THE WANTON OF ARGUS aka THE SPACE-TIME JUGGLER

by John Brunner

  “True enough,” said Landor. “You have put guards at the entries of the castle?”

  “Ay, though it’s by way of locking the ship after the air has blown. When did she go? Did she return from her meeting with Sabura Mona?”

  “Ay, for we spoke together after she came back. But her slaves were dismissed, and there was none to see or hear—”

  Ordovic cursed. “Tampore! Was there no guard before the door?”

  “There was one. Where is he?”

  “Bought?” suggested Landor, and Tampore flared, “The man who can be bought does not enter the bodyguard. He is dead for certain.”

  “Who was it?”

  “One Elvir.”

  “By the winds of Argus!” said Ordovic, and stormed into the passage. There was a squad of guards there. His eyes switched over them, and he shot out a brawny arm and said, “Elvir!”

  A big man in the second rank stepped out and came up to him. Behind, he heard a furious growl of astonishment from Tampore.

  He said in clipped thieves’ argot, “Elvir, were you not on guard at the royal apartment—here—last night?”

  “I was. I came at midnight and changed places at dawn with my relief.”

  Landor came out behind Ordovic, bidding Tampore be quiet. He listened. Ordovic said, “Who was your relief?”

  “Darbo, Captain.”

  One of the other guards spoke up. “That’s so, captain. I went in search of the sergeant when the slave came with news of the disappearance.”

  “Elvir, did you let anyone in—anyone at all—last night after you came on duty?”

  “As is customary, I let pass Dolichek, the prince’s whipping-post, and the whipmaster—the black giant.”

  Ordovic cursed. “And they came out again?” Landor demanded, striding forward.

  “Of a truth, yes!”

  “But did you not know that Dolichek is no longer the prince’s whipping-post? That my lady told the giant to break his whip and go serve the Princess Andra?”

  Elvir’s face went ashen. He said, “No, Ser Landor. I swear it. I heard nothing of that. I did merely as usual in letting Dolichek pass to bear the burden of the prince’s misdemeanors.”

  Landor said suddenly, “There is something wrong. I can sense it. Guards, into the inner rooms!”

  They filed inside and fell in again in order. Landor said, “With your permission, Sergeant?”

  Tampore nodded, and he continued, “Search this apartment! Shift everything! Something is wrong. And Elvir, you are not to be blamed. With the others—to it.”

  They left no fraction of an inch of all the rooms in the suite unsearched, but found nothing to justify Landor’s misgivings. At length the latter sat down on the bed with his head in his hands and said, “Still there is something wrong. It is as if there was unreality—Which of you searched beneath the bed?”

  Three of the guards signified assent, Elvir among them, and Elvir said, “Ser Landor, I felt strange on doing so, for though there was nothing there I felt there should be. I felt that way too, now I recall, when Dolichek came last night with the whipmaster—worse when they went away again.”

  “Lift the bed,” commanded Landor harshly, and six brawny guards bent to it and tugged and carried it half across the room. The space where it had stood was curiously shifting, as if it were seen through water, and he walked up to it and bent and searched the floor with his fingers, his face drawn and strained.

  After a while it changed to a smile of triumph, and he heaved and lifted out of nothing a still, doll-like figure with matted yellow hair.

  “Sharla!” Ordovic said, but Landor shook his head and stepped out of the shifting unreality.

  “Dolichek,” he said. “That is how it was done.”

  He laid the boy on the bed. It was amazing how closely in repose his young-old face resembled Sharla’s.

  “He lives?” questioned Ordovic.

  “Assuredly. But he sleeps.”

  “How was he hidden?”

  “Magic, Ordovic.”

  “This is the black witch’s doing,” said Tampore, stepping forward and glowering. “Did I not warn you, Captain Ordovic?”

  But Landor shook his head. “I know few wizards and not one witch whose powers are capable of that. Kelab is one of them, of course—wait, Ordovic,” holding up his hand as Ordovic was about to speak. “But it was a strange thing to save us from the marriage bond and then to steal Sharla.”

  Ordovic said fiercely, “Would he take her for himself?”

  “He would not dare,” Landor said confidently.

  Tampore said, “I do not see how it could be done—anyone could take my lady Sharla for Dolichek if her hair were dirtied, her face bruised and if she wore a similar garment; but one could not take Kelab for the Leontine giant.”

  “He is a magician, remember,” Ordovic insisted.

  “Landor, I think he is likely. When I met him in the Low City this morning, he demanded a thousand circles for his regulation of the marriage bond and said he would be at his ship today at ten.”

  “If he had just stolen Sharla from the castle of the kings, he would not have faced you in the Low City.”

  Ordovic said, “With his insolence he would dare anything!”

  Tampore coughed, put in, “Ser Landor, the lady Andra is in the fortress on the Hill of Kings in Oppidum.”

  “What of it?”

  “I have friends among the guards there. We could find out if Kelab has been to see the lady Andra.”

  Ordovic said hotly, “You deny that this is the black witch’s work, yet can you name any other who would do it? Save Barkasch of Mercator, who is off-world?”

  Landor wasn’t listening. He said, “Tampore, what were your guards doing to let them leave the castle?”

  “The black giant is well enough known to my men, but it is strange that they should have let out Dolichek.”

  “Then perhaps they did not leave the castle. Tampore, organize searches of every room and hole in and under the castle, and ask all the guards who were on watch last night whom they let pass—without exception.”

  Tampore nodded and signaled to his men, but Landor stopped Darbo, let the rest go. He said to Ordovic, “Does Sabura Mona know of this?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Darbo,” said Landor, turning to him, “go down and inform her, and beg her to come to us if she will. In either case, return at once yourself.”

  The soldier saluted and withdrew.

  They waited in silence, Ordovic pacing the room like a caged lion, his face grim and set, Landor struggling to preserve his outward calm. Almost a quarter of an hour passed.

  Eventually Ordovic said, “Darbo is slow in returning. It irks me to wait and do nothing. I’ll go seek him.” He left the room and followed the passage, inquiring at stages where he could find Sabura Mona, and came eventually into the right corridor. He glanced down it. There indeed was the door to which he had been directed.

  And something more.

  His heart leaped and his hand closed on the hilt of his sword, and he padded silently up to the embrasure of the door. Darbo lay in it. There was fresh blood all over his face, and his heart had ceased to beat.

  Ordovic rolled him over and his face showed his amazement, for the tough metal of the soldier’s helmet had been crushed and driven into his skull with a blow like the butt of a Thanis bull—

  He flung the body aside, ripped his sword from his scabbard and forced open the door.

  The room was dim, but he could make out two figures, two monstrous figures, locked together in the center of the room, struggling: one vast and ebony—the Leontine giant, seven feet tall—the other also huge, but shorter and fatter. A woman. Sabura Mona.

  He gaped in amazement at what he saw.

  For Sabura Mona had the measure of the giant. He had one enormous hand sunk in the softness of her throat, but she did not appear to notice it. With the other, he was seeking vainly to force her arms from their grip on
his waist, constricting the soft organs of his belly as surely as a steel band.

  And she laughed. The incredible woman laughed, soundlessly, and instead of letting his arm drive back her head and snap her spine as the giant intended, she was forcing it forward—forward—

  He snatched his arm away while he still had room to bend it, just an instant before joint and muscle and tendons would have torn apart, bent backwards at the elbow, and her head snapped forward, came up under his chin.

  Then in one huge astounding heave compounded of legs and arms and body and head, in that one instant when he had no grip on her, she flung him bodily at the ceiling.

  He went up like a lifting ship and fell like a mountain, his skull split on the hard stone twelve feet above, and Sabura Mona, without a glance at the corpse, turned to dip her hands in a bowl of water, while Ordovic, sword limply in his hand, gaped.

  The incredible woman wiped her hands and turned to him. “You are Ordovic?” she demanded, and he stared at her.

  “You are—Sabura Mona?”

  She nodded. “Your messenger told me you wished me to come. My lady Sharla, it seems, has disappeared.”

  Ordovic nodded. He gestured at the body of the giant. “With him, supposedly—if he was whipmaster to Dolichek.”

  “He was.”

  “But if he is still in the castle, Sharla—uh, my lady Sharla cannot be far either.”

  “Possibly,” nodded Sabura Mona. “Let us go, then. But first, one small matter. Tell no one about my killing—him.” She nodded at the dead man with a quivering of four chins. “Say you slew him, if you like, but tell no one I did. Understood?”

  Her eyes were strangely luminous, and he nodded dumbly, followed her up the bare passages. As they approached Sharla’s rooms, he noticed she began to wheeze as if she were exhausted.

  Landor met them, nodded, said, “What kept Darbo?”

  “Struck down by the Leontine giant, Ser Landor, and if Ser Ordovic had not saved me, that would have been my fate too,” said Sabura Mona. She glanced commandingly at Ordovic, who nodded weakly.

  “By the winds of Argus, then!” said Landor explosively. “If he was still here, perhaps Sharla—”

  A soldier came stumbling down the passage, breathing in great sobbing gasps, as if he had run too far too fast. He said, “Ser Landor!” and saluted with difficulty. “Ser Landor, your flying machine—the one in which you came to the castle of the kings—it’s gone!”

  “Gone!” said Landor, electrified.

  “Yes, gone! And what is more, Sergeant Tampore sent a messenger on a fast horse to the fortress in Oppidum where the lady Andra is, and he has signaled by sun and mirror that Kelab the Conjurer visited her last night close on midnight, and stayed half an hour, and departed.”

  Landor said, “A fast horse—he could have done it in time to be here with the whipmaster by a quarter before one, and left, taking the helicopter and Sharla—by the winds of Argus, soldier! Have horses prepared for us! There is but one wizard on all Argus who could blanket the sound of a helicopter taking off, and that one is Kelab.”

  The soldier saluted and went back down the passage at a lope. Sabura Mona said, “Is this the doing of my lady Andra?”

  Landor said, “Hers and the conjurer Kelab’s, I fancy. The Leontine giant took her out under the eyes of the guard, in guise of Dolichek, and doubtless also with some charm against discovery provided by Kelab.”

  Sabura Mona shook her head sadly, with a vast trembling of chins and pendulous cheeks. Ordovic could not believe her the same woman who had tossed the giant like a Thanis bull. She said, “Ser Landor, I have certain spies—”

  “Among my lady Andra’s slaves?”

  “Assuredly!” said Sabura Mona, her eyebrows rising in surprise. “All places.”

  “I shall need your counsel, then. At this moment the most important thing is to find Sharla, which means going in search of Kelab the Conjurer at once. If we still had the helicopter—”

  Sabura Mona shrugged her elephantine shoulders.

  “I can do no more than sit here in the castle of the kings and weave plots as a red liana weaves its beast-traps. But I shall do what little I can, Ser Landor. Be assured of my aid at all times.”

  Landor said with an attempt at graciousness, “I am grateful, Sabura Mona, and am sure you will serve Sharla as you served her father. If you will pardon us. Come, Ordovic. Our horses should be ready by now.”

  There was a gray sky over Oppidum. Toward dawn it had rained, but now it had ceased, though the streets were still deserted in the Low City. The night’s gayety had passed.

  Two bodies lay on the Street of the Morning. One was that of a hungry-looking man with a face like a wolf. His throat was slit in tribute to Kelab’s skill in divination, and there was a cross carved on his face to show he was accursed and no burying money should be left for him. The other was Samsar’s, but that one was barely recognizable as human.

  There was a chill wind, too, but Kelab the Conjurer sat on the balcony of his ship, sixty feet above the brown concrete of the spaceport, and sipped a hot brew from Thanis.

  Opposite him sat Sharla, her face strangely composed and quite relaxed, and she also was drinking the heart-warming beverage.

  Every now and again the conjurer cocked his head on one side as if he was listening, and Sharla’s eyes rested on him and saw the glint of gold in his left ear-lobe, and remembered that this was the one of which Sabura Mona’s had reminded her. She thought for the first time not how small and slender he was, but that he was vaster than he seemed, like a volcano filled with smoldering fires, as if he was the strongest man in the world and also the most gentle.

  He for his part sometimes looked across at her and smiled faintly, and thought how very beautiful she was in her white kirtle, with her pale lovely face and her golden hair.

  But he did not need to look. He knew her, directly, as he knew everything near him; and certain things farther away, much farther away.

  They had sat out on the balcony in silence for some time, no words being needed, when he glanced at the watch that had come from nowhere in the Empire, and said, “I think they are approaching, dear. Go to the place I showed you.”

  She rose with a quick smile and went inship, and he cleared away the tray from which they had eaten breakfast and checked that all was in readiness.

  Then he sat down to wait.

  VIII

  At the entry to the spaceport hostlers came out from the stables, running, and Ordovic and Landor dropped from their mounts, sweating and panting.

  Curtly, Landor tossed the men their pay and demanded, “Where is the ship of Kelab the Conjurer?”

  One of the hostlers, a big fair man with a red scar from eyebrow to chin, shifted the stick he was chewing to the side of his mouth and said, “She stands most east’ards on the port, Ser Landor. ‘Tis Ser Landor, en it?”

  Landor nodded curtly and turned to Tampore and the squad of soldiers who had clattered into the yard with them.

  He said, “Out of sight till called for, men! There’s little you can do against this magician, but mayhap we’ll need you to bring away his body.”

  Tampore saluted, and they reined in under the eaves of the gallery around the yard. Ordovic and Landor, swords swinging, stalked out of the yard on to the brown damp concrete of the port beyond.

  There was only one ship that could have been Kelab’s—a lean black vessel, her sides shiny with wet, that reminded Ordovic uncomfortably of certain fleet pirate craft he had tangled with in the Outlands. He glanced at Landor, but Landor had suddenly withdrawn into himself, and there was a tiny bluing of the air around him. Ordovic looked away quickly. There was a new smell in the air—a smell of powers beyond the human.

  They walked across to the lean ship and stopped twenty feet from the nearest fin. Above them, on a balcony built out from the side of the ship, they could see Kelab leaning back in a chair, drinking.

  Landor shouted, “Conjurer!”

 
; He put down his mug and glanced at them, and his dark face split in a smile of welcome. He raised a hand in salute.

  “The best of mornings to you, Ordovic and Landor! You are early in bringing me those thousand circles.”

  “We bring no money, traitor,” said Landor harshly. “What have you done with the Princess Sharla?”

  Kelab raised his eyebrows. “I? I have done nothing with any princesses to my knowledge.”

  “Liar!” accused Ordovic fiercely. “Who else but you could have stolen her from the castle of the kings?”

  “Come down, Conjurer!” called Landor. “Come down from that ship!”

  Uneasily for the first time, Kelab said with a hint of peevishness, “I will not.”

  “Come down!” ordered Landor with a bellow, and the bluing of the air around him became stronger. Kelab puckered his brows and staggered; then he turned obediently and went inship. Ordovic looked at Landor with new respect, and fresh hope sprang up in him. It had seemed hopeless to walk out and face the conjurer like this, but maybe Landor had known what he was doing after all.

  He was an enigma, Landor. From obscurity to Lord Great Chamberlain of the Empire at a step: guide to Sharla, yet unknown: a man who, as far as he and Sharla, and even the Empire, were concerned, walked out of nowhere on Loudor three months and a few days ago, after, as he claimed, a two-month search for Sharla.

  And now he was in a position to wield the powers of the Empire, via Sharla, as Sabura Mona had done with Andalvar. There should be a battle royal betwixt those two.

  Save, of course, that it was now Kelab who held the whip.

  The lower door of the ship before them opened, and a flight of steps grew from the side of the nearest fin. Kelab the Conjurer came out the door and began to descend the steps, and behind him—

  “Sharla!” said Landor. “This liar said he had not seen you.”

  He stopped suddenly, because Sharla was gazing at him from the topmost step with something that was almost contempt and yet was mixed with pity. Kelab continued to come down undisturbed.

  She said, “I am not Sharla of Argus.”

  Ordovic’s mouth fell open and he gazed in blank astonishment, but Landor rounded on Kelab and said furiously, “This is of your doing, Kelab!”