A noise drew him away from the slow, slow, strug-gling figures, and he looked down at his feet. In the pool of spilt wine he could see the caricatured figures of his friends reaching out to him, their hands clawlike. Gleaming eyes and gaping mouths transfixed him. He could feel the tiny hands seizing his foot. He tried to move it, but it would not respond.
‘Wanna shee wot’s appening,’ came the garbled cry of the small struggling figure. ‘Gorra right. Gretmearc rules. All shstallsh to be open to everyone-shee?-everyone.’
Hawklan turned again and tried to call out to the men struggling with him to leave him alone, but no sound came. The little figure staggered and with a joyous shout fell to the ground taking one of his assailants with him.
‘Shorry,’ he cried in a jovial sing-song voice.
Staggering to his feet he sent another man sprawl-ing, and then he lurched into a table which fell over, crashing noisily into a large and elaborate display of some kind. The lights inside the pavilion went wild, flickering dementedly.
The little figure laughed infectiously and gave a cheer of approval.
Hawklan smiled at the man’s antics and tried to rise so that he could intervene. But the grip on his arm tightened, and the scrabbling at his foot grew more frantic. He tried to call out again.
Suddenly, through all the flickering commotion and the noise of the happy destruction being wrought by the drunken man and his pursuers, a solid black shadow flapped into the pavilion and flew over Hawklan’s head.
Hawklan heard a sickening and vaguely familiar thud behind him, followed by a cry, and some of his leaden stupor eased. Then a familiar grip tightened on his shoulder and an equally familiar voice, now urgent and fearful, said, ‘Get up. Hawklan. Get up.’
Hawklan struggled to obey. Black wings beat in his face and the cry was repeated. This time the voice was almost screaming. It was a tone he had never heard before.
There was another crash as the drunk continued to career around the pavilion.
‘Gavor,’ mumbled Hawklan. ‘Gavor. Help me.’
He felt another presence at his back and Gavor was gone again. His mind groped for consciousness now as a drowning man strives for air. The knowledge that his friend might be in danger acted on him more effectively than did any awareness of his own peril, and he exerted what will he had left to try to stand up.
He was partly successful, but his right arm was still gripped tightly, and the scrabbling at his foot persisted and grew horribly. Without looking, he raised his foot and drove it down fiercely. The impact seemed to shake his entire body and he heard tiny cries of fury and hatred swirling off into the distance.
His vision was clearing, as was his head, but every-thing still seemed to be moving very slowly. He turned and saw Gavor deliver a pitiless blow to the temple of a strangely liveried individual who fell like a stricken tree and lay still. Gavor flapped desperately for a moment to recover his balance and then looked across at Hawklan’s right hand.
Hawklan followed the wide-eyed stare and looked down in horror. He could feel his hand, but not see it. His arm stopped just below his elbow. The hand and forearm had been absorbed into the chair, and he could feel it pulling him further in.
The remains of his stupor fled and he became coldly and frighteningly conscious. He pulled desperately on his arm to try and free it, but nothing moved. He felt as if he was trying to lift an entire mountain, and worse, the grip on his arm tightened menacingly. Gavor was about to land on the chair and assail it with his beak, but Hawklan waved him away.
‘Don’t touch it,’ he cried. Then almost without real-izing it, he seized the hilt of his sword in his left hand and pulled it from its scabbard like a great dagger. He felt a strange surging power run through him, and the grip of the chair eased momentarily, before tightening again, and drawing him in further, irresistibly.
Here was an obscenity that could be healed in only one way.
Arching his body awkwardly, he drove the sword down into the chair with all his strength, although, more correctly, the sword seemed to leap forward of its own accord, like a hound after prey.
There was a dreadful choking sound from the chair and the grip tightened on Hawklan’s arm until he began to feel his bones being crushed. Abruptly he was in a dark and tormented place, assailed by clamour and death from all sides, and so full of unending despair that his whole being was filled with a dreadful killing frenzy. He heard his voice screaming both in pain and rage and, withdrawing the sword, he plunged it repeatedly into the horror that would have bound him.
The grip on his hand finally slithered away and the choking sound rose up into a howling scream. Freed, Hawklan staggered back and, his frenzy still on him, seized the sword with both hands and swung it down in a whistling, pitiless arc.
The blade seemed to pass through the terrible chair, leaving it intact, but Hawklan felt it cutting through something, and his flesh crawled at the sensation. He lifted the sword high again, the action harmonizing with his still mounting fury, then with a roar of murderous anger that mingled with and overtopped the cry rising from the chair, he struck again.
The impact seemed to shake the very earth beneath his feet, and he knew he had struck some evil to the heart.
The screaming rose in pitch, a rasping shriek, be-coming louder and louder, until Hawklan felt that the very sound itself was solidifying about him. For an instant it seemed that the seat and the back of the chair were the maw of some dreadful beast spewing forth hatred in its death agony.
Then, it was over. The screaming dwindled into a loathsome gurgling, and everywhere was suddenly silent. Hawklan was equally suddenly spent. He gazed around shakily. The two men who had been struggling with the drunken little man were staring, thunderstruck, at the chair, which seemed to be rotting away as they watched. Beside it, the liveried figure was stirring and groaning.
The little man leapt to his feet and ran over to Hawklan, remarkably sober.
‘Run, man, run. We’ve been lucky so far,’ he said, his whole manner urgent.
Then, eyes wide, as he stared at the remains of the chair, he muttered, ‘This is unbelievable. Appalling.’
Hawklan hesitated and the man pushed him in the chest with unexpected strength, sending him staggering backwards through the doorway and out into the night.
Chapter 20
In the far north of Fyorlund, on its bleak border with Narsindal, stood the great tower fortress of Narsindal-vak. Built on top of a high peak with its roots set deep into the ancient mountain rock, the single circular tower tapered high into a sky invariably leaden with low cloud.
The base was unprotected by any wall, but was a solid and massive extension of the tower’s flaring taper. It blended into the rock in a manner that a travelled observer would have likened to the construction of Anderras Darion.
Narsindalvak dominated the surrounding land for many miles and its sheer size imposed a respect and awe on even the most hardened of its occupants. But for all its soaring majesty the towering fortress attracted little affection, for inside its great sprawling roots lay the extensive barracks that had housed the generations of High Guards who until relatively recent times had maintained The Watch, the Fyordyn’s ancient and traditional duty to guard their borders against the Second Coming of Sumeral.
In token of this duty, rings of windows peered out of every level of the tower like countless staring eyes, and at the top its sweeping sides flared out again to form the huge high-domed Watch Hall, the weary guard post for those same generations of High Guards.
Situated at the end of a long, weary and claustro-phobic valley journey, Narsindalvak offered nothing to entice a visitor but a continually howling wind and an unending view of the monotonous greyness of the plains of Narsindal, misty and miserable at their best; dank, sinister and dangerous at their worst.