Sightblinder's Story Page 17

  The light of the moon, now close to setting, combined with the orange glow shed by the guttering flames of the remaining torches, showed him a great, silent mystery.

  The magician was not really surprised that no one had yet appeared from the manor or elsewhere to mourn the dead or begin the rituals of burial. The only real surprise, he thought, was that no robbers had yet appeared either. None of the bodies looked as if they had been rifled. Pouches that would hold personal belongings were still intact, here and there rings still showed on fingers.

  It was only now that the Ancient Master noticed what appeared to be wagon tracks, running here and there across the short grass and the barren earth. He paced the field eagerly, muttering a short spell that served to enhance his eyesight temporarily. Yes, perhaps half a dozen four-wheeled vehicles, pulled by load beasts, had been here briefly, had circled, had unloaded at least part of their cargo and then had loaded up once more and moved out. It appeared that the wagons had departed in the general direction of the southern end of Lake Alkmaar, where it was drained by the outflow of the Tungri. The magician knew from scouting reports that the last road running in that direction ended at a dock, a few kilometers out of town. And at that dock was the beginning of the downriver water-route leading to the lands of the south and west.

  There must be some connection, the magician thought, between the wagons and the massacre. But what that connection might be was not immediately apparent.

  He intended to find out.

  For a time now the Ancient One, raging silently at his bad fortune in being thus victimized, walked back and forth among his dead.

  And only after he had walked upon this field of corpses for a time, his thoughts busy with other matters than the physical reality around him, did he realize that not all of the fallen men around him were as yet completely dead.

  It was a sound that told him, a soft and intermittent little noise that came and went like breath, and yet did not much resemble any other sound that he had ever heard from human lips. He located the source of the sound, and approached it, and saw one of the fallen bodies moving slightly, shaking lightly on the ground.

  Only then did it occur to the wizard that the sound he was hearing might possibly have some relationship to human laughter.

  He bent down, and with his strong hands seized this man who unlike his fellows was still breathing, and hoisted him to his feet in an effort to compel him to tell what had happened. But despite his magic the only reply that the magician could elicit was a continuation of the ghastly rhythmic croaking, forced out between swollen lips. The victim’s eyes were puffed shut as if with weeping, his whole face was swollen and discolored, and he appeared to be in the last stages of exhaustion.

  The wizard now called upon deeper powers, making a renewed effort at enchantment. But still the man died, standing on his feet and trying to laugh, before he could be forced to speak more coherently.

  The wizard withdrew his magic, letting the body fall.

  Well, if one man had survived, so might another. The magician prowled, striding swiftly, until he found another of the fallen figures stirring, this one a little more vigorously than the first.

  In response to a spell directed at him by the magician, this man even managed to get to his feet.

  And now he came shambling toward the wizard, a quivering, blank-faced survivor, his uniform begrimed, his weapons still unused at his belt. He stumbled to a halt within a long stride of the Ancient Master.

  Commanded to speak, the man rasped out: “The wagons … Show of Ensor…” The words trailed off.

  “Go on! Speak! Speak, I command you!”

  “…dancing girls came out. Men in the front row grabbed ’em. I was thinking, why couldn’t I have been standing there, get a chance at a good feel at least…. Then…” The man’s voice died again.

  “Then what?”

  “Then … we all … the laughing started.”

  “The laughing? Speak up clearly!”

  “Yes sir. Laughing. Like—hee, hee—first there was this big man, in a strongman’s costume. He stood behind the girls. And then—ho, ho—there was this little clown—”

  The soldier swayed on his feet. Sounds, almost recognizable as a kind of laughter, bubbled from his lips again, the last laugh turning into a bright red bubble of blood.

  The second man fell dead. The Ancient One bent over him, gesturing. But all the powers of magic that the wizard could bring to bear were ineffective now.

  The magician stood back and sent forth a calling spell above the fallen. But there was no spark of life left in their ranks to respond to the power he emanated.

  The Ancient Master turned abruptly until he was facing toward the manor’s torchlit gate, which was standing closed. That gate had been deserted by those who were supposed to guard Lady Ninazu, and by every other human presence as well.

  The wizard had already heard enough about the mysterious figure called the Emperor to think that he could recognize him in this strange new “little clown.”

  “And now the damned villain has taken flight—got away somewhere—before I could come to grips with him. But no matter. I’ll get my hands on him eventually.”

  He who called himself the Ancient Master remained standing in the middle of the field, his mind and soul engaged now with the next step in the process of summoning up his demons. His eyes, more reptilian than human now, stared at nothing. As he stood there, all but oblivious to his physical surroundings, the stars turned indifferently in their high smooth paths above him. An hour of the night slid by, and then another.

  Then suddenly the Ancient Master moved again. Signaling his griffin to follow him, and with the Sword of Force gripped firmly in his right hand, he strode on toward the manor’s front gate. Surely someone in there would be able to give him a better report than either of those he’d heard so far.

  There were still no attendants in sight as the Ancient One approached the closed grillwork of the gate, but a single shout was enough to bring them out of hiding. Figures in servants’ garb scrambled about, and the gate was quickly opened for him from inside.

  “What has happened here?” He swept an arm behind him, indicating the field of fallen men. “Why was I not informed of this?”

  The steward, summoned by lesser servants, had already appeared and was struggling to find answers. “The flying messengers have all disappeared, dread lord.”

  “I know that. Someone could have brought word in a boat of what had happened here. Did you see what happened?”

  “Not I, sire. But there was nothing that we could do to help your men—”

  “Yes, yes. I’ll hear about your problems later. Where is Lady Ninazu? She, if no one else, ought to have been aware of what was happening out here. Don’t tell me she slept through it all.”

  “Sire—” The steward was more devastated than ever. “Sire, the lady has disappeared.”

  “What?”

  The servants, though none of them would admit being eyewitness to anything important, took turns in trying to tell the story of the night’s events—or rather in trying to avoid personal responsibility for its telling. But eventually it came out in a fashion. After the destruction of the garrison, they had discovered first the lady’s absence, and then that a boat was missing. Then a drowned sentry had been found in the water near the docks. And then—

  It was at approximately this point that the magician observed one of the stable hands staring at the griffin, as if he had never seen anything like such a beast before, which his Lord knew was not the case.

  “What ails you?” the Ancient One demanded sharply.

  The man stumbled and stuttered. “Sire, it is only that I had thought that there was only one of them. I mean the one that’s still in the stables. The load beast one.”

  “What in all the lands of the demons are you raving about?”

  The man stuttered and staggered his way through an explanation of sorts. A trip to the stables to view what he said was rea
lly a griffin revealed a very ordinary load-beast, with no detectable tinge of magic about it at all.

  “And you say that I came riding on this peasant’s animal, and left it here?”

  “It must be that I am wrong, sire. Very wrong.”

  “Either that or you are very mad. Or else someone has been playing jokes.” The magician issued terse orders for the man to be locked up until he could return to question him some more, or have him brought to the island for that purpose. But there was no time to investigate this matter now. Indeed, the whole trip to the mainland had taken the Ancient One longer than he had expected. By the time he remounted his griffin and urged it into the air again, the sky in the east was beginning to turn pale with the first faint hints of dawn.

  The affair of the slaughtered garrison represented a setback, of course, and he had not made much progress toward solving it. Still, the wizard remained basically confident of his position. With Shieldbreaker at his side, and his demonic reinforcements on their way, he could not see that he had anything seriously to fear.

  By now the water of the lake, stretching in a flat plain far to left and right beneath his griffin’s wings, was no longer black with night. Now it was glowing very faintly with the reflection of the first beginnings of daylight in the sky.

  Something, some moving presence in the lake, drew a slow dark line across that faint metallic glow. Some object tall as a tree, in its majestic passage through the water, was leaving a long triangular wake. The object was a towering, almost man-shaped figure that waded on two legs between two of Lake Alkmaar’s little islands—

  The Ancient Master uttered a soft exclamation, followed by several magical incantations. Then he murmured a command in his griffin’s ear, and the creature turned aside from its direct course to the castle. Down they went.

  The wizard had been worried when his subordinates told him of what was happening out on the lake at night, that some strange presence there was wreaking havoc on his boats. And he had become all the more worried, as paradoxical as that seemed to his subordinates, when it became clear that this strange new enemy was not actually killing any of his men. He feared that he could recognize a certain signature in that reluctance—and now in the first tentative light of day that recognition had been confirmed.

  The Ancient One commanded his steed to circle Draffut at low altitude, and at a respectful distance. The wader stopped, and his great head turned, following the flight of griffin and wizard without apparent surprise.

  At last the shadowy giant, half-enveloped in a rising billow of morning mist, called out: “I am here, little man. Bring here your Sword and try to kill me, if you will.”

  But the man who rode the griffin knew better than to attack any unarmed opponent, let alone this one, with the Sword of Force. Instead he turned his mount without replying, and sped on to his castle, landing at the high aerie. Soon he would have demons on hand to do his fighting for him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The faint splash of Zoltan’s paddle could still be heard receding down the tunnel when Lady Ninazu moved away from the others and came around the edge of the grotto pool to Arnfinn, who had already drawn a little apart. He saw her eyes gleaming with the reflection of distant starlight as she drew near him, and he heard her say: “I am ready now, my Ancient Lord, for you to lead me to my brother.”

  Arnfinn dreaded the thought of having to lie to her any longer. “And if I were to tell you, my lady, that I do not know where he is?”

  Her gaze flickered away and back to him. Her chin lifted in conviction. “Then I would think that you were pleased to jest with me, great lord. You are the master of this castle, and must know what is within it. And, even if you did not, I know where Kunderu is.”

  “Where?”

  In solemn silence Ninazu turned slightly away from him, and raised one slender arm to point. Her small, pale hand extended one finger toward the top of the castle’s central tower.

  Arnfinn said: “If you can lead me to your brother, Lady Ninazu, then I will set him free.”

  Her marvelous eyes searched him. “You promise that?”

  “I swear it.”

  The solemnity of her regard lasted for only a moment longer. Then it melted in the ghost of a smile. She said: “We can start from here, in the grotto, and go along a secret way. Kunderu and I used it often when we were children.”

  She turned away from Arnfinn, and to his surprise began to climb along the wall, stepping on an irregular series of carved and built-in decorations that made a kind of fanciful stairway. Arnfinn raised the torch he was still holding and looked at the wall. The narrow, uneven steps that Ninazu was climbing gave the impression of not being a real stair chiefly because they went nowhere at all, ending in the middle of the wall where there were three shallow decorative niches. Beyond that point the inner wall of the grotto stretched up flat and unclimbable. Lady Yambu and Ben were watching her with curiosity as she went up.

  When she was very nearly at the topmost step, Ninazu turned, and beckoned to Arnfinn with one finger.

  He followed her. It was only when his climbing feet had attained a man’s height above the surface of the pool that he was able to see that the stair went somewhere after all. What had looked from below like a blind decorative niche, set between two more shallow niches just like it, turned out when seen from this angle to be the genuine entrance to a passageway.

  Ninazu’s smile became more impish, or perhaps simply more childlike, when she saw Arnfinn’s surprise—or rather the surprise of the person whose image he was wearing in her eyes. She said to him: “My father delighted in building such tricks as this. And when Kunderu and I were children, we found new uses for them.” She giggled.

  The passage into which she now led Arnfinn was narrow, barely wide enough for one person, and windowless. Chill air blew through it gently from somewhere up ahead. And as they went it soon became so dark that Arnfinn, following the lady, had to put one hand in front of him and touch her back to make sure she was there. He had the Sword sheathed now, and his left hand rested on its pommel.

  The passage climbed, on little steps. He knew that they must now be threading their way upward through the enormous thickness of the outer wall of the keep itself. After some minutes of silent ascent they emerged, to Arnfinn’s surprise, in the prosaic environment of a lofty storeroom. Obviously the place, with dust and cobwebs everywhere, had not been much used of late.

  Now he could see Ninazu again, by the faint moonlight coming in through a tall, narrow window. Still smiling, she led him through the cavernous storeroom and opened a creaking door. Together they peered into the corridor outside, which was lighted only by remote torches, and locally deserted. Motioning for Arnfinn to follow, the lady moved out into the hall and turned to the right, where the corridor soon ended in a peculiar little balcony, open to the night.

  The balcony, when they had gone out onto it, seemed to come to a dead end. But when they walked around a decorative column, they came to another narrow, unsuspected opening in the wall.

  Before he followed Ninazu into this dark doorway, Arnfinn looked around to get his bearings. They were already at a considerable height above the dark lake, and about to enter the base of the castle’s central tower.

  The wall through which this second hidden passage ascended was not as massive as that of the lower keep, but still it was a good three meters or more in thickness, allowing plenty of room inside it for the narrow, hollow way.

  They had barely started up through this second passage when Ninazu turned her head to gibe at Arnfinn like a little girl. “Admit it! You, the high lord of the castle, didn’t even know that these tunnels were here!”

  “I have already admitted it.”

  They moved on, with impervious darkness closing in on them again.

  Into the darkness Arnfinn said: “These secret passages must not extend all the way to your brother’s prison room, or else Kunderu would have used them to get out.”

  The lady ahe
ad of him stopped suddenly, and he could hear her suddenly indrawn breath.

  Then she moved on, climbing more stairs, but only for a short distance. Before Arnfinn was expecting the climb to end they came to a window that looked out over the darkened lake, under the starry sky. A few lights, small fires, speckled the distant shore. Here Lady Ninazu stopped. Arnfinn could faintly distinguish her profile against the stars as she stood looking out.

  After some time had passed in which she said nothing and gave no sign of moving on, he prodded: “Well? Aren’t we going on?”

  “I don’t know,” she said after a time. And it seemed to Arnfinn that her voice was strangely altered.

  “You don’t know?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Arnfinn persisted. “I thought you were so anxious to see that your brother was set free.”

  Still Ninazu had nothing to say to him.

  He squeezed past her where she was standing at the window, and then sat down just above her on the narrow stairs. He did not know why, but he was rapidly developing a sense that doom was closing in on him.

  Presuming on his supposed authority, he spoke to Ninazu more sternly: “Answer me! Are you afraid of what we’re going to see when we find him? Are you afraid that he’s no longer alive?”

  “I know that he’s alive,” she answered instantly, as if disgusted that such a question could even be raised.

  “What, then?”

  In answer she sank down on the narrow stair, sitting just below him and leaning on his knees. “Great lord,” she murmured. “Hold me. Help me.”

  “I will! I will!”

  “Have you any magic that can heal the heart and mind?”

  “Ah, gods, Ninazu! Whatever magic I have to offer you is yours!”

  And after that she would say no more, but clung to Arnfinn’s legs and wept. She would not move, nor respond to his questions, nor answer his entreaties. They sat there through the long hours of the night.