The Black Throne

by Fred Saberhagen

  I looked up then to see Peters throwing his unearred opponent against the one who had just risen. The man whose chest he had smashed lay sprawled, leaking blood through his ears and nose as well as his mouth. I glanced back, a precaution. The man whose chest I had cut open still lay beside the companionway. He was not breathing.

  Three of the six, then, were down, two were attacking Peters, and the final one was just withdrawing his stiletto from a point somewhere below Hans Pfall's left ribcage. He turned his attention now to Peters, who had crouched and extended both his hands toward the two men he had dealt with before who now faced him again. Smiling, the burly man moved to assist them, swinging his club almost jauntily in his left hand, knife in his right, low and near to his hip. As he passed the still form of Captain Guy I heard a pistol's sharp report. The club slipped from his fingers and he dropped to one knee, left hand moving to clutch somewhere at his midsection.

  Above the eternal growl of the Symmes' Hole I heard the man say, "I thought you was dead!" Then he dropped to his other knee and I could see past him to where Captain Guy still lay, back propped against a bollard, a derringer in his right hand, a small smile upon his lips.

  "You were wrong," the captain said.

  I advanced upon the two who faced Peters, one of whom had snatched up the saber dropped by the earliest attacker. As he heard my approach, this one turned to face me. He bent from the waist and extended the weapon out to his side, point angling back in toward me, his other hand fluttering forward—an obvious and cumbersome attempt to transfer knife-fighting technique to the larger weapon. I strode forward almost contemptuously then. This was no problem for a trained fencer.

  My heel struck a patch of bird feces and I slipped. Thus is arrogance occasionally brought down by the lowly. My attacker was on me in an instant, trying to lay the edge of his weapon across my windpipe and lean upon it. We both, of course, tried kneeing the other in the groin, and both successfully turned a thigh against it. In that my right arm had gone high and then out to the side during my fall and that my opponent now had a knee upon its biceps, I released the blade. I couldn't swing it from that position, and it was just an added burden of weight. I brought the hand over quickly, getting it beneath his blade, where it joined the other in holding the weapon back. Unfortunately, it was the edge that I was blocking. Fortunately, it was not too sharp. Unfortunately, it was sharp enough. . . .

  I felt it cut into my hands and he grinned as the blood began to run and drip upon my shirtfront; and he breathed on me, which nearly proved my undoing. His teeth were in very bad condition.

  I still heard the sounds of struggling from Peters' quarter. The ship skipped again, and the forte of the blade ground heavily against my left palm. The Symmes' thunder came like some thousands of Niagaras now, and from the awkward angle at which I lay I saw that far off to my left and high up in the sky a great tower of mist and fog had grown up, drifting, looming, inclining toward us like an enormous shrouded human figure, white as bone, snow, or the skin of a cadaver. . . .

  I spat full in my assailant's face—ungentlemanly, unsanitary, and not a thing I'd learned from the French master; but rather a trick told me by a young British officer called Flash with whom I'd gone drinking one night, described by him as so unnerving it had almost cost him his life in a duel. It had remained in my mind as a particularly egregious breach of etiquette ever since. Fortunately, I am neither an officer nor a gentleman, and it worked beautifully. He drew back sufficiently for me to grit my teeth and push, which gave me just enough of an opening to form my right hand painfully into a fist and drive it forward against the source of his bad breath. He did not rock back as far as I hoped, his weight still holding me pinned, but a leaning corpse-white figure other than the misty apparition in the sky caught hold of his neck then and twisted, raising him from me. The man's body swung toward Valdemar as he was drawn to his feet. His right elbow went back like a piston, and the point of his blade against Valdemar's abdomen; then he drove it forward, running my rescuer through. Valdemar twisted his neck and I heard it crack. Then he released him and looked downward.

  "Oh! The irony of it!" he observed. "To send others to that shore I may not tread!"

  He withdrew the weapon from his middle and let it fall, also.

  "Thanks," I said. "We'll do right by you one of these days. Really."

  There came a short, barking laugh from my right and I looked that way just in time to see Peters rising from the deck, ruddy blade in his right hand, a scalp in his left.

  "Counting a little coup," I observed.

  "It's been a coup-coup day, Eddie," he replied, and we both turned toward the captain and Pfall.

  Both men were still living but in very bad shape. We gave what aid we could. None of the mutineers had survived. Pfall grunted something in that guttural language of his.

  "He says to get the balloon up here pronto, an' he'll tell us how ter set 'er up." Peters translated.

  "Right," I answered. "Let's go."

  Our rush took us past Ligeia, who stood in the companionway, smiling. For a moment I'd have sworn I saw a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth, but her tongue flicked and the illusion vanished, leaving only the smile.

  We dragged the thing topside and unfolded it, not knowing how much time remained.

  Pfall directed us in its inflation. Peters had to lean close to him for every instruction, for his voice had weakened and the Symmes' sounds increased yet again in volume. Valdemar and Ligeia labored with us, also; and when Pfall breathed his last after giving us some final information, Valdemar cursed bitterly that yet another man went unwilling to the place he most desired.

  Captain Guy gestured to me and I went to him, there being nothing more to do just then but wait for the gasbag to achieve proper inflation.

  "Eddie," he said weakly, "I've a favor to ask."

  "Anything, sir," I replied.

  "Take me forward, that I might see this thing that's about to swallow the Eidolon."

  Peters and I fetched up a comfortable chair from my stateroom and placed him in it. We strapped him there for security's sake and carried him forward then.

  "It's bigger than that canyon out in the West," Peters announced, when we beheld the great dark thunderhole beneath its shifting tower of mist.

  "Find a way to secure the chair here, men," Captain Guy directed, and we fetched more lines and did that for him. In the meantime, he'd produced his pipe and filled its bowl and fetched his tinderbox from somewhere within his bloody jacket.

  "Let me give you a hand with that," I suggested.

  "I can manage."

  "You really propose to remain here?"

  "Haven't that much time left," he replied, taking his first puff, "and I wouldn't miss this for anything. How many masters get to follow their vessel to the end in a fashion such as this?" He took another puff. "Leave me now. You've work to do and I want to enjoy the view."

  I squeezed his shoulder gently, leaving a bloody palmprint.

  "God be with you, Captain," I said. "You did right by us. Thanks."

  Peters said something, too, but I couldn't make out the words. When we turned to head back astern I realized how far we were inclined. Glancing forward again, I knew that we were seeing deeper into the Hole than we had before. We hurried.

  Ligeia and Valdemar were already in the basket, the balloon tugging at its lines we had dogged to ring-bolts in the deck.

  "Cast off," the lady said, and I cut the lines and we shot skyward.

  In a matter of moments we beheld the battered Eidolon quivering upon the brink of Symmes' abyss, pathetic human invention about to launch itself against eternity. For a moment, I thought of Poe.

  Valdemar uttered a strange hissing noise, then observed, "To think that I should be a survivor."

  * * *

  There are many moments when, even to

  the sober eye of Reason, the world of our

  sad Humanity may assume the semblance

  of a Hell—b
ut the imagination of man is

  no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful—but, like the demons

  in whose company Afrasiab made his

  voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep,

  or they will devour us—they must be

  suffered to slumber, or we perish.

  From The Premature Burial,

  Edgar Allan Poe

  XIII

  Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

  Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

  Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,

  Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

  How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?

  Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

  To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

  Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

  Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?

  And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

  To seek a shelter in some happier star?

  Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

  The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

  The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

  Sonnet—To Science,

  Edgar Allan Poe

  * * *

  We continued to rise at a rapid rate, the thunder from the Earth's polar aperture finally beginning to diminish. Ligeia insisted on cleaning my lacerated palms thoroughly, then dressing them with heavy bandages. Fortunately, she had been able to provision our gondola considerably while Peters and I were occupied with our late captain.

  Our wish was to return to Europe, or at least to some other civilized land. But we soon discovered that we had very little control over our course. At least, we were being borne northward by steady winds. We found that we could control our altitude to a great degree, by throwing over ballast or releasing gas, thus managing to maintain a sequence of favorable winds. But it was hard to tell directions.

  Valdemar curled up on the floor, Ligeia covered him with a tarpaulin, and he became a general-purpose piece of furniture. Ligeia would sit and meditate upon him for hours at a time. Peters used him as a pillow; I, an ottoman.

  There can be too much of excitement, too much of sensation. Our first day airborne was an affectless thing. We were psychically drained from all that we had experienced of late, from all that we continued to experience. As my feelings had been for a time following my ordeal at the hands of the Inquisition, as well as that maddening other-worldly journey aboard the Discovery, or the morning after Prince Prospero's party on the night of the Red Death, so now I knew the distancing of fatigue within a consciousness too stimulated for slumber and a consequent sense of the unreality of my present surroundings—akin, I suppose, to that of a late-night reader's, of some fantastical romance, with the difference that I could not escape by closing the book. (While this comparison may not be unique, little has been made of that reader's own prisonerhood within my life—so to speak—and the special solace for us both that the glory of language with its bright procession of tellings preceded the spurious consolations of philosophy by an age, as demonstrated in the fact that none misses sleep for philosophy.) And my mind in this state is wont to divagate, eyes go unfocussed, body wisdoms rise to swamp all thinking.

  The second and the third day were of the same order, though reality came scratching at the door more and more often, and we ate and we talked again and Grip granted us an occasional obscenity from basket rim or cable.

  We maintained our swift, high-altitude northering for the better part of a week. I tried to discover whether it might be June, July, or August and neither Peters nor Ligeia was certain. And it seemed mean to rouse Valdemar on such a small matter.

  So we sailed on, landing only once the following week on a tropical isle in a valley of many-colored grasses. We took this chance only because the one thing we were low on was water, and this colorful spot with its River of Silence come out of some hill by a route obscure and lonely, also bore numerous pot-holes and fissures, whence volcanic gases rose. After we had drunk our fill and loaded every container we possessed to its limit we were able to reinflate the balloon at one of these openings.

  So we ascended again, rising till we picked up another strong wind of what seemed a northerly persuasion. Soon our course took us above a heavy cloud cover. And this went on, and on, and on.

  We discussed descending to take our bearings but argued ourselves out of it, in that we were unlikely to sight any really familiar landmarks, and we might—in the matter of descending through what could prove massive foggy banks—encounter some mountainous prominence to our detriment.

  We even lost track of the days after a time. For so long as our supplies lasted, though, we were determined to continue rather than risk falling short of our hemisphere, our temperate zone.

  It was not until the gasbag began to leak and the decision was taken from us that we finally entered the clouds, drifting through them with the distinct feeling that all motion had been suspended—as if we had been imbedded in cotton. The only indication I had as to how long we had been in transit now was that my hands were well-along in their healing.

  When we finally emerged from the clouds it was above a green landscape that was not a jungle. Beyond that, we had not the least idea where we were.

  We kept on, hoping for some sight of civilization, having stabilized again at a lower altitude. A night passed in this fashion.

  Dawn came into the upper atmosphere, though the Earth was still in darkness when we descended upon it. The sounds and smells and—after a small while—the sights were all hearteningly familiar. A brief reconnoiter along a rural roadway showed me a sign at a crossroad saying richmond 10 mi.

  We deflated our balloon the rest of the way and concealed it in a wood. Valdemar being slow and unsteady on his feet, we were unable to travel very well. So, leaving Ligeia with him in the wood, Peters and I set out in search of some sort of vehicle in which we might transport him.

  After having hiked a mile or two we heard the sounds of voices. Changing our course slightly in that direction we came shortly to a metal gateway which stood slightly open. A portly man who stood within bade us enter. He shook our hands as we did so, introducing himself as Mr. Maillard. He was a fine-looking gentleman of the old school, well-dressed, well-mannered, dignified. At his back, however, strolled a number of peculiarly garbed individuals—that is to say, they were accoutered in the costumes of many periods and many lands—including a woman who paused periodically to flap her arms and announce "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" in a surprisingly deep voice.

  "We'd like to rent or borrow a cart, a wagon, a wheelbarrow, a coach," I said. "Might that be possible, sir?"

  "I believe so," Maillard replied, "though I'm not the one you should talk to in this regard. Come with me to the main building and we'll find someone in the office to help you."

  We followed him in the direction of a large old mansion house, and on the way were accosted by a man walking on all fours who rubbed up against our legs and purred. After he had departed in pursuit of a rabbit, I said, "Sir, we are not from this area, and while I have my suspicious I must inquire as to the nature of this—institution."

  He smiled.

  "As you have guessed," he reported, "it is an asylum for the insane. Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether established it here some years ago after leaving France, where they had developed radical experimental treatments for patients of this sort."

  We mounted to the old house and entered there. Mr. Maillard left us in a large, once-elegant living room, now somewhat shabby, saying he would locate someone concerning the cart and send him to us. Peters and I collapsed onto the slightly worn furniture.

  "Hard to believe we're back, Eddie," he said. "Be sure an' find out what month it is 'fore we leave."

  "The month, sir, is September," said a small man largely submerged in a dark chair in a dark corn
er, off to our right.

  "Beg pardon," I said. "We didn't notice you there."

  He chuckled.

  "It has its advantages," he observed. He rose then and bowed, a silver-haired and goateed individual, bright blue eyes enlarged through heavy spectacles. "Dr. Augustus Bedloe, at your service."

  "Ah, you are a member of the staff."

  "No. As a matter of fact, I am a patient here."

  "I'm sorry. . . ."

  "No need. I am not demented, if that is what you fear."

  "I—do not understand."

  "Might I inquire as to your professions?"

  "I am Edgar Perry, U. S. Army, retired," I stated, extending my hand. "My friend is Dirk Peters, First Mate of the Eidolon."

  He clasped our hands and shook them.

  "Merely attempting to ascertain whether you were in any fashion associated with the courts or law enforcement establishments. I am pleased that you are not."

  "Always glad to please." I glanced at Peters, who shrugged.

  "I am actually one of the only two sane persons in this institution," Dr. Bedloe announced.

  "Of course," I agreed.

  "I am serious, sir, and I speak only for your own benefit—to warn you."

  "How did this state of affairs come about?"

  "The inmates took over three days ago," he explained, "confining Tarr and Fether to a padded room. Mr. Maillard, a dangerous maniac, was their leader."

  I studied his face. He sounded so convincing.

  "And why should you believe me?" he said. "Well, consider: Why should the gate be unlocked and the inmates wandering the grounds?"

  "That did sort of bother me, Eddie," Peters said uneasily. "Tell me, Dr. Bedloe, whatcha doin' here if yer sane?"

  "The alternative was to be hanged for murder a few years ago," he answered. "It was preferable to fake lunacy and live. That was why I inquired concerning any affiliations on your part with the legal business."