by Larry Niven
“And you’ll cancel your spell!” Urtarra clapped his hands to his temples. “It’s perfect!”
Dardash nodded. “All of Bhitsala will see their king up there in the sky, far beyond the reach of ordinary men, and when he falls to his death—Who but the gods could be responsible? Even Marcurades cannot aspire to the status of a deity and hope to go unpunished.”
“I bow to you, Dardash,” Urtarra said. “You have earned my undying gratitude.”
“Keep it,” Dardash said coldly. “I’m doing a specified job for a specified fee, and there is no more to it than that.”
The days that followed required him to make a number of carefully weighed decisions. On the one hand, he did not want to spend much time in the palace workshops for fear of becoming associated with the flying machine in people’s minds and thus attracting some blame for the final disaster; on the other hand, he needed to see what was happening so that he could work the appropriate magic. There was a plentiful supply of mana in the vicinity of Bhitsala—he could sense it in his enhanced youthfulness and vigor—but he had no wish to waste it with an ill-conceived spell. If mana was again returning to the world at large, perhaps sifting down from the stars, it behooved him to conserve it, especially as he aspired to live as a magician for a very long time, perhaps forever.
He was intrigued to see that Marcurades had divided the work of building his flying machine into two entirely separate parts. One team of carpenters was concerned with fashioning four wings of the lightest possible construction. The frameworks over which the silk was to be stretched were so flimsy that strong cords had been used instead of wood in places where the members they joined always tended to move apart. Nevertheless, Dardash noted, the resulting structures were surprisingly stiff, and his respect for Marcurades’s capabilities increased, although he knew that all the work of the artisans was futile.
The king had exercised even more ingenuity in the device that was intended to spin the wings. At its heart was a large, well-reinforced copper container beneath which was a miniature furnace. The latter incorporated a bellows and was fired by coals and pitch. The invisible force that springs from boiling water traveled vertically upward through a rigid pipe, at the top of which was a slip ring. Four lesser pipes, all bent in the same direction, projected horizontally from the ring in the form of a swastika. When the furnace was lit, the steam expelled from the end of the pipes caused the swastika to rotate at a considerable speed, and by decreasing pressure losses and improving lubrication and balance, Marcurades was making it go faster every day.
Dardash watched the work without comment. He knew from his reading and a certain amount of experimentation that all should come to naught when the wings were attached to the pipes of the swastika. For no reason he could explain, the faster that wing-shaped objects traveled, the more difficult they became to urge forward, and the resistance increased much more rapidly than one would have expected. Under normal conditions Marcurades’s machine would have been able to produce no more than a feeble and faltering rotation of the wings, far short of the speed needed to create the inexplicable lightness required for flight, but the circumstances were far from normal.
Dardash prepared a simple kinetic sorcery and directed its power into the four newly completed wings, altering their unseen physical nature in such a way that the faster they moved, the less effort it took to increase their speed even further. He prudently remained in a distant part of the palace when Marcurades assembled his machine for the first time, but he knew precisely when the first test was carried out. An ornate ring he wore on his left hand began to vibrate slightly, letting him know that a certain amount of mana was being used up: The wings of the flying machine were spinning in a satisfactory manner.
Dardash visualized the hissing contraption beginning to stir and shiver, to exhibit the desire to leave the ground, and he strained his ears for evidence of one possible consequence. He knew that the king was reckless when in the grip of an enthusiasm, and if he was foolhardy enough to go aloft in the machine in its present form, he would almost certainly be killed, and Dardash would be able to claim his reward earlier than planned. There came no cries of alarm, however, and he deduced that Marcurades had foreseen the need to control the machine once it soared up from the still air of the courtyard and into the turbulent breezes that forever danced above the cliffs.
I can wait, he thought, nodding his appreciation of the young king’s engineering talent. What are a few more days when measured against eternity?
The news that the king had constructed a machine with which he intended to fly into the heavens spread through Bhitsala and the surrounding regions of Koldana in a very short time. There was to be no public ceremony connected with the first flight—indeed, Marcurades was too engrossed in his new activity even to be aware of his subjects’ feverish interest in it—but as the stories spread farther and became more lurid there was a gradual drift of population toward Bhitsala.
The city filled with travelers who had come to see the ruler borne aloft on the back of a mechanical dragon, eagle, or bat, depending on which variation of the rumor they had encountered. Bhitsala’s lodging houses and taverns experienced a profitable upsurge of trade, and the atmosphere of excitement and celebration intensified daily, with runners coming down from the palace at frequent intervals to barter the latest scraps of information. People going about their routine business kept glancing up toward the white-columned royal residence, and such was the pitch of expectancy that every time a flock of seabirds rose from the cliffs, an audible ripple of near-hysteria sped through the streets.
Dardash, while keeping himself closely informed of Marcurades’s progress, made a show of being disinterested almost to the point of aloofness. He spent much of his time on the balcony of Urtarra’s apartment, ostensibly engaged in astrological work, but in fact keeping watch on the western ramparts of the palace, behind which the flying machine was receiving finishing touches. During this period of idleness and waiting he would have appreciated the company of Nirrineen, but she had taken to associating a great deal with certain of the courtesans who attended the king. Urtarra had expressed the opinion that her absence was all to the good, as it meant she had less chance to become an embarrassment, and Dardash had voiced his agreement. But he waxed more moody and surly and ever more impatient, and as he scanned the foreshortened silhouette of the palace he seemed, occasionally, to betray his true age.
“And not before time” was his sole comment when Urtarra arrived one day, in the trembling purple heat of noon, with the intelligence that Marcurades was on the point of making a trial flight. Dardash had already known that a significant event was about to occur, because the sensor ring on his left hand had been vibrating strongly for some time—evidence that the machine’s wings were rotating at speed. He had also seen and heard the growing excitement in the city below. The population of Bhitsala appeared to have migrated like so many birds to rooftops and high window ledges, anyplace from which they could get a good view of the forthcoming miracle.
“This is a wonderful thing you are doing for the people of Koldana,” Urtarra said as they stood together on the balcony, with the blue curvatures of the bay stretching away beneath them. His voice was low and earnest, as though he had begun to suffer last-minute doubts and was trying to drive them away.
“Just have my payment ready,” Dardash said, giving him a disdainful glance.
“You have no need to worry on that…” Urtarra’s speech faltered as the air was disturbed by a strange sound, a powerful and sustained fluttering that seemed to resonate inside the chest.
A moment later the king’s flying machine lifted itself into view above the palace’s western extremity.
The four rotating wings were visible in a blurry white disk edged with gold, and slung beneath them was a gondola-shaped basket in which could be seen the figure of the king. Dardash’s keen eyesight picked out weights suspended on ropes beneath the basket, giving the whole assemblage the same kind
of stability as a pendulum, and it seemed to him that Marcurades had also added extra fitments at the top of the pipe that carried steam to the wing impellers.
A sigh of mingled wonder and adoration rose up from the watching throngs as the machine continued its miraculous ascent into the clear blue dome of the sky. At a dizzy height above the palace, almost at the limit of Dardash’s vision, the king reached upward to operate a lever, the insubstantial disk of the wings tilted slightly, and the machine swooped out over the line of the cliffs, out over the waters of the bay.
Ecstatic cheering, great slow-pulsing billows of sound, surged back and forth like tidal currents as Marcurades—godlike in his new power—steered his machine into a series of wide sweeps far above the wave crests.
“Now,” Urtarra urged. “The time is now!”
“So be it,” Dardash said, fingering the scrap of parchment on which the spell for the kinetic sorcery was written. He uttered a single polysyllabic word and tore the parchment in two.
At that instant the sun-gleaming shape of the flying machine was checked in its course, as though it had encountered an invisible obstacle. It wavered, faltered, then began to fall.
The sound that went up from the watching multitude was a vast wordless moan of consternation and shocked disbelief. Dardash listened to it for a moment, his face impassive, and was turning away from the balcony when two things happened to petrify him in mid-stride.
Far out across the water Marcurades’s flying machine, which had been tilting over as it fell, abruptly righted itself and began to hover, neither losing nor gaining height. Simultaneously, a fierce pain lanced through Dardash’s left hand. He snatched the sensor ring off his finger and threw it to the floor, where it promptly became white-hot. Outside was a pounding silence as every one of Marcurades’s subjects, not daring to breathe, prayed for his safety.
“The king flies,” Urtarra said in a hushed voice. “He built better than you knew.”
“I don’t think so,” Dardash said grimly. “Look! The machine’s wings are scarcely turning. It should be falling!”
He strode to a chest where he had stored some of his equipment and returned with a silver hoop, which he held out at arm’s length. Viewed through the metal circle, the hovering aircraft was a blinding, sunlike source of radiance. Dardash felt the beginnings of a terrible fear.
“What does it mean?” Urtarra said. “I don’t—”
“That light is mana, the raw power behind magic.” Dardash’s throat had gone dry, thickening and deadening his voice. “Fantastic amounts of it are being expended to keep Marcurades and his machine aloft. I’ve never seen such a concentration.”
“Does that mean there’s another magician at work?”
“I wish that were all it meant,” Dardash said. He lowered the silver hoop and stared at the flickering mote that was the flying machine. It had begun to move again, slowly losing height and drifting in toward the shore, and Dardash knew with bleak certainty that aboard it was a new kind of man—one who could use mana instinctively, in tremendous quantities, to satisfy his own needs and achieve his ambitions. Marcurades could tap and squander mana resources without even being aware of what he was doing, and Dardash now fully understood why the future divined for the king had been so cataclysmic. Such power, without the discipline and self-knowledge of the traditional sorcerers, could only corrupt. The mana-assisted achievement of each ambition would inspire others, each grander and more vainglorious than the one before, and the inevitable outcome would be evil and madness.
Dardash, all too conscious of the dangerous nature of the energy behind his profession, suddenly foresaw the rise of a new kind of tyrant—the spawning of monsters so corrupted by success and ambition, believing themselves to be the fountainheads of power, that they would eventually seek to dominate the entire world, and even be prepared to see it go up in flames if their desires were thwarted.
“I forbid it,” he whispered, his fear giving way to resentment and a deep, implacable hatred. “I, Dardash, say—NO!”
He ran back to the chest, driven by the knowledge that with each passing second Marcurades was a little closer to safety, and took from it a slim black rod. The wand had no power in itself, but it served to direct and concentrate magical energies. There was an unexpected noise in the next room and, glancing through the partially open door, Dardash saw Nirrineen coming toward him. Her expression was one of childish delight, and her hands were at her throat, caressing a gold necklace.
“Look what the king has given me,” she said. “Isn’t it the most—?”
“Stay out of here,” Dardash shouted, trying to control his panic as he realized there was almost no time left in which to accomplish his purpose. He wheeled to face the balcony and the bright scene beyond it, pointed the wand, and uttered a spell he had hoped never to use, a personal sacrilege, a destructive formula that used mana to combat and neutralize mana.
The flying machine disintegrated.
Its four wings flailed and fluttered off in different directions, and from the center of the destruction the body of the machine plunged downward like a mass of lead. There was a sputtering explosion as it struck the water, then it was gone, and Marcurades was lost, and all that remained of the young king and all his ambitions were spreading ripples of water and the four slow-tumbling wings that had borne him to his death. A lone seabird shrieked in the pervading silence.
Dardash had rime for one pang of triumph, then his vision dimmed and blurred. He looked at his hands and saw that they had withered into the semblance of claws, blotched and feeble, and he understood at once that his brief battle with Marcurades had been even more destructive than he had anticipated. In that one instant of conflict every trace of mana in the entire region had been annihilated, and he, Dardash, no longer had access to the magical power that had preserved his body.
“Murderer!” Nirrineen’s voice seemed to reach him from another time, another existence. “You murdered the king!”
Dardash turned to face her. “You overestimate my powers, child,” he soothed, motioning for Urtarra to move around behind her and block the exit. “What makes you think that a humble dabbler in simple magic could ever—?”
He broke off as he saw Nirrineen’s revulsion at his appearance, evidence that more than a century of hard living had taken a dreadful toll of his face and body. Evidence, too, that a momentous event had just taken place. Evidence of his guilt.
Nirrineen shook her head, and with near-magical abruptness she was gone. Her fleeing footsteps sounded briefly and were lost in the mournful wailing that had begun to pervade the room from outside as the people of Bhitsala absorbed the realization that their king was dead.
“You should have stopped her,” Dardash said to Urtarra, too weak and tired to sound more than gently reproachful. “She has gone to fetch the palace guard, and now neither of us will ever…”
He stopped speaking as he saw that Urtarra had sunk down on a couch, hands pressed to his temples, eyes dilated with a strange horror, seeing but not seeing.
“So it has finally happened to you. Soothsayer: Now you can foresee your own death.” Dardash spoke with intuitive understanding of what was happening in Urtarra’s mind. “But do not waste what little time remains to you. Let me know that my sacrifice has not been in vain, that the whore wasn’t carrying Marcurades’s seed. Give me proof that no other mana-monsters will arise to usurp magicians and wreak their blind and ignorant havoc on the world.”
Urtarra appeared deaf to his words, but he raised one hand and pointed at the opposite wall of the room. The blue tapestries acquired a tremulous depth they had not previously possessed, came alive with images of times yet to be. The images changed rapidly, showing different places and different eras, but they had some elements in common.
Always there was fire, always there was destruction, always there was death on a scale that Dardash had never conceived.
And against those fearful backgrounds there came a procession of charismati
c, mana-rich figures. Knowledge, foreknowledge, was again vouchsafed to Dardash in wordless whispers, and unfamiliar names reverberated within his head.
Alexander…Julius Caesar…Tamburlaine…
The sky grew dark with the shadow of thousands of wings; annihilation rained from great airborne ships, creating a lurid backdrop for the strutting figure of Adolf Hitler…
Dardash covered his eyes with his hands and sank to a kneeling position, and remained that way without moving until the sound of heavy footsteps and the clatter of armor told him the palace guards had arrived. And the stroke of the sword, not long delayed, came like a kindly friend, bringing the only reward for which he retained any craving.
“Talisman”
♦
by Larry Niven and Dian Girard
The stranger swung his baggage off his horse’s back, patted the animal on the side of the neck, and handed the reins to the stable hand. Old Kasan was rarely interested in people; he barely glanced at the stranger. Slanted eyes, round face with a yellow tinge…
Kasan led the animal to an empty stall and gave it food and water. Now, the beast was a puzzler. It suffered his ministrations with an air of strained patience. Its tail ended in the kind of brush usually seen on an ass. Kasan fancied that its look was one of tolerant contempt.
“Ah, horse, you underestimate me,” Kasan said. “I won’t be tending other people’s horses forever.” Horses did not often mock Kasan’s daydreams. This one’s nicker sounded too much like a snicker. “It’s true! Someday I’ll own my own rental stable…” And Kasan fondled the beast’s ears and mane, as if to thank it for listening.