Goddess Worldweaver

8

Miradel watched, horrified, as the pictures played out in the Viewing Chamber. The sight of the armada struck like a cold blade into the pit of her stomach, and she choked back a sob as the tall, dark ships for the first time cast a shadow across Nayve’s verdant shore. She was so appalled that she couldn’t draw breath when she saw Natac, astride Regillix Avatar, vanish into the inky miasma. Orange flame blossomed in the murk, and she shuddered with each explosion, not knowing if her beloved had cast, or been struck, by fire.

Finally the great serpent emerged into view, wings striving for lift, a dozen harpies straining to catch the dragon from below. But those massive pinions were strong, and Miradel slowly drew in a breath of air as serpent and rider at last rose free. It was a little victory that meant all the world to her in that instant, yet what could it mean against the complete scope of the disaster?

The druids in the chamber, a hundred or more of them, were stunned into silence by the awful scene.

“It can’t be real!” gasped one woman, a novice brought to Nayve by the goddess barely two years ago.

But it was real. Nayve was facing a threat beyond anything in her historical memory, and it seemed that every effort of resistance must be as futile as the last. If the thousand beautiful boats of the Metalfleet could be brushed aside by these ships, what hopes could they place in the army on land?

All the peoples of Circle at Center had been following the news of the invasion with growing terror, and none of them knew the answer to that question. Indeed, from beneath the Loom of the Goddess Worldweaver, it seemed as though the whole Fourth Circle, the nexus of the cosmos and the Center of Everything, could only tremble in dread. A multitude of earthquakes rippled across the land, crumbling mountains, clawing fissures through verdant plains, draining lakes and streams through cracks in the ground, leaving wastelands of mud, silt, and sand. In Argentian, tall towers of crystal and wood crashed to the ground, killing hundreds. In the Lodespikes, a prosperous gnomish town was buried under the rubble of a crushing landslide.

All these scenes were played on the wall of the Viewing Chamber, the elder druids taking turns sifting the wool through the flame. Of course, many of the order were gone from the Center now, playing an important role in the army and navy of the world. Not only were druids windcasters for Roland Boatwright’s fleet, but they served as healers in the ranks of the foot soldiers. Too, the mightiest among them could wield goddess magic with devastating effects.

But others were needed here, in the temple and the city, and Miradel felt a flush of shame as she thought about her fear, relieved in a small measure that she was not in the front of the fight.

As to the actual scene, five hundred death ships simultaneously grounded themselves in the shallows at the edge of the Blue Coral Sea, and it was as though the strands of threads refused to draw close to complete the picture, to give a specific view. Instead, the druids saw a storm of darkness, like a cloud of black smoke lying low and heavy over the sea, drawing close to land. Here and there sparks blossomed as fires burst into sight, but mostly it was more like a single vast blanket than any individual collection of ships and warriors.

Yet when those first keels touched ground, the hundred druids in the chamber uttered a collective groan. They felt the pain in their feet, in their guts, in their souls. Several ran sobbing from the room, and Miradel caught a young woman next to her, who fell into a complete swoon. She noticed that Shandira was kneeling, helping several others who had fallen.

The black woman looked at her, and Miradel was shaken to see this tall, lithe woman trembling like a frightened deer.

“What happened?” Shandira asked, her voice a harsh whisper.

“You are one with Nayve, now,” the elder druid replied. “And so you are suffering the pain of the world.”

“Why, again? Tell me why this scourge strikes such a peaceful world.”

Miradel went to the candle, still burning near the flat, white wall; Most of the other druids had left, but there were several tufts of thread remaining near the single flame. She lifted them, stretched them gently with her fingers, fed them one at a time into the yellow tongue of fire.

“View the Fifth Circle… to the far distance in the direction that is neither metal nor wood,” she intoned.

The world of Loamar was there, portrayed on the wall as it might have been viewed by a bird flying at impossible height with impeccable clarity of vision. The dark shore of the Worldsea fringed the circle, the coast separated by narrow channels, bays, and harbors. The terrain rose into the distance, each inland plateau of Loamar higher than the last, until the dark fortress of Karlath-Fayd himself rose like a mountain range at the far end of the world… the far end of all existence.

“I have heard tales of Hell,” Shandira said in awe. “And they make it seem to be such a place. Only this is so cold, so dark… it is lifeless.”

“Yes,” Miradel said. “Lifeless, now that the armada has sailed forth. But look, see the gargoyle atop his highest precipice?” She gestured at the grotesque statue, a visage of fang and horn, leathered wings folded back as if poised for flight. “It will fly forth in rage to defend its lair, should any intruder approach.”

“As horrible as any demon of fire,” acknowledged Shandira. “But this prince of death… he dwells within?”

Miradel fed more threads into the flame, guiding the image through the deep canyons that formed the halls of the fortress. Finally the route emerged into a wide bowl. On the far side of the cavernous space was a throne carved from the very mountain itself. “It is hard to see very well, but look-there is his cloak, shimmering in the distance. And of course you can see his eyes.”

Indeed, the monstrous presence was discernable in the gauzy screen, and the two fiery eyes-like the flames of infernal hell-glowed and flared from on high. “Does he never move?”

“Not in the half century since the death ships sailed,” explained the elder druid. “It is as though he is a statue. But the goddess told me that his eyes can flash mighty destruction, and that any who beholds that gaze is immediately burned to ash. There is great power lurking within that stony shell!”

“Power enough to send an army against a world,” Shandira murmured, as the picture of Loamar faded, and once again the green shore of Nayve trembled on the wall as the toxic cloud swept toward land.

He had forgotten the Somme, forgotten the mud and the machine guns and the talk of the Lord. He didn’t know how long he had been aboard the death ship, only that he had come here more recently than the pikemen who wore tattered uniforms reminiscent of Alpine heights, much more recently than the legionnaires who still wore the toga and kilt of Caesar’s guard. But they were all brothers in arms now, a company of men ready to wage war. They knew and hated their captain, the black-bearded brute who ruthlessly ruled their ship and their lives. For a long time they had had only some vague notion of their enemy, unseen but also hated.

His existence was not so much a life as a vague passing of time, just as time had been passed by the ghost warriors in Loamar for the past several dozen centuries, and for those same warriors, embarked upon the death ships, over the course of the last fifty years.

But now that enemy had a face, had white sails and silver missiles that brought fire and death. He had seen many black ships burn, and he did not want to face the fate of those crews who had plunged, burning and suffering, into the water. When the dragon had flown overhead, breathing fire that incinerated ships to both sides of his own, he had felt an upswell of fury. He had no weapon to strike at a flying creature, but he opened his mouth and wailed an inarticulate groan of fury. His weapon, the familiar, heavy Enfield rifle, was in his hands, and he longed to plunge the bayonet into the guts of a living foe.

When the sturdy keel struck the shallows, and the vessel was grounded on the shores of Nayve, he moved to action as if he had trained all his life for this moment. In his hands he bore that thing shaped like his rifle, with a lethal bayonet affixed to the terminus. In some dim recess he knew that it was not a rifle, for he had no bullets, no way to shoot. It was the blade that was lethal, and he knew that on this green and verdant shore there were enemies to be slain with that keen point and sharp, serrated edge.

So he moved to the fore of the deck, with the legionaires and the pikemen, and he felt the planks begin to lower. The ship changed around him, the once-steep hulls bending, folding, flattening to form a smooth ramp. This ramp descended into the shallows, and the front of the vessel was open, facing the land. In a single mass the ghost warriors charged down and out, splashing into water that surged as high as their hips, slogging toward shore with rifles, pikes, spears all leveled toward the enemy lurking on the dunes.

From somewhere within him a cry gurgled up, a howl of battle that was no longer a human sound nor even the noise of any living thing. Instead, it was a plea for blood, a promise of violence… and as the death ships came to shore it erupted, simultaneously, from twenty thousand ghostly throats.

Tamarwind’s knees went weak as he heard that awful sound wail upward from the shore. Elves in his line, warriors who had trained for hundreds of years, clapped their hands over their ears and fell, writhing, to the ground. A whole rank of younger troops turned and started to flee, only to pause before the roaring scorn of Rawknuckle Barefist, who had blocked the inland paths in fear of just such a rout.

The beach was black with charging troops, spears and bayonets bristling all along the front. Against that tide Tam’s regiment of elves, a thousand strong and arrayed in a two-rank line, seemed like a tissue paper dike attempting to hold back the tide. Even the knowledge of other formations-more great regiments of elves, as well as legions of gnomes and an army of trolls-seemed like merely potential casualties. All would fight bravely he knew, but one of them would eventually be overwhelmed. With the line breached, the rest of the defenders would be imperiled; they would have to flee or die. At best, they could hope to buy a little time, for a tremendous payment in lives and in blood.

Yet he had trained and prepared too long to abandon hope now. He shouted commands, inarticulate barks for the most part that nevertheless served the purpose of stiffening the ranks, letting the elves know their captain was with them. Most of these men had never been in a battle before, but he knew they would serve bravely and well. He had first learned this about himself nearly five hundred years earlier: the elven heart had some kind of instinctive war memory that proved unfailingly courageous in the hour of need.

At the same time, he was overwhelmingly sad, thinking about these elves who could have looked forward to hundreds more years of pastoral life. All that was put at risk, for many would be lost, because of the necessity to fight.

Lastly, as the ships towered above the beach, still surging forward with teeming decks, Tamarwind allowed himself to think of Belynda. There were so many things he wished he had told her: for centuries he had planned to speak to her, to convince her of his love, and yet the time had never been right. He had waited, always hoping for a better opportunity, and now it occurred to him that his opportunities might have run out. That thought frightened him more than death or injury, violence or flame, and in that awareness he wanted very much to get away from here alive.

The death ships had spilled their cargo with appalling haste. Tam had watched in astonishment as each bow had folded into a ramp, dropping forward into shallow water to disgorge a tight rank of shadowy warriors. Already the first of these were scrambling out of the surf onto dry land. Water dripped from their tunics and legs just as it would drip from real flesh, and for the first time the elven veteran accepted the fact that these were real foes capable of inflicting genuine and lethal wounds.

He was heartened to see a few silver spheres fly through the air as Gallupper’s guns, atop the nearby dune, opened up. The metallic shot skipped across the sand, rolling into the tightly packed ranks before exploding in a blaze of white heat. Again and again the batteries spoke, dozens of shots scattering into the files of ghost warriors, tearing great rips in those lines. There were more of them shooting from the dune to his left, and as the enemy masses tried to form ranks, they found themselves under resolute and fiery assault.

But still more of them were coming ashore, the numberless tide of death ships looming tall and black just beyond. Those already on land, meanwhile, ignored the lethal barrage, re-formed the ranks where they had been torn by the explosions, and started to march toward the elves. Either the batteries slowed their fire or, more likely, the numbers of the enemy simply dwarfed that responding barrage. In any event, it seemed to Tam that they came on without so much as awareness of the explosions flashing among them.

“Steady-raise those pikes. Hold your ranks, elves!” Tamarwind shouted, taking some comfort from the sound of his own voice. The front of the elven line bristled like a hedgehog as the steel-headed pikes were tilted forward. At the junctures where one company met the next, giants stood ready, fighting in trios armed with massive, long-handled axes.

“Giants-take up your halberds and move into position!” Tam called, as the ghost ranks advanced, approaching the markers that had earlier been placed. When the leading rank was a hundred yards away, the elf turned to the rear, signaled the company of longbowmen who had been waiting for his sign. “Fire away-volleys, one after the other!”

The deadly missiles arced overhead, flying in eerie silence, slashing through the sky and then plunging down into the dark rank of attackers. Many arrows plunged into the sand, but numerous others tore into flesh, puncturing heads and shoulders and chests among the grim legion. A hundred attackers fell in that first volley, and already the second barrage of arrows was rising into the sky, passing high over the elves to once more pepper the lethal horde.

Now that eerie wail was repeated, an ululating cry from a hundred thousand bloodless throats. Sand churned, and the air itself seemed to tremble as the Deathlord’s legion advanced into a trot, then a ragged run. The tight discipline wavered as the faster runners broke ahead of the slower. A hundred tall, black spearmen, carrying leather shields and garbed as Zulu veterans, rushed toward the center of the elven line. They halted, casting their spears into the midst of Tam’s troops, then came on in another rush. A few fell to well-aimed arrows, and the rest met a bloody end on the pikes that danced and bobbed before the defenders’ faces.

But now the rest of the horde was close, and there was a great clattering of wood and steel as the pike butts were planted and the blades chimed together, then quivered under the impact of undead but very corporeal flesh.

Tamarwind drew his sword, the slender, double-edged blade forged a hundred years ago by a druid master. He stood with the First Company to his right, and a trio of halberd-armed giants at his left. In another instant the ground before him was swarming with dark, hateful faces. A spear thrust toward him, and he hacked the weapon in half with a single slash. Two muskets tipped with lethal bayonets jabbed, and he was forced to take a half step backward. But he lunged forward again, two quick stabs dropping the ghost warriors that might have been summoned here from Shiloh or Gettysburg.

A giant roared, and the mighty axe blade swept past, cleaving a centurion in two before plunging deep into the sand. The halberdier tried to wrest his weapon free as three swordsmen rushed in; Tam dropped one with a throat-cutting slash, then held the other two at bay until the giant raised the halberd and brought both attackers down with a single, haymaking swing.

Feeling the rhythm of his comrade, Tamarwind rushed forward in the wake of the halberd’s swing, stabbing a charging Turk in the throat. The man, who might have fought in Saladin’s army or even in the legions of Mohammed himself, fell to the sand and thrashed, choking and gasping as new death slowly claimed him. Tam had already found his next target and moved on from there.

His blade stayed eerily shiny, even as it ran through guts and lopped off limbs. The attackers pressed forward with that keening wail, a sound unlike anything raised from human voice, yet in its very strangeness it seemed a potent and demoralizing battle cry. He realized another strange thing as the battle wore on: the attackers he slew fell to the ground as corpses, yet as more and more of them died, the piles of corpses did not swell to the heights he would have expected. It was as if the flesh of these warriors gradually dissolved, even as additional ranks of ghost warriors kept rushing forward to replace the gaps left by the slain. As fresh bodies collapsed on top of the pile, those at the bottom slowly vanished into the dirt.

Tamarwind took a glimpse along the length of his line, heartened to see that most of the pikes were still in position. A few elves had fallen, but the attackers that pressed between the long shafts were quickly felled by swordsmen. All told, the line was holding well.

Indeed, so effective were the pikes that the attackers seemed to be focusing on the junctures where the giants-and Tamarwind-fought. One of the tall defenders groaned aloud and staggered backward, clutching his belly where it had been ripped open by a Viking’s battle-axe. The other giants were bleeding from scores of cuts on their legs and hips, and the elf wondered how much longer they would be able to hold.

But for now, the attackers could make no progress, and at the cost of blood and pain and sweat, Tamarwind and his warriors battled on.

He marched up the beach in a file of ten thousand warriors, his Enfield heavy and lethal in his hands. A flash of light and heat erupted to his right, sending fiery bits of metal through the column. Warriors to both sides of him fell, keening their death wails, while a tongue of fire reached around to singe his arm. But he ignored the flash of pain, stepping over the bodies of the slain without a second thought. In a few minutes his ghost flesh had healed, leaving not so much as a sign of his wound.

The beach was littered with bodies, and more of the silvery fireballs were erupting to all sides. The warrior looked at the top of one of the high sand dunes just as another barrage came forth from that place. He watched as the spheres scattered through the air, falling along the file of warriors advancing to his left. It was a good shot: the entire line erupted into flame and death over a hundred feet of its length, warriors blazing, stumbling, and falling as the incendiary explosive seared undead flesh.

But there, too, the loss was ignored by the survivors, more and more warriors kicking through the smoldering sand, tightening up the column, marching inexorably inland.

The warrior wanted to charge up the dune, to strike with his bayonet against the purveyors of those fiery assaults, but that was not the direction he was ordered to go. Instead, he heard the words of his captain, the croaky and rasping sound that seemed to come from within his skull, urging him to tighten up the rank, to speed up into a trot.

The same command must have been delivered to the whole file, because now the column was moving at a lumbering run, feet in sandals and boots churning through the sand, bearing the attackers closer to the sounds of battle. He pushed along behind the warrior in front of him, a fellow Tommy from the fields of Flanders. Behind him came a pair of fierce-looking warriors in face paint and feathers, each bearing a stone-headed tomahawk.

The enemy came into view, a long front of short, bearded warriors protected by steel breastplates, helmets, and shields. They were squat and powerful looking, with feet spread wide, and short-bladed weapons-swords, daggers, axes-wielded opposite the round shields. All along the front the ghost warriors were attacking, and these creatures-gnomes, the warrior called up from some recess of knowledge-were holding their ground with courage and skill.

He opened his mouth and found himself making a strange noise, a boiling gurgle of sound that seemed to propel him forward with great fury. The Tommy before him went down, thigh hacked by a gnomish sword, and then he was into the line, thrusting the Enfield forward with a practiced stab, bypassing the small shield, penetrating the bristling beard to jab the bayonet into the gnome’s throat, above his protective plate. Immediately the white whiskers were stained red, and the little fellow tumbled backward, dropping his blade from nerveless fingers.

And the warrior charged ahead, pushing through the gap in the gnomish line. Another diminutive warrior charged, then fell back, gagging through the blood of the awful thrust into his mouth. The two Iroquois came behind, one falling dead, the other bringing the stone tomahawk hard against a gnomish helm. The blow knocked the defender to the side, and the painted warrior snatched up a metal axe, pushing onward as the captain urged more of his troops through the breach.

Slogging ahead, his rifle light in his hands, the warrior looked in astonishment at the green, grassy field beyond the line. Never in his fighting in France had he beheld such a glorious sight; there, even a successful attack had only yielded another field of mud, another trench and fencing of barbed wire.

But here, the enemy line was broken! Ghost warriors poured through the breach, a hundred strong in the first minute, a thousand more coming as the gnomes to either side were butchered and driven away.

Natac and Regillix Avatar had flown back and forth above the front throughout the long day of fighting. Twice they had landed, once to patch a breach in the elven lines, and again to repel a sudden rush, warriors charging up a dune to try to take one of Gallupper’s battery positions. Each time the dragon had breathed a fiery cloud of death, disrupting the attacks enough so that additional troops could rush to the danger spot and hold the tide.

The Tlaxcalan was proud to the point of awe as he witnessed the doughty defense. There were four possible routes off of the beach, each leading toward a wide valley in the range of hills just beyond the coast. Each of these routes was defended by an army of nearly ten thousand Navyian fighters. To the right were two elven forces, the troops of Barantha on the far right, with the forces of Argentian, commanded by Tamarwind Trak, just to the left of that formation.

Third from the right was the rank of gnomes, a number of forces mustered from Circle at Center, the Ringhills, and the Lodespikes. These warriors were small but well armored and tightly packed; for hours they had stood up to the press of attackers without any sign of wavering. Finally, on the left, the trolls of King Awfulbark of Udderthud were waging deadly combat, tearing at the ghost warriors with their great claws, lifting and rending with brutal force. The trolls suffered grievous wounds, but the injured simply fell back from the line until, a few minutes later, their hurts were healed.

Between each of these armies, as well as posted on the heights to the left and right of the entire force, emplacements of batteries showered fiery barrages onto the beaches. The attackers pushed right through the flaming onslaughts, but that didn’t keep them from exacting a terrible toll.

Now, as the dragon took to the air once more, Natac strained to see into the distance, wanting to insure that the positions remained intact. He was disturbed to see a lot of activity behind the gnome position, and as Regillix flew him closer, his worst fears were realized.

“They have breached the line,” he observed, the dragon nodding grimly in agreement.

“Shall we land and try to block that up?” asked the serpent skeptically.

“No, there are too many of them,” Natac admitted, cursing the luck that had kept them away from this spot. A few minutes earlier they might have made a difference; now, the attackers had spilled through the line in a flood. The two wings of the shattered gnomish army were falling back, away from the breach, and the press of attackers surged inland unabated. Already thousands of them were turning right, to come at the flank of the trolls, or left, to push against the vulnerable end of the elven position.

Regillix dipped a wing, curling into an arc around the shattered position. Natac was tempted to go down and help the gnomes-they could insure escape for at least some of the nearly surrounded fighters-but he acknowledged a more important role for the sake of the whole army.

“Let’s land behind Tamarwind and give him warning. With luck, the elves can pull away before they’re surrounded, and we can be on our way to warn Awfulbark and his trolls.”

“Aye,” grunted the dragon unhappily. “A bitter choice, that, but the only one we can make.”

Already he was veering downward, gliding to a patch of open ground behind the rank of Tamarwind Trak’s elves. Natac took one glance back, saw a hundred gnomes vanish under the onslaught of the unholy attack. He thought of Nistel, of King Dimwoodie, and the other great gnomes he had known, and tears rose to his eyes.

“You will be avenged, my loyal warriors,” he muttered, before turning to the task of saving the rest of his army to fight another day.

M IRADEL walked through the beech trees on the fringe of the Grove. A long reflecting pool stretched toward the College, the pillared ramparts and marble towers mirrored perfectly in utterly still water. The sun was climbing, the Hour of Darken well advanced, and the purple twilight seemed to add an ethereal luminescence to the view, brightening the alabaster stone beyond that of the midday sun.

Other druids wandered past, heads down, silently treading across the grassy floor, the smooth walkways leading between the trunks of the great oaks.

Miradel found Shandira at the edge of the pool. She looked like a statue, regal and tall and, even amid the gentle folds of her white robe, sleek and strong. Staring in the direction of the Center of Everything, the black woman was a miniature, vital version of the Worldweaver’s Spire, rising high into the darkening sky at the same time as it pierced the infinite depths of the reflecting pool.

“I will speak to the goddess,” Miradel said. “There can be no other answer.”