The Complete Darkwar Trilogy: Flight of the Night Hawks, Into a Dark Realm, Wrath of a Mad God

Tad rolled over on his back and stared upwards in the darkness. ‘I wish we were back at Stardock.’

Zane sighed deeply. ‘Me, too.’

• CHAPTER FIVE • (#ulink_8656dfc1-41c1-5287-8709-8c9d49610de3)

Sorcerer’s Isle (#ulink_8656dfc1-41c1-5287-8709-8c9d49610de3)

ALL EYES WERE ON NAKOR.

He pulled an orange from his seemingly-bottomless rucksack and offered it first to Miranda, then to Pug, and then to Magnus. All declined. He stuck his thumb into the peel and began to remove it, a process all of them had witnessed a thousand times before.

‘Nakor,’ said Pug, ‘what are you not telling us?’

‘Nothing,’ said Nakor. ‘At least nothing I knew until Magnus arrived.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Miranda, sitting on the side of the bed where Caleb lay sleeping.

Pug stood at his younger son’s feet and Magnus occupied the other chair in the room.

‘You know who the old witch in the village was, yes?’ asked Nakor.

‘Not really,’ said Magnus. ‘I’ve encountered her twice before and all I sense is that she’s more than a common purveyor of charms and herbal remedies. There’s power there, but it’s muted.’

‘You said the Goddess called her an echo,’ said Miranda. To Nakor she said, ‘What does that mean?’

Nakor glanced at Pug who said, ‘I think I understand, or at least, I have a partial understanding. Tell us what you know.’

Nakor shrugged and his usual happy demeanour vanished. Instead, Pug saw the darkest expression Nakor had ever revealed to him. ‘The Gods are beings of vast power,’ Nakor began. ‘Our understanding of them is filtered through the limits of our perceptions.’ He looked at the other three. ‘All of you have been to the Pavilion of the Gods, so you know that it is both a physical place and a metaphor for something much less objective. It is a place of the mind as well as a place of the body.

‘When I have encountered beings of a certain type in the past—’ He stopped and was silent for a moment as if considering his choice of words, then he resumed. ‘I mentioned Zaltais of the Eternal Despair,’ he said to Pug, who nodded. ‘Do you remember him being cast into a pit – I said he was a dream, remember?’

Pug nodded. ‘You’ve said that each time he’s been mentioned, yet you have offered no explanation.’

With a slight smile, Nakor said, ‘I assumed, perhaps in error, that you would have gleaned the truth without my having told you since we discussed this all down in Krondor, before the Serpentwar destroyed that city.’

Magnus said, ‘This is all new to me, so why not explain it now?’

‘The Nameless One sleeps,’ Nakor said.

All three knew of Nalar, the Greater God of Evil, who had been cast out by the other Controller Gods, as the Greater Gods were sometimes called. ‘That is the legend, anyway,’ continued Nakor. ‘When the Chaos Wars raged, the Nameless One seduced the Valheru and caused them to rise up and challenge the Lesser Gods, just as he had seduced the Lesser Gods to rise up and challenge the Controllers.’

Magnus said, ‘I’ve studied the lore as much as any outside the priesthood, Nakor. But nowhere have I read about the Nameless One bidding the Lesser Gods to attack the Greater Gods. He was a Greater God. Why would he invite such an attack upon himself as well as the other Greater Gods?’

‘To skew the balance,’ answered Pug. ‘To change the dynamics between the seven Controller Gods.’ He looked at Nakor, who nodded, and Pug said, ‘Before the Chaos Wars, when the old order died and the new order arose, there were seven Controllers.’ He started to count on his fingers, as if emphasizing each in turn. ‘The Nameless One, who is the Darkness; Arch-Indar, the Light; Ev-den, the Worker from Within; Abrem-Sev, the Builder; Graff, the Weaver of Desire; Helbinor, the Abstainer, and at the centre, The Balance.’

‘Ishap,’ supplied Magnus.

Pug nodded, and Nakor resumed. He finished his orange and put the peel into his bag, licked his fingers, and held them up as he counted on them. ‘After the Chaos Wars, the balance changed.’ He held up one hand, displaying four fingers and a folded thumb. ‘Left behind were the Nameless One and the four dynamic gods: Abrem-sev, Ev-den, Graff, and Helbinor.’

He then unfolded his thumb. ‘Ishap, in the middle, is the balancer. He is, in a way, the most powerful, for he will add to any side that is disadvantaged, and he will oppose any side that seeks to gain supremacy, always striving to restore the balance.

‘All of them are vital to the very existence of our world. One is action, one is reaction, one is higher purpose and mind, and the other is all things unseen and unknowable, but vital to our very being. And the last maintains the balance.’

He put his hands together, his fingertips and thumb forming a circle. ‘They are a unity. They form the very fabric of our reality. But they are but expressions of forces. Those forces are vital, dynamic, and they are the expression of even more basic beings.

‘The Selfless One, She Who is Light, and the Nameless One, He Who is Darkness, are the sources of those two basic powers. The Good Goddess died in the Chaos Wars, and the other five Controllers were forced to imprison the Dark One in another realm, under a mountain so vast that this entire world could rest upon a ledge on its peak.

‘There he slumbers.’ Nakor looked around. ‘Zaltais was one of his dreams.’

Pug said, ‘I thought I understood, but I didn’t.’

‘If one lies in a prison, might one not dream of a surrogate, a ruler who sits on a throne in a distant place and who can command armies to free the prisoner?’

Miranda said, ‘Zaltais was trying to raise an army to storm a prison on another plane of reality?’

‘No, it’s just a metaphor,’ said Pug.

‘Everything is a metaphor,’ said Nakor. ‘The witch is but an echo of the Good Goddess.’

Magnus said, ‘Wait. The old woman I encountered in the Pavilion may have been such, but the village witch is a real person.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ agreed Nakor. ‘The gods will often place a tiny fragment of themselves within a mortal. It is how they learn to manifest their roles in this world, to understand fully their obligation to their worshippers. When the mortal dies, the spark returns to the god.

‘The relationship between gods and humanity is complex. The gods are also manifestations of how humanity sees them. Ban-ath here in Midkemia and Kalkin in Novindus are essentially the same, yet they manifest differently, with slightly different charges and natures.’

‘So the old witch has a divine spark within her?’ asked Magnus.

‘Just so,’ said Nakor. ‘Arch-Indar is dead as we understand such things, but her power was so vast, so profound and fundamental, that even ages after her death the echoes of her being still influence us.’

‘Is that why you started that religion down in Krondor?’ asked Miranda.

‘I didn’t start it,’ answered Nakor. ‘I only resurrected it. When the avatar appeared, I knew that eventually goodness will return. When that young girl, Aleta, started manifesting all those abilities, I knew that it was the right choice.

‘When it does, the other Controllers will release the Nameless One from his prison and return the order of our world to its proper place. Without Arch-Indar to offset his evil, the Nameless One must stay imprisoned.

‘Remember that Ishap is also “dead”, but his followers have retained considerable power, some from the other Controllers, but some simply from the memory of the Balancer. He’ll return before the Good Goddess because his temple has been restored for a longer time, and the one I reinstituted is still very young. But, when Ishap’s back, and Arch-Indar eventually returns, then the other Controllers can release the Nameless One from his prison, and return the order of our world to its proper place. Without her to offset his evil, the Nameless One must stay imprisoned.’

‘And having worshippers will cause that?’ asked Magnus.

‘Eventually,’ said Nakor with a shrug. ‘How long is anyone’s guess.’

‘Centuries,’ said Miranda.

‘If we’re lucky,’ said Nakor. ‘It could be longer. Certainly it’s unlikely that any of us will live long enough to see it – and we’re all going to live a lot longer than most!’ he added with a grin.

Magnus sighed loudly. ‘You speak of centuries into the future, longer perhaps; what has this to do with our current situation?’

Nakor put both palms out and gave a dramatic shrug. ‘I have no idea.’ He looked at Pug. ‘Do you?’