Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [122]
Thus they followed Blachloch wholeheartedly, abandoning their farms, working with a will in the mines and the forge to craft the weapons that were to carve them a future.
This future came to be embodied for them in the monument that stood in the center of the village—the Great Wheel. Older than the village itself, the Wheel had been rescued from the destruction of the Sorcerers’ Temples by the persecuted Technologists following the Iron Wars. They brought it with them as they fled for their lives into the Outlands, and now it hangs in the center of an arch formed of black rock. The huge wheel with its nine spokes has become the center of a ritual known in the village as the Scianc.
Who knows how the ritual began? Its roots are buried in the mud and blood of the past. Perhaps, long ago, when the Sorcerers saw the knowledge they had worked so hard to acquire sinking into the darkness of their harsh lives, they used this method to try to pass on what they had learned to the next generations. Unfortunately, next generations remembered only the words, the knowledge and the wisdom dwindled and burned out like the flame of a guttered candle.
On the seventh night of every week, the entire population of the village gathers around the Wheel and recites the chant that each learns as a child. Accompanied by the music of instruments of iron, tortured wood, and stretched animal skins, the chant begins by paying homage to the three major forces in the Sorcerers’ lives—Fire, Wind, and Water. With voices that rise higher and higher as the music of the instruments becomes more frenetic, the people sing of the construction and building and development of wonders that no one now remembers or understands.
On the night before the men of the village were to leave with Blachloch on the raid of the farming communities, the Scianc was particularly wild, the former Duuk-tsarith cleverly using it as the DKarn-Duuk uses the war dance—to heat the blood until human conscience and compassion is burned away. Round and round the great Wheel the chanters danced, the beating and strumming of the instruments adding their inhuman voices to the melee. Torches lit the darkness and in their light, the Wheel—forged of some type of shiny metal, the knowledge of whose making had been lost—shone in the torchlight like an unholy sun. Occasionally one of the dancers leaped up onto the black stone platform that supported the monument. Grabbing hold of one of the forge’s hammers, he would strike the center of the nine-spoked Wheel, causing it to join in the chanting with a voice of iron that seemed to shout from the bowels of the earth itself.
Most of the Sorcerers took part in the Scianc, men, women, and children, chanting the words no one understood, dancing in the flaming light, or watching with mixed emotions.
Andon watched in sorrow, hearing in the words of the chant the voices of the ancients crying out to their children to remember the past.
Saryon watched in a horror so vast it was a wonder he did not go mad. The flaring lights, the shrieking music, the leaping figures of men and women drunk with bloodlust—all seemed sprung from his carefully taught visions of Hell. He paid no attention to the words of the chant, he was too sickened. Here dwelt Death, and himself in the midst of it.
Blachloch watched in satisfaction, his black-robed figure standing well outside the circle of dancers, calm, observant, unnoticed. He heard the words of the chant, but he’d heard them often, and they didn’t matter anymore.
Joram watched in frustration. He heard the words. What’s more, he listened to them and he understood them—in part. He alone had read the hidden books. He alone, of all those there, saw the knowledge those ancient Sorcerers had hoped to impart to their children. He saw it, but he didn’t understand it. The knowledge remained locked up in those words, locked up in the books. And he couldn’t find the key—the key that was in strange, unfathomable symbols.
Simkin watched, bored.
With the rising of the moon, the