Compleat Traveller in Black (25 page)

And it did.

Echoed, re-echoed, amplified, the laughter started to resonate. A sort of buzzing filled the air, making it feel denser than normal. The vibrations fed on one another; they became painful to the ears; they set the teeth on edge; they shrilled and rasped and ground. Here and there amid the throng people looked frightened and cast about for a way to escape. But there was none. The whole huge bowl-like plateau round Lake Taxhling had become a valley of echoes, where sound instead of dying away increased in volume, and intensity, and harshness.

Meantime the accidental creations of the river once known as Metamorphia, conjured back to the surface after so many centuries, remained utterly still … until they began to tremble under the impact of the noise.

Suddenly a thing like a walrus with a flower for a head cracked sharply across. A sprinkling of fine powder wafted into the air, dancing in time with the vibrations.

Then a curiously convoluted object, half slender and half bulky, as though a giant dragonfly had miscegenated with a carthorse, shattered into tiny fragments. At once there was a rush into the vacancy from either side. Something not unlike a monstrous fist, with lamellar excrescences, collided with a great hollow structure and reduced it to tinkling shards.

The laughter took on a rhythmical pattern. Now it could be discerned that whenever it reached a certain pitch of intensity another of the objects Crancina had conjured forth broke apart; each such breaking entailed another, and then others. The watchers, who for a moment had been frightened, found this also very amusing, and their mirth redoubled until all were gasping for breath.

Into dust vanished the last relics of articles cast long ago from the citadel of Acromel; into sparkling crystals and jagged fragments dissolved what had once been sacrifices, and weapons, and the bodies of sad drunken fools, and those of condemned criminals, and the carcasses of careless animals, and the husks of insects, and luck offerings, and deodands, and stolen treasure abandoned by its thieves, and fish which had swum from higher reaches of the river, and all sorts of casual rubbish, and leaves and twigs and branches tossed into the water by children at their play, and accidental conformations created by the perversity of the river itself out of lumps of mud that tumbled from its banks.

Instead of a horde of weird fantastical solid objects there was for a moment a silvery shimmering expanse. Precisely then the laughter reached its peak, and the final gust was like a blow from a gigantic hammer, descending so fast that the very air grew solid at the impact.

So powerful was the impact, it made the plateau split.

Those who were closest to the cliff-edge fled from it, shouting, all thought of merriment forgotten. The earth trembled underfoot, and a jagged cleft appeared across the bed of the lake, beginning where the waterfall tumbled down the escarpment.

In one – two – three violent shifts of colossal mass, Lake Taxhling disappeared: first in a torrent, carving a gash down the face of the steep rocks a dozen times as wide as formerly; then in a steady flood as more and more of the cliff-rim fell away and the water could spill over as from a tilted basin; lastly as a dribbling ooze, which bared the mud of its bottom. …

And in the middle of the new flat bare expanse, a statue: a little awry from the vertical, and draped moreover with garlands of grey-green weed, but the solitary item not affected by the pounding laughter that had smashed all of Crancina’s evocations into rubble, and intact enough after its long submersion to be instantly identifiable.

The first to recognize it was Orrish, regaining his feet after being knocked down by the earth-tremors. For a long moment he gazed at it in disbelief. Then, in sudden frantic haste, he clawed open the belt holding up his leather breeches, and produced the amulet he secretly wore.

Holding it aloft, he shouted, “Frah Frah! Have we not at last given you the offering you most desire? Laughter has been scant since you departed! And there’s a bigger joke than all the rest!”

Raising his spear, he pointed at Lashgar and Crancina and those who had taken station nearest them. The pattern of the rifts breaching the lake floor was such that the little promontory they stood upon was isolated between two crevasses. As though the spear had been a magic wand, the promontory’s surface tipped, and with a sighing noise subsided. The count, and the witch, and the priests, and the idols, and all their hangers-on, were abruptly floundering waist-deep in the foulest possible kind of muck. With every desperate attempt to scramble free they sprayed more of it over themselves and one another, until they were all unrecognizable.

* * *

“A satisfactory outcome after all,” the traveller said, putting by the staff that had dislodged the promontory. “But it was a narrow squeak. Still, this time the amusement I hear is unforced.”

There had been one person agile enough to escape the general muddying of the count’s party, and now in his gaudy garb of red and yellow he was leaping up and down on safe dry land, waving his bladder-tipped stick as to conduct the chorus of laughter emanating from the crowd.

One final touch …

The traveller waited for precisely the correct instant; then, with a tap of his staff on the ground, he ensured that just as Jospil pointed towards it, the statue of Frah Frah tilted forward, overbalanced, fell smack on its face, and disappeared into the yielding mud, over which already the clear stream of the river was coursing in search of its future channel.

At that, which might be seen as ominous, the laughter faded, but the people dispersed good-humoredly enough despite the problem – to be solved on the morrow – of what those formerly dependent on the lake would do to earn their living now. A few daring boys hurled lumps of mud at Lashgar and Crancina and the priests, but the pastime staled rapidly and they too made off.

Apart from those stuck in the mud, after a few minutes the only ones left were Jospil and Orrish. Unaccountably despondent, gripped by a sense of anticlimax, they sat side by side on a rock, shivering in the bitter wind, watching those who were entrapped and wondering why their struggles did not seem so funny anymore.

Shortly they grew aware of a third.

VIII

“It is not given to many to enjoy their heart’s desire,” murmured the traveller. “Did you enjoy it?”

“I …” Not knowing quite whether he was speaking, nor whether he was speaking to somebody, Orrish licked his lips. “I guess I’m glad to have made the proper offering to Frah Frah. But as for what tomorrow will bring …”He shrugged. “All I know is, things can never be the same.”

“Interesting,” said the traveller. “One might say the same about chaos – not that anyone existing in it would think it worth making so trite an observation – yet here we are at a point where its forces wane so much mere laughter serves to defeat them. … If it’s any comfort, in times to come you will be remembered, and even honored, as the one who gave the witch the lie direct. As for you, Jospil, even though you are not likely to be revered, you may henceforth pride yourself on having broken free of Crancina’s tyranny, to make your own way in the world against all odds.”

“If that be so,” answered the hunchback curtly, “I reckon little of it. How much of a witch was my sister before you came to Stanguray?”

The traveller was discreetly silent for a while, then said at last, “I should like you to know: it is an earnest of the fulfillment of my task that you relish my aid so much less than what you have accomplished on your own.”

“I am not one to ponder riddles,” Jospil sighed. “I care only for straight answers to straight questions. What happened to Crancina, that she made me quit our home in search of employment with Count Lashgar?”

“She had made a wish, and I was bound to grant it.”

“A wish?” Jospil’s eyes grew round. “Of course! I’d nearly forgotten! To know what use might be made of all the blood being spilled up here!”

“Your recollection is exact.”

“And she discovered, or worked out, that it could be used to revive those strange and antique idols from the lakebed. … How?”

“Yes, how?” chimed in Orrish. “And to what end?”

“Jospil knows the answer to half that question,” said the traveller with a wry smile.

“You mean …?” The hunchback bit his thumb, puzzled. “Ah! We only spoke of part of her wish. Her greater ambition was to be in charge.”

“As you say.”

“But if part was granted, why was the other part not? Why is she not in charge completely and of everything, which I’m sure would be ideally to her taste?”

“Because you also made a wish. And, as it so happens, when I’m obliged to grant two wishes that conflict, the outcome tends to be biased in favor of whichever party cares less for himself, or herself.”

He added sternly, “But in your case, boy, it was a close call!”

Jospil gave his sly frog’s grin. “Well, at least I have a trade now” – he slapped the traveller with his bauble – “and there will be great dispersion from Taxhling, in all directions. From Lashgar’s wardrobe mistress I’ve learned that a comedian at court may be a personage of influence; certainly my involuntary benefactor was, who served Count Lashgar’s father till he was beheaded.”

“You’re prepared to run that risk?” Orrish demanded, aghast.

“Why not?” Jospil said, spreading his hands. “It’s better than some dangers that we take for granted. They say a moment of glory may redeem an age of suffering. … But one more thing, sir, if I may trespass on your patience. What did my sister hope to achieve, if not to make herself immortal?”

“To re-enact on a far grander scale a certain ceremony involving a homunculus.”

Jospil blinked. “That means nothing to me!” he objected. “Nor would it have done to her when you called at our cook-shop. But for your intrusion, we might still be there and –”

“And she would still be pronouncing her sweet-water cantrip at every dark of the moon.”

“Exactly!” Jospil rose awkwardly to his feet. “Sir, I hold you entirely to blame for the plight we’re all cast into!”

“Even though you so much desired to be rid of your half-sister’s tyranny, and you are?”

“Yes –
yes
!”

“Ah, well” – with a sigh. “I deserve these reproaches, I admit. Since but for me Crancina would never have known how reviving the strange creations of Metamorphia and imbuing them with blood could make her mistress of the world.”

Orrish’s jaw dropped; a second later Jospil clutched the hem of the traveller’s cloak.

“She could have done
that?”

“Beyond a peradventure. What magic is left nowadays is by and large residual, but the bed of Lake Taxhling was the repository of an enchantment such as few contemporary wizards would dare risk.”

“I could have been half-brother to the ruler of the world?” Jospil whispered, having paid no attention to the previous remark.

“Indeed you could,” the traveller said calmly, “if you had genuinely believed that ‘a moment of glory redeems an age of suffering’ – and, I assure you, had she achieved her aim she would have understood how to cause suffering.”

Frowning terribly, Jospil fell silent to reflect on lost opportunities, and Orrish ventured, “Sir, will you stay with us to rectify the consequences of your actions?”

There was a long dead pause; the traveller hunched gradually further and further into the concealment of his hood and cloak.

Finally he said, as from a vast distance, “The consequences of my actions? Yes!

“But never the consequences of yours.”

* * *

There followed a sudden sense of absence, and in a while Jospil and Orrish felt impelled to join the rest of the people, shoring up houses rendered unstable by the earthquake.

Which, of course, was all that had really happened … wasn’t it?

IX

“Litorgos!” said the traveller in the privacy of his mind, as he stood on a rocky outcrop overlooking the salt-and-silt delta being transformed by the outgush of water from on high. Already the pillars of Stanguray were tilting at mad angles; marble slabs and tiled façades were splashing into the swollen river. “Litorgos, you came closer to deceiving me than any elemental in uncounted aeons!”

Faint as wind soughing in dry branches, the answer came as though from far away.

“But you knew. You knew very well.”

And that was true. Silent awhile, the traveller reflected on the charge. Yes indeed: he had known, though he had not paid attention to the knowledge, that when he granted Crancina her wish he was opening the bonds which held Litorgos. For the sole and unique fashion in which the blood spilled into Lake Taxhling might be turned to the purpose Crancina had in view was through the intervention of an elemental. So much blood had been spilled the world over, another few thousand gallons of it was trivial, except …

And therefore Tarambole had told the truth. It was not an elemental working against the traveller that called him back to Stanguray.

It was an elemental working with him.

For otherwise the wish could never have been granted.

“There was a time,” the traveller said in this confessional, “when I was ready to believe that the One Who –”