Quag Keep (25 page)

“Milo!” Yevele had returned, was standing over him.

Again (was it some hidden impulse of his own, or was he only the tool or player of some other power?) he put the hand wearing the ring up and out. His grip closed about her wrist.

The dull stone was indeed alive. In its depths there stood a figure. Tiny as it was it showed every detail clearly. A woman, yes—very much of woman—well-endowed by nature. But not Yevele!

Under the fingers that imprisoned her wrist there was no hardness of mail, no wiry arm strengthened by sword exercise to a muscularity near his own. Milo, still keeping that hold, faced her whom he so held. Not Yevele, no. . . .

The hair that floated around her was as silver as the moonlight. In her marble-white face the eyes slanted, held small greenish sparks. Her jaws sharpened, fined to form a mask that held beauty, yes, but also more than a touch of the alien. Now her mouth opened a trifle to show sharp points of teeth such as might be the weapons of some beast of prey.

That change in her jerked Milo free from the spell which had held him. He was on his feet, but he did not loose his hold on her. Save for a first involuntary pull against his strength, she, too, stood quiet.

“Who are you?”

For a moment she stared at him, her slanted eyes narrowing. There was on her face a shadow of surprise.

Her lips moved. “Yevele.”

Illusionist! His newly awakened mind, freed from the spells she could so easily weave about the unwary, gave him the true answer. He did not need to hear the truth from her—he already knew. Now he spoke it aloud. “Illusionist! Did you so entice the berserker?” They had been too occupied with danger to question Naile before the coming of the storm, but Milo believed that he now saw the answer to the other's desertion of their party.

She tried to fling off his grasp, her face more and more alien as her features formed a mask of rage. But Milo held her tight, as the once cloudy gem blazed, while the disk that had spun through the air whirled and dove for his face like a vicious insect. He flung up his other hand to ward it off.

It dodged his defense easily, as might a living creature, swooped, and flattened itself against his skin above the wrist of the hand that gripped its mistress. Milo cried out—the pain from that contact, was as intense as any burn. In spite of himself, his hold loosened.

The woman gave a sinuous twist of her arm and her body broke free. Now she laughed. For a moment he saw her waver, become Yevele. But the folly of keeping up such a broken cover of deceit was plain. Instead she turned from him, kicking off the clumsy sand shoes.

She was mistress of more than one form of magic, for she skimmed across the surface of the dust apparently as weightless as the wind, not even raising in her passage the uppermost film
of the sea. Above and around her whirled the moon disk, moving so swiftly that its very radiance wove a kind of netting for her defense.

Useless though pursuit might now be, Milo followed doggedly after. He had no way, he was sure, to return to the party by the dragon. If there was any hope to win free of the sea it might be to trail his beguiler.

She rounded a dune and was lost to his sight. Then he came to the point where she had disappeared. When he reached it he saw that flicker of light now so well ahead that he had no hope of catching up.

However, now it kept to a straight line, for the dunes fell away and the surface of the Sea of Dust was as level as it had been in that place where they had found Naile battling with the dragon. There was something else . . . The light flickered, dipped, spun from the dull gray of the sea into what stretched not too far ahead, a mass of darkness rising unevenly.

The blotch of that shadow swallowed up even the moonlight. Milo paused, his head up, his nostrils testing the smells of the night. He lacked the keen sense of the elf and the berserker, but he could give name to what he smelled now—the rank odor of a swampland. Yet to find this in the ever-abiding aridity of the Sea of Dust was such a strange thing it instantly warned him against reckless approach.

That swampland was no barrier for her whom he followed. The light spun on out, wan and pale, into the embrace of the darkness, drew even more rapidly ahead. Milo's dust shoes beat a path for him to the edge of the shadow. He caught a diminished glimmer of what might be a stretch of water; he could smell the fetid odor of the place. For the rest it was only darkness
and menace. To follow out into that would be to entrap himself without any profit.

But that he had reached the place they had been seeking, the place of which Lichis had told them, Milo had no doubt. Somewhere out in that quagmire, which defied all natural laws by its very being, lay the fortress of the enemy.

What if he had remained in the illusionist's spell—would she have left him immured in some bog, as treacherous as the dust, to be swallowed up? He looked down at the ring that had given him the warning. There was no light there now, the stone was once more dull and dead. Milo wheeled slowly, to look back, careful of how he placed his feet. There was no returning. . . .

He had no idea how long he must wait for dawn, nor how he might reach the others, draw them hither to face the next obstacle in their quest. Using the dust shoes as a supporting platform, he hunkered down, his gaze sweeping back and forth along the edge of the swampland. There was growth there. He could trace it in the moonlit humps of vegetation. There was life also, for he started once and nearly spun off into the dust, as the sound of shrill and loud croaking made him think, with a shiver he could not entirely subdue, of that horror tale told about the Temple of the Frog and the unnatural creatures bred and nurtured therein to deliver the death stroke against any who invaded that hidden land. That, too, occupied the heart of a swamp, holding secrets no man of the outer world could more than guess.

The line between the Sea of Dust and this other territory ran as straight as a sword's point might have drawn it. None of the vegetation or muck advanced outward, no point of dust ran inward. That line of division was too perfect to be anything but artificial. Milo, understanding that, fingered his sword hilt.

Wizardry—yet not even the wizardry he knew of—if Hystaspe had been right. A wizardry not of this world—and it was hard enough for a fighting man to withstand what was native. He had no spells except . . .

Milo stretched out his right wrist. Moonshine could not bring to life the dice. He struggled to remember. They had turned—or one had—as he had followed the enticement of the illusionist into the night. Then he had been so under her spell that he had not been able to influence the turning. He advanced his other hand, flattened down the thumb to inspect the once more dead stone ring, putting it beside the other with the map he could not see. Where had he gained those rings?

The swordsman fought to conquer memory, seek those passages in his mind that were blocked. He was—

There was a flash of a mental picture, here and gone in almost the same instant. Sitting—yes, sitting at a table. Also he held a small object, carven, shaped—the image of a man! That was of some vast importance to him—he must struggle to bring the memory back—to retain it long enough to learn—He must . . .!

Something flashed out of the air, hung before him. Moonlight glittered on it. But this was no disk—it hissed, shot out a spear tongue as if to make sure of his full attention. Memory was lost.

“Afreeta.”

The pseudo-dragon hissed as banefully as had her greater cousin, but his speaking of her name might have been an order. As speedily as she had come to him, she sped off through the night. So the others now had their guide. In so little was Milo's
distrust of the future lifted. He tried once more to capture that memory—thinking back patiently along the lines he had followed. He had looked at the bracelet, his rings—before that had been the call that had made him remember the Temple of the Frog. He was . . .

Slowly he shook his head. Something in his hand—not the rings—not the bracelet that tied him to this whole venture. He thought of the scene with Hystaspes. What the wizard had said of an alien who had brought him—and the others—here to tie. . . . Tie what? Milo groped vainly for a clue. What lay away, hidden in the unnatural swamp, was of the highest danger. They were the ill-assorted hunting party sent to ferret out and destroy it. Why? Because there was a geas laid on them. Men did strange things to serve wizards whether they would or not. It was not of Chaos, that much he knew. For a swordsman could not be twisted and bent into the service of evil.

But this tied him! He pounded his wrist against his knee in rising anger. It was a slave fetter on him, and he was no man to take meekly to slavery. His anger was hot; it felt good. In the past he had used anger to provide him with another weapon, for, controlled as he had learned to control it, that emotion gave a man added strength.

Before him lay someone, something, that sought to make him a slave. And he was—

Voices!

He got to his feet, hand once more seeking sword hilt. Now he faced the swells of the dunes. From between them figures moved. More illusions?

Milo consulted the ring. It did not come to life. As yet he had
no idea of the range of that warning. He continued to hold his thumb out where he could glance from the setting to those drawing near at the pace dictated by the dust shoes.

Though he could not see most of their faces because of the overhang of helmets, or cloak hoods, he knew them well enough to recognize that they had the appearance of those with whom he companied. Still he watched the ring.

“Hola!” Naile's deep call, the upflung arm of the berserker, was in greeting. He led the party, Afreeta winging about his head. But close behind him trod a smaller figure, helmeted head high. It was toward her that Milo now pointed the ring.

There was no change in the set. Still he could not be sure—not until perhaps he laid hand on her as he had on the singer out of the night. Wymarc drew close to her as if he sensed Milo's suspicion.

“There was the smell of magic,” the bard said. “What led you on, swordsman?”

The dark figure of Naile interrupted. “I said it, songsmith. He followed someone he knew—even as did I. That damn wizardry made me see a brave comrade dead in the earth these three years or more. Is that not so, swordsman?”

“I followed one—with the seeming of Yevele.” He took three steps forward with purpose, reached out to touch her. No blaze—this
was
Yevele. The battlemaid drew back.

“Lay no hands on me, swordsman!” Her voice was harsh, dust-fretted, with none of the soft warmth that other had held. “What do you say of me?”

“Not you, I have proved it.” Swiftly then he explained. The threat that an illusionist could evoke they all already knew. Perhaps Deav Dyne, Gulth (no one could be sure of any alien's reaction
to most magic that enmeshed the human kind) or Ingrge might have withstood that beguilment, but he was sure that the rest could not.

“Illusionist.” The cleric faced the dark swamp. “Yet you were led here—to what we have sought.”

“A swamp,” Naile commented. “If they sink us not in dust, perhaps they would souse us in mud and slime. Such land as that is a trap. You were well out of that, swordsman. It would seem those trinkets you picked up somewhere are near as good as cold steel upon occasion.”

He was answered by one of those croaking cries from the swamp. But Gulth, who had trudged waveringly at the end of their party, gave now a hissing grunt that drowned out the end of that screech.

Throwing aside his dust-stiffened cloak, the lizardman headed straight for the murky dark of what Naile had so rightfully named “trap.”

16

DAWN CAME RELUCTANTLY, AS IF THE SKY MUST BE FORCED INTO
illuminating this strangely divided land. Now they could see color in that mass of vegetation, rank, sickly greens, browns, yellows. Here and there stood a twisted and misshapen rise of shrub, some species of water-loving growth maimed in its growing by the poisoned earth and muck in which it was rooted. There were reeds, tangles of bulbous, splotched plants among them. Dividing each ragged clump of such from another lay pools, scum-covered or peat-dark brown, to the surface of which rose bubbles that broke, releasing nauseating breaths of gas from unseen rot.

Some of these pools, in the farther distance, achieved the size of ponds, and one might even be considered a lake. In these larger expanses of water there spread pads of water-growth rootanchored below. There was a constant flickering of life, for things squatted on those pads or hid among the reeds and shrubs, darting forth to hunt. Above insects buzzed—some so large as to be considered monsters of their species.

Yet the line of damarcation between dust and quag must form an invisible wall, for the life of the swamp never, even when being pursued or hunting, came across it. The line between dust and quag was no physical barrier, however, for Gulth had had no trouble in entering the water-logged land and had immersed his dust-plastered body in one of the dark pools, seemingly having neither fear nor distaste for the stinking mud his bathing stirred up, or what might use that murk to cover an attack.