He faltered backward and felt his skull explode: not so much with pain as with the paralyzing anticipation of pain to come. It was not the first time in his life he had been felled with a bung-starter, and he guessed as the stones of the courtyard rushed up to meet him that it was the landlord who had laid him low.
* * * *
It was some time before he could spare sufficient attention from the pain in his head to wonder where he was, and then he faced a puzzle. He assumed that city policemen were taking him somewhere, and he was bound hand and foot, but unaccountably gagged. Lying on cushions in a dark enclosure, progressing feet first, he thought he might be in a coffin, and that they intended to take revenge for their comrades by burying him alive. The rhythmic jolting suggested that his pallbearers were trotting, though, and it was hard to accept that image.
He could hear their deep but easy breathing, and the slap of bare feet on stone, which he doubted he would have heard so clearly inside a coffin. Forcing his eyes a little wider, he saw that this box was larger. Openings on either side were covered with dark but not fully opaque curtains.
He breathed a little more easily. He was in a litter, it seemed, and being carried along by barefoot slaves, surely an odd way to be haled before a magistrate. He tried to sit up so he might look through the curtains, but he was tied to the frame, and so securely that he was unable to rap on the litter with his feet or elbows.
He told himself he should enjoy the unaccustomed ride and wait to see where it led, but he was unable to accept that advice. Being carried along on a pole, as intractable prisoners usually were, would have been less frightening than this mystery. He suspected he was being kidnapped. His desperate struggles only tightened his bonds.
What little light had sifted through the curtains now failed as the way led downward. The air grew cool, then positively dank. The slaves trotted less swiftly as their footfalls echoed in drafty spaces.
At last the litter was set down among odors of mold and dust. The slaves departed softly. He heard only water dripping; and, very distantly, a tinny clashing that might have been someone’s notion of music. Footsteps approached, and one of the curtains was jerked aside.
The face of a man long dead, or so he had thought, looked down on him. Long and wolfishly lean, white as a tombstone by moonlight, and with eyes of pitiless topaz, it was the face of Vendriel the Good.
As if divining the nature of his captive’s terror, this apparition was quick to say, “I am Lord Morphyrion,” but this gave scant reassurance: he was grandson of the wizard-lord and head of the infamous Fandragoran branch of the House of Vendren.
With remarkable prescience, or perhaps merely with a sardonic glance at their family tree, his parents had named him for a notorious madman of antiquity.
He gestured with a hand so disproportionately large that it looked like an independent creature. Crondard was struck by the fancy that the lord’s black garments contained only the wires necessary to manipulate his head and hands, for he was thin to the point of incorporeality.
Men in the black livery and tiger emblems of the Tribe obeyed the gesture and unbound him, but he was in no hurry to get out of the litter. He knew the search would be hopeless, and so it proved, but he felt about him for his weapons. Pulled forth roughly, he clenched his jaw against the pain of standing more or less erect.
“A Fomor.” The lord studied him for a moment and frowned thoughtfully. “You are a Fomor? It is said that your folk can see through the veil of the material world.”
So it was said, mostly by Fomors like his mother, who spent more time in conversation with ghosts, sprites, oracles and divine messengers than with real people. As a disciple of Mantissus the Epiplect, he had outgrown such nonsense, but he had entertained second thoughts since coming to Fandragord.
Feeling that it was expected of him, and dredging up a trace of the accent he had labored to lose thirty years ago, he answered, “That is the pride of my people, and their curse.”
The Vendren lord nodded, seeming pleased. “I take it you are the same Crondard Sleith who recently fled the capital to escape the justice of my kinsman, Lord Leriel. Did you know my daughter, Lereela?”
The Fomor failed to repress a shudder at her name, but Morphyrion fortunately happened to be looking away as he spoke it. “We never met, but of course I know of the lady, whose beauty and grace—”
“Enough! I erred by failing to dash the wicked bitch’s brains out as an infant, but I am not a complete fool. She takes after my grandfather, and you know it.” He waited for a response, but Crondard was at a loss for a tactful one, so he went on: “You don’t look well, young man. Please be seated.”
He knew he was young only by the standard of Lord Morphyrion, whose marble face was cracked by a spiderweb of wrinkles, but the turn of phrase pleased him. The chair he chose creaked and listed beneath him. Like everything else in this huge room, it had once been magnificent. Now the tapestries rotted on the crumbling walls, and fine siftings of wood-dust lay about the furniture as testimony to the industry of termites and worms.
“In addition to possessing the natural talents of a seer,” the lord said, sitting opposite and crossing legs like reeds, “you have made a name for yourself as a necromancer, no mean feat in Fandragord.”
“That was a misunderstanding, one that I myself don’t begin to understand—”
The explanation was waved away. “I heard some of the details, and I can imagine the rest. Lereela had many misguided admirers here, as she does in Frothirot. One of these was a young man named Zornard Glypht, who begged her, in a turn of phrase she found tiresome, to make his dreams come true.” Sudden anger caused alarming red spots to glare in the lord’s bony cheeks, and Crondard believed that the whole of his limited blood supply had been required for this effect. He spat: “And so the willful baggage did it!”
The Fomor looked away in embarrassment, which Morphyrion correctly interpreted: “No, no, no, I don’t mean she took the moron to bed, that would have been refreshingly normal. Before leaving for the capital, as her vicious parting gift to him and to the city of her birth, she made his dreams come true. All of them.
“At first this was merely a nuisance, and mostly to Zornard himself. He dreamed in the darkest hours, when few others were inconvenienced. Streets would be rearranged in ways that defied logic, animals would develop the power of speech, heroic statues of the dreamer would grace our public squares.
“This palace, where he had so often pursued the inappropriate object of his desire, haunted the sleeper’s mind, and so I suffered more than most from the suspension of nature’s laws, especially as I sleep little and reserve the night for scholarly pursuits. Studying some ancient and irreplaceable volume, I would be vexed to find it transformed into a book of gibberish credited to Zornard Glypht, for the fool fancied himself a poet. The illusions were transient, though, and I could often will them away. Besides, my daughter was to blame for this annoyance, not him, and so I exercised forbearance ... until his first nightmare.”
Morphyrion’s yellow eyes looked away, a relief to Crondard after some moments of suffering their concentrated intensity; but their fixed stare at empty space, like a cat’s seeing ghosts, became almost equally disturbing as he muttered, “A living palace of pink, doughy flesh that caressed me, that sprouted wormlike offspring to pursue me, a palace that died and began to putrefy around me—this nightmare of his recurred, and more than once.”
Crondard jumped when those horrid eyes flashed back to fix on him. “I am a merciful man,” Morphyrion said, “one who would not kill another merely for dreaming. I had him brought here and attempted, by the most humane means, to keep him awake.
“This worked for a while, but more and more severe methods had to be used to restrain his inconsiderate wish for sleep. My servants continuously rattled pots and pans beside him, but after two weeks or so he had developed a facility for dreaming on his feet, and with his eyes open. All of his dreams became nightmares, and all of them c
entered on me.
“Only then did I resign myself sorrowfully to the necessity of pincers, hot irons and the rack as inducements to wakefulness. After just a few days and nights of this, his unexpectedly weak heart gave out. My own heart was heavy, as you may imagine, but after I had restored his corpse to the bosom of his family and paid them a reasonable indemnity, I tried to put the unfortunate episode behind me.”
The lord’s hair was full and long, like his monstrous ancestor’s, and silver as rainwater. He tossed it back with a vain and oddly boyish gesture, as if demonstrating how he had put Zornard behind him.
“To my profound chagrin,” he continued at length, “death did not stop his dreams. They wandered abroad at noon, and with even greater substance and malevolence. Tell me, Crondard Sleith, do I look familiar to you?”
Intent upon Morphyrion’s monologue, and upon the lines of speculation it opened, Crondard answered the sudden question without weighing the consequences. “You look like Lord Vendriel the Good.”
Crondard suspected that the lord’s thin smile was a very bad sign, but his response was mild: “I don’t, you know, not at all. My appearance was rather ordinary, though I always flattered myself that it reflected my kindly nature—until Zornard’s dreams gave me the face and figure of my despised grandfather. I hardly dare go out by daylight anymore, weary of all the fainting and shrieking I now provoke from the little people who formerly worshipped the ground I trod.”
Trying to give a suitable appearance of solemnity, Crondard counted the freckles on the backs of his hands. It was true that Morphyrion was no Vendriel, but in the capital he was rumored to have diverted himself in youth by sneaking around to strangle the weak and afflicted. He was probably the most powerful man Crondard had ever spoken to, as well as the craziest, and it would have been impolitic to laugh at the picture he painted of himself; but he was sorely tempted.
When the silence had stretched out uncomfortably, Crondard glanced up to confront that unsettling stare. At a loss for anything else to say, he blurted, “Why don’t you do something about it?”
“Ah! Advice from so notorious a necromancer would be most welcome. What do you propose I do?”
“I meant—” Crondard wished he had kept silent—“why don’t you reverse your daughter’s spell? Or get her to do it?”
“My grandfather’s natural talents have passed me over; my only skills are for scholarship and philanthropy. And my daughter, who inherited his abilities, has never done a single thing I asked her. You wouldn’t believe how many charlatans and mountebanks lay claim to such powers, and how many of them I’ve employed. Zaggo, do we still have those people in the Rose Garden?” he turned to ask one of his attendants. “No? I fear I can’t show them to you, Crondard Sleith, they all seem to have been buried. They all agreed, however, that this plague of dreams will stop only when Zornard Glypht’s body has been found and destroyed.”
“You said you restored it—”
“To his loved ones, yes, but it no longer lies in the family tomb, and they denied knowledge of its whereabouts with their dying breaths. Either it was moved, or the self-styled poet has dreamed himself somewhere else. I suggest you start your search in this palace, since it has always loomed so large in his nightmares.”
V
Few things could please Crondard more than a dashing new uniform, but he had misgivings as he strode through the streets of Fandragord in the black regalia of Lord Morphyrion’s guard. Any heraldic emblem, but most especially the Vendren Tiger, roused a certain uneasiness in one not born to wear it. He had only to glance down at his lacquered breastplate or the pommel of his new broadsword to be unnerved by the snarling mask of that beast.
He was nevertheless grateful for its magical power to clear a way through crowds, for he was in a hurry to return to the Sow in Rut and test his new sword on the innkeeper who had struck him down and handed him over to Morphyrion’s men. After that he would get as far from the city as he could, losing the uniform on the way. In the lord’s service he enjoyed immunity from the city authorities, but it was limited by the ability of the police to poison him, drag him into an alley or knife him in a crowd. If he remained in Fandragord, he could cut his throat either by appearing in public or by pretending to look for the corpse of Zornard Glypht in the palace of the Vendrens.
One long night of touring the palace, with the lunatic lord clinging like a bad smell and constantly inquiring if he felt any evil influences, had convinced him that would be the quicker route to suicide. He had counted sixteen fresh graves in the Rose Garden, presumably those of his predecessors in the quest for the elusive dreamer, and he might have missed a few by the uncertain torchlight. Never in his life had he been subjected to such a concentrated and prolonged assault by flesh-crawling terrors, but he was certain that their origin was entirely natural, insofar as that adjective could be twisted to describe Lord Morphyrion and his home. After a day of restless sleep, he had escaped the palace by prattling glibly of a dream that had inspired him to seek the corpse elsewhere. This assertion of his visionary powers had delighted Morphyrion.
Of course his troubles would be over if he found and destroyed the dreaming dead man. If he did, Morphyrion promised to shower him with riches and send him back to Frothirot in triumph: not just to be reconciled with the First Lord, but to assume the vacant captaincy of Company ‘Ironhand’ and eventually succeed to the leadership of the Fomorian Guard.
“Lord Commander Crondard Sleith” had a pleasant ring to it, but he might as well skip to the moon on a rainbow as seek the unquiet grave of Zornard Glypht. He had seen strange things in Fandragord, but could any student of Mantissus ascribe them to the nightmares of a corpse?
“Your own nightmares, more likely,” he could hear that philosopher say. “A whore turned into a corpse and attacked you when you were drunk, eh? And after you fell off your horse and baked your crapulent head in the desert sun for an hour or so, you saw a boy instead of a boar, did you? You’ve certainly convinced me, Crondard, and now you must excuse me while I burn my misguided books and begin my new studies as a wizard.”
He realized that he was talking to himself, which cleared his path even more quickly, and that his feet had led him to the inn. After loosening his sword in its scabbard and making sure his ax was not tangled in his elegant cape, he plunged through the door. His brisk advance faltered when he found himself in the phantom entryway he had seen on the first night.
“Liron Wolfbaiter!” the landlord cried from the taproom, distracting him from his study of the ghastly mural of Vendriel the Good. “Just the man I’ve been wishing to see.”
“Enjoy the sight, you backstabbing bastard, for it will be your last.” The room was quickly emptying again, but he saw no policemen. “Do you have a sword, or would you care to borrow one of mine? Or, if you have a spare bung-starter, I’ll be pleased to demonstrate how a Fomor uses one.”
“Would you have gone to Lord Morphyrion if I’d suggested it?” the landlord asked as he quickly shuffled tables into a makeshift barrier. “If the police had taken you, would the magistrate have given you a flashy new outfit and sent you on your way? Your own brother wouldn’t have taken such care of your interests as I have, Wolfbaiter.”
Stalking him around the growing island of tables, Crondard hurled a chair that shattered against the wall, a wall that had not been there yesterday. Forgetting his purpose for the moment, he went to the wall and struck it with the heel of his hand, cracking the plaster. It seemed real enough.
“This room was open to the courtyard before,” he said, drawing his ax to give it a proper test.
“They knocked out the wall, but it keeps coming back.” The speaker was Fardel, one of several patrons held in their seats by befuddlement or a taste for mayhem.
“Pay no mind to him, he’s—”
“Telling the truth, probably,” Crondard said, beginning to stalk the landlord again. He demonstrated how a Guardsman could spin a battle-ax in the air and catch it by the
handle without looking. With two casual strokes, he narrowed the space between them by two tables.
“Lord Nephreiniel left you a handsome gift!” the innkeeper all but screamed. “Don’t you want to see it? It’s out in the courtyard, a truly splendid animal.”
“He’s gone, is he?” It had been his slim hope to accompany that lord to Zaxann and ask his protection against Morphyrion, though he doubted Nephreiniel’s power to give it. If he betrayed the chief of the Fandragoran Vendrens by fleeing, he would have to travel farther than Omphiliot. But perhaps Nephreiniel had given him the means of fleeing far and fast. The splendid animal could only be one of his fine horses.
“I’ll settle with you later,” he told the landlord, although his thirst for revenge had been almost satisfied by throwing a scare into him and wrecking his furniture. Hesitating at the rear exit, he asked, “What’s that damned music?”
The distant, tinny dissonance could hardly be called music, but he had heard it often since coming to Fandragord. It was probably a local craze, so commonly entangled with the noise of the city that natives were deaf to it, because the landlord and the others stared blankly. Fardel’s stare was also blank, but the halfwit was tapping his foot to the jerky rhythm.
As on his first visit, a rickety structure surrounded the courtyard, looking even more slapdash now that he had time to study it. He knew nothing of carpentry, but it seemed improbable that such leaning and contorted walls could stand. He tried to find specific reasons for his disquiet by making a systematic survey, but it came to nothing.
Making his eye follow a straight line from base to roof or from one angle to another proved impossible: he would blink and lose his place, or his eye would be distracted by a flurry of motion behind a window. All those windows, when he looked at them directly, were empty.
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