Chieftain of Andor

by Andrew J Offutt

  And the Morgrof of Elgain watched her.

  A girl twining sinuously at his feet caressed his ankle with soft hands. After a time he glanced down at her with a little frown. She lay half on her back, displaying most of her white self in a mulberry-colored gown cut low at the bodice and high on the thigh. She smiled up at him.

  “You see neither the dancer nor me, my lord,” she said in a calculatedly husky voice. “Both of us should be enraged. Instead, we are desolated.”

  “Who could overlook either of you, Losane?” Andrah said, bending a little to stroke her hair.

  She thrust out her lower lip and rolled her eyes beneath their purple-painted lids. “Ah, mere chivalry, my lord, and transparent, too! Ye’ve eyes for none but that thin Witch of Khoramor! Does she indeed possess hips and bosom, one wonders?” And Losane displayed her own with justifiable pride. No second glance was necessary to prove their presence.

  “I — I was watching her brother’s game,” Andrah began weakly, and the girl at his feet chuckled.

  “Oh, my lord! What of our land when the morgrof will not speak true even to a pleasuremaiden! Tsk!” She pursed her lips prettily; they were dyed to match her eyelids. “Never have I understood my betters. My lord sits there, watching her … she is at the far end of the room … and watching you!”

  “Oh, she’s not — ” But as Andrah looked, he caught Shansi jerking her head away. His arms tingled and he felt suddenly overwarm; she had been watching him, furtively, while he looked elsewhere!

  The couchgirl chuckled again. “Eh? Eh, my lord?” She shook her sleek head. “The nobility! Were ye of less birth, either of ye, ye’d already have left this noisy place to tryst somewhere darker and more quiet! Why, my lord — ye seem surprised. Is it possible the morgrof knows not what we all know? — that the Khoramor Shansi is struck to the heart with you, and hardly able to keep her eyes from your face or your name from her lips? Why, ’tis only her pride and station, my lord, and the recent trouble betwixt yourself and her brother — these are all that keep her from laying herself at your feet!”

  Andrah gazed down at the girl. Slowly he raised his head to stare down the hall at Shansi. Absently, he reached for his goblet. Smiling, the pleasuremaiden Losane guided the cup into his hand, noting the tremble of his fingers.

  Later, while the Morgrof of Elgain lay alone on his pallet, gazing at the ceiling of his huge — and lonely — bedchamber, the couchgirl Losane smiled again as the so-slender woman in the hooded, unmarked cloak clinked one, two, three silver stolars into her palm.

  5 - The Witch of Khoramor

  The planets move; the suns move; the galaxies move. The universe moves, its origin unknown, its destination unfathomable. Whence came it and its galaxies and suns and planets and satellites? Where go they, on their constant journey through space inconceivably vast?

  Where have they been, the countless planets revolving about the countless suns in the — countless? — galaxies in the universe — universes?

  Perhaps Daron, or God, or Allah, or Yahweh — perhaps He knows. Perhaps.

  The Earth, Gordon had told Robert Cleve on Earth, had passed with its neighbors once and perhaps more than once through an enigmatical zone. A zone in which the laws of cause and effect were suspended; in which that which could be dreamed might happen, in which Aristotelian logic — A is A — did not hold immutable and unchallenged sway. A zone in which nothing was necessarily true; nothing necessarily followed. During that time locusts fell from the sky like rain, and wooden staffs became writhing serpents, and the Nile ran red. During that time a bush burned, but was not burned, and perhaps a voice issued from it. During that time the Reed Sea was parted or stricken arid, and the folk hero Moses led his fleeing followers across. There was magic in the world, and spells, and divination and conjuration: miracles. Magic and sorcery, witches and warlocks and magi and diviners had existed on Earth. Perhaps more than once.

  Then the Earth and its neighbors had passed on, moving on in their interminable journey, and again there had been Natural Law.

  Sorcery existed now, Gordon told Robert Cleve, on the far, far planet its inhabitants called Andor. Witches cast their spells — graems — and the spells took effect Fire revealed answers and pictures. Smoke congealed, took palpable forms. Words became incantations, and incantations became conjuries, and conjuries became fact.

  There were enchantresses on Andor, Gordon told Cleve. Sorcerers and sorcery. And they ensorceled. Believe, Gordon told Cleve, and fear them. If you find a witch against you, beware her. If a witch befriends you, accept her friendship willingly and gratefully. Cultivate her. Only witches can fight witches, Gordon told him, with certainty of success.

  Robert Cleve was forced to believe that there was a world called Andor, that there lived a man named Doralan Andrah. And that the nameless organization on Earth, with which the bespectacled man called Gordon was his only contact, was in contact, too, with Andor. He was forced to believe that the brain of a man from Earth could be transferred across the airless parsecs to Andor — and retain the Andorite’s memories.

  These things he was forced to believe, because he was here, on Andor, and he was Robert Cleve — and Doralan Andrah.

  Doralan Andrah believed in witches, and the Other-world, and enchantment and the Starpowered Ones and their graems. And so believed all his fellows.

  But Robert Cleve was of Earth. Worse, he was of America, where belief in magic is laughed at and sneered at, save only in church and on Wall Street. Despite all Gordon had said, despite all he had seen and heard here, despite the beliefs of his peers and of the memories he now possessed, Doralan Andrah’s memories, Cleve found it most difficult to accept witches and witchery. Certainly, miracles were possible — all that was needed was belief and a project not too impossible. With belief, one could be cured of nearly anything, achieve anything. But … spells? Fire and candle and blood, fingernails and hairs and darkly murmured words, waving hands and wraithy creatures from some shadowy Otherworld?

  No, this was too much.

  Thus he believed that Ledni believed in her power, his childhood friend, tomboyish Starinor Ledni. And Shansi? He was not so certain about Khoramor Shansi. She was, he was sure, a very intelligent woman in her early twenties — and his Earth-American mind told him that no intelligent person could truly believe in the things of which Grimm and Andersen had written.

  She was fascinating, a word that appears among the synonyms for sorcerous. She would not leave his thoughts, she and those strange, jungle-cat eyes, the rich mahogany hair, the high cheekbones above model-gaunt cheeks; that wide, thin-lipped mouth that seemed to beckon his kisses, promising to flower beneath his lips. The lissome body, so slim and yet so graceful, so womanly with its svelte, swaying hips and flowing walk — that, too, beckoned, with a call more ancient than any monument on Andor or on Earth. There was a tightness in his flat belly, a dryness in his throat, a throb at his temples, an ache in his thighs. When she was not present his eyes searched for her. When she was, he strove to keep his gaze from her, fighting himself. And he lost battle after battle.

  The thought never occurred to him that there was a word on Earth for the mental-physical attraction he felt; a word in songs and books and poems.

  Bewitched.

  So it was that Ledni of Starinor wept and loved and spelled her spells; and hoped, and murmured, and watched, ever she watched. In despair. In vain. But with hope yet: Shansi possessed things of him, but she possessed nothing of himself that he had given her.

  But still Ledni strove in vain.

  For it happened, somehow, that the night was dark and redolent of a thousand natural perfumes, that the room was darkened and beautiful with draperies and carven panels, and alive with the mingled scents of many flowers and incense and a perfume of necromantic creation and enchanting power. And he was there, and she was there: Doralan Andrah, Morgrof of Elgain, and Shansi, enchantress of Clan Khoramor. The gown she wore was a clinging caress of wispy aquamarine on her sl
enderness. Her hair was loose, a pearl-strewn, sheening mass about her pale shoulders and pale face with its golden-green eyes. The wine was unwatered, the divan too near, her svelte hips and silken-clad thighs irresistible.

  Then his harness and red robe and her gown were forlorn together on the floor, and the candles burned low, flickering over the twining limbs on the pillow-strewn couch. She tasted his wand of masculine magic, and he delved deep into the arcane body of witchcraft. The candles burned still lower, and he slept. But Shansi slept not. Some strange dust from a concealed pocket pouch sparkled in the air above the candles, and their flame changed. He slept more deeply, alone on the couch, asleep, and his harness was now alone on the floor.

  In the corridor without, the giant warrior Stek looked up as the paneled door opened softly. He gazed at her without friendliness, knowing only a part of what had occurred within his lord’s apartment. And she gazed back with eyes of green and gold, smiling and murmuring, and soon Stek was asleep. She fled them, carefully, on feet that scarce touched the palace floors. She left the palace, walking carefully, guarding closely and carefully and delightedly the gift Andrah had given her, willingly; something of himself.

  Soon she was naked again and seated cross-legged before her blue-writhing witchfire. She murmured, she gestured, weaving her graem.

  And in another place:

  Ledni, Witch of Starinor, started up gasping from her own fire, staring at the flame picture before her. Unheeded were her woman’s tears at the kisses she’d seen; now her face bore a mask of horror. But it was as a witch rather than as a woman that she cried:

  “No! No, Ando! Don’t! You’re giving her — ”

  But he did, thoughtlessly, and she saw him fall into a sleep first natural and then enchanted by Shansi’s power. She saw Shansi leave him there, guarding well the precious gift Doralan Andrah had given her of himself, transferring it from his body to hers. Then the fire darkened, and Ledni knew that Shansi’s work had begun, for Ledni was unable to see into Shansi’s keep.

  Ledni swung a cloak about herself and fled into the night.

  As the morgrof slept, as his giant guardian slept, so slept the palace, now, enveloped by a strange, clinging mist. In the innermost chamber of her very private keep within the city of Mor, the Witch of Khoramor sat cross-legged on the floor before her fire, naked and pale, for witches practice their craft not in peaked hats and black robes but with both mind and body open and unadorned. Into the flame she dashed the small sponge containing his gift. The fire hissed and whooshed and leaped high and poured smoke upward to the ceiling. It writhed, that smoke of virulent ensorcelment, thick and coppery, and it formed, slowly, coalescing as if shaped by the hands of an invisible sculptor. It swirled into legs, and arms, and a torso, and a head with a warrior’s club of hair on its back.

  Shansi looked up at the image.

  “You are not of this place,” she whispered, for so she had learned, and her lips barely moved. “You are not Doralan Andrah. Return … return … Many times she repeated the word, but nothing happened; the specter would not depart. She frowned. “Very well. If ye’ll not return then, whence ye came, hear these words as ye sleep, and obey them: Become who you are, what you are. That and naught else. Forget all else save who ye truly be, in that other place and that other life. Doralan Andrah’s mind and memories are not yours, thief … return them to him!”

  And she clapped her hands, calling a name. The coppery smoke-image collapsed in upon itself and swirled and vanished, vanished without drifting away. New smoke crawled up the wall from the witchfire. It rose up and darkened, growing darker and darker until it was an unreflecting, impenetrable black. Again it formed, and this time red eyes stared at their invoker from its writhing depths, eyes that glowed and flashed and spoke pure malignance.

  “Stek will remember nothing,” Shansi said, and the Otherworld eyes blinked, a headless nod. “We will cast the black mantle of guilt over his shoulders. But these menace, and must be final — three who have aided me and must have ever-silent tongues, and one who is my deadliest enemy. These are their names: enasoL, and haruJ and hanroB, and” — her lip twisted, her eyes glittered — “and indeL! Go!”

  Again the eyes blinked. The shadowy smoke-image flowed out the door, beneath it, and Shansi sat alone, waiting, smiling. Then she rose and called to two strong men who feared her power — and with just cause. Their names were Jurah and Bornah, and while they were on her orders they were safe from Otherworld powers.

  *

  The couchgirl Losane swept with her little smile from the privatemost chamber of the new Watch Commander of Mor, swinging her dark cloak about herself. Nestled against her soft belly as she hurried along the left bank of the river bisecting Mor — indeed, the city had grown up along first one, then the opposite bank of the River Sky — was the warming chill of good silver coin. She had it snuggled comfortingly to her, above her tight-drawn cincture. Fog swirled about her ankles and paled the moon’s light as she hurried along Sky River’s left bank.

  She chuckled.

  She had come far, from the squalor into which she had been born. Sold into slavery by her father that he and his wife might eat, she had been brought to Mor and, though ill-used, never beaten. Fortunately for her; for Daron, lover of beauty, had smiled upon her and given her the face and body he loved to look down upon. One of Thran’s men had brought her to the palace, and her living standards had risen again. Then she had met the Starpowered Khoramor, and carried out her mission at the banquet, receiving three silver stolars from the Khoramor witch’s own slim hand. With these she’d bought perfume still more costly, raiment still more diaphanous and thus more costly, spun by the red spiders of Rivshar, and jewelry more ladylike and eye-catching than her couchgirl’s bells. Now she was in her own element, and well on her way to making knees bend. The Watch commander was a simple matter. And not ungenerous.

  Next she would —

  The fog seemed to thicken, to darken, to tighten about her. It pressed her body, clouded her eyes, cloyed her nostrils. Suddenly she found that her feet would no longer move, nor could she raise her smoke-imprisoned hands to tear at the smoky cage about her head. She screamed, but the sound carried to no ears other than her own, and as she drew a deep breath she took in only the air she had expelled in the futile shriek. The fog had become dark smoke, tight about her as hostile arms. Her air grew more stale with each desperate breath. It was the fog, the smoke, become an impermeable cage, a shield about her, admitting no air and allowing no sound to escape.

  The hopes of the couchgirl Losane fled with her beauty, as her eyes popped wide and wider and her tongue jabbed far out, quivering from her gaping mouth, seeking the air that was no longer there. The bosom with which Daron had been generous and with which Losane had been equally generous ceased to move. And then her life fled, her spirit journeying to Daron to be returned to Andor again in a body less lovely, and the shadow-thing swirled away on another mission as the couchgirl Losane slumped into Sky River with a muffled splash.

  The Watch commander of Mor was stricken for days and unhappy for a week. Then he found another daughter of Daron eager for success, and he thought no more of Losane, ever.

  *

  In the corridor outside his lord’s room Stek the Strong slid down the wall, tilted, and eased sideways onto the floor. His snoring was not disturbed by the passage of the two patchless men, both armed and cloaked, who entered the room of the sleeping Morgrof of Elgain. They were steering his naked, cloak-swathed form through the door when the Witch of Starinor, her dark eyes streaming tears that glistened on her face, stepped before them. Her Starinor-patched cloak swirled.

  “I am Ledni, Witch of Starinor,” she said, in a sob-choked voice. “Return him to his bed, on pain of demon-death!”

  They blanched and nearly dropped their deep-sleeping burden. But they backed, and then swung again toward Andrah’s couch to return him to its rumpled fabrics. The little cry at the doorway made them look again at her, and t
heir faces went still whiter.

  She struggled in the writhing, tentacular grip of a great cloud of dark smoke. Her lips moved rapidly, summoning aid from its own world. It was not bravery moved the man holding Andrah’s feet; the smoke-thing attacked Ledni of Starinor, and must thus emanate from his mistress Shansi; it did not want him, its ally. He moved swiftly. His dagger wheeped from its sheath to glitter a moment in the waning candlelight of Andrah’s bedchamber. Then it swung down. Inches of icy steel slid into Ledni’s body, just between the wide-set little apples of her diminutive bosom. The smoke cloud swirled away as she sank down.

  They left her there, lying half across the still-snoring Stek and bleeding on his huge calf. The man whose dagger it was, was no fool, else Shansi would not have recruited him. He bent and appropriated Stek’s dagger, sheathing it at his own hip. Then he withdrew his smeary blade from the girl and slid it beneath Stek’s hand.

  They carried their cloak-muffled burden down to the river, there stretched it on the waiting raft, taking back the mantle so that the sleeping morgrof was nude. They stood on the bank, near the golden-eyed woman in the gently flapping purple cloak, watching as the Morgrof of Elgain floated away, through the city and from it, southward on the ever-widening Sky River, whose southern mouth none had ever seen.

  They turned then to receive from their Starpowered employer their reward. She gave it not; they received it from the swirling black cloud-fingers of her demon, and she watched and waited until their bodies plop-plopped into the river to join Losane.

  Alone with her knowledge, Shansi, Witch of Khoramor, turned and walked back to her fire. She had done much; she was exhausted; there remained yet much to do.

  PART II

  Robert Cleve