by Brian Daley
Dinner being effectively over, the participants began stumbling and aiding one another out of the hall by the nearest exits, avoiding the main tunnel’s entrance at the head of the table where the smoke was the thickest. John was holding both sisters there by their wrists, however, trying between gasping breaths and hacking coughs to rally his forces.
In Crassmor’s tactical assessment, getting past John would be the linchpin of the affair. The knight found a sword abandoned by its owner and took it up as his own eyes began to water. There seemed no alternative to a duel with the alarmingly large and agile John.
Just then Crassmor saw, through the drifting smoke, the delicate Arananth raise a pewter beer pitcher she’d snatched from the table-with her free hand and, standing on tiptoe, bring it down on the pirate’s head. It made a sound like a town clock Crassmor had once heard. John, rocked, released the women. Arananth took the pitcher with a two-handed grip and dealt him another blow before Oorda, with a cry, grabbed her. The bandit half-collapsed, holding himself up by leaning on his chair, one hand clamped to his scalp.
Crassmor, ever attentive to the moment’s advantage, was already on the move. Tucking the sword through his belt and skirting the dazed John, he caught up one sister’s hand in each of his and churned toward the exit, ending their difference of opinion.
“But—” Arananth panted.
“What—” Oorda protested.
“Run!” Crassmor hollered, shoving them on their way. This they did. He paused and whirled, hearing faltering footsteps behind him. Fanarion staggered out of the swirling smoke, eyes watering, wheezing. He must have known the knight by his voice; the old mage raised a finger and aimed it in his direction. Perhaps it was a brief resurgence of old power, or the emotion of the moment, but green sparks crackled along the digit.
However, Fanarion could apparently bring to mind no truly puissant curse, and so he began spewing maledictions. “May misfortune pursue you! May you never know peace!” The pronouncements didn’t frighten the knight particularly, under the circumstances. He did not wish to be the target of some stronger wording, though; he took up a wine goblet and dashed its contents into the mage’s face, ending the ranting and dousing the green sparks. Then he raced away. Within seconds, he’d caught up with the sisters.
Crassmor could hear John, who must have shaken off the effects of Arananth’s blows, yelling for his men. As the knight ran along the main tunnel, he heard the pack take up the chase, gaining, and still had no idea how to find Bint or deal with the guards on duty at the windlass. He regretted the wasted effort and self-deception of carefully planned rescues. Grossly unfair, he reflected, the scheme of things.
As they drew up on the kitchen chamber, they saw Bint in the tunnel before them, shouldering a cask. Calling for them to get out of the way, he held it high. They dodged past him. Bint hurled the cask down the tunnel, breaking it on the stone. Fish oil washed down the steep, smoky tunnel, lapping the side walls. Bint had three more casks by his side, their heads already broached. He emptied one with a wide swing, then drew the others down the tunnel, where they shattered.
The younger knight was gasping for breath as they gathered around him, babbling questions. Glancing back down the tunnel, Crassmor could barely make out madly thrashing figures sliding on a quick return trip toward the dining chamber, caroming off one another with yells of distress, thumping off the walls. Indicators, Crassmor realized, of a significant setback in pursuit.
Bint explained, “I heard the hubbub. It occurred to me that slippery footing might work to our advantage.” He grinned proudly through layers of ash and grease.
“Admirable. Resourceful,” Crassmor congratulated, catching his breath. “Straight on and around the bend to the winch, is it not? And the guards—”
“Came running when they heard that hoopla,” Bint anticipated. “They turned their backs on me when I pretended I was still shackled.” He pointed; Crassmor saw two unconscious men lying against a nearby wall. A heavy iron skillet testified to the fact that Bint hadn’t violated his word not to raise hand or edge against anyone. He’d been fortunate in that the men hadn’t been wearing their steel caps. This boy holds real promise, Crassmor decided. Arananth was eyeing Bint, not without some interest. Oorda gazed back down the tunnel, evincing concern. Bint added, “Best we were off, before Fanarion can whistle up his giant or—”
A clank of metal had come from below. They saw a man working his laborious way up the tunnel, scaling sideways along its wall, avoiding the grease chute of a floor by swinging from hold to chancy hold like an ungainly gibbon. John, of course; the clank had been the sword thrust through his belt. He advanced quickly.
They couldn’t simply run, Crassmor knew; John would overtake them before they could reach the cave’s mouth. He shoved his cousin at the women. “Get them away however you can. Go downstream; their sister Alanna should be there, not far. Tell her that if she fails to wait for me, I’ll come back to haunt her.”
Oorda grew stubborn, unsure that she wanted to leave now that she’d spoken her devotion to John. Crassmor bellowed, “Arananth’s your responsibility too!”
She sneered at him, but went off with Bint and her sister. Oorda warned Crassmor over her shoulder, “Keep John at bay only! If you hurt him, I shall rip out your liver!”
Me hurt him? Crassmor marveled. He turned to watch the pirate laboring toward him. Reasonable to the last, he called out, “I say, John! That’s quite far enough, my dear fellow; you mustn’t come any closer.”
John paused in his difficult ascent. “And if I do?” Crassmor tsked. “I haven’t taken my sword out yet, you’ll notice. I only wish to be on my way.”
John resumed, giving no sign of having heard. Since the bandit needed both hands and feet to climb, the knight judged that he could keep John from surer footing with a little judicious pinking.
But, as Crassmor should have understood by then, John was a man of great competence. From just beyond Crassmor’s poking range, he stopped and let fly with a knife seized from the dinner table.
Crassmor dropped; the knife passed over him. He hit the floor, then rolled furiously as he saw John draw back with a second blade. The second knife struck a note from the stone. John, having gathered himself, sprang, to land beyond the oil slick as the knight bounced to his feet.
Both had their swords out. “Fanarion will summon the giant,” John promised. “You cannot get far from here.”
“Far enough, I think. The others are probably down the winch rope already.” Crassmor wished he hadn’t forgotten his dirk at the table.
The bandit took a resolute step forward; both men went en garde. “I have fifty people to think of!” John grated.
Crassmor, shaking his head, answered earnestly, “Each of us has only one life to consider here, my friend. Let us both live out the night, what say?”
John attacked; their edges met. John wasn’t as skillful as his opponent, but his longer reach and longer sword made the match damnably even. The knight might have inflicted damage by shortening their fencing distance, but wasn’t inclined to put himself any further within the other’s reach. And he found he had no wish to kill this man who’d spared Bint and taken this band of unfortunates under his protection—not if he could help it.
Plangent stroke and counterstroke sounded in the tunnel. John pressed hard, exploiting his advantages in what Crassmor felt to be an unsportsmanlike fashion.
The knight went on a desperate offensive, calling experience and speed into play, driving the bigger man back across the terrain he’d won. Before Crassmor could quite force John’s heel onto the treacherous footing of the slick, the pirate counterattacked and half-turned their positions. In another moment Crassmor found himself with his back to the kitchen doorway.
Kitchen? his brain echoed. He backed off from the exchange then and plunged into the kitchen, searching frantically. John poised in the tunnel for a moment, wary of a trap. Then, seeing Crassmor waiting with his back against a heavy butch
er’s block, he came on. As his antagonist approached, lifting his sword in both hands, the knight brought his own left hand into view in a blur. Tumeric flew at John in a spray, halting him in surprise. Crassmor followed up with other spices flung from bowls at random: paprika and nutmeg, gren and brokt and curry, pepper and ginger and soulant.
One, at least, was the specific spice that Oorda had used to touch off John’s allergy at the dinner table. He grunted, sneezed, drew a great breath, and sneezed again. His eyes brimmed over; his nose opened like a spigot. More sneezes racked him. He stumbled back in dismay, unable to defend himself.
Crassmor sidled after. John, eyes puffed nearly shut, reeled in the tunnel. “Behind you, John!” the knight called. The Lord of John’s Winch began to twist around, realized it was a trick, and spun back frantically, his feet nearly tangling. Crassmor reached to poke him once, lightly, trying not to feel a certain malicious amusement. John flinched away from the sword point, as intended, onto the oil slick. With a howl of fury and gyration of arms and legs, he tobogganed back down the tunnel.
Crassmor turned and raced on, delirious with the joy of being alive. He was speculating on how far downriver he’d have to go to rendezvous with Alanna and the others—and regretting that he’d have to abandon his doublet—when, rounding the corner, he slid to a halt.
Oorda stood by the windlass, aghast, staring off toward the mouth of the cave in a paralysis of fright. Beside her stood Bint, in a similar condition. In front of them, likewise, stood Arananth. From beyond Crassmor’s line of vision, its source at the cave’s mouth, came a moist, bestial, gargling laugh and a primitive stench that cut through even the pungent odors of John’s Winch.
“Look; look!” boomed a voice that sent currents of fear up Crassmor’s spine. “Gaze upon me, upon death! The sight of me has stilled many a mortal heart with terror!”
Crassmor’s hackles stood straight up and he heard his own teeth chattering. Plainly, the giant had answered Fanarion’s summons without delay, intercepting the others. And it sounded as if the creature didn’t understand that it was only to capture, not to kill.
It didn’t seem just to have come so close only to fail, but, wiping a sweating palm on his doublet, Crassmor concluded that he had. Then his fingers felt Fanarion’s spectacles, still tucked away there, summoning a brief image of the squinting magician. A plan burst into the knight’s desperate head.
He settled the glasses over his nose, twisting the arms and frames a bit to make them stay on. The blinding distortions of the thick lenses nearly made him ill, but he squared his shoulders and, knowing his life was at stake, stepped around the bend.
He heard the giant’s grunt of surprise and knew that the monster had seen him, yet the knight could see nothing clearly in the blurred world of the lenses. All he could discern was a huge, squat form filling the cave before him; that was more than enough.
The giant hooted gleefully, its voice in a bass register so deep that Crassmor had to strain to understand it.
“Another! Another one come forth to die, eh? Cast your eyes upon me, O mortal! See the most terrifying sight in the world!” The form moved indistinctly, the giant’s wild gesticulations and threatening motions registering only as shifting blotches of color. Crassmor made an elaborate show of squinting at the creature.
“Can’t seem to see you,” the knight admitted truthfully.
“What?” the giant howled, the blast of his breath stirring the knight’s hair. Crassmor’s knees began to feel weak. He tapped the spectacles and essayed an embarrassed smile.
“I say, cannot quite make you out, you know. You’re too close.”
“Another like cursed Fanarion,” the giant yowled, “wearing glazen eyes and blind despite those?”
“Oh, there are a good many of us,” Crassmor confessed timidly.
The giant roared like a scalded bear and his image wavered. The rock drummed to blows of immense power as he struck it in anger. Even though he couldn’t see it, Crassmor was awed by the tantrum.
“Drop that sword!” the giant bellowed, and Crassmor did. “Since you cannot appreciate my magnificent horrendousness, I will slay you first!” He was quite plainly annoyed at having been deprived of a favorite sport, scaring victims, preferably to death.
Crassmor hastened to say solicitously, “A thousand pardons, Terrible One; would that I could look upon your utter frightfulness once before I die! The giant of John’s Winch is accounted a wonder to behold. But you are too near to make out clearly.”
The huge shape shifted again in the lenses. “Now look upon me, little one, and shudder in amazement!” The creature, obviously familiar with Fanarion’s need to put distance between himself and the object on which he wished to focus, had presumed that the same was true for Crassmor. The giant had taken a step backward.
“My most craven apologies,” Crassmor sniveled. “Though I perceive something of your horrific aspect now, still are you indistinct.”
The giant screamed so loudly that Crassmor clapped hands to ears; then the monster took another step back. “Regard now my terrible mien,” the monster bade, “and fall to your knees in astonishment!”
“To my knees I go!” Crassmor wailed, suiting action to words. “But gaze upon you in all your monstrousness I cannot. You are yet the slightest distance too close to me yet, though I’ll die knowing that the sight of you would have made my heart leap into my throat like a red fish, I’m sure!”
“And so it shall!” the giant expostulated in a voice that must, Crassmor thought, have knocked the birds out of the trees. The creature moved back again, and the knight heard the sound he’d been waiting for, the creak of wood and hawser. The giant had stepped back onto the winch platform.
Crassmor tore off the spectacles, snatched up his sword, and leaped up all in a moment. But though he’d braced himself to sever the hoisting line without a sidewards glance, a snarl from the monster, or perhaps some undeniable drawing power of its horrible appearance, a compulsive aura, made him look that way involuntarily.
Crassmor froze. It was, in fact, an arresting sight, a being that not even a nightmare might endure, but would wake the sleeper from shattered dreams. The giant was stooped over on the platform, a creature perhaps a dozen feet tall, wearing the untanned skins of animals. He was enormously broad, seeming squat for all his height, fully a third of which was a long-jawed, almost lupine head. The mouth was guarded by crooked, yellowed fangs and held a red tongue. But it was the tiny, deep-set, gleaming red eyes that caught and held the knight with something akin to Fanarion’s spell, a hypnotic insanity.
Seeing Crassmor’s stark, immobilized terror, the giant reared back in a seizure of maniacal laughter; the hawser creaked as the platform shook it. Crassmor was still unable to move.
Without warning, the sword was wrenched from his limp grasp. Like some berserk woodchopper, Bint swung the blade. It struck the hoisting line where it met the windlass. The line, taut with the giant’s weight, parted cleanly. One side of the platform was secured at the cave’s mouth, and so the platform dropped away from beneath the monster like a trapdoor.
The giant gasped in mid-laugh and doubled over. He made a clumsy grab for one of the shear legs, missed, and plummeted from sight with a shriek of outrage that made the humans cringe. The sound ended with a concussive splash.
Crassmor and the others went to the cave’s mouth, and the Tarrant son held a torch out over the water. They could make out nothing of the giant, only dark water flowing around the pilings.
“When you blocked the sight of him from me, I began to throw off the fascination of him,” Bint told his cousin. “And then he turned his eyes away in laughter.”
Crassmor was already removing his shoes and pushing them into his belt, pulling off his doublet, and realizing gloomily that it, like his hat and cape, which were still back in Borra’s alcove, would soon be outlaw’s attire. “Yes, yes, now let’s all move quickly,” he prompted. “And mind that you throw yourselves well out into the
river, or you’ll have no better luck than our departed friend.” There was no time, he knew, to pay out more hoisting line from the slow-moving windlass.
Bint went first, with a running start, casting the sword aside. He raced in a dive between the shear legs, landing well out in the river. Arananth, stepping out of her layers of clothing, clad only in a charming underslip, followed after with surprising athleticism. Just then there came to Crassmor’s ears the furor of renewed pursuit. John and his men had found some method of conquering the fish-oil slick.
Crassmor leaned out over the river. He saw a twisted rope of rawhide hanging nearby and realized that the giant had let himself down from the cliff above when he’d arrived. Crassmor called down, “See if you can locate a cockleshell or canoe—WOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
He was falling, gasping for air, kicking empty space, having been violently propelled off the cave’s brink by Oorda. She must have taken a good start; he flew clear of the shallows to hit the water gracelessly.
Murky water pulled at and chilled him; he eventually surfaced, blowing spray and shaking strands of hair from his eyes. He’d lost his shoes.
Arananth and Bint were not too far away, watching. Crassmor called to them urgently to start off; they swam downriver together. People were gathered at the mouth of the cave, waving torches and yelling a good deal. Above all there rose the voice of the redoubtable Oorda, addressing, Crassmor quickly concluded, John. The knight listened, to determine whether further pursuit was to be feared.
“How dare you talk of going after them when I have poured out my love for you, you toadsucker! Have I not proclaimed the tenderest feelings of my heart, no matter how they were elicited? And you would humiliate me, reject me? You’ll be a castrate first! My blood’s every bit as good as hers!”