From the
Book of Warls,
Interregnal period
The leather-armored patrolmen walked in pairs in this quarter of the city; the light of their poled lantern cast a yellow light on the damp stone of the walls, so that they went in a pool of brightness that married the gloom of Sarissa’s perpetual dusk.
In the rotting buildings, the poor of Sardis lived in squalor. A few of the more enterprising entertained the warmen on leave who were Sarissa’s only visitors, and as the patrolmen went, they could hear the sounds of shrill laughter, strains of rasping music, and the occasional cry of alarm of some drugged or drunken warman awakened to his peril too late.
The patrolmen paid no attention to these sounds of lawlessness. They were accustomed to them, and they had no desire to remain near the house of the warlock on the Street of Night.
The warlock’s name was Kelber, and it was known that he lived under the protection of the new warleader of Sarissa, Tallan. But even without the warleader’s contemptuous protection, no patrolman would have disturbed the old warlock at his mysterious, sinful work. No Sarissan passed the crumbling stone house on the Street of Night without a thrill of superstitious horror and the sign of the Star in the air to ward off the warlock’s familiar devils.
So the patrolmen, with unknowing irony, called the
All’s Well
and passed swiftly by. And within the house the cry went unheard, for the walls were meters thick. For a thousand years no house had been built on Sarissa that was not a fortress. The planet had a dark and bloody history, with a succession of savage kings and warleaders of which Tallan, called The Unknown because no man knew from whence he came, was only the most recent.
The warlock’s workshop lay at the back of the stronghold, near a warren of storerooms that had once held weapons and food. The walls were crusted with white salts, for the house backed against the vast desolation of the Great Terminator Marsh, a bog that covered most of the land area of the planet’s single continent.
Few Sarissans realized the extent of this immense marsh. Indeed, few Sarissans knew that their world was a sphere, an astronomical anomaly: the single planet of a dull red star.
There was no sky on Sarissa. The cloud layer lay at ten thousand meters. In three thousand years, since the planet was first occupied by men, the clouds had never parted.
The oxygen content of the air was low, and Sarissa had bred a brutish race of savage, slow-witted men from the original colonists who had come here, for God knew what reason, in the last years of the Golden Age.
Within the old warlock’s laboratory, the walls were damp and the air cold. Strange, ancient machines crowded the floor. Books and fragments of old manuscripts were piled on tables and benches. Stuffed creatures from half a dozen worlds hung grotesquely from the vaulted ceiling. The room had a smell of age and decay.
It could have been the workshop of any witch or warlock anywhere in the Empire, except that it was not lit with lamps or torches but by electricity.
Heavy cables, the insulation checked and worn, snaked about the floor, eventually to vanish into one of the storerooms. This chamber was filled, from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with an astonishing collection of storage cells, batteries of every shape and size, scavenged by Kelber from half a hundred ancient mounds and ruins. The battered machines powered by this tangle of cables and batteries all carried the ancient Star blazon of the legendary First Stellar Empire. Magical devices, they were, built by the god-men of the Golden Age.
Even with Tallan’s tolerance, the patrolmen would not have spared this room or its contents had they the courage to investigate it. In dread and panic, they would have put the old man to the sword and the house to the torch. Sin, the terrible power of darkness that had destroyed the Golden Age, was everywhere. But no patrolman had troubled Kelber since the new star king began to rule; besides, the old warlock was failing and growing feeble and half mad with age and disappointment.
He crouched over a worktable now, consulting an ancient book, shaking his head and talking to himself. He limped from the book to one of the machines and made an adjustment with gnarled, arthritic hands.
He was gray-bearded and dirty. He could not remember when he had last eaten, nor did he care.
He wormed his way through the clutter to a half-formed, almost human thing sprouting wires and tubes that lay on a metal frame in the center of the room.
He turned an hourglass and mended a broken connection, chittering and mumbling to himself. When he had done, he shuffled to a control panel and closed a switch, and immediately some of the ancient machines began to hum and the air filled with an acrid smell of burning.
The man-thing on the rack twitched and shuddered and then lay still, its flesh bubbling where the wires entered.
The warlock dashed the hourglass against the wall in a fury. He trembled with demented anger, bobbing up and down, trying to
remember,
muttering old chants from the
Book of Warls,
the black bible of warlocks. But it was useless,
useless.
Why couldn’t he
remember?
How had he grown so old, so
forgetful--?
From the dark doorway came the sound of laughter, contemptuous and cold. “Another failure, Grandfather.”
The old man returned to his desk and began rooting like an animal in the piled confusion of papers.
“Back to the
Warls,
is it?” The speaker stepped into the light. He was a large man, immensely strong, proportioned with a powerful grace that no Sarissan could hope to match. He wore a dark cloak and cowl.
The warlock frowned and said crossly, “Power is what I need. Power. I used it and it is gone! How did the ancients do it,
how?
Where did the new life in the batteries come from? Where did they find it?”
“Try chanting, Grandfather,” the cloaked man said ironically, turning back his cowl.
His face was inhumanly handsome, lofty, noble. Only the old warlock knew that it was the face of an actor of the Golden Age, a man four thousand years dead, and the warlock had forgotten.
“I did it once,” the old man said with the stubborn anger of age.
“A miracle,” the large man said with sarcastic piety. He made the sign of the Star mockingly. He unfastened his cloak and thrust it back to hang from his broad shoulders. The bright light glittered on the ornamented war harness of a star king. A great sword hung at his side, the pommel carved with the royal mark of Sarissa.
“They
could help me,” the warlock said querulously. “By the Star, they
should
help me--”
“Don’t swear by the Star, Kelber,” the star king said with mock sadness. “You’ll be struck down.” His cold eyes surveyed the clutter of forbidden machines. On Sarissa the mere possession of such engines of sin could mean death at the hands of a terrified mob. Perhaps, he was thinking in his icy, methodical way, it would be simplest merely to call the patrolmen.
The old man sat, confused in his mind. His folded hands trembled. He was trying to remember. It seemed to him that things had not always been this way. It seemed to him only a short time ago he had been a robust man, a seeker after the old knowledge, a strong man with a searching mind, impatient with the laws and the timid questings of the Navigators. But what had happened, he wondered. Where did it all go? How did I forget? How did I grow old?
The star king stepped to the center of the room and looked down at the incomplete thing on the rack. He prodded it with a booted foot. The wires trembled. There was no sign of life. He turned to look speculatively at Kelber. “What were your plans for
this,
I wonder.”
The warlock rubbed his bony hands across his face and frowned. “Plans? What plans? I don’t understand you.”
“Three years ago you were told there was no need for this cyborg. Energy weapons are what’re wanted. But you wasted your time on this--thing.”
The old man grew suddenly very angry. “You--you and this thing, as you call it, are the same, Tallan. You remember that.”
The star king shook his head. “You are old, Grandfather. You grow senile. You imagine things. How could such a thing be?” The mouth smiled, but the eyes remained cold, watchful.
The warlock shook his head and blinked his tired eyes. “Tallan. You remember. You
must
remember--”
Again, that slow and contemptuous shake of the head. “You only imagine it happened that way, old one. I am Sarissa--a star king. How could what you say be true?”
“Here, Tallan,” the old man said pleadingly. “Here in this workshop--”
“No.”
“Tallan?” A puzzled twist of the head.
“I said that you imagined it, Grandfather. I let you imagine it because it amused me. But tonight it does not amuse me.”
Kelber felt his old heart flutter. He suddenly realized his danger.
Tallan said, “I warned Landro that you were an old fool. I told him that he would get no weapons from you.” He smiled grimly. “You know only the
Book of Warls,
and there are no weapons there.”
“I never claimed it,” the warlock muttered. “The
Warls
tell of things that
were.
Men must find for themselves. I
know--”
“What, exactly, do you know?” Tallan said scornfully. “Landro asked for weapons, and you spent his money on
this.”
He pushed again at the racked, inert cyborg with a booted foot. “I should call the patrolmen.”
The old man grew crafty. “That you’ll never do--king.” He came down hard on the last word, for he
did
remember now, he was sure that he remembered Tallan lying just there, on that same rack-- When, how long ago? He couldn’t recall, but it was
so,
and his voice filled with irony and emotion because Tallan, who wore the harness of a star king, who threatened his life, was not even a
man.
The warleader’s eyes narrowed speculatively.
The old man’s arrogance increased, expanded dangerously. But he was too angry and confused to be prudent. “The people fear you,” he said. “They call you The Unknown. But I know you, Tallan, star king, great war-leader--
I
know you.”
Tallan said thoughtfully, “Perhaps you do, Grandfather. Perhaps, after all, you do--”
The old warlock’s mind veered wildly back to his obsession. “Then help me,” he demanded heedlessly. “Tell Landro I need power--more equipment-- Tell him I want--” He stopped suddenly because Tallan had moved across the room and stood over him now, towering, darkly menacing.
“The trouble with knowledge-seekers,” Tallan said quietly, “is their fanaticism. They can’t be controlled, and when that happens, old man, their usefulness is at an end. Sometimes they are even so unwise as to threaten their protectors.”
The old warlock’s breath began to come in short, labored gasps. It had been years since he had known real fear, and he could scarcely recognize it now. But his mouth was dry, and his body trembled as he shrank back, back, until his shoulders touched the cold stones of the wall.
“Every living thing,” Tallan said, “has the instinct of self-preservation, the need to destroy what threatens it.
Every
living thing, Grandfather. You taught me that yourself. Do you remember?”
Kelber blinked. He could feel his ancient heart pounding and leaping within his chest like an imprisoned animal. Had he taught Tallan? Yes, of course he had. He could remember now the great naked shape stirring with first life, the first childlike weeks with a lifetime of knowledge to impart in six months, a year. He learned so quickly, so well, not like a human child at all. And there had been times when he had wished, with all his old man’s human heart, that the cyborg could learn to love, to be a son, to be a man. But, of course, it never came to that. And he could recall the great strength, the power, and the training for war, and the slashing climb through the shattered ranks of the bandit captains who tried to hold Sarissa then. What chance had they against Tallan? Gods of space, what chance had
he,
Kelber, now?
Suddenly, the smell of the marshes was strong in his old nostrils, and life seemed very precious, even this doddering, failing life. “Tallan,” he said shrilly, “Tallan-- no--
no--”
But the great warman had struck one strong blow with a fist of mail. The old man’s head was flung back against the stones of the wall with a sickening sound of crushing bone.
For a time, Tallan stood unmoving, listening to the unnatural stillness. Then he touched the old man’s throat, feeling for a pulse that no longer throbbed.
He picked up the warlock’s body as though it weighed nothing and carried it to a straw pallet in the corner. He did not give it another glance.
Next he moved to the unfinished cyborg on the rack. He drew a blade of god-metal from his harness and swiftly opened the head. From the bloodless cavity, he took an oval object trailing hundreds of hair-thin wires. He cracked it open against the edge of an electrical cabinet. Inside the oval, racing through a maze of printed circuits and crystals, a tiny light flickered. He reversed his dagger, and using the pommel, he crushed the contents of the brain-egg. It took a long while, but presently the light faded and died out completely.
He dropped the two halves of the cyborg’s brain onto the stones of the floor and ground the crystal and plastic to bits beneath his heel. “Sleep long, brother,” he murmured with an ironic half-smile.
He sheathed the dagger and drew his great sword of god-metal. For several minutes he walked methodically from one wired cabinet to another, smashing dials and controls, overturning equipment racks, savaging wiring until it hung in useless tangles from the ancient machines. In moments he destroyed the work of half a lifetime.
When he had finished, he turned to the book-laden tables, overturning them, spilling sheaves of priceless old manuscripts and diagrams over the flagstones. Then he took flint and god-metal from his pouch and struck a fire. When it was burning well, he smashed the light globes so that the room was illuminated only by the spreading flames, splashing and dancing on the old walls.