Night & Demons (14 page)

The boy who bought
The Stars Are Ours
still lives inside the much older, much more cynical Nam vet who became a professional writer. I continue to glow because Andre Norton liked my story

* * *

T
hrough the forest’s bare branches glittered stars as cold as shattered hope; there was no moon. Hardin the Wizard shouted the final word of his spell and threw down the book bound in pale cockatrice skin. Lightning flashed from the empty sky and rent the great oak.

Hardin flinched from the power he had summoned, but the cat, his familiar, arched her back and spat at the hissing ruin. The air was dense with the dry odor of seared wood and the biting, sulfurous stench of the thunderbolt.

The oak swayed, then with a long groan of despair toppled away from Hardin and his familiar. Branch and bark and heartwood that was old when men first came to the island crashed through the lesser vegetation and hammered a trench deep in the soil. The ground continued to vibrate long after the impact.

Hardin muttered a word and snapped his fingers. Witchfire lighted above him, casting its sickly glow over the scene. He stepped cautiously into the crater the oak’s roots had stirred when they ripped out of the earth. The cat hopped to a stone turned up by a twisted rootlet, then gathered herself and made another graceful bound to where an iron-bound box rested at the bottom of the pit.

Hardin pointed to the latch of the box; he spoke a word to no effect. Scowling, he uttered a second word. Pins clatðtered, but the lock held, and the cat turned her face up to Hardin and laughed.

Hardin shouted a final word of power. A white flash tore from his fingertip, splitting the lock and twisting the straps back.

Throwing open the lid, Hardin drew out the ancient book within. On the front board the leather binding showed dimðples from which great feathers had been plucked, and on the back were the lesser pits of a mammal’s fur; but all the cover was from a single hide.

Hardin raised the book
Gryphon
and opened it. “There is no wizard more powerful than I!” he shouted to the starlit sky.

“Bishop Holar is a greater wizard yet, Hardin,” said the cat with a cat’s grin.

Hardin looked down at his familiar. “Bishop Holar has been in his tomb this hundred years past!” he said.

“Aye, Hardin,” said the cat. “And still Bishop Holar is a greater wizard than you.”

Hardin closed
Gryphon.
There was a sound like distant thunder. “We will go home, now,” said the wizard.

Hardin stood in a corner of his loft, turning the pages of
Gryphon
on the lectern before him. The shutters at his shoulder were thrown back. Through them came the light of sunset and the odor of blooming honeysuckle. The cat slept beside the layer of ash which insulated the coals smoldering on the open hearth in the center of the room.

Glaring at the cat, Hardin said, “
Gryphon
will make me greater than Bishop Holar ever was!”

The cat grinned and stretched, but she did not turn toward the wizard. A pole sturdy enough to be the forepost of a warship jutted from the wall, holding a pot over the coals. The oak shaft was carved with the likenesses of a cockatrice; and a gryphon swallowing the cockatrice; and a dragon engulfing the lesser pair.

“Bishop Holar was buried with the book
Dragon
in his arms, Hardin,” the cat said. “You will never be as great as he while he holds
Dragon
and you do not.”

Hardin strode angrily around the lectern. “I will open the wall of Holar’s tomb so that you may bring the book to me,” he said.

The cat twisted onto her other side and looked at the wizard. “You sent my mate to fetch fire from the cell of the Younger Kalias, Hardin,” she said. “The—”

“He lost the path!” Hardin said. “Had he followed my instructions—”

“The rock closed over him,” the cat continued. As she spoke, she showed her claws and sheathed them again. “For three days I heard him wailing; then he died.”

Hardin grimaced and touched the lectern. “That was before I had the book
Gryphon
,” he said. “With
Gryphon
I could have protected him, as I can protect you.”

The cat rolled from the hearth and walked past Hardin. Her tail was high. First lifting her forepaws, she hopped to the window ledge with a surge of her hindquarters. The sun had sunk to a pool of bloody light on the horizon.

“Bishop Holar has
Dragon
,” said the cat. She turned to face the wizard. “I owe you service, but I do not owe you my life. You will not send
me
to fetch
Dragon,
Hardin.”

Hardin’s right hand clenched in a fist. With an oath he struck the cabinet on the north wall, making the pewter plates jangle within.

The cat grinned at him.

The moon was at zenith. Cold light flooded through the open southern windows, by its angle twisting into knowing leers the faces carved on the casement. At the lectern, Harðdin read
Gryphon
by a glow like foxfire which hovered over the pages of the book.

The cat entered by the window and leaped down, her pads thumping on the pine floor as she landed. The wizard stared at her with brooding eyes.

The cat licked herself, eyeing Hardin over her shoulder. At last she paused and said, “You’re up late, Hardin. Are matters well with you?”

“I am well,” said the wizard, hiding his anger as best he might. “I have all the power of
Gryphon
in my tongue now, cat. I will draw Bishop Holar from his tomb, and he will give me the book
Dragon.”

The cat laughed, a throaty rasping with more of mockery than humor in it. “You are not strong enough, Hardin,” she said. “If you try, you will burn, and all the world will burn with you.”

“I will force Bishop Holar to my bidding!” Hardin said. “You are my servant and must stand by me. When I signal, you will quench the flames so that the world remains for me to rule!”

“I will save the world and your body from the flames, Hardin,” the cat said. “But Bishop Holar will have your soul as his toy for all eternity, for he is a greater wizard than you.”

Hardin closed
Gryphon
with a sound like mountains splitting. He lifted the book from the lectern.

“Come!” he said. “This night I will make you human so that you have hands to do my will.”

Hardin took the brazier from its cabinet and the crystals he kept in an ivory casket. With them in his hands and his familiar following, the wizard strode from his house and into the neighboring grove.

The leaves of the oaks whispered like the wings of demons.

Moonlight through the leaves cut shadows as sharp as appliques of black cloth. Hardin set his brazier in the center of the grove and arranged the crystals in its bed. He laid no fuel of the ordinary sort for his fire.

The cat lay at her full length as she watched him. She was silent, but her tail twitched away her tension in sudðden strokes.

Hardin whispered and touched the array. Pale flames, yellow and blue and the green of burning copper, sprang from the brazier. Hardin took up the book
Gryphon
and began to chant.

The words echoed softly, as though from the walls of a cavern. The cat rose to her feet and paced about the brazier with a mincing step unlike her usual stride.

Hardin turned the page, continuing to call out the spell. The fire burned brighter. Its flames had the weight of stained glass, hinting at scenes of another world.

The cat danced, pirouetting on all fours. Her throat pulsed with her cries, but no sound could be heard over the booming thunder of the spell.

The cat rose to her hind legs. The flames were a bright, throbbing crimson like that of blood ripped from a rabbit’s lungs. The oaks twisted their limbs away from the power in their midst.

Hardin shouted the final word of his incantation. The flames vanished with the suddenness of spiderweb burning, and the wizard slumped to the ground.

The cat continued to dance, spinning and rising onto her toes. Moonlight was white on her skin, and the flood of her long hair was as black as the night between the stars.

Hardin watched her, his face sallow with exhaustion. The cat laughed, at the wizard and at the moon.

The bishop’s seat had been moved to Witsted after Holar died, and the parish of Vann had withered like wheat slain by a black frost. The sea breeze that rose up the cliffs covered the ruined churchyard in an eternal fog. Gravestones had toppled, yews had grown to mounds of shaggy gloom, and rust had frozen the gates open.

Hardin led, carrying the brazier and crystals as well as the book
Gryphon.
The cat had refused that burden or any. She wore a cape for the sake of modesty, and even that with bad grace. Her legs, as bare as the wind, scissored beneath the fur-trimmed hem.

The churchyard’s back wall was in a swale, and the ground near the three tombs there was wetter even than the rest of the enclosure. Tree branches dripped into pools of standing water. The cat hissed in irritation as she followed the wizard.

They were alone in the churchyard. The cat unpinned the cape and swept it from her shoulders. It dropped, partly on a fallen marker and partly in the water pooling over a sunken grave.

Hardin arranged his crystals within the brazier: quartz and tourmaline; chrysoprase and chalcedony; and in the center, a jagged piece of bloodstone whose red streaks ran like arteries through a green matrix. He spoke a word to light his witchfire, and the flames sprang up red.

The cat looked at the fire, then looked at Hardin. Her lips drew back in what could have been either a smile or a sneer.

“Are you ready?” Hardin asked.
Gryphon
was open in his hands and his face was tense.

“I will serve you as I must, Hardin,” said the cat. “But if you proceed as you intend, you will regret it for all eterðnity, for Holar is greater than you.”

“Enough!” said the wizard. “You will do my will, and I will do all else that is needful.”

Words stood out in letters of cold fire from the pages of the book
Gryphon.
Hardin began to intone them; the night trembled to the rhythms of his voice. The flames brightðened, and the cat shook her long hair loose in the night breeze.

The three bishops’ tombs had walls of flint nodules set in mortar and their roofs were of local slate, but the doors had been fashioned from imported marble. Crosses were carved on the first door and the second; but if there had ever been a cross on the door of Holar’s tomb, it had rotted from the stone. The marble was black with damp, and the firelight hinted at faces in the stains.

Hardin chanted. Distant thunder echoed his words, and the gulls on the cliffside below called nervously. Heat from the brazier cleared the air around it, but the atmosphere of the churchyard took on a brooding weight more oppresðsive than the fog.

The flames climbed. Gray light oozed through the door of the tomb on the left. It coalesced as Hardin spoke, as though the words of his incantation were hammerblows that forged formlessness into the wraith of a stern old man.

The cat postured before the figure, arching and twisting her nude body. The wraith looked at her in fury. He would have raised his hand for a blow, but chains of fire gripped him. To Hardin, the wraith said, “Stop while you can, you fool!”

Hardin paused, panting with the effort past and awareðness of the labor yet to come. “I dare not stop,” the wizard said. His face was bleak and set. “And I shall not stop!”

Hardin resumed chanting. The cat laughed as she danced, but her throaty gurgle was lost in the sound of syllables thundering like waves driven onshore by a winter gale.

The flames blazed yellow. At each syllable they leaped higher than the top of the ancient cypress whose roots had crumbled a corner of the wall before squirming through a dozen graves. Hardin’s voice rose in pitch but did not falter. The pages of
Gryphon
turned at the bare touch of his fingers.

Another blob of light formed on the door of the center tomb, the way water beads as it soaks through canvas. Harðdin spoke and the light congealed, becoming the figure of a man with a thin, ascetic face. This wraith nodded to his predecessor, still locked in fiery constraint, then gazed sadly at Hardin.

The cat grinned and offered herself, thrusting her pelvis toward the second figure. He would have signed the cross before him, but bonds of fire shackled his limbs as they had his predecessor’s.

“Young man,” said the saintly figure to Hardin, “cease now; for the sake of your soul and for the world of men.”

“My soul is lost unless I gain
Dragon
,” said the wizard. His voice rasped like stone on stone, and his eyes were puzzled to be gazing again on things of this world rather than what they glimpsed in the pages of
Gryphon.
“I will not cease!”

Hardin chanted, and the brazier glared white as the light of the desert sun. The wraiths stood watching. The first scowled, but the lips of the second moved in prayer.

The earth groaned a low, dismal note like the call of an ox dying. The door of the third tomb split with a whipcrack. Through the opening stepped a dapper man in bishop’s robes, holding a book whose red leather binding still showed the pattern of great scales.

Bishop Holar looked at the wraiths drawn from the other tombs. The first figure glared at him, but the second continðued to pray with the same sad expression as when he viewed Hardin the Wizard.

Bishop Holar chuckled and turned to Hardin. “Well done, boy,” he said in a silver voice, “far better than I had expected of you. But you may as well give over now and leave me to my—”

Holar smiled.

“To my rest, shall I say?”

The cat smiled back at Holar. Her expression was a mirðror of the bishop’s own, each as cruel as a hook-bladed knife.

“I will have the book
Dragon
,” said Hardin in nearly a falsetto.

“Your familiar has used your pride to dig a pit for you, boy,” said Bishop Holar with a nod of respect toward the cat. “She has mocked you till you tried this thing, knowing that if you did it, I would break you or between us we would break the world. Leave off now, while you can!”