by John Brunner
Under the supervision of the crone Roiga, servants had toiled to bring necessary articles into the cabinet she was making ready. It lacked windows, naturally; what air there was must seep through tiny crevices, and about each had been carefully inscribed a line of minuscule writing in an obsolete syllabary. It lacked furniture, too; in place of which it was hung with curtains of goat-hide, woven marshgrass and the plaited hair of murdered girls. There was a mirror in the center of its floor, which was as true a circle as the mason’s art could contrive, but that mirror was cracked across, and the traveller knew with what the blow would have been struck: a human thighbone. He had been aware that enchantments of this caliber were still conducted, but in this case at least one unqualifiedly essential preliminary had been totally neglected.
Patience.
Rat’s-bane and wolf-hemp; powder of dragon-bone and mullet-roe; candied mallow and murex pigment; vantcheen spice … Yes, all the ancient indispensables were here. Bar one. Bar the one that mattered more than anything.
The traveller withdrew into dismal contemplation.
Then, finally, Garch came, pale and trembling but determined not to let his companions recognize the full depth of his terror, to perform the rites required of him as lord of this land which yielded more than its proper share of good things. He was correctly robed in a chasuble the hue of blood; he correctly wore one shoe of hide and one of cloth; he correctly bore the wand, the orb and the sash; and the proper symbols, although awkwardly, had been inscribed on his right palm with indigo and henna.
He entered by the door of ashwood clamped with brass, and it was closed behind him with the traditional braided withes: at the height of his eyes, at the height of his heart, and at the height of his genitals. That done, Runch and Roiga and Scail perforce withdrew. Unless they chose to run away, indeed, by tomorrow’s daylight, the process was in train and they were to be dragged with it.
Even running away might not help.
As for the traveller in black, he had no choice. This was intrinsically a part of that which bound him. From this moment forward, he was compelled to remain. Here was no petty hearthside conjuration, to be laughed at when it failed and neglected thereafter; here was no witty tampering with the course of natural events, such as certain happy enchanters had counted a fair reward for the relief of boredom; here was no ritual from which profit to others might ensue, such as the merchant-enchanters of a bygone age had employed to make their cities prosperous.
No, those trivialities could be ignored. Here, though, was a ceremony so elaborate, so pregnant with possibility, and so absolutely devoid of probability that its very name, regardless of what language it was uttered in, sent shivers down the spines of uncomprehending listeners. Here, set on foot in a selfish lordling’s mansion, was such a pattern as had not been undertaken since the epoch of the Grand Five Weavers and the Notorious Magisters of Aiken Cromlech: the most ancient, the most arcane, the most honorable appellation of the Ones Who –
The traveller froze the progress of his mind. Almost, he had recited the full title to himself. And were he to do so, all – all – everything would be eternally lost.
If it were not already lost. He feared it was.
VII
The lady Scail slept but ill that night, and when her shoulder was gently touched at last by the maid who attended her in her chamber, she rolled her face fretfully back into her satin pillows.
“Fool!” she snapped. “I said to waken me at dawn! I’ll have your head for disturbing me when it’s still dark!”
Indeed, across the windows a pall of utter lightlessness was spread.
“But, madam,” whispered the poor girl, “according to our time-candles dawn should have befallen an hour ago. Yet the sky remains like pitch!”
Lady Scail sat up on the instant. Through the opened shutters she saw the truth of the maid’s assertion. Rising from her night-couch, she exclaimed in wonder.
“Why – why, that bodes success in spite of all! Go rout out Runch and Roiga, and bid them meet with me at once!”
Unprecedentedly, not waiting to be handed her daytime garments, she threw aside her sleeping-gown and struggled by herself into a creased chemise.
On being awoken, Roiga trembled with delight and expectation. She had spent weary decades in a worn-out body, with her knees cracking from the rheumatism and her eyes returning blurred images of the world. Now within her shrivelled bosom her heart beat hammerwise at the impending prospect of repurchased youth. She hungered – no! She lusted after what she could recall but not repeat!
It was the same for one-eyed Runch: still a mighty man to outward view, scorning the luxury that his companions loved and affecting the disciplined, hardy habits of a soldier accustomed to camping in a field after marching all day through sleet and hail. Therefore he reposed at night on a simple bed of planks, with but one blanket over him.
But during the past few years he had more and more often failed to pleasure the girls he summoned to his spartan couch, until at last he had been unable to endure further humiliation and took to sleeping alone.
The promise of being able to rectify that …!
These three, however – and perhaps Garch himself, but none could certify what was transpiring in his secret room – were the only persons in the whole of the Cleftor lands who found any semblance of joy wherewith to greet the advent of this amazing and unprecedented … day? Well, “day” it should indeed have been by rights, and everywhere there should have been the normal daily bustle: the younger children playing by the doorway, the older dispatched to the dame-school with their slates and pencils; the farmers bound to market hauling their travoises laden with cheese and bacon, their wives plucking geese or hunting eggs …
But over all the country from Deldale to Herman’s Wynd, and back again from Contrescarp clear to the Ten Leagues’ Stone, at Poultry Rock and Brown Hamlet and Legge, at Yammerdale and Gallowtree and Chade, at Swansbroom and Swingthrimble and Slowge, it was dark until what should have been high noon.
And when the light eventually came, it was the wrong sort of light.
It was the sickly greyish glow of chaos, that bleached all color into the dullness of ash.
Now the mountains showed deformed, like mutant fungi; now the trees, still vaguely visible, stood rigid as parodies in a picture, and the random disposition of their branches seemed to summate the entire gestural vocabulary of obscene signs such as might be made with upraised fingers. Watching the changing sky in high delight from the vantage point of the tower’s solar, Roiga and Runch and Scail shouted in succession for the best wine, the richest mead, the finest delicacies that the stores could offer, by way of pre-celebrating their anticipated triumph. The obscurity of night and morning had retreated to the fringes of the Cleftor domain, and now it was as though a tunnel had been opened, vertically to the frontiers of the sky, for the beings from beyond to make a grand re-entry to their former state.
But the servant-maids gawped and gaped and rubbed their ears as they came and went, for there was a dullness to their hearing that occasionally attained an ache, and there was a stale taste in all mouths which twice made Runch accuse a waiting-wench of giving him vinegar, not wine, and a dragging heaviness oppressed all bodies. Yet for the most part those three frenetic counsellors – if no one else – were able to ignore it, and drank toast after toast to the wonderful skills of Garch their thegn.
It was not until they were three parts drunken that they realized there was another in the solar apart from the servants they had bidden to attend them.
“Who’s that?” cried Scail, and slopped wine down her dress in haste to look over her shoulder.
“Oh – oh!” Roiga moaned, and would have shrunk into hiding like a mouse scuttling to its hole.
“Declare yourself!” shouted Runch, rising and drawing the sword he always wore.
“Here I am,” the intruder said, black cloak swishing as he strode forward to the tap-tap measure of his staff. “Put up that blade,
for it’s no protection against the doom that’s coming on you.”
Runch hesitated, and the swordpoint he had presented to the traveller’s chest wavered back and forth. He said, “Who …?”
“One who has many names and yet a single nature!”
They were thunderstruck on the instant. Dropping her wine-mug, Scail whimpered, “But I thought –”
“Did you?” the traveller snapped. “Yes, I can believe that you must have regarded my existence as so much superstition, and your brother likewise. Else you’d have buckled to like ordinary sensible folk, and taken what was to hand and made the most of it. Instead of which … Do you not know who wait admission to this place?”
Uncertain, but feigning bravado out of shame at her fit of cowardice, Roiga said bluffly, “Why, of course. Have we not agreed to call on Tuprid?”
“Tuprid who takes pleasure only in destruction, whom I saw snuff a star as men would snuff a candle, that he might witness the dying agony of the creatures on its planets as they froze into everlasting ice! And who else?”
“Why, Caschalanva, naturally!” Runch exclaimed.
“He who prefers fire to Tuprid’s cold! They’re ancient rivals. Each struggles to outdo the other in causing pain. And with them?”
“Quorril,” muttered Scail, and began to sound a fraction nervous, which though well justified was a belated sign.
“Whose diet is souls,” said the traveller. “And Lry as well?”
They all three nodded.
“To whom,” he concluded, “love is hate – who breeds discord and warfare like the plague. And you believe these to be the only ones your brother has invoked?”
There was a heartbeat’s worth of silence.
“It was all that we agreed he should invoke,” Scail said at length. “It’s with those four that we struck our formal bargain.”
“Bargain!” The traveller gave a sad laugh.
“Why, certainly! Do they not owe us toll, for opening the road back to where they once ruled?” She was on her feet, facing him defiantly. “Should they not be grateful?”
“Yes! Is it not a trifle, in view of such grand service, that they should restore my manhood?” Runch demanded. And –
“Will they not give me back my youth?” shouted Roiga.
At the same moment there was a shifting underfoot, as though the land had taken on colossal weight, and their converse with the traveller in black was instantly forgotten. They rushed to the windows and peered out, this way and that, striving to catch a glimpse of whatever had descended to the earth.
“Oh, my wonderful brother!” Scail cried. “Had I but the half of his skills!”
“Well, well!” said the traveller, and then again: “Well, well! As you wish, so be it!”
None of them heard him. Nor did they hear the later whisper that echoed from the stone walls following his departure, which sounded a little like:
“Now why did I not think of that before?”
IX
This therefore was the manner of the coming back of the former Great Ones to the world. And it was not entirely to their liking.
* * *
Left alone in the stock-depleted house of Buldebrime, the gaggle of apprentices had at first been worried and afraid; then the boy of fourteen who had conceived that mocking doll sought to calm the youngest of his companions by producing it again, and they dissolved into laughter as he forced it through absurd motions by heating it so the limbs could be deformed without breaking. As well as making them bolder, laughter recalled them to routine. They fed themselves, and then, since no master was present to forbid them, they made free of the house, tumbling together in many enjoyable games until sleep overtook them.
On the morrow, however, they were frightened anew by the curious unprecedented length of the darkness that enveloped the neighborhood, and moreover they were hungry, because last night they had eaten their fill from the supplies in the pantry. For most of them it was the first time in months that they had had a square meal; so nothing was left but crumbs.
They hunted high and low by the wan light of such candles as they had managed to make for themselves after Buldebrime’s stock had been confiscated by Garch’s men, and ultimately found a way to prize off the padlock blocking access to the attic room. In company of the girl with the scarred face, the leading boy braved the ladderlike steps and looked around the shadowed books and mystic articles with frank amazement.
“Would that I knew what all these things are for, and could employ them!” said the girl.
The traveller spoke soft words, unnoticed, in a corner.
In the increasing chill of their hut by Rotten Tor, little Nelva and her mother listened in agony to the racking coughs the cold inflicted upon Yarn.
“Oh, Mother!” cried the bairn, seeing how the fire faded and gave off no heat. “Would I knew what the nice man with the black cloak did, to make the lamp burn brightly! Then would I do it to the logs, and we would all be warm!”
The traveller again spoke unheard words, and went his way.
* * *
Trapped by the incredible darkness in a very bad inn, the Shebya trader scratched his flea-bites and wrangled with the landlord, claiming that anyone who offered such hard beds and such foul beer had no right to the regular score from his clients. At length, losing temper, he shouted out aloud.
“Ho, that I knew a way to rid the world of greed like yours, that turns one’s belly sour with rage! Ho, that I dealt only with folk as honest as myself, having codes and principles that require strict adherence to a contract!”
He was exaggerating just a smidgin; nonetheless, as all agreed, the Shebyas were on the square, though a hint of sleight-of-mind might sometimes afford them the better of a trade with anyone less subtle.
Chuckling, the traveller tapped his staff against the wall.
He wondered how it was faring with Garch Thegn of Cleftor Heights.
And the answer, framed in brief, was – not so well.
Down to him came the powers to which he’d bowed, weary of long conjurations, but content inasmuch as all had said to him, “Well go see first that you have kept your word, and then we’ll talk of settling our bargain!”
Which, according to the books wherein Garch reposed most trust, was as fair an answer as they’d ever given anyone.
So into the nervous night he waited on their presence, and ultimately at the moment which – said a well-measured time-candle, if no visible stars – corresponded with the hour of the full moon, he rose expectantly from his discomfortable position in the middle of his cracked mirror.
One came of the Four, and only one, and in such rage as made the walls shake and the tower tremble. And reached out for Garch with impalpable but cruel claws.
Because …
That elemental, Tuprid, who had snuffed stars, had gone to see first of the places in his allegedly restored domain the nearest to a star, a place of light: to wit, a lamp-maker’s shop. And there had found awaiting him a little girl, scar-faced, beside whom a boy clutched her hand to loan her courage, chanting at a candle they had brought, somewhat after the shape of a human being, and compelling it to burn against the fiercest orders of the visitor. Below, the other children cried, and she thought of them, and made her efforts double, and in the upshot melted a maker of great darkness into shapeless wax dribbling across a book bound in human skin.
After that, very suddenly, the moon could be viewed through the skylight.
Also the elemental Caschalanva, who preferred the taste of fire to that of ice, had gone down by the bitter vales under Rotten Tor, and a little girl who wished desperately to make the logs burn brighter had sensed in a bout of inspiration precisely what was needful to be done …
And in an inn where fleas plagued the customers, the being Lry who fostered dissension found a predilection towards greed that was emanating from the spot with such force as gales have that choose a mountain-range for organpipes. Greed being among the chiefest of his tools, he snatc
hed at it – and when it dissipated fractionally after, upon the granting of the Shebya’s wish, he was swept along with it into nowhere.
Whereupon, learning of the fate of his companions that were a good deal more than merely companions, Quorril returned to cry that they were cheated, and – souls being his diet – seized Garch’s with a snatch of an immaterial claw that laid wide open the wall of his secret room, releasing potent fumes. The high tower of the mansion tumbled down, its foundations changed to mud and sand.
Among the ruins, with her dying breath, the lady Scail called down a doom on Quorril for what he had done to her brother, and – she being now dowered, as she had desired, with the half of Garch’s skills, and in particular that half which concerned the binding, rather than the releasing, of elementals – that being ceased his flight towards the sky, and perforce joined her, and Runch, and Roiga, buried forever beneath that stack of masonry.
* * *
“Where let them rest,” the traveller said contentedly, having viewed all this from the vantage of the same sward where he had conversed with the Shebya.
“And Buldebrime, and Tradesman Humblenode,” said a quiet voice beside him. He had not expected to be alone at such a moment; he did not look round. “And many more!”
“And many less guilty, Highness,” he appended. “Inasmuch as ‘guilt’ has any meaning to Yourself. Yet none of them entirely innocent. Willing, at least, to serve a lord whose power was drawn from chaos, it being apparent to any commonsensical mind that no mortal force could make his barren land so wealthy. Equally, prepared to apprentice children to masters who starved and beat them, for the sake of having them put to a supposedly profitable trade. …”
He shrugged, both hands clasping his staff. “No matter, though,” he concluded. “Has it not all come to a most tidy end?”