Descent of Angels (6 page)

‘If you’re expecting a long and inspiring speech, then I’m afraid I’ve none to give you.’

Amadis’s voice easily projected to the far reaches of the Circle Chamber, and Zahariel felt a thrill of excitement course through him at every word. Only the Lion and Luther had voices of such power and resonance.

‘I’m a simple man,’ continued Amadis, ‘a warrior and a knight. I don’t give speeches, and I’m not one for grand shows, but the Lion asked me to talk to you here today, though I’m no public speaker, that’s for sure. I have returned to Aldurukh and I will be working alongside the instructor knights for a spell, so I expect I’ll be seeing you all over the next few weeks and months before I return to the forests.’

Zahariel felt his pulse quicken at the idea of learning from a warrior such as Amadis, and felt wild, uncontrollable elation flood him.

‘As I said before, I’m not usually one for theatrics, but I do understand their value, to you and to me,’ said Amadis. ‘Seeing me here will drive you on to become the best knights you can be, because I give you something to aspire to, a reason to want to better yourselves. Looking out at your faces reminds me of where I came from, what I used to be. Many tales are told of me and some of them are even true…’

Polite laughter rippled around the chamber as Amadis continued.

‘As it happens, most of them
are
true, but that’s not the point. The point is that when a man hears the same things said of him often enough, he begins to believe them. Tell a child often enough that it is worthless and beneath contempt and it will start to believe that such a vile sentiment is true. Tell a man he is a hero, a giant amongst men, and he will start to believe that too, thinking himself above all others. If enough praise and honour is heaped upon a man, he will start to believe that such is his due, and that all others must bow to his will.

‘Seeing you all here is a grand reminder that I am not such a man. I was once a would-be novice, standing out in the cold night before the gates of this monastery. I too walked the spiral under the rods of instructor knights, and I too undertook a beast quest to prove my mettle to the Order. You are where I was, and I am where any one of you can be.’

Amadis’s speech seemed to reach out to Zahariel, and he knew that he would remember this moment for as long as he lived. He would remember these words and he would live by them.

The words of this heroic knight had power beyond the simple hearing of them. They seemed to be aimed directly at every warrior gathered in the chamber. Looking around. Zahariel knew that every knight, novice and supplicant felt that every word was for him and for him alone.

Thunderous applause and spontaneous cheering erupted in the Circle Chamber, the knights and supplicants rising to their feet. Such displays were almost unheard of within the walls of Aldurukh, and Zahariel was swept up in the infectious enthusiasm of his brethren.

He looked over at Nemiel, his cousin similarly caught up in the wave of pride.

Such was the power, strength and conviction in his words and delivery that Zahariel vowed, there and then, that he would be the greatest knight the Order had ever seen, the most heroic warrior ever to sally forth from the great Memorial Gate to do battle with the enemies of Caliban.

Despite the pride and hubris inherent in such vows, he made a silent oath that he would never lose sight of what it meant to be a knight, the humility that must accompany all great deeds and the unspoken satisfaction in knowing that doing the right thing was reason enough to do it.

Eventually, the applause died down, as Amadis lifted his arms and waved away the clapping and cheering.

‘Enough, brothers, enough!’ he shouted with a smile on his face. ‘This isn’t what I came here for. Despite my earlier words, I do seem to have given a bit of a speech, but hopefully it wasn’t too boring, eh?’

THREE

T
HE NIGHTMARE ALWAYS
began the same way. It was two years ago and he was seven years of age, one of nearly two hundred would-be aspirants who had come to the fortress monastery at Aldurukh seeking to be accepted as knights-supplicant by the Order. From whatever pleasant fantasy was drifting around inside his skull, the darkness would always come to wrench him back to his first day with the Order.

It had been mid-winter, the only time of year at which the Order recruited, and hundreds of children would arrive at the fortress, desperately hoping they would be among the handful chosen to start on the pathway to becoming a knight.

The rite of selection was the same for every one of them.

The guards manning the gates would tell the waiting aspirants there was only one way to be accepted for training within the Order. They must survive a single night beyond the gates of the fortress until dawn the next morning. During that time, they had to remain standing in the same spot. They could not eat, or sleep, or sit down, or take rest in any way. What was more, they were told they each had to surrender their coats and boots.

It had been snowing the day Zahariel took the test, and the snow lying in wide drifts against the walls of the fortress and upon the branches of the trees at the forest’s edge gave the scene a curiously festive appearance.

Nemiel had been beside him: the two of them had each decided they would become knights, assuming they managed to pass the test and were found to be worthy.

The snow was thick on the ground by the time the test started, and throughout the day, the snowfall continued until it had risen as high as their knees. Though the forest was several hundred metres from the walls of the fortress, the darkness beyond the tree line seemed to reach out from the haunted depths like a living thing, enveloping them in its silky embrace like an unwelcome lover.

As he dreamed, Zahariel turned in his sleep, the phantasmal cold making him shiver in his cot bed. He recognised the dream for what it was, but such knowledge did not allow him to break from its inevitable course. His extremities had grown so numb, he felt sure he would lose his fingers and toes to frostbite, and knew that in the morning after the darkness, he would wake and check to make sure his nightmare had not translated into the real world.

Throughout the test, the guards had done everything in their power to make the ordeal more difficult. They had wandered among the ranks of miserable, barefoot children, alternating between cruelty and kindness in their attempts to break them.

One guard had called Nemiel a pus-brained simpleton for even thinking he was worthy to join the Order. Another had tried to tempt Zahariel by offering a blanket and a hot meal, but only if he would first give up on his ambitions and leave the test.

Once again, Zahariel could see the guard’s face leering down at him as he said, ‘Come inside, boy. There’s no reason for you to be standing out here, freezing. It’s not as if you’d ever make it into the Order. Everybody knows you haven’t got what it takes. You know it, too. I can see right through you. Come inside. You don’t want to be outside once night comes. Raptors, bears and lions, there’re a lot of different predators come around the walls of the fortress at night. And there’s nothing they like more than to see a boy standing in open ground. You’d make a tasty morsel for the likes of them.’

So far, the nightmare had followed a familiar course, treading the paths of memory, but at some point, never the same one twice, it would deviate into madness and things of which he had no memory, things he wished he could erase from his mind as easily as his pleasant dreams were wont to vanish.

In this variation, Zahariel stood beside a fair-haired boy he had never seen before, in his nightmares or in reality. The boy was a youth of wondrous perfection and pride, who stood with ramrod straight shoulders and the bearing of someone who would grow into the mightiest of warriors.

A guard with a gnarled face and cruel orange eyes leant down towards the boy.

‘You don’t need to finish the test,’ said the guard. ‘Your pride and fortitude under pressure has attracted the attention of the Order’s Grand Master. Your fate has already been decided. Any fool with eyes can see you’ve got what it takes to be the chosen one.’

Zahariel wanted to cry out, to tell the boy not to believe the falsehoods he was hearing, but it was what the boy wanted to hear. It promised him everything he had ever desired.

The boy’s face lit up at the news of his acceptance, his eyes shining with the promise of achieving all that he had ever wanted.

Thinking the test was over, the boy sank, exhausted, to his knees and leaned forward to kiss the snow covered ground.

The cruel laughter of the guards brought the boy’s head up with a start, and Zahariel could see the dawning comprehension of his foolishness slide across his face like a slick.

‘Foolish boy!’ cried the guard. ‘You think because someone tells you that you are special that it must be true? You are nothing but a pawn for our amusement!’

The boy let out a heart-rending howl of anguish, and Zahariel fought to keep his eyes fixed straight ahead as the boy was dragged to the edge of the forest, red-eyed and crying, his face pale with shock and disbelief.

The boy’s cries were muffled as he was hurled into the dark forest, the tangled webs of roots and creepers dragging him deeper and deeper into the choking vegetation. Though the boy’s pained cries grew weaker and weaker, Zahariel could still hear them, echoing in unimaginable anguish long after he had been taken by the darkness.

Zahariel tried to shut out the boy’s pain as the weather grew colder and the number of aspirants standing outside Aldurukh dwindled as other boys decided it was better to bear the stigma of failure than to face the ordeal for a moment longer.

Some went pleading to the guards, begging for shelter within the fortress and the return of their coats and boots. Others simply collapsed, worn down by cold and hunger, to be carried away to fates unknown.

By sunset, only two-thirds of the boys remained. Then, as darkness fell, the guards retreated to their sentry points inside the fortress, leaving the boys to endure the long hours of the night alone.

The night was the worst time. Zahariel twisted as his dream-self shivered in the dismal darkness, his teeth chattering so violently he thought they might shatter. The silence was absolute, the boy’s cries from the forest stilled and the guards jibes and taunts ended.

With the coming of night, the silence and the power of imagination did a better job of terrorising the boys than the guards ever could. The seeds of fear had been sown with talk of predators prowling around outside the fortress, and in the still of the night, those seeds took root and sprouted in each boy’s mind.

The night had a quality that was eternal, thought Zahariel.

It had always existed and always would exist. The feeble efforts of men to bring illumination to the galaxy were futile and doomed to failure. He dimly perceived the strangeness of the concept as it formed in his mind, expressing ideas and words that he had no knowledge of, but which he knew were crushingly true.

Afterwards, it was the sounds that Zahariel feared the most.

The ordinary sounds of the forest at night, noises that he had heard more than a thousand times in the past, were louder and more threatening than any sounds he had heard before. At times, he heard sounds he swore were the work of raptors, bears or even the much-feared Calibanite lion.

The crack of every twig, every rustle of the leaves, every call and scream of the night: all these things sounded heavy with menace. Death lurked just behind him or at his elbow, and he wanted to run, to give up the ordeal. He wanted to go back to the settlement where he was born, to his friends and family, to his mother’s soothing words, to the warm place by the hearth. He wanted to give up on the Order. He wanted to forgo his knightly pretensions.

He was seven years of age and he wanted to go home.

As horrible and unearthly as the noises had been, it was the voices that were the worst part of the ordeal, the most loathsome invention of his nightmare.

Between the roars and the snap of branches, a million susurrations emerged from the forest like a cabal of whispering voices. Whether anyone else could hear them, Zahariel did not know, for no one else reacted to the sounds that invaded his skull with promises of power, of flesh, of immortality.

All could be his, if he would step from the snow-covered esplanade before the fortress and walk into the forest. Without the presence of the guards, Zahariel felt able to turn his head and look towards the tangled, vine choked edge of the forest.

Though forests carpeted much of the surface of Caliban and his entire existence had been spent within sight of tall trees and swaying green canopies, this forest was unlike anything he had seen before. The trunks of the trees were leprous and green, their bark rotten and diseased. Darkness that was blacker than the deepest night lurked between them, and though the voices promised him that all would be well if he stepped into the forest, he knew that terrors undreamt of and nightmares beyond reckoning dwelt beneath its haunted arbours.

As ridiculous as it seemed to Zahariel, he knew that this dream-shaped forest was no natural phenomenon, a region so unnatural that it existed beyond the mortal world, shaped by its dreams and nightmares, stirred by its desires and fears.

What lurked within its depths was beyond fear and reason, madness and elemental power that seethed and roared in concert with the heaving tides of men and their dreadful lives.

And yet…

For all its dark, twisting, horrid power, there was an undeniable attraction.

Power, no matter its source, could always be mastered, couldn’t it? Elemental energies could be harnessed and made to serve the will of one with the strength of purpose to master its complexities.

The things that could be achieved with such power were limitless. The great beasts could be hunted to extinction and the other knightly brotherhoods brought to heel. All of Caliban would become the domain of the Order, and all would obey its masters or die by the swords of its terrible black angels of death.