CHAPTER ONE
The Lake of Voices
'Which way?' Jhary looked about him. 'The sea or the mountains? Neither's inviting…'
Corum sighed deeply. The morbid landscape had instantly depressed him. Rhalina touched his arm, her eyes full of sympathy.
Though she looked at Corum, she spoke to Jhary who was now adjusting his ever-present sack on his shoulder. 'Inland would be best, surely, since we have no boat.'
'And no horses,' Jhary reminded her. 'It will be a fearful long walk. And who's to say those mountains are passable when we reach 'em?'
Corum gave Rhalina a quick, sad smile of gratitude. He straightened his shoulders. 'Well, we made up our minds to enter this Realm, now we must make up our minds which way to go.' His hand on the pommel of his sword he stared towards the mountains. 'I have seen something of the Power of Chaos when I journeyed to Arioch's Court, but it seems to me that that Power extends further in this Realm. We'll head towards the mountains. There we may discover some inhabitants who may know where lies this City in the Pyramid Lord Arkyn mentioned.'
And they set off over the unpleasantly mottled rock.
A while later it became evident that the sun had not moved across the sky. The brooding silence continued, broken only by the ghastly screechings of the black birds which nested in the peaks of the mountain. It was a land which seemed to radiate despair. For a short time Jhary had attempted to whistle a bright little tune, but the sound had died, as if swallowed by the desolate land.
'I thought Chaos all howling, random creativity,' said Corum. 'This is worse.'
'It is what becomes of a place when Chaos exhausts its invention,' Jhary told him. 'Ultimately, Chaos brings a more profound stagnation than anything it despises in Law. It must forever seek more and more sensation, more and more empty marvels, until there is nothing left and it has forgotten what true invention is.'
And at length weariness overcame them and they lay down on the barren rock and slept. When they awoke it was to observe that only one thing had changed…
The great black birds were closer. They were wheeling overhead in the sky.
'What can they live on?' Rhalina wondered. 'There is no game here, no vegetation. Where is their food?'
Jhary looked significantly at Corum who shrugged.
'Come,' said the Prince in the Scarlet Robe. 'Let's continue. Time may be relative, but I have a feeling that unless we accomplish our mission soon, Lywm-an-Esh will fall.'
And the birds circled lower so that they could see their leathery wings and bodies, their tiny, greedy eyes, their long vicious beaks.
A small, fierce sound escaped from the throat of Jhary's cat. It arched its back slightly as it glared at the birds.
They trudged on until the ground began to rise more sharply and they had reached the nearer slopes of the mountains.
The mountains squatted over them like sleeping monsters that might at any moment awake and devour them. The rocks were glassy, slippery and they climbed them slowly.
Still the black birds wheeled among the crags and now they were certain that if they allowed themselves to sleep the birds would descend and attack. This knowledge alone kept them climbing.
The frightful screeching grew louder, more insistent, almost gleeful. They heard the flap of obscene wings over their heads, but they refused to look up, as this would have wasted a fraction of the energy they had left.
They were looking now for shelter, for a crack in the rock into which they might crawl and defend themselves against the birds when, finally, they attacked.
They could hear the sound of their own gasping breath, the scrape of their feet on the stone, mingling with the flappings and screechings of the black birds.
Corum spared a glance for Rhalina and saw that there was desperate fear in her eyes and that she was weeping as she climbed. He began to feel that he had been tricked by Arkyn, that they had been sent, cynically, to their doom in this wasteland.
Then the flapping filled his ears and he felt the slap of cold air against his face and a talon grazed his helmet. With a strangled cry he felt for his sword and tried to tug it from the scabbard. He looked up in terror and saw a mass of black, flapping, savage things with glaring eyes and snapping beaks. The sword came free and, wearily, he lunged out at the birds. They cackled sardonically as his sword failed to find flesh. Suddenly his six-fingered jewelled hand reached out instead, moving without his volition, and it clutched one of the birds by its scrawny throat and squeezed that throat as it had squeezed human throats before. The bird gave a single surprised squawk and died. The Hand of Kwll threw the corpse to the glassy rock. The birds flapped a little distance away in consternation and settled in the near-by crags watching Corum warily. It had been so long since the hand had acted in that way that Corum had almost forgotten its powers. For the first time since it had destroyed the heart of Arioch he was grateful to it. He displayed it to the birds and they made disturbed sounds in their throats, eyeing the corpse of their dead companion.
Rhalina, who had not witnessed the power of the Hand of Kwll before, looked with relieved astonishment at Corum. But Jhary merely pursed his lips and took advantage of the pause to draw his sword and lay propped on his elbows against the hard rock, his cat still on his shoulder.
And thus they sat, the birds and the human beings, regarding each other beneath the silent, brooding sky on the slopes of the bleak mountains, until it occurred to Corum that if the Hand of Kwll had saved them from their immediate danger, the Eye of Rhynn might prove even more useful. But he was reluctant to raise the eye-patch and look with the eye's full powers into that strange nether-region from which he could sometimes summon ghostly allies - the dead men earlier slain at his command. And, particularly, he did not want to summon those last who had been slain at the command of the Hand and the Eye - Queen Ooresй's subjects, the Vadhagh riders, his own race, who had been slain by accident. But something must be done to break this impasse, for none of them had the strength to resist a mass attack by the birds and even if the Hand of Kwll should slay one or two more it would not save Rhalina and Jhary-a-Conel. Reluctantly his hand began to rise towards the jewelled eye-patch.
And then the patch was off and the horrid, faceted, alien eye of the dead god Rhynn glared into a world even more dreadful than the one they presently inhabited.
Again Corum saw a cavern in which dim shapes moved hopelessly this way and that. And in the foreground were the beings he had least wished to see. Their dead eyes peered out at him and there was a frightening sadness about the set of their faces. They had wounds in their bodies, but the wounds did not bleed, for these were now the creatures of Limbo, neither dead nor alive. Their mounts were with them, too - creatures with thick, scaly bodies, cloven feet and nests of horns jutting from their snouts. The last of the Vadhagh folk - a lost part of the race which had once inhabited the Flamelands created by Arioch for his amusement. They were dressed from head to foot in red, tight-fitting garments, with red hoods on their heads. In their hands were their long, barbed lances.
Corum could not bear to look upon them and he made to move the eye-patch back into place, but then the Hand of Kwll had reached out, reached into that frightful Limbo, and was gesturing to the dead Vadhagh. Slowly the score of corpses moved forward in answer to the summons. Slowly they mounted their horned beasts. Slowly they rode out of that ghastly cavern in a nameless netherworld and stood, a company of death, upon the slippery slopes of the mountains.
The birds screeched in surprise and anger but for some reason they did not take to the air. They shifted from foot to foot and darted their beaks at the scarlet warriors who now advanced upon them.