The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (51 page)

I hugged the boughs and peered up through the foliage. The comet
slowed and slowed still more as it sank, sank nearer...until it paused
midair perhaps two hundred feet above the swamp, about of a height
with the top of the Flume.

And, coming to rest in the air, it was a comet no more, but an
airborne raft of carven logs with cressets blazing all around its rim.
Amidships stood a man of more than human stature, half again a tall
man’s height, heroically muscled, and clad in a golden corselet and
brazen greaves.

So regal seemed his ownership of the very air he stood on! Already
he’d conjured a rapt multitude, for atop the Flume a torch-bearing
crowd gazed up at him, while all the rooftops and stairways of the
under-Flume city had sprouted hundreds more folk, all clutching
lights and lanterns.

A sorcery breathed from this giant. Though he hung so high above
us, his face blazed eerily visible. His carven features, the leonine
curlings of his golden mane, and his eyes! His eyes beamed down a
radiant tenderness upon our upturned faces.

He seemed to behold his enraptured worshippers with a rapture of
his own. His voice filled the sky in tones of tenderness—it plucked
our spines like lute-strings, and woke plangent melodies within our
minds, even though, for me at least, what he uttered was the most
brazen inversion of historical truth that it would be possible to speak.

“Beloved Lebanites! Dear friends! My sisters and my brothers!
When Rainbowl burst two hundred years ago, a dire vandalism was
done against you! Zan-Kirk—my Sire, and still beloved by me—was
cut down by his traitorous consort Hylanais, as he was in the very act
of bringing back to Lebanoi her greatness and her ancient grandeur!

“Oh Hylanais! Thou misguided witch! You were self-ensorcelled
by your spite against my father, who was your loving mate! Just when
our city was to taste of greatness, you struck the chalice from her
hand—you or your bastard spawn! You shattered Rainbowl and our
hope, and sealed Zan-Kirk within this boggy tomb where he now lies
with his doomed army....

“But hear me now, O Lebanites! Even this, the Rainbowl’s breakage,
was not the true loss of your greatness, not the
whole
loss. After all,
your mills perhaps produce less wealth, but still you have sufficiency
of trade!

“No! Lebanoi lost her
true
greatness far longer ago than the
shattering of Rainbowl! Lebanoi’s true greatness fled with the
Rainbowl’s
creation!
Lebanoi lost her strength and glory half a
millennium ago! Her greatness fled when the Sojourners in their fiery
vessel departed. For it was the flame of their star-seeking craft that
melted
great Rainbowl from the mountain’s living stone! That
created
Rainbowl for our lasting benefit! But that boon, though great, was
too little recompense for the loss of the Sojourners themselves—our
loss of them amidst the distant stars!”

Ah Shag, even I—crouched like a lemur in my tree—was moved
by the vision he conjured, for I had heard of the Sojourners, those
grand Ancients, those bold travellers who in their daring had leapt
off the earth itself and out into the vastness of the star-fields... The
Narn-son spoke on:

“But note well, my friends! The Sojourners left us with the means
to our reunion with them! The Rainbowl is a beacon, my people! It
is a bell! When it is sounded, it will call the Sojourners
back
to us!
And—oh hear me, my countrymen—the art of its sounding is now
known
to us.

“For my great Sire, Zan-Kirk, descended to the subworld because
only in those sulphurous deeps could the lore be found to
send
a
summons that might reach the stars, and call our mighty forebears
home. Call them home to share with us their harvest of star-spanning
lore, of trans-galactic discovery!”

The Narn-son was eloquent, I can’t deny it. His tones were pure
and plangent. My heart cried assent:
A beacon! A bell! Yes, kindle it,
sound it! Bring those starry navigators back home to us!

At the same time, I sensed there was a reason that he was using
the sorcery of his voice up here, in the swamp, instead of down in
Lebanoi proper, where he could have swayed far more folk just as
powerfully. I began to realize there was something
in the swamp itself
he wanted. Uneasiness began to crawl up my back on tiny ants’ feet.

And now the Narn-son gazed down upon the swamp below. He
spread his hands towards the waters, and apostrophized the murky
pools in their beds of black growth:

“My father, I have come for you!”

He brought his torch-rimmed raft down now, gently descending
towards the swamp itself, until it hung hovering just above the largest
pond—a small black lake in truth, that opened out beside the tree I
crouched in. And as Gothol sank towards this tarn, he reached out
his fist and opened it palm-down. A white spark drifted down from
his hand, and when it touched the water, a dim, pale light overspread
the pool, and seemed—so faintly!—to thin the utter blackness of the
deep.

The Narn-son’s raft settled onto the surface. He was below me
now, and I could see that at the raft’s center sat a low golden chair,
like a squat throne. Under the raft’s weight the water flexed like
crawling skin, and chuckled and muttered in the mucky marges of
the fen.

Gothol solemnly addressed the tarn, speaking as if to the water
itself, or to someone in it. His voice was mellow and tender, but by its
sheer size it made the swamp seem smaller:

Father who art sunk in sleep,

Who art shepherd of the drowned—

Bestir thy flock to quit the deep!

Come sound the Bell thou sought’st to sound.

Ascend the lofty shrine of stone

Whence giants of our race adjourned!

What seas of stars have they o’erflown?

What whirling worlds of wonders learned?

Their ark sailed incandescent floods

Past archipelagoes of flame!

Unto what power have these, our blood,

In all their wanderings attained?

Unto what wisdom have they grown

That left with wisdoms we have lost?

What rescues might to them be known

Whom vast galactic gales have tossed?

Long hast thou lain in dreams of war—

Lift from the dark your eyeless gaze!

Stand beneath the sky once more

Where seas of suns spill all ablaze!

And call, with me, those sailors home

Whose ships those seas of suns have roamed!

The waters’ blackness relented further. Moonlight in spiderweb
filaments lay like glowing nets on bulky shapes upon the silty bottom.

Gothol cast a torch into the water. Its flame—undimmed—shrank
to a blood-rose of light as it sank. Deep in the smoky muck it settled
by one of those shapes, beside its head, the red glow revealing an
eyeless face of leather and stark teeth.

The Narn-son spoke a syllable. That blind face stirred. The gaunt
jaw moved.

Gothol gestured at the water. A circle of foam began to spin, and
a vortex sank from this, sharp-tipped—a whirling foam-fang that
struck and somehow seized the sodden lich.

A gangly stick-figure was plucked up to the surface, to lie spinning
on a slow wheel of foam. It was the black, shrivelled form of a man in
loose-hung armor. Gothol, with a slight lift of his head and his right
hand, made it rise dripping from the wheeling foam, and hang in the
air before him. He reached out his arms, and embraced it.

It lay, a crooked black swamp-rotted root, against the giant’s
burnished corselet. He carried it to the low golden chair, and
enthroned it. The dripping mummy lay slack against the carven gold.

“Father,” the Narn-son said.

Torchlit, he was a dreadful object, this bony remnant of a big-
framed man, though dwarfed by him who’d called him Father. The
trellis of his ribs showed through his rusted mail. His crusted sword
hung from his caved-in loins. His knob-kneed legs rose from his
rotted boots like dead saplings from old pots. He wore a helmet with
the beaver up, swamp-weed dangling from its rusted hinges.

The giant leaned near. “Father, greet your bereaved son, un-
orphaned now by your return.” He touched the mailed chest—which
expanded—and the eye-sockets, in which two orange sparks kindled.

The shrunk ribs heaved. With crackly, whistly labor, Zan-Kirk
leaned forward and began to cough—slow, endless coughs that
sounded like hammerblows fracturing ice. He wrenched his mummied
jaws apart, and spat a black clot into the black waters.

Then slowly, slowly the wizard raised his hand before his face, and
higher yet, till he could fan his stark-boned fingers out against the
zenithed moon, and thus he held them back-lit, gazing at them for
many moments.

He turned at last the glow of his empty orbits to his son’s eyes. His
voice emerged in rusty gasps: “Plucked...like a root...from my sleep....
How dare you...
puppet
me...like this?”

“I wake you, Sire, to serve your
own
great Work, suspended by my
step-dam’s sorcery. I wake you to enthrone you at my side, that we
together
might recall the Sojourners to their primeval home. That we
together
might embrace the gods that they have certainly become.”

“Enthrone me!” hissed the lich.
"Use
me, rather.... You want my
army.... What of Hylanais?... Does she live?” His long-drowned voice
was all whispers and gasps, but when he spoke the name of Hylanais,
it came out crackling like a blaze.

I think I did not fully credit that this charnel thing had life, until
I heard him speak the witch’s name, and heard his words come
scorched from him, as in the furnace of that warlock’s wrath.

The golden giant smiled sadly. “Father, I do not know. I only rejoice
at
your
new life, and the work we shall do together.”

"Life
...These cold sparks...gnawing my dead bones?...
Life?”
And yet
Zan-Kirk rose, and with a noise of wet wood crackling, strode stiffly
left and right across the raft. Found—with a groan—enough strength
in his arm-bones to wrench his rusted blade from its scabbard, and
slice the air with it: stroke, and counter-stroke....

When he spoke again, there was a bit more timbre, and more
purpose in his voice, though still a hissing voice it was. “For my
allegiance...two conditions... First... If we win...you and I... stand
forth as
equals
...before the Sojourners...for their bounty....

“Second...the demon-bitch...Hylanais
, if she...walks the earth... I
shall be free...be
helped
at need...to work her death...in agony.... Do
you
accept
...these terms?”

“Great Sire,” the giant boomed, “your demands are branded on
my heart-of-hearts, so inward to my purpose are they now.”

Zan-Kirk nodded. The phosphorescence of his sockets flared. He
walked to the raft’s rim and raised his sword. He flourished it, and its
blade glowed red, as from a forge. Two-handed, he propelled it point-
first down into the waters.

The sword came ablaze as it dove, and burned a red track through
the murk. It transfixed the muddy bottom and burned there still,
revealing heaped on every side a bulky litter of uncanny forms,
trunked and limbed and skulled in every bestial shape: his demon
army, so long drowned.