The Laughter of Dark Gods

by David Pringle - (ebook by Undead)

  His failure to find any inspiration in the court lists redoubled M. Voltigeur’s determination to protect himself from the second promised visit of the Phantom. The guard outside the house was increased to eight. All six of the servants were issued with blades, and Jean Malchance acquired from the governor’s own armoury a flintlock pistol with gunpowder and shot, which he gave to his friend with the instruction that it must be saved as a last resort.

  Odo was asked to spread his alarm spells more liberally, with the aid of a wand of jade borrowed from Verena’s temple. He was also asked to occupy the room to the right hand side of M. Voltigeur’s. One of the minor shrines of the town, dedicated to the veneration of Morr, responded to the unique situation by sending a priest to assist in matters of magical defence—an unusual step, given that priests usually considered their magic too noble to be wasted in petty secular affairs.

  This priest was a skilled diviner named Hordubal, who was lodged in the room to the left hand side of M. Voltigeur’s.

  Jean Malchance again elected to place himself outside the bedroom door, as the final line of external defence. He further suggested that as a new precaution he and M. Voltigeur should bring the three chests containing the magistrate’s valuables to his bedroom. He helped his friend pack them most carefully, and when they were locked he summoned Odo again, instructing him to place alarm spells as well as magical seals upon the locks. Then he put them away beneath the bed—where, he said, they would surely be safe from any interference.

  When darkness came, M. Voltigeur made no attempt to go to sleep, having resolved this time to remain awake. He kept no less than five stout candles burning in his room. Alas, as the night wore on, his determination to stay alert was put to an increasingly severe test by a seductive drowsiness which continually crept up on him.

  Four or five times the magistrate drifted off to sleep, only to dream each time that all the men he had ever condemned to death were rising from their graves and marching through the streets of Yremy, calling to him to meet them at a place assigned by destiny, to which he knew that he would in time be drawn.

  No sooner had he lost count of the occasions on which this happened than he opened his eyes with a sudden start, and saw a figure standing at the foot of the bed, wrapped all around by a dark cloak. Shadowed eyes were staring at him through two holes cut in a leathern mask.

  “It will do no good to strive against your fate, Monsieur Magistrate,” said the voice, which sounded like the rustling of fallen leaves stirred by a cold north wind. “Sentence is passed, and only remains to be carried out.”

  This time, M. Voltigeur did not pause to debate matters with the Phantom. Nor did he bother to cry out to rouse his friends, but clumsily brought the pistol from beneath his sheet, and fired it.

  The effect of what he did was not quite what he had expected. Instead of an instant explosion there was a sinister hiss and a great gout of white smoke which stung his eyes horribly. When the explosion came, after several seconds had passed, he had ceased to expect it and it made him jump with alarm. The recoil—which also came as a great surprise—wrenched the weapon from his hand. To the cloud of white smoke which had already blinded him there was added a much thicker cloud of black, and when he was finally able to see again he was not at all surprised to find that the visitor was no longer standing by his bed.

  As the door burst inwards to admit the sword-wielding Malchance, M. Voltigeur leapt to the foot of the bed, fully expecting—or, at least, desperately hoping—to see a corpse stretched upon the rug. But all that was on the floor were the wide-scattered contents of one of the treasure-chests. The lid had been wrenched away by sheer brute force which had burst the hinges asunder.

  Next door, the voice of Odo could be heard crying: “The alarms! The alarms! The door is breached, and so is the chest!”

  One by one the servants arrived—but it appeared that they already suspected what they might find, for their blades were not held aloft, and when they found that the Phantom was nowhere to be seen they did not seem at all surprised.

  Through the rest of the night the magistrate and his friend worked methodically through their inventory, in order to discover what had been taken from the second chest. By the early morning they were certain that one thing and one thing only was gone: a fine embroidered chemise trimmed with the fur of a rare white hare, which the late Mme. Voltigeur had used as her favourite nightshirt.

  M. Voltigeur did not trouble to swear the company to secrecy, for he knew by now how futile such a gesture would be. The whole town seemed to know what had happened almost before the rising sun was clear of the horizon, and by high noon there was not a single detail of the night’s events which had escaped the scrupulous attention of the gossips.

  When he had eaten a far-from-hearty breakfast the magistrate summoned Jean Malchance, Odo and Hordubal to a conference, and implored all three to help him make some sense out of what had happened. He begged Odo to tell him what kind of magic had been worked to bring the Phantom into his room despite all possible precautions, and to leave it again so cleverly.

  “Monsieur,” said Odo, who had been racking his brains for some time in the hope of excusing the apparent failure of his magical alarms, “it seems to me we can only conclude that the so-called Phantom is indeed a phantom, in a perfectly literal sense. This is no illusionist protected by a spell or potion of invisibility, for he does not come through the door or the window at all. It can only be a ghost, and if it appears in this house, it is surely the ghost of one who died in this house.”

  “Ghost!” exclaimed M. Voltigeur, who had not thought of such a possibility, and was loath to consider it now.

  “Whose ghost?”

  Odo hesitated, but felt obliged to say what was in his mind. “I am reluctant, monsieur, to say what will probably seem a shocking thing, but I think we must consider your late wife the most likely candidate, for the things which the Phantom has taken from you and from your younger daughter are certainly things which your wife once owned. Can you remember, perchance, whether it was your wife who gave to your other children the things which were subsequently removed from their possession?”

  While the wizard was speaking a deep frown came upon the magistrate’s face, but M. Voltigeur did not react angrily. He was a man used to weighing evidence and drawing scrupulous conclusions, and when he considered the question which Odo had posed he realized that although he had not seen the connection before, all the objects removed from the houses of his sons had indeed been given to them by their mother, and that the trinket stolen from his elder daughter had likewise been a gift from her.

  “But what possible reason could my late wife have for haunting me?” complained the magistrate. “I was ever as just and fair in my dealings with her as with the world at large. She lived and died in comfort, with all that a woman could desire, and had the privilege of bearing seven fine children, only two of whom died in infancy. I cannot believe that she might want to hurt me.”

  “And yet,” said Hordubal, who seemed enthused by the possibility of finding an explanation of events which had utterly mystified him, “perhaps there is other evidence to incline us in the direction of an explanation of this kind. My lord Morr is the god of death and the god of dreams, and I felt his nearness when I slept last night in your house. You have admitted that each time you have seen the Phantom you have awakened momentarily from a dream in which graves seemed to open to yield up their dead, and that you have had a sense of being drawn to some fateful rendezvous. Perhaps your encounters with the Phantom were the meetings of which your dreams spoke.”

  “No doubt it was kind of Morr to send me an illuminating vision,” said M. Voltigeur, with a sharpness born of disbelief, “but I might wish that he had made it clearer.”

  At this, Hordubal shook his head sorrowfully, and said: “It is we who are the servants of the gods—they are not ours. We should be grateful for what they send, not resentful that they do not tell us more.”

  “
Most certainly,” agreed Odo, in a pious way.

  But M. Voltigeur only scowled, and turned to his friend. “This is nonsense, Jean, is it not?” he said. “Assure me, please, that there is another way of interpreting this case, which these silly men have overlooked.”

  “Well,” said Jean Malchance, smoothly, “it certainly seems to me that there are several facts which are difficult to explain within this theory. The Phantom has certainly not been restricted to the bounds of this house, as true phantoms usually are. He has not even confined his attentions to the houses of M. Voltigeur’s kin. He has carried out raids all over Yremy, and he was solid enough to engage the watchman Helinand in a very substantial duel. And if the Phantom were in truth a ghost, how could he break the hinges of the chests? I must remind you that when I burst into M. Voltigeur’s room last night the contents of the chest were already strewn across the floor, and it seemed that Odo’s magical alarm had proved no more effective than his magical seal.”

  “Quite so!” cried the magistrate. “What have you to say to that, Master Spellcaster? And since the alarm on the chest proved to be ineffective, how can we be sure that the alarms on the door and window of my room were not defective also? It is my belief that this Phantom is as solid as you or I, but that he is so clever a magician that your frail spells have been utterly impotent to keep him at bay!”

  “Well,” replied Odo, in the offended tone which all wizards adopt when their competence is questioned, “you may believe that if you like, but I must agree with my friend the good servant of Morr, that you have too haughty an attitude to man and god alike. My magic is a good and humble magic entirely appropriate to the needs of Yremy’s people, and if it is not enough to protect you in this case I can only conclude that you do not enjoy as much favour with the goddess Verena as your calling has led you to suppose.”

  “Peace!” said Jean Malchance, in a soothing fashion. “It will not help us to become annoyed with one another. Nor will it help us to blame the gods for what they have or have not done, for I cannot believe that they are behind what is happening here. Let us think about this logically, and see where reason might lead us.”

  “Oh, certainly,” replied Odo, unmollified. “Let us do that, and let us discover what feeble creatures we are, who hope to reach the bottom of such mysteries. If my magic has failed, then more powerful magic must be at work, and that is all there is to it.”

  “Perhaps so,” said Malchance, evenly, “but I think that there is another way to interpret what has happened here, and with your permission, M. Voltigeur, I will describe it—though I must warn you that you may not like it any better than what these men have said.”

  “I am a magistrate,” replied his friend, stoutly, “and I am eager to hear all evidence and argument, wherever it may lead.”

  “Well then,” said Malchance, “let us consider the possibility that Odo’s precautions were not so easily evaded. We packed the chests together, you will recall, and locked them all. Then I left the room in search of Odo, did I not, returning some minutes later so that the alarm spells could be set?”

  “That is so,” said the magistrate. “But I did not leave the room. No one could have removed the objects from the chest before the spell was set.”

  “But it is possible so far as I can tell,” said Malchance, “that the objects we later found strewn around the room were not in the chest when the alarm was set, and could have been distributed before the lock was broken. Assessing the evidence purely from my own point of view, I cannot help but ask myself whether it might have been the case that the chest was broken open at exactly the same moment as the lock on the door, when I burst into M. Voltigeur’s room. If that were true, there might have been no failure of the alarms.”

  “But that is absurd!” exclaimed the magistrate. “I tell you, Jean, that the objects were not removed while you were out of the room. Who could have done it, save for me? Who could have secreted them, and later have strewn them around the room, except myself? And who, except myself, could have broken the lock on the chest at precisely the time that you burst through my door?”

  Jean Malchance spread his arms wide, and said: “There you have it, in a nutshell. Who has seen the Phantom in this house, except yourself? No one. Who could possibly have done any of these mysterious things, except yourself? No one. Ergo, I must ask that we take seriously the proposition that you are the one who has done them!”

  Here Malchance was forced to pause, because M. Voltigeur appeared likely to suffer a fit of apoplexy.

  The clerk put a reassuring hand on his friend’s shoulder, and said to him in a kindly tone: “Of course, I do not say that you have done these things knowingly, but only that you must have done them. You could have conjured up this ghost. You could have taken these relics of your dead wife from your children’s houses. You could be the Phantom, and it is hard to see that anyone else can have done what the Phantom has done. What other explanation is as probable? That you have been bewitched or accursed is certainly possible, but I must in all conscience say that we cannot seriously doubt that yours are the hands which have actually carried out these actions.”

  M. Voltigeur was of a different opinion. “This is absurd!” he howled. “It is monstrous! I have been your firmest friend for forty years, Jean Malchance, and now you accuse me of this! I am a victim of robbery and evil haunting, and the only conclusion which my friend can reach is that I have robbed myself and haunted myself! It is no wonder, you serpent of ingratitude, that I had the wit and wisdom to become a great judge, while you remained my clerk. Logic be damned! Your contention is the vilest slander I have ever heard, and I only wish that I could find a punishment to fit such a crime, for I would surely exact it. Leave my house, and take your worthless spellcasters with you. Begone! I will face this vicious Phantom alone, and I will find out who he is for myself. It is doubtful that Odo or Hordubal would have been overanxious to agree with the curious hypothesis which Jean Malchance had advanced, but when M. Voltigeur exploded in this manner, and called them worthless, they were by no means inclined to dispute it. In fact, they each came quickly to the conclusion that M. Voltigeur was equally excessive in his ingratitude and his ungraciousness, and that Jean Malchance’s charges, however unlikely they might seem, must have struck a spot made sore by conscience.

  Jean Malchance, on the other hand, seemed to repent his reckless words, and begged to be allowed to remain—in order, as he put it, to help M. Voltigeur defend himself against himself—but this only roused M. Voltigeur’s anger to a higher pitch, and he would not be content until his former friend was banished from his house.

  The two spellcasters went with him, feeling very aggrieved by the way that their sincere attempts to help had not been better appreciated.

  By nightfall, the story of the quarrel was all around the town, and so was the rumour that the notorious Phantom had all along been none other than M. Voltigeur himself, turned to a life of crime by arrogance and impiety. Many people who had never imagined such a possibility soon began to say that they had expected it, having always been certain that a judge who handed down such unusual sentences could have no real respect for the law.

  Thanks to the incautious suspicions of Jean Malchance, M. Voltigeur went to bed that night a much less admirable man, in the estimation of his neighbours, than he had been before. In his own mind, however, he was absolutely certain that he was not guilty of the perverse charges which Malchance had so unexpectedly levelled against him, and he was enthusiastic to prove it in whatever manner he could.

  He distributed his servants about the house as before, and the guardsmen about the grounds, but he was not prepared to trouble himself with magical alarms and magical locks in whose efficacy he could no longer trust.

  Before he went to bed he carefully searched through the one chest which had not been plundered, and removed from it a small oval portrait of his dead wife, which had been painted before their marriage, and presented to him as a token of her respect—for she ha
d ever been a respectful woman, who had never taken advantage of their intimacy to excuse any lapse of politeness.

  He could not be entirely certain that this portrait was the article most likely to be sought by the Phantom, but it seemed altogether likely. He placed the portrait beneath his pillow.

  He had kept the pistol, having persuaded himself that he had missed his shot on the previous night only because he had not understood how the cursed thing was supposed to work and had failed to hold the barrel straight when he was bewildered by the smoke and the recoil. He was determined that his hand should be steadier this time, if he had the opportunity to fire another shot.

  The careful taking of these precautions calmed his anger somewhat, but they could not quiet his anxiety, and when he went to bed he felt as though an iron band had been drawn around his waist, squeezing his belly. His head was like a seething cauldron, his thoughts like bubbles bursting randomly upon his consciousness, so that he hardly needed to fall asleep in order to experience delirium.

  Two images kept coming back to him while he waited: the image of the graveyard where the dead were rising from their tombs, bent on keeping their appointment with the man who had sentenced them to death; and the image of Jean Malchance, who had undergone in a single instant of time a dramatic transformation from friend to foe.

  It was the latter image which possessed him more firmly. What had made Jean do it? Was he, too, the victim of some awful magic? Might he too be accursed?

  Because these images kept rising into his mind despite the fact that he was wide awake he was forced to search for something solid to look at, for the purpose of distraction. He took the portrait from his pillow, and occupied himself in staring at the face of the young girl whose wise and careful father had done him the honour of accepting his most generous offer for her hand.