Wave after wave of cold water swept over the pas- sengers. Sarazin – cold, cold! – shivered and shivered. Wondering if he would die of exposure before they ever reached the Gates. Then the raft nosed into the water and Sean Sarazin was lifted up and carried away entirely. He tried to scream. Gagged, he could not. Then an agonising pain tore at his scalp.
'Got you!' cried Tarkal, hauling Sarazin back on to the raft. Then, leaning close to Sarazin, the Slavemaster said: 'You don't get away that easily. Oh no. For you're very special to me, oh yes, as special to me as Douay.'
Then Tarkal kissed Sarazin on the forehead, gently, gently. Drawing blood was a pleasure reserved for the future. 'Gates ahead!' cried Lod. Sarazin thought: -Already?
But of course. For the horseracing river trifled with distances which meant dawn-to-dusk labour for a man slogging along with a heavily laden pack.
He closed his eyes as the raft ploughed down one last water-slope. The raft rocked and bucked as they churned through the final rapids. Then Tarkal screamed in triumph, and Sarazin knew they were out of the Gates. Or almost. He opened his eyes. Saw rock-snap spray, a water-splintered sun, and something out of nightmare swooping towards them. Something human screamed as wing-claws snatched it. Tarkal, screaming and swearing, drew his sword. The weapon went spinning as something whipped him away into the water.
Lod drew his own blade – then thought better of it, and dived into the water. 'Kill the prisoner,' said one of Tarkal's surviving men.
A subordinate drew steel, loomed above Sarazin. Who gazed upwards, eyes bulging in terror. And saw the sky shudder to shadow, saw his assailant's body ripped to the sky. -Neversh. The thought was a scream.
And screams audible split the sky as another man was torn away. A scythe-sweeping tail slashed across the raft, mowing down the survivors. Sarazin closed his eyes. Then opened them. For: -This is the last of life. He did not choose to die in self-made darkness.
So he gazed open-eyed at the scene. The Neversh in the sky, two of them. No, three. Four! Five! A full five of the monsters, nightmarish creatures of the Swarms, enormous brutes flailing through the air in front of the Gates of Chenameg, attacking the slow and the foolish with feeding spikes, grapple-hooks and clawed feet, sweeping and slashing with whiplash tails which could kill a horse or break a man in half.
From the battlements of Douay's fortress at the Gates of Chenameg, crossbowers unleashed their bolts, shooting at the low-flying monsters. One floundered, sank low, then struggled for height and flew out of Sarazin's field of vision.
He bit ferociously at the gag in his mouth. He needed his voice, his voice! To scream for help. All it needed was one person to dare the river and tow his raft to safety. But it was not to be, for the gag held. And if the defenders of the Gates looked at the raft, doubtless they saw but a scattering of corpses aboard – nothing worth swimming for when the Neversh were in the skies. -Tarkal lived.
So thought Sarazin, bitterly. He was almost certain the Slavemaster had been knocked overboard by the same blow from the tail of a Neversh which had sent his sword spinning away. -Lod too. So who's dead?
Glambrax was dead. That was for certain. Sarazin could see the dwarf lying beneath a man's corpse, blood guttering from a bloody headwound. Three dead soldiers were aboard the raft. The head of one had been smashed to pulp by a whiplash from a monster's tail. -Gods.
The Gates of Chenameg were already receding into the distance. Sarazin looked left, looked right, scanned the banks for signs of human life. He saw baskets of abandoned laundry, unattended fishing rods, and cooking fires burning without human supervision. Most people had fled – and those who had not were lying as if dead, hoping to escape the attentions of the Neversh.
A little further downriver, the raft drifted past a huge stockade of earth, logs and stones, a fortress raised by a company of men who hunted creatures of the Swarms for a living. As the raft went by, the shadow of a Neversh flickered overhead. And nobody within the stockade even thought of risking life and limb to retrieve that piece of river-refuse.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
A corpse-laden raft drifted down the Velvet River. Strong and steady ran the river. Not at the horsepanic pace of the Manaray Gorge, to be sure – but the river never paused, never rested. A man could outrun it or, indeed, outmarch it – but only briefly. Nobody could have matched the river's pace for a daylength journey.
Noon came, then night. Then dawn. Then noon again. From the Gates of Chenameg to the city of Shin was, by river, a matter of about a hundred leagues, and, shortly after noon, the raft drifted past the ruins of that city.
Briefly, it grounded on the shore. Then the current eased it away, and it floated downstream, towards the west. Sarazin by then was in agony, for, quite apart from the tortures of thirst, his hogtied body was wracked by cramps.
There was no escape, for he had been tied up by experts. What was more frustrating than anything was the thought of his magic candle, still safe in one of his pockets. His enemies had not recognised it as the magical treasure it was, once a much-valued possession of a wizard. But it was useless to him, for he could not get to it. - And I had it all figured out.
Tarkal was a fool, and he had been tricked so easily, conned into taking them back to Drake Douay. By rights, Tarkal should now be dead, and Sarazin should be on his way to becoming Slavemaster. But, as it was, Tarkal was probably drinking up large and listening to Douay entertaining his guests on the skavamareen – while Sean Sarazin was doomed on this downriver journey. Which, in all probability, would terminate in his death. On floated the raft, into night. Into nightmare.
It was fifty leagues from Shin to the border between Chenameg and the Harvest Plains. And, while dawn was pinking the sky, the raft slipped across that border. There was no more forest to left or to right, only the flatlands of the plains. The river grew wider, slower, more leisurely.
And Glambrax stirred.
Raised his bloodstained head, vomited violently – then collapsed again. -Come on, you gutless dwarf!
So screamed Sarazin. But this experiment in telepathy proved fruitless, for Glambrax had not stirred again by noon. Then the raft drifted through a breach in one of the dams which had once tamed the Velvet River for irrigation.
At some time in the past, heroes had breached that dam, thinking to save their land from the advance of the Swarms. But a smooth grey bridge – manufactured by those monsters – now spanned the gap. On that bridge stood a keflo, a low-slung monster. Silent. Unmoving. Statuesque. Sarazin lay very still, staring at it. And Glambrax groaned. -Quiet! Quiet!
Perhaps telepathy worked on this occasion, for the dwarf relapsed into silence again. It was not until noon that Glambrax finally crawled towards Sarazin and, after a struggle, released his gag. Then began to feed him water.
Releasing the ropes was a slow business, which took the weakened dwarf till midnight. But it was done. So, when dawn came, both were free – but neither was good for anything. It was not until the next day that they managed to push the corpses overboard.
On floated the raft. Much of the time Sarazin lay sleeping, dreaming of winter snow on the heights of the Ashun mountains, of voices far distant in time and space. He would wake now and then to a bloodstained raft stinking of offal and vomit, to the steelbright sun glittering on the riverflow. Overhead, the shadows of vultures.
The riverbanks were empty. No monsters. The monsters of the Swarms were, doubtless, on the fringes of the occu- pied territories, hunting out humans, killing, slaughtering, ravaging. Here, in the heartland of the new dominions of the Swarms, Sarazin was safe, for the moment.
He had endless time to think. And to sorrow. For what did he lament? For himself? No. For the loss of his world. He experienced.. . not exactly weltschmerz, no, not an abstract sorrow for the fate of the world as a whole, but grief for the loss of particular people.
Not dear friends, no, he had been singularly short of bosom companions throughout his life, but perfectly ordinary people – servants, soldiers, tavern keepers, scribes, librarians, members of the Watch, even minor
