The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (50 page)

At the moon-drenched middle of a large pool, I drove my pole in
the muck and, thus anchored, turned my face towards his approach,
and waited. At length, he edged out into view. “He” surely, so hugely
thewed his arms and shoulders showed, his cask-like torso. Shy
though, he seemed—pausing, then gingerly poling forward again, as
though doubting his welcome.

But at length he came to rest, his raft rim almost touching my
gunnel. His massy shoulders were torqued out of line, his huge arms
hung a bit askew, and his gnarled body seemed constantly straining
to straighten itself. So thick was his neck his whole head seemed a
stump, his ears a ragged lichen, his brows a shaggy shelf. Yet for all the
brute strength in the shape of him, his eyes were meek and blinking.

“Friend, you are in danger here.” His voice, an abyssal echo, came
eerily distinct from his great chest.

I felt a strange conviction from his calm utterance, which I
resisted. “Does this danger come from you yourself, Sir, or from some
other quarter?”

“Another quarter. It comes from Gothol, who is, in a manner of
speaking, my half-brother.”

Again his deep resonance somehow invited my trust against my
will. But indeed his words were full of sombre implications which, as
I sorted them out, prickled along my spine.

“If it comes from Gothol, it also comes, then, from...”—my throat,
for a moment, would not give passage to the name. The deformed
giant courteously waited, despite an air of growing unease. “Ahem....
Comes also, then, from Zan-Kirk, who
begot
Gothol on the demon
Heka-Tong.”

“Just so, my friend. That great mage indeed did sire Gothol thus,
down in the sub-World.”

“So...if you speak of him as your half-brother,” I ventured to
continue, “then might you not, Sir, be born of Zan-Kirk’s consort,
Hylanais...?” I stood in some suspense, fearing that perhaps my mouth
had outrun my wit. I had asked, in effect, if he had not been born of
the witch’s defiant coupling with a nameless vagabond abroad in the
wilderness, done in vengeance for her mighty consort’s sub-World
dalliance with the demon Heka-Tong....

“Born of Hylanais, yes, and named by her Yanîn—but truly, hark
me, Sir—”

“Delighted. My name is Nifft, called the Lean, of Karkmahn-Ra.”

“I greet you, Nifft, but in all truth we stand in
danger
even now.
For Gothol is
at hand
. And Zan-Kirk—even now quite near to us—
will himself follow hard upon Gothol’s coming!

“In fact, good Nifft, we have
no time
to flee. If you’ll permit me, I
will take the liberty of hiding you. We truly have no time—see there?”

His gnarled arm swept up-flume. Up at the fractured Rainbowl
Crater—up from behind the low rampart that repaired the lowest
fraction of its gaping wound—a golden star had risen....

Or comet? It moved at a steady, easy pace down...down towards
us, sinking smoothly through the night sky in an arc that arched along
the Flume’s great lanterned length. This gliding, golden star looked
likely to alight quite near us. Urgently, the deformed brute asked me:
“To preserve your safety, Sir, would you permit me a rather brusque
liberty with your person?”

The comet sank nearer and nearer—now there was no doubt it
would alight near where we stood. “Well,” I said, “I suppose if you
think it—”

“Thank you Sir!” His huge arm plucked me from my punt and
hurled me into the air, hurled me high into the branches of the great
tree shadowing us.

I was plunged into the black cloud of its leaves, where I bruisingly
impacted with its boughs, which I desperately embraced. My
launcher’s voice rose after me, soft but distinct:

“I’ll be at hand my friend, but we must not be seen. A dire work
which we cannot prevent is to be done here, and witnesses will
surround us who must not see you. You must lie still, and watch, and
harken. On our lives, don’t betray our presence here!”

II

But my dear Shag, let us leave me—I assure you I don’t mind—leave
me up in those boughs for a moment, up in the tree where Yanîn has
just tossed me. Because it occurs to me that just now you might be
wondering, “Hylanais? Zan-Kirk? And who might these be?”

They were long faithful lovers, these two mages. In the use of
their powers they were beneficent, and their thaumaturgies were
often helpful to the cities of that coast, for their powers were wielded
in controversion of all mishap or malevolence that might befall
Kolodria.

Their concord was Lebanoi’s blessing, as was their discord nearly
Lebanoi’s undoing.

They were faithful to one another, these two, until Zan-Kirk’s
ambition urged him to an exploit that could truly test his power.
And thus it was, in a moment fatal to Lebanoi’s peace, that Zan-
Kirk resolved to descend to the Sub-World, and there to couple
with the Demoness Heka-Tong. This would be an eroto-chthonic
feat unequalled in thaumaturgy’s annals, and it may actually be the
case that the sorcerer fatuously expected his mate’s approval of this
exploit for its daring.

Instead, her wrath and reproach are well chronicled in Shallows
ballads. In one, the sorceress most movingly expostulates:

Ah Zan-Kirk, had we not a vow

That all-encircled us as now

This sky, these green-clad mountains do?

Thour’t all to me—not I to you?

Go then—rut as suits thy will!

But know, therewith our vow dost kill.

Thereafter, from unplighted troth,

I fly bird-free, and nothing loath

To try the love of any man

That please mine eye, where-ere it scan.

And should I choose conceive, I shall,

And so, of all we’ve shared, ends all!

Thus a Chilite lay reports her rage. Zan-Kirk answered this with
equal rage. This was to be an exploit, in no way erotic. It was a Feat,
to which he, as a hero, had a right. At her threatened infidelity, he
thundered,

Shouldst thou do me adultery

What spawn thou hast in bastardy

Shall choke its life out in my grip,

And I thy bitch’s bowels shall rip!

—spoke thus, and wheeled his dragon-mount up and away through
the dawn-lit sky, south to Magor Ingens, the hell-vent through which
he descended to his infernal exploit upon the vast, fuliginous body of
the Narn Heka-Tong. This was a coupling that required seven years for
its accomplishment, and at the end of that term Gothol—who at pres
ent bestrides the sky above us—was born full-grown in all his power.

In these years of betrayal Hylanais embraced a nomad’s path.
Cloaked or cowled, she appears here and there in the popular record
of song and penny-sheet poetry, from which it seems she wandered
up and down through the length of Kolodria, and even across the
Narrows into Lulume, and in the course of these peregrinations she
committed a retaliatory infidelity with a hulking rural simpleton
chance-met on a country lane.

However impregnated, she bore a man-child some few years
before Zan-Kirk accomplished his swiving of the Narn Heka-Tong.
The warlock must perforce abide with the Narn as she lay in brood,
but Zan-Kirk’s rage at Hylanais caused him to leave the Narn-son,
Gothol, too abruptly, before that potent nursling had been molded to
the mage’s will.

Rumors winged with terror flocked ahead of Zan-Kirk’s return
to Lebanoi, for he came to destroy his “faithless” mate. He raised
a demon army and led it up from the Sub-World through the Taarg
Vortex. The march of this subworld army through
our
world—through
Sordon Head, and thence across Kolodria’s southern tip—left a wake
of slaughter and nightmare still traceable seven generations later.
Perhaps to still the panic his advent might spread, he sent ahead
nuncios to Lebanoi to proclaim that it was Rainbowl Crater he came
to “protect,” and the city itself had nought to fear from him if it
offered him no opposition.

Hylanais was amply forewarned. She scorned to draw her forces
from the sub-Worlds. Those she recruited were warriors who had
proven their greatness in their dying. She went to the Cidril Steppes
and raised the Orange Brotherhood from the plains where they’d
fallen, holding off the K’ouri Hordes. These she called up from the
blanketing earth where they’d lain three hundred years. In Lulume
she raised the Seven Thousand from their tombs in Halasspa, which
they saved from the Siege of Giants by their valiant but fatal sortie
from that city’s walls.

She rushed her forces overland. Her dead army’s march still echoes
eerily in the mountain folks’ traditions, but of physical scars they left
none. All passions were quelled in them but the soul-fire of warriors.
They advanced without hungers, or hurtfulness.

Hylanais arrived just before her wrathful mate. Her forces took
the high ground just beneath the crater’s wall. Rainbowl is closely
flanked by neighboring peaks, but sea-ward the crater presents
an almost sculpted rim, like an immense chalice of glossy stone.
Beautifully carven by nature, it had spillways cut from its base to feed
the Flume, which like a titanic wooden nursling suckled from the
crater’s mother waters.

Shortly after the witch had deployed, the warlock drew his forces
up below her. Her lich army’s shadowy sockets stared down into the
Subworld legion’s sulfurous orbs.

Rainbowl Crater’s catastrophe is almost universally ascribed to
Zan-Kirk’s ungoverned fury, for it seems he was one of those men who
thinks fidelity their
mate’s
sacred duty, not his own. Raging upslope
he came, in his fury conjuring a lightning-storm so ill-controlled as
to wildly overleap his hated consort, and strike great Rainbowl’s wall
instead.

Thus, battle was never joined. A thunderous din of broken stone
deafened half the world, and the crater’s towering rim fragmented.
Colossal shards of stone hung in the air, then thundered down the
slope, just ahead of the down-rushing waters unpent by the blast.

The avalanching rubble entombed those martial legions of the
dead. The great wave swept the demons down, and drowned Upflume
Valley and half its population in a demon-clogged flood.

Though no direct witness is recorded, the Elder Fiske’s lines are
surely close to the truth as best we can reconstruct it:

Now Rainbowl, a chalice with moon-silvered rim

Gigantically balanced above the mad din

Of up-swarming demons and down-swarming dead—

Now Rainbowl is ambushed by black thunder-heads.

White tridents of lightning lash Rainbowl’s curved wall,

And the stone is all fractures, is starting to fall...

The wall is all fragments hung loose in the sky

Thrust out by a water-wall half a mile high.

On the dead who so long in their first tombs have lain

The stone crashes down and entombs them again,

And the following wave smites the demon array

And washes them wheeling and wailing away.

And thus it came to be that under the landslide of Rainbowl’s
broken wall, the witch’s army of the Raised Dead lay once more
entombed, and that downslope a great swamp was created in Upflume
Valley, and buried in the muck of that swamp, a host of demons lay
ensorcelled. The subsequently famed “swamp-spice” which flourished
in that fen—the herbs and weeds and worts of various and subtle
potencies—sprang from the sub-World nimbus that corona’d those
drowned demons.

III

I hope you will not have forgotten, Shag, that we left me hugging the
high branches of a tree in that same swamp, on a torchlit night with
the full moon at zenith, nor have forgotten the slow-sinking golden
comet that was descending, arching down towards us.