Madwand

by Roger Zelazny

  MADWAND

  By Roger Zelazny

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  I

  I am not certain.

  It sometimes seems as if I have always been here, yet I know that there must have been a time before my advent.

  And sometimes it seems as if I have only just lately arrived. From where I might have come, I have no idea. Recently, I have found this vaguely troubling, but only recently.

  For a long while, I drifted through these halls, across the battlements, up and down the towers, expanding or contracting as I chose, to fill a room—or a dozen—or to snake my way through the homes of mice, to trace the sparkling cables of the spider’s web. Nothing moves in this place but that I am aware of it.

  Yet I was not fully aware of myself until recently, and the acts I have just recited have the dust of dreams strewn over them, myself the partial self of the dreamer. Yet—

  Yet I do not sleep. I do not dream. However, I seem now to know of many things which I have never experienced.

  Perhaps it is that I am a slow learner, or perhaps something has recently stimulated my awareness to the point where all the echoes of thoughts have brought about something new within me—a sense of self which I did not formerly possess, a knowledge of separateness, of my apartness from those things which are not-me.

  If this is the case, I would like to believe that it has to do with my reason for being. I have also recently begun feeling that I should have a reason for being, that it is important that I have a reason for being. I have no idea, however, as to what this could be.

  It has been said—again, recently—that this place is haunted. But a ghost, as I understand it, is some non-physical survival of someone or something which once existed in a more solid form. I have never encountered such an entity in my travels through this place, though lately it has occurred to me that the reference could be to me in my more tangible moments. Still, I do not believe that I am a ghost, for I have no recollection of the requisite previous state. Of course, it is difficult to be certain in a matter such as this, for I lack knowledge concerning whatever laws might govern such situations.

  And this is another area of existence of which I have but recently become aware: laws—restrictions, compulsions, areas of freedom . . . They seem to be everywhere, from the dance of the tiniest particles to the turning of the world, which may be the reason I had paid them such small heed before. That which is ubiquitous is almost unnoticed. It is so easy to flow in accordance with the usual without reflecting upon it. It may well be that it was the occurrence of the unusual which served to rouse this faculty within me, and along with it the realization of my own existence.

  Then, too, in accordance with the laws with which I have become aware, I have observed a phenomenon which I refer to as the persistance of pattern. The two men who sit talking within the room where I hover like a slowly turning, totally transparent cloud an arm’s distance out from the highest bookshelf nearest the window—these two men are both patterned upon similar lines of symmetry, though I become aware of many differences within these limits, and the wave disturbances which they cause within the air when communicating with one another are also patterned things possessing, or possessed by, rules of their own. And if I attend very closely, I can even become aware of their thoughts behind, and sometimes even before, these disturbances. These, too, seem to be patterned, but at a much higher level of complexity.

  It would seem to follow that if I were a ghost something of my previous pattern might have persisted. But I am without particular form, capable of great expansions and contractions, able to permeate anything I have so for encountered. And there is no special resting state to which I feel constrained to return.

  Along with my nascent sense of identity and my ignorance as to what it is that I am, I do feel something else: a certainty that I am incomplete. There is a thing lacking within me, which, if I were to discover it, might well provide me with that reason for being which I so desire. There are times when I feel as if I had been, in a way, sleeping for a long while and but recently been awakened by the commotions in this place—awakened to find myself robbed of some essential instruction. (I have only lately learned the concept “robbed” because one of the men I now regard is a thief.)

  If I am to acquire a completeness, it would seem that I must pursue it myself, I suppose that, for now, I ought to make this pursuit my reason for being. Yes. Self-knowledge, the quest after identity . . . These would seem a good starting place. I wonder whether anyone else has ever had such a problem? I will pay close attention to what the men are saying.

  I do not like being uncertain.

  Pol Detson had arranged the seven figurines into a row on the desk before him, A young man, despite the white streak through his hair, he leaned forward and extended a hand in their direction. For a time he moved it slowly, passing his fingertips about the entire group, then in and out, encircling each gem-studded individual. Finally, he sighed and withdrew. He crossed the room to where the small, black-garbed man sat, left leg crooked over the arm of his chair, a wineglass in either hand, the contents of both aswirl. He accepted one from him and raised it to his lips.

  “Well?” the smaller man, Mouseglove by name, the thief, asked him when he lowered it.

  Pol shook his head, moved a chair so that his field of vision took in both Mouseglove and the statuettes, seated himself.

  “Peculiar,” he said at last. “Almost everything tosses off a thread, something to give you a hold over it, even if you have to fight for it, even if it only does it occasionally.”

  “Perhaps this is not the proper occasion.”

  Pol leaned forward, set his glass upon the desk. He flexed his fingers before him and placed their tips together. He began rubbing them against one another with small, circular movements. After perhaps half a minute, he drew them apart and reached toward the desk.

  He chose the nearest figure—thin, female, crowned with a red stone, hands clasped beneath the breasts—and began making a wrapping motion about it, though Mouseglove could detect no substance to be engaged in the process. Finally, his fingers moved as if he were tying a series of knots in a nonexistent string. Then he moved away, seating himself again, drawing his hands slowly after him as if playing out a line with some tension on it.

  He sat unmoving for a long while. Then the figure on the desk jerked slightly and he lowered his hands.

  “No good,” he said, rubbing his eyes and reaching to recover his wineglass. “I can’t seem to get a handle on it. They are not like anything else I know about.”

  “They’re special, all right,” Mouseglove observed, “considering the dance they put me through. And from the glimpses they gave you at Anvil Mountain, I have the feeling they could talk to you right now—if they wanted to.”

  “Yes. They were helpful enough—in a way—at the time. I wonder why they won’t communicate now?”

  “Perhaps they have nothing to say.”

  I found myself puzzled by the manner in which these men spoke of those seven small statues on the desk, as if they were alive. I drew nearer and examined them. I had noted lines of force going from the man Pol’s fingertips to them, shortly after
he had spoken of “threads” and performed his manipulations. I had also detected a throbbing of power in the vicinity of his right forearm, where he bore the strangely troubling mark of the dragon—a thing about which I feel I should know more than I do—but I had seen no threads. Nor had I noted any sort of reaction from the figures, save for the small jerking movement of the one as the shell of force was repelled. I settled down about them, contracting, feeling the textures of the various materials of which they had been formed. Cold, lifeless. It was only the words of the men which laid any mystery upon them.

  Continuing this commerce of surfaces, I grew even smaller, concentrating my attention now upon that figure which Pol had momentarily bound. My action then was as prompt as my decision: I began to pour myself into it, flowing through the miniscule openings—

  The burn! It was indescribable, the searing feeling that passed through my being. Expanding, filling the room, passing beyond it into the night, I knew that it must be that thing referred to as pain. I had never experienced it before and I wanted never to feel it again.

  I continued to seek greater tenuosness, for in it lay a measure of alleviation.

  Pol had been correct concerning the figure. It was, somehow, alive. It did not wish to be disturbed.

  Beyond the walls of Rondoval, the pain began to ease. I felt a stirring within me . . . something which had always been there but was just now beginning to creep into awareness . . .

  “What was that?” Pol said. “It sounded like a scream, but—”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Mouseglove answered, straightening. “But I just felt a jolt—as if I’d been touched by someone who’d walked across a heavy rug, only stronger, longer . . . I don’t know. It gave me a chill. Maybe you stirred something up, playing with that statue.”

  “Maybe,” Pol said. “For a moment, it felt as if there were something peculiar right here in the room with us.”

  “There must be a lot of unusual things about this old place—with both of your parents having been practicing sorcerers. Not to mention your grandparents, and theirs.”

  Pol nodded and sipped his wine.

  “There are times when I feel acutely aware of my lack of formal training in the area.”

  He raised his right hand slightly above shoulder-level, extended his index finger and moved it rapidly through a series of small circles. A book bound in skin of an indeterminate origin appeared suddenly in his hand, a gray and white feather bookmark protruding from it.

  “My father’s diary,” he announced, lowering the volume and opening it to the feather. “Now here,” he said, running his finger down the righthand page, pausing and staring, “he tells how he defeated and destroyed an enemy sorcerer, capturing his spirit in the form of one of the figures. Elsewhere, he talks of some of the others. But all that he says at the end here is, ‘It will prove useful in the task to come. If six will not do to force the wards I shall have seven, or even eight.’ Obviously, he had something very specific in mind. Unfortunately, he did not commit it to paper.”

  “Further along perhaps?”

  “I’ll be up late again reading. I’ve taken my time with it these past months because it is not a pleasant document. He wasn’t a very nice guy.”

  “I know that. It is good that you learn it from his own words, though.”

  “His words about forcing the wards—do they mean anything at all to you?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “A good sorcerer would find some way to learn it from the materials at hand, I’m sure.”

  “I’m not. Those things seem extremely potent. As for your own abilities, you seem to have come pretty far without training. I’d give a lot to be able to pull that book trick—with, say, someone’s jewelry. Where’d you get it from, anyway?”

  Pol smiled.

  “I didn’t want to leave it lying around, so I bound it with a golden strand and ordered it to retreat into one of those placeless places between the worlds, as I saw them arrayed on my journey here. It vanished then, but whenever I wish to continue reading it I merely draw upon the thread and summon it.”

  “Gods! You could do that with a suit of armor, a rack of weapons, a year’s supply of food, your entire library, for that matter! You can make yourself invincible!”

  Pol shook his head.

  “Afraid not,” he said. “The book and the jumble-box are all I’ve been keeping there, because I wouldn’t want either to fall into anyone else’s hands. If I were traveling, I could add my guitar. Much more, though, and it would become too great a burden. Their mass somehow gets added to my own. It’s as if I’m carrying around whatever I send through.”

  “So that’s where the box has gotten to. I remember your locating it, that day we went back to Anvil Mountain . . . ”

  “Yes. I almost wish I hadn’t.”

  “You couldn’t really hope to recover his body or your scepter from that crater.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. It was just seeing all that—waste—that bothered me. I—”

  He slammed his fist against the arm of his chair.

  “Damn those statues! It sometimes seems they were behind it all! If I could just get them to—Hell!”

  He drained his glass and went to refill it.

  The sensation ebbed. I did not like that experience. The room and its inhabitants were now tiny within the cloud of myself, and more uncertainties were now present: I did not know what it was that had caused me pain, nor how it produced that effect. I felt that I should learn these things, so as to avoid it in the future. I did not know how to proceed.

  I also felt that it might be useful for me to learn how to produce this effect in others, so that I could cause them to leave me alone. How might I do this? If there were a means of contact it would seem that it could go either way, once the technique were mastered . . .

  Again, the stirring of memory. But I was distracted. Someone approached the castle. It was a solitary human of male gender. I was aware of the distinction because of my familiarity with the girl Nora who had dwelled within for a time before returning to her own people. This man wore a brown cloak and dark clothing. He came drifting out of the northwest, mounted upon one of the lesser kin of the dragons who dwell below. His hair was yellow, and in places white. He wore a short blade. He circled. He could not miss the sign of the one lighted room. He began to descend, silent as a leaf or an ash across the air. I believed that he would land at the far end of the courtyard, out of sight of the library window.

  Yes.

  Within the room the men were talking, about the battle at the place called Anvil Mountain, where Pol destroyed his step-brother, Mark Marakson. Pol, I gather, is a sorcerer and Mark was something else, similar but opposite. A sorcerer is one who manipulates forces as I saw Pol do with the statue, and the book. Now, dimly, I recalled another sorcerer. His name was Det.

  “ . . . You’ve been brooding over those figures too long,” Mouseglove was saying. “If there were an easy answer, you’d have found it by now.”

  “I know,” Pol replied. “That’s why I’m looking for something more complicated.”

  “I don’t have any special knowledge of magic,” Mouseglove said, “but it looks to me as if the problem does not lie completely in that area.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Facts, man. You haven’t enough plain, old-fashioned information to be sure what you’re up against here, what it is that you should be doing. You’ve had a couple of months to ransack this library, to play every magical game you can think of with the stiff dolls. If the answer were to be found that way, you’d have turned it up. It’s just not here. You are going to have to look somewhere else.”

  “Where?’” Pol asked.

  “If I knew that, I’d have told you before now. I’ve been away from the world I knew for over twenty years. It must have changed a bit in that time. So I’m hardly one to be giving directions. But you know I’d only intended to remain here until I’d recovered from my injury. I
’ve been feeling fine for some time now. I’ve been loathe to leave, though, because of you. I don’t like seeing you drive yourself against a crazy mystery day after day. There are enough half-mad wizards in the world, and I think that’s where you may be heading—not to mention the possibility of your setting off something which may simply destroy you on the spot. I think you ought to get out, get away from the problem for a time. You’d said you wanted to see more of this world. Do it now. Come with me—tomorrow. Who knows? You may even come across some of the information you seek in your travels.”

  “I don’t know . . . ” Pol began. “I do want to go, but—tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Where would we be heading?”

  “Over to the coast, I was thinking, and then north along it. You can pick up a lot of news in port cities—”

  Pol raised his hand and cocked his head. Mouseglove nodded and rose to his feet.

  “Your warning system still working?” Mouseglove whispered.

  Pol nodded and turned toward the door.

  “Then it can’t be any—”

  The sound came again, and with it the form of a light-haired man appeared in the doorway, smiling.

  “Good evening, Pol Detson,” he stated, raising his left hand and jerking it through a series of quick movements, “and good-bye.”

  Pol fell to his knees, his face suddenly bright red. Mouseglove rounded the desk. Picking up one of the statuettes and raising it like a club, he moved toward the brown-cloaked stranger.

  The man made a sudden movement with his right hand and the thief was halted, spun and slammed back against the wall to his left. The figurine fell from his grip as he slumped to the floor.

  As this occurred, Pol raised his hands beside his cheeks and then gestured outward. His face began returning to its normal color as he climbed to his feet.

  “I might ask, ‘Why?’ ” he said, his own hands moving now, rotating in opposite directions.

  The stranger continued to smile and made a sweeping movement with one hand, as if brushing away an insect.