The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (35 page)

Wearily Kane followed her gesture. Pain etching his brow, he made
a sign and barked a stream of harsh syllables. A shadow crossed the
open window and fell over the vivisected corpse. When it withdrew,
the tortured form had vanished, and a muffled slap of wings faded
into the darkness.

“Why do you think to hide your depraved crimes from my sight,
Kane? Do you think I’ll forget? Do you think I don’t know the evil that
goes into compounding this diabolical drug you force me to drink?”

Kane frowned and stared into the haze of phosphorescent vapor
which swirled within the cucurbit. “Are you carrying iron, Dessylyn?
There’s asymmetry to the nimbus. I’ve told you not to bring iron
within the influence of this generation.”

The dagger was an unearthly chill against the flesh of her thigh.
“Your mind is going, Kane. I wear only these rings.”

He ignored her to lift the cup and hurriedly pour in a measure
of dark, semi-congealed fluid. The alembic hissed and shivered,
seemed to burst with light within its crimson crystal walls. A drop
of phosphorescence took substance near the receiver. Kane quickly
shifted the chalice to catch the droplet as it plunged.

“Why do you force me to drink this, Kane? Aren’t these chains of
fear that hold me to you bondage enough?”

His uncanny stare fixed her, and while it might have been the
alchemical flames that made it seem so, she was astonished to see the
fatigue, the pain that lined his face. It was as if the untold centuries
whose touch Kane had eluded had at last stolen upon him. His hair
billowed wildly, his face was shadowed and sunken, and his skin
seemed imparted with the sick hue of the phosphorescent vapors.

“Why must you play this game, Dessylyn? Does it please you to see
to what limits I go to hold you to me?”

“All that would please me, Kane, is to be free of you.”

“You loved me once. You will love me again.”

“Because you command it? You’re a fool if you believe so. I hate
you, Kane. I’ll hate you for the rest of my life. Kill me now, or keep me
here till I’m ancient and withered. I’ll still die hating you.”

He sighed and turned from her. His words were breathed into the
flame. “You’ll stay with me because I love you, and your beauty will
not fade, Dessylyn. In time you may understand. Did you ever wonder
at the loneliness of immortality? Have you ever wondered what must
be the thoughts of a man cursed to wander through the centuries? A
man doomed to a desolate, unending existence—feared and hated
wherever men speak his name. A man who can never know peace,
whose shadow leaves ruin wherever he passes. A man who has learned
that every triumph is fleeting, that every joy is transient. All that he
seeks to possess is stolen away from him by the years. His empires
will fall, his songs will be forgotten, his loves will turn to dust. Only
the emptiness of eternity will remain with him, a laughing skeleton
cloaked in memories to haunt his days and nights.

“For such a man as this, for such a curse as this—is it so terrible
that he dares to use his dark wisdom to hold something which he
loves? If a hundred bright flowers must wither and die in his hand, is
it evil that he hopes to keep one, just
one,
blossom for longer than the
brief instant that Time had intended? Even if the flower hated being
torn from the soil, would it make him wish to preserve its beauty any
less?”

But Dessylyn was not listening to Kane. The billow of a tapestry,
where no wind had blown, caught her vision. Could Kane hear the
almost silent rasp of hidden hinges? No, he was lost in one of his mad
dened fits of brooding.

She tried to force her pounding heart to pulse less thunderously,
her quick breath to cease its frantic rush. She could see where Mavrsal
stood, frozen in the shadow of the tapestry. It seemed impossible that
he might creep closer without Kane’s unnatural keenness sensing his
presence. The hidden dirk burned her thigh as if it were sheathed
in her flesh. Carefully she edged around to Kane’s side, thinking to
expose his back to Mavrsal.

“But I see the elixir is ready,” announced Kane, breaking out of
his mood. Administering a few amber drops to the fluid, he carefully
lifted the chalice of glowing liqueur.

“Here, drink this quickly,” he ordered, extending the vessel.

“I won’t drink your poisoned drugs again.”

“Drink it, Dessylyn.” His eyes held hers.

As in a recurrent nightmare—
and there were other nightmares
—
Dessylyn accepted the goblet. She raised it to her lips, felt the bitter
liqueur touch her tongue.

A knife whirled across the chamber. Struck from her languid
fingers, the crystal goblet smashed into a thousand glowing shards
against the stones.

“No!” shouted Kane in a demonic tone. “No!
No!”
He stared at
the pool of dying phosphorescence in stunned horror.

Leaping from concealment, Mavrsal flung himself toward Kane—
hoping to bury his cutlass in his enemy’s heart before the sorcerer
recovered. He had not reckoned on Kane’s uncanny reflexes.

The anguished despair Kane displayed burst into inhuman rage
at the instant he spun to meet his hidden assailant. Weaponless, he
lunged for the sea captain. Mavrsal swung his blade in a natural down
ward slash, abandoning finesse in the face of an unarmed opponent.

With blurring speed, Kane stepped under the blow and caught the
other’s descending wrist with his left hand. Mavrsal heard a scream
escape his lips as his arm was jammed to a halt in mid swing—as
Kane’s powerful left hand closed about his wrist and shattered the
bones beneath the crushed flesh. The cutlass sailed unheeded across
the stones.

His face twisted in bestial fury, Kane grappled with the sea
captain. Mavrsal, an experienced fighter at rough and tumble, found
himself tossed about like a frail child. Kane’s other hand circled its
long fingers about his throat, choking off his breath. Desperately he
sought to break Kane’s hold, beat at him with his mangled wrist, as
Kane with savage laughter carried him back against the wall, holding
him by his neck like a broken puppet.

Red fog wavered in his vision—pain was roaring in his ears... Kane
was slowly strangling him, killing him deliberately, taunting him for
his helplessness.

Then he was falling.

Kane gasped and arched his back inward as Dessylyn drove her
dagger into his shoulder. Blood splashed her sweat-slippery fist. As
Kane twisted away from her blow, the thin blade lodged in the scapula
and snapped at the hilt.

Dessylyn screamed as his backhand blow hurled her to the stones.
Frantically she scrambled to Mavrsal’s side, where he lay sprawled on
the floor—stunned, but still conscious.

Kane cursed and fell back against his worktable, overturning an
alembic that burst like a rotted gourd. “Dessylyn!” he groaned in
disbelief. Blood welled from his shoulder, spread across his slumped
figure. His left shoulder was crippled, but his deadliness was that of a
wounded tiger. “Dessylyn!”

“What did you expect?” she snarled, trying to pull Mavrsal to his
feet.

A heavy flapping sound flung foggy gusts through the window.
Kane cried out something in an inhuman tongue.

“If you kill Mavrsal, better kill me this time as well!” cried Dessylyn,
clinging to the sea captain as he dazedly rose to his knees.

He cast a calculating eye toward the fallen sword. Too far.

“Leave her alone, sorcerer!” rasped Mavrsal. “She’s guilty of no
crime but that of hating you and loving me! Kill me now and be done,
but you’ll never change her spirit!”

“And I suppose you love her, too,” said Kane in a tortured voice.
“You fool. Do you know how many others I’ve killed—other fools who
thought they would save Dessylyn from the sorcerer’s evil embrace?
It’s a game she often plays. Ever since the first fool...only a game. It
amuses her to taunt me with her infidelities, with her schemes to
leave with another man. Since it amuses her, I indulge her. But she
doesn’t love you.”

“Then why did she bury my steel in your back?” Despair made
Mavrsal reckless. “She hates you, sorcerer—and she loves me! Keep
your lies to console you in your madness! Your sorcery can’t alter
Dessylyn’s feelings toward you—nor can it alter the truth you’re
forced to see! So kill me and be damned—you can’t escape the reality
of your pitiful clutching for something you’ll never hold!”

Kane’s voice was strange, and his face was a mirror of tormented
despair. “Get out of my sight!” he rasped. “Get out of here, both of you!

“Dessylyn, I give you your freedom. Mavrsal, I give you Dessylyn’s
love. Take your bounty, and go from Carsultyal! I trust you’ll have
little cause to thank me!”

As they stumbled for the secret door, Mavrsal ripped the emerald-
set collar from Dessylyn’s neck and flung it at Kane’s slumping figure.
“Keep your slave collar!” he growled. “It’s enough that you leave her
with your scars about her throat!”

“You fool,” said Kane in a low voice.

“How far are we from Carsultyal?” whispered Dessylyn.

“Several leagues—we’ve barely gotten underway,” Mavrsal told
the shivering girl beside him.

“I’m frightened.”

“Hush. You’re done with Kane and all his sorcery. Soon it will be
dawn, and soon we’ll be far beyond Carsultyal and all the evil you’ve
known there.”

“Hold me tighter then, my love. I feel so cold.”

“The sea wind is cold, but it’s clean,” he told her. “It’s carrying us
together to a new life.”

“I’m frightened.”

“Hold me closer, then.”

“I seem to remember now....”

But the exhausted sea captain had fallen asleep. A deep sleep—
the last unblighted slumber he would ever know.

For at dawn he awoke in the embrace of a corpse—the moldering
corpse of a long-dead girl, who had hanged herself in despair over the
death of her barbarian lover.

RAMSEY CAMPBELL

T
opops
abandoned
his city at dawn. As he descended the translucent
stairs from his palace the green sun of Yifne sank beneath the
peaks before him, and the leaves streaming from the trees on the
surrounding mountains seemed to dull again. He strode across the
square and reached the polished cones which housed his court. Their
tips glimmered green, but looking back he saw that the pearly cones
were dimmed by the spire of the palace, already a glory of emerald.

He strode on, through the hives like foothills behind the houses
of his court. His adversaries had promised that a steed would be
prepared for him at the gate of the city. They had insisted that he
walk through the streets of the city, lest the sound of hooves awaken
support for him; and he agreed, upon the stipulation that he leave at
dawn, rather than in the darkness like a thief whose city had been
filched. As he strode towards the gate he thought:

“Had I not bowed to democracy, Lomboan and his cronies could
not have worn the clothes and the words of the court. Had I not
been bowed by their words and the plots they concealed, I should
not have given them tracts in the city to govern in my name. Had
they not learned new words in secret with which to bind their tracts,
their supporters could never have outnumbered those still loyal to
me. But my body has aged before my mind, and the army that I might
command could not sustain me. It appears that my time is past, but
nonetheless my thoughts are formed with grace, using words of power,
as befits a king.”

Now he was in sight of the gate. It was open, in accordance with
the promise that he had exacted, and beyond the stout walls waves
rippled and faded in the white grass. Against the planed road to
the mountains stood a swordsman holding the king’s steed. Topops
strode forward and thrust his foot into the stirrup, acknowledging the
swordsman neither by word nor glance.

Topops was stroking the fur of his steed and whispering words of
praise into its great veined ear when he heard the slither of discovered
metal. The swordsman had swept his blade free of its green-woven
sheath and was poised to cut at the legs of Topops’s steed. The
leaves which protected the man’s skull and body were well-nigh
impenetrable—but Topops’s foot had already lashed out, crushing
the man’s windpipe, and in the same movement he half-swung from
the saddle and caught the flung sword by its hilt. His lungs heaving,
he rode his steed over the choking man in sorrowful fury, for years ago
they had ridden together, leaved for battle.

Then from beyond both halves of the gate came the snorting and
spittle of restrained steeds, and Topops knew that the swordsman had
been sacrificed to weaken him. He shouted: “Fall, droppings of the
world! Conceal yourselves, lest you be shovelled into the pit and thus
subjected!” and casting his sword in an arc that almost splintered the
edges of the gate, rode forth.

Two of Lomboan’s men edged from ambush and flinched back from
the whooping blade. One tried to arrest its flight with his own sword,
but screamed as it sprang from his hands to slash through the grass
and stand quivering. “No power!” the other, a squat man with a dull
pulped face, shouted in encouragement. “Empty words, empty head,
empty crown! We ghostise him!” and by his speech Topops knew him
for a mercenary from one of the decadent lands. He brought his sword
down like a whip on the mercenary’s skull, not cleaving the leaf but
stunning him, and heeled his steed towards the mountains.

Miles onward he halted, brushing sweat from his face and clutching
at his breath. He opened the baskets which hung beside his heels and
smiled bitterly to find provisions; they would have formed part of the
mercenary’s payment, and the man would have feasted at once, using
Topops’s body as table. He gazed back to the city of Topome, which
shone now like green buds growing from the rippling tinted plain. Far
down the road two insects scuttled in the dust. Topops stroked his
steed, which was the swiftest in the land and which would carry him
to Yemene, three days’ ride away on the coast, and to a ship.

At dusk he reached the mountains. Avoiding the route used
by traders from Yemene, he rode until he reached a second and
untravelled pass. Its mouth was little wider than an alley between
hives, and Topops knew enough of the superstitions of mercenaries to
suspect that his pursuers might baulk at its entrance. “Nevertheless,”
he thought, “most forms of life may be subdued by the words of a
king.” And he rode between the towering dim walls.

Hours later he heard a dry tinkling far back down the pass, like
the sound of the settling of ash, and knew that his pursuers had not
been deterred. He rode on, often holding back cold rough darkness
with both hands. Eventually he slept, laying himself along the back
of his steed so that the brushing of his chin might sustain the coaxing
of his hands.

When he awoke, in darkness close as the lid of a coffin, the sounds
of his pursuers had ceased. He allowed his steed to continue until the
darkness parted jaggedly high above him and displayed a sprinkling
of stars. His eyes, alert now to any light, made out a cave ahead. It
was dry, and Topops led his steed within, and both slept. But near
dawn they were thrust forth by something soft which emerged from
deep within the cave, filling the bore entirely and carrying before it a
clattering debris of loose rock. Dazed, dismayed and uncertain of his
words’ power against its bulk, Topops mounted his steed. He gazed
back, but was unable to determine whether what protruded from the
cave was a limb or a worm.

By full daylight he had almost reached the far side of the mountains.
The grey chiselled walls loomed above him, and on the ledges lay
great balls of bone through which the wind moaned softly. Behind
him came distant rustles of pursuit. He urged on his steed, out of the
mountains. As he emerged slow waves of wind and cloud-shadow
passed across the forest which stretched beneath him to the horizon.

He rode obliquely into the forest, which was almost a day’s
width. The heads of the trees shook violently above him, buffeted
by the wind, but already green heat was settling between the trunks
like a still warm sea. Soon he encountered the cleared route of the
traders. Ashes of old fires stirred among the green gripping roots. He
quickened the pace of his steed, plunging between the tremendous
unshaken trunks in flight from the stifling heat of noon.

Long before dusk he was forced to halt, for his steed’s fur was
lank with sweat and his own head pumped like a heart. He led the
beast into a glade and, as it had not been provided for, shared his
food and water with it. Then he lay back in the soft green hollow
of a trunk. The branches glittered and chattered with birds. One,
grasping a horizontal branch with long translucent legs as pink as its
plumage, fluttered its wings and spun wildly head over heels. Topops
rested, heavy with thought, for beneath the agony of the swordsman
he had trampled his memory revealed sorrow and acceptance. “Let
Lomboan know that his words cannot cast out humility and courage,”
he thought.

At last he rose. The hissing and creaking of the forest concealed
any sounds of pursuit. He coaxed speed from his mount, thinking to
reach the plain beyond the forest before dusk. The baskets drummed
against his heels, his steed’s muscles flowed between his thighs, wind
swept back the branches of his hair. Then his steed fell, netted by the
long twining grasses.

Topops struggled to his feet. The beast was kicking weakly, its
round black eyes rolling. He slashed the vines, but the beast lay
snorting, and blood and foam began to pulse from his mouth. Then
Topops knew that the food they last shared had been poisoned. He
had eaten little, disliking the taste. Cursing, he stroked the beast’s
head and, closing its eyes with one hand, plunged the sword deep.

He cut the straps between the baskets and, emptying one, tied
it about his shoulders. He collected fruit and filled his flasks with
water from a nearby stream. Then he strode down the path between
dimming trees, until exhaustion dragged relentlessly at him and he
sheltered in a glade.

When he awoke it was daylight. The bright coiled and thrusting
green of the glade pained him like the plucking of torture. He
staggered to his feet, embracing a trunk, and the forest sprang closer
to oppress his eyes. His limbs were numb and felt immense. He tied
the basket to him with battling fingers and began to trudge towards
the edge of the forest, his mind floating dully outside him.

When he reached the white plain, on which the sand shifted
whispering like an echo of the sea on the horizon, he saw that he had
emerged a mile west of the road to Yemene. The poison burdened
his mind, but he realised that his pursuers might have gained, and
that he must not keep to the edge of the forest. Instead, he staggered
forward obliquely onto the plain.

The green sun throbbed in his eyes like a silent gong; it glittered
on grains of sand, stabbing with points of light. The sand slid beneath
him; it threw him face downwards into hollows, it crawled beneath
his nails as he tried to rise, it rustled in his ears like insects. As he
groped to his feet in the midst of the plain, he glimpsed a building
ahead, sinking with the rest of the landscape as his mind slipped
down again.

He shuffled forward, grasping the straps of his basket. Remembering
his pursuers, he turned, and the plain whirled with him. Against the
green of the forest he saw a clump of pale pulpy blossoms. Then,
as he chafed his fingers with the straps to gain a hold on his mind,
he made out that the blossoms were the faces of his pursuers, idly
awaiting his death.

He began to run, supporting himself with his sheathed blade,
plunging his feet into sand. The building ahead was clearer now: a
low round hut, white as the plain, like a globe half-buried in the sand.
Topops knew that it was a shrine, abandoned before the building of
Yemene and for that reason shunned by the people of the coast. He
could run no more; his chest was wheezing like a bellows clogged with
sand, and the horizon swayed as if storm-wracked. “It is fitting that
a king should defend a shrine,” he thought, gathering his mind. “Let
the mercenary defy the superstitions of his fathers and find death.”

He groped his way around the shrine and found the door, which
was framed like a blank canvas in a crust of sand. He thrust at the
door. The sand scraped and sifted down, but the door refused to
move. Around the curve of the shrine he saw the mercenary, a blur
of dull green and flesh, preparing to mount his steed. Topops plunged
his sword into the plain and, thrusting against it, ground his shoulders
into the door. With a thud of released sand, it swung inwards.

Topops unsheathed his sword and entered, steadying himself with
one hand. The interior of the shrine was gibbous: against the flattened
side of the half-globe stood a throne of white rock. Otherwise, apart
from a scattering of sand, the shrine was empty.

Topops glanced about, choosing the area he might best defend.
“An ousted king should fight before a throne,” he thought, and
gripped the arms of the throne, closing his eyes and preparing his
mind for combat. When he opened them he noticed a carving on the
wall to his left. It was crude but powerful, and he fastened his mind
upon it for strength.

It depicted a child gazing up at a man, who was in turn gazing up
at a form whose outlines were vague. The child’s face turned to the
man, and the man’s to the form, bore identical expressions of awe.
Topops found that the sketched but unclear lines of the form affected
him somehow with the same emotion. Seeking power, and moved by
the passion which had gouged the figures from the stone, he stepped
forward and traced the lines of the carving with his fingers. As he
completed the strokes a shiver of inexpressible recognition passed
through him; and the carving retreated from his hand as a door slid
open in the wall.