Iron Chamber of Memory (25 page)

“Nonsense,” Mandrake said.

“She says that you are lovers, and that when you–”

“More nonsense. I never touched her.”

“I saw her knock on your door at night!”

“Then you must have seen me turn her away. It would corrupt the honeymoon for a bachelor to covet and embezzle to himself the pleasures a wedded husband by such dire oaths of lifelong faith and selfless love alone can win. After all I have said—is that what you think of my character? That I am a murderer and a fornicator?”

Laureline hissed, “You cannot believe him! You dare not! Why would I invent such a story? Women don’t lie about things like this! He will kill me as soon as he is alone with me in this room.” But her eyes were filled with a swirl of dangerous emotions.

Henry said calmly. “Manny, I cannot take the chance you might be lying.”

Mandrake said, “It looks like you damned well have to, old man! Unless you have something else in mind?”

Henry said, “Very simple. We all three step out of this chamber. I close and lock the door. Then I melt the key.”

Mandrake said, “What will that do?”

“If none of the three of us ever return to this chamber, my poor outward self never remembers that I am in love with a would-be murderess. The two of you end up with an unhappy marriage, but alive. You see? Then it does not matter who trusts who or which of you I believe. The door is shut. We have all made a sacrifice of our personal happiness to save the others, even though we will forget why we are unhappy. We will do the right thing, but not know we had done it.” He took the keyring out of his pocket, and held up the key with the red rose image for its bow.

Laureline said, “My idea is much more fun and delicious!” And she reached back with her free hand and snatched up the little bottle of heroin. “You promised me his death. I charge and compel you to abide by your promise!”

Henry then felt all the pains of that morning tremble through his bones. Sweat was pouring from his skin and stinging his eyes. A pounding dizziness swirled into Henry’s brain. His thoughts scatted like a cloud of insects. He felt his bowels loose, and the strength of his sinews unknit. Laureline pulled her arm from his shivering and nerveless grip. The keys dropped to the floor with a bright chime of noise.

Henry found he could not prevent himself from throwing his body at Mandrake, any more than he could have prevented his finger from flinching away from a hot stove. Henry’s vision narrowed to a black tunnel.

He saw his own arm, moving by itself, striking toward Mandrake’s heart with his walking stick. As his eye fell on the amethyst ring, however, he regained control of his hand and turned the stick aside, so that it struck instead against Mandrake’s upraised arm. A flash of light went off.

Mandrake with his other hand pulled a small green book from his coat pocket and held it up, saying words that came from his mouth with a sound like a trumpet.

The darkness burning in the corners of Henry’s vision receded, and the pains in his limbs were gone. He found himself on his knees, his walking stick in his hand. Mandrake was lying on his back, his right arm deeply cut, bleeding heavily, the little green book still clutched in his left hand.

Neither man was in a position to stop her when Laureline stooped, snatched up the keyring, and ran in a clatter of heels and a lilt of girlish laughter around the curve of the chamber toward the white hexagonal door at the far end.

Henry rose to his feet, threw the pink rope off from around his neck, and strode angrily after her. He could hear her heels echoing from around the spiral turn. An inner panic told him to run. He increased his pace.

He came into view just in time to see her stepping into the beams of blinding light issuing from the open portal. The sound of strange music was all about him, lutes and buzzing reeds, the throb of horns and beat of tambours, the skirl of bamboo flutes.

He blinked and tried to focus his eyes. He could see the chamber beyond the hexagonal portal: Each wall was covered with floor-to-ceiling looking glass of beaten and polished silver, and the panels between the mirrors were covered with mosaics of diamond grit, spelling out words in a language he did not recognize, the cursive script that looked like scimitars, kukri knifes, and pothooks. The walls met at obtuse or acute angles, as there were nooks and bays opening out from a nine-sided rotunda. There was a tall dome or perhaps a chimney midmost into which four tall silver pillars, inscribed with spiral lines of writing in Hebrew and Latin, disappeared, their capitals hidden by the lip of the dome. Directly beneath was a silver-basined pool on which floated lotus blooms. The webwork of reflections from the pool danced across the roof, and were reflected in all the mirrored walls.

Laureline splashed intro the middle of the pool which was up to her mid-thigh. She turned toward the portal, her expression one of awe and astonishment. She threw back her head and laughed a deep and throaty laugh. Her long hair lifted and spread to either side of her, pushed by some motion of the air Henry, from his position outside the silver-walled chamber, could not feel.

She rose up off the ground as if pulled by unseen wires, and passed behind the lip of the upper dome.

That sight was not so strange or shocking that it made Henry forget his friend, lying motionless back around the curve of the wall. Henry ran quickly back to where Mandrake had fallen, and was relieved to see him sitting up. Mandrake was trying awkwardly to staunch the flow of blood from his right arm with his left hand.

Henry ripped off the hem of his cloak to bind up Mandrake’s arm. “Sorry, fellow, but what did she do to me?”

Mandrake said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. A shadowy line of smoke came out of the little bottle and reached and touched you. It had fingers. It was an arm. A freakish thin arm made of shadow came out and grabbed you by the heart!”

“And how did you stop me? With that book? You made the pain go away.”

Mandrake shook his head as if to clear a fog from his thoughts. As he sat, clutching his bandaged arm, his face began to look more calm, less bewildered. “No, no. In the excitement of the moment, we are forgetting the exact order of events. All that happened was this: When Laureline showed you the bottle, you were overcome by temporary insanity, willing to do anything to get your next fix of heroin. So, when you rushed at me with your sword, naturally I reached into my pocket for the first thing I could find, which was my book. I threw the book and it knocked the bottle of heroin out of her hand. The moment you saw the heroin was gone beyond all recovery, you snapped out of it. That’s all.”

Henry looked back and forth, and then down at Mandrake. “That could not possibly be what just happened here.”

Mandrake said, “Certainly it is. Look there.” And he pointed at the broken shards of the bottle on the floorboards. It had struck the stones of the fireplace and shattered.

Henry pointed silently to the little green book with brass clasps still in Mandrake’s hand.

Mandrake stared at the book in surprise.

Henry said, “If you threw the book, why is it still in your hand? And if I struck you with a walking stick, why is your arm lacerated rather than contused? The flash of light I saw also went off the last time I swung this stick. The first time, my mind convinced me I had opened a tin lantern; the second time, that some bulbs in the lighting fixture had broken. And, thinking back, I remember the same light when I stuck open the cellar door downstairs. But that lamp there is an oil lamp, and it is not broken. This time, the deceiver, the curse, whatever it is that makes us explain away what we are not allowed to see, it could not come up with anything convincing. It was caught flatfooted, presented with a strangeness too extraordinary to cover over.”

Mandrake fished a tiny key out of his pocket, unlocked, and opened the little book in his hand. “The first half is in Aramaic. The second half is in Koine Greek. Those are not languages I read.”

Henry said, “And when did I learn how to field-dress wounds? Come along. The answers will be in the next chamber.”

Mandrake said, “What is in the next chamber?”

“The same as this, only one step further in.” He blinked in confusion. “What happened to Laureline? Wasn’t she just here? We were talking about… something…” He snapped his fingers. “The inner chamber! She was trying desperately to get into the chamber.”

Mandrake leaped to his feet. “Dear God! You’re right! Lorelei was just here. The moment she stepped over the threshold, we forgot her.” He began loping around the curve of the chamber, running toward the far wall. “She could be doing anything with the papers in there!”

“Papers?” Henry ran after.

“Contracts and covenants. Legal documents. Estate papers, wills, that sort of thing. The Deed to the Wrongerwood House. Mr. Twokes, the other lawyers, and I have been going over the wards and bounds pretty carefully these last few days, setting things in order.”

The hexagonal portal was open, and silvery light was shining in beams from the mirrored walls of the inner chamber. The music of flutes and zithers poured out. Laureline was not in sight.

Henry said grimly, “Let us go in. We are not who we think we are.”

Their ears popped as they crossed the threshold. Each man staggered and blinked as an inner and deeper life poured into his soul.

The first man said, “My name is not Henry Landfall.”

The other said, “I am Mandragora.”

Sir Henwas Lanval of Avalon was blinded for a moment. He passed his hand before his eyes.

Now he hefted the sword of ancient days in his hand. The blade was Galatine, and had been carried before him by Sir Gewain, also called Sir Gwalchmai the Mayhawk of Camelot. Sir Gewain had challenged him that the eyes of Lady Tryamour, Lanval’s beloved from the Elfinlands, were not more fair than the gray eyes of Queen Guinevere. The matter was put to the trial of tourney, but Sir Gewain lost the famed blade to Sir Lanval. The peculiarity of the blade was that it shined like thirty torches when it struck the ill-begotten or accursed. Small wonder that, even in the world of men, Sir Lanval never let the hawk-shaped grip from his hand.

This very day, this far famed blade had slain two of the talking animals, wolf-warlocks who took the shapes of men, as they contested the narrow way, or sought to force the doors; and the light of the sword had driven away the Dark Prince, greatest of the Soul Eaters, who fled from the brink of Le Coupee on wings of membrane. The Great Lion of Sark had risen from its eternal sleep before the doors of the House when the wolfish men approached, and Lanval with his sword had come to the aid of the noble beast.

And on previous nights, he had departed this chamber, some charm of the Silver-White Lotus Chamber allowing him to keep his memory for an hour even in the dull airs of the outer world. He and his blade had flown to the aid of Mandragora. They had fought side-by-side, defending the house from the Dark Prince’s servants and the talking animals that besieged it in battles that he later remembered only in his dreams.

Lanval looked down at himself. He was clad in white, with hauberk and winged helm forged by the dwarven craftsman of Brising, slaves of Albrecht who had escaped his dark world. The white surcoat was adorned with the image of an ermine spot beneath three roundels.

They also had repaired for him the great sword Galatine, that had so unjustly and treacherously been used in his hand to break the wards and shatter the back-gate of Wrongerwood House, and allow the Unpitying Fair Damsel, Lorelei of the Lake, entry into this sacred house. She by her spells had been attempting for two years to enter that house, but had never been able before then to bring her memories. Always before, she had been powerless inside here, forgetting all her arts. The sword had not been broken, but in sorrow its fair light had been quenched when Lanval, or, rather, Hal, had used the sword’s virtue to force the door to the cellar here.

The dwarves had used the hoof of the White Ox of Oxford to burnish the blade to gleaming brightness once again. With a tremor of fear, Lanval now recalled his battle of riddles with the water- monster Vodonoy to recover the ox hoof. Lanval blessed the mist which had hidden that true scene from his eyes. The mist had disguised as well the smoky cave no foe dared approach, where Lanval slept, for he slumbered in the coils of a baptized and repentant dragon of monstrous size. To his eyes then, it had seemed nothing more than a tobacco shop.

The knight turned and looked at Mandragora the Thaumaturge, who was dressed in his robes as a blackfriar, with his scholar’s hood upon his head, and the book of miracles in his hand. Lanval said, “How could I have been so confounded by such small things? Why were my eyes so blind? We were at war, deadly war, the whole while.”

He looked left and right. The many mirrors and many nooks of the chamber were confusing to the eye, but he saw no sign of the green-eyed girl.

Mandragora said, “My aunt and cousins were slain by the mermaid’s song, and made to drown themselves. Lorelei forced the old caretaker away from the house, but good hap allowed me to find Gwent mab Nodd, called Nodenson, who was the knight of the black-scarred face still keeping watch over the Badbury Rings. The caretaker’s keys I gave to you.”

“Ah, that is why she cried out his name when she ran afoul of his protections in the cellar. And the Wolfhound brothers? Are they talking animals as well?”

“Yes, but baptized, and they rend the other wolfenkin as wolfhounds rend wolves. They are the Hounds of God, the
Canes Domini
.”

“Many talking animals escaped! And I did not slay the Dark Prince, who is the chieftain of the blooddrinkers. We must see to the walls!”

“You forget the day. On Holy Saturday, when the world mourns Our Savior in the tomb, the evil wights are bold to assault the strongholds of ancient memory. But now is Easter Sunday, and the bells of Saint Peter will drive them forth. We must deal only with the Unpitying Fair Damsel found here. And quickly! For I see her mischief!”