Come Armageddon Read online

  Sadokhar moved one of the candlesticks closer, the flame wavering with the trembling of his hand. He did not take his eyes from the blue silk cloak. The Book inside it had come from Tathea’s journey of the soul to the world before this, where God and devil had fought face to face for the future of man.

  Again he was in awe of her. Her familiar face he had seen in a thousand moods, her marvellous, fierce, dark eyes which knew they had seen heaven, and forgotten it ... except in sudden agonising and sublime moments, and partaken something of hell also, and the memory of its shadow lay across her.

  She reached forward and her fingers lifted the fold of the silk and pulled it back. It fell easily, slipping on its own smooth surface.

  Sadokhar held his breath, his heart hammering.

  The gleam of the beaten gold shone, chrysolite burned like diamonds, catching the milk-white purity of pearls.

  Then he heard Tathea give a long, shuddering sigh—not wonder but, strangely, fear—and he saw them the moment after she did, resting on the gleaming gold: long, black keys, as dense as night and yet subtly iridescent, casting no shadow. He heard Sardriel draw in his breath.

  Tathea’s face was stiff, eyes blank with fear as if she could not believe what she saw. Her hands were rigid and she began to shake.

  Her fear flooded into Sadokhar as if he were still a child at her skirts and his life depended upon hers.

  “What are they?” Ardesir said hoarsely, panic in his voice.

  “Keys to what?” Sadokhar whispered.

  For a moment it seemed she could not reply. Her throat convulsed, choking. Her skin was white, no blood in it. She started to move backwards.

  “To what?” Sadokhar shouted, stepping forward, although he had no idea what he meant to do.

  Tathea staggered a little, losing her balance.

  He caught her in his arms. There seemed no weight to her, her body was weak and so thin he could feel her bones through the fabric of her gown. He looked at her in horror, his skin prickling and cold with sweat. The face he saw was old, withered and all but fleshless, the eyes blind, the hair lank and blasted with white.

  “No ...” A long, moaning cry of denial broke from him. The woman he held was alive, but only in the beating of her heart. The spirit was gone, the courage and the strength that had carried her through five hundred years was shrivelled away, her mind wasted in senility.

  Ardesir stood as if paralysed, unable to believe.

  Sardriel bent forward as if he would help, then stopped, not knowing what to do.

  Sadokhar held Tathea gently, his arms locked, body aching. He began to rock her back and forth, as if she were a troubled child. He wanted to say something. But what could bring her back and undo the horror of the last few moments? What would make it as it had been?

  He held her more closely, feeling her body almost weightless, as if she were slipping away, even in his arms. Her breath rasped in her throat, struggling to fill her lungs.

  “Don’t,” he said hoarsely. “We’ll fight ... We’ll make the war happen, I promise!” It was a cry of desperation. He had no idea how, no plan. “We’ll win! We’ve got to ... It is what we were born for.” That was not true either. It was what he was born for, not she. But he could not do it without her. “Tathea! Come back!” he cried. “We can’t win alone! We don’t even know what it is! Help us! We don’t understand it!”

  He moved to try to make her more comfortable, and knocked his leg against the table. The candlestick swayed, spilling golden lights and shadows across the gleaming surface of the Book. He knew that inside it was the word of God to His children, the promises of the light and glory of eternity. It could not be wrong! Those who believed in it had to win. However long the struggle or how hard or high the climb, in the end there had to be that heaven which was the soul’s dream, the passion, the love beyond all others.

  “Tathea!”

  But she did not answer, even with the slightest movement.

  Sadokhar looked up and saw Ardesir’s face ash-pale, and knew the fear in him as if he could taste it in his own mouth. Ardesir’s body was rigid and it was seconds before he spoke.

  “Asmodeus has never defeated her before,” he said gently, forcing his voice to be steady, even warm although it trembled a little. “He won’t now—not with us here too.” He put his slender hand on Sadokhar’s shoulder. “We’ll keep vigil, and pray. Our faith will be strong enough ... but it is a bitter test.”

  Sadokhar felt a tiny seed of calm within himself. He rose to his feet and carried Tathea through to her bedroom and laid her on the bed. Ardesir and Sardriel followed and they all kneeled beside her, each asking in his own words for the help of God to restore Tathea as she had been, and give them the power to fight in His cause.

  But as the night deepened she did not move, nor did she as dawn came, and sunrise.

  “You must go and wash and eat,” Sardriel said quietly as the light broadened across the room, showing their faces gaunt with weariness and shock. “Sit in the judgement hall as usual, speak to people, receive visitors.”

  Sadokhar’s body clenched in denial, but he knew Sardriel was right. This was the first blow against them, and already he was prepared to let the world see it had drawn blood. He stood up slowly. “Yes ... of course. I’ll return when I can. Send word to me if there is any change.”

  Sardriel and Ardesir both nodded silently. Sardriel went with Sadokhar as far as the outer chamber. For a moment it looked as if he were about to say something more, some word of hope or grief, the emotion was in his eyes, then it was concealed again, and he merely said goodbye.

  The day passed in duties performed with half the attention, and the night in vigil, with snatches of sleep. The second dawn brought no change but a deeper bending together of resolve, a few words of faith, brief because there was too little to say.

  From the moment the darkness closed over Tathea, she was sucked from all she loved into a place of isolation and chaos. She knew with terrible certainty who it was she faced. His presence was around her more surely than the whirling rubble in the air or the choking clouds of dust.

  “They will fail without you!” he said from behind her, his voice as intimate as a touch to the skin. “The people will return to their old ways. The faith you taught them was only skin-deep. Come the first cold winds withering their prosperity and they’ll go back to their old superstitions. I can send storms to drown their coasts, blight on their crops, rains to flood their valleys. Rock their comfort, make them afraid and you’ll see the truth of their mettle.”

  There was nowhere for her to set her feet. She was drifting.

  “Some will, but there will be more who won’t,” she argued. “Destroy things and they’ll rebuild. Afflict them and they’ll find courage to fight back. They’ll close ranks against you!”

  He laughed, a wild, hollow sound like the breaking of ice.

  “They’ll turn on each other, every one for himself! Fear will kill all the seeds you’ve planted, it will strip away the thin paint of virtue and show the heart of self beneath. Even those you think you know, Tathea! Kor-Assh will never come to Tyrn Vawr. He will dither and hesitate for ever, always finding yet one more excuse to wait in Lantrif, outside the battle, until it overtakes him and it is too late.”

  Still he was behind her, but she could feel his breath on her cheek.

  “And Ardesir will grow more and more afraid, until at last his terror overcomes him and he runs away. He is afraid—you know that! You have seen it in him—the cold, sick gripping of the stomach when pain is there in front of him, real pain, horror, failure.”

  “He’ll overcome it,” she whispered, not even sure if her voice was strong enough for him to hear. “Everybody with intelligence and imagination knows fear. It’s what you do with it that matters.”

  “And Sardriel will retreat further and further from the pain of feeling,” he went on. “Until in the end he feels nothing at all—no love, no pity, no laughter, no hope. He will become a
brain without a heart.”

  “No he won’t! There’s no point in being alive if you can’t feel! The purpose of being is to have joy! He knows that!”

  “He knows you said it!” he jeered. “Words, and where are you now? Silent and cold in a bed! They watch over you and hope and pray—but for how long?”

  “Until I return!” she cried, swinging round to face him, the blood pounding in her body till she shook with the force of it.

  He stood there proud and terrible, familiar as eternity. A smile curved his lips. “And even Sadokhar—especially Sadokhar—will fail. His courage will turn to savagery, his justice to vengeance on those he thinks betray him—which they all will, in the end. He will cease to be king and become tyrant, drowning in the blood of his own people.”

  She refused to believe it, she could not! She stared at him, defending the only way left, by attacking. “And what about Ishrafeli?” she demanded. “You couldn’t beat him before. You shook the earth and you blotted out the stars, but you couldn’t kill the love in him! You can’t quench the light in any of us unless we let you—and we won’t. I won’t!”

  His eyes narrowed to slits of fire. “Oh yes, you will! Your human imagination cannot begin to think what I will do to them. Time is mine, Tathea. They will grow old and die, waiting for a war they will never fight and their souls will wither inside them. In the end the earth will be mine, and everything in it, every bird and beast, every tree and blade of grass. And you will see it, exhausted, bitter and alone, to the last twilight!”

  Tathea’s eyes opened wide. She was lying on her own bed and Sadokhar was kneeling beside her, tears on his face. Beyond him Ardesir was smiling, so widely he was almost laughing, and Sardriel’s lips moved in a silent prayer, his eyes bright.

  Sadokhar held her gently and she sat up, feeling the strength returning, her hair black again where it fell forward over her shoulder.

  She saw the golden Book on the small table by the wall, the dark keys still on its face.

  Sadokhar turned to follow her gaze. “What are they?” His hand tightened over her arm so she could not have reached for them even if she would.

  “Asmodeus’ keys to this world,” she answered, her voice coming between dry lips. “He showed them to me the night you were born.”

  He understood. She did not need to put it all into mundane words for him. He would die. Ardesir and Sardriel would die, and Kor-Assh also, if he came. Even Tathea herself could wither with doubt. She too was vulnerable if her faith slipped from her ... and for the first time in his life he realised that it could. He had seen the weakness in her soul as well as the glory, the burden of time—when she had fought and waited alone, shoring up her strength for the day of the last battle, always clinging to the faith that they would win.

  Today she had been swayed by doubt that perhaps they would not. Asmodeus would stay his hand, and without war the end would be not a cataclysmic battle in which they could be victorious, but a long watch until one morning they saw the emptiness of it all, and realised they were alone, and there was no prize to win or lose, only the slow descent into oblivion. The whole journey had been purposeless. They had endured all the agony and the sacrifice and the hope so Asmodeus could mock them. And through them, God Himself!

  “There is away!” he said with more strength than he thought he had. “I don’t know what, but I’ll find it.”

  “The keys ...” Ardesir said softly. He knew the prophecy, as they all did: Tathea must take the keys of this world from Asmodeus himself.

  “No!” Sardriel reached out his hand, but he was too late. Ardesir stretched forward and grasped them, and as his fingers touched the leaden metal it shimmered and dissolved, all except one key which slithered to the floor without a sound.

  Ardesir closed his eyes, blind for a moment with despair.

  Sardriel stood rock-still.

  Sadokhar bent and reached for the solitary key on the floor, and felt its metal on his flesh. He closed his hand over it, and it remained, solid as the key to the castle gates. It was not Asmodeus’ key to the world, it was something else, and as he kneeled there a wild and terrible thought filled his mind, memory of a door in the ruined city of Sylum, a wraith-like man he had seen there, and an idea so fearful he could not speak it aloud.

  Tathea saw him and lunged forward, grasping his arm, but she was too weak to hold him. Sardriel caught her as she swayed, holding her steady, unwittingly shielding her with his own body as Sadokhar slipped out of the door, and the instant after, she heard the heavy lock turn and knew they were shut in.

  Chapter II

  SADOKHAR STOPPED ONLY LONG enough to dress for the journey, then he went to the stables, saddled his horse and rode out into the night. The city was asleep. The clatter of hoofs on stone was the only sound that disturbed the darkness. He was long used to battles with the sword and he knew his own skill, but this was different, unknown and unguessable, a war of the spirit, and he knew the weakness within himself, the possibility of failure. It had been years ago, he had been little more than a boy, when he had met the bear in the forest, before he and Tathea had left Hirioth for the Eastern Shore. It had stood before him in the glade, a giant woken from sleep, and he had frozen with terror, incapable of fighting or running.

  It was Tathea who had rescued him, seizing his arm and scrambling, half lifting him up the great oak tree until at last the beast grew bored and shambled away. But Sadokhar had never forgotten that faced with the unknown, he could fail.

  Now he rode through the night past the guards at the city gates, and out on to the moonlit road eastward. Last night had taught him many things. Deep in his heart with an immovable ache was the knowledge that Tathea was vulnerable. Perhaps she was not immortal as he had always assumed, not incapable of any wound but that to the soul. Her body and her will could be broken. Armageddon must not wait.

  Kor-Assh had not yet come. They had sent no embassy north to Ulfin, but last night had also taught Sadokhar that the last words of the prophecy meant exactly what it said. Before Tathea could take the keys from Asmodeus, he must walk the earth himself They must be taken from his hand, not some vision of them grasped so easily from where he had placed them on the Book. That had been a threat, a gesture of his power. Sadokhar should have known it. Asmodeus would never have left them could they be stolen so simply.

  And yet Sadokhar had the one key that was not of this world, but of another, far more terrible, and if he used it then he could seek out Asmodeus, face him, and goad him into bringing the legions of hell to begin the final war.

  He rode hard all night, following the old Imperial road from the Heartlands to the sea, as he and Tathea had done when he first left Hirioth with her.

  He passed villages and towns and saw the glow of torches in windows, the thousand peaceful homes filled with laughter and pain, passion and triviality, each one seeking untold dreams. He felt an ache of love for everything they were, and could be. The night wind was soft on his cheek, carrying the scent of herbs and trodden grass, and the vast distances of the night. Far away, water gleamed under the moon like the polished surface of a mirror.

  He lifted his face towards it and felt his heart tighten inside him. He could never love the beauty of it enough. He had loved Hirioth with its ancient trees, its beasts, its millions of whispering leaves. He had loved the great bare mountains of the Wastelands arching up to the wind-driven clouds. Above all he had loved the storm-racked, surf-booming beauty of the Eastern Shore with its endless skies and pale, rib-streaked sands.

  If it really were hell which lay beyond the portal in Sylum, then he might never see the world again with its familiar, precious and terrible wonder. He would be somewhere else ... Alone? And if not, with whom? Spirits of those who had denied God and everything He had made and loved? Even to imagine it was unbearable.

  He stared at the silver light across the arch of heaven, and the sleeping earth beneath.

  If he did not go, if he stayed here, loving it, and Armaged
don came at another time, when he, Ardesir and Sardriel were dead and Tathea left alone and weakened by doubt and the waiting, the crushing disappointment, then Asmodeus might win ... No, more than that—he would win!

  There was no decision to make. But if he gave himself time to think of all it meant then his courage might fail him. Now that he had seen the choices clearly he had no escape. It was not his mission to fight Armageddon as he had believed all his life, but to provoke it. That was the great and terrible service he could do the world he loved so fiercely. It would demand from him the ultimate sacrifice.

  He turned his horse and started to ride down again towards the sea. It was time to stop thinking and just do it; give fear no room.

  It had been sunset when side by side he and Tathea had first breasted this rise and seen the ruins of the great city below them, flushed with the colours of the dying day.

  He remembered his indrawn breath of amazement even now, twenty years after. At their backs the west had burned in a sea of gold, shards of fire stretching across a scalding sun, feathered clouds like the vast underside of some world-folding wing hung, closing in the sky.

  In front of them the pillared streets had been lent an illusion of beauty. It did not matter that the columns supported the empty air. The black scars of smoke melted into indigo, no more than shadows on the ochre, peach and rose of the crumbling walls. They had been too far away to see the wreckage of pavements, or that the green was not the gentle order of gardens but the thick riot of thrusting weeds. Thistle heads were amethyst lamps in the sunset; ivy and bindweed strangled the last of the unbroken columns and loaded the arches with clinging weights of vine.

  He had seen the tears on Tathea’s face, not understanding then that those shattered glories were the wreckage of a nation she had known and loved.