Could it be avoided? Transcended? If he could only think clearly for a moment. .
And then, it stopped. The pain left him-but left him raw, aching, and brutally cold. It was too dark to see. He feared moving, so he just drifted. The blood in his ears thumped with the echoes of pain and the sounds of his sobs.
A grey blur floated before his eyes. He blinked to clear them and found the Elfin moneylender standing before him.
“Are you sure I’m not dead?” Daniel asked Agrid-more croaked-and he realised that he asked it in English, not Elvish. But that didn’t seem to matter.
“Fairly certain.”
Daniel sighed. “Really? How do I know I can trust you?”
Agrid Fiall smiled. “If you can’t trust the dead, whom can you trust?”
Daniel hazarded a movement and brought his hand to his face. Contrary to what every nerve ending told him, his skin was still attached to the rest of his body, as well as somehow illuminated in the dark.
“What happens now?” Daniel asked. “You said punishment. Is this what it’s going to be? Torture? You just keep going until I break? Is there more to come?”
“My friend,” said the moneylender with a leer. “You haven’t begun yet.”
“More pain?” Daniel asked, and felt tears in his eyes.
“Perhaps. Is pain the worst that can happen to you?”
“I don’t know. It feels like it.”
“If you do not fear anything more than pain, then you are blessed.”
“Right now I can’t think of anything worse than what just happened to me. What was it?”
“You don’t fear solitude?”
The moneylender disappeared.
“Silence?”
And Daniel heard nothing more.
He tried to call out, but no sound came. He shouted, clapped, hummed, even whistled, but nothing registered in his ears. He felt for them, and they were still there. He clicked his fingers, clapped-there wasn’t even the ring of silence.
Time, interminable, passed. Touch, physical sensation, was a comfort, and then it was a torment. All other senses lost, except for the one that was sensitive to pain, to cold, to fear.
In despair, no sight or sound to console him, he floated in a sea of nothing.
IV
Alex stood in the centre of a ring of nearly two hundred heavily armed warriors. Behind him were the thirty- some knights with whom he’d been travelling the forgotten paths of England and Europe. The hundred and fifty or so before him were the knights they had found sleeping under what he thought was Blanik Mountain in the Czech Republic.
Alex conducted the negotiations in Latin, which he had thought would be fairly standard, but had almost immediately uncovered a wealth of small differences in pronunciation and formulation. In any case, they were communicating. Mostly.
“We require you to fight with us,” Alex said to a slight, dark-complexioned knight in ornate, Slavic armour. “In Britain. We are under attack. Many of our warriors are killed, dead where they slept undisturbed for almost a thousand years, murdered by the great evil that is growing there. We need our brothers in arms to avenge them, to help us plug a great spring of darkness that if left unchecked now will flood all of Europe-all the world. It is by joining us now that we have a chance to stop this tide of destruction.”
The Slavic knight related some or all of Alex’s impassioned speech to the knights behind him, who were peering attentively at the new knights who’d invaded their hidden chamber.
A discussion broke out among them when the knight had finished his translation. It grew into a clamour, and then the leader waved his hands for quiet.
“We cannot come with you,” he said sternly. “We wait for Wenceslaus.”
“Who’s he?”
“Our commander and king. When the great conflict comes, and when all Czech people argue and two cannot be found who agree on any one matter-when Blanik Forest burns and blood fills Pusty Lake-then will Wenceslaus rise from where he sleeps, claim the sword of Bruncvik, and crack open this mountainside. We will ride out, with him commanding us, and chase our nation’s enemies into the farthest ocean. But not before then will we leave this place.”
“Tell them this,” Ecgbryt said to Alex, and Alex began translating: “Let me assure you of the danger that will surely come to this world. There are gaps in the walls between the worlds, where those who keep the gates have no authority.”
“We have no knowledge of these things,” the knight said, this time without relaying Alex’s words to his comrades. “We shall stay here.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex said, turning to Ecgbryt. “I was under the impression that Ealdstan was responsible for all of these knights. But either his breadth of interest was much wider than I had credited him, or there are more players at work here than I originally conceived.”
“I would not know,” Ecgbryt answered. “I was asleep most of the last thousand years.”
“It’s something to bear in mind, I think,” Alex concluded. He gave the Czech chief one more questioning glance, then turned to tell the rest of the company what the man had said, and the information trickled down the line as it was translated and retranslated into the three archaic languages that the men spoke.
“Leave them,” Berwin said, stepping forward. He was starting to assume the position of a sort of deputy commander or captain to Alex and Ecgbryt’s dual leadership. He seemed to speak most of the languages that actually mattered on this jaunt and took it upon himself to organise practical aspects, like where and how to set up camps when they bedded for the night. Not that they did that, much. None of the awakened knights, Ecgbryt included, seemed to need much sleep; it made sense, Alex acknowledged; however, he was getting far less than his necessary seven hours a night, and fatigue was starting to overtake him.
“Their ways are not ours,” Berwin said. “We would not journey from our realm to help them; what reason have we for asking them to leave theirs?”
Alex frowned. Berwin had a point, but still. . a hundred and fifty knights-that was more than he had ever heard of in one place before. More than was probably still left in Britain, in total.
“Please,” Alex beseeched. “There are trolls, dragons, giants, and all manner of malicious spirits infesting our country. With your help, they would be eradicated swiftly, and you would be back here soon and none would be the wiser. What say you? For honour’s sake?”
The last request was relayed with a smirk by the dark complexioned knight. There were grunts and scoffs.
“That was the wrong tack,” Berwin intimated to Alex and Ecgbryt. “Slovak knights have always viewed the signposts of honour askew. Their ways are not ours.”
“We owe no debts to your island race,” the Slavic knight responded. “If your small outpost were to disappear overnight, who would notice? We here are the keystone of the arch of civilisation. Were we to falter, the whole would tumble away into oblivion.”
“In an arch,” Alex replied, “each stone is as vital as the other. Send just a small band of your men to join with ours.”
An argument seemed to break out when this request was translated. Knights on both sides of the translator shouted and made wild gesticulations. He raised his hands for quiet once more.
“Them, take them,” he said, and pointed to a corner of the massive cavern. Eight knights were standing quite apart from the rest of them, incongruously clad in medieval plate armour. “They call themselves the Hussites. We can hardly understand them, and we don’t know why they were sent to us. They have strange opinions and are
