The thought was like a slap in the face, and Magnus bent his will to dispelling the glamour, to seeing things as they truly were. For a moment, he saw bare walls decked with old spiderwebs, a floor strewn with refuse about a rotting straw pallet-and the most hideous crone he could ever have imagined. Only a few white hairs strayed over a nearly bald and liver-spotted scalp; a huge bent nose protruded from a mass of warts with two malevolent yellow eyes; the skin sagged, almost hiding a gash of mouth that opened, showing two rotting teeth and crooning, in a voice like a rusty gate, "Nay, dream ... dream ... forget this nightmare vision, for there is naught of the real about it.... Come back to the truth, to the actual, to the vision of my pleasures, my treasure. . . ."
The rusty gate was suddenly transformed into a thrush's song, low and melodious, husky and thick with desire, and the beautiful woman was back, the tapestries glowing behind her, writhing as they enacted the pleasures they showed, and she was stripped to the waist, a vision of earthly delights, beginning to unfasten her skirt as she crooned, "Oh, I love thee! Oh, I ache for thee! Come, caress me, my treasure!"
But Magnus, with the sensitivity of a lifetime's training, was aware of a mind sliding around his own, seeking the entry he had given it, then denied it, probing, finding the crack of desire in his shield, pressing against it, pushing and tickling at his mind. He was breathless for a moment, amazed at the skill it revealed, for he could tell that her mind was no match for his own in sheer power--
But far greater than his, in dexterity, born of long practice. How many young men had she bent to her will, to have become so proficient at it?
What did she want of him?
"Only the pleasure that you seek to give me." The skirt came away; there was no other garment beneath it, and her body swayed against his. "Come, my love. I am open to thee; I ache for thee! Come!"
"Nay," Magnus grated, and with a wrench of his will, he saw the room as it really was again, saw the naked, filthy hag who pressed against him, and recoiled from her in revulsion.
Then the enchanted room was back, and the woman was young, beautiful, and sensuous once more. There was sunlight behind her now, from a window high above, turning her silken hair into a flame of gold. "Come," she breathed, eyes devouring his, fingers plucking at his breeches. "Have at me!" And her head tilted back, eyes closing, lips parting....
A flash of memory of that slash of mouth, with its rotten teeth, made Magnus recoil again ... but the memory was quickly smothered with the sight of her, proud and glorious and longing, standing full in a sunbeam, and his body clamored for her with an intensity that was sickening. She smiled, beckoning, and almost against his will, he felt himself stepping toward her with slow, dragging steps, reaching out to touch her perfect skin, head bending over hers, lips parting....
He forced out the single syllable, thwarted longing shaping it to a groan: "No!"
"Thou canst not mean no." Tears filled those huge, wondrous, violet eyes, filled and overflowed; the beautiful head bowed, shoulders heaving with sobs. "Oh, thou wilt not leave me forlorn!"
Guilt seized him, and shame at making a woman weep; pity filled him, and he reached out to gather her close, to comfort her, to press her to him in the golden rays of the setting sun that seemed to set both of them aflame with desire, gilding the huge expanse of snowy feather bed, and he felt his need for her rising, filling him, a physical pain within him.
But the thought of pain reminded him of the tapestries. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at them, and recoiled with a gasp of horror.
Suddenly, the tapestries were gone, and the cobwebbed walls were all that were there behind the naked hag who stood before him, screaming, "Fool!" Oblivious of her nudity, she howled, "Villain! Vile miscreant! Travesty of a man! If thou wilt not take what is offered thee, become what thou art-the lowest of the low!" Her hands snapped out; he felt her will compelling his own as her eyes seemed to swell, swallowing him, dragging him into the dreadful, bloodshot, yellow gleam, and he felt himself dwindling, growing slack, falling to his knees, till he writhed on the floor.
"Be the serpent thou art," she hissed, malicious satisfaction in her eyes, "and shalt be evermore."
He strained against the compulsion, but again, the touch of an expert had bound him, constrained him; he knew she had only convinced him he was a snake, that physically he was still every bit the man he had been-but his subconcious knew differently. It was now convinced of his snakehood as completely as it had once been certain of his humanity; she had bound him within his own skull, far more expertly than anyone he had ever met, and he could no more throw off that conviction than he could leap to the moon unaided.
"Away," she hissed, lips curving with cruel satisfaction, and he felt himself rising, lifting, up off the floor and to the stairwell. He writhed and strained against the compulsionbut only felt his body whipping about like a snake's. She crowed with delight, and followed him down the spiral stair-down, down, and down, then out into the dusk, for night was falling again.
A hundred yards from her tower, he felt his body drift to the ground at the foot of a huge old oak-and, suddenly, whip itself about, curving against the bark.
"There shalt thou stay," the hag grated, "warding that tree from harm, till death take thee-and thy bones shall assure all who come nigh that they must do the bidding of the Hag of the Tower!"
She turned away, and Magnus stared after, at the sagging, mottled flesh and gaunt shanks, realizing that the musicrock's song had been a warning, that he should have heeded it more closely. . . .
How had it ended?
He strove to remember, but had only a fleeting notion that the youth had escaped the fate the witch had bound him toand he had the vagrant dread that if he looked, he might find the skeletons of other young men bound around tree trunks nearby. The music, he thought desperately-maybe the song would tell him the means of escape! He listened, yearning, but the only sound was the wind. Even the birds would not sing so close to the witch's lair; no doubt they shied away from the miasma of her malice. And certainly the musicrocks had been stilled by her rage.
Magnus slithered against the bark of the tree, knowing for the first time in his life what was meant by the word "despair."
At sunset, Rod came to a village in a small valley. Smoke from cook-fires drifted up into a clear sky; peasant men were making their way out into the fields, sickles in their hands, to gather in the last of the crop.
It was very quiet.
Rod frowned; this was wrong. Peasant farm laborers should have been singing as they went out to the fields, as they did in the rest of Gramarye. Granted, it was chill in autumn; their breath steamed, and they wore heavy woolen tunics; but even so, the peasants of Gramarye laughed and jested as they went to their work, and sang as they reaped. Their wives sang, too, as they went about their work-and the children chanted rhymes over their games.
But no one sang in this town.
Rod looked up at the sun, and saw the silhouette of a dark tower against it, at the top of a ridge. The local lordling? A tyrant, crueler than most? Could that be the cause of the silence?
One way to find out. He rode down into the town.
The peasants drew back at sight of him, and the whisper ran. "A knight! A knight!"
Rod frowned. Was a knight so strange a sight here? Well, he'd have to ask. But as he rode toward a housewife, she looked up in alarm, called her children to her, and shooed them into the house.
Well! Rod had heard of peasant mothers telling their nubile daughters to turn their faces to the wall when the gentlemen passed by-but not their toddlers! He turned to an old man who was shuffling along the single street. "Good day, gaffer!"
The man looked up at him warily. "What wouldst thou wi' me, sir knight?"
"Am I so strange a sight? Are knights so rare here?"
The old man launched into a windy and elaborate answer obviously disguised to hide the facts, but Rod was adept at extracting sense from circumlocutions, and ascertained that ye
s, knights were that rare-even the local baron visited only once a year, with all his men. Otherwise, he stayed away, for fear of the witch in the tower, and his bailiff came with a very strong guard only once a month. Other than that, there were never any knights who came this way, except for the very occasional wanderer who rode on up the trail to the tower-and was never seen again.
Rod frowned. "What's so bad about this witch? Is she that cruel?"
The old man explained that, yes, she was, and went on in some detail. When he was done, Rod rode on up the trail in his own turn, face set in very grim lines, resolved to rid the peasants of the hag's tyranny-and very much afraid for his son.
3
What do you do when you're a snake?
Of course, Magnus's options were rather limited-he was bound to the tree by the same sort of subconscious compulsion that had him convinced he was a serpent. If he tried to slither away, he found himself moving counterclockwise, around the base of the trunk-and if he wanted to move clockwise, he had to squirm backwards. It struck him as ominous that the only direction he could go, forward, was widdershins, opposite to the direction of the sun's path; surely that was strengthening the spell, driving it deeper into his subconscious by use of a direction associated with magic.
In a word, he was stuck. What had he done to deserve it? Nothing, except dream about women-and refuse the blandishments of a female. He had taken no action to hurt her; he had only preserved his own integrity, and kept himself from being used and eventually degraded (if the tapestry was any guide to her future plans) by saying "no."
How to escape?
He couldn't think of any way out except-and it galled him to admit it---to call for help. If anyone could help him, which for some reason, he doubted. Probably a subconscious command the witch had left-but there it was.
Still, it was worth a try. Who could he call? His mother and father, of course, but he winced at the indignity of calling on his mother at his age. And it would be just as bad calling his teenaged brothers, and Cordelia would be impossible; he could do without their laughter, thank you. Which left Dad.
That, he definitely did not want to do-not after having quarreled with him, and been told to get lost. But there was no alternative-Dad was better than his mother or siblings. Of course, there was Fess.
But where Fess went, Dad would go--after all, he was riding the robot-horse.
Rod rode uphill through the gathering gloom. He could no longer see the squat tower, but he knew it was there. Weariness tugged at every fiber, but he fought it off and kept riding. "He could be anywhere around here-if he's here at all. Any sign of him, Fess?"
"There is a trail off to our right, Rod."
"You mean the footpath? The one that virtually screams, `Look here to discover intruders'? That footpath?"
"The very same, Rod. The one you decided to avoid."
"I noticed you didn't disagree. Why? You see some sign of Magnus there?"
"Unfortunately not-but we might, if we went closer."
"No need-we're coming out on top of the ridge, now." Rod tensed. "Odds are the trail leads there, too-to the tower." He loosened his sword in its sheath.
Fess stopped, looking downward. "What's the holdup?" Rod frowned. "There is a skeleton, Rod."
Rod froze, then looked down.
Sure enough, it was a skeleton, wrapped around the base of the tree as though it had died out of devotion to the forest. Rod felt his scalp prickling. "Odd posture, wouldn't you say?"
"I would, Rod. It is indicative of ritual slaying."
"Or someone with a bizarre sense of humor." Rod was far less charitable than his robot. "A someone with a very twisted mind-and a cavity where his heart should be."
"There are others," Fess reported, surveying the hillside with infrared eyes. "A dozen at least, that I can see from this location."
"The townsfolk did say something about the witch taking young men, didn't they?" Rod scowled. "And something about very few of them ever coming back."
"Surely you are not saying that this is what she did to them when she became bored with them!"
"I've heard of worse-I suppose. Come on, Rust Rider. Let's see what we can find around the other trees."
"Rod, I resent. . . "
"Okay, okay! You're a Stainless Steel Steed. Up and out of the trees now, okay?"
Moving slowly, Fess stepped out of the scrub and into the shadow of the last tree, a huge old oak with the scars of broken limbs, rough bark, and ...
Something pale at the base.
Rod stared down, transfixed, not even able to speak.
A snake lay coiled around the roots-a pale snake with his son's head. Magnus opened his mouth-and hissed.
Fury struck, anger at the witch who had mangled his son. The world about him dimmed as Rod concentrated on the spell, the compulsion imposed on his son, which had twisted his perceptions into seeing himself as a snake, and made him project his own delusion into other people's minds-with all the titanic strength of the hybrid esper he was.
Rod tore at that compulsion, pushing it away with all the strength of his mind; for a moment, he saw Magnus as he really was, naked and curled around the base of the oak. But only for a moment; then the young man's mind forced the delusion back into Rod's, and he realized just how much more powerful his son's mind was than his own. Rod withdrew shaken and reeling. Awe and dread pooled within him, but he let them pass, holding on to Fess's mane and waiting for the dizziness to subside, for pride to rise in its stead-and found that the anger was still there, glowing hot, but controlled now, energy to be directed, not tearing loose. He looked down into his son's shrunken face. "Who did it, Magnus? Tell me her name. Just think it. Show me her face-and where she is."
The snake's face creased with desperation; the mouth opened, but all that came out was a strained hiss. Magnus's mind, though, flashed through the answers to Rod's questions-the name "Hag of the Tower," the song drifting through the dusk, the dream-girl, the long, long tug of wills between seduction and truth....
"Got it." Rod nodded. "In the tower." He turned to look up at the stone pile, the image of the foul old witch still vivid in his mind, and sent out a telepathic summons, immediate and commanding, brooking no delay. He felt Magnus's mind writhe in a panic of shame and embarrassment at the thought of the help he was calling in, but Rod quelled it with a stern admonition, a pure-thought equivalent of "This is no time for vanity." Of course, it was scarcely "vanity" when the "help" would see you coiled around a tree trunk-but there wasn't much option, either. Aloud, he said, "You stay there for a few minutes," and turned Fess's head away toward the tower. Behind him, Magnus gave a last hiss, as much of exasperation as of despair-but Rod felt the young man's mind melding with his own, subordinating its strength to his direction. Rod smiled tightly, solace and warmth almost making him forget his anger for a moment.
Then he came to the portal.
The door to the Hag's tower was ten feet high, of stout old hardwood planks, weathered past gray into darkness, and polished at head-height by use. Something glinted in the moonlight; Rod looked up. He saw a scythe blade with its tip broken off. It hung from a rusty chain, and attached to that chain were old horseshoes, broken bolts, cracked pots-a complete collection of junk metal-framing the portal. Above it hung another chain, stretching off around the tower with more junk attached.
Lousy housekeeping-but all Cold Iron. That explained why the Little People hadn't done anything about the witch. Rod was glad the door wasn't anything that looked to be worth saving. He narrowed his eyes, directing Magnus's ferocious raw emotional power at it....
With a blast like that of a cannon, the door flew apart, splinters flying in all directions. An unseen field deflected them as Fess leaped ahead, carrying Rod into the darkness of the witch's lair.
It was infested.
All around the curve of the walls stood great earthenware urns, unglazed terra cotta, sealed across their mouths-but as Rod rode in, those seals broke, the jars cracked; a f
oul ichor began to ooze out, and strange bloated beings struggled through the openings. They leaped down, fully formed and instantly alert, and came at him from all sides, hairless rats the size of Doberman Pinschers, glowing yellow-green teeth dripping ichor, running on two feet, front paws stretching out to claw.
Rod was in no mood for subtlety. He pointed both forefingers, thinking of machine guns and laser cannon, and streaks of ruby light sliced through the rats. Supersonic screams tore at his head as the rats split in half, twitching, tops and bottoms both still struggling toward him, then in half again as the ruby beams came back, and back once more, till they were struggling, heaving blobs of protoplasm. Then, suddenly, they subsided into mounds of gray fungus. Rod nodded; it had been an open question, whether they had been constructs, or just illusions. In either case, light had dispelled them.
He turned to the spiral staircase. "Think you can manage them, Fess?"
"This body has its limits, Rod, but that helix does not surpass them." The horse started up the steps.
As he passed the first turn, a huge hissing filled the stairwell. Rod scowled, eyes trying to pierce the darkness. "What's coming, Fess?"
"I hear a rapid scraping, Rod, but I do not see . . ."
Two yellow eyes glowed in the darkness above them, small but wide apart, and the hiss filled the whole stairway, beating at Rod's ears. Enough, he decided, and thought of molecules racing faster and faster, closer and closer together...
A spark glowed in midair, growing and growing, shedding a dim light on the scene....
Enough for Rod to see a monster snake, gliding down the stair toward him. Its body was at least three feet thick; its mouth opened a foot wide, and that was just enough to let out the hiss. The pits beneath its eyes were minor caves-but it seemed to have been waked in mid-molt. Shreds of skin hung from it, some showing muscle and blood underneath; a rotting crest waved atop its head; wattles hung down from its jaws. There wasn't enough light to tell colors, really, but it seemed to be the grayish-blue of a dead fish's belly.
The anger surged back, forestalling both panic and nausea. What kind of depraved maniac kept pets like this around the house? Rod drew his sword, trying to think of something a little more effective.
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