Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) (58 page)

Presently he saw some dense bushes move. Something large was pushing slowly through them. His legs tensed, ready to spring into instant flight. The bulk of whatever was advancing seemed formidable.

Then a glint of something bright and flashing caught his eye, and the next moment the thing moved into the open. A grin of mingled joy and pure amazement broke over Hiero's features, and he could hardly restrain himself from yelling aloud.

Hopping sedately toward the mound, as if wanting to gain the shelter of his comfortable stable, came the shape of a giant hopper. On his back was strapped the owner's saddle, stirrup-boots lashed to their girth so as not to swing loose. Various articles of gear hung on the harness as well, also securely fastened in place. Segi had come to seek his master.

There was no mistaking the great brute. Hiero knew his own harness. If more evidence were needed, the sharp point of his beloved spear, once a part of Klootz' saddle in the North, thrust up along the hopper's withers, tied so as not to catch on branches as the animal moved.

Hiero rose and then slid slowly down the face of the mound, calling to the hopper as he came. Segi put one ear back in mild surprise at the sight of the man but seemed in no way disconcerted or inclined to flee. When Hiero came close, he lowered his great head and sniffed the man thoroughly. Satisfied, he raised himself to his full height again and leaned back on his great tail, looking proudly and haughtily about, as if to say, "Well, I've done
my
job. The rest is up to others."

For a long time, Hiero stood with his face buried in the hopper's great tan shoulder, a prey to raw emotion. That out of the empty wastes such a thing could happen! He had to control himself for a number of minutes. Segi stood patiently, his long ears twitching at flies, but otherwise quite content to wait and see what his owner wanted next.

At length, the man got himself in hand and, patting the great flanks, began to inspect what the hopper had brought him.

First there was the short spear, its broad, steel head and crossbars catching the light, a copy of the medieval boar spears of far-off and forgotten Europe. He freed it from its wrapping and laid it handily by on the ground. Next, also strapped to the saddle, he found something else and again almost whooped with delight. There, leather sheath and all, was the pick of all his weapons, the terrible short sword of the North, the ancient weapon given him at graduation from the Metz Academy. As long as his forearm, curved on one side and straight and edgeless on its back, the bolo of the lost empire gleamed with oily sheen in the sun. The worn badge of the circle with its flaming top and the faded "U.S.A." marks seemed to him a pledge from the past of future victory to come. When he had strapped the shoulder belt on and the heavy weight had settled across his back, hilt ready to his hand over his left shoulder, then indeed did he feel complete.

Spear and sword—yes, here was his dagger, the six-inch, two-edged blade with buckhorn handle—all complete. Next he found a broad leather belt, and then a leather box, heavy though small. His casting pieces and crystal! There were two packs of dried meat, sealed for long journeys. His excitement blazed. He knew who had sent this!

Where was her message? His fingers fumbled as he went over the saddle again like a squirrel going through a pile of nuts. Here was a leather water bottle, a small one, wisely chosen for use on foot and also when mounted. Damn it, where was that message? He knew it was there as well he knew the sender's scent and the feel of her skin!

He forced himself to stop and think finally, while the patient Segi leaned down and snooted at his black hair.
Use your head, stupid! Suppose Segi had been killed? Would she leave a note pinned to his right ear for anyone, including the enemy, to read? Think, the way she did for you, you oaf!

Eventually, he found it by sheer patience. It was wrapped in a tiny packet of fine, oiled leather, no bigger than his finger joint and jammed up into the far side of the saddle horn itself.

With trembling fingers, he unwrapped it and, with the sun beating down on his head, began to read. Above him, the hopper's nostrils flared at intervals, picking up the varied smells eddying past in the light breeze. But none seemed to convey any danger, and the towering figure stayed relaxed on his great haunches while his master read and reread the parchment message from his far-off mate.

"My Love," it began, "I know you are not dead. Where you are, what they have done, I know not. The Unclean have done something, somehow. If you are not dead and I cannot reach your mind, they must be the ones. I would have sent this by Klootz, but he is gone. The stablemen said he went mad in the night, rearing and bellowing in his stall. When they tried to calm him, he broke the stall gates as if they were matchwood and fled through the stable yards into the night. Some guards say he tore through the northern gate at the hour before dawn, and he has not been seen since. He may follow you, so be alert. An assassin tried to kill Danyale at the end of the ball. The man has not yet spoken. The king is hurt but will live. My cousin Amibale has vanished also, and none can or will say where. The priest Joseato is missing too. The high priest says he knows nothing. The troops seem loyal, and Mitrash is with me. He says to tell you that he has sent messages. God help you, my love. Segi has my message planted in his simple mind. If he can find you, he will. Come back to me." It was unsigned, save for a single sweeping "L."

Hiero was glad that none but Segi could see him now. Whoever heard of a Metz Senior Killman, the pick of the woodsrunners of the North, with two runnels of water flowing down his sweaty face?

After a while he could see again, and he marveled at the wonder of his wife. Hardly out of girlhood, but what a woman! She had never lost her head for a second. Hiero was
not
dead, so send a message. Klootz was gone, so send the next best thing, Segi, the pick of hopperdom and a beast who had already learned to know and love him. He shook his head in admiration. He would be willing to bet that she had issued all the right orders to the guards as well and that she and Danyale and the kingdom were in as good a state of defense as could be managed. And she had found the sudden departure of Duke Amibale and the priest suspicious, that too was clear. They would not find it easier to surprise her, even with her mate gone.

Mitrash had sent messages, had he? A good man. The messages had gone to the Brotherhood of the Eleventh Commandment, Hiero was sure. Even now, a long way off somewhere, Brother Aldo and his fellow councilors might well know what had happened and be moving in their turn. The Metz felt a tremendous sense of relief. Luchare and her father were safe, as safe as anyone these days, and the kingdom was alerted. He had all the help she could send, and now the rest was up to him. Only Klootz's fate puzzled him. Where could the morse have gotten to?

He patted Segi again and talked soothingly to him. The big hopper had really done wonders. Hampered by his saddle and harness, he had come hundreds upon hundreds of leagues, somehow patiently following his vanished master. He looked fine, too, hardly gaunted at all. Despite all that Hiero had been taught about the hopper's capabilities, he was still amazed. Segi must have crossed the dreadful desert, too, going without water for days; and when through it, he had come unflinchingly on, dodging predators, snatching bits of leaf as he hopped, and never ceasing until Hiero was found.
How many men,
Hiero mused to himself,
would have done as much, would have persevered into an unknown wilderness out of pure affection? Do I, does any man, deserve such devotion?

In a few seconds, he had run up the termite mound and secured his few possessions. In another, he freed the stirrup-boots and mounted. His head behind but on a level with his steed's, he gently urged the hopper on, south and west, their heads pointed into the sunset and at the distant blue line. The calling hills still held Hiero in their grip; unthinking, he urged his strange mount forward to whatever fate lay hidden in their distant folds.

Dark Perils, Dark Counsels

In an underground place, a large screen covered one end of a room. Blue bulbs set in the bleak stone walls shed a pallid light upon a great table of polished black marble. Around the table and under the screen were arranged four black chairs with legs carved into contorted shapes and bearing strange arabesques and flourishes along their broad arms and backs. Pulled away from the head of the table was a fifth chair, larger than the others and more ornate. It alone was unoccupied.

In the four chairs in use sat or lounged four gray-robed men. A stranger entering the room might have thought that he had encountered four offspring of a single birth, so alike were the seated men to one another. All were bald, or with heads and faces so shaven that no hair appeared. All had pale ivory skin. At sight of those faces, a child would have screamed in instant horror. The eyes were dead, gray pools of nothingness, in which there yet glowed a baleful fire. The faces were expressionless, carved in a sickly marble, set in grim lines and yet smooth, seeming ageless and yet old beyond memory. Only the flickering of the awful pairs of eyes to the great screen and back toward each other seemed to betray life, together with the writhing and uncoiling of the long white hands when they rested on the smooth surface of the table. The men's attentions were fixed on the screen, but occasionally one would mutter to another or inscribe some notes on one or another small square of writing material laid before him. The Great Council of the Unclean, those who called themselves the Chosen Masters, was in session.

Though the men appeared identical at first glance, a further look would have discerned differences. Each bore upon the gray of his breast an embroidered symbol, worked in threads of metallic, glittering stuff. Each had a different color, one being red, one yellow, one blue, and the last of all green. None of the colors seemed normal somehow, being oily and iridescent, at once too pale and too dark, changing constantly but always sickly and abhorrent. The livid green of the fourth man's mark seemed the worst of all, a ghastly parody of the fresh and limpid hue of spring in the ordinary world. But that world was what these monsters were sworn to destroy or, as they put it, to bring to order. The symbols were spirals and coils worked into mind-bending twists which the eye could not follow, as if they faded in some impossible way into some other and fouler dimension.

The screen itself was covered with a maze of fine metallic wire which, like the symbols of the robed men, was worked into impossible bendings and anglings, back and forth in a weird pattern which changed by the moment. It contorted itself each instant into something new and even more peculiar. Here and there on the wires glowed tiny lights of different colors, like minute bulbs. Yet if they were bulbs, they were as strange as their background, for they also moved, appearing and reappearing at what looked like random, but was not. It was clear that the four could read the board and understand it, as one would read a printed page. None but they and one other could have done so, however. For this was the Great Screen, and all the lore and memory of the Unclean was embedded in it, as were all their plans and contingencies of the future. It would have taken the life of a normal human to learn the basic elements necessary for the interpretation of its easiest and most accessible secrets.

At length, the one who wore the hellish green turned away from the screen and examined his fellows thoughtfully. Just as the one who wore the blue seemed in some indefinable way the youngest, so did the creature of the green seem older than the others, though exactly why, no one could have said.

"I will speak, according to the rules of the Great Council, where no mind can be deemed safe and thoughts cannot be trusted with our deliberations."

It was clear that this was a formula being recited, a formal opening of the meeting. The voice of the speaker was thin yet resonant, toneless and yet vibrant. It was also chill, the timbre gelid and ringing like the slow grinding of ancient glacial ice.

"As the Senior among you, I call on the Lord S'duna, First among the Brotherhood of the Blue Circle. Upon him mainly has fallen the brunt of the most recent events. He and his bear much of the responsibility for them. This is said not in blame, but only is strict accountability. This is also said," he added as S'duna stirred and shrugged, "under orders."

As the others looked up in sudden interest, the green-symboled man touched his brow and inclined his head toward the large and empty chair at the head of the table.

"Yes," he went on, "to me, S'lorn, First of the Green, in my fortress in the South there came in the night, on the One Circuit, a message. The Unknown One, That Which Is Not To Be Named, that which
is
not, but was and will be, sent a message. Any of us could have received it. Why I was chosen, save for age, I know not, but can perhaps guess." He paused. "I think, and I have spent much thought on this matter as I journeyed, that I received the message to summon the Council because I am the farthest away in the body. My thought, and it is no more, reads thus: In many, many lives of the outer world, we four, or they who taught and preceded us, have seldom found it necessary to meet in the flesh. Now, I think, the matter grows urgent, and thus the importance is stressed that I who live the farthest off should summon us together. The Nameless One, the Chosen of the Chosen, has many secrets. There may be other explanations, but I think mine will suffice." He folded the pale hands in the lap of his robe. "Let the Lord S'duna speak to us and unfold his reading of the recent past."

The Master of the Blue Circle did not flinch. While he was not on trial, still the others were watching and judging. All were equals, the Great Council having been devised to still the ceaseless internecine warfare which had so long crippled the Unclean plans in the past. All were equal, but it was not in the nature of such beings to spare another pain, nor was it the way they had all been taught since birth. The troubles of the recent past had involved S'duna far more than the others. So they would watch, not being hostile, but if there were any sign of weakness, or indecision . . .