“Nay, my lord.” Griswall was the first to answer. “They are passing rare. But whenever one appears it is usually to seize upon a captive to be spirited to the Dark Lands.”
“This I know, except for the spiriting. I warrant that those three out there are dead-alives from Marack and not from Om. The Vuun is their transportation. They are brought to life here—as at Castle-Gortfin—by sorcery of the Kaleen. The Vuun then takes them to a place where one of ours can be captured. It is that simple. It was said last night in council that those who had fought and died and not been buried at Gortfin were up to fight again that night, though their weakness was such that they were but stumbling blobs of flesh. … Be not afraid of them,” I finished bluntly, “for they are mindless, weak, so that any man here could easily carve his way through a thousand. Indeed, sirs,” and I laughed, “their stench is their greatest weapon.”
My arrogance was sufficient to the task. And it was a pleasure to see that Charney and Griswall and the others who, but moments before, had been terrified of something unspeakable, horrible, now frowned, chagrined, and walked out to the cadavers by the boulder to see for themselves, unafraid. They returned, gasping for breath. And Charney said, “You are right, most noble sir, in that their greatest weapon is indeed their stink. Chivalry gains little with such opponents.”
The true dawn was showing again, and with a promise of bright sun. I gave the order to break camp and prepare to march. We would breakfast, I told them—with nose held high—in some other spot, for I had, in sooth, lost all stomach for this one.
We rode out in silence and the rocky mesa changed swiftly to the lower slopes of a great range of mountains all covered with a dense forest of conifers. At breakfast, on a grassy mound by a fast-flowing stream of cold, sweet water, we talked of the Vuun and what its presence meant. And it was then that I questioned Ongus, the skinny sorcerer, as to his purpose with us.
“The key, my lord,” he answered shyly. “The word key for the opening of the circle before the keep of the great wizard. Without it we could not enter.”
I looked to Murie. “Is not the wizard informed of our coming?”
“How so, my lord?”
“Has Fairwyn no magic? No crystal balls within which to send and receive thoughts? Are: there no mirror messages?”
“I know naught of crystal balls, my lord. And the snow-land is a land of mists and clouds, usually, where mirrors do network… .”
“Birds,” Ongus put in. “We have sent a carrier bird to Goolbie. But he might not have successfully flown the distance.”
“Enough,” I said, and then to Griswall and Charney, “Have you truly never seen a dead-alive before?”
“My lord,” Griswall replied, and he looked me squarely in the eye for doubting him. “In all my forty years I have met none who have seen one, let alone fought with one. No one would, of their own accord, leave the confines of a dottle circle.”
“But since the dottles also fear them,” I suggested slyly, though with a straight face, “why cannot these walking bladders of putrescence just walk right through a circle and cut you down?”
“But it is written” Charney quoted, brimming with student lore, “that no dead-alive will cross a dottle circle.”
“True,” I said tersely. “But it occurs to me that the reason may be other than mystic. For example, those who manipulate the dead-alives may be aware, even if you are not, that if the creatures entered the circle they would then meet their true end; for despite your fear, I warrant you would destroy it— just as those at Gortfin were destroyed. And you would find it passing simple, as Om would know full well. As agreed, other than its ability to instill terror, and thus prevail, the single weapon of the dead-alive is its stink. Now what think you of the Vuun?” (I had briefed them all the previous night as to the coming of the hundred riders.)
“The question would be,” Griswall had said, “are they in pursuit? Do they lie ahead in ambush—or are they after us at all?”
Now Charney said, “It would appear that the Vuun, alone, does follow in our tracks.”
Griswall said, “That makes sense. The Vuun is their ‘eyes.’ He has told them of our presence on this road. They have created dead-alives for the Vuun to take to us—in the hope, perhaps, that the creatures might succeed in a job of abduction.”
I smiled.
“But there is the chance of treason, too,” Charney put in. “Black betrayal. How else would the hundred riders know of our specific whereabouts, or of our purpose?”
“Do you think they seek to stampede us back to Glagmaron?” I asked softly.
“The question then is who will be in Glagmaron tonight The king marches for Kelb. Only Fon Tweel remains in Glagmaron.” Griswall’s question and answer were rhetorical.
“Then”—Murie’s voice came strongly above the sound of the rushing stream—”if only Fon Tweel is in Glagmaron city, I am for the snow-lands.-1 will not return to Glagmaron.”
I think she sensed what I now knew. The others sensed it, too. Something was rottenly awry in the state of Marack. “Good sirs,” I said. “The sun rises fast, and we should follow the thinking of our princess.” So saying, I arose and walked her to our waiting dottles. We mounted up. I was on Henery again, Murie on a lovely female. We waited for the somewhat glum Caroween to join us, then followed Griswall’s ten up the ascending mountin road.
The wind from the northeast blew strong. And when we had thundered still farther over the ever-rising path, it seemed snow-laden, with the frost of glacier and perma-ice. We rode with our cloaks raised to our eyes, and our furred caps to below our ears. The lush deer-meadows soon disappeared. We stopped in the last one for a full four hours. In this way the dottles were allowed to fully browse while we rested.
There would be no stopping at all tomorrow for the simple reason that there would be nothing to stop for. All would be ice and iron-stone; all would be bare and windswept. A reason for the limited size of our party was that, though forage was kept in readiness at the keep, it was only enough for a hundred dottles at a single entry. Other than that, they would go without food for one full day—coming and going.
I asked Murie, as we rode, to tell me something of the sorcerer Goolbie, and why he had chosen the cruel isolation of the snow-lands as opposed to the court or the Collegium. “He is old,” she said, “almost two hundred years.” (I would point out that a Camelot life-span is well over a hundred—the first eighty years, what with cold steel, and all that, being the hardest.) He had asked her grandfather, King Iblis, Murie explained, to create the keep of the snow-lands as a place of purification, meditation: where the great ones of the realm could seek the peace of quiet and tranquility, if so desired. He, Goolbie, sought the same thing but for different reasons. According to her father, Goolbie searched “for the meaning of it all,” why magic worked, especially his own, and from whence came Ormon and the Gods.
“A most noble research,” I said, “for a man to question the Gods themselves, and his own abilities.” And we left it at that.
The pace was a bit slower now. From twenty miles an hour, we fell to fifteen. At one point, and for a period of two hours or more, we literally clung to the side of a great precipitous canyon from which the road had been hewn from solid granite. Below us, on the final stretch of this perilous nightmare, was a sheer drop of well over five thousand feet to a roaring, boulder-strewn maelstrom of frothing water. “A freshet”—Griswall smiled—”from the snows above.”
We were silent in the last hours of the day, laboring mentally with our dottles as they pounded ahead. They would not deliberately slow their pace unless absolutely forced to. To them, it seemed that all ground was a challenge; that the distance between two points was forever to be shortened and conquered by forging dottle paws. Toward twilight I was once again mounted on Henery. And his great, smoothly coordinated muscles had carried me across the hump, as it were, of the crest of the pass. Great snow peaks still rose on all sides. But now, too, there was an endle
ss expanse, a desert of snow and ice before us that seemed to go on forever.
We had brought fuel for the night. We camped and set up our cooking pots. All around us were broad patches of wind-whipped snow, hard black earth, and equally black boulders. Goolbie, I thought, had certainly chosen a most Ghast-forsaken bit of terrain to call his personal fief and keep. But, despite the piercing cold, the night was pleasant. We made a wondrous stew of gog-meat and vegetables, its aroma enhanced by our labors of the day. We sat and talked for a while, cleaned our weapons, and prepared for the morrow. I sat with my arm about Murie. Caroween had perked up somewhat, the sudden loss of Rawl put to one side. We relaxed, while in the deepening darkness our skinny Ongus played upon his pipes and bellows to produce a wild and blood-charging rhythm of notes and sound. He then recited in singsong, poetic, minstrel cadence, the saga of a great court of knights and ladies who had sacrificed themselves in gigantic battle with sundry ogres, dragons, fiends of Ghast, and warlocks in that time when the world of Camelot-Fregis was still young.
I fell asleep, being reminded of the Terran chronicler Mallory, in the question and sequence of “who smote down who, and when. …”
Just before I kissed Murie soundly and retired to my heavy saddle blankets—we had again put our pickets out for the night—I was pleased to see one of our first guards, a student of Charney’s ten, step boldly beyond the dottle ring for at least a hundred yards to show his courage. I waited until he returned. He was grinning broadly. I grinned, too, and went to sleep.
And Hooli camel And it was Hooli. I know it now, though 8t the time, what with my mixed-up imagery of dreams, irrational thoughts, and whatever, I was not sure. Just the voice, that was my own, as before; no starship, no picnic, and no fat-fannied honey-bear floating in air with a motarboard on his head. The voice announced itself once or twice, intruding like a candle’s flicker: “Collin! Collin! Beware again… ! You are alone and there is great danger, and I cannot help you. Turn back! Turn back for your life’s sake!”
I awoke again and, as before, in a sweat, trying to string the words together as they had come to me. Had it indeed been Hooli? If so, why had he not appeared as strongly as before? Was it rather a manifestation of Om—such as that moon-gibering hysteria of the previous bout? If so, did Om wish to drive me back to Glagmaron and Fon Tweel? Conversely, if it was really the Pug-Boo, did he, indeed, wish me to withdraw from the protection of the sanctuary offered by Goolbie? Why? I woke Charney, Griswall, Murie, all of them. I ordered everyone to sleep with chain-mail shut and weapons at the ready, and I gave them no explanation. I asked, too, that each man sleep by a single saddled dottle, and that Murie and Caroween sleep next to me. I was curt, taciturn in my orders, so that even Murie frowned. We slept fitfully again, rolled tightly in our fur blankets. This time there were no dreams.
We awoke to a slow-moving wind, raw and bone-piercing. We were all glum, silently preoccupied with our gear and our saddle-cups of sviss. It was as if a spell had been cast upon us. I finally managed a smile for Murie, and she one for me, and that was the extent of it. We mounted, and once again were off.
And now the road, if one could call it that, was one freezing monotony of bleak ice and rock-hard earth. The dottles set a truly mile-eating pace, as if to make up for the delay in the climbing of the mountains. Early morning had seen bright sunshine. By coon clouds had gathered. We halted briefly to heat sviss and to mix hot snow-water with honey as a treat and an instant energy jolt for the dottles. We rested for minutes, then went on. I was quite sure by now, and the others concurred in this, that there was neither pursuit nor ambush in the offing; concomitantly, since there had been nothing behind, nor along the way, the chance of anything ahead seemed small.
The .terrain, as stated, was generally flat, but with great snowcapped peaks always to the right and left, and to the rear. This flatness, however, did not exclude an occasional hill over which the road passed. To either side, too, there were sometimes lowlying hillocks of stone and snow, and with here and there an ice-locked gully.
It was late in the afternoon when we mounted the rise of a last hill. For on the other side, almost at the epicenter of a mile’s square, shallow basin, we sighted the keep of Goolbie, the great sorcerer. It was still a few miles distant. But even in this camouflaged stillness of stark whites and blacks, we could see that it was by no means small.
It was well engineered of stone and mortar. It had a great wall, a drawbridge, portcullis, and gate. Above and beyond the wall two towers arose. Upon one of these flew the blue and white banner—strewn with an abracadabra of cabalistic signs —that was the chosen heraldry of Goolbie. A haze of blue smoke hovered above the towers. We assumed by this that Goolbie and the Pug-Boo, Pawbi, were alive and well on stone mountain.
We drove ahead with the clouds falling lower and random snowflakes twisting cottonlike through the now still air. The dottles had began a running prance again. They sensed rest, forage, and warmth, and stretched their six pairs of thumping legs accordingly.
Since we had come over the slight rise precipitously, we could not tell if Goolbie’s pennant had been run up specifically to greet us, or whether it had been there all along. Five hundred yards from the raised drawbridge—it, too, spanned a gully like the one at Glagmaron—we were forced to halt. Griswall had recognized the two large stones, similar to Terran menhirs, which stood up-end, facing each other across the road. And beyond these, according to Ongus and he, we could not go without the words.
I held up my hand, moved instantly to the fore, and to the utter horror of Ongus, stepped deliberately between the two stones, touching a stone of my belt as I did so. I felt what could be likened to a magnetic field in that the metal of my mailed shirt heated instantly with resistance. The stone regis-ered a plus category. I withdrew and put my arm back into the field, sans any metal. I then experienced a mild shock, which I knew would be far more intense had I not warped the field slightly with my belt’s stone. On either side of the menhirs the effect was the same. So, satisfied that Goolbie had created a magnetic field of no mean proportions as a protective device against intruders, I then withdrew. It was notable that, though the road led to the castle and beyond, a side road made a perfect half-circle to the far side, paralleling, I surmised, the actual periphery of the field.
I returned to the others. Murie and Caroween were smiling. They had long since ceased to wonder at my audacity. My men were grinning, too. Only Ongus remained somewhat miffed.
I nodded and he stepped forward to the double menhirs. He clasped his hands, over which were draped a string of opaline beads, and began to chant. I listened intently, noting that the chant had a pronounced staccato rhythm. He did it once. He did it twice. He did it three times; though I thought he had actually cracked the field on the first time. He looked awfully young and intense as he stood there muttering. I thought, too, that his sorcery, linked finally with Ormon, as all magic is to some deity or other, gave him a feeling of power; of control, such as his slight body and almost feminine gestures could not gain for him in any other way.
“Praise be!” I said loudly and suddenly, as Ongus returned to mount his dottle. “Now let us be to yon friendly shelter. For though we no longer fear dead-alives—and any of those would most certainly freeze solidly here—yet would I like warm food, rest, and baths for my lady, and for us all. …” So saying, I leaned smartly across my saddle and kissed Murie’s cheek as a sign that the journey was well done. We had only to go those last few hundred feet.
A light swirl of snow swept gently across our path, but quickly subsided to intermittent flakes. I ordered shields to the fore as we cantered two-by-two, in cadence, so as to present the usual Marackian military splendor and readiness for battle. For we were a military guard. Griswall led out his ten. Then Murie, Caroween, and I to the center, with myself in the lead. After me, shields hugged tight to furred cloaks, came Charney and his students.
As we approached the walls, the bridge across the gully dropped, snapp
ing icicles with brittle, glasslike pops in the still air; the portcullis raised, the double-gates opened, and we set up a cheer.
We streamed across the bridge and entered upon a courtyard that, though large, was still less than a tenth of the size of Glagmaron. We bore to the right keeping close to the inner wall, moving toward the entrance to the main hall from which the lights of many candles shone, since the doors were half open. Without, it was still daylight, though dusk was fast falling; within, what with the clouds, it would be darksome indeed. Halfway to the entrance—and we riders were all within the courtyard now—the great gates slammed shut and the portcullis rattled down to its teethed position: this with our herd of unmounted dottles still outside.
.At that very moment, I, like the others, instinctively halted my forward movement. In our few brief seconds of entry one thing was certain: no single soul had come forward to greet us, and the slamming of the gates seemed done by unseen hands. We turned our backs to the wall and faced toward the entrance to the keep. I motioned to Griswall and that hoary knight stood high in his stirrups and bellowed: “Ho! Castellan! Lackeys! Great Sorcerer, Goolbie! Is this the manner in which you greet your princess? Step forth, and now! For we are weary and sore in need of sustenance and roof!”
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