As soon as possible he would set matters right in that regard, Vuron vowed silently. First the withdrawal to a new defensive line, then the machinations to destroy Leda's influence . . . perhaps Leda.
Chapter 6
IT WAS AS BIRTH, only the passage was doubly painful now. Separation and self-reliance were immediately ahead. The whole of the cold and unforgiving experience of life was graven in steel. No escape. Certain end. Did an infant wall in premonition? Certainly it knew of its loss in some way, but never so starkly as this.
Inside the Soulless Sounding could be found all things and no things. The saddest, most melancholy of dreams — of all those loved and gone, loved and lost. Each parting was final. impossibly ended, yet seen and experienced again in such a way as to negate it while knowing that it remained. No matter — soon enough there would be no memory whatsoever ... or would that alone remain forever . . . ?
Gord and Gellor were alone, helpless, lost in a gloom that clouded the senses. There was no haven to be found, no escape in the dreadful night. The things that dwelled always therein were not so deprived. They moved and stalked, coming ever closer, hungering.
The portal was a hole dug into the frozen ground, a place just long and wide enough to contain a bier.
Seen from above, the depth seemed such that its contents were but four feet below. It was a coffin with a lid of pure crystal. Inside was a corpse upon which till manner of worms and foul things battened, but the ghastly visage of the thing smiled a terrible grin of welcome to the viewer.
Being in the passage was like falling forever, with the surety of a terrible impact of equal duration. The sickening weightlessness reached its absolute maximum, an ecstasy of terror from which there was no escape. Even as the free falling sent its delightful sensations and its nausea through the entire being, the prospect of crushing impact at the infinitely distant end was there, compacting, rupturing, breaking internally.
"What do demons perceive when in this place?"
"Think not on that," Gord advised his companion when Gellor uttered that question. The same thought had indeed come to the young champion's mind as he experienced the horrors of traversing the Soulless Sounding. "No matter what, only the greatest can survive the ordeal."
"Small wonder," the bard growled, shaking his grizzled head to clear the awful things filling his brain. "This journey is one I vow never to make again!"
Gord understood all too well. It seemed as if they had wandered in a delirium for ages. Between breaths, whole decades passed. Was that delusion? Who could say for certain in such a twisted continuum as this? Was there a reality here? Or was everything drawn only from the minds of those who were so foolish as to enter the Soulless Sounding? No matter. The visitors walked, crawled, ran, fell, crept flew.
In any manner they could, they moved, seeking the place they instinctively knew was that which would lead them to their goal.
Gord was reflecting thus when an apparition made him start and tremble. "This accursed place now seeks to steal the last of my sanity," he muttered loudly enough for his companion to overhear. "Would that she were really so near!"
"She?" the troubador asked, even though he knew that his friend had not meant for him to hear. Then he, too, saw. "I too see a drow clad in demon armor coming nigh. Beware that vision, Gord! The thing she bears has an aura of deepest malevolence."
"It is no drow bearing evil," Gord countered. "I have conjured up in my mind the dream of Leda — she who meant all to me, the one who gave her soul to prevent the incursion of all darkness." As he said those words, Gord's mind brought back scenes of the beautiful dark elf as they first met long ago on Oerth. He saw again the search for the Theorpart in the dusty wastes of the Ashen Desert, saw her save his life, then condemn herself to an eternity of misery by going with Vuron to the depths of demonium.
Gellor received those pictures from his friend, felt the emotions that wrapped them. "I am sorry, Gord, very sorry to intrude," the troubador said with a husky voice. "You fairly blast your thoughts out, and I have no choice but to share . . ."
"What matter? There is nothing left any more."
"But she is here!"
"Here? No — not unless the whole of the Abyss is here, unless eternal service to Graz'zt is here!"
"Stop bloring as a sheep, and attend my words, Gord! If you and I see the same thing, then it is no dementia brought about by the sickness of this place. We are seeing what is!"
At that, Gord stopped his depressed rantings and stared. Seeming to float, making swimming motions, before them was indeed Leda — or one who was her clone, as she had been of Eclavdra. The drow priestess was alternately near and far, whether from distortion of sight or actual distance in the Soulless Sounding. She bore a strange bag, the thing that the bard had remarked fairly shone of blazing evil force. Perhaps it was that very thing that enabled Leda, or whoever the drow female was, to move so swiftly through the strange, sick space.
Six thousand six hundred and sixty regions there were in the Abyss, all found in the six hundred sixtysix tiers that formed the chaotic sphere of demonium. Of the whole of this black netherplane, fully six hundred of the layers could be reached via the Soulless Sounding. The uppermost tiers and the farthest regions of the Abyss, those most removed from the middle and upper planes, were distant from the distorted tube that pierced space. The greater portion, though, fully eighty percent of the whole, could be reached by a relatively brief journey through the terrible passage called the Soulless Sounding. Of course, only the very strongest of beings could survive for more than a few minutes within its distorted, mind-twisting confines.
The dark elf whom Gord and Gellor observed was now moving with astonishing rapidity, evidently heading for the same destination as the two of them sought, a distant place marked by iridescent striatums reminiscent of black opal and ancient silver hammered into six great horseshoe-shaped arches.
"She will escape us!" Gord exclaimed, noting that the drow was traveling at a far faster rate than he and his companion were. "Come on, hurry!"
Gellor made a valiant effort, but soon realized that he was quite unable to keep up with Gord. "You go ahead as fast as you can," he panted. "I'll follow and catch up with you when you reach that one and stop her."
With hardly a backward glance, Gord assented and rushed ahead. In order to speed his progress he drew forth Courflamme, knowing that its power would be much multiplied once the weapon was out of its scabbard and consciously applied to his movement. "Now, sword," he whispered to the strange blade of sooty metal and bright crystal. "Carry me with all speed to where that dark elf is!"
It was as if the weapon understood. Gord felt a flow of energy from his fingers, through hand and arm, to the very tips of his toes. At the same moment he also felt as if the blade were leeching force from him. Now almost one entity, sword and swordsman shot ahead as quickly as if Gord were astride a sleek courser, and the distance between him and the dark elf melted away by the second.
As the gap closed to what seemed no more than a spear-cast, the pursued drow sensed that someone or something followed and spun around, drawing something from the rune-emblazoned bag as she turned. "Away!" she commanded, her face a hard mask of power and demoniacal threat. Then her lovely lilac eyes opened wide, the rest of what she was about to say was forgotten, and instead her face softened into wonderment as she cried, "Gord? Gord? Is it really you?"
He wanted to call the same question back asking the vision before him if she were the real, true Leda. Instead, Gord restrained the urge, forced himself to stand fast. "I am Gord," he said firmly, even as the young champion drew upon all of his powers to study and analyze the one who stood before his gaze. It was no illusion, no creature masked by dark dweomer, no shapeshifter or sham.
Leda was now doing the same thing. The man who appeared to her to be Gord, her forever lost love, responded coolly, stood aloof and staring when she called to him. Drawing upon the energy within the Eye of Deception, and using it with her own abilities, Leda scanned the one who said he was indeed Gord. She saw only the surface of him, that and a leaping aura of mixed bright and dark. She could penetrate no deeper, even with the strength of the Abyssal artifact aiding her sight. Wary, withdrawing slightly now, Leda responded, "Are you? Are you so?"
Satisfied, Gord in turn stepped closer to Leda, a smile of joy beginning to spread across his face, gray eyes brimming with happiness. "Leda . . ."
"Stay still, you!" the dark elven priestess demanded, focusing the iris of the Eye upon him. "I think you are some other one masquerading as the favored of Rexfelis."
"No, Leda, no! It is truly I. Look at me, read my aura, test my statements to see if there is any falsehood in them."
Rather than admit her inability to do so, for display of weakness was tantamount to death anywhere in the Abyss, especially here in the Soulless Sounding, Leda dissembled, pretending to test him as he had suggested, even as she secretly watched the approach of another who was struggling through the thick stuff of the place trying to Join the two. It would take several minutes, perhaps longer, for that one to arrive. There was little time to spare. She would make one more inquiry before using the artifact to blast the impostor from existence. "I see . . . yes," she said to the might-be-Gord slowly, screening her mind carefully as she spoke. "But what is the diamond and jet force which springs forth around you? That is not the aura of Gord of Grimalkin."
"Gord of what?" The strangeness of what Leda spoke set his mind racing. He saw the thing, a swirled sphere of blacks and almost-blacks with a glaring spot of hateful fire growing in its center, pulse and shimmer in her hands. It came to him in a flash. Leda was about to loose some bolt of energy upon him. Why? Had she become a true spawn of the Abyss? A soulless demon?
Never! Then it was something else that brought the dark elf to the brink of slaying him. That she cared for him radiated plainly from her. The cause was certain, then. She was suspicious, thought that he was an impostor. These things took but a splitsecond to enter and leave his consciousness. He realized that Leda was unable to penetrate the dweomers he had surrounded himself with, and the force of Courflamme too served to shield his actual nature, would not allow penetration of his being. Without hesitation, Gord let the sword slip from his hand. "Now," he said with open palms and love filling him, "seek again for Gord of Greyhawk."
"It cannot be!"
"But it Is, Leda! Don't you see me truly now?"
The beautiful features of the dark elf were drawn into a frown. "Yes. The energy of that weapon masked much — it hid your power! Never did the Gord I knew and loved have such ..."
Gord noted the uncertainty, seeing too the tiredness that Leda could not hide, the strain etched on her face. Not least from her stressful journey, she too had recently undergone much. In answer to her statement, though, the young champion said only, "I have changed and experienced change in the last year, but I am still who I was."
Leda shook her head, making her long, platinum tresses ripple. "Perhaps you are actually who you claim to be; but you are not the same one I left, for you now have within you .. ."
"An inescapable charge and a desire to succeed. Let that suffice," Gord interjected. "This is no fit place for us to be reunited, yet I am loath to move elsewhere until we speak further," he said to her, giving her a look and a smile that said far more than words could. Gord stooped to retrieve Courflamme as he moved closer.
The orb came up into a defensive position in a flash. "Stay back!" Leda commanded, uncertainty still plain in her tone. "Leave that blade where it lies for the time, and tell me who now approaches!"
He turned toward where Gellor labored to join them. The bard was moving as if he were knee-deep to water, but his pace was strong and certain. "That is my boon companion, Gellor, a troubador of Nyrond," Gord said to the drow priestess with a reassuring warmth. "He and I are both bound by the same oath to fight and defeat those who would loose the Ultimate Darkness on the multiverse."
"Stay, then, and we shall await his arrival," Leda told the young man firmly. She liked the distorted space no more than Gord, but determination made it bearable. Leda was torn between suspicious fear and the desire to throw herself into Gord's arms. She controlled herself with a conscious effort, willing her knees not to tremble. The feelings that had been just below the surface washed across her in a surge.
How much she had given up in parting from him there that day in the Flanaess, consigning herself to dwell in the horrid reaches of the Abyss, the sacrifice, the emptiness and the pain and all the rest she had endured came near to sweeping over the little dark elven woman. She had been strong, determined, able to endure the imprisonment because she thought it permanent, forever. Now her lost love, Gord, was here ... or was he? There was still the possibility that it was a trick — some ruse devised by the filthy cambion, Iuz. And even if it was actually Gord, was he the same Gord? Did he still love her as she adored him? And if all were as she hoped, how long would it be before the malice of this place, the evil weavings of demons and devils, parted them again? She swayed, and the light around her seemed to dim.
"Leda?" Gord said, holding her slender, mall-clad form to him as if she were an infant. Without warning Leda had suddenly fainted, and he had had to move as quick as a cat to catch the thing she had held and to keep her from falling to the caustic stuff that was the all-in-all of the Soulless Sounding. "Are you hurt? 111?"
"The Eye . . ." she managed to whisper, clutching feebly at it where it lay in Gord's left hand.
"It is safe. You can have it back as soon as you're recovered sufficiently to hold it. Never mind the damned thing!" Gord said crossly. "It's not important. You are!"
The strength of his arm, the sound of his voice, comforted Leda. At last she was sure it was Gord. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him quickly , then fell back, sobbing.