The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (36 page)

Wing
on
, he told it, which was part of him now, his golden shimmer gathered around the dark shell.

And it beat straight along the wide, black way, passing through fading wisps of gold, flashing at the gigantic squatting form on the towering lip of the pit where the light was slowly sinking …

Unlea followed the faint pittering of his feet. He was silent now. Her legs, breath, everything hurt. She wanted to lie down but wobbled on … and then went blindly to her knees as a terrific cry blasted the blackness and she couldn’t tell if it were a roar or outcry of pain or exultant triumph, and she pressed her hands to her ears and screamed herself, in dubious echo …

Clinschor reeled on the circular wall and felt the rays of darkness streaming through him. Felt himself changing again, expanding his cloudiness until it encompassed all the massed stone of earth, all the grinding weight and pressure, slow shattering of faults and fissures, the incredible squeezing of blackness into diamond clarity; all this was suddenly
him
as limbs and torso became the dark icy waters underground, the hot bubbling too, the viscous darker fluids oozing like the ages.

Down below they clawed, scraped, fell back, climbing over one another. He held his clenched fist over the abyss and felt the fragment throb and sting as the infinite dark touched it even through his flesh. He knew they felt it down there with pain and hate, gnashing fangs in sharkish mouths as they swarmed around the Great One. He vibrated rapidly on the narrow rim, mouth wide, foam flying, waiting for the Great One to come to him, fuse together, waiting as the heat and pressure built in his fist, pain searing up his stringy forearm as if he held a drop of molten gold, burning its way through the flesh … yet he held … and held … Because he saw the Great One now, brushing aside the scuttling pack, struggling to clamber and flutter up the sheerness … saw how in Him darkness itself seemed to take ultimate substance, and unending emptiness found incomprehensible shape that even Clinschor (except Clinschor was now legion, ten thousand thousand names, faces, times come and coming) could only vaguely perceive, an endless yet totally compressed body that tossed like a hurricane, movements that flew and crawled, yet there were legs and arms too, heads and vast shapelessness, heads and flashing horns where night honed night to keenness … things that rose and fell and swarmed, flopped and changed … fire without light flamed and eyes glared that were holes in time and made black blacker … it lifted up in its chaotic might: spiked crowns adorned tossing heads, in solid emptiness and not flapping and not crawling, ascended, and he knew its vacant thoughts and chill cloud of heart … saw futures in amazing worlds where armies convulsed and skies broke open and the sun burst its heart and blood and fire rained everywhere … saw into future ages where foods would be made from filth and stones, and men drawn from iron with cold fire in their veins; where senseless steel tangles were worshipped and seemed to think … fruit eaten that never grew … creatures living that were never born … lumps of metal counseling the nations … the Great One ascended, not precisely like water filling a pipe or smoke a flue, and the churning thoughts of all the heads beat in his flayed mind: wines of poison distilled from springtime’s sweetness … children hacking one another to shreds … cities crawling and rising and pressing back all fresh green until there was only squat stone, metal and stained, sour air …

The Great One ascended with lightnings in his grip; stinks and storms in his hearts. The first strands of darkness already coiled around Clinschor, gusting, as his hand exploded into golden flame and his body shrieked through clenched teeth, locked there, emptiness flooding his mind as the Beast began to eat the Grail speck and blackness squeezed him and pressed out all the myriad Clinschors into void so that void was now his own mind too, the shapelessness his.

As the first of many jaws gaped to grind off the burning fingers and wrist, his consciousness reached to touch with vacancy all living creatures, staining, seeping, filling, drowning them with palpable darkness. So his own pain (as he burned and was devoured) was his delight, because when the last agonizing shred of light was swallowed the world would be dark enough to receive and sustain the Great One.

He saw his people rising in joy at his coming: kings, generals and sheriffs, politicians, pontiffs, great merchants all dimming with delight … criminals, lawyers and judges dancing in ecstasy as the last illumination failed … physicians sagely prescribing nothing in the dark nothingness. Blackness sang hosanna as priests gazed down from blessing bloody swords … the black sun rose. He saw ten thousand poets, writers, artists of all kinds grip their tools, musicians tooting, as all shaped the spill of rich nonsense that poured from countless pens and lightless brains, spouted from stages, colored, carved in stone and steel and spewed from the center of ascending blank while every drudge and scholar dryly rejoiced at last and opened the wan and narrowed eyes that light no longer could burn! The black sun rose as the bright heart sank …

The teeth snapped shut on his arm and the eyes that were holes in nothingness froze him … a gaze that emptied and emptied and yet was forever filled …

Parsival soared straight into the beast’s squatting, grinding, flame-lit immensity, clinging to the hard, smooth beetleback. He willed the winged thing to arrow at where the strange heart ponderously crunched in the skeletal framework of what he now perceived was not an organism at all but flaming iron and stone grinding and creaking, rasping, all angles and fury; black lifeless bones stirring in frenzy, vast clockworks, gouts of fire and dripping sparks.

He flung himself free and arced on his own tattered wings past uncompleted black sheets of steel. It suggested a miles-high knight, the machine and flame within the hollow suit filled with greasy fumes. He flew past rattling and clashing groans … a clear space and there was the heart: a dark, uneven wheel that wobbled and dripped flame. He perceived it was the key point that locked the whole gigantic imbalance together, timed and checked the spidery, almost erratic tangle of dark bending angles that in turn shifted the vast, hollow outer limbs and the terrible head high above. Angles and beams slashed at him. The only illumination was fire. The deadly dark was sucking away the vague glow still throbbing in him. He was battered by the crashing metal, choked by the smoke, blasted by the raving gears … He tried to pick a way through the interior of the knightshape. Aimed at the faint golden pulsing beyond the wall: the titanic construction crushed massive stones down over it, heaping and grinding rubble with awkward, violent speed. Another swordlike mock arm sawed at him, he ducked aside, still sinking steadily in the almost total dark and cyclonic fuming … and then the thick air tore him in wild circles through the edged interior (like a leaf in a whirl of air), just missing razor ribs and frenzied gears and he knew if he perished here he perished everywhere and forever, just as a person who dies in his sleep, dreaming, dies in his waking too …

The ruby light from his eyes shone on the bony, tattered figure perched on the low, curved wall. John the Pig didn’t realize the wall was the rim of what Clinschor saw as an immense well where the beast was emerging to claim his kingdom. The red glare of pigsight burned the blasphemous form into foul clarity and he leaped, squealing with triumph, hearing the scrape and clatter of his hard hooves on the slick stones, mouth chewing and foaming. The pig in his wrath ordained the punishment. As he leaped he dreamed of statues and massed worshippers packed and swaying shoulder to shoulder, copper, silver, brass gleaming, and the hot, raw, spewing blood as gongs raved and incense fumed and bodies, hundreds, thousands spurted, spilled, screamed and he drank deeply, grunting his prayers into the walls of silence:

Speak!
Squee!
Speak!
Squee!

They were chasing Layla again. She’d suddenly sprung ahead, wildly animated, and raced beyond the faint torch circle on the heels of what they didn’t know was John the Pig. A moment later, in the shadowy flickers (that seemed to partly suspend the flow of natural time), they saw bony, dark-hollowed Clinschor perched on the curved wall, head backtilted, arm outstretched as if saluting nothingness, vibrating and suddenly roaring great, tearing, wordless, irregular gasps of bellows breath as if monstrous and invisible hands squeezed his chest, bouncing there on his stiff legs.

Lohengrin hardly knew him: the uncut, flying hair, beard, fleshless stick of a body — but he recognized the long nose and the unforgettable voice.

“One of his fits,” he muttered, and Broaditch said:

“They say the plague can do that.”

… as the equally gangling shape of John jumped, piping an uninflected screech, arms wide …

But
how
did
they
find
each
other?
Broaditch wondered.
By
stench?

… pouncing, fingers clawed, and then they were locked together, and as Clinschor’s hand opened to clutch his attacker Broaditch saw a bright glitter that made him blink before it was lost down (he assumed) the shaft. He stood a moment watching the afterglow in his mind, dying colors that hinted images, memories … landscapes … distant figures … so it was Lohengrin who really was watching (even as he chased his mother right to the well’s edge) the pale, skinny, obscenely mad pair battling on the arc of wall, spitting, clawing (
devour
him!
The pig said,
devour
him!
), and John chewing, tearing strips of flesh from the other’s flabby, stringy arm. Lohengrin felt a rush of sickness. John was gulping, bolting the bloody meat, as Clinschor bawled scream after scream. Layla, falling forward, eyesight blurred, swaying straight at them, saw multiples; tripled, quadrupled hands and heads. She stopped and gaped at the struggling form, the crisscrossing violence of arms and gnashing toothed heads drooling blood (both were biting now, jaws locked in each other’s chests), the fearful thing mounting, looming over her; a mindless, mechanical rasping squealing, screaming, blatting, foaming thing. Her own cries echoed as it twisted and multiplied and long arms lashed out and the thing senselessly plucked at her and she felt it was sucking her into its churning chaos and yelled:

“Save me! My God, save me!”

The boundless emptiness that had been Clinschor opened its burning hand as the great fangs tore the golden speck from him and the black throat gulped it down.

He made a sound as the last light winked out and the sleek, smooth, magnificent darkness swelled in a great wave lapping over the earth, and the wave was himself, and he was everywhere at once stirring life into vital action, drinking raw energy and spilling it back again: the bird striking and spearing the least worm, the jungle cat’s joy as it sprang and became one with its shuddering, crumpling prey … drinking the life that drove the world on and on … the battling men, the thrill of the victor, the mounting power and fear of success after success … Stormwinds shattering the rotten trees, the weak kitten dying and the others feeding on the remains … more life … more life … each weakness crushed and cast aside, the vital weeds choking away the fragile blossoms … touching minds, whispering of stone, smooth, invulnerable, polished to dark sheen … monuments rising, gleaming … whispering of steel, of fire … whispering to all minds the grace of strength and glory … how he would clean the waters of the nations and smite the feeble and deformed and impure with granite fists, all cowards, weaklings, crying out in a whisper:
Who
can
defeat
me? Who
is
like
me?

So Clinschor’s body struggled on its own because it was but a mote in the vast eye of his consciousness, which was spreading over the earth like ink in water. He was aware of a mere vagueness, a shadowy movement as if he gazed down on scuttling ants at his feet, his body a discarded husk … expanded … exhaled his immense message … dreams of striking sharks shaking their victims to pieces, of a dark hawk pirouetting on a cloud-edge then screaming straight down, talons aflame in burnished air, slamming into the pale dove, blotting it out in a bloodspatter and flutter of feathers … dreaming of crashing bulls, crushing snakes … tigers … rising higher … higher … dreamed a stone tower, the final monument, rising, compacted of ground bones and cement, a tower rising through the clouds into the void and blackness beyond, millions fed to its dark blocks, generations slaving and breaking to lift it … yes … the last dream as the body sagged in the other’s arms and the other rooted in his flooding throat now, chewed, drank and swallowed, sucked as Lohengrin’s blade hit them — zip thwock! left and zip thwock! right — and they reeled and, locked together, toppled in pieces into the seeming pit. Then Lohengrin and Broaditch gaped in mutual terror (Layla had fallen flat on her face) as a figure suddenly seemed to rise, float up out of the abyss, arms outreaching …

Moments before, Lohengrin had watched (coming closer behind his mother) the gorging mouth grinding into Clinschor’s strangely passive flesh as they tottered together on the rim, the terrible gray-blue eyes glassy and remote with rapture as he was literally being eaten alive, and this was beyond even horror, and Lohengrin knew he had to stop the feasting. He had to end this thing, this sickening ugliness, the bloodflooded jaws, the eyes lost in their terrible joys. His mother was stopped and screaming. He dimly noted one of their tangled arms whipped free and clutched at her and his sword seemingly of itself chopped once, twice, again and again, and they were falling, erupting in blood and bone chips, a hand flopping up, a leg seeming to struggle a part-step by itself … in disgust, actually retching bile, he swung a last cut and the mess fell in sections into the gaped pit …