Sagaria

by John Dahlgren

  “They’re both traps. They both lead to certain death.”

  “Why would anyone wish to make them that way? Why two?”

  With a casual gesture, King Brygantra managed to convey that to the dead, the concerns of the living could not be disregarded, but were nevertheless perceived as if at a great distance.

  “The doings of those who have sold their souls to the darkness are cunning and devious. If the people who wished to set the snare had constructed only one tunnel leading out of here, then tomb-robbers would rightly have regarded it with suspicion. But two? They send one of their number along one tunnel and then, if he meets his doom, they proceed with confidence along the other.”

  Sagandran could hardly believe the callousness only partly hidden by the king’s indifferent tone. Would tomb-robbers really value the lives of their friends so cheaply? He supposed they must.

  “Then how are we to get to this Palace of Shadows you talk about?” demanded Perima.

  “Through here,” replied the king with a courtly bow.

  He backed a few paces away from Perima and Sir Tombin. He was behaving, Sagandran thought, more like the commissionaire of a swanky apartment building than a king. The guards likewise fell aside, forming a path that led to the solitary giant coffin, the one that had not opened when the others did.

  “This is the great gate to the Palace of Shadows, and its portcullis and drawbridge also,” said King Brygantra.

  “It just looks like a coffin to me,” said Samzing, breaking his long silence. Unnoticed by Sagandran, he’d pulled himself up off the floor and was now acting as if his previous abject terror had all been part of some grand master plan to which the others would never be privy.

  “It does indeed take the form of a grand sarcophagus, but instead it is the gateway to what is all too often a graveyard of human aspirations,” said the king ominously.

  “The Palace of Shadows,” breathed Perima.

  “Yes.”

  The moment Sagandran climbed in the giant coffin, he was dazzled by a solid wall of brilliance that struck him in the face as forcefully as a fist.

  He seemed to be floating downward – or possibly sideways or upward – through treacle-thick, warm air. Blindly, he flailed his arms until one of them made solid contact with someone else, provoking a cry of pain and outrage. The air was full of the noise of confusion. He realized that the rest of the companions were as disabled and disoriented as he was.

  He closed his eyes as tightly as he could, but that didn’t diminish the glare at all. It was as if this were a light he could not only see; it imbued every part of him; it was felt by and overloaded his every sense. Should he not find some way of removing himself from the bath of incandescence soon, he felt it might dissolve him entirely: skin, flesh, organs, bones, mind, everything. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to be disturbed or concerned by the prospect. The light seemed to be cleansing his mind of troubled thoughts, soothing it, reassuring it.

  Then he was suddenly standing on the solid floor of a brightly lit corridor. The featureless walls extended as far as he could see in both directions and seemed to be made of highly polished silver. A breath of warm air caressed his cheek. There was no obvious source of illumination, yet everything around him was uniformly radiant. His head was reeling.

  His friends seemed to have arrived at the same moment he had. They were standing in strangely incongruous poses, their faces wrought into expressions of strong emotion, as if they’d been frozen in a moment of intense activity. There was something else odd about their appearance, and it took him a few seconds to realize what it was.

  They cast no shadows.

  His shoulders slumped. In the same instant, the others fell out of their fixed poses. Sir Tombin was holding Xaraxeer half-scabbarded and he staggered, clearly as dizzy as Sagandran.

  “Oh my,” said Samzing softly. “How my head does spin.”

  Sagandran’s head was spinning too. So was his stomach. The main trouble was that they seemed to be spinning in opposite directions. Perima appeared to be having the same problem. Woozily supporting herself with one arm on the wall and holding her hair back from her face, she was demurely throwing up.

  “Watch what you’re doing!” shrilled Flip, lurching away from her hurriedly.

  “You would have thought,” remarked Sir Tombin to no one in particular, “that King Brygantra – jolly nice fellow, let me say, won’t hear a word against him, and so on – that he might have, you know, thought to mention this would happen. Forewarned is forearmed, after all.”

  “Maybe he and his men never came through here themselves,” ventured Sagandran. His mouth tasted as if he’d been eating cold barley broth. His voice sounded a bit that way as well.

  “Very sensible of them,” said Samzing tartly.

  Only Cheireanna seemed unaffected by the dislocation to which they’d been subjected. The girl was gazing around her with eyes that glinted with awe.

  This may be, thought Sagandran, steadying his rebellious digestive tract, the first time she’s ever seen anything more luminous than flickering candlelight or the flames of a fire. It’s a wonder she’s not terrified out of her wits.

  He glanced at her again. She must have more courage than seems possible.

  “Which direction is that breeze coming from?” asked Sir Tombin suddenly.

  Perima pointed weakly, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve.

  “That’s what I thought too,” said the Frogly Knight, nodding. “So that must be where the nearer end of this passageway is. Well, probably, anyway.”

  It was Sagandran’s turn to nod. Sir Tombin’s deduction made sense.

  “Anyone got any more upchucking to do?” said Samzing gaily, drawing a glare from Perima. “No? Well, in that case, let’s be on our way.” He wrinkled his nose ostentatiously. “I don’t especially want to stay hanging around our dear friend’s little commentary on these adventures.”

  This time Perima’s glare would have flash-fried a chicken whole, but miraculously, the wizard remained unscathed.

  The gleaming white walls of the passage were totally uniform. As the companions trudged along, Sir Tombin in the lead, Sagandran found himself haunted by the strange feeling that they weren’t really moving anywhere at all, that they were just going through the motions, marking time. He tried to find any small blemish on the walls’ smooth surface, so he might reassure himself by watching it as he walked past it, but there wasn’t any mark to use as a measure. Lacking any sense of distance being covered, he soon began to lose all track of the passage of time. It’s like this was a passage of no-time, he thought, grimacing at his own pun. He wished he’d been wearing his wristwatch when he’d departed the Earthworld, so that he might trace the movement of its second hand, but the timepiece was still sitting by his bed in Grandpa Melwin’s cottage.

  That led him to ask a further question. How much time had really elapsed since he’d run out of that cottage into a rainy night? He knew how much time he’d lived through – a matter of a few days – but was that the same as the amount of time that had really passed back home? Sagandran had read tales about people who’d wandered into the Land of Faerie. They returned to the mundane world after only a few weeks had passed for them but a whole century for everybody else; he’d also come across science-fiction stories in which people had all sorts of adventures in some parallel world before returning to the exact same moment they’d started. Could either of these two things be happening to him?

  What was time, anyway? Back on the Earthworld he’d have thought it was a silly question, and he’d have dismissed it with a laugh. Whatever writers might do with it in stories, time was just itself: time. It marched on, unless it flew. It was no man’s prisoner, and so on. It was the tick of the classroom clock on a summer day when the fields and trees were calling to him. It was so familiar, you didn’t have to think about it. It just was. Now he wasn’t so sure. He’d thought the world and universe around him just were, as well, and now he
knew differently.

  Ah, wait though. The soft, insistent push of the breeze against his face was definitely becoming a little stronger. And, unless his ears were playing tricks on him, there was a susurrus of sound coming from somewhere up ahead.

  “I think,” said Sir Tombin, “we’re getting somewhere at last.”

  “Any idea where, old thing?” asked Samzing languidly.

  “Not the foggiest, dear chap. But we’ll soon find out, won’t we?”

  “I was afraid you might say that.”

  Within minutes they could see a black rectangle ahead. Involuntarily, their pace quickened and soon, they were standing with the brightly lit tunnel at their backs and a sheer cliff dropping away below them.

  The passageway emerged into the open air and out onto a thin rock shelf halfway up the side of the great ravine they’d seen in the distance. Looking off to his right, Sagandran could once more see the mighty stronghold that was the Palace of Shadows squatting over the end of the gorge. It seemed to have been built out of the darkness itself. Afternoon had turned into night while the companions were journeying through the mountain, and the feeble moonlight glanced off aspects of the castle’s turrets, fortifications, parapets and grim, monstrous walls. The edifice exuded such a sense of its own massiveness that Sagandran could swear he felt it pulling him toward it, as if he were a whirling mote being drawn by the gravity of a world.

  “The legends,” said Memo primly from Samzing’s shoulder, “talk of a final abyss.”

  Sir Tombin spun toward him, almost losing his balance on the ledge.

  “What final abyss? What legends?”

  “The legends of how the Rainbow Crystal will save, or perhaps not save, the three worlds from doom, of course,” replied Memo waspishly.

  “You could have told us something about this before,” Perima pointed out.

  “Doesn’t everyone know the legends?” queried Memo to the company in general.

  “No!” they all cried, except Cheireanna, who was standing right at the very edge of the vertiginous drop, staring downward. It made Sagandran feel ill just looking at her, so he didn’t.

  “Well, I’m sor-ree,” said Memo in a tone that said, “dimwits.” “The legends are in all the books, there for anybody to see.”

  Sagandran’s fists were clenched so tightly he wondered if his fingernails were drawing blood from his palms.

  “Okay,” he said. “Forget all that, Memo. Just tell us what the legends say. What happens to the people who come with the Rainbow Crystal to confront the Shadow Master? Is there anything that might help us?”

  “Oh, all right,” muttered the memorizer. “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “We most emphatically do,” Sir Tombin assured him.

  “Indeed,” added Samzing firmly, “if you do not tell us the entirety of these legends of yours forthwith, Memo, I shall take the greatest of pleasure in dropping you off the edge of this cliff.”

  “You wouldn’t do that!” cried Memo, aghast, realizing he was sitting on the shoulder of a potential assassin and had no obvious way of getting off it.

  “Wouldn’t I just?” murmured the wizard.

  “Oh, well, if you’re sure you don’t already—”

  Perima’s voice was acid. “Could we take turns tossing him off the cliff, Samzing?”

  “Be like that!” snapped Memo. “Now, let me just get my thoughts in order. Aha. Yes. Tum-de-tum-de-tum. The Boy Whose Time Has Come arrives in Sagaria from a world that is beyond the boundaries of reality. You know that bit already. He comes into possession of the Rainbow Crystal by accident, or maybe as a gift from some sage a lot wiser than he is. Yes, we’ve done all this. He meets a rat, a brat and a frog, according to one of the racier versions. Well, I think we know who the rat and the frog are.” He gazed around him with a breezy smile that rapidly faded. “Ahem, it doesn’t take three guesses to work out the identity of the brat. I wonder,” he added hastily, “if the word brat is merely an error of transcription, and what the scribe really meant to write was the old runic character meaning ‘gorgeously lovely young female of regal bearing’? The two runes are very much alike, you know, terribly easy to confuse, and—”

  “Get on with it,” said Sagandran through gritted teeth.

  “Thanks to the intervention of—um, the runes for ‘wizard’ and ‘bumbling old goat’ are very similar as well. Anyhow, they eventually get to Qarnapheeran, where they meet up with a character who’s largely unregarded in most versions of the legend but whom the finest modern revisionist textual critics say could well be the most signif—”

  “It’s a long drop, Memo,” Samzing reminded him.

  “Ah, yes, well, we can leave the semantic analysis until later, I agree,” said Memo, nodding vehemently. What made his nodding look so absurd, reflected Sagandran, was that the oversized spectacles stayed in the same place throughout the procedure, while Memo’s head bobbed up and down behind them. “Now, where was I? Have I said that before? Somehow this motley bunch of ragamuffins – I’m only repeating what it says in the books, I assure you! – gains access to a portal that’ll take them to the Shadow World. There—”

  Flip erupted. “We know all this! It’s what’s going to happen next that’s important, you dunderhead.”

  “I’m getting to that bit. Don’t hurry me or I’ll forget something I shouldn’t. The Boy Whose Time Has Come – that must be you, Sagandran – and the brat – er, the princess brat – they’re seized by a bad, bad, bad, bad wizard, who, with the benefit of hindsight, I think we can confidently identify as my ex-master, Deicher. Oh, he was bad, all right. I’m surprised, thinking about it, that I was able to put up with him all those y—”

  Sir Tombin drew Xaraxeer from its sheath and started idly examining its golden blade for sharpness.

  “Yes, well, the frog and the bumbling old goa—wizard and the horse and the gallant, undervalued memorizer go after them. Did I mention the horse? I should have. Anyway, the horse … lost my track here. Oh, yes, the rest of the bunch pursue them, and on the way they pick up a peasant girl. Even so …”

  Cheireanna turned from regarding the ravine to give Memo a long, icicle-cold look.

  I wonder if she understands more of what we’re saying than we think? mused Sagandran.

  “… they find the boy and the bra—princess. Soon after, they meet King Brygantra in the Mausoleum of the Grand Ancients – that’s what that place was called, you see – and King Brygantra tells them how to get to the Palace of Shadows, which is where their arch-enemy, the Master of All Darkness, hangs out. So, they have a confrontation with him.”

  Memo fell silent.

  “Yes?” prompted Sagandran, after the silence threatened to become permanent.

  “Well,” said the memorizer, “that’s where things become really interesting, you see. From the point of view of textual analysis, that is.”

  There was another silence, broken only by the crackling of Samzing’s knuckles as he clenched and unclenched his fists.

  “From that point onward in the story,” Memo added, “there are two quite distinct courses of events, diametrically opposed to each other. It depends on which of these two quite dissimilar variants of the legend you choose to regard as the genuine one. It’s well known that one or the other of the two variants is a falsification, created by some partisan scribe or other with the intent to deceive, but since nothing’s known about him or her, it’s impossible to guess the true account. Scholars have concluded that both must be given equal weight, equal credibility, until history proves the matter one way or the other. So, which do you want first – the good news or the bad?”

  “Both,” said Flip forcefully. He rubbed his forepaws together with a level of potential violence that startled Sagandran. “Or, by the bladder of the arch-foe Arkanamon himself, I’ll—”

  Wisely, Memo started speaking again before Flip could outline what exactly he would do. “According to manuscripts derived from what we scholars call the first
strand, or Strand A, the companions reach the Palace of Shadows, confront the Shadow Master and, surprisingly soon thereafter, end their days in the slave mines. Those of them, that is, who haven’t been beaten into shapeless pulp during their, ahem, contretemps with the Master of Darkness.”

  “I could have stayed at home with Golma,” Samzing mused. “Such an excellent cook, she is.”

  “But wait!” cried Memo. “The versions derived from the other strand, that’s Strand B, to be precise, tell of a quite different conclusion.”

  “Speak quickly, little one,” hissed Perima. “Your life may depend upon it.”

  “In the Strand B versions, the companions reach the Palace of Shadows, just like in the Strand A variants, and they have a confrontation with the Master of Darkness – no change there, either – but instead of being defeated by him, they emerge triumphant, and their glorious deeds are celebrated throughout the rest of time by the grateful populations of the three worlds!”

  “Indeed?” said Sagandran dubiously. “The Earthworld as well?” Somehow, he thought it unlikely. Unless things had changed considerably since he’d left home, the folk of the Earthworld hadn’t the slightest conception that a titanic battle between Good and Evil was underway, upon whose outcome their fate depended.

  “Don’t doubt me,” said the memorizer earnestly. “For all you know, Sagandran, someone in the Earthworld could write a book on the whole of the adventure, and everyone there would know of the legend, and of the valorous part you played in it.”

  Oh yeah, thought Sagandran, and pigs might fly.

  Sir Tombin had other concerns in mind. “Do the two versions of the legend give any clue at all, Memo, even the tiniest hint, about what we might do to encourage the possibilities of one of these results over the other?”

  “Hm, not really.” The memorizer unnecessarily adjusted his spectacles. “Oh, according to the variant in which we’re victorious, we get to the Palace of Shadows by going through the slave mines. According to the other version we build a pair of great wings out of light, supple withies and glide there on the hot zephyrs rising up from the gorge.”