Empire of the East

by Fred Saberhagen

  The scream began in the mighty voice of Zapranoth, but ended in the shrilling of a woman. She cried out then: “Ah, mercy, master! Burn me no more. To you I must show myself in my true form.” And Chup without stopping to think looked out of his ruined building, and saw a young woman stretched out on the ground, clothed scantily in her own long hair of fiery red, and in her one body she was all the women he had ever yearned to have, yes, Charmian among them. To Chup she stretched out her imploring arms. “Ah, spare me, lord!”

  He craved no more the gold and emeralds of the East, but this temptation could have moved him. Still, he knew better than to heed another lie. He burned more hair.

  “Separating flesh, piercing hide. I give him to the flames.”

  The woman screamed again, and in mid-scream her voice belonged to something else, surely nothing human, and surely not the powerful Lord of Demons; but yet it was Zapranoth’s. With shaking hands Chup fed more hair into the crackling flame. He was somehow making up the words he needed, or they were being sent to him.

  “In the name of Ardneh—”

  Where had that name come from? Where had he heard it, before now?

  “In the name of He-Who-Wields-the-Lightning, Breaker of Citadels,

  I fetter Zapranoth.

  I fetter him with metal.

  I make his members

  So that he cannot struggle.

  I force him to vomit what is in his stomach.”

  Chup looked outside. The image of the woman was gone, and in its place lay something huge, that made Chup think of greasy ashes, and of a mound of corpses on a field of war. The thing was fettered in mighty hoops of shining metal, and the labored breathing of it sounded like the wind. The greasy ashes stirred and struggled, made heads and tails and many-jointed limbs, but could not get from out the binding bands. And now a mouth larger than any of the others appeared, yawning as if forced open from inside, and from it there tumbled forth all manner of wretched people and beasts. The people wore the clothes of many lands, or none at all, and rolled about and lay stunned and crying like newborn babes, though most of them were grown. Among them were some soldiers of the West, their weapons still in hand. And there was one huge figure, that Chup recognized…

  Tumbling back to life from what had seemed the bitterest of nightmares, the High Lord Draffut gave no immediate thought to his own condition, or to the outcome of the battle, or to anything except the ruin of his lake. Disregarding the ruin and confusion that surrounded him, he raised his eyes at once to what had been his high domain. The radiant cascade of the lake had slowed to a mere trickle. It was draining with the new finality of death.

  He rushed at once to climb the slope behind the citadel. Power remained in him to melt the rock to life, and make it form holds for his hands and feet; the power absorbed through ages of his dwelling in and near the lake, that would not let him die, that healed his bones almost as fast as they were broken. Only this life-power let him bear the shock when he had mounted to his lake and found it a drained shell, cracked at the bottom like a broken egg. The dull, black fabric of its inner lining, the only material the Old World had devised that could resist the quickening force of pure life-principle—this shell remained, now for the first time in his memory marked by no shifting patterns or gay butterflies. The healing machines, their lives already fading, hopped and struggled feebly, like dying frogs in a drained pond.

  Draffut did not stand long within the broken doorway, gazing at the utter ruin of his life and purpose. The cries from down the slope came to his ears. Human cries, from the battlefield, of men in deadly need and fear. He moved to answer them, without stopping to consider what he might be able to do.

  Down the slope again he went, walking at first, then quickening his strides into a run. Before him like a trodden anthill lay the demolished citadel and its swarming men. Here and there they were still fighting one another. But there were no more valkyries in the air.

  Close before Draffut one of them lay motionless, smashed by a fall, rotors bent and body broken with the violence of its crash. A look through the sprung-open belly doors showed Draffut that the man inside was cold and dead. Draffut, raging, picked up the machine, shook it and shouted at it. Where his hands touched the metal it stirred with faint life; but that was all. Only now did the magnitude of what had happened come home to the Lord Draffut with full force. Even if he could somehow repair or vivify this machine, there was nowhere for it to go, no healing possible for the dead man inside. Nor for any of the others who now lay upon the field, or who might fall tomorrow.

  Far down the mountainside, near where the great crack in the mountain had shattered the citadel’s outer wall, a bright gleam caught Lord Draffut’s eye. It was the many-colored radiance of the lake, trapped in a small pool in the rocks. At once he tore the battered flyer apart, pulled out the corpse inside. Cradling the body tenderly in one arm, he hurried on.

  Reaching the small pool, not much bigger than a bathub, he found that some of the wounded of both armies had sought it out already, were sprawled beside it drinking, or splashing the fluid on their wounds. Picking his way carefully among these injured men, Lord Draffut reached a spot beside the radiant pool. He dropped into it the dead man he carried, then set himself to disperse healing to as many as he could.

  With every passing moment, more wounded, mostly Easterners, were crawling and staggering to the place. A groaning, demanding throng grew rapidly around the Lord of Beasts. The level of the fluid in the pool sank rapidly as well—rock could not hold it in for long—and Draffut crouched low beside it, scooping up healing handfuls which he poured into mouths or onto wounds. The dead man he had carried here was sitting up and groaning now.

  Draffut splashed a remnant of the lake onto a mangled arm-stump, whose owner shouted with the ending of his pain; perhaps a new and proper arm would grow. Another man, his belly opened, came sliding in blood to reach the pool, and Draffut poured for him an end of agony.

  Amid the general cries of pain, and with his dazed concentration on his task, Lord Draffut did not notice when a different, heartier voice, raging and commanding, was raised in the rear of the rapidly growing throng about him.

  “—back to your ranks, malingerers! The enemy still holds the field. You who can walk, rejoin your units, cowards, or I’ll give you wounds…Guardsmen! Take up your arms and fight for me!”

  Nor did Lord Draffut, in his dazed state, fully notice what was happening when this shouter came raving, scattering wounded Guardsmen from the pool with blows of the flat of his sword. Draffut was aware only of one more victim reeling toward him, with sunken eyes and the stink of terrible gangrene. Draffut scooped up for this one a generous handful, and threw it accurately. From his hand the fluid of the lake leaped out, a clear and innocent serpent in the air. Only in that instant did the sunken eyes of the raving, raging man meet those of Draffut, in a look that the Beast-Lord would long remember; and only in that instant did Draffut know who this man was.

  The splash of liquid struck. A maddened shout ceased in mid-syllable, a sword dropped clanging to the ground. Then nothing more was heard or seen of Som the Dead. He and his portion of the Lake of Life had vanished from the world of men.

  “—with the knife of fire I cut off feet and hands,

  Shut his mouth and his lips—”

  The bellowing of Zapranoth grew louder and more desperate, and at the same time became more muffled.

  “Blunted his teeth,

  Cut his tongue from his throat.

  Thus I took away his speech,

  Blinded his eyes,

  Stopped his ears,

  Cut his heart from its place.”

  The fire swam before Chup’s eyes, and the exhaustion of the magician, a feeling new to him, seemed to weaken his every bone. Once more he begged the powers of the West to send him words, for it was growing very hard to think. Then summoning his strength, he shouted:

  “I made him as if he had never been!”

  Silence had
fallen all across the riven plateau of the battlefield; in silence the army of the East had begun to turn to desperate flight or to surrender. Looking where Zapranoth had been, Chup could see no more metal hoops, no more heap of greasy ashes, nothing.

  But in his mind still spoke the Demon-Lord: “Master. Yet a very little of my life remains. Save that, and from it all the rest can be remade. My powers can be restored, to raise for you an army to lead, to build for you your kingdom—”

  Chup with great care gathered the last hairs, while beside him Lisa-Carlotta moved her mistreated head and once more opened her dazed eyes.

  “His name is not any more.

  His children are not.

  Nor his kindred.

  He existeth not, nor his record;

  He existeth not, nor his heir.

  His egg cannot grow.

  Nor is his seed raised.

  It is dead.

  And his spirit, and his shadow, and his magic.”

  Thus was the Lord of Demons, Zapranoth, destroyed, and thus did Chup of the North earn a place in the army of the West. His bride was searched for, especially where some said they had seen her pass, descending along a new path created by the splitting of the mountain. But she was not found.

  When the last drops of his lake were gone, the great Beast-Lord Draffut fled to somewhere where there were no cries of wounded men.

  “Lisa?” Rolf of the Broken Lands had come to speak to the unrecognizable girl who, they said, had been his sister once.

  “Rolf.” She knew him, but her voice was dull. She was inconsolable—not for her own pain, not for the East’s defeat, nor for any of the fallen—save one.

  “My Dark Lord,” she said. “My strong protector. He was all I had.”

  Book Three

  Ardneh’s World

  I

  Ominor

  They were preparing a man for death by slow impalement, for the amusement of the Emperor, who sat in meditative silence amid the blooming drowsy richness of his garden. On the sloping lawn a little below his simple chair, the sharpened stake had been erected in a space framed by formal plantings of tall flowers, among which bees buzzed richly. A few meters beyond that the garden ended at a low sea-wall of stone, and beyond the wall the vast calm lake began. So close was the wall to where the Emperor John Ominor was waiting that with a little effort he might have made a jewel—there was no other kind of stone in easy reach—go splash.

  In his view the lake stretched east to meet the sky, and in that sky there frowned a lone high thunderhead, its cloudy base below the watery horizon. Something in the appearance of the cloud suggested a giant air-elemental, but of course that could not really be. The demons charged with the defense of the palace would long since have taken the field against any such intruder, and the sky above the lake would no longer be innocent and summery.

  The man who was to die—there was supposedly some evidence to link him with a plot against the Emperor—let out his first unbelieving cry, as the sharpened wood began to have its way with him. Ominor had not been paying close attention, he had larger matters on his mind today, but now he uttered a small sound of satisfaction and leaned back a little in his chair.

  The Emperor of all the East appeared to be neither old nor young (though in fact he was very old indeed) and was not noticeably thin or fat. His coloring approximated the human average. His clothes were simply cut, and were for the most part white, with here and there fine trimmings of deep black. Around his neck on a transparent chain there hung a sphere of black, the size of a man’s fist, shining as if with oil. It was nowhere pierced by any fastener, but held to the chain by being enclosed in a light basketwork of silver filaments.

  While listening to his entertainment, John Ominor gazed out across the near-monotony of the watery plain. Much closer than the thunderhead, but infinitely smaller, a pair of wings were beating, with gradual enlargement. A courier reptile, who perhaps embodied the final relay of a message that had started halfway round the world. This pleasant confirmation of his power crossed the Emperor’s mind vaguely; time enough later to discover if the messenger brought good news or bad. His gaze dropped to a fishing boat, that sculled past no more than half a kilometer from shore. His eyes followed a fisherman now, but yet his mind was elsewhere.

  Today Ardneh was coming to the palace.

  By electronics and witchcraft the Emperor had sought round the whole earth for his most tenacious enemy. At first the objective of the hunt had been simple: to find and kill. Then, when it had become apparent that finding Ardneh’s life might be endlessly difficult if not impossible, the searchers’ efforts had been bent toward arranging contact, negotiations.

  Of enemies John Ominor had plenty, both within and without the power structure he controlled; but Ardneh was unique.

  The noises of the impaled man were wholly animal now, and the Emperor turned to watch for a few moments. But he could not relax and enjoy himself, as he had planned to do for a few moments before confronting his visitor. The meeting was now less than an hour away. And Ardneh was beginning to loom too large.

  True enough, most of the West looked to Prince Duncan of Islandia as their foremost leader. And Duncan was certainly formidable; he was now maintaining an army on this very continent, where Ardneh’s seaboard territory, the Broken Lands and a few other contiguous provinces, gave Duncan a strategic base in which to rest his forces between campaigns. Ominor of course continually planned reoccupation of the seaboard, but somehow could never quite amass enough troops and demons and materiel for the job, not while he was distracted and his strength was drained by a hundred other guerilla conflicts and rebellions around the world. And Duncan would never remain for long in his coastal stronghold, but pour his army out again like some uncontainable liquid into the heart of the continent, where among the vast forests and plains Ominor’s generals would fail once again to bring him to decisive battle.

  Not far from the sea-wall, and from where the Emperor sat, there stood a summerhouse roofed with dark glass and sided with viny trellises. Glancing toward this shelter, the Emperor saw that his councilors were beginning to assemble within it.

  Eight high subordinates had been summoned to attend the confrontation with Ardneh. All wore fine black garments edged and piped with white, negative images of the Emperors’s own distinctive garb. When he had counted the six men and two women into the summerhouse, John Ominor rose from his chair and without haste walked down to join them. The two torturers left off their careful work for a moment to fall with foreheads to the ground as he passed near. Ominor glanced with passing amusement at the victim on his stake, boldly upright as if in insolence, and unlikely to be punished for it.

  Inside the summerhouse, the eight remained with foreheads against the sandy floor until he had taken the chair at the head of the long table. Then they seated themselves in order of precedence. He was certainly the most ordinary-looking of the nine assembled.

  There were no formalities; Ominor simply looked enquiringly at the man who sat at his right hand. This was his chief wizard, the High Sorcerer of all the East, who had many names but was at present known simply and conveniently as Wood.

  Wood understood at once what question he was required to answer. He said flatly: “Ardneh is not a human being.” Today Wood himself was wearing his most human aspect; he appeared old and gnarled, like some ancient tailor with bowed legs and stringy-muscled arms. He had a big, bent nose, and oddly bulging eyes that very few folk cared to meet.

  “Some elemental power, then,” the Emperor commented. When confirmation of his statement was not immediately forthcoming, the Emperor added quickly: “Surely Ardneh is not a beast?” Ominor’s speech as usual was loud and quick, and as usual it was difficult for his hearers to gauge the exact degree of his impatience.

  Wood answered quickly, daring to look his Emperor in the eye. “My Supreme Lord, Ardneh is neither man nor woman, and surely he is no beast. He is therefore a power, but I hesitate to call him elemental. And I
think he is not a djinn. He fits no known category. I must confess that there are things about him I do not yet understand.”

  “An understatement, surely. Keeping in mind this persistent lack of understanding, what do you propose we do today?”

  “That we proceed as planned, my Supreme Lord.” The answer came without noticeable hesitation. Wood could scarcely have maintained his rank just below the Emperor without considerable courage, as well as the proper amount of prudence. Around the table the seven other councilors were waiting, still as carven images. Abner, High Constable of the East, commander of Ominor’s armies, sat straight backed at Ominor’s left hand, a thick muscle bulging in his neck as he looked with unreadable eyes past the Emperor at Wood. The Emperor was silent watching Wood as he might have watched a prisoner on trial. But it was the way he looked at everyone.

  Wood went on: “If Ardneh is so powerful that we cannot defend ourselves from him here, at the center of our world…” With a little shrug he let the sentence trail off.

  For a few moments no one in the summerhouse spoke. From the middle distance came the gurgles of the wretch who labored hard at dying on his stake. Then Ominor lifted his weighty gaze from Wood, and flicked it toward the foot of the table. “You who labor in the uncommon arts, what can you tell me today that I have not already heard?”

  The junior of the two technologists present only bowed his head in answer, while the senior stood up as spokesman, stammering: “V-very little, Supreme Lord. The electronic direction-finding stations continue in operation, and sites for two new stations have been established since our last meeting. But where the life of Ardneh may be hidden, that we still cannot say.” Candor, even about failures, was the least dangerous course to take with Ominor. All who survived as his top aides had learned this well.

  Most of the others around the table were indicating by their expressions how scornful they were of such esoteric methods as the two technologists were striving to employ. Technology was well enough in its place, making wheels for wagon or chariot, forging swords with hammer, bellows, and anvil. But no one understood electronics, no, not even the technologists who played with Old World gear.