“And as time went by with their descendants growing up in a Christian environment, more and more of them converted?”
John nodded. “They did indeed, until we became as you find us—almost all Christian, but with Muslims and Buddhists and others welcome to come, and to worship as they please.”
“I take it the immigrants intermarried with the original pioneers.”
“They did,” said Prester John, “and taught one another their martial arts. As time went by, we became one hybrid people with the blood of Russians, Persians, Turks, Mongols, and Chinese—indeed, all the peoples of Asia—coursing in our veins, with their combined wisdom in our heads and hearts.”
“And their blended prowess in the arts of war in your arms,” Matt concluded.
“Indeed,” their host confirmed. “The third Prester John established athletic contests in these arts, and the young folk strove to perfect their skills, while those who were mature exercised to keep them at their peak. Late in his reign, when the Mongols and Turks allied against us, the Prester led his armies to a battle that was hard fought but brief, routing the hordes completely.”
“And every Prester John since has had to fight off his own attack by barbarians?”
“Yes, and sometimes twice in one reign. If the wild horsemen of the steppes have never penetrated to the West before, you may thank my predecessors. Even my father, in his youth, fought off an alliance of Mongols under a chieftain named Temujin.”
Matt’s scalp prickled as he recognized the man who had held the title “Genghis Khan,” universal ruler, in his own world.
Prester John’s face darkened and his head bowed. “I alone have failed in this duty.”
“Only temporarily,” Matt said briskly. “That does explain why Arjasp realized his gur-khan had to hit you before he attacked anyone else, though.”
“Indeed,” Prester John said, his expression grim. “Arjasp and his gur-khan seem to have learned from the mistakes of those who attacked and lost before them. They struck first at my capital of Maracanda, as I have told you. Later, fugitives told us that they sacrificed those few of our nobility whom they caught, slew them with ceremony on the altars of their god of deceit and blood. Then the gur-khan left Maracanda and all the kingdom with a strong garrison and rode west to conquer in their tens of thousands, with little to stop them save armies who knew not of their coming.”
“Surprise has served them well,” Matt said, “and their reputation for being both unbeatable and cruel to their enemies, but merciful to those who surrender, has taken them even farther. Of course, legions of the conquered have been quick to convert to the worship of Ahriman.”
“So many will side with them who triumph, no matter who or what they are.” Prester John sighed. “I fear that Arjasp plans to conquer all the continent of Asia.”
“I don’t think he means to stop at the Caucasus or the Bosporus, either,” Matt said. “He means to go on and conquer all of Europe, too, clear to the Atlantic.”
“And when he has finished,” John said grimly, “he will come back to tear this city apart brick by brick and slay us all.”
“On top of which, since the demons have let in anyone who was seeking you out, Arjasp will have all his remaining enemies in one place.” Matt slapped his knees and stood up to pace. “Your pardon, Majesty, but I don’t think we should hang around—any of us.”
“Agreed,” John said with a smile of weary amusement. “What business brought you to me, after all?”
“Oh, just to ask a little favor,” Matt said. “Nothing much, just that you would take your invincible army and attack the barbarians from the rear.”
John nodded heavily. “I will gladly, Lord Wizard, but I must first defeat those who have conquered my own kingdom.”
“Deal!” Matt declared. “We help you win back your capital, and you attack the barbarians. Of course, I realize you’ll have to clear them out of the rest of your kingdom first.”
Prester John stared up at Matt as though he were insane, then asked the djinn, “Is he serious?”
“Most serious, I assure you,” Lakshmi said grimly. “I have come to realize he is at his most profound when he seems most foolish. But wizard, what of our true mission?”
John was instantly on the alert. “What mission is this?”
“A small matter,” Matt said. “Four small matters, actually, and everyone a child. Arjasp stole our offspring.”
“For hostages!”
“And distractions,” Matt said. “The hostage idea hasn’t worked too well—it just made me more sneaky than ever. But the distraction is working very well indeed—we’re off trying to find our kids instead of fighting barbarians.” He turned back to Lakshmi. “But you haven’t forgotten, Princess, that the kids are with Arjasp, and Arjasp is in Maracanda.”
“Of course!” Lakshmi cried, and Marudin grinned. “Win Maracanda, and we have nearly won the children back.”
“Only need to find them,” Matt agreed. “Of course, if Arjasp saw the three of us coming, he might kill them—but if he only saw John and his army?”
“Certainly there would be a hundred places for us to hide, if Arjasp were so distracted,” Lakshmi agreed.
Prester John frowned. “How, though, can you help me take back my capital if you have no army?”
“By being a wizard who has three companions,” Matt told him, “two djinn and one very talented apprentice.”
Balkis finally came out of her daze and stared up at him.
They came to the eastern gate accompanied by Prester John and a whole company of cavalry. “I do not see how poor three of you can banish a host of demons,” John said for the tenth time.
With weary patience Lakshmi assured him a new way. “It is an old tale I learned from a djinn who lived a thousand years before me, Majesty.”
Marudin reddened and looked straight ahead.
“I trust your knowledge, or I would beseech you not to go,” John said, but his voice reverberated down the corridors of dread. “Still, if you fail to banish them and are beset, my soldiers and I shall charge out to rescue.”
“You would all die in a trice.” Lakshmi was still trying to be gentle. “Be of good cheer—you shall not need to. But deeply do we cherish your courage and loyalty.”
“Only be sure all your people are ready to march when we win,” Marudin reminded him.
“They are summoned and set.” Prester John looked back down the long avenue to the fortress. Every inch was filled with soldiers and civilians, carts and packhorses, wagons and chariots. “They stand at your whim.”
“I must go out with you, too!” Balkis insisted, though she was trembling with fear.
“Other way around,” Matt told her. “We need to have you watching from the wall to bail us out, just in case we do get in over our heads.”
“Fear not, lass,” Marudin assured her. “We shall emerge unscathed.”
Balkis stopped trembling, but her face was pinched with worry.
“Sorry, Your Majesty, but you can’t talk us out of it.” Matt turned away from Prester John and called to the porters, “Open the right-hand gate!”
With obvious misgivings, ten soldiers put their shoulders under the huge bar and slid it clear. Two more stepped in and swung the right-hand portal open. Matt marched out with the djinn on either side of him and heard the great valve boom shut behind him.
“I just hope you’re right,” he told Marudin.
“I assure you, I have seen it,” the prince told him testily. “When you behold them, you shall understand.”
“Forward, then, to glory!” Lakshmi commanded.
Matt swallowed his heart down out of his throat and matched their pace, striding forward with the sound of his own pulse drowning out the awed and fearful murmur of the people thronging the wall behind him.
They hadn’t gone more than three paces before the sand before them began to stir and churn, as far as they could see from east to west and all the way to the desert horizo
n. Forms rose from the ground itself, and braced though he was, Matt nearly cried out in terror.
CHAPTER 28
They were horned, they were horrid, they were whelked, they were warty. They came in sickening combinations of human and animal parts—and features that came from neither. There were single glaring eyes, dozens of eyes, and any number in between—bulging, dished, compound stalked, large as platters, small as pebbles. There were pointed teeth, shark teeth, viper fangs, chisel teeth, dagger teeth, serrated teeth, and plain strips of whetted steel. There were trumpet snouts braying, wolf muzzles, octopus tentacles, beaks clacking, fur, goat legs, elephant legs, feathers, and fins. There was everything humans have ever seen and much more that they had imagined, all put together in mockeries of anthropoid and animal forms. There were giant insects with human heads, human bodies with scales and insect heads, claws and pincers and mantis-arms and spider legs.
They gibbered and hooted and droned and brayed and howled and shrieked. They marched toward the trio, looking neither to left nor right, grinning with menace—obviously meaning to chase them back inside if they could, though probably hoping the companions would stand their ground so that the demons would have an excuse to tear them apart. They were creatures of nightmare, some that Matt recognized from his own childhood night terrors, and the sight of them evoked that numbing, paralyzing fear all over again. His knees turned to jelly, but Lakshmi’s arm clamped about him to hold him up, and he understood in a flash that half the creatures’ power was the sheer terror they inspired in anything that saw them.
Anything except djinn, it seemed. “Recite, wizard!” Lakshmi snapped. “It shall take all our power merged to stop this horde!”
Matt felt Marudin’s hand tighten on his other arm and realized they were all three linked. The prince began the chant they had rehearsed, and he and Lakshmi joined in:
“The wall is long and tall and wide.
Let it be with silver dyed—
A mirror polished clear and bright,
Reflecting all who stand outside!”
Then just for good measure, Matt threw in,
“There be fools alive, I wis,
Silvered o’er, and so is this!”
Matt knew he shouldn’t take his eyes off the monsters for a second, but he risked a quick glance back over his shoulder. The white plaster of the city’s walls shimmered in the pounding glare of noon, glimmered, clouded, then cleared—to reflect the sunlight back in searing brightness. But it wasn’t the light that mattered, it was the reflection of the horde of monsters that faced those walls, walls that had become one gigantic mirror.
A second of unearthly silence held the desert.
Then it broke. The air filled with shrieks and howls of unearthly pitches and tones as the demons saw an army of horrible and twisted forms facing them. They couldn’t bear the ugliness, either, and the sheer horror of the sight struck terror into their very cores. As one, they turned and charged away, bellowing in panic, stamping down into the ground and disappearing beneath the sand. Those with wings took to the air and soared away until they were only dots in the sky, then disappeared. In minutes the plain was clear.
Matt stared, dumbfounded, but Lakshmi kept her wits about her. She whirled, beckoning with her whole arm and crying in a voice like a trumpet, “Come now as you promised! They are gone, they are banished, but they may come back before sunset, and they will not be so easily daunted a second time!”
Matt shook himself awake. “That’s right—it was the surprise that got them, wasn’t it? The shock. They’d seen each other before, but never all together!”
“And did not realize the wall had become a mirror,” Marudin confirmed. “They saw an army of monsters marching toward them and were as terrified by the sight as we were. But when they return to whatever power sent them, it will chastise them most severely and send them to confront this city again.”
“Come on!” Matt bawled to the city. “This is your one chance, and it may not last long!”
The gates burst open and Prester John came riding out with Balkis beside him on a mount of her own, looking decidedly insecure in her saddle. They rode at the head of a column four horses wide, all that the gates would allow. The priest-king rode up to them and turned his horse aside. An honor guard of several score soldiers drew rein behind and around them while the generals led the procession on past.
“I cannot thank you enough, djinn and wizard!” John said. “Forever shall my people sing your praises!”
“Had you not better lead them, then?” Lakshmi demanded.
John shook his head. “My generals shall suffice for that. It is my place to stay and watch, to be sure the last of my people has left the city. Then may I ride in their wake.”
“Commendable,” Lakshmi sniffed, “but only if your generals know where to go and how to ride there. Can they lead your army to Maracanda?”
“They can,” John assured her, “and are more than enough to counter any barbarian patrols we shall meet on the way.”
“Even if you slay such patrols to the last man, you shall have no surprise,” Lakshmi warned. “I doubt not Arjasp has spies who will warn him of your coming long hours before you near the city.”
“Let them be warned,” John said, with a feral grin. “They are only a garrison, after all, not the conquering army that battles in Persia. Even with my forces being only half what they were, they shall still prove more than a match for so few.”
“What if they close your own gates upon you?”
“They are indeed my own gates.” Prester John touched a long black case hanging from his belt. “I hold the key.”
Matt wondered what kind of a key could move a locking bar hundreds of pounds in weight, but decided to wait and see. Not that it mattered—he knew half a dozen spells that could do the job, so long as Arjasp hadn’t already detected them and set the counterspell on them—and if Prester John’s spell was as old and complex as Matt suspected, it would be like trying to protect a Yale lock by putting it inside a tin can.
“Then hew your way into the city,” Lakshmi said, “but if you hack your way to Arjasp, first make him tell where my children are locked. Then remember his crimes!”
“That I swear,” Prester John told her. “If we catch the man, we shall see justice done.”
“The justice we seek,” Marudin said, “is that you give him over to us.”
Matt glanced at the djinni’s eyes and shuddered.
They rode through the mountain pass and down into John’s own kingdom, an army ten thousand strong with two djinn, a wizard, and his apprentice to strengthen it. They could see peasants in the fields freezing at their work to stare, then running to spread the alarm to the villages. Presumably the Mongols picked up on the rumor, for now and again Matt saw a stocky rider on a shaggy pony sitting atop a rise. Whenever John sent a party after such a one, though, he wheeled his pony and disappeared.
Late in the afternoon, as they climbed toward a ridge, a score of horsemen appeared against the darkening sky, filling the road between two outcrops of trees.
Prester John, once more back at the head of his troops, said only, “They have chosen their ground well, and their time.”
“Yes,” said Lakshmi, “for your folk are wearied with a long day’s travel.”
“So are they, though,” Prester John pointed out. “I doubt not they have scoured the countryside for all who could come quickly. Many of them have ridden a hundred miles this day.”
“You have to admire their courage,” Matt said. “There can’t be more than two dozen of them, but they’re still going to try to stop us.”
“They are fools,” John said simply. “Surely they must know that I will guess they have hundreds more hidden within those woods!” He snapped orders to his men, and companies of horsemen whirled to the left and right, plunging off the roadway to ride through the fields around the woods.
John sighed. “The peasants shall lose their year’s labor this day, but fight we
must, though it destroys the standing crops.” To his general, he said, “Be as merciful as you may. These are brave men who choose to die from loyalty to a falsehood. Let us spare them if we can.”
The general nodded heavily, his own face heavy with regret.
“We might be able to make it a little less bloody,” Matt said thoughtfully, then slipped the wand out, pointed it at the northern grove, and chanted,
“Afrit of the Hindu Kush,
Who sought to bar our Marids’ path,
Leave your station in the evening’s hush!
Come to your master’s men with wrath.
Fright all horsemen whom you see
And chase them from these verdant trees.”
“What have you done?” John cried. “You have set an afrit upon my soldiers!”
“Not yours, no,” Matt said. “I told him to come to his master’s men, remember.”
Shrieks and howls split the air. Horsemen boiled out of the northern grove, riding away in terror any way they could. Some, seeing John’s soldiers before them, drew their curved swords, ready to strike down any who stood in their way, but officers barked orders, and the soldiers opened avenues for the fugitives.
A howl of disappointment sounded from the grove, and a horrifying sight came charging out into the roadway. Twice as tall as horse and rider, tusked and bug-eyed, it leaped into the midst of the barbarians. With howls of terror they galloped away. The afrit stood, looking about in consternation and bewilderment. Then it shrugged and dove into the southern grove.
Seconds later Tartars came boiling out of those trees, too, riding hell-bent for leather in any direction except back.
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