The cry seemed to give the watching Mandrocs the heart they needed and they charged forward as one. Hawklan dropped Andawyr and stood astride him.
‘No!’ Andawyr shouted in despair, seeing his inten-tion. But no other path now lay before Hawklan. He drew Ethriss’s black sword and in one seamless flowing movement cut down the attackers as if they had been no more than the dank Narsindal mist itself.
The blade rang out, joyous and clear in the gloom, as if every glittering star in its hilt were singing a hymn of triumph.
In their ghastly armour and mounted on their dreadful steeds the Uhriel struck a chilling fear into even Loman’s burning anger and he felt his body become rigid.
Oklar raised a mailed hand towards him, and his eyes blazed blood red as if from some terrible inner fire. His mount pawed the ground with its clawed foot, its head swaying from side to side and staring at the smith.
Then the hand clenched in frustration and Loman felt hope bubbling up through the icy stillness that had descended on him.
He drove his sword into the ground, snatched up a fallen spear, and with a great roar hurled it at the apparition threatening him. Impelled by the smith’s great strength, the spear hissed as it cut through the rain-soaked air on its journey towards Oklar’s heart.
The Uhriel, however, brushed it aside almost casu-ally with a sweep of his arm. The force of the impact shattered the stout shaft.
Oklar urged his steed forward. The creature did not move at first, but its eyes shone with a deep malevolence and its mouth opened to emit a rasping snarl. Oklar drove great spurs into its scarred sides and with another snarl it began loping slowly forward, its movements angular and peculiarly unnatural.
With his heightened awareness, Loman saw, albeit dimly, the true nature of the Uhriel, rending its way into the reality of this time and this place.
‘Your old men protect you from our true wrath, for the moment, Orthlundyn, though they wilt and fade even as we speak.’ Oklar’s voice seemed to shake Loman’s soul. ‘But we are warrior kings whose empires spanned the world, even before we saw and knew the One True Light. Nothing can save you or your army from our swords when we deem it fit to draw them.’
As he spoke his actions imitated his words, and he drew a great sword. His steed let out a raucous cry of delight at the sound. Out of the corner of his eye Loman saw the watching Mandrocs moving back, some falling to their knees. He felt the two Goraidin involuntarily retreating from him.
But he could not move. His eyes were drawn to the Uhriel’s blade. It seemed to be alive, flickering red and yellow as though it were the mobile, changing heart of his own forge. The sight fascinated him as much as it terrified him and, for all he knew that it was to be his death, he wanted to touch and handle it in its glory; or use its power to make those transcendent creations that lay beyond the outer fringes of his great skill.
Yet even as these thoughts occurred, the image of Hawklan’s black sword formed, with its transcendent chorus of wonder beyond all words.
From somewhere inside him he found the courage to denounce Oklar’s work. ‘Is there no end to your corruption, creature?’ he said sadly.
Oklar’s steed craned its neck forward and bellowed at him, its foetid breath making him grimace.
He wrenched his sword out of the ground and lev-elled it at his approaching doom.
Oklar loomed tall and hideous in front of him, his sword suddenly blood red.
Loman felt his terror melt into raging anger and he gathered his mind and his body together for a strike that would cut down both horse and rider even as he died.
Suddenly, he felt a ringing song pass through him and the ominous form in front of him seemed to start in alarm. Its fearsome eyes dimmed a little and then blazed out anew, more terrible than ever. The foul steed too was affected; it twisted its serpentine neck to and fro, and then let out a high-pitched snarl as though it were being strangled.
Then Oklar turned to his two companions and with a great screeching cry dragged his steed about and charged from the field, trampling underfoot any too slow to avoid his awful charge.
Loman stood aghast as he listened to the terrible cry of rage that rose over the tumult of the battle even as it faded into the distance. Relief surged over him.
‘Strange fortunes look over you this day, smith.’
The voice brought Loman back to the heart of his terror again with its dark icy stillness. Oklar was gone, called by some strange event beyond this battle, but Creost and Dar Hastuin remained and it was Creost who had spoken.
So soon sentenced again after his reprieve, Loman was almost unmanned as he turned to face Sumeral’s two other terrible aides. Creost with his flaccid, mouldering, skin, and his black, empty, eyes; and Dar Hastuin, gaunt and blasted, whose empty white-eyed gaze exuded a malevolence quite equal to that from Creost’s dark pits and whose white hair writhed and twisted from under his helm like a mass of blind, venomous, snakes.
Creost’s mount, like Oklar’s, was a grotesque, preda-tory, caricature of a horse, but it was covered with scales, and it glistened with a clinging dampness that was not that from the teeming rain. Dar Hastuin rode Usgreckan.
Both carried swords whose wrongness bit into Lo-man’s soul as deeply as had Oklar’s, but they offered him no temptation now and he tried to watch the approaching figures as he might any other two oppo-nents.
As they neared, he noticed that both the Uhriel had newly healed and livid scars about their faces.
Gavor, he thought, finding strange solace in the sight. His trembling grip tightened on his sword.
He felt Yengar and Olvric come to his side again, swords raised, though neither affected anything other than terror in the face of the slowly advancing Uhriel.
‘If they’re men, they’ll die as men,’ Loman managed to say as he raised his sword to meet them, though he could not keep the tremor from his voice.
‘Indeed they will,’ said the voice behind him.
Loman started violently and looked quickly back over his shoulder.
A rider was there. For a moment he thought it was one of the Lords as he took in the red cloak and the white surcoat, emblazoned with the symbol of the Iron Ring, and covering a fine chain mail armour.
But the rider’s face was covered with a visor and he saw that though blood had oozed through great scars in the armour, and the cloak and surcoat were torn and bloodstained, the blood was old and long dried. He blinked to clear his vision, and as he did so, he heard the song of the metal that formed the mail coat and the simple undecorated sword that the figure carried. It was a lesser song than that of the black sword of Ethriss, but it was beyond any that he had ever made or taken from the Armoury at Anderras Darion.
And the horse was Serian.
‘Hawklan?’ Loman asked, knowing the answer.
‘These are my enemies before they are yours, smith,’ said the figure, its voice muffled by the visor. ‘Go to your true battle-it hangs in the balance, and will remain so no matter what the outcome here. It needs your heart, your will, your skill.’
Loman reached up and the figure took his hand briefly.
‘Light be with you, Loman,’ said the voice softly, then the figure saluted and eased Serian forward past the silent smith.
Loman stepped aside as the figure turned to face the Uhriel. ‘Lord Vanas ak Tyrion, son of Alvan, and king and betrayer of the long dead Menidai. Duke Irgoneth, patricide and usurper of the throne of drowned Akiron. I greet you.’
The two Uhriel stopped their advance as if they had been struck and Loman felt their terrible presence waver.
‘In Ethriss’s name I offer you redemption and re-lease from your torment, if you forsake His way now,’ the figure went on.