Free The Queen of Swords by Michael Moorcock Page A

sword and tried to tug it from the scabbard. He looked up in terror and saw a mass of black, flapping, savage things with glaring eyes and snapping beaks. The sword came free and, wearily, he lunged out at the birds. They cackled sardonically as his sword failed to find flesh. Suddenly his six-fingered jeweled hand reached out instead, moving without his volition, and it clutched one of the birds by its scrawny throat and squeezed that throat as it had squeezed human throats before. The bird gave a single surprised squawk and died. The Hand of Kwll threw the corpse to the glassy rock. The birds flapped a little distance away in consternation and settled in the nearby crags watching Corum warily. It had been so long since the hand had acted in that way that Corum had almost forgotten its powers. For the first time since it had destroyed the Heart of Arioch he was grateful to it. He displayed it to the birds and they made disturbed sounds in their throats, eyeing the corpse of their dead companion.
    Rhalina, who had not witnessed the power of the Hand of Kwll before, looked with relieved astonishment at Corum. But Jhary merely pursed his lips and took advantage of the pause to draw his sword and lay propped on his elbows against the hard rock, his cat still on his shoulder.
    And thus they sat, the birds and the human beings, regarding each other beneath the silent, brooding sky on the slopes of the bleak mountains, until it occurred to Corum that if the Hand of Kwll had saved them from their immediate danger, the Eye of Rhynn might prove even more useful. But he was reluctant to raise the eye-patch and look with the eye’s full powers into that strange nether region from which he could sometimes summon ghostly allies—the dead men earlier slain at his command. And, particularly, he did not want to summon those last who had been slain at the command of the Hand and the Eye—Queen Ooresé’s subjects, the Vadhagh riders, his own race, who had been slain by accident. But something must be done to break this impasse, for none of them had the strength to resist a mass attack by the birds and even if the Hand of Kwll should slay one or two more it would not save Rhalina and Jhary-a-Conel. Reluctantly his hand began to rise towards the jeweled eye-patch.
    And then the patch was off and the horrid, faceted, alien eye of the dead god Rhynn glared into a world even more dreadful than the one they presently inhabited.
    Again Corum saw a cavern in which dim shapes moved hopelessly this way and that. And in the foreground were the beings he had least wished to see. Their dead eyes peered out at him and there was a frightening sadness about the set of their faces. They had wounds in their bodies, but the wounds did not bleed, for these were now the creatures of limbo, neither dead nor alive. Their mounts were with them, too—creatures with thick, scaly bodies, cloven feet and nests of horns jutting from their snouts. The last of the Vadhagh folk—a lost part of the race which had once inhabited the Flamelands created by Arioch for his amusement. They were dressed from head to foot in red, tight-fitting garments, with red hoods on their heads. In their hands were their long, barbed lances.
    Corum could not bear to look upon them and he made to move the eye-patch back into place, but then the Hand of Kwll had reached out, reached into that frightful limbo, and was gesturing to the dead Vadhagh. Slowly the score of corpses moved forward in answer to the summons. Slowly they mounted their horned beasts. Slowly they rode out of that ghastly cavern in a nameless netherworld and stood, a company of death, upon the slippery slopes of the mountains.
    The birds screeched in surprise and anger but for some reason they did not take to the air. They shifted from foot to foot and darted their beaks at the scarlet warriors who now advanced upon them.
    The black birds waited until the dead Vadhagh were almost upon them before they began to flap their