Compleat Traveller in Black (30 page)

The leader of this party, however, was clearly not overjoyed with whatever business he had most recently transacted. He frowned as he rode, and uttered not-infrequent objurgations.

Which he redoubled for fluency and loudness when, on spotting the black-clad figure by the track, the leading man-at-arms dropped his spear to an attack position and cried, “Halt!” The palfrey obeyed with extraordinary promptness, and thereby almost spilled his rider to the ground.

“Good morrow,” said the traveller mildly. “Sir, would you instruct your man to put up that overeager point? It’s aligned upon a portion of my carcass that I am anxious to preserve intact.”

“Do so,” the Shebya commanded, and pulled a face. “Forgive him,” he continued, doffing his cap. “But we’re collectively upset, I’d have you know, and extremely edgy, as it were. We’ve done so poorly on our errand to this famous thegn – of which we had, admittedly, high hopes.”

“The saddles of your mules seem light enough,” the traveller observed.

“Oh, ordinary pack-goods one can dispose of anywhere,” the Shebya said. His keen eyes were fixed on the traveller’s curious staff, and one could almost hear the logical, though erroneous, deductions he was making. “But … Well, sir, might I hazard a guess that you too are bound to call on Garch?”

“That possibility,” the traveller conceded, “should not be totally ruled out.”

“I thought so!” the other exclaimed, leaning forward on his palfrey’s withers. “Might I further suggest that you would welcome information concerning the thegn’s alleged willingness to purchase – ah – intangibles and other rare items at a respectable price?”

“It would be rash to deny that I have heard reference to some such habit of his.”

“Then, sir, save your trouble. Turn about, and evade the oncoming night – for, truly, the nights they have hereabout are not of the common cozy kind. The tales you’ve likely heard are arrant nonsense.”

“Nonsense, you say?”

“Yes indeed!” The Shebya grew confidential, lowering his voice. “Why, did I not bring him an object virtually
beyond
price? And did I not in the upshot have to peddle it door to door, for use in some lousy household enchantment instead of the grand ceremonials of an adept? That it should keep company with pollywogs and chicken-blood – faugh! I ask you! Would not dragon-spawn have been meeter?”

“And was the article efficacious?” the traveller asked, hiding a smile.

The Shebya spread his hands. “Sir, that is not for me to determine. Suffice it to say that tomorrow will tell. For the sake of insurance, as it were, against the risk that the purchaser may prove inadequately skilled in conjuration to derive maximum benefit from her acquisition, I purpose to be some distance hence.” His mask of annoyance, willy-nilly, gave place to a grin; it was granted by everyone that, rogues though the Shebyas might be, they were at least engaging rogues.

“Howbeit,” he appended, “do take my advice. Don’t go to Garch expecting to sell him remarkable and unique artifacts or data at such price as will ensure comfort to your old age. Apart from all else, the mansion is in a turmoil. Someone, so to speak, would appear to have laden the thegn’s codpiece with live ants, and he gibbers like a man distraught, ordering all who displease him to be shortened by the head without appeal. Another excellent reason for departure – which, sir, if you will forgive the briefness of this conversation, inclines me forthwith to resume my journey.”

After the Shebya and his companions had gone, the traveller remained. The air thickened still further. It grew resistant to the limbs, like milk on its way to becoming cheese. Lost on a high outcrop, a kid bleated hopelessly after its nanny. Chill that one might have mistaken for agonizing frost laid a tight hold on the land, yet no pools crisped with ice. The traveller frowned and waited longer still.

At last, over the high tower of the mansion, the coffin black of night started to appear: solid-seeming blotches on the sky. At roughly the same time, there were noises to be heard along the road again, coming from the direction which the Shebya and his troupe had taken. Into sight came a party of hurrying horsemen, full-armed, glancing apprehensively at the gathering dark. Some had equipped themselves with torches, and kept making motions toward their flint and steel.

In their midst, tied face to tail on a dirty donkey, was Buldebrime moaning and crying out, hands lashed at his back and his grease-bespattered smock in rags.

Some distance behind, unable to keep pace, a furious driver cursed a pair of shaggy-fetlocked horses drawing a cart loaded until the springs sagged with candles, lamps, and articles in bags whose nature could not clearly be discerned.

Of itself, the parade might have been amusing. Given the circumstances which had led to it, the traveller could not find it other than appalling.

The darkness spread, and yet it did not move. Rather, it occurred, moment by moment, at places further from its source.

VI

“Be calm!” Lady Scail adjured her brother, for the latest of countless times.

“Be calm?” he echoed, mocking her. “How can I? Are they not deserting us, the traitors, deserting
me
who won them prosperity from this lean harsh country and made them the envy of folk in richer lands?”

It was true: news was arriving every few minutes of some trusted serving-man, soldier or steward who had surreptitiously crept away from the household.

“Is it not, moreover,” Garch pursued, “the night before full moon? At midnight must I not go into the prescribed retreat? And how can we tell as yet how greatly we’ve been deceived by Buldebrime? Perhaps he miscalibrated our time-candles, so we’ll have no means to judge the proper hour!”

Admittedly, it was impossible to make astronomic observations under such dark as this.

Nonetheless, Scail blasted the same injunction at him, saying, “You fool, you have to keep your head at any cost! Countless enchanters, so they say, have met their doom because an elemental took advantage of just that weakness in their character!”

Sweating, gulping draft after draft of wine to lend him courage, he did his best to comply, since reason was on her side. However, self-mastery was hard. The mansion – and not only it but the entire surrounding countryside – was aquiver. The jagged range of Cleftor Heights was thrumming to a soundless vibration of menace, as though some being incarcerated in a restless star had found the means to transmit terror down a shaft of light and struck the bedrock into resonating the keynote of a symphony of disaster, against the advent of the instrumentalists.

Moreover, it is not good for one who invokes the forces of chaos to pay any attention whatsoever to reason. …

“Where’s Roiga?” Garch demanded of a sudden.

“Where she should be: making ready in your room.”

“And Runch?”

“They called him to the gate a while ago. They’ve sighted the party bringing Buldebrime.”

“Then I’ll go down to the dungeons,” Garch declared, and drained his goblet. “I must be first to learn what that traitor’s done!”

There was routine in this mansion, as in the household of any great lord, and to outward appearance it was being maintained. At the intersection of two echoing corridors the traveller in black saw proof of this. Thump-thump down the passages to the beat of drums came provisions for the nightly company at dinner: pies stuffed with game, so heavy two men staggered under the load, and the whole roasted haunches of oxen and sheep; then trays of loaves; then serving-girls with jugs of wine and beer, and butlers carrying fine white linen napkins on their arms, and boys with ewers and basins that the diners might wash their hands in scented water, and harpists, and flautists, and a female dwarf. This last hobbled awkwardly in a floor-length gown, designed to make her trip often on its hem for the amusement of the gathering.

One could not reasonably foresee there being much laughter in the banquet-hall tonight. The stones from which the building was constructed shared the incipient convulsions of the landscape, and overmuch dust danced in the light of the torches.

Intermittently, from beneath the floor, issued screams.

Orderly, with professional niceness, the least spoken-of among Garch’s retainers – Tradesman Humblenode, the torturer – had set out the various equipment of his calling: here whips and fetters, thumbscrews there; tongs, knives and nooses at another place; and in the center of all a brazier, at which a little dirty boy worked a blacksmith’s bellows in a vain attempt to make the fuel burn as bright as was required. Even here beneath the courtyard, where the walls oozed continual damp, the pervasive obliterating light-absorption of the strange night might be perceived.

At the mere sight of Humblenode’s instruments Buldebrime had collapsed into snivelling, and it was long after the thegn’s intrusion into the dungeon that they contrived to make him utter coherent words.

“No, I did not filch any such candle! I have no knowledge of enchantment – none!”

“Try him with a little red iron,” Garch proposed, and Tradesman Humblenode set a suitable tool to the fire.

“Have pity, have pity!” Buldebrime whimpered. “I swear by Orgimos and Phorophos, by Aldegund and Patrapaz and Dencycon –!”

“I thought you had no knowledge of enchantment?” murmured Garch, and gestured for Humblenode’s assistants to stretch the lamp-seller on a rack.

But in a short space from the application of the first iron he escaped into unconsciousness, and not all Humblenode’s art sufficed to waken him.

“Is Runch meantime testing all the lamps and candles that were brought from his shop?” Garch remembered to ask, somewhat belatedly. He had given that instruction, and not checked that it was carried out – though Runch and Roiga, of all his retinue, had most to lose by neglecting his requirements.

“I come from him, sir,” a nervous waiting-maid reported, who was trying not to look at the limp body of Buldebrime, or anything else present in the cell. “He assures you he has tested every one, and whatever you are seeking isn’t there.”

Garch drew himself up to his full height. “So the treacherous lamp-maker has tricked me,” he muttered. “Can he not be forced awake by midnight?”

“By no art known to me,” said Humblenode apologetically. It was the first time he had failed his master. He braced himself as though to endure treatment after his own style in consequences.

But Garch spun on his heel and strode away.

He came upon Runch, together with his sister and attendants, at the head of the dank noisome stairway to the dungeons; his private means of vertical transportation did not, for logical reasons, descend to that level.

“Have you succeeded?” Scail demanded.

“Failed!”

“And time is fast a-wasting,” muttered Runch.

“What must be done, must be done,” Garch answered. “Prepare me for my watch alone.”

“But surely tonight it was imperative to conjure Wolpec, and ask his earnest of your ultimate success!” Under her face-mantling layers of rouge and powder, the Lady Scail turned pale.

“What’s to be done will be done now!” Garch snapped. “Like it or not! You have tomorrow’s daylight to run away by, if that’s your plan. For the moment, leave me be!”

Without so much as a brotherly embrace, let alone that other kind which had in the past lent crucial potency to his doings, he pushed by them both and was gone.

Under the supervision of the crone Roiga, servants had toiled to bring necessary articles into the cabinet she was making ready. It lacked windows, naturally; what air there was must seep through tiny crevices, and about each had been carefully inscribed a line of minuscule writing in an obsolete syllabary. It lacked furniture, too; in place of which it was hung with curtains of goat-hide, woven marshgrass and the plaited hair of murdered girls. There was a mirror in the center of its floor, which was as true a circle as the mason’s art could contrive, but that mirror was cracked across, and the traveller knew with what the blow would have been struck: a human thighbone. He had been aware that enchantments of this caliber were still conducted, but in this case at least one unqualifiedly essential preliminary had been totally neglected.

Patience.

Rat’s-bane and wolf-hemp; powder of dragon-bone and mullet-roe; candied mallow and murex pigment; vantcheen spice … Yes, all the ancient indispensables were here. Bar one. Bar the one that mattered more than anything.

The traveller withdrew into dismal contemplation.

Then, finally, Garch came, pale and trembling but determined not to let his companions recognize the full depth of his terror, to perform the rites required of him as lord of this land which yielded more than its proper share of good things. He was correctly robed in a chasuble the hue of blood; he correctly wore one shoe of hide and one of cloth; he correctly bore the wand, the orb and the sash; and the proper symbols, although awkwardly, had been inscribed on his right palm with indigo and henna.

He entered by the door of ashwood clamped with brass, and it was closed behind him with the traditional braided withes: at the height of his eyes, at the height of his heart, and at the height of his genitals. That done, Runch and Roiga and Scail perforce withdrew. Unless they chose to run away, indeed, by tomorrow’s daylight, the process was in train and they were to be dragged with it.