The Champion of Garathorm Read online

  'So I believe,' said Hawkmoon without interest. He turned away from Count Brass and began to move a division of Dark Empire cavalry out from beyond Londra's walls. He seemed to be working on a battle situation where the Dark Empire had defeated Count Brass and the other Companions of the Runestaff. 'It must be exceptionally - pretty. But for my own pur­poses I prefer to remember Londra as it was.' His voice became sharp, unwholesome. 'When Yisselda died there,' he said.

  Count Brass wondered if Hawkmoon was blaming him - accusing him of cohabiting with those whose compatriots had slain Yisselda. He ignored the inference. He said: 'But the jour­ney itself. Would that not be exhilarating? The last you saw of the outside world it was wasted, ruined. Now it flourishes again.'

  'I have important things to do here,' Hawkmoon said.

  'What things?' Count Brass spoke almost sharply. 'You have not left your apartments for months.'

  'There is an answer," Hawkmoon told him curtly, 'in all this. There is a way to find Yisselda.'

  Count Brass shuddered.

  'She is dead,' he said softly.

  'She is alive,' Hawkmoon murmured. 'She is alive. Some­where. In another place.'

  'We once agreed, you and I, that there was no life after death,' Count Brass reminded his friend. 'Besides - would you resur­rect a ghost. Would that please you - to raise Yisselda's shade?'

  'If that were all I could resurrect, aye.'

  'You love a dead woman,' Count Brass said in a quiet, dis­turbed voice. 'And in loving her you have fallen in love with death itself.'

  'What is there in life to love?'

  'Much. You would discover it again if you came with me to Londra.'

  'I have no wish to see Londra. I hate the city.'

  'Then just travel part of the distance with me."

  "No. I am dreaming again. And in my dreams I come closer to Yisselda - and our two children.'

  'There never were children. You invented them. In your mad­ness you invented them.'

  'No. Last night I dreamed I had another name, but that I was still the same man. A strange, archaic name. A name from be­fore the Tragic Millenium. John Daker. That was the name. And John Daker found Yisselda.'

  Count Brass was close to weeping at his friend's insane mutterings. 'This reasoning - this dreaming - will bring you much more pain, Dorian. It will heighten the tragedy, not decrease it. Believe me. I speak the truth.'

  'I know that you mean well, Count Brass. I respect your view and I understand that you believe that you are helping me. But I ask you to accept that you are not helping me. I must con­tinue to follow this path. I know that it will lead me to Yisselda.'

  'Aye,' said Count Brass sorrowfully. 'I agree. It will lead you to your death.'

  If that is the case, the prospect does not alarm me.' Hawkmoon turned again to regard Count Brass. The count felt a chill go through him as he looked at the gaunt, white face, the hot eyes which burned in deep sockets.

  'Ah, Hawkmoon,' he said. 'Ah, Hawkmoon.'

  And he walked towards the door and he said nothing else before he left the room.

  And he heard Hawkmoon shout after him in a high, hysteri­cal voice:

  'I will find her, Count Brass!'

  Next day Hawkmoon drew back the tapestry to peer through his window down into the courtyard below. Count Brass was leaving. His retinue was already mounted on good, big horses, caparisoned in the Count's red colours. Ribbons and pennants waved on bolstered flame-lances, surcoats curled in the breeze, bright armour shone in the early morning sunlight. The horses snorted and stamped their feet. Servants moved about, making last minute preparations, handing warming drinks up to the horsemen. And then the Count Brass himself emerged and mounted his chestnut stallion, his brazen armour flickering as if fashioned from flame. The count looked up at the window, his face thoughtful for a moment. Then his expression changed as he turned to give an order to one of his men. Hawkmoon continued to watch.

  While looking down upon the courtyard, he had been unable to rid himself of the sensation of observing particularly detailed models; models which moved and talked, yet were models nonetheless. He felt he could reach down and move a horse­man to the other side of the courtyard, or pick up Count Brass himself and send him off away from Londra in another direc­tion all together. He had vague feelings of resentment towards his old friend which he could not understand. Sometimes it occurred to him, in dreams, that Count Brass had bought his own life with that of his daughter. Yet how could that be? And neither was it a thing which Count Brass could possibly con­ceive of doing. On the contrary, the brave old warrior would have given his life for a loved one without a second thought. Still, Hawkmoon could not drive the thought from his skull. For a moment he felt a pang of regret, wondering if he should, after all, have agreed to accompany Count Brass to Lon­dra. He watched as Captain Josef Vedla rode forward and ord­ered the portcullis raised in the gateway. Count Brass had left Hawkmoon to rule in his place; but really the stewards and the veteran Guardians of the Kamarg could run things perfectly well and would make no demands on Hawkmoon for a deci­sion.

  But no, thought Hawkmoon. This was not a time for action, but a time for thought. He was determined to find a way through to those ideas which he could feel in the back of his own mind and yet which he could not, as yet, reach. For all his old friends might disdain his ‘playing with toy soldiers' he knew that by putting the models through a thousand permutations it might release, at some point, those thoughts, those elusive no­tions which would lead him to the truth involving his own situation. And once he understood the truth, he was sure he would find Yisselda alive. He was almost sure, too, that he would find two children - perhaps a boy and a girl. They had all judged him mad for five years, yet he was convinced that he had not been mad. He believed that he knew himself too well - that if he ever did go mad it would not be in the way his friends had described.

  Now Count Brass and his retinue were waving to the castle's retainers as they rode through the gates on the first stage of the long journey to Londra.

  Contrary to Count Brass's suspicions, Dorian Hawkmoon still held his old friend in great esteem. It caused him a pang of sorrow to see Count Brass leaving. Hawkmoon's problem was that he could no longer express any of the sentiments he felt. He had become too single-minded in his considerations, too absorbed in the problems which he attempted to solve in his obsessive manipulation of the tiny figures on his boards.

  Hawkmoon continued to watch as Count Brass and his men rode down through the winding streets of Aigues-Mortes. The streets were lined with townsfolk, bidding Count Brass fare­well. At last the party reached the walls of the town and rode out across the broad road through the marshes. Hawkmoon looked after them until they were out of sight, then he turned his attention back to his models.

  Currently he was working out a situation in which the Black Jewel had not been set in his forehead, but in that of Oladahn of the Bulgar Mountains, and where the Legion of the Dawn could not be summoned. Would the Dark Empire have been defeated then? And if it could have been defeated, how might that have been accomplished? He had reached the point he had reached a hundred times before, of reenacting the Battle of Londra. But this time it struck him that he, himself, might have been killed. Would this have saved Yisselda's life?

  If he hoped, by going through these permutations of past events, to find a means of releasing the truth he believed to be hidden in his mind, he failed again. He completed the tactics involved, he noted the fresh possibilities involved, he considered his next development. He wished that Bowgentle had not died at Londra. Bowgentle had known much and might have helped him in this line of reasoning.

  There again, the messengers of the Runestaff - The Warrior in Jet and Gold, Orland Fank or even the mysterious Jehamia Cohnalias, who had not claimed to be human - might have helped him. He had called to them for their help in the dark­ness of the nights, but they had not come. The Runestaff was safe now and they had no need of Hawkmoon's help. He had
felt abandoned, though he knew they owed him nothing.

  Yet could the Runestaff be involved in what had happened to him, was happening to him now? Was that strange artefact under some new threat? Had it set into motion a fresh series of events, a new pattern of destiny? Hawkmoon had a sense that there was more to his situation than anything which the ord­inary, observed facts might suggest. He had been manipulated by the Runestaff and its servants just as he now manipulated his model soldiers. Was he being manipulated again? And was that why he turned to the models, deceiving himself that he con­trolled something when, in fact, he was controlled?

  He pushed such thoughts aside. He must devote himself to his original speculations.

  And thus it was that he avoided confronting the truth.

  By pretending to search for the truth, by pretending that he was single-minded in that quest, he was able to escape it. For the truth of his situation might have been intolerable to him.

  And that was ever the way of mankind.

  3

  A Lady All In Armour

  A month went by.

  Twenty alternative destinies were played out on Hawkmoon's wargame boards. And Yisselda came no closer to him, even in his dreams.

  Unshaven, red-eyed, acned, his skin flaking with eczema, weak from lack of food, flabby from lack of exercise, Dorian Hawkmoon had nothing of the hero left in him, either in his mind, his character or his body. He looked thirty years older than his real age. His clothes, stained, torn, ill-smelling, were the clothes of a beggar. His unwashed hair hung in greasy strands about his face. His beard contained flecks of distasteful substances. He had taken to wheezing, to muttering to himself, to coughing. His servants avoided him as much as they could. He had little cause to call on them and so he did not notice their absence.

  He had changed beyond recognition, this man who had been the Hero of Koln, the Champion of the Runestaff, the great warrior who had led the oppressed to victory over the Dark Empire.

  And his life was fading from him, though he did not realise it.

  In his obsession with alternative destinies he had come close to fixing his own; he was destroying himself.

  And his dreams were changing. And because they were chang­ing he slept even less frequently than before. In his dreams he had four names. One of them was John Daker, but much more often now did he sense the other names - Erekose and Urlik. Only the fourth name escaped him, though he knew it was there. On waking, he could never recall the fourth name. He began to wonder if there was such a thing as reincarnation. Was he remembering earlier lives? That was his instinctive con­clusion. Yet his common sense could not accept the idea.

  In his dreams he sometimes met Yisselda. In his dreams he was always anxious, always weighed down by a sense of heavy responsibility, of guilt He always felt that it was his duty to perform some action, but could never recall what that action was. Had he lived other lives that had been just as tragic as this one? The thought of an eternity of tragedy was too much for him. He drove it off, almost before it had formed.

  And yet these ideas were half-familiar. Where had he heard them before? In other, earlier dreams? In conversation with someone? With Bowgentle? In Danark, the distant city of the Runestaff?

  He began to feel threatened. He began to know terror. Even the models on his tables were half-forgotten. He began to see sha­dows moving at the corners of his eyes.

  What was causing the fear?

  He thought that possibly he was close to understanding the truth concerning Yisselda and that there were certain forces pledged to stop him; forces which might kill him just as he was on the point of discovering how to reach her.

  The only thing which Hawkmoon did not consider - the only answer which did not come to mind - was that his fear was, in fact, fear of himself, fear of facing an unpleasant truth. It was the lie which was threatened, the protecting lie and, as most men will, he fought to defend that lie, to stave off its attackers.

  It was at this time that he began to suspect his servants of being in league with his enemies. He was sure that they had made attempts to poison him. He took to locking his doors and refusing to open them when servants came to perform some necessary function. He ate the barest amount necessary to keep alive. He collected rain water from the cups he set out on the sills of his windows and he drank only that water. Yet still fatigue would overwhelm his weakened body and then the little dreams would come to the man who dwelt in darkness. Dreams which in themselves were not unpleasant - gentle landscapes, strange cities, battles which Hawkmoon had never taken part in, pecu­liar, alien folk whom Hawkmoon had never encountered even in the strangest of his adventures in the service of the Runestaff. And yet they terrified him. Women appeared in those dreams, also, and some might have been Yisselda, yet he experienced no pleasure when he dreamed of these women, only a sense of deep disquiet. And once, fleetingly, he dreamed that he looked in a mirror and saw a woman there in place of his own reflec­tion.

  One morning he awoke from such a slumber and instead of rising, as was his habit, and going directly to his tables, he re­mained where he lay, looking up at the rafters of his room. In the dim light filtering through the tapestries across the window he could, quite plainly, see the head and shoulders of a man who bore a strong resemblance to the dead Oladahn. The re­semblance was mostly in the way the head was held, in the ex­pression, in the eyes. There was a wide-brimmed hat on the long, black hair and a small black and white cat sat on the shoul­der. Hawkmoon noticed, without surprise, that the cat had a pair of wings folded neatly on its back.

  'Oladahn?' Hawkmoon said, though he knew it was not Oladahn.

  The face smiled and made as if to speak.

  Then it had vanished.

  Hawkmoon pulled dirty silk sheets over his head and lay there trembling. It began to dawn on him that he was going mad again, that perhaps Count Brass had been right, after all, and that he had experienced hallucinations for five years.

  Later Hawkmoon got up and uncovered his mirror. Some weeks before he had thrown a robe over the mirror, for he had not wished to see himself.

  He looked at the wretch who peered back at him through the dusty glass.

  'I see a madman,' Hawkmoon murmured. 'A dying mad­man.'

  The reflection aped the movement of the lips. The eyes were frightened. Above them, in the centre of the forehead, was a pale scar, perfectly circular, where once a black jewel had burned, a jewel which could eat a man's brain.

  'There are other things which eat at a man's brain,' mut­tered the Duke of Koln. 'Subtler things than jewels. Worse things than jewels. How cleverly, after they are dead, do the Dark Empire lords reach out to take vengeance on me. By slay­ing Yisselda they brought slow death to me.'

  He covered the mirror again and sighed a thin sigh. Painfully he walked back to his couch and sat down again, not daring to look up at the ceiling where he had seen the man who so much resembled Oladahn.

  He was reconciled to the fact of his own wretchedness, his own death, his own madness. Weakly, he shrugged.

  ‘I was a soldier,' he said to himself. 'I became a fool. I deceived myself. I thought I could achieve what great scientists and sor­cerers achieve, what philosophers achieve. And I was never capable of it. Instead, I turned myself from a man of skill and reason into this diseased thing which I have become. And lis­ten. Listen, Hawkmoon. You are talking to yourself. You mut­ter. You rave. You whine. Dorian Hawkmoon, Duke von Koln, it is too late for you to redeem yourself. You rot.'

  A small smile crossed his sick lips.

  'Your destiny was to fight, to carry a sword, to perform the rituals of war. And now tables have become your battlefields and you have lost the strength to bear a dirk, let alone a sword. You could not sit a horse if you wished to.'

  He let himself drop back onto his soiled pillow. He covered his face with his arms. 'Let the creatures come,' he said. 'Let them torment me. It is true. I am mad.'

  He started, believing he heard someone groaning beside
him. He forced himself to look.

  It was the door which groaned. A servant had pushed it open. The servant stood nervously in the opening.

  'My lord?'

  'Do they all say I am mad, Voisin?'

  'My lord?'

  The servant was an old man, one of the few who still regularly attended Hawkmoon. He had served Hawkmoon ever since the Duke of Koln had first come to Castle Brass. Yet there was a nervous look in his eyes as he replied.

  'Do they, Voisin?'

  Voisin spread his hands. 'Some do, my lord. Others say you are unwell - a physical disease. I have felt for sometime that perhaps a doctor could be called ...'

  Hawkmoon felt a return of his old suspicions. 'Doctors? Poi­soners?'

  'Oh, no, my lord!'

  Hawkmoon controlled himself. 'No, of course not. I apprec­iate your concern, Voisin. What have you brought me?'

  'Nothing, my lord, save news.'

  'Of Count Brass? How fares Count Brass in Londra?'

  'Not of Count Brass. Of a visitor to Castle Brass. An old friend of the count's, I understand, who, on hearing that Count Brass was absent and that you were undertaking his re­sponsibilities, asked to be received by you.'

  'By me?' Hawkmoon smiled grimly. 'Do they know what I have become, in the outside world?"

  'I think not, my lord."

  'What did you tell them?'

  That you were not well but that I would convey the mes­sage.'

  'And that you have done.'

  'Aye, my lord, I have.' Voisin hesitated. 'Shall I say that you are indisposed ...?'

  Hawkmoon began to nod assent but then changed his mind, pushing himself from the bed and standing up. 'No. I will receive them. In the hall. I will come down.'

  'Would you wish to - to prepare yourself, my lord? Toilet things - some hot water?'

  "No. I will join our guest in a few minutes.'

  'I will take your decision to them.' Rather hastily Voisin departed from Hawkmoon's apartments, plainly disturbed by Hawkmoon's decision.