The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (13 page)

His laughter mocked her. “Come out and be betrayed? Be whipped
again while you look on? Listen to your sweet lying voice, while your
father’s huntsmen creep closer? No, I have other plans.”

“Plans?” she questioned. Her voice was apprehensive. “Mouse,
your life is in danger so long as you lurk here. My father’s men are
sworn to slay you on sight. I would die, I tell you, if they caught you.
Don’t delay, get away. Only tell me first that you do not hate me.”
And she moved toward him.

Again his laughter mocked her.

“You are beneath my hate,” came the stinging words. “I feel only
contempt for your cowardly weakness. Glavas Rho talked too much
of love. There are laws of hate in the universe, shaping even its
loves, and it is time I made them work for me. Come no closer! I do
not intend to betray my plans to you, or my new hidey holes. But
this much I will tell you, and listen well. In seven days your father’s
torment begins.”

“My father’s torments—? Mouse, Mouse, listen to me. I want
to question you about more than Glavas Rho’s teachings. I want to
question you about Glavas Rho. My father hinted to me that he knew
my mother, that he was perchance my very father.”

This time there was a pause before the mocking laughter, but
when it came, it was doubled. “Good, good, good! It pleasures me to
think that Old Whitebeard enjoyed life a little before he became so
wise, wise, wise. I dearly hope he did tumble your mother. That would
explain his nobility. Where so much love was—love for each creature
ever born—there must have been lust and guilt before. Out of that
encounter—and all your mother’s evil—his white magic grew. It is
true! Guilt and white magic side by side—and the gods never lied!
Which leaves you the daughter of Glavas Rho, betraying your true
father to his sooty death.”

And then his face was gone and the leaves framed only a dark hole.
She blundered into the forest after him, calling out “Mouse! Mouse!”
and trying to follow the receding laughter. But it died away, and she
found herself in a gloomy hollow, and she began to realize how evil
the apprentice’s laughter had sounded, as if he laughed at the death
of all love, or even its unbirth. Then panic seized her, and she fled
back through the undergrowth, brambles catching at her clothes and
twigs stinging her cheeks, until she had regained the clearing and was
galloping back through the dusk, a thousand fears besetting her and
her heart sick with the thought there was now no one in the wide
world who did not hate and despise her.

When she reached the stronghold, it seemed to crouch above her like an ugly jag-crested monster, and when she passed through the great gateway, it seemed to her that the monster had gobbled her up forever.

Come nightfall on the seventh day, when dinner was being served in the great banquet hall, with much loud talk and crunching of rushes and clashing of silver plates, Janarrl stifled a cry of pain and clapped his hand to his heart.

“It is nothing,” he said a moment later to the thin-faced henchman
sitting at his side. “Give me a cup of wine! That will stop it twinging.”

But he continued to look pale and ill at ease, and he ate little of
the meat that was served up in great smoking slices. His eyes kept
roving about the table, finally settling on his daughter.

“Stop staring at me in that gloomy way, girl!” he called. “One
would think that you had poisoned my wine and were watching to see
green spots come out on me. Or red ones edged with black, belike.”

This bought a general guffaw of laughter which seemed to please
the Duke, for he tore off the wing of a fowl and gnawed at it hungrily,
but the next moment he gave another sudden cry of pain, louder than
the first, staggered to his feet, clawed convulsively at his chest, and
then pitched over on the table, where he lay groaning and writhing
in his pain.

“The Duke is stricken,” the thin-faced henchman announced
quite unnecessarily and yet most portentously after bending over
him. “Carry him to bed. One of you loosen his shirt. He gasps for air.”

A flurry of whispering went up and down the table. As the great
door to his private apartments was opened for the Duke, a heavy gust
of chill air made the torches flicker and turn blue, so that shadows
crowded into the hall. Then one torch flared white-bright as a star,
showing the face of a girl. Ivrian felt the others draw away from her
with suspicious glances and mutterings, as if they were certain there
had been truth in the Duke’s jest. She did not look up. After a while
someone came and told her that the Duke commanded her presence.
Without a word she rose and followed.

The Duke’s face was gray and furrowed with pain, but he had
control of himself, though with each breath his hand tightened
convulsively on the edge of the bed until his knuckles were like knobs
of rock. He was propped up with pillows and a furred robe had been
tucked closely about his shoulders and long-legged braziers glowed
around the bed. In spite of all he was shivering convulsively.

“Come here, girl,” he ordered in a low, labored voice that hissed
against his drawn lips. “You know what has happened. My heart
pains as though there were a fire under it and yet my skin is cased in
ice. There is a stabbing in my joints as if long needles pierced clear
through the marrow. It is wizard’s work.”

“Wizard’s work, beyond doubt,” confirmed Giscorl, the thin-faced
henchman, who stood at the head of the bed. “And there is no need
to guess who. That young serpent whom you did not kill quickly
enough ten days ago! He’s been reported skulking in the woods,
aye, and talking to...certain ones,” he added, eyeing Ivrian narrowly,
suspiciously.

A spasm of agony shook the Duke. “I should have stamped out
whelp with sire,” he groaned. Then his eyes shifted back to Ivrian.
“Look, girl, you’ve been seen poking about in the forest where the old
wizard was killed. It’s believed you talked with his cub.”

Ivrian wet her lips, tried to speak, shook her head. She could feel
her father’s eyes probing into her. Then his fingers reached out and
twisted themselves in her hair.

“I believe you’re in league with him!” His whisper was like a rusty
knife. “You’re helping him do this to me. Admit it! Admit!” And he
thrust her cheek against the nearest brazier so that her hair smoked
and her “No!” became a shuddering scream. The brazier swayed and
Giscorl steadied it. Through Ivrian’s scream the Duke snarled, “Your
mother once held red coals to prove her honor.”

A ghostly blue flame ran up Ivrian’s hair. The Duke jerked her
from the brazier and fell back against the pillows.

“Send her away,” he finally whispered faintly, each word an effort.
“She’s a coward and wouldn’t dare to hurt even me. Meantime,
Giscorl, send out more men to hunt through the woods. They must
find his lair before dawn, or I’ll rupture my heart withstanding the
pain.”

Curtly Giscorl motioned Ivrian toward the door. She cringed, and
slunk from the room, fighting down tears. Her cheek pulsed with
pain. She was not aware of the strangely speculative smile with which
the hawk-faced henchman watched her out.

Ivrian stood at the narrow window of her room watching the
little bands of horsemen come and go, their torches glowing like
will-o’-the-wisps in the woods. The stronghold was full of mysterious
movement. The very stones seemed restlessly alive, as if they shared
the torment of their master.

She felt herself drawn toward a certain point out there in the
darkness. A memory kept recurring to her of how one day Glavas
Rho had showed her a small cavern in the hillside and had warned
her that it was an evil place, where much baneful sorcery had been
done in the past. Her fingertips moved around the crescent-shaped
blister on her cheek and over the rough streak in her hair.

Finally her uneasiness and the pull from the night became too
strong for her. She dressed in the dark and edged open the door of
her chamber. The corridor seemed for the moment deserted. She
hurried along it, keeping close to the wall, and darted down the worn
rounded hummocks of the stone stair. The tramp of footsteps sent her
hurrying into a niche, where she cowered while two huntsmen strode
glum-faced toward the Duke’s chamber. They were dust-stained and
stiff from riding.

“No one’ll find him in all that dark,” one of them muttered. “It’s
like hunting an ant in a cellar.”

The other nodded. “And wizards can change landmarks and make
forest paths turn on themselves, so that all searchers are befuddled.”

As soon as they were past Ivrian hastened into the banquet hall,
now dark and empty, and through the kitchen with its high brick
ovens and its huge copper kettles glinting in the shadows.

Outside in the courtyard torches were flaring and there was
a bustle of activity as grooms brought fresh horses or led off spent
ones, but she trusted to her huntsman’s costume to let her pass
unrecognized. Keeping to the shadows, she worked her way around to
the stables. Her horse moved restlessly and neighed when she slipped
into the stall but quieted at her low whisper. A few moments and it
was saddled, and she was leading it around to the open fields at the
back. No searching parties seemed to be near, so she mounted and
rode swiftly toward the wood.

Her mind was a storm of anxieties. She could not explain to herself
how she had dared come this far, except that the attraction toward
that point in the night—the cavern against which Glavas Rho had
warned her—possessed a sorcerous insistence not to be denied.

Then, when the forest engulfed her, she suddenly felt that she
was committing herself to the arms of darkness and putting behind
forever the grim stronghold and its cruel occupants. The ceiling of
leaves blotted out most of the stars. She trusted to a light rein on her
horse to guide her straight. And in this she was successful, for within
a half hour she reached a shallow ravine which led past the cavern
she sought.

Now, for the first time, her horse became uneasy. It balked and
uttered little whinnying cries of fear and tried repeatedly to turn off
as she urged it along the ravine. Its pace slowed to a walk. Finally it
refused to move further. Its ears were laid back and it was trembling
all over.

Ivrian dismounted and moved on. The forest was portentously
quiet, as if all animals and birds—even the insects—had gone. The
darkness ahead was almost tangible, as if built of black bricks just
beyond her hand.

Then Ivrian became aware of the green glow, vague and faint
at first as the ghosts of an aurora. Gradually it grew brighter and
acquired a flickering quality, as the leafy curtains between her and
it became fewer. Suddenly she found herself staring directly at it—a
thick, heavy, soot-edge flame that writhed instead of danced. If green
slime could be transmuted to fire, it would have that look. It burned
in the mouth of a shallow cavern.

Then, beside the flame, she saw the face of the apprentice of
Glavas Rho, and in that instant an agony of horror and sympathy
tore at her mind.

The face seemed inhuman—more a green mask of torment than
anything alive. The cheeks were drawn in; the eyes were unnaturally
wild; it was very pale, and dripping with cold sweat induced by intense
inward effort. There was much suffering in it, but also much power—
power to control the thick twisting shadows that seemed to crowd
around the green flame, power to master the forces of hate that were
being marshaled. At regular intervals the cracked lips moved and the
arms and hands made set gestures.

It seemed to Ivrian that she heard the mellow voice of Glavas Rho
repeating a statement he had once made to Mouse and to her. “None
can use black magic without straining the soul to the uttermost—and
staining it into the bargain. None can inflict suffering without enduring
the same. None can send death by spells and sorcery without walking
on the brink of death’s own abyss, aye, and dripping his own blood
into it. The forces black magic evokes are like two-edged poisoned
swords with grips studded with scorpion stings. Only a strong man,
leather-handed, in whom hate and evil are very powerful, can wield
them, and he only for a space.”