Andawyr reached forward and took his hand. ‘Eth-riss’s ways are beyond us, Hawklan,’ he said. ‘Grief reforges us, you know that, whether we will or no. Perhaps there lies your answer. Perhaps in the aeons you must have lain in silent darkness, the ties that bound you withered, while those which held and supported you grew strong.’ He released Hawklan’s hand and made a small gesture of helplessness.
Hawklan looked at Gulda. Still her face was unread-able, but when she spoke, her tone was certain.
‘You’re at peace now because you were at peace then,’ she said. ‘For all the pain, you accepted what was, and your actions and thoughts were true to what you saw, or as true as any man’s can be. That’s why you sense no silent horde waiting vengefully for you in the darkness of your mind.’
‘And I’m wakened now to do as I did then?’ Hawklan asked, almost angrily.
A brief spasm of irritation passed across Gulda’s face. ‘You’re wakened now to be yourself and to act as you see fit,’ she said.
‘And if the end is the same?’ Hawklan said, open horror on his face.
‘What end?’ Gulda replied coldly. ‘There was no end, there is no end. There are only steps along a journey. The step the Orthlundyn took was not the one they had anticipated, but none can see the future, and though they were destroyed, in their destruction they ensured the removal of Sumeral from this world for countless generations.’
‘You understand what I mean,’ Hawklan said.
‘And you understand what I say,’ Gulda replied sharply. ‘You know you must choose right thoughts, and perform right acts-but the choice is wholly yours.’ She leaned forward, her face suddenly passionate. ‘If you would look for guilt at the heart of all this, don’t look to your own puny failings or waste your energies reproach-ing the Guardian who created you and then slept. Look to Sumeral and only to Sumeral. He had the choices that you have, that we all have, and he chose to destroy what others had created to replace it with some vision of his own. He brought this on us, wilfully and willingly, and what we do now with His choices is up to us.’
Hawklan made no reply. Instead, he said, ‘I’d ex-pected something different. A sudden surge of old memories probably; faces, places, happenings. Certainly not this… handful of recollections that I seem to have stumbled on by accident. The only emotion I seem to have is surprise-surprise that I feel so unchanged.’
‘You are of this time,’ Andawyr said. ‘Perhaps Eth-riss intended you to remember nothing, but to just… be here… ready armed with the blessings of your great understanding and experience. Perhaps the few memories you have, he left you as a token so that you might know your worth.’
Gulda shook her head. ‘There are depths in human-ity that are beyond Ethriss’s reach, even though it was he who created us,’ she said. ‘Did he not tell the Cadwanol that they were to go beyond?’
Andawyr nodded.
Gulda went on. ‘Hawklan can send now into those depths the knowledge that the terrible price his people paid was not in vain, nor was it through some failure or weakness on his part. It was paid because a great evil had to be opposed. Now he’s been given the chance to oppose that evil again-should he choose.’
‘There is no choice,’ Hawklan said simply. ‘It’s of no matter why I am what I am. I am here, I have such memories as I have, and I have no alternative but to oppose Sumeral.’
He looked at his two friends thoughtfully. Andawyr, the strange little man who exuded an almost childlike innocence yet who was the powerful and tested leader of an order that had preserved the knowledge of long gone times intact, and with it, skills in the use of the Power that had perhaps formed the world itself. Then Gulda, a dark deep shadow of a person, with a staggering breadth and depth of knowledge. Who was she? He remembered the indistinct figures he had seen shimmering around her in the mist at their first meeting. Figures calling out to Ethriss… Something had drawn them to her, for all she claimed to know nothing of them. Then there was her grip and the way she had handled his sword-a swordswoman for sure, but… And was it true what Loman said? That she never slept?
And on his shoulder, Gavor. Stranger by far than the two opposite, with his hedonistic and irreverent ways, and the black spurs that had come to Loman’s hand in the Armoury as mysteriously as had the black sword to Hawklan’s. Spurs that even fitted around an irregularity in the wooden leg that Hawklan had made for him. He it was who had taunted Dan-Tor at that grim silent stalemate at the Palace Gate in Vakloss and exposed Oklar.
Ravens had fought at that dreadful battle and seem-ingly won their day, surviving to harry Sumeral into Narsindal.
Who are you, my faithful companion? Hawklan thought. To save your life I struck a first blow and pinioned an Uhriel.
His eyes drifted around the room. It was elegant and beautiful, though the carvings and pictures that decorated it were simpler than in most of the rooms and halls of the Castle. Andawyr’s small torch and the glow of the radiant stones threw jagged shadows of the stacks of books on to the walls, to form a further dark mountain range beyond that which the books and documents themselves formed.
It came to him that he had lied. He was different. He was more whole, more sure in his balance in some subtle way. That most of his earlier life was gone from him pained him no more than the sight of some old, long healed wound. As Andawyr had said, he was armed with the blessings of the understanding and experience that that life had given him, and to these were added all the richness of the last twenty years among the Orthlundyn. Such memories as he did have were like flowers rising up from the dark rich earth that held and nurtured their roots. Even the vivid memories of his final terrible moments held no crippling sadness. If anything they would be a spur to his future actions.
Abruptly, his euphoria evaporated as Andawyr’s earlier remark returned to him with chilling clarity. ‘Our position may be more grave than I feared.’
‘If I’m not Ethriss,’ he said quietly. ‘Then who is? And where is he?’ He leaned forward urgently. ‘And if he can’t be found, then who in the end will oppose Sumeral Himself?’
His words hung ominously in the silence.
‘We’ve no answers, Hawklan,’ Andawyr said. ‘Only questions.’
Hawklan did not respond but, after a moment, stretched out his legs and then stood up. ‘I came here to talk about what we should do next,’ he said. ‘Now I know.’
Chapter 7
The sound of Eldric’s own footsteps echoed behind him as he strode purposefully along the corridor. With so many conflicting memories around him he still felt slightly ill at ease in the Palace. There were distant and deep memories of happy, reliable times when his father had been alive and when Rgoric’s father had reigned, and he, Eldric, had been a young trooper on Palace secondment facing a future that was as true and straight as the past. Then came the memories of the double blows of the King’s early death and the Morlider War to be followed by the creeping lethargy and uncertainty that had grown relentlessly through the years of Rgoric’s cruelly blighted reign. And finally and most vividly, the memories of the terrors and triumphs of the last months, with his imprisonment and rescue, the miraculous recovery and brutal slaying of Rgoric, the exposing and routing of Oklar and, dominating all, the gradual realization of the true nature of what had come to pass in Narsindal.