Iron Chamber of Memory

by John C. Wright

  But it would have been discourteous indeed to step away from the reception line and miss shaking hands with the royal family, and so there was no opportunity then. After, Hal had to give the toasts both sincere and risqué that followed, and at that point, the male guests all decided as a group, including the young Marquis of Carabas and the gray-haired, but grinning Duke of Devonshire, to hoist Manfred on their shoulders and haul him bodily to the honeymoon suite in the Rose Crystal Chamber, peers and lords mingling with servants and tenants unabashed, shouting ribald advice, while the ladies and their maids hurried a blushing Laurel into and through the throng, keeping pace with Manfred.

  And then it was too late. The happy mob was streaming into the upper corridor. What else could Hal have done? Could he have stepped into the cheering, riotous throng and belabored them with his walking stick? Hal thought Manfred looked a little panicked, but he remembered no reason why Manfred should be worried, not on this, his wedding day, aside from the worries every bridegroom is right to worry.

  The door to the Rose Crystal Chamber was locked, but Laurel’s mother stepped over to Hal and pushed him toward the door, and all the men cheered. Laurel said, “Allow me!” and plucked the keyring from Hal’s fingers. Again, what else was he supposed to do? Argue with the bride on her wedding day?

  The throng put Manfred down, and a dozen hands picked up Laurel and shoved her into his arms. Manfred put an arm around her shoulder and another under her knees, smiling to all his well-wishers, “The Roman and his Sabine Bride need a little privacy now, you barbarians!”

  Meanwhile she leaned from his arm, reached out with the key, and undid the lock. The well-wishers were all standing behind the happy couple on the stairs rank on rank. Hal, more by instinct than reason, tried to close the door against the laughing, raucous, joyful throng, but they came down the stairway, and it would have been easier to halt an avalanche.

  The Ill Wishers

  Then they were within the Rose Chamber, brilliantly decorated, and the cheering became a little more hoarse and sinister. Henry looked up woebegone at Laureline. Their eyes met, remembering both their constant and deep love for each other, and her look of shock and guilt. Henry knew she had recalled her attempt to have Henry murder Mandrake. Mandrake, for his part, finding himself holding a woman whom he was being forced to marry, whom he did not love, and, in fact, who had tried to kill him opened his arms and dropped her, reaching for the keyring.

  But the roaring mob, looking rather more shaggy than they should have, with green eyes that glowed like the eyes of wolves, called out in gruff and hoarse voices. The Duke of Devonshire, gray and lean like a famished wolf, and the Count of Carabas, grinning like a panther, heard the Countess Margaret shout out a command, and the two grabbed Mandrake roughly by his arms. Laureline’s blue-dressed maids of honor, her sisters, had grown strangely more beautiful and alluring than they had appeared even a moment before, and now moved with a sinuous, boneless grace, like undersea creatures, and one of them picked up the keyring and returned it to Laureline before Henry could move.

  Henry was taken roughly by the shoulder by Laureline’s mother, Ran du Lac. The old woman seemed to have miraculously put on about one hundred pounds of blubber and fat, and turned her skin an unhealthy shade of pale green, her teeth to iron, and her scent to the rotting odor of old fish. Henry stared in bewilderment, aghast. Another young thug in a tuxedo seized his elbow, and one particularly shaggy-looking farmlad from the village bit his wrist and pried his walking stick from his hand.

  In a moment, cursing and struggling, the throng moved around the spiral curve, and Laureline had worked the lock to the silver hexagonal portal. Into the wall it slid, allowing light and music to escape.

  A Rout of Monsters

  With roars, shouts, howls, and yips of excitement, the throng of people shoved themselves into the chamber, dragging Manfred with them, and then the talking animals, walking mermaids, lamia, man-eaters, ghouls and witches, their apparel glistering, and making a riotous and unruly noise. They threw down the bridegroom Mandragora, and bound him fast with chains.

  The bride’s mother was now a four-hundred-pound toad-like thing with a gaping mouth full of jagged teeth like a shark. Her three sisters from Germany were singing and swaying on the surface of the waters, creatures of appalling loveliness, but with eyes devoid of humanity or pity.

  The bride now threw aside the veil, and unfurled her dark and swanlike wings. “Oh, my beloved! Shall I not couch with you this day?” And her sisters stripped the bridal dress from her, and the bride in mockery lay down and wound her white arms and legs like snakes around the bound and helpless Mandragora, and she bit his neck and licked his blood.

  Henry Landfall was pulled over the threshold easily, but Henwas Lanval, champion of Camelot, was not so easily taken. He threw the monsters from his arms, which now were garbed in mail, and smote a beast who tried to bite his neck, but was now protected by the aventail of his winged helm. He fell upon the talking beast who had taken his sword, grabbed its snapping jaws with both gauntlets, put his knee against its back, and reared and broke the vile creature’s spine.

  The sword was in his hand, and the first wolf-faced monster who staggered back, blinking and blinded, died from a blow through heart and lungs, that also cut the gargoyle standing directly behind. Blood splashed across the white surcoat, and stained the proud ermine there, warm and glorious.

  Over the screams and shrieks and roars of the beast-men and the blasphemies of the magicians, Lanval cried out the name of Arthur, and took a step, sweeping the blazing blade in a mighty sweep to the left. Paws and claws and tentacles and heads, human and inhuman, were swept away in a prodigious spray of blood, as the magic sword parted flesh and bone. He swung the other way, and men with the heads of hippogriffs and wolves, and rodents, and bears and all the vermin that prey on man or his livestock, were severed from their bodies. He drove the blade up to its hilt into the throat of the Duke of Devonshire, a corpse-mage who had used his own dark magic to raise himself back from the dead into hideous mockery of life. Lanval laughed the laugh of madness. No one else in the chamber was armed, no one else was armored. With his back to the door, he could slay as he willed, like Arthur himself that glorious, red day at Badon Hill!

  With a mighty swing he decapitated the catlike and inhuman head of the Count of Carabas, but the head rolled rapidly away, eyes blazing brightly, yowling for help.

  And those yowls were answered. Up from the pool in the center of the chamber stood the pale and grim prince in his black armor and blacker crown. He spread his vast wings of membrane, and spoke a word of blasphemy, so that all in the chamber were thrown to their knees or hindlegs, save only Lanval.

  The Dark Prince pointed one long white finger at Mandragora. Lorelei had an athame, a witch’s knife, driven a quarter-inch into Mandragora’s neck. The Dark Prince said in a bloodless voice, “Throw down your sword and surrender, and I promise you will pass freely from this chamber.”

  A small voice inside him told him not to listen, but the mother of the bride reached into Mandragora’s mouth with a pair of scissors, and cut his tongue out. The sight was so horrific that Lanval was drained of strength. He presented his sword to a gargoyle with the head of a bat.

  Nine monsters grabbed Lanval, forcing him to the ground. Quickly chains were twined around his arms and wrists, legs and ankles. A baboon-creature bit through the leathern straps and yanked his helmet off, and seized his hair in its stinking paws. The baboon pounded Lanval’s face into the floor over and over again, breaking his nose and dislocating his jaw.

  The bat thing proffered the great sword to the Dark Prince, who took it in hand. There was a hiss as the grip of the sword burned the unholy hand of that prince, but the gaunt man neither winced nor cried out. The light of the blade died, and the metal turned black.

  Next, without a word, without a sign of remorse, the Dark Prince stepped over to where Mandragora was chained and tongueless and helpless, and drove the
sword into the intestines of the wonder worker, and upward into his vitals.

  Lorelei released the chained man, her fingers trembling before her mouth, her eyes wide, shocked. “No!” she cried.

  Blood and offal and the fluids from other organs gushed out. The tongueless, inarticulate and lingering scream of Mandragora was horrible beyond description.

  And the cry went on and on and on. Lanval forced his head backward against the grip of the baboon-thing. The flesh around his eyes had begun to swell, but he could blink through his own blood to see what was happening to his friend.

  A minute passed, and then two, and still Mandragora did not die. A voluminous wash of red blood like an apron poured out of his opened stomach, over his legs, and into the lotus pool, and more blood poured out, and more, and still it did not cease to pour. Mandragora cried out again, but then closed his jaws, and hissed, and ceased from crying. Instead, jaws clenched shut, he stared at the Dark Prince unblinkingly, his face expressionless.

  The Dark Prince said, “Did you say no to me, my pet?”

  Lorelei’s eyes were round with panic. “Indeed not, Master! I was cheering for you!”

  “Women are weak weapons. You always fall in love with those you lure.”

  “Not so, dread and dreaded Master! My heart is cold and dead!”

  “Bah! A woman’s heart. Turn him prone.”

  Lorelei, with shrill little grunts of effort, receiving no help from any in that chamber, managed to roll the chained body of her husband onto his face. She pointed to the wedding band, gleaming like the sun. “My master, he wears the Ring of Youth, which restores all wounds. While he wears it, he cannot die, and I cannot be mistress here, and all of what is his be mine. Unchain the hand!”

  Mandragora was roughly pulled by two large wolfish animals into a sitting position, his intestines in his lap, and his left hand, the one that bore the ring, behind him. Each monster in the chamber took its turn trying to pull the ring off his finger. It would not move.

  The Dark Prince said, “Larger than they seem are all such rings, for the weight of worlds is held in little things. It must come willingly from his finger, or not at all.”

  Lorelei said, “What shall we do? His blood is sacred while he wears that ring, and may counteract the poisons you have spread into the pool, my Master.”

  He pointed at Lanval. “Sever the hand of the knight and bring it here!”

  A creature with the head of a boar said, “He is armored by the Brisings’ lore. No weapon of ours will bite.”

  But Lorelei said, “Galatine will cut him. For me, for my sake, he, willing himself woe, sought to end his life. That a miracle preserved him is not to his credit: the sin makes his armor unwhole.”

  The Dark Prince took the sword, and stepped over to Lanval, while the baboon pinned Lanval’s chained hands to the floor. Lanval jerked his arms when the Dark Prince swung, and shoved the baboon’s skull into the path of the descending blade. The head of the baboon burst into flame, and fire gushed from its mouth and eye-holes, and the body danced and twitched and died. Lanval smiled.

  The blade did not want to cut him. Sometimes the blade turned sideways in the grip of the Dark Prince, and sometimes it missed and struck the chain, and twice more Lanval, in his wild struggle and his fury, managed to wrestle some hapless creature of the many holding him down into the way, so that they were struck instead. But the Dark Prince neither smiled nor grew tired, and his spirit was greater than the spirit in the darkened blade, and at last the thing was done, the blade cut through wrist bones and blood and flesh and rang against the floorstones beneath. Blood spurted, bright and red, from the veins in Lanval’s stump.

  The Dark Prince lightly tossed the severed hand onto the bloody mess that was the lap of Mandragora. “Place the ring on the finger of Sir Lanval, and his life will be saved, your own forfeit. Or keep your hand closed, and watch him die, and endure now and always an eternal pain like your master, the Fisher King. Slaves! Pull Lanval to the lip of the pool, and let the blood from his wound pour in and pollute it. We shall watch as Mandragora watches him die.”

  The creatures pulled Lanval to the pool’s edge. He was directly across the chamber from Mandragora, and rough hands and crooked claws pulled the lolling head of Mandragora upright, so he had an unobstructed view of Lanval. Oddly, Lorelei was kneeling next to Mandragora, both her hands on his shoulder, looking at him anxiously.

  Lanval said, “Don’t do it! In the name of God and Christ, do not let them prevail!”

  As a cruel sport, and to silence his cry, the monsters held Lanval’s face beneath the water for short, and then longer periods, until he breathed water into his lungs. This made his heart race, and the rush of blood from his stump grew faster and stronger as his skin turned pale and more pale.

  There came a roar of triumph from the chamber. The monsters and abominations all began cavorting, and the lamia and lilim began to sing. Through the haze of blood in his eyes and bloodloss in his veins, through the reddish waters and his swollen eye-bruises, Lanval squinted and saw Mandragora, quite dead, and the Ring of Youth thrust onto his own severed hand, which lay upon the floor.

  A beast had taken up Galatine, its blade as black as mourning weeds, and thrust it through the breast and heart of Mandragora, until an inch protruded out his back and scraped against the floor.

  Then the eyes of Lanval went dark, and his soul was not in his body.

  Birds and wolves were tearing strips of flesh from the face and body of Mandragora. Lorelei, next to the still-warm and bloody corpse of her husband, had her hands in her face, her shoulders shaking, and next to her, taller than a man, the Dark Prince loomed, staring down at her. For the first time, his face showed expression, a hatred and jealousy that stretched his mouth and narrowed his eyes, and made all the muscles in his jaws twitch horribly. He was biting his own tongue for spite, and the tongue tip was writhing between his teeth like a dying worm. The small voice in his heart told Lanval that the Dark Prince hated with a bitter hatred the fact that when he died, all his slaves and serving women would cheer. Ran, the mother of the bride, was crouched like a shapeless vast toad at the feet of the Dark Prince, and, like him, was ignoring the celebrations and howls of victory, and watching Lorelei.

  As she knelt, weeping, her tears hot on her peerless cheeks, cheeks he had kissed so many times, Lorelei let out a sudden high, sharp cry. Without any other fanfare, her black wings fell from her back, disintegrated into a cloud of feathers, each of which floated gently to the ground.

  “Let her be killed, O Master,” the bitter old green-faced hag croaked and pointed at the now-wingless form of her daughter. “Some enchantment in this house has replaced her heart of stone with a heart of pink and girlish flesh.”

  Lanval heard over the noise and commotion, for he opened his eyes, and found himself, not chained and maimed with his head in the pool, not with a dozen creatures on his back (he could see his old body across the chamber, motionless) but instead inside a new body, his flesh pink and uncalloused, untouched by sun or time, which had grown on the instant out from the hand no longer severed. On his finger gleamed the Ring of Youth.

  He stood, even while the commotion of beasts and warlocks were calling out, “Hurray! Hurray! Our bride is made the mistress of this house this day!” Here was the sword Galatine. He plucked it out of the breast of Mandragora, and shouted as the light of thirty torches exploded from the blade. While the Dark Prince glared and blinked, and the obscene obesity of Ran clutched her blinded eyes and screamed, Lanval plunged the sword first into him, and then into her, killing them both stone-dead in the blink of an eye.

  The monsters in the chamber, taken unawares in the middle of their cavorting celebration, screamed and yowled. Yet more than half were shouting still in triumph, unable to hear the warning cries of their fellows. They had not seen their tall Master die.

  A white dove landed on the naked shoulder of Lanval. “Do not forget your Lord nor your promise! You are not here to sla
y, but to unlock the inmost truth.”

  “The key! Where is it?”

  He knew where it was. He reached down and took the necklace from between the breasts of Lorelei. She did not resist, nor did the chain, for the cunning of the dwarfish craftsmen made the catch come open at his touch, and the keyring dwindled and hidden inside the reflections of the gem popped out into the solid world, and jumped into his hand.

  The dove flew up, and to the left. Lanval followed, striking down any pale-face witch or wolf-toothed talking animal who rose to stop him. He threw aside a large and silver looking glass where the dove landed and pecked. Behind was a door as black as night, eight-sided, and midmost was an image of a flower of six petals, painted red. Beneath the flower was a lock and ring. He inserted the key and twisted, and sheathed the sword, pulling on the ring with both hands.

  He could see nothing before him. All was black without any sight or sound. But behind him was the smell of blood, the sound of a weeping girl, and the roar of monsters.

  “Behold the Black Iron Moly Chamber,” said the dove.

  In he leaped.

  15. The Place Beyond Falsehood

  The Life Beyond Life

  Harry could see nothing, nothing at all, except the whiteness of a small shape he realized must be the dove, and yet, he could feel the peace that extended from it, shining upon his soul, as one might feel the rays of the noonday sun. The bird was growing larger, glowing. It had become a being of light, larger than a man, larger than an elephant, perhaps larger than the universe, and it flew ahead of him, urging him to follow.

  They passed down a colonnade of tall, pointed arches.

  He heard the sound of rushing waters before him and behind, and the sound was like that of one of the great sea caves hidden below the island, but somehow he knew this was much larger. Once only he turned and looked back, and saw a small round chamber that seemed to be orbs within an orb, the outer layer covered with stars like the robes of Mandragora, and the inner layers each lit with its own small lamp, one glass sphere within another, and a tiny dot of blue at the very center, smaller than a doll’s house.