Triumph of the Darksword - Margaret Weis [147]
“Gwen!” Joram shouted. Rising to his feet, fear giving him strength, he made his way up the rubble-strewn stairs, calling out his wife’s name. There was no answer. Reaching the porch, he tried to shove aside a piece of wreckage to reach her in case she was trapped inside. Sudden dizziness and a wrenching pain in his arm reminded him of his injury. He staggered, almost falling.
The distant sound of an explosion, like a muffled thud, caught his attention, penetrating his despair. Turning, Joram looked out from the top of the mountain onto the plains below. Sunlight glinted off hundreds of metallic surfaces—tanks crawling around Merilon. White flashes of laser fire bombarded the magical dome. He thought he saw—though it might have been his imagination from this distance—one of the gleaming crystal spires of the Palace topple.
Everything, everyone around him was dead. Now Merilon was dying. The Prophecy was coming to fulfillment.
“Why didn’t I die?” Joram cried in anguish. Bitter tears stung his eyes. Then, suddenly, blinking them back, he looked out again across the plains. “Perhaps that’s why …” he murmured.
He would die, but not here. He would die in Merilon, fighting. The Prophecy wasn’t fulfilled. Not yet.
Looking hastily around, Joram caught a glimpse of dark metal almost buried beneath the crushed stone. Setting his teeth against the agony that each move caused, he made his way through the wreckage, back down the stairs. The Darksword lay near the body of the Executioner. One of the dead warlock’s hands was stretched out, almost touching it.
Joram leaned down to lift the sword. His legs gave way and he ended up falling to his knees beside it. Reaching out his hand, he hesitated. “I can save them,” he said, “but for what? For this?” Lifting his head, he looked on nothing but death.
He will hold in his hand the destruction of the world—
Joram looked back at the Darksword. The sun shone bright upon it, but it did not reflect the light. Its metal, dark and cold as death….
And Joram understood.
Going to Merilon, dealing death to its foes. That fulfilled the Prophecy. This war would end, but there would come another and another. Fear and mistrust would grow. Each world sealing itself off from the other. At the end, each would believe that the only way to survive was to destroy the other totally, never realizing that, in so doing, it would destroy itself.
“Open the window. Set the Life free,” came a clear, sweet voice behind him.
Turning, he saw Gwendolyn sitting calmly amid the wreckage at the top of the Temple stairs. Her bright blue eyes were on her husband. There was no sign of recognition, yet she was speaking to him.
“How?” Joram cried out from where he knelt beside the sword. Raising his arms to the heavens, he shouted in frustration. “How do I stop this? Tell me how.”
His voice came echoing back. Bounding off the columns of the Temple, reverberating from the mountainside, it cried louder and louder, “How?” Thousands of dead voices took up the cry, each voice softer than the softest whisper. “How?”
Gwendolyn motioned for silence and the echoes hushed. Everything in the world hushed, waiting….
Clasping her hands around her knees, Gwendolyn regarded her husband with a serene smile that pierced him to the heart, for he saw that she still did not know him.
“Return to the world that which you took from it,” she said.
Return to the world that which you took from it. He looked at the weapon. In his hand. The Darksword, of course. He had made it of the stone of the world. But how to return it? He had no forge fire to melt it. He might cast it off the mountain peak, but it would only fall to the rocks below and he there until someone else found it.
His eyes went to the altar stone. Looking at it closely for the first time, he realized what Menju had suspected earlier—it was made of darkstone.
Turning back to Gwen, he saw her smiling at him.
“What will happen?” he asked.
“The end,” she said. “Then the beginning.”
He nodded, thinking