The Book of Silence (33 page)

“They were Dûs, Garth, and not tied to this world as we Arkhein are,” the voice said quietly, speaking from the air near his right ear.

“All right, then, if the Arkhein can manifest themselves where the Eir and Dûs could not, why have I never heard of it happening before?”

“The rules are different now,” the voice replied. “We were restrained by Dagha's rules, confined by the power of the higher gods even while we drew much of our own power from them. Now things have changed.
Everything
has changed. Even I don't know all the differences yet; I have never been so free before and have not yet had time to learn what this freedom means.”

A brutal shaking distracted Garth from the conversation; he staggered up the dark passageway, grateful that there were no branches where he might make a wrong turning. Ahead, he glimpsed a pale gray glimmering; he moved onward and saw that it was the first faint light of dawn.

Chapter Thirty

Frima had been blindfolded as well as bound and gagged, and did not see what happened to her captors. She heard a rumbling, then a crashing, and then the deafening roar of an angry warbeast, mixed with human screams. The hands that had held her fell away, and she tumbled heavily to the floor, bruising her elbows on the stone. She tried to call out, but the gag stopped her voice. She struggled with her bonds in an attempt to work the loops of rope and fabric down over her hands.

She heard thrashing sounds and the scraping of stone on stone in those brief instants between the warbeast's growls and roars; the screaming of its victims was almost constant. At least once she heard a crunching she knew to be the splintering of bones. Something warm and wet sprayed across her legs where they protruded from her disarrayed robe.

Finally, when the roaring seemed to be almost upon her, the screaming faded and died.

The roaring, too, died in its turn, and she heard a harsh, inhuman breathing. Something viscous and unpleasant dripped onto her face.

She managed to work one hand free, thanking Tema and the other gods for giving her such small, delicate hands. Saram had complimented her on them more than once. She reached up and pulled away the blindfold, both hopeful and afraid.

Koros looked back at her, its golden eyes gleaming strangely in the faint dawning light that filtered into the Aghadite tunnel. She saw, behind the beast, that a large part of one wall of the tunnel had been broken away; Koros had obviously managed to track her down and come to her rescue, letting nothing bar its way.

That moment of realization seemed to stretch on forever; time distorted and slowed, and she felt herself drawn out across an eternity, staring into the warbeast's eyes for endless eons.

This was more frightening than anything the Aghadites could have done to her; the three-minute piece of warped and broken time was utterly beyond her experience or conjecture, and she was certain, while it was occurring, that the universe had come to an end for her, that she was dead or dying. She could think of nothing but death that might be so unlike life as she had known it.

Then, abruptly, time returned to normal. She wrenched the gag from her mouth and called, “Koros!”

The warbeast growled a greeting in reply, and she noticed for the first time that it was standing astride a disemboweled corpse, and that the substance dripping upon her face was blood from the creature's jaw.

“Get me out of here!” she cried, still unsure what was happening, but eager to be away from the dead and mangled Aghadite, away from the place where she had felt reality coming apart around her.

Koros seemed to understand; it backed up into the opening it had smashed through the stone wall of the hiding place, ignoring the ruined corpses it trod underfoot as it moved.

Frima reached down and struggled with the ropes that bound her ankles, getting them free after a few moments of tugging. She staggered to her feet, pulling at the bindings that still remained, and tottered after the warbeast, out onto the Street of the Temples and into the light of dawn.

She realized for the first time that the rumbling she had heard was still continuing, even growing. She had thought it to be caused by some Aghadite machine, but now discovered that it was coming from the earth beneath her feet, and that the ground was beginning to shake. She didn't like it.

She was unsure what to do; she did not know where Garth had gone, whether he was still in the temple of Death, whether it would be safe to enter the temple. She stood for a long moment, glancing about indecisively, trying to decide upon a course of action.

Finally, as she was about to try to coax Koros into hunting down its master for her, Garth emerged from the shadows of the temple cave, running unsteadily. She let out a glad cry at the sight of him, happy to see him still alive, and then noticed that the Sword of Bheleu was gone. She started to say something about it, concerned lest it fall into the wrong hands.

Garth ignored that; he stopped, stared in surprise at the sight of Frima alive, saw Koros, and called, “Mount up! Quickly!”

Confused, Frima obeyed; she had learned not to argue with Garth when he gave her direct orders so urgently. She clambered awkwardly onto the warbeast's back.

An instant later the overman leaped up behind her and called a word to the beast. Koros growled in response, then bounded forward and set out at full speed for the city gate. It seemed unhindered by its recent injuries, or by the two crossbow quarrels that still protruded from its shoulder. One had come free from the shoulder, and Koros had worked out the one in its paw, leaving an oozing wound.

For a long moment Frima had no time to do anything but hang on, as Koros moved at incredible speed through the city's deserted streets.

The rumbling sound grew and deepened, and she could feel the ground shaking whenever the warbeast's paws touched it for more than an instant. The air had turned very hot and dry and was full of sound and vibration; black dust was rising from the ground and vibrating off the buildings on either side. Something terrible was obviously happening, or perhaps was about to happen, but she did not know what it was.

The street in front of them cracked open, and a stone house at one side fell inward with a roar; undaunted, the warbeast leaped the crack and bounded onward. It seemed untroubled by the trembling of the earth. When it reached the open ground of the market, it charged across at a speed that forced Frima to close her eyes and gasp for air.

Then they were out of the city, past the broken gate, and still Koros ran, headlong down the slope of ancient black lava.

Finally, when they had left the stone surface behind and reached the end—or the beginning—of the highway that led eastward through the site of Weideth, Garth leaned down and signaled to the beast with a blow on its flank. It slowed to a limping walk, its head low. Even its huge supply of energy was not inexhaustible. Frima struggled up into a sitting position, releasing her armhold around its neck, and peered back under Garth's arm.

A column of thick black smoke was pouring up from Dûsarra, from every part of the city, as if the black walls were the rim of a vast chimney; an orange glow lit the sky. More smoke and more of the orange light streamed from the crater above the city. As Frima watched, she saw one of the temple towers sway and then collapse. The rumbling was now a steady roar, but comfortingly distant.

Nobody emerged from the gate. She watched, expecting a fleeing multitude, but no one appeared; instead, the walls on either side of the ruined gate abruptly tottered and fell inward. Something red and glowing poured forth where they had stood, and she realized at last that the volcano had awakened and was consuming Dûsarra.

Garth glanced back at the crumbling black city and the lava that was devouring it. “So much, then, for the cult of Aghad,” he said.

“Do you think they're all in there?” Frima asked.

Garth shrugged. “Enough of them are. Their god is dead and their temples destroyed; I won't trouble myself about any who may have survived.” Without the Sword of Bheleu driving him on, he was no longer obsessed with the cult's destruction to the last man. He had his revenge.

Frima looked up at the overman's leathery, noseless face, then back at her vanishing birthplace. She did not understand what Garth meant about the god; gods did not die, she told herself.

Still, she, too, felt that she had had her fill of vengeance. She was ready to begin finding herself a new life. She suspected, as well, that she might be carrying more than her own life; she was beginning to notice other indications, in addition to her bouts of nausea, that she might be pregnant. The prospect delighted her. She turned away from Dûsarra and looked eastward toward the rising sun.

Appendix A

A History of This Novel

The Book of Silence
is the fourth and final volume in the “Lords of Dûs” series. There are no published spin-offs or related series outside the four volumes, nor are any presently in the works, so unless you skipped ahead you've now finished the whole thing—but the possibility of adding more eventually hasn't been totally ruled out.

I described the origins of the series as a whole in the appendices to the previous volumes, but I deliberately skimmed over certain things with only the very briefest of mentions until now. The time has come to reveal those, along with the other sources
The Book of Silence
came from.

The first and most obvious source is simply the need to finish up the series and tie up everything I had set up in the first three volumes. I always knew I was going to end the series with the events of Chapter Twenty-Eight—I won't be more specific in case you've skipped ahead to read this. In the very earliest version, believe it or not, that was just going to be an epilogue tacked onto the end of the planned collection of short stories, but I quickly realized that was a stupid idea; I needed to build up to it more than that.

It's almost tempting to include that original epilogue here—yes, I wrote it—but I'm going to resist the temptation. I was nineteen when I wrote it, and I wrote about as well as you might expect a reasonably-bright nineteen-year-old obsessed with sword and sorcery to write, which is to say, badly.

At any rate, I realized early on that I needed to do it right, in a climactic story describing Garth's last errand for the Forgotten King, and that was to be a novelet called “The Last Quest,” in which Garth would fetch an item of great magical power from the crypts of Ur-Dormulk and bring it back to Skelleth for the Forgotten King. The central menace would be Dhazh; back then the cult of Aghad had not yet developed into anything like its final form, and I had not yet worked out any details of the Age of Destruction. The nature of the desired object was not yet determined; I think my preferred theory at that point was that it would be some of that blood oozing from Dhazh's truncated horn. I'm really not sure when it became the Book of Silence.

And the final scene—the epilogue—would have taken place in the King's Inn, rather than in Dûsarra.

When I revamped the whole project to be mostly novels, I decided that this should all be combined with “Return to Dûsarra,” which was to have been the story tying up all the loose ends from “City of the Seven Temples,” such as dealing with the cult of Aghad. The two stories blended nicely, becoming what wound up as Chapters Five through Twenty-Eight of
The Book of Silence
.

When I gave up the idea of including
any
short stories in the series, the already-written “The Dragon of Orgûl” became Chapters One through Four and part of Five—well, except that the scenes involving Haggat were added later.

And Chapters Twenty-Nine and Thirty were added when Lester del Rey pointed out that ending the series with Chapter Twenty-Eight would be a really bad idea—bad enough that he wouldn't buy the novel if I stopped there. That was a very, very convincing argument, especially since I had largely outgrown my adolescent morbid streak by the time I got around to actually writing the book.

So those are the sources in my own plans for
The Book of Silence
, but there was another source for the whole series that had been just background before, but came to the fore in this volume. I refer to the works of Robert W. Chambers and Ambrose Bierce, specifically the collection
The King in Yellow
and the short story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.”

This all starts with the Bierce story. “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” written in 1887, describes a citizen of the great city of Carcosa who finds himself in an unfamiliar place that he eventually recognizes as the ruins of Carcosa, where he finds his own gravestone. It's a nice little ghost story that somehow caught the fancy of several later writers, most notably Robert W. Chambers, who in 1895 published a collection of short stories under the title
The King in Yellow
. Several of the stories in the collection, though not all of them, were tied together by mention of certain mysterious objects, apparently all related, chief among them a blasphemous, madness-inducing play entitled “The King in Yellow” and a strange symbol called the Yellow Sign.

And the play, “The King in Yellow,” is set in Carcosa, and mentions several of the names Bierce invented for his story. We get tantalizing hints of the play's setting, characters, and content, but never anything even remotely resembling an actual explanation. Chambers (perhaps deliberately, perhaps not) appears to be not entirely consistent with Bierce's story; for example Bierce created the name “Hali” but applied it to a person (or perhaps a deity), while Chambers applies it to a lake.

At least two other writers then borrowed from Chambers, much as he had borrowed from Bierce; H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos drew heavily on the horrific aspects of Chambers' creation, while Marion Zimmer Bradley adapted the hinted court intrigues and psychic powers from “The King in Yellow” into her Darkover series. (In case you've ever wondered why, for example, the name Hastur appears in those very dissimilar works, now you know—they both got it from Chambers.)

Right from the very start, I borrowed Chambers' King in Yellow as my mysterious mentor figure, the Forgotten King; as the series progressed, though, I decided that I would borrow considerably more than that. I went through
The King in Yellow
end to end, noting every detail, every name, every vague hint Chambers gave about the play, the Yellow Sign, and all the rest of it. I assembled all this into my own grand theory of just what the heck was going on, and then used that as the background for my own story.

I had already created my own gods and my own maps, but Chambers had never dealt with those, so there was no contradiction. I decided that the play, “The King in Yellow,” was set during, and written during, the Eighth Age of my invented chronology, the age when light and darkness were in balance, and that it was the events described in the play that tipped the balance and began the world's long, slow, inevitable slide into despair, destruction, and death.

And I went to great lengths to make my descriptions of the city of Ur-Dormulk match the descriptions Chambers gave of Carcosa—or rather, what his Carcosa would have been if it were sacked by barbarians, left in ruins as Bierce described, and then rebuilt atop the ruins. The strange deep lakes, the mysterious fogs, an illusion of twin suns, doors sealed with the Yellow Sign...

It was great fun working all this in—and I'm sure the vast majority of readers never noticed.

Oh, lest anyone wonder about plagiarism, it's certainly not an issue legally, since
The King in Yellow
went into the public domain long before I was born; ethically it's perhaps slightly less clear-cut, but building on the work of previous authors is a tradition going back millennia. Had Chambers still been alive I would have asked his permission, but he was not.

Other influences on the series that I should probably mention, as long as I'm at it, would include Michael Moorcock's Elric and his sword Stormbringer; I admit that the Sword of Bheleu owes something to Stormbringer. Fritz Leiber's stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were part of the inspiration for the crypts of Ur-Dormulk, and specifically for the pillar/fountain, which was my own version of the fountain in Lankhmar's Plaza of Dark Delights.

And I think that covers it.

The Book of Silence
was first published January 1984 by Del Rey Books, ISBN 0-345-30880-8. The original cover art was by Darrell K. Sweet. There were at least four Del Rey printings. The novel has been translated into German, Spanish, and Italian.

The Del Rey edition went out of print in the early 1990s, and I reclaimed the rights. In 2001 I signed a contract with Wildside Press to publish this new edition.

In preparing the Wildside Press edition I've generally followed the Del Rey edition. A few typos and other small errors have been corrected, and I've modified some punctuation I thought was off, but no significant editing has been done.

The only significant differences are in these appendices, and the new map. The map in the Del Rey edition, although based on my own original map, was drawn by Chris Barbieri, and Wildside was unable to obtain the rights to it. We are therefore using the revised map I drew for the new edition of
The Lure of the Basilisk
, as adapted by Alan Rodgers at Wildside.

The Appendices are new for this edition.

—Lawrence Watt-Evans,

Gaithersburg, MD, March 2002