Gilead's Blood Read online

  THE VOICE RANG in Gilead’s mind once more.

  The trees of the Drakwald grew more choked with each passing day. They were in the oldest part of the vast tangle of ancient trees now, a dark, forbidding land that had been this way since the earliest times. An eternal forest, its prehistoric glades undisturbed for a hundred thousand generations, dark and misshapen, with a rank smell and black, twisted trunks and branches that felt spongy and decayed to the touch. Densely overgrown, the pathless depths of the forest might render the most gifted ranger lost and bewildered, and there was a constant scent of subhuman fear on the air.

  Yet still Gilead felt energised, invigorated, and ready for anything, the beautiful voice of the elven woman luring him on.

  The sky had long since been hidden beyond the tree canopies that formed a heavy, claustrophobic blanket high above. The branches made a vault above their heads, sealing in the moist atmosphere. The air was heavy with dank vegetable smells and the creaking, flexing sounds of the forest. The two riders came to a halt, listening for the familiar sounds of birds and undergrowth creatures. But this part of the Drakwald was dead, and nothing but the most primordial life could survive here.

  Fithvael started. Their steeds were suddenly nervous, pricking their ears and flaring their nostrils. The sweet smell of horse sweat rose from their twitching flanks and they pawed the ground, eager to move on.

  The riders had reached a dense, high wall of foliage, a heavy hedge of twisted black branches with shiny, dark green leaves that smelled of rotting corpses. They dismounted and approached the barrier. It shivered in the breeze like a living thing and seemed to lean and reach out towards them, almost as if trying to surround them. The rustle of leaves and twigs became a cracking cacophony as the hedge strained to grow thicker and taller around them.

  ‘There is too much magic here,’ Fithvael said, trying to dispel his unease.

  ‘And there is elf magic in my mind. We have nothing to fear,’ Gilead replied, arming himself with the pair of blades that were always ready at his side.

  Gilead struck out at the hedge, both blades whirring through the air, tearing into the leaves and branches before him. As they died, the leaves soared into the air, floating there, drying and browning, shrivelling to dead veins before disappearing into dust. Dismembered boughs screamed and twisted in death throes, spitting sticky brown sap that burned in the throats of the two companions.

  Fithvael coughed and gasped, tearing a strip of cloth from his shirt and wrapping it around his mouth. But Gilead fought on, oblivious to the hot rasp of breath in his throat, and to the smouldering places on his attire where the acidic sap had begun to corrode his clothing.

  Fithvael breathed easier through his makeshift mask and, arming himself, he ducked under Gilead’s scything swordarm to join the fray. As the pair of them cut away at the dark wall, it twisted and grew around them, until the pair could feel new growth brushing against the backs of their legs.

  ‘Faster!’ Gilead cried, slicing and chopping in the confined space.

  As the two warriors worked in concert, they began to destroy the barrier faster than it could re-grow. Fithvael struck hard and fast beside his friend, trying to slash away the new growth that burst from the ruptured stems.

  They hacked away at the foliage as if it were an army of greenskins, merciless with their elven blades. Small shoots of new growth showed black against the older, dark green leaves, but there were many places now where the sliced and torn twigs remained bare.

  ‘It’s working!’ Gilead bellowed in triumph and, redoubling his efforts, he forced his blades deeper into the thorny barrier. He strode forward into the breach in the hedge, slicing and chopping and powering his way through. Standing close against Gilead’s back, Fithvael kept the new growth at bay as best he could. They were cocooned now in the densely growing wall of vegetation, with barely room to move, but they were still making headway.

  Fithvael fought back the thought that they would be suffocated by the noxious plant, walled in by the dark magic that had somehow created this barrier. Then tiny threads and chinks of light began to penetrate the dense greenery before them. At first, pinpoints of light showed through and then stronger bars of sunlight dappled the scarlet of Gilead’s sap-bedraggled cloak.

  ‘We are here,’ breathed Gilead. He repeated the words over and over to the rhythm of his sword and dagger as he cut away the last of the hedge. It crumbled and broke behind them, defeated, dry and dead. Moments after breaking through, while they were still breathing hard from their exertions, Fithvael and Gilead turned back to the wall. They saw nothing but their own faded path leading back through the dim glades of the forest, their horses nearby.

  ‘It wasn’t real!’ said Fithvael. ‘That hideous barrier… it was just an illusion.’

  ‘Our sweat and fear was real enough!’ Gilead answered, turning from the space where the hedge had so recently been. There was nothing now but the sour-sweet corpse smell that had followed them from the moment they had entered the Drakwald, more pungent than ever.

  Gilead took a step - then stumbled to his knees. Fithvael hurried to him.

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘We are very close, Fithvael te tuin. Our guide awaits us… she just told me her name.’

  ‘Her name?’

  ‘She calls herself Niobe,’ said Gilead, drawing his cloak around him and rising unsteadily. ‘She is so very beautiful…’

  ‘Of course she is, but-‘

  Gilead hushed him abruptly with a raised finger. ‘We are very close. She is showing me visions. A path.’

  IN THE PARTITIONED chamber of her mind, Niobe had stored up a host of images of her prison. Some had collected there unbidden, others she had gathered deliberately, hoping they might be of use to her in freeing herself and her comrades.

  She could feel him close to her now, the one whose mind she had reached with her voice. He had followed her calling, he had come for her, and now she could begin to feel his mind and judge his strengths. She probed his psyche, finding many avenues barred and many doors closed. It was as if he was wounded inside, damaged, shut off to the outside. What pain had haunted his life to make him so?

  She saw him in her mind. He was fair, tall and graceful, and his sword hand was strong and fast. She encountered both defeat and triumph in the brooding depths of his soul and was satisfied. Despite his pain, despite the soul-deep wounds that laced him, he would be the one.

  Her mind burned suddenly with the bright new image of the monstrous living thicket, bursting out its thorny new growth. Niobe knew at once that Lord Ire had also detected the existence of her interloper, of the unwanted intruder into the land he had annexed with his dark Chaos sorcery.

  She knew she had to warn her rescuer.

  ‘BE ON YOUR guard, Fithvael. She is penned in by beasts, and a great magic force that is not her own surrounds her. She is warning me this place is evil.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Fithvael said sardonically. He had known that for days. Biting back his cynicism, he paused abruptly. ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked.

  ‘I hear the growl and snort of beasts,’ replied Gilead.

  Fithvael drew his sword and slung the edge of his moss-coloured cloak over one shoulder, freeing his sword arm from its confining folds. He braced himself.

  ‘Aye, the growl and snort of beasts, where once we heard only the creak and groan of vile, twisted branches,’ Fithvael said.

  But Gilead did not acknowledge him. He had drawn his own sword the instant he saw Fithvael reach for his. They turned their backs to each other and Gilead shut out the images that were now flashing in his head - images of a huge, shimmering, faceless man in black and grey noble’s garb, with pewter and silver ornament; images of a vast, ethereal fortress; images of magic war machines that spewed ball lightning out over the forest. Images surely planted in his mind by Niobe to warn him of his fate.

  ‘On my word,’ Gilead breathed to Fithvael as their cloaks brushed close and they moved tog
ether. Wary, they stared out into the twilit forest, watching for movement.

  When it came, it came without stealth or ceremony. A deep, bellowing howl and a tide of frothing, jeering man-beasts washed down upon them.

  They were distorted, mangled beast-things with flattened craniums and dislocated, distended jaws. Many had horns and tusks crowding in amongst crooked teeth and flaring nostrils. Their flanks were naked and hairless, and their leathery hides were the colour of pumice, which lent their skins the sheen of death. Fithvael saw spine pelts and crowns of coarse hair. He saw the grey-white, seemingly sightless eyes of the beast nearest to him and he charged, a war cry on his lips.

  Gilead thrust his sword at the grey, hump-backed creature that loomed before him. It was half as tall again as the elf and three times as wide, with massively bulging joints in its stocky limbs, and huge, broad-knuckled hands that wielded a short-handled, double-headed axe. The blue metal of Gilead’s sword was met by the crudely hooked blade of the beast’s axe. Gilead swung his blade down in a sudden arc, sliding along the curve of the monster’s axe and taking advantage of the weakness. He rested his blade momentarily in the curve and then thrust upward. The beast was turning, and took a deep wound to the top of an upper limb that was less an arm, more a living cudgel.

  The beast cried out through its clenched mouth, the mandible too distorted to open wide. Gilead saw flecks of spittle hovering in the air for what seemed like minutes. Time stood still for him as, shadowfast, he dived forward, cleaving the beast’s face in two across its jaw, severing the monster’s jowls. Its exposed teeth flashed through the filthy ichor that gouted from the wound, Gilead made a second thrust through the neck while the beast was in mid-howl, and it fell to earth, dead.

  Fithvael drove hard at his assailant, avoiding its blank-eyed stare and slicing with his sword. The abomination parried with the iron-capped club that it wielded one-handed, but Fithvael ducked and swung, side-stepping the heavy blow. Still the beastman stood solid; its weapon whirred through the air, passing Fithvael’s head as he bent his knees and drove his blade upward. He connected with the monster’s bullish neck, gouging a wad of flesh and tearing through arteries, but still the creature stood its ground.

  Fithvael looked once into its eyes and saw his target. Swinging his blade high, he drove it down into the eye socket of his wailing adversary.

  ‘Left!’ cried Gilead as a spiked mace sought contact with the back of Fithvael’s skull. The veteran warrior did as he was bidden, curving his body to avoid the weapon. Gilead drove his sword through a ribcage and another beast fell.

  Gilead and Fithvael fought together in practised unison with little need for words and signs. They swung and sliced, ducked and feinted, taking one beast out at the knees, another through the chest, a third in the gut.

  As the day darkened, and the canopy blackened above them, the warriors fought and killed three dozen grey skinned, white-eyed beastmen.

  GILEAD WOULD HAVE continued on that same night, but they were both tiring and Fithvael persuaded his friend to rest and take up the quest again the following day. Gilead was unsettled, almost frenzied. He knew that he was close to Niobe now. He could feel her mind probing his and see the pictures she was sending out to him. But he respected Fithvael’s counsel. He would rest if he must.

  LORD IRE, CHAMPION of Chaos, stood at the top of a steep, sweeping staircase made of sparkling, black obsidian lapped to a mirror finish. Gilead looked up at the man, who appeared far taller than the elf; a statuesque figure of preternaturally perfect proportions. He was dressed from crown top to toe tip in a million shades of black and grey. His cuirass and coulter looked like polished slate and his cloak clasp, buckles and ornaments were pewter and silver. He stood in profile, his head turned away. Gilead concentrated on that profile, marvelling at the perfect tail of blue-black hair that hung in a swathe down the man’s shoulder.

  Gilead looked on, eyes unblinking, at the giant of a man before and above him, waiting. Waiting for the man to turn and face him. Waiting to look into his eyes and see what horrors lurked there.

  It was only as Gilead made to draw his sword that the man finally turned his body toward the elf. The turn was slow. Lord Ire’s head seemed to remain in profile for minutes. Gilead watched the man turn, knowing from Niobe’s pictures and from her voice in his mind that this was the fell beast-master who held her captive. Lord Ire finally turned to face his would-be assailant and took his first step down the long stairway.

  Gilead used every ounce of his will to rest his hand on the hilt of his sword and draw it, but he could not do it. He stared up at the figure, and into that face as it came closer, trying to quell the terror in his mind.

  In profile, Lord Ire’s face was pale and elegant with a long straight nose and narrow upper lip over a strong jaw line, appearing more elf than human, though human he was. He was clean-shaven and the perfect arch of his half brow was a work of art in its own right.

  But full face there was no symmetry. The left hand side of Lord Ire’s face was a very different kind of art. Hair that grew low over this forehead was held back in a silver brace that bisected his head top to bottom and left to right. The upper quadrant was all hair, black and slick and oily. Where a single eye might have shone out between blinking fringed lids there were a series of slots In the beaten silver mask, the spaces between showing a single lidless orb, hard and white like a marble, staring out, unblinking and blind. The lower part of the face was covered in another swathe of the same black hair, straight and glossy, slashed across by a slack purple mouth, slick with bloody spit.

  As the elf stared, Lord Ire’s sighted eye looked down on Gilead, and the perfect half of his mouth twitched in a wry smile.

  Gilead tore his eyes away from the hideous visage and bent to examine his sword hilt. He concentrated for a moment, grasped it and at last managed to free it from its scabbard. As he did so, he looked up again to where the Chaos lord was descending the steps. He saw one footfall and then no more. Lord Ire seemed to disappear before his eyes.

  Then Gilead heard the steady, long stride of a huge man above his head but looking up he saw no ceiling. He saw nothing except mist.

  Startled, Gilead looked down to see that his beautiful blue steel sword, Galeth’s sword, with its ornate gold hilt and elven rune engravings, had disappeared. He was left holding what appeared to be a rough wooden thing made of two laths, the kind he had learned to swing before he had taken his first infant steps. The kind he and Galeth had play-fought with in the main yard of Tor Anrok, under the tutelage of Taladryel and Nithrom, all those years ago. But it could not be.

  Gilead ran for the staircase, throwing the toy weapon away. As he reached the first step, he saw that the staircase descended rather than ascended… yet Lord Ire had been above him, coming down these very steps.

  Turning about sharply, his stance low and defensive, Gilead found himself by a second staircase. It was straight and the ascending slate steps had no visible means of support. They simply hung in the air. Gilead took the first step tentatively, but finding it firm and strong, he took the next three at ordinary walking pace, then broke into a run, taking two and three steps at a time until he reached the top.

  Suddenly there was a wall before him that he had not seen as he ascended. And then the stairs sloped into a new position and locked together in a steep, unforgiving slope. He slid backwards frantically until he found himself at the bottom of the drop and fell over the lip.

  Gilead landed on his feet at the opening of a long, arched tunnel.

  This place was not real. It could not be real.

  He paced forward and found himself in a huge arsenal. Coming through the great portal in the north end of the store, the warrior-son of Cothor Lothain could not see the south, east or west walls, although he knew they must be there. Above him, some half a mile up, he could see that the ceiling was vaulted in a series of gigantic, interlocking domes.

  Gilead gasped a horrified breath as his eyes focussed on wha
t was laid out before him. Massed in the otherworldly building were more war machines than he had ever thought to see in a lifetime. Elaborate, multi-armed trebuchets were ranked beside rows of massive war cannons with iridescent barrels that stretched high into the vaulted ceiling. Giant crossbows with ornate winching handles, armed with bolts shaved from entire tree trunks, stood alongside giant catapults which looked strangely fragile and ethereal, like mere shadows.

  As Gilead stood in horrified wonder, the machines began to throb and jostle as though wakened from some heavy sleep. Gilead closed his eyes and breathed deeply into his chest. A second breath cleared the elf’s mind and a third calmed the adrenaline rush to his body at the sight of so great an armoury.

  He opened his eyes and for a brief moment he was surrounded again by the sights and sounds of the Drakwald. He sighed his relief.

  Then the arsenal grew up around him once more, as vast and seemingly real as when he had first crossed the threshold. Gilead fled, turning and running desperate miles to reach the door that had been right behind him only moments before.

  Stone and wood, metal and mortar had no meaning here. In this place, space was a malleable commodity. The rules of architecture, the rules of reality held no meaning. The rules had been bent until they were so broken and twisted that they no longer existed at all.

  FITHVAEL ROUSED AS dawn broke over the forest, to find Gilead already awake and standing beside the remains of the campfire. His friend was fully clothed and armed, but he looked pale and drawn.

  ‘We must leave,’ said Gilead. ‘We must get the Lady Niobe out of there and we must do it now.’