EXILED Defenders of Ar

by Jack Lovejoy

  How much longer he would survive was the question of the day, every day. From the woeful looks of the two messengers he ushered through the door, he probably would not have lasted the afternoon, had he been so foolish as to announce their bad news for them.

  He had discovered that his master’s reptilian eyes were not keen at distinguishing stationary objects. There were now over a hundred stuffed effigies ranged about the hall, and the mountings for a dozen more—each awaiting the capture of some mighty personage of the mrem, and he had survived several outbursts of insane rage lately by posing among them until Khal stopped shrieking and gnashing his teeth. But he did not trust even that expedient now. So enraging was today’s news that the first words were hardly spoken, when he prudently ducked behind a stuffed generalissimo, and crawled on his hands and knees out the door.

  Nor did he stop in the dim corridor outside. Not until he had reached an abandoned tower of the palace, remote from Khal’s grisly chamber, did he feel safe. For the moment, at least. There was no escape; of course, should Khal really want to get his repulsive webbed hands on him; but out of sight, out of mind. Perhaps when Khal thought about him again, his insane rage at the news that Srana had again eluded capture—evidently the whole army sent to pursue her had mysteriously been annihilated—would have cooled.

  The tower overlooked the befouled palace gardens. The chained dragon was restless, and it was not long before Nizzam discovered why. It was feeding time. The gate was opened, and the two hapless messengers thrust into the garden. The dragon at once vanished, reappeared behind its victims, and pounced. While it devoured one of them, it evilly watched the futile panic of the other out of the corner of its eye.

  Nizzam watched only long enough to be certain of his own fate today, should his hiding place be discovered. Khal had not even bothered to appear on the balcony to enjoy the torment below as he usually did. Had his rage truly driven him insane this time? Perhaps too insane to remember the existence of his wretched servant....

  But soon this hope too was dashed. The palace servants—a staff decimated by Khal’s wrath—were now out in force, searching the rooms and corridors for something, and he was pretty sure that something was himself. He glanced down into the garden. The dragon had now devoured its second victim, but still looked hungry. Or had Khal some more insidious torment waiting for him? He dared not wait to find out.

  The servants, as fellow sufferers, had shared their intimate knowledge of the palace and its neighborhood with him. He had long cherished wild fancies about using this knowledge to escape, but until now had always lacked the courage to try. Courage still did not inspire him—it was sheer despair. For those same servants, in fear of their own lives, would not hesitate to betray him to Khal. Just as he would have done to them, had their positions been reversed.

  There was only one wing of the palace that these mrem servants never entered, where the staff was exclusively liskash, handpicked by Khal. At least, none entered who ever returned to tell the tale. But despair breeds desperate measures, and he sneaked and crept, slunk, dodged, and tiptoed, up stairs and down, hiding in empty rooms, skulking through deserted corridors, until he reached a particular closet.

  “These liskash ain’t so smart as they think they are,” an old wine steward had boasted to him one day. “I’ve been here forty-three years, and could tell them a thing or two about this palace.”

  Among the things he had revealed to Nizzam was that a secret passageway led from a closet in the consort’s bedroom to another closet in the old guest wing of the palace, the very wing from which all mrem were now excluded. The secret of this passageway had supposedly been passed down from generation to generation by the reigning mistresses of Cragsclaw. But of course every servant in the palace, down to the meanest scullery wench, knew about it, just as they gossiped freely about every tryst secretly indulged in the night before by their betters.

  Lighting a candle, Nizzam slid the panel shut and, hardly daring to breathe, tiptoed down the narrow, musty passageway. For how many generations had the secret lovers of the queens of Cragsclaw tiptoed through this very darkness? Would there ever be kings and queens here again? For the first time in all his dreadful months of groveling before an alien sorcerer he thought of something nobler than saving his own hide.

  But it was the sight of the eggs that really brought home to him his role in unleashing so many evils upon the mrem. Emerging from the closet in the old guest wing, he crept warily down a winding staircase to what had once been a dungeon block, now sealed off from the vast cave like cellarage. Moldering stone walls, rough hewn from the living rock, he had expected to find here the ideal hideout, repulsively dank and nasty, but the last place anybody would think of looking for him. What he found instead was a teeming broodery. In dungeon after dungeon, like caverns beneath a mountain, hundreds of sickly-green eggs nestled in beds of plant mold, warm with decay: the nucleus of a master race.

  This explained some things that had recently puzzled him.

  Twice he had come upon Khal in the presence of strange cave reptiles, surly, ugly, and suspicious-natured, but physically like the warlord. Much more like Khal, certainly, than the legate of the Eastern Lords. It was apparent now that whole families of liskash must have been brought here for selective breeding. No doubt the remote fastnesses of the planet were even now being combed for the most likely specimens of Khal’s lost race.

  Then he came upon something more ominous still. Hatchlings barely knee-high crouched in the cave like dimness of an old dungeon cell, while a hideous liskash nurse recited to them in some hissing, guttural language: perhaps the first incantations of their training as sorcerers. An entire planet dominated by a race of Khals? Nizzam shuddered, and tiptoed away.

  This was definitely not the hideout he had expected. He knew what the dragon was fed up in the garden. He did not want to find out what these gruesome little hatchlings ate down here. But as he crept back toward the winding staircase, he heard footsteps descending, and ducked behind a slime-encrusted stone pillar.

  Peeking out, he felt his fur stand on end. It was Khal! Had the sorcerer followed him down here? Trembling with panic, he turned and plunged down the nearest corridor, seeking the blackest shadow he could find. But turn where he might, he could not elude the sinister footsteps, and the dim, flickering light of Khal’s lantern drove all concealing shadows away before him.

  Then he reeled with terror, and nearly swooned. It was a dead end! The corridor opened into a dungeon, or perhaps a natural cave; it was difficult to judge exactly what it was in the gloom, only that there seemed to be no exit. And even the concealing gloom was now deserting him! And the footsteps were drawing closer and closer! Half paralyzed with fright, he backed into a stone block or altar at the very center of the cavern, and barely kept himself from howling in despair. The footsteps now whispered in the corridor just outside.

  Frantically, Nizzam groped over the stone block, hoping he might at least hide behind it. Then he realized that it could be nothing other than the marble slab relieved to fit a reptilian shape, on which Khal had lain for so many years beneath the Kazerclawm. Did he still lie brooding upon it, as he had all those years, seeking to extend his powers further and further into the evil dimension? Whyever it was here, it was growing more visible by the moment, as were the dank, scraggy walls around it.

  The brightening light confirmed that there was indeed no exit, but he spotted an alcove and dived into it just as the footsteps reached the door. Hunkering down in its gloomiest corner, Nizzam shut both eyes and clapped both hands over his mouth, to muffle the chattering of his teeth. His fur and ears standing on end, he cringed as if expecting the first scream of rage to strike him like a blow.

  But it never came. He heard only the whisper of a reptilian body stretching out on the marble slab. Minutes passed in deathly silence. Then more minutes. At last he began to hope against hope that Khal had not followed him down here
after all, and was unaware of his presence. Tentatively Nizzam opened his eyes.

  He was startled by a ghastly shape that vanished the instant he looked at it; time enough only to sense its consummate evil. Still more minutes passed in silence. Then the ghastly shape reappeared, more vivid and hideous with evil; just when it had nearly incarnated into a living being, it suddenly vanished again. The next time it reappeared it was not alone.

  Shutting his eyes tight, Nizzam tried to pretend it was only his imagination, that he was hallucinating out of sheer fright. But it was no use. He knew that the evil shapes were real, that Khal had succeeded in exorcising reptile-demons from the evil dimension to which they belonged. More tentatively than ever, he reopened his eyes—and instantly shut them again. Reptile-demons, at various stages of incarnation, were all around him now. Each time he squinted his eyes open, he found more of them glaring down at him with vindictive malice. They knew he was here; soon Khal himself would know.

  There remained only one possible chance to escape, a desperate chance, whose possible consequences were so horrible that he had scarcely dared contemplate it before. But the consequences of remaining where he was were now certain, and perhaps even more horrible. Khal belittled Nizzam’s powers of magic with relentless sarcasm, nonetheless he was a true magician. He realized by now that he would never rank among the great wizards of The Three—so much had his sufferings humbled him—but he really had studied diligently, and knew at least by rote the principles of teleportation.

  He now regretted that he had not made a practical trial of his book learning when he first encountered Khal beneath the Kazerclawm. True, his wits were so befuddled at the time that he could hardly remember his own name, let alone complex incantations; but he should at least have tried....

  Since then Khal had intimidated Nizzam with boasts about how many powerful wizards had fallen into his clutches when they attempted that very means of escape. Hence no wild fancies about his own escape had ever included teleportation. But this was it. Though more terrified than he had ever been in his life, terror seemed this time to clear his wits rather than befuddle them. To remain where he was even a few minutes longer meant certain doom. Still, he hesitated longer than he should have, hampered from facing the inevitable by a lifetime of cowardice.

  At last, gritting his teeth as if plunging into an icy stream, he concentrated on his book-learned incantations. Perhaps Khal’s own concentration on exorcising reptile-demons was too intense to notice a teleport of a bare few hundred yards or so, to an open field beside the road to Ar. Overcoming a final jolt of panic, he hurled himself into nothingness.

  Nizzam’s first thought upon rematerializing was that he had miscalculated. It was night. Had he teleported himself through time as well as space? And what spatial region was this? Certainly not anywhere near the road to Ar. Volcanic fires, smoke, and skeletal trees: a tortured landscape made lurid by an eternal crimson twilight, over which brooded a lurking evil. In the distance he could see dark reptilian shapes, more hideous even than those he had just escaped; for some reason they hung back from charging ravenously at him. No, he had not miscalculated—except in believing he could elude Khal’s vigilance.

  He felt like just sitting down on one of the volcanic boulders and bawling. Then he realized that someone was already sitting on a boulder not far away, with his back to him, and Nizzam approached him warily from behind. Just as he reached him, the man turned around. It was of all people the master wizard Mithmid. Nizzam recognized him at once from his visit to the Sentinel, some four years ago, although his face—gaunt, starving, demon-haunted, and weary to exhaustion had aged dramatically.

  “Hello, Nizzam,” he said in a parched voice. “You haven’t brought anything to eat or drink, have you? Ah, too bad. Although sleep is what I need even more. I don’t think I can hold them off much longer.” He nodded toward the dark liskash shapes. “They probably wouldn’t kill me right away, though. Us, I should say. Looks like you’ve fallen into Khal’s clutches, too.”

  “Out of them, really,” said Nizzam. “At least, for a while.

  What do you think he’ll do to me here? Us, I mean?”

  Mithmid shrugged wearily. “He’s been trying for what seems like weeks to subject me to the most fiendish torments he can devise. The illusions are the worst, although he isn’t really very imaginative. Just cunning and vindictive. Exactly what he plans to do with me in the end, I don’t know.”

  “Have you stuffed and mounted on a hand-carved wizard’s chair, between the governor of Kazerclawm and the king and queen of Casmara;” Nizzam blurted out. “He’s boasted about it.”

  Mithmid stared at him in wonder. “How in three moons could you possibly know that?”

  Nizzam started to posture and prevaricate, according to his old custom, but the look in the great wizard’s eyes, and the bracelet he flourished on his left wrist, glimmering with fragments of the Khavala, extracted the truth from him. Most of it, at least. He still withheld his role in the events at Kazerclawm.

  “You’re despicable, Nizzam.” Mithmid frowned at him.

  “But I shouldn’t be surprised, after what your late master, the Sentinel, told me about you. Srana told me some things too, indirectly. We’ll get to the bottom of this later, though I’d just as soon leave you here. I will, too, if you don’t do everything I say. Understand?”

  Nizzam nodded his head abjectly.

  “All right, then,” Mithmid continued. “Tell me all you know about Cragsclaw. But be warned. I know the place intimately.”

  This time Nizzam withheld nothing; he detailed all the changes Khal had wrought in the ancient fortress. The dark liskash shapes appeared closer now, as if they were edging up for an attack. Mithmid noticed this too, and rose wearily to his feet, and raised his left hand, a glimmer with fragments of the Khavala. The reptilian shapes scattered for cover.

  At that moment Nizzam caught another kind of reptilian shape out of the corner of his eye: hideous, ghostly, evanescent. Then it was gone. Moments later it reappeared—or one like it—just as in the subterranean vaults beneath the palace of Cragsclaw.

  “He’s coming,” he cried. “Look! He’s becoming stronger and stronger at conjuring up reptile-demons. For months, maybe years. And now that he has the Third Eye—”

  “Oh, stop whining, Nizzam,” Mithmid said with weary impatience. “Of course he’s coming—and we’re going. Now that I know how his force image is directed, we need only ride its counterforce back to the place from which he teleported himself.”

  “Not there!” Nizzam started to protest.

  “Stay if you like,” said Mithmid. “I’m too tired and hungry and thirsty to argue. In fact, it might be better if you did stay.”

  “No, no, I’m sorry. Anywhere you want to go is just fine with me. Even back to Cragsclaw.” He lowered his voice, and looked nervously around at the hideous shapes incarnating around them. “Soon, I hope. He’s coming—”

  After a moment’s disorientation, Nizzam found himself seated on the very marble slab from which Khal must have just teleported himself. Mithmid sat beside him, his bead in his hands, as if the effort of riding the counterforce back here had exhausted his last strength.

  “Shall I help you, master?” whispered Nizzam. “I know a way to the palace gate, so nobody will see us.”

  “I know it better than you do. I also know the way to the kitchen.” His weak, parched voice was barely audible. “And right now I’m so famished I don’t care who sees us.”

  For such a scrawny old man, Mithmid tucked into an amazing spread of trenchers and goblets. The cooks who served him whispered anxiously among themselves, as if wagering on the precise moment he would burst. But the repast only strengthened him—enough at least to be well clear of the neighborhood of Cragsclaw by nightfall. The soft, plump Nizzam now seemed the more exhausted of the two.

  “I was on the road for many, ma
ny years,” explained Mithmid, “in search of the Third Eye. A quest that was, alas, unsuccessful.”

  Nizzam lowered his eyes so guiltily that the old wizard watched him with curious attention. But it was late, and he really was exhausted from his long sleepless ordeal. They would be on the roads and rivers together for many days yet. Time enough to elicit the rest of Nizzam’s history.

  Devastation was everywhere, but it was haphazard, the work of marauders rather than armies. That would come with the fall of Ar. Towns with formidable defenses were still allowed to buy their safety; those without were simply plundered, on the old barbarian principle that one only bargains where he lacks the power to seize.

  Wizards were now more hated than ever, and it was as an itinerant housepainter and his apprentice that Mithmid and Nizzam took lodgings at an inn. They were up and on the road betimes the next morning, the former much refreshed, the latter footsore from so much unaccustomed walking. Two days later they found themselves in a river city, its people impoverished by tribute, but its walls still intact. It took Mithmid less than an hour to find a particular bargemrem and his son, who had not long ago delivered one of the very fragments of the Khavala on his wrist downstream to Ar.

  “Can’t get you closer than, say, five miles from the city, master,” said the bargemrem, who suspected that he was not bargaining with any common housepainter. “I was well paid the last time, and expect to be again.”

  This was no time to haggle, and the arrangements were soon concluded. How soon the new barrage being erected across the river would be complete—and the final assault on Ar launched—the bargemrem did not know.

  “Level hasn’t dropped yet.” He shrugged. “Last two times it did nearly put me out of business. Remember, five miles is as close as I’ll come, and it’s for cash, not promises.”