“A few of their travelers chanced into our City, and the King was enthralled by Them, but he had no way of communicating with Them. For one thing, not even he could bear to look Them in the face or listen to their voices. And yet he could not bear to give up commerce with Them altogether.
“They told him of one way only by which they might communicate. A very old way. Almost all peoples have it, and all old legends. It means the sacrifice of a maiden.
“She would have to submit herself to their sorcery, and thereafter would serve as liaison between the two peoples. The human mind, They said, was too complex, too hybrid, to deal with minds like Theirs. Their sorcery would change the mind of their instrument, dividing it in a way to make communication possible. They did not tell us, then, what else the sorcery might do.
“The King chose his daughter for that sacrifice. This thing meant more to him even than she, and she was the one alone, he thought, whom he could trust in a position of such power. Too, I think their kinship was to help in the transmission of knowledge from Them to the King.
“It happened without my knowledge. I loved the King’s daughter very deeply. I should have interfered, had I guessed. But I came just as the ceremony was beginning, and until it was too late I did not know—”
He turned his back to the mirror and struggled with his beasts, bending over them as if he did not want to see that scene again.
“Look,” he said.
They moved with intricate, hideously lithe steps about the circle of fiery stones. There was a veiled figure in the center of the circle now, and the King was leaning forward, a look of pain and eagerness on his face.
Fire leaped from the shining circle on the floor. It blazed to a pyramid of white light, and when it sank again the veil had vanished from the girl in its midst. She looked out with blank, unseeing eyes, violet under an iron crown. Her dark hair lay in ringlets on her shoulders.
She had a lovely, soft mouth and even now, a look of vividness and a delicate, familiar beauty which made Boyce lean forward suddenly and catch his breath, forgetting even the figures parading around the fire with snake-like motions of their robed arms.
“Irathe—” he heard himself whisper.
‘Die fire leaped again. Through it the slim, crowned figure was faintly visible. It shimmered before his eyes, curiously unfocused Inside the screen of flame. It divided, drew apart.
The fire sank. There were two figures inside the burning ring. But only for a moment. Then Irathe swept up her skirts in one smooth motion and stepped over the low-burning flames. Her eyes were violet-bright, the color of the fire. Her face was dazzling with a beauty more burning than the old Irathe ever knew. But danger was in the face now, danger and a fierce, unstable joy.
BEHIND her a motionless girl stood in the enchanted ring. Not a girl—a marble figure, pale as stone, drained of all life, the marble hair lying upon the marble shoulders, the marble robes sweeping straight to the floor. Hands clasped before her, eyes closed, serene and empty, the figure of Kerak’s Oracle had taken shape in the ring and remained there while Irathe stepped lightly away from all that remained of her old self.
It was the same face—if it could be, when all that meant life had been drained from it. Boyce saw now that he might have known those marble features in Kerak—or could he have known them, in that inhuman repose, without the spark which meant Irathe glowing behind them? His memory had been too imperfect then. He had not known her face or her name, and nothing about the lifeless Oracle’s features had reminded him of her other self.
The Huntsman, still bending to stroke the head of one snarling cat-creature, spoke as if to the beast, his voice soft.
“I had loved her before the—change. How could I stop loving her, afterward? And there was nothing left alive in the good half for a man to love, so it had to be Irathe as she is now—evil, terrible to the mind and the eye and most so for a man like me who can see beneath the surface. But to my heart, she is still Irathe, and my love.”
Suddenly he slapped the snarling beast across the face. It twisted its head with catlike quickness and slashed at his wrist with bared fangs. The Huntsman laughed and cuffed it aside.
“They could not destroy the marble image which was all that remained when that half of Irathe’s mind which was good and sinless split from the half which was evil, knowing too much of magical things. Irathe wanted to destroy it The sight of it seemed to madden her. She was not Irathe now and the knowledge of her own incompleteness was more than she could bear with that marble thing as a reminder.
“They were indifferent. They had what They wanted; they would not help further. So Irathe, thinking to get the white marble being out of her sight and memory, drove it into the drifting lands and hoped she might forget it.
“The gods alone know what thoughts move in that still, stone mind. But some memory of her mother’s people led her to Kerak, and they took her in. Then Irathe sent a cage of fire to keep her imprisoned, hoping the City would drift away and rid her forever of that shape which had been herself.
“But it was not so easy. The two halves of her were not wholly parted. A bond between them remained, a bond so strong that while it stretches between Kerak and the City, the two are anchored together and cannot drift apart. That means, of course, that Irathe must conquer Kerak’s Oracle. She does not know the way. She has worked a long, long while on that secret.
“By now she is very wise—far wiser than I think she knows the answer which will mean the conquest of her other half. But the Oracle, too, is wise. And Tancred, Kerak’s magician, is a rival in some ways even for Irathe. So she could not gain an entrance into Kerak—until she found you.”
Boyce broke in abruptly, cutting off the slow, reminiscent voice that seemed to be watching the past unfold as it spoke on.
“You’re lying,” he declared, with all of Guillaume’s arrogance. “I knew her too.” He hesitated. He would not say, “I loved her too.” That was a matter between him and the real, complete Irathe, if ever they met again. But once they had met—he was sure of that—and she had been whole.
“I know you did.” The Huntsman gave him one glance under the tiger-striped hood, and hatred and envy was in the glance. But his voice was calm. “You knew her as I did, in one of her moments of completion. You see, there are certain times when the cage of flame does not prison Kerak’s Oracle. The time is now, Boyce.”
The dark eyes were sombre.
“You have listened to me, William Boyce, because I had information you needed. But why do you suppose I troubled to make these explanations?”
Boyce hesitated. But before he could speak he sensed a change in the Huntsman’s face, bright and triumphant as lightning flickering across a leaden autumn sky.
And suddenly Boyce knew his mistake. He had a flash of keen regret, the knowledge that he had, somehow, walked blindly into a trap—and then, for an intolerable instant of spinning vertigo, the walls before him tilted and slipped sidewise and dissolved into roaring chaos.
Tumbling mists shrouded him. Another mind, another power, was using him as a man’s hand wields a machine. His body, his eyes, his thoughts, were not his own now. Briefly he crouched in a timeless, lightless place, the deepest citadel of his self, where no Intruder could reach.
The monstrous claustrophobia slackened—was gone.
HE STOOD again before the laughing Huntsman.
Thick, wordless sounds spewed from his lips as he tried to speak. The Huntsman’s eyes were ablaze with triumph.
“Is it hard to use your tongue, Boyce?” he mocked. “That will not last long. In a moment the feeling will pass. When a man has been out of his body it is not always easy to return.”
Boyce hunched his shoulders, feeling such anger as he had never known before against this sorcerer who could use him at will as a man dons a glove and doffs it.
He felt warmth beginning to return to his limbs, though he had not felt their coldness till now.
“You—”
“Speak! You have done me a great service, Boyce. I owe you an honest answer, at least.”
“What have you made me do?”
The Huntsman sobered. And now his eyes glittered with something very much like madness.
“You have done an errand for me. Not your body—but another part of you, your mind, your soul, perhaps. I sent that to Kerak a moment ago. Have you forgotten my words? This is one of the brief cyles during which the Oracle is free of her cage of flame.”
“What did you do?”
“I used you to summon the Oracle here. Free from her cage, she can go where she wills—but the spell of emptiness holds her, even now. She comes to the City now, because you called her, Boyce.”
BOYCE spoke hoarsely.
“Why should she come to my call?”
“Should a woman not come when her lover calls? When her husband summons?” The Huntsman dwelt on the words, as he would have gripped the sharp blade of a dagger. What showed on his face was pure jealousy.
Lover? Husband? But it was Ira the who had come to earth—
“I will give you death if you like,” the Huntsman said quietly. “It is best of all. Better than life. Perhaps in death you may join Kerak’s Oracle.”
That passion-drained calm, more than the Huntsman’s previous mockery, roused Boyce. He thought—with a breath this sorcerer can drive me as a wind drives a leaf. But—“Curse your magic!” Boyce roared. The ice had gone from his limbs. The fire of rage melted the paralyzing chill.
For so long had the Huntsman dueled with the rapiers of magic that he had apparently forgotten more primitive methods of battle. Boyce’s fist smashed home on the man’s jaw, a solid, vicious blow that jolted his arm dear back to the shoulder.
He did it almost without reason, driven only by a sudden, instinctive revolt against the cobweb-soft, clinging bonds of enchantment that had wound about him since he had entered this alien world—and even before that.
To have the Huntsman use him, mind and body, with that contemptuous disregard for his own demands, was suddenly unendurable. And that molten, rising rage culminated in the blow that caught the Huntsman by surprise and sent him crashing back, stunned, against the wall.
“Magic!” Boyce said, his voice a snarl of hatred. “There’s the cure for that!”
But the Huntsman could not answer. He was a crumpled, silent figure, red blood trickling down his jaw.
A wordless, eerie cry made Boyce turn. He had forgotten the pack. The tiger-cats were shifting uneasily, their bright, dappled bodies sliding soundlessly in an intricate pattern, backward and forward. The beautiful mad faces watched him.
He glanced quickly around the room. A breath of wind rippled down a tapestried hanging bright with black and gold. Boyce took a cautious step in that direction.
And another. Still the pack hesitated. Boyce reached the tapestry and slipped beneath it. As he had guessed, there was an opening in the wall. A metal door was ajar, and a soft wind blew on his sweating face.
Mournfully, with inhuman sweetness, from the room he had left rose a wailing scream from a beast’s throat. It was echoed and reechoed.
Boyce put his shoulder to the door and slammed it shut. There was no bolt, only a latch that could be lifted from either side. If the Huntsman recovered—
Boyce’s teeth showed in an unpleasant grin. His heavy shoulders squared.
He turned to stare down the dim, blue twilight of the tunnel.
CHAPTER XIII
The King Is Dead
BRIEFLY he thought that the walls were hung with arabesque curtains. Then he saw them more clearly. Bas-relief carvings had been laid with a lavish hand on these walls. It was a design of roots, or branches—or, perhaps, serpents—intertwined in a jungle tangle that the eyes could not follow. The stone was varicolored, marked with brighter striations, glittering with mica and gem-chips. The passage seemed to be walled and roofed with a twining barrier of twisting roots.
A faint bluish light filtered through the tiny interstices between the carvings, as though they had been overlaid on a surface that held a light of its own.
Some instinct made Boyce move his hand to his hip, but the sword was gone, taken from him, no doubt, during his captivity to Irathe. But he did not want to think of her.
He could not go back. And the Huntsman might soon wake, unless the blood-scent had roused the pack to hunger.
Quietly Boyce moved along the passage. The twining coils on the wall and ceiling were motionless. Yet a feeling of tingling awareness, of the presence of some monstrous danger, never left him for a moment. As though he walked close beside a veil that might at any moment be ripped aside, that already rippled with a little wind that blew from an unknown and very terrible place.
Nerves—well, he had reason to feel nervous! His harsh grin broadened. To be plunged from his normal life into the maze of ancient, alien sorcery and intrigue—suitable enough for a Norman of Guillaume’s era, who walked amid witches and warlocks and Saracen magicians and believed in them devoutly. But Boyce did not believe. What a superstition-reared Crusader might accept blindly, a modern man could not.
Perhaps, Boyce thought, he had been accepting too much on faith. He should have questioned more from the beginning. Yet his mind had not been entirely his own. He had been, for the most part, a tool in Irathe’s skilled hands, and the Huntsman’s.
The stone carving of a beast’s head was set amid the tangled root-carvings at his right The stone eyes watched blindly. Into it—through it—the glittering coils seemed to grow.
Still the silence deepened.
He went on. There were more carvings to left and right. Some were animal, others human.
In the end he paused for a moment before one of the stone masks. He studied it A root grew through the jaw, deforming the face curiously, but it was carved from a different material than the other gray, granite masks Boyce had seen. And, under the coiling tendrils, he could trace the shadowy outline of a body.
The sculptor had even suggested the details of iris and pupil in the open eyes of the mask. It looked like . . . It was like . . .
The stone lips moved.
Painfully, half-articulately, with a dry, stone clicking that was infinitely horrible—the head spoke.
“Boyce,” it groaned—and the stone tongue clicked on the name against stone teeth. “Boyce!”
Now Boyce knew the face, and realized what end had come to Godfrey Morel. Though the end had not yet quite come.
HE REACHED for the loathsomely clinging root-carvings, but that inhuman voice halted him.
“Stay! Do not touch the walls! Do not!” Boyce knew that he was shivering. He licked his dry lips.
“Godfrey,” he said. “What—isn’t there—”
“Listen,” Godfrey Morel said with his stone tongue. “Very soon I shall be—silent. Before then . . .” The clicking died.
“What can I do?” Boyce asked hoarsely. “Those things—”
“I am part of them already,” Godfrey said. “Part of it. It is a plant Hell-spawned. A devil’s plant. Here are its roots, but through all the City, within the walls, beneath the floors, the tendrils have grown secretly. It is Jamai’s plant—his spy.”
“Jamai?”
“A devil-thing,” Godfrey said, his voice strengthening. “With its aid he knows all the City’s secrets. Within the walls its tendrils grow—listen—see—and when, Jamai comes here, it answers his questions. I have seen that happen! It must be fed sometimes on the brains of living things, or it will relapse into an ordinary plant. He made it, long ago—with his sorceries.”
Sorcery? It was easy to accept that explanation, in this haunted blue twilight, but since Boyce had seen the Huntsman’s vulnerability, he was not so ready to believe. There were tropisms in plants—hypersensitivity—plants that could, in effect, see and hear and sense vibrations. Even in Burbank’s day the study of plant-mutations had been understood.
Under certain abnormal stimuli, such a monstrous thing as this was t
heoretically possible—a hypersensitive plant, amenable to directed control, that absorbed brain-tissue and perhaps the energy of the mind itself. A specified plant that could be controlled like a machine!
Theoretically it was possible. But that did not lessen the horror of the monstrosity. Boyce felt faintly sick as he stared at the chalky, stiff face on the wall above him.
“I am nearly a part of—this thing,” Godfrey Morel said. “I have learned—something of what it knows. Only in a few parts of the City does counter-magic keep this hell-thing away. It cannot enter the King’s palace.
“The Oracle comes here. Jamai will try to kill her. Irathe—hates the Oracle. There is one power in the City that . . .” The voice stopped. After a moment it began again, less clearly.
“Hard to—speak. Go to the King. I think—he can help—hates Irathe as she—hates him. Tell him—Jamai is bringing the Oracle here . . .”
“Wait,” Boyce said. “It’s the Huntsman—”
“You have just come—from Jamai.”
“No. Godfrey, you’re wrong. I’ve come from the Huntsman.”
“The Huntsman—is Jamai. The same . . .” A cry burst thickly from the mask’s gaping mouth.
“Under the dragon mask—secret way! To the King—quick! Quick!”
The face was stone!
“Godfrey,” Boyce said—and then shouted the name. “Godfrey!”
Stone eyes stared at him.
Silence brimmed the blue tunnel.
Boyce went on. The sickness was still deep within him, but the fact that now he had some sort of goal gave him strength. He had learned little enough from Godfrey Morel, but he guessed that the King of this haunted city might be a friend. Or, at least, an enemy of his enemies.
Irathe and the Oracle were the same—or had been, once. The Sorcerer King might hate Irathe, but would he hate the Oracle?
And the Huntsman—Jamai? Boyce tried to understand that. It seemed meaningless. Why should the Huntsman masquerade as Jamai, or vice versa? Why . . .
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