs and from their bodies sprouted a dozen or more tentacles. Their huge eyes rolled, their massive fangs clashed.

  “The Karmanal of Zert,” Jhary said in mild surprise as he dropped the reins and armed himself with sword and poignard. “I have encountered these before.”

  “How did you escape them?” Rhalina asked.

  “I was at that time companion to a champion who had the power to destroy them.”

  “I, too, have a power,” Corum said grimly, raising his hand to his eye. But Jhary shook his head and grimaced.

  “I fear not. The Karmanal of Zert are indestructible. Both Law and Chaos have, in their time, taken steps to do away with them—they are fickle creatures who fight for one side or another without apparent reason. They have no souls, no true existence.”

  “Therefore they should not be able to harm us!”

  The laughter rang on.

  “I agree that, logically, they should not be able to harm us,” Jhary answered equably. “But I am afraid that they can.”

  About ten of the hopping creatures were nearing their chariot, weaving between the statuelike warriors.

  And they were singing.

  “The Karmanal of Zert always sing before they feast,” Jhary told them. “Always.”

  Corum wondered if Jhary had gone mad. The tentacled monsters were almost upon them and the companion to champions continued to chat without apparent awareness of their dan
ger.

  The singing was harmonious and somehow made the creatures even more terrifying while, as a counterpoint, Xiombarg’s laughter continued to fill the sky.

  When the hopping things were almost upon them Jhary raised his hands, dagger in one, sword in the other, and cried, “Queen Xiombarg! Queen Xiombarg! Who do you think you would destroy?”

  The Karmanal of Zert stopped suddenly, as frozen as the army which surrounded them.

  “I destroy a few mortals who have set themselves against me, who have caused the deaths of those I loved,” said a voice from behind them.

  Corum turned to see the most beautiful woman who had ever existed. Her hair was dark gold with streaks of red and black, her face was perfection and her eyes and lips offered a thousand times more than any woman had offered a man in the whole of history. Her body was tall and of exquisite shape, clothed in drapes of gold and orange and purple. She smiled tenderly at him.

  “Is that what I destroy?” she murmured. “Then what do I destroy, Master Timeras?”

  “I am called Jhary-a-Conel now,” he said pleasantly. “May I introduce…?”

  Corum stepped forward. “Have you betrayed us, Jhary? Are you in league with Chaos?”

  “He is not, sadly, in league with Chaos,” said Queen Xiombarg. “But I know he rides often with those who serve Law.” She looked at him affectionately. “You do not change, Timeras, basically. And I like you best as a man, I think.”

  “And I like you best as a woman, Xiombarg.”

  “As a woman I must rule this realm. I know you for a sometime hero’s lickspittle, Jhary-Timeras, and assume this handsome Vadhagh with his strange eye and hand is a hero of sorts…”

  She glared suddenly at Corum.

  “Now I know!”

  Corum drew himself up.

  “NOW I KNOW!”

  Her shape began to alter. It began to flow outwards and upwards. Her face was that of a skull, then that of a bird, then that of a man, until at last it reverted to that of a beautiful woman. But now Xiombarg stood a hundred feet high and her expression was no longer tender.

  “NOW I KNOW!”

  Jhary laughed. “May I, as I said, introduce Prince Corum Jhaelen Irsei—he of the Scarlet Robe?”

  “HOW DO YOU DARE ENTER MY REALM—YOU WHO DESTROYED MY BROTHER? EVEN NOW THOSE STILL LOYAL TO ME IN MY BROTHER’S REALM ARE SEEKING FOR YOU. YOU ARE FOOLISH, MORTAL. AH, THE IGNOMINY. I THOUGHT A BRAVE HERO BANISHED MY BROTHER—BUT NOW I KNOW IT WAS A MORON! KARMANAL CREATURES—BEGONE!” The hopping things vanished. “I WILL HAVE A SWEETER VENGEANCE ON YOU, CORUM JHAELEN IRSEI—AND ON ALL WHO TRAVEL WITH YOU!”

  The golden light faded, the orange aura disappeared and the purple rain ceased to fall, but Xiombarg’s huge shape still flickered there in the sky. “I SWEAR THIS BY THE COSMIC BALANCE—I WILL RETURN WHEN I HAVE CONSIDERED THE FORM OF MY VENGEANCE. I WILL FOLLOW YOU WHEREVER YOU TRY TO ESCAPE. AND I WILL GIVE YOU CAUSE TO WISH THAT YOU HAD NEVER ENCOUNTERED LORD ARIOCH OF CHAOS AND THUS WON THE ANGER OF HIS SISTER XIOMBARG!”

  Xiombarg faded and silence returned.

  Corum, much shaken, turned to Jhary. “Why did you tell her? Now there is no escape for us! She has promised to pursue us wherever we go—you heard her. Why did you do it?”

  “I thought she was about to find out,” Jhary said mildly. “Also it was the only way to save us.”

  “To save us!”

  “Aye. Now the Karmanal of Zert no longer threaten us. I assure you that we should have been in their bellies by now if I had not spoken to Queen Xiombarg. I guessed that she could not know very well what you looked like—most of us seem very alike to the gods—but that she might learn when we fought. Corum—it was the only way to stop the Karmanal.”

  “But it has done us no good. Now she goes to summon whatever horrors she plans to set upon us. Soon she will return and we shall suffer a worse fate.”

  “I must admit,” said Jhary, “that there was another consideration. Now we have time to see what this is coming yonder.”

  They looked.

  It was something that flew and flashed and droned.

  “What is it?” Corum asked.

  “It is, I believe, a ship of the air,” said Jhary. “I hope it has come to save us.”

  “Perhaps it has come to harm us?” Corum said reasonably enough. “I still feel you should not have revealed who I was, Jhary…”

  “It is always best to bring these things out into the open,” Jhary said cheerfully.

  6

  THE CITY IN THE PYRAMID

  THE SHIP OF the air had a hull of blue metal in which were set enamels and ceramics of various rich colours, making a number of complicated designs. It brought a slight smell of almonds with it as it began to descend, and its moan was almost like that of a human voice.

  Now Corum could see its brass rails, its steel, silver and platinum fixtures, its ornate wheelhouse, and he felt that he was reminded of something by it—an image, perhaps, of childhood. He stared curiously at it as it began to land and a small object rose up from it and flew towards them.

  It was Jhary’s cat.

  Suddenly Corum stared at Jhary and laughed. The cat came and settled on the shoulder of the companion to heroes and it nuzzled his ear.

  “You sent the cat to find help when the Chaos pack set upon us!” Rhalina said before Corum could speak. “That is why you told Xiombarg who Corum was—for you knew that help was coming and thought your plan thwarted at the last moment.”

  Jhary shrugged. “I did not know the cat would find help, but I guessed.”

  “From where has that strange flying craft come?” asked the King Without a Country.

  “Why, where else but from the City in the Pyramid? It was my instruction to the cat to look for it. I would gather that it found it.”

  “And how did it communicate with the folk of that city?” Corum asked as they drew nearer to the blue ship of the air.

  “In emergencies, as you know, the cat can communicate quite clearly with me. In a very serious emergency it will use more energy and communicate with whom it pleases.”

  Whiskers purred and licked Jhary’s face with its little rough tongue. He murmured something to it and smiled. Then he said to Corum, “We’d best hurry, though, for Xiombarg may begin to wonder why I did reveal your name. It is one of the characteristics of many of the Chaos Lords that they are impetuous and not given overmuch to thinking.”

  The ship of the air was a good forty feet long and had seats running the whole of its length on both sides. It appeared to be empty, but then a tall, comely man stepped from the wheelhouse and came forward towards them. He was smiling at Corum’s complete astonishment.

  For the steersman of the ship of the air was quite plainly of no other race but Corum’s. He was a Vadhagh. His skull was long, his slanting eyes purple and gold, his ears pointed and his body slender and delicate but containing a great deal of energy.

  “Welcome, Corum in the Scarlet Robe,” he said. “I have come to take you to Gwlās-cor-Gwrys, the one bastion this realm has against that Chaos creature you have just met.”

  Dazed, Corum Jhaelen Irsei entered the ship of the air while the steersman continued to smile at his astonishment.

  They took their places near the wheelhouse in the stern and the tall Vadhagh made the ship rise slowly and begin to head in the direction it had come. Rhalina looked backward at the forest of frozen warriors they left behind. “Is there nothing we could do to help those poor souls?” she asked Jhary.

  “Only help make Law strong in our own realm so that it can one day send aid to this realm, just as Chaos now sends aid to ours,” Jhary told her.

  They were soon crossing a land of oozing stuff which flung up tendrils at them and sought to drag them down into itself. Sometimes faces appeared in the stuff, sometimes hands raised as if in supplication. “A Chaos sea,” King Noreg-Dan told them. “There are several such places in the realm now. Some say that that is what those mortals who serve Chaos f
inally degenerate to.”

  “I have seen its like,” nodded Jhary.

  Strange forests passed below them and valleys filled with perpetually burning fire. They saw rivers of molten metal and beautiful castles made all of jewels. Horrid flying creatures sometimes rushed into the air towards them but turned aside when they recognized the craft, though it was apparently without protection.

  “These people must have a powerful sorcery to make boats fly,” Rhalina whispered to Corum. And Corum made no reply at first, for he was deep in thought, racking his memory.

  At last he spoke. “This is not sorcery, as such,” he told her. “It requires no spells and few incantations but is instead mechanical in its nature. Certain forces are harnessed to give power to machines—some of them much more delicate than anything the Mabden could imagine—which propel such vessels through the air and do many other things. Some of the machines could once sunder the fabric of the Wall Between the Realms and pass easily from plane to plane. My ancestors are said to have created such machines but most chose not to use them, preferring a different logic to their living. I dimly remember a legend which says that one Sky City—that was the name they gave to their cities—left our realm altogether, to explore the other worlds of the multiverse. Perhaps there was more than one such city, for I know that one did destroy itself when it went out of control during the Battle of Broggfythus and crashed close to Castle Erorn, as I told you. Perhaps another city was called Gwlās-cor-Gwrys and is now known as the City in the Pyramid.”

  Prince Corum was smiling joyfully and speaking excitedly. With his mortal hand he pressed Rhalina’s arm. “Oh, Rhalina, can you understand what I feel at finding that some of my race still live, that Glandyth did not destroy them all?”

  She smiled back at him. “I think so, Corum.”

  The air about them began to vibrate and the boat shuddered. The steersman called from the wheelhouse, “Do not be afraid. We are passing into another plane.”

  “Does that mean we are escaping Xiombarg?” asked the King Without a Country eagerly.