"Perhaps we call them by another name? Could you describe them?"
Kaow Shalang Gatt made a movement with his staff.
"They are about twice the height of a man—one of our men—with seventy teeth that are like ivory razors.
They are very hairy and have claws like a cat's. We use them to hunt those reptiles we have not yet trained for war."
"I see," Meliadus murmured, thinking that such war-beasts would require special tactics to defeat. "And how many such dragon-hounds have you trained for battle?"
"A good number," said his guest.
They moved on, meeting other nobles and their ladies, and each was prepared with a question such as Adaz Promp had asked, to give Meliadus the opportunity of extracting information from the emissaries.
But it became plain that although they were willing to indicate that their forces and weaponry were mighty, they were too cautious to provide details as to numbers and capacity. Meliadus realised that it would take more than one evening to gather that sort of information, and he had the feeling that it would be hard to get it at all.
"Your science must be very sophisticated," he said as they moved through the throng. "More advanced than ours, perhaps?"
"Perhaps," said Orkai Heong Phoon, "but I know so little of your science. It would be interesting to compare such things."
"Indeed it would," agreed Meliadus. "I heard, for instance, that your flying machine brought you several thousand miles in a very short space of time."
"It was not a flying machine," said Orkai Heong Phoon.
"No? Then how...?"
"We call it an Earth Chariot—it moves through the ground..."
"And how is it propelled? What moves the earth away from it?"
"We are not scientists," put in Kaow Shalang Gatt.
"We do not pretend to understand the workings of our machines. We leave such things to the lowlier castes."
Baron Meliadus, feeling slighted again, came to a halt before the beautiful heron mask of the Countess Flana Mikosevaar. He announced her and she curtsied.
"You are very tall," she said in her throaty murmur.
"Yes, very tall."
Baron Meliadus attempted to move on, embarrassed by the countess as he had half-suspected he would be.
He had only introduced her to fill the silence following the visitor's last remark. But Flana reached and touched Orkai Heong Phoon's shoulder. "And your shoulders are very broad," she said. The emissary made no reply, but stood stock still. Had she insulted him?
Meliadus wondered. He would have felt some satisfaction if she had. He did not expect the Asiacommunistan to complain, for he realised it was as much in the man's interests to remain on good terms with Granbretan's nobles as it was in Granbretan's interests, at this stage, to remain on good terms with them. "May I entertain you in some way?" asked Flana, gesturing vaguely.
"Thank you, but I can think of nothing at this moment," said the man, and they moved on.
Astonished, Flana watched them continue their progress. She had never been rejected thus before and she was intrigued. She decided to explore these possibilities further, when she could find a suitable time.
They were odd, these taciturn creatures, with their stiff movements. They were like men of metal, she thought.
Could anything, she wondered, produce a human emotion in them?
Their great masks of painted leather swayed above the heads of the crowd as Meliadus introduced them to Jerek Nankenseen and his lady, the Duchess Falmoliva Nankenseen who, in her youth, had ridden to battle with her husband.
And when the tour was completed, Baron Meliadus returned to his golden throne wondering, with increased frustration, where his rival, Shenegar Trott, had disappeared to, and why King Huon should have deigned not to trust him with the information of Trott's movements. He wanted urgently to rid himself of his charges and hurry to Taragorm's laboratories to discover what progress the Master of the Palace of Time had made and whether there was any possibility of discovering the whereabouts in time or space of the hated Castle Brass.
Chapter Eight - MELIADUS AT THE PALACE OF TIME
EARLY NEXT MORNING, after an unsatisfactory night in which he had given up sleep and failed to find pleasure, Baron Meliadus left to visit Taragorm at the Palace of Time.
In Londra there were few open streets. Houses, palaces, warehouses and barracks were all connected by enclosed passages which, in the richer sections of the city, were of bright colours as if the walls were made of enamelled glass or, in the poorer sections, of oily, dark stone.
Meliadus was borne through these passages in a curtained litter by a dozen girl slaves, all naked and with rouged bodies (the only kind of slaves Meliadus would have to serve him). His intention was to visit Taragorm before those boorish nobles of Asiacommunista were awake. It could be, of course, that they did represent a nation helping Hawkmoon and the rest, but he had no proof. If his hopes of Taragorm's discoveries were realised, he might gain that proof, present it to King Huon, vindicate himself and perhaps, too, rid himself of the troublesome task of playing host to the emissaries.
The passages widened and strange sounds began to be heard—dull booms and regular, mechanical noises.
Meliadus knew that he heard Taragorm's clocks.
As he neared the entrance to the Palace of Time, the noise became deafening as a thousand gigantic pendulums swung at a thousand different rates, as machinery whirred and shifted, as jacks struck bells and gongs and cymbals, mechanical birds cried and mechanical voices spoke. It was an incredibly confusing din for, although the palace contained some several thousand clocks of differing sizes, it was itself a gigantic clock, the chief regulator for the rest, and above all the other sounds came the slow, ponderous, echoing clack of the massive escapement lever, far above near the roof, and the hissing of the monstrous pendulum as it swung through the air in the Hall of the Pendulum where Taragorm conducted most of his experiments.
Meliadus's litter arrived at last before a relatively small set of bronze doors and mechanical men sprang forward to block the way, a mechanical voice cutting through the din of the clocks to demand:
"Who visits Lord Taragorm at the Palace of Tune?"
"Baron Meliadus, his brother-in-law, with the permission of the King Emperor," replied the baron, forced to shout.
The doors remained closed for a good deal longer, Meliadus thought, than they should have done, then opened slowly to admit the litter.
Now they passed into a hall with curved walls of metal, like the base of a clock, and the noise increased.
The hall was full of ticks and clacks and whirrs and booms and thumps and swishes and clangs and, had not the baron's head been encased in its wolf-helm, he would have pressed his hands to his ears. As it was he began to be convinced that shortly he would become deaf.
They passed through this hall into another swathed in tapestries (inevitably representing in highly formal-ised design a hundred different time-keeping devices) which muffled the worst of the noise. Here the girl slaves lowered the litter and Baron Meliadus pushed back the curtains with gauntleted hands and stood there to await the coming of his brother-in-law.
Again (he felt) he had to wait an unconscionable time before the man appeared, stepping sedately through the doors at the far end of the hall, his huge clock mask nodding.
"It is early, brother," said Taragorm. "I regret I kept you waiting, but I had not breakfasted."
Meliadus reflected that Taragorm had never had a decent regard for the niceties of etiquette, then he snapped: "My apologies, brother, but I was anxious to see your work."
"I am flattered. This way, brother."
Taragorm turned and left through the door he had entered, Meliadus close on his heels.
Through more tapestried passages they moved until at last Taragorm pressed his weight against the bar locking a huge door. The door opened and the air was suddenly full of the sound of a great wind; the noise of a gigantic drum sounding a painfully
slow beat.
Automatically Meliadus looked up and saw the pendulum hurtling through the air above him—its bob fifty tons of brass fashioned in the form of an ornate, blazing sun, creating a draft that fluttered all the tapestries in the halls behind them and raised Meliadus's cloak like a pair of heavy silken wings. The pendulum supplied the wind and the hidden escapement lever, high above, supplied the sound like a drum. Across the vast Hall of the Pendulum was stretched an array of machines in various stages of construction, of benches containing laboratory equipment, of instruments of brass and bronze and silver, of clouds of fine golden wires, of webs of jewelled thread, of time-keeping instruments—water-clocks, pendulum movements, lever movements, ball movements, watches, chronometers, orreries, astrolabes, leaf-clocks, skeleton clocks, table clocks, sun dials—and working on all these were Taragorm's slaves, scientists and engineers captured from a score of nations, many of them the finest of their lands.
Even as Meliadus watched, there would come a flash of purple light from one part of the hall, a shower of green sparks from another, a gout of scarlet smoke from elsewhere. He saw a black machine crumble to dust and its attendant cough, tumble forward into the dust and vanish.
"And what was that?" came a laconic voice from nearby. Meliadus turned to see that Kalan of Vitall, Chief Scientist to the King-Emperor, was also visiting Taragorm.
"An experiment in accelerated time," said Taragorm.
"We can create the process, but we cannot control it.
Nothing, so far, has worked. See there . . ." he pointed to a large ovoid machine of yellow, glassy substance . . .
"that creates the opposite effect and again, unfortu-nately, cannot be controlled as yet. The man you see beside it," he indicated what Meliadus had taken to be a lifelike statue (some mechanical figure from a clock being repaired), "has been frozen thus for weeks!"
"And what of travelling through time?" Meliadus said.
"Over there," Taragorm replied. "You see the set of silver boxes? Each of those houses an instrument we have created that can hurl an object through tune, either back or forth—we are not sure for what distances. Living things, however, suffer much when undergoing the same journey. Few of the slaves or animals we have used have lived, and none have not suffered considerable agonies and deformities."
"If only we had believed Tozer," Kalan said, "perhaps then we might have discovered the secret of travelling through time. We should not have made such a joke of him—but, really, I could not believe that that scribbling buffoon had truly discovered the secret!"
"What's that? What?" Meliadus had heard nothing of Tozer. "Tozer the playwright. I thought him dead!
What did he know of time travel?"
"He reappeared, trying to reinstate himself in the King Emperor's graces with a story that he had learned how to journey through time from an old man in the West—a mental trick, he said. We brought him here, laughingly asked him to prove the truth of his words by travelling through time. Whereupon, Baron Meliadus, he vanished!"
"You—you made no effort to hold him ... ?"
"It was impossible to believe him," Taragorm put in. "Would you have?"
"I would have been more careful in testing him."
"It was in his interest to return, we thought. Besides, brother, we were not clutching at straws."
"What do you mean by that—brother?" retorted Meliadus.
"I mean that we are working in the spirit of pure scientific research, whereas you require immediate results in order to continue your vendetta against Castle Brass."
"I, brother, am a warrior—a man of action. It does not suit me to sit about and play with toys or brood over books." Honour satisfied, Baron Meliadus returned his attention to the subject of Tozer.
"You say the playwright learned the secret from an old man in the West?"
"So he said," replied Kalan. "But I think he was lying. He told us it was a mental trick he had devel-oped, but we did not think him capable of such discipline. Still, the fact remains, he faded and vanished before our eyes."
"Why was I not told of this?" Meliadus moaned in frustration.
"You were still on the mainland when it took place,"
Taragorm pointed out. "Besides, we did not think it was of interest to a man of action like yourself."
"But his knowledge could have clarified your work,"
Meliadus said. "You seem so casual about having lost the opportunity."
Taragorm shrugged. "What can we do about it now?
We are progressing little by little . . . "somewhere there was a bang, a man screamed and a mauve and orange flash illuminated the room . . . "and we shall soon have tamed time as we are taming space."
"In a thousand years, perhaps!" snorted Meliadus.
"The West—an old man in the West? We must locate him. What is his name?"
"Tozer told us only that he was called Mygan—a sorcerer of considerable wisdom. But, as I said, I believe he was lying. After all, what's in the West save desolation? Nothing has lived there but malformed creatures since the Tragic Millenium."
"We must go there," Meliadus said. "We must leave no stone unturned, no chance overlooked ..."
"I'll not journey to those bleak mountains on a wild goose chase," said Kalan with a shudder. "I have my work to do here, fitting my new engines into ships; ships to enable us to conquer the rest of the world as swiftly as we conquered Europe. Besides, I thought you, too, had responsibilities at home, Baron Meliadus—our visitors ..."
"Damn the visitors. They cost me precious time."
"Soon I shall be able to offer you all the time you require, brother," Taragorm told him. "Give us a little while..."
"Bah! I can learn nothing here. Your crumbling boxes and exploding machines make spectacular sights, but they are useless to me. Play your games, brother, as you please. I'll bid you good morning!"
Feeling relieved that he no longer had to be polite to his hated brother-in-law, Meliadus turned and stalked out of the Hall of the Pendulum, through the tapestried corridors and halls, back to his litter.
He flung himself into it, grunted for the girls to bear him away.
As he was borne back to Ms own palace, Meliadus considered the new information.
At the first opportunity he would rid himself of his charges and journey to the West, to see if he could re-trace Tozer's steps and discover the old man who held not only the secret of time, but also the means of his at last exacting his full vengeance upon Castle Brass.
Chapter Nine - INTERLUDE AT CASTLE BRASS
AT CASTLE BRASS, in the courtyard, Count Brass and Oladahn of the Bulgar Mountains, straddled their horned horses and rode out, through the red-roofed town, and away to the fens, as was their habit now every morning.
Count Brass had lost some of his brooding manner and had begun to desire company again since the visit of the Warrior in Jet and Gold.
Elvereza Tozer was held captive in a suite of rooms in one of the towers and had seemed content when Bowgentle had given him supplies of paper, pens and ink and told him to earn his keep with a play, promising him an appreciative, if small audience.
"I wonder how Hawkmoon fares," he said, as they rode together in pleasurable companionship. "I regret that I did not draw the straw which would have enabled me to accompany him."
"I, too," said Oladahn. "D'Averc was lucky. A shame there were only two rings that could be used—Tozer's and the Warrior's. If they return with the rest, then we'll all be able to make war on the Dark Empire . . ."
"It was a dangerous idea, friend Oladahn, to suggest, as the Warrior suggested, they visit Granbretan itself and try to discover Mygan of Llandar in Yel."
"I have heard it said that it is often safer to dwell in the lion's lair than outside it," Oladahn said.
"Safer still to live in a land where there are no lions," Count Brass retorted with a small quirk of his lips.
"Well, I hope the lion does not devour them, that is all, Count Brass," said Oladahn frowning. "It
may be perverse of me, but I still envy him his opportunity."
"I have a feeling that we shall not long have to put up with this inaction," Count Brass said, guiding his horse along the narrow track between the reeds, "for it seems to me that our security is threatened from not one quarter but many..."
"It is not a possibility that worries me overmuch," said Oladahn, "but I fear for Yisselda, Bowgentle and the ordinary folk of the town, for they have no relish for the sort of activity we enjoy."
The two men rode on to the sea, enjoying the solitude and at the same tune yearning for the din and the action of battle.
Count Brass began to wonder if it .were not worth smashing the crystal device that was their security, plunging Castle Brass back into the world they had left, and making a fight of it, even though there was no chance of defeating the hordes of the Dark Empire.
Chapter Ten - THE SIGHTS OF LONDRA
THE ORNITHOPTER'S WINGS thrashed at the air as the flying machine hovered over the spires of Londra.
It was a large machine, built to carry four or five people, and its metal bulk gleamed with scrollwork and baroque designs.
Meliadus bent his head over the side and pointed downward. His guests leaned forward also, barely polite. It seemed that their tall, heavy masks would fall from their shoulders if they leaned any further.
"There you see the palace of King Huon where you are staying," Meliadus said, indicating the crazy magnificence of his King Emperor's domicile. It towered above all the other buildings and was set apart from them, in the very center of the city. Unlike most other buildings, it could not be reached by a series of corridors. Its four towers, glowing with a light of deep gold, were even now above their heads, though they sat in the ornithopter, well above the tops of the other buildings. Its tiers were thick with bas-reliefs depicting all manner of dark activities beloved of the Empire. Gigantic and grotesque statues were placed on corners of parapets, seeming about to topple into the courtyards far, far below. The palace was blotched with every imaginable colour and all the colours clashed in such a way as to make the eye ache in a matter of seconds.
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