The Sundered World

In the violent streets of a despoiled London, Alan Duval is wounded by the poisoned blade of a ceremonial dagger. His life is saved by a mysterious feral girl. Then, suddenly, bewilderingly, he is transported from Earth to a mirror world - Tir - in which he encounters a darkly comic creature, Granny Ddhu. Treating his wounds, she confers on him the Oraculum of the Tridedana, the gateway to immense power and the first step in a seemingly impossible quest. The spiritual continent of Monisle has been at war for a thousand years with the forces of darkness. Duval must use his powers to defeat the Tyrant of the Wastelands. The survival of Earth as much as war-ravaged Tir depends upon his success.

A FIGURE WAS standing over him, peering at him. The figure was the source of light that was dazzling him, the brilliance of the light obscuring the face that gazed down at him from above it.

Where am I?

He remembered the blizzard. Sitting down in the circle, the lancinating cold.

What's going on?

It was bewildering. He didn't know what was happening. All he could determine was the rough size of the creature, which was small, perhaps five feet or so, and the strikingly conical shape of its body, from a narrow tapering head to a wide, seemingly circular base, which appeared firmly fixed in rather than upon the ground. The ground! Suddenly there was a low-pitched snarl.

Fright made him attempt to sit up. But his limbs could only tremble and jerk fitfully. Darkness yawned about him, a terrifying abyss, that left him groaning and bathed in sweat.

"Arrrhhhggh -- Duuuvaaallll!" He heard his name spoken, a rattling within his mind.

Nothing seemed to make sense.

He had been wounded in some squalid backstreet in London. Then he had woken up in an Arctic hell of snow and fury. He had stumbled into the stone circle, sat down in the centre. He remembered the never-ending fall of snow, covering him, drowning him in its lethal cocoon.

And now --

He was no longer exposed to the Arctic blizzard. That much was obvious. So somebody -- or something -- had found him, dragged him away from there. Some kind of a shelter, he thought. It was so maddeningly bizarre he wanted to scream. There was the impression that for some time he had been drifting in and out of coma. It was not possible. Nothing that was happening to him was remotely possible. He must have died in that filthy backstreet in London.

Lord God -- I must be dead!

He lay still, helpless from the cold and the shock of mortal injury, while his uninjured left eye registered a sepulchral darkness. Even the darkest nights, with a heavy overcast of clouds, still allowed some faint illumination -- a hint of moon or stars -- but he could see nothing at all. He thought about that.

He also considered the fact that he could hear the howling of the wind, blowing that same blizzard, but he couldn't feel any gusting of the wind on his face. So the blizzard must be close -- that Arctic landscape was nearby.

Trying to move his arms, they felt too weary to lift. Instead he blew air through pursed lips so that it registered on his nose, eyelids and cheeks. His face was not without sensation. There was a sickly, tumescent throbbing in his right eye and he could not part the lids. He explored the feeling in that eye, cautiously, by attempting first to blink it, then to open the eye. It felt bad, worse than before, when he had been exposed to the blizzard, a worsening injury. But he had felt his breath on his cheek. He still had normal feeling there. It confirmed that the wind was exterior. That he was somewhere inside, out of that blizzard. He must be in a natural shelter of some sort. It had to be a cave.

For a time he drifted again, lost track, resurfaced. Walking the streets of London ... Oggy's Caf ... The feral girl. He saw her bruised face again. Her starved figure.

Terror caused another wave of sweat. It was so disorientating, so confusing.

Remaining still, hardly daring to breathe for fear of lapsing out of consciousness, he fought to analyse his situation. His mind wasn't reliable. It was fogged by exhaustion, but he wasn't dreaming and he could think. His arms weren't paralysed. They were extremely weak but he could move them a little, even if it was only to lift them a fraction against gravity. The snow -- brought my temperature down. In an ironic way, it had probably saved his life. The hypothermia that, over a longer period of time, would have killed him had in some shorter term eked out his survival. The wound! Although he had hardly been aware of the wound on first recovering consciousness, he could feel it now, the focus of sick, heavy waves of pain, from deep inside his abdomen.

If vital structures had not been damaged in the initial stabbing, the spread of the poison had ravaged them since. The wound felt really bad. It felt beyond hope.

He had been vomiting earlier. Whenever that had been. When?

Not so long ago. His instinct suggested it could not have been more than a day. He tried to focus on time and place. The stone circle wasn't very far away. If this was a cave, then it must open somewhere in the black tors.

Had he dragged himself here, in the extreme of injury and exhaustion? Not likely! Even the limited sensibility in his arms and legs told him that he was wrapped in some protective blanket under which he was wearing no clothes. That caused an irrational spurt of palpitation. Gently, hesitantly, he felt with the pulps of his fingers: the substance enveloping him like a quilt was natural, a soft material, like moss. Under him too -- a bed of that same moss separated him from the dirt of the cave floor.

He was only coming round to the startling implications of this when he heard sounds approaching in the pitch dark, shuffling movements, yet regular and purposive, and without the benefit of light. His heart thudded again but he was so wearied he couldn't even lift his head in anticipation of what was coming.

Suddenly his left eye was blinded by illumination. Tears of irritation welled up into it and he was forced to close it. Even through his closed eyelids, he sensed how the light mellowed, faded. A greenish tinge settled over it and he squinted his eye open again, blinking.

That was when he first saw the extraordinary figure who was standing over him, peering down at him, and he heard that growling summons.

"Arrrhhhgggh -- Duuuvaaalll!"