“Mister Frithfroth—what does that mean?” He pointed to the Carnyx. “‘Blow this horn and summon the next army’? What is the next army?”
“Why, it refers to all the knights who sleep beneath Britain’s soil.”
“No, that’s the
old
army. Who is the
next
army?”
Frithfroth looked up quizzically and caught Godmund’s eye. The grizzled warrior just shrugged.
“But they are not an army yet. They are just separate warriors, all taken from different points in this nation’s history. They are not yet an army, but when they arise, they will be.”
Teddy frowned and walked back to join the others.
He is eight years old,
Frithfroth thought. He tried to think back to the time when eight years was all the time that he knew on this earth. Now, eight years was no more time to him than a fortnight had once been.
A clap of thunder shivered the silence and a wisp of smoke twisted from the ground, dispersing into the stale air to reveal Ealdstan. The children were awed, which was naturally the only reason for the act. They leaned in toward each other, all of them trying to put on a brave face.
The aging wizard brought his staff down on the ground three times, pounding the rock beneath his feet violently.
May the Hand that Makes guide your hearts,
May the Light that Illumines shine on your path,
And the One that Goes Between aid your steps.
“Paul Trevellian, approach,” the wizard said.
Swallowing hard and shaking visibly—but nonetheless endeavouring to hold his head up high with strong, British reserve—Paul left the small pack. He was not the oldest of the group—Sarah was—but he assumed the most responsibility. He was rather bright, but this characteristic was often hampered by his sense of duty—he tended to do what was expected of him, even if that was at odds with his own or his companion’s best interests.
Ealdstan towered over him, his face dark.
Has he used an altering enchantment?
Frithfroth wondered.
Is he trying to terrify the lad? Has he no heart?
Reaching into the folds of his red robe, Ealdstan pulled out a knife in a leather sheath.
“This blade has many enchantments on it—it is made of stone and is the only weapon that should be used to destroy Gád’s heart. If you are to free this land from his poisonous clutches and wish to return to your home, strike well and strike true. And remember, when in doubt, follow the water.”
Paul accepted the knife and bowed low. “I will do my best to not let you down, O wisest of all rulers,” he said, straightening. And then he bowed again and returned, walking backward, to his cousins.
Ealdstan glared at them and then pounded his staff three more times, and in another wisp of smoke, he was gone.
“Come along, lifiendes,” the knight Æþelwulf said. “Our journey is a long one, and best started soon.”
Farewells were said. Frithfroth saw tears in Molly’s eyes. They entered the squat fortress that protected the Great Carnyx and those remaining waited until they heard the heavy stone doors within the building close before they left.
Walking back to the tower, Frithfroth prayed that they had
not just sent more children to their deaths—that these would be the ones who finally completed this perverse quest.
_____________________
IV
_____________________
“That’s it,” Vivienne said. “That’s the last journal.” She waited quietly while Freya got her head together.
“I’m hungry,” she said, helping herself to water and snacking on some of the dried meat from the kitchen. As she did so, Vivienne tidied the table of all the books and documents from their last session. She did a comprehensive job and the rooms were pretty much as they’d first found them.
“I’m glad. I’m tired of—I’m actually tired of being tired.” She yawned. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. We’ve been cooped up in here long enough.” Vivienne stood and stretched.
“What about Daniel?” Freya sighed. “Any word or sign of him? As though you care?”
“That’s rather unfair.”
“Forgive me for saying it, Vivienne, but you seem very blasé about all of this.”
Vivienne shrugged on her coat. “When you get to my age, you either risk everything or you risk nothing. I’m sorry if you find me cold. But in the scheme of things, I find I’m most effective if I try only to affect the things that I can control, and leave the things that I can’t to play out by themselves.”
“Great. Well, Daniel’s certainly out, since no one can seem to control him. But shouldn’t we . . . look for him? Possibly?”
“Yes. Certainly. We certainly should go looking for him. Shall we go now?”
“Um, before we go down, there’s one more room to see. We should check that out, if we’re going to be thorough.”
“Really? You’re happy leaving Daniel out wherever he is?”
Freya glared at her. “Now you’re being unfair. You know what’s in that room, and I want to know as well.” Freya packed the bedroll up and crammed the few items she had taken out back into her backpack.
“Well, let’s go if you’re going, then,” Vivienne said in an inscrutable tone.
They went up the stairs in silence. Vivienne walking behind Freya, who soon wished Vivienne led the way.
They found the door and stood in front of it in silence for a few moments. Freya looked back at Vivienne. “Anything you want to say?”
Vivienne shook her head, and Freya pushed the door open.
It was a bedroom. It was not luxuriant but comfortable, with some pieces of wrought iron furniture and a golden light fixture just like the one in the other room. Against the far wall were stacks of the enchanted silver lamps, which cumulatively gave the room a sort of holy glow. The only other objects in the room were a bedstead with a thin mattress, some clean linen sheets—and a body.
“It’s Modwyn,” Freya said, inching closer to the bed. The ward of Niðergeard was stretched out on the bed, on top of the sheets, in her magnificent green robes that Freya had last seen her in, all smooth and perfect, her hair falling gently around her shoulders, curling and rising like waves upon a steep shore. “You knew she was here all the time.”
“She’s dead. It doesn’t change anything.”
“Really?”
“It—it wouldn’t have changed anything if you knew.”
“Really.” Modwyn’s posture reminded Freya of illustrations of Sleeping Beauty in the picture books she had as a child. Her arms crossed over her chest and she seemed to be holding something.
Freya edged even closer, half-expecting Modwyn to suddenly
wake up and startle her. But she didn’t, and as Freya came closer, she realised, with dread, that she wouldn’t, ever, for clutched in Modwyn’s hands was the hilt of a knife. She’d plunged the blade into her own chest. A wave of anger rose and broke inside Freya. So that was it then. Modwyn had been so distraught at the invasion of Niðergeard that she had taken her own life, leaving all others to cope without her—abandoning the living. What a selfish tragedy.
“It was her final sacrifice,” a voice from the door said, making the two women jump. She turned and saw Frithfroth standing there, looking even more diminished and forlorn than ever. “It was not selfishness or fear that forced her into that act. In that act, she protected the tower from invasion. She saved the Carnyx, she saved Niðergeard.”
Freya turned back to the prone form of Niðergeard’s protectress. Not a part of her was decrepit or decaying. She really did look as if she were only sleeping.
“I come up and minister to her,” Frithfroth said. “I pay my respects and remember her and thank her for saving me. It was her last act—a loving one.”
“She’s dead, Frithfroth,” Freya said. “She’s just dead. She killed herself so she wouldn’t have to face the horror of being killed. She took the easy way out.”
“Don’t,” Vivienne said quietly.
Freya knew the temptation of ending all her problems by her own hand; it disgusted her that Modwyn had not been stronger than she was. She had left everyone alive to fend for themselves and thrown her lot in with the dead and decaying knights in the basement.
“Why hasn’t she decayed?” Freya muttered. And for reasons she only half understood, she reached out and pulled the knife out of Modwyn’s hands and out of her chest.
Modwyn drew a breath at the same time, her eyes snapping
open, her mouth gaping for air, and Freya leapt back, her hand still around the knife, which had a stone blade. Her other hand flew to her chest, over her pounding heart, as she stared at Modwyn in fear. Modwyn tilted toward her in the bed and spent a moment coughing and wiping her eyes.
“Tha—thank you,” she croaked, gradually recovering enough to speak.
Vivienne and Freya could only watch and gape, eyes as wide as saucers.
“I’m sorry, Freya.”
“Sorry for what?”
“We told you so many lies.”
_____________________
IV
_____________________
Daniel woke up in his cell and almost burst into tears of relief. He rose from the cold floor and brushed himself off. The hallucinations, the visions, the eternally cyclical conversation—none of it was real. He gave a prayer of thanks to anyone who might be listening and sat on the stone bench, blowing on his fingers to warm them.
But he couldn’t see his hand. At first he thought it was because it was too dark, but then he noticed a thin line of brick-red smoke that extended and moved as if it were his hand. The two lights were forgotten now as Daniel explored this new effect. He reached his other out and saw another line of red smoke spread forward. He moved them back and forth, side to side, and crossed them together. They passed through each other without the slightest resistance.
He looked down at the rest of himself and found a thicker bar of smoke that divided at the end to mark his legs. He reached forward to try to touch a leg, but there was nothing to grasp onto and he spiralled out of control, a tumbling ball of smoke.
He started to expand, the molecules in his body dissipating. He filled the small room and spilled out into the hallway. He was without form except that which was imposed on him by walls. He grew to fill the city, aware of the points of life of the yfelgópes and the rest of the Niðergearders within it. He thought he could feel Freya.
He spilled into the overworld and had the experience of being both fully in the dark and fully in the light at the same time. He spread across the plains, into the cities, and throughout the country. He felt life as intense points of emotion inside of him. He could feel love and hate and was profoundly moved to find how little there was of either. Corruption and rot had set into the nation, and it was in the hearts of its people who harboured it. He reached out to pry it away, but it shrank and split from him as he grew larger, spilling across the planet and breaking through the stratosphere.
As he grew in the expanse of space that lay between the planets, he felt a moment of respite. The earth and all that was in it—so confused and muddled—shrank to a nearly microscopic thing inside of him.
Was this death? Was this the end? Would he continue stretching until he was one with everything? Would he stay fully conscious, or would he just melt away into creation? He started to mourn himself and all the things that he had left undone, the people he had left behind.
And then the stars tilted in the sky and he was falling again, the exact same sensation he felt when he fell asleep.
The arcing lights whizzed and spun around Daniel, faster and faster, turning from points of light into lines and then into planes and then into solids. Curves, sheets, and ribbons rippled past his disembodied vision, unresolved equations for shapes and solids that did not yet exist. Colours drifted through and around him,
unbound by form or object—pure properties with no affiliation, washing around in a conceptual soup.
Then sound entered, and he could see its effects on the properties that grew dimensions as he watched—three, four, five, six dimensions were added, and all that Daniel saw and felt joined into a whole, folding into and out of itself exponentially into a tangle of line and surface. It was as if it crystallised like a snowflake with an uncountable number of complex branches that grew and diverged and weaved in and out of each other in a mathematically precise path. The sound changed and Daniel felt heat as all the points bent inward and the curved bows they made stretched out to contain an infinite number of points and spread into membranes that were also broad to an infinite number of points, but that were nonetheless limited enough to maintain shape and design. And each of those squared infinities on every side, edge, corner, face, and border vibrated, creating a music that was the sound of every aspect of the created universe.
It was horrifyingly beautiful, and its poetry nearly destroyed Daniel. And at the point when the vibrations started to create light from the music they made, Daniel felt himself racing toward it, even as it grew to envelop him. With apprehension so great it broke the barrier of fear, he plunged into the outer edges of reality, tearing through the skeins and spirals, and into the heart of the total whole.
The inside of the absolute complexity showed windows into entire wholes of reality, separated each from the other. They whizzed past him and he saw entire completions buzz by from every angle and perspective.
He was drawn toward a certain facet of the all of everything, and after an aeon of travelling, he saw it ahead of him, glistening and humming in a tone that reminded him of his mother’s voice. He willed himself faster toward it.
As he hit the wall, every atom in his cloud of perception crashed like a cymbal, and then he was through the outer border of his own reality. He could feel that it was his, although he could, of course, not recognise it. The galaxies and star clusters spun and rotated in spinning spirals, watch-like in precision and delicacy, but built and balanced on a celestial scale. The movements traced golden paths in the darkness, and where gravity and dark matter fields harmonised, purple paths that were far below the visible spectrum appeared to Daniel’s eyes. It was through these that Daniel was pulled, navigating across aeons among the quantum particle rivers and streams that flowed through gravity tunnels.