But it was due north that the threat now waited. After keeping a slow but steadfast pace, they finally came to within half a mile of the thing, and Elayeen drew them to a halt, peering ahead intently with the eldengaze that had so discomfited Gawain earlier.
“It looks like a rider,” Gawain said.
“I have seen this shape before,” Elayeen said, “Though not as I do now.”
“What is it, miheth?”
She stood in her stirrups, her gaze fixed ahead, and then she sat back, and when she spoke, her voice was hard and distant as the Dragon’s Teeth. “It is a Graken, with a rider on its back.”
“Dwarfspit!” Gawain spat. “Captain, the body and the tail will remain here to protect the Gorians. The head will advance with the three of us.”
“Aye my lord,” Tyrane acknowledged, signalling his men, and with a glance across Elayeen at Allazar, Gawain advanced.
They rode in line abreast, Elayeen at the centre, Gawain to her right and Allazar on the left. Behind them, Tyrane in the centre flanked by the two hefty men of the vanguard, and then three more Callodon riders behind them. This was the ‘head’ of the column. Behind it, the remaining nineteen Callodonians sat saddle, weapons at the ready under the watchful eye of their sergeant.
At five hundred yards, the fading heat from the road and its gentle undulations no longer impairing their view, all saw the great winged beast simply standing in the middle of the Jarn road, blocking it completely, a smaller, darker figure upon its back. Halfway between them and the dark-made beast, they also saw the charred remains of the two scouts and their horses scattered about the road.
At three hundred yards, with the gruesome remains just ahead of them, Gawain called a halt.
“I have its range.” Elayeen said.
“Not yet.” Gawain announced.
“We have your back.” Tyrane announced grimly, eyeing the remains of the scouts he had deployed, and Gawain nodded.
The Graken, at some unspoken command from its rider, let out a shrill cry, and eased forward a few yards, and then stopped.
“It is trying to goad us forward,” Allazar suggested.
“We need no goading,” Gawain muttered darkly.
“The trees beyond it are broken,” Elayeen sighed, her voice almost sad. Then, in a harder tone, “The rider misjudged the arching of the boughs when he brought the beast to ground on the road. It is injured, and unless the branches overhead are cleared, it is trapped and grounded.”
“It will not be leaving here.” Gawain asserted, stringing an arrow.
The rider on the Graken’s back raised an arm, holding aloft what looked like a large lump of coal or burnt wood. And then a familiar shimmering appeared to float in the air twenty yards in front of them. Morloch.
“By the Teeth!” Tyrane gasped.
The shimmering form seemed almost to solidify, Morloch at first standing with his back to them, turning the illustrated pages of some huge tome. He stood as tall as Gawain, or so it seemed, and was dressed in black, a loose shroud perhaps, which shimmered when he moved. The head atop the vision was round, and loathsome. Completely bald, the skin stained and mottled with black blotches which seemed to crawl beneath the flesh, moving. The Morloch turned. Thin blackened lips, held in a perpetual sneer, eyes black with aquamire, no whites to them at all, no pupils. There was a festering wound on his right cheek, open and weeping, a legacy perhaps of his last encounter with Gawain, or perhaps a more recent injury received when the great wave struck the Teeth beyond which he lurked.
“You!” Morloch spat, unbridled hatred twisting his already grotesque features.
“I,” Gawain replied firmly, “Who else, filth?”
In his tower, far to the north, Morloch advanced upon the great black lens in which Gawain’s image was centred. To those watching Morloch’s apparition hovering above the road to Jarn, the dark wizard’s face appeared strangely distorted, and contorted with fury.
“You shall vex me no more, vermin of the Raheen! I shall unleash upon your stinking lands and putrid people such wrath as this world has never seen! You shall be the last, vermin, the last to die! Oh I shall not destroy you, Raheen, as I did your miserable mountain citadel, no, no, you I shall keep until the end! You shall be the last while all around are rent asunder and blasted in the black furnace of my vengeance and wrath!
“Know this, king of nothing, know this! All the horror and dread I shall unleash upon your festering world is the wages of your sins against me! Did you think I could be destroyed so easily! Did you think some feeble relic left by decrepit weaklings made dust before your reeking forebears were conceived would be enough! I am Morloch! And! I! Shall! End! You! All!”
And with that last blast of hatred, the hideous and distorted image of the face of Morloch faded, shimmered, and was gone.
Ahead, on the track, the rider upon the Graken lowered the dark objected which had seemed to serve as some kind of connection between Morloch’s lens and the road to Jarn, and the Graken began advancing again, slowly.
17. A Poor Substitute
Behind him, Gawain heard the men of Callodon let out long-held breath. They had not witnessed such an apparition before, and to them, it must have been terrifying. Gawain looked across at Allazar, and loudly, for the benefit of the Callodon riders, exclaimed:
“The black-eyed bastard always has to have the last word. Last time he spoke to us, I believe it was something like ‘aaagh!’”
Allazar smiled grimly. “In truth, he did not look well, Longsword.”
“Alas I saw nothing,” Elayeen said, her gaze fixed forward.
“Nothing?”
She shrugged apologetically. “I saw the rider yonder raise up a dark and glowing thing, and then heard Morloch’s voice ranting.”
“The ‘glowing thing’ was a Jardember,” Allazar explained as if reading aloud from a book, “An intricately carved piece of Ulmus-tree heartwood, dark runes burned into its carved facets and then infused with aquamire. Morloch’s powers must be weak indeed to require the use of such a tool to appear to us thus. He had no need of such devices in order to appear in the hall at Ferdan, nor upon the plains of Juria when first he appeared to Longsword.”
“He appeared in a vision as he did at Ferdan, miheth, in a shimmering cloud just in front and slightly above us.”
“Thank you, G’wain. I saw it not. May I now shoot the rider advancing towards us? I do not like the darkness, and how it spoils the light of the woodlands around us.”
“I fear it may be a waste of an arrow, my lady.” Allazar said softly.
“Nevertheless.” Elayeen canted her bow at an angle and drew the shaft, paused a moment, and released the arrow with a slight gasp as the bow’s recoil jolted her broken fingers.
They watched as the shaft seemed to speed well wide of the intended mark, heading for the trees to the right of the shuffling Graken. But the wind from the east bent its path, swinging its track towards the west. A black disk appeared briefly before the Graken and its rider, and they saw an even briefer puff of smoke when the arrow struck it.
“Did I hit it?”
“No, miheth, the rider summoned a shield, the arrow was burned.”
“Dwarfspit. It was one you just repaired for me.”
“We three of Raheen will advance, Captain, you and your men should remain, watch our backs lest any surprises emerge from the trees.”
“Yes my lord.” Tyrane agreed, and the six of Callodon, sweat still visible on their brows from the sight of Morloch, formed a line across the road, crossbows at the ready, eyeing the slender form of the elfin queen astride her horse, and drawing strength from her calm resolve.
When clear of Tyrane and his men, Allazar asked quietly: “We three of Raheen, Longsword?”