Empire of the East (14 page)

Rolf had only a moment to look at these others, as he was hurried forward to be confronted by the Satrap himself. Ekuman's baleful eye swung round on him, and the two men who held Rolf's arms forced him to kneel.

The Satrap's voice struck him all the more impressively for seeming mild. “You fought well today, sirrah. What would you have by way of reward?”

“I would have—only what I thought I had. The chance to fight against the one I thought was wearing that devil-painted helmet!” Rolf did not look at Sarah, but he could hope that she had heard him.

“And whom did you think you were fighting?” Ekuman asked him calmly.

Rolf turned his head to look at Chup.

It was a moment before the warrior-lord understood just what the prisoner meant. Then Chup sat up straight in his chair. “Me? You clod of dung! You thought that
I
had arrayed myself in helm and shield to descend and fight a formal duel with
you
?”

Thinking back, Rolf realized that it had been only his own foolish assumption, that Chup would fight him. Others had used his foolishness to lead him on, to make him murder Nils to give them sport.

“Clod of dung?” mused Ekuman. “Yes, a peasant, by all signs—but that stroke was well put that felled the other. Young master, where were you taught to use a sword?”

Intrigue was foreign to Rolf's experience, but he could feel very plainly the mutual distrust and malice of all the evil folk around him. He could sense divisions arraying each of them against the others. If he had known what lie would be most like to set them on to mutual destruction, he would have tried to tell it. As matters stood, he instinctively chose the truth as his weapon.

“All that I know of swordplay,” he said clearly, “I was taught here in the Castle.” And he realized the truth had scored, somehow; if Charmian's eyes could kill he would have died in that moment.

“Taught by whom?” asked Ekuman reasonably.

“By this one.” Rolf leveled a pointing arm at the old soldier. The man did not look at Rolf. Behind his stoic front he seemed to quiver neither more nor less than before.

Lightning came, not far away. An easy ripping crackle at the start, and then a giant tore the sky in two from top to bottom, letting through a momentary blaze that seemed to come from some furnace-glare beyond. The light was strong on Charmian's face, as she raised her eyes with an expression of relief. She was looking over Rolf's shoulder. Rolf turned his own head for a moment; a tall gray figure, wizard if there ever was one, was standing now within the door.

“Face the Satrap!” A guard's fist struck Rolf's face; Rolf turned back. Somehow an afterimage of the gray wizard's hollow eyes came with him, superimposing itself on Ekuman's face.

“And you were well fed?” Ekuman asked, as if all that moved him was some mild concern for Rolf's welfare.

“I was.”

One of the robed men by the stretcher turned up his face, and Rolf saw with fascinated horror that a creature that was a toad and something more than a toad crouched half-hidden on the wizard's shoulder, under his cloak. “Lord, I am sure now, this man who lost was starved and weakened. Deprived of rest. The signs are very plain.”

After that Rolf could hear nothing more for a few moments. In the very abyss of his fear and hate he came near feeling pity for people grown so pettily malignant, to play such games with helpless slaves. But he had believed them—that he would have a chance at Chup—he had wanted to believe. He felt himself swaying on his knees. Just now he could not have turned to face Sarah to save his life—his life? No, that was not worth turning his head to save. If only Nils had killed him, instead!

When he could think again, when his self-disgust was turning wholly outward against those who had so tricked and used him, he saw that his tutor was being made now to kneel at Rolf's side. The man spoke at last, in a muttering voice. “Mercy, Lord.” But he did not raise his eyes to look at Ekuman.

“Tell me, my loyal sergeant—who gave the orders for this method of training the two gladiators?”

In answer the old soldier gasped. His head twisted around, eyes staring, as if he wanted to see something invisible that had fastened on him from behind. In the next moment he was toppling forward from his knees, much as Nils had done in the arena. But this man was smitten by no blade, only stiffening and straining in some sort of fit, gone foaming and speechless.

Ekuman was on his feet, barking angry orders. The man with the toad-creature watched the fit, then raised his head frowning as he who had been in the rear of the chamber came forward at a majestic pace, tall and gray.

Ekuman held out to this one a blackened case of metal, and said, “Elslood. Tell me quickly what you can make of this.”

Frowning, the wizard Elslood took the thing, weighed it in his hand, muttered over it for a moment, then raised the curved lid, while some around shrank back. He stared at the lump of blackened stone that lay inside. “I can tell you nothing quickly, Lord, save that there is some real power here.”

“That much I knew. Put the thing in some safe place, then, and attend me here. I mean to get to the bottom of this game that was played in the arena today.”

Elslood shut the case with a snap. He looked down once—as if indifferently—at the fallen soldier, who was still writhing feebly on the floor while others tried to minister to him. Elslood looked at Rolf, and again, stronger than before, the image of his eyes burned brilliant and gigantic in Rolf's mind. Then he handed the case to the man with the toad, at the same time indicating the far side of the chamber with a motion of his head. The man with the toad-creature accepted the case and started across the chamber with it. On the far side was an arras which might hide a closet or a separate apartment.

Through the window nearest him, Rolf heard rain roar suddenly upon the flat roof-terrace just outside. Servants had just finished lighting torches, and the flames smoked fitfully. Rolf had the sensation that the sky, like some great flat coffin-lid, was pressing down upon the tower.

“Now, sirrah!” Ekuman was speaking to him again. But this time the Satrap's voice seemed to be coming and going, issuing from behind a barrier and then emerging once more, echoing through an immense distance. Rolf did not seem to be able to answer. The image of Elslood's eyes, growing and swelling, remained like some malignant growth within his head, clouding thought and vision alike. The tall gray wizard was standing nearby, but Rolf dared not look up at him again.

“Answer me, sirrah!” Ekuman was almost shouting. “Good answers now will save some pains when you are taken down below!”

Whether it was the boldness of utter despair that now settled on Rolf or whether some outside power came to his aid and he managed to put away both the terror that Ekuman wanted to fasten on him and the imposed vision of the wizard's eyes that would compel him to be silent. The Satrap's face grew clear before Rolf and he stood up from his knees.

Ekuman's voice was clear and ordinary once more, coming with the drumming of the rain through a heavy silence. “Tell me, master swordsman, whose agent are you?”

Beyond all fear now, Rolf smiled. “I? I am Ardneh—”

The night pressing on the Castle was destroyed. The light that rent it was as sudden as that which had blazed out of Elephant's side, and a thousand times, a million times, as bright. The concussion that came with it was beyond all sound.

 

Rolf was aware only that something had hit him with force enough to knock him down, nay, turn him inside out as well. Other people had been hit also, for a voice was screaming, over and over. No, it was more than one voice. Some of the women's voices had turned guttural, and there were masculine ones gone high and childish.

By some means that Rolf did not understand at first, the window nearest him had just been widened, so that rain drove in on him where he lay on the floor amid loose stones and broken wood. The noises of human agony went on. Could that be Sarah screaming, Chup stabbing her with his punishing cudgel?

When Rolf raised his head a ball of lightning was still adrift in the middle of the room. He watched it dancing about there, lightly and hesitantly, as if it looked to see whether any chance for destruction had been missed, before it skipped to the wall and vanished up a chimney.

A path of ruin had been plowed straight across the center of the room. From the blasted window nearest Rolf to the flaming arras of the distant alcove, human bodies and furniture had been treated like the nestings of mice turned up by a furrowing plow. The wooden floor was marked with a blackened path, smoking and smoldering. The incoming rain hissed on this scar where it was near Rolf's head, but could not reach it elsewhere.

The smoke oozing up from the floor was forming a thick cloud in the higher air, so Rolf did not at once attempt to stand. Crawling would serve, for the moment. Where was Sarah? She was gone, like his sister and his parents. On hands and knees he moved dazedly over wreckage, seeing without emotion the twitching dead and the struggling injured, hearing the lip-licking crackle of the hungry bright young flames.

Not finding Sarah, he went on dazedly following the black burning furrow of the lightning-plow. At the end of the path he came to Zarf's roasted body; Zarf smelled of cooked meat now. In death his face no longer ordinary, and the dead thing at his shoulder was no longer a toad, but an odd terrible little creature like a bearded human baby. And here was a monstrous spider, sizzled crisp; and none of these were stranger than other things that were strewn across the floor, amid tumbled shelves and fallen, burning draperies.

Not having found Sarah, Rolf turned back again. He saw now that there were new people in the room, moving capably about, and he got himself to his feet. More he could not do. Now soldiers and servants were pouring into the chamber, from the stair and from the roof-terrace.

And Ekuman himself was on his feet. His rich garments were torn, his face begrimed, but the vigor of his movements showed that he had taken no serious hurt. In his hands he now held one of the Old World things that Rolf had earlier noticed on the wall behind the throne—one of a pair of red cylinders, whose mate still hung there on a strap. At one end of the cylinder was a black nozzle which Ekuman aimed at the burning floor. With his other hand he gripped a trigger that reminded Rolf of some of the controls inside the Elephant.

From the black nozzle there shot out a white rope that looked hardly more substantial than smoke, but remained coherent and opaque and was heavy enough to sink to the floor. There it expanded. Like some magic pudding the whiteness spread itself across the burning floor, flame and smoking wood vanishing beneath it. The wounded lying on the floor brought their heads above the white blanket to gasp for air—but they need struggle and cry no longer for fear of being burned. The fire was quickly being put out.

There was Sarah, beside Nils' stretcher, holding up his head above the whiteness. The sight of her alive was joy to Rolf, even though a soldier had her in charge, and even though two more of them seized him as he took his first step toward her.

Ekuman worked on, a diligent laborer. From the seemingly inexhaustible device he held there spread out a white carpet to cover all the fire. His soldiers and his servants took heart from the sight of their Lord standing calmly unharmed in the midst of it. Soon, at his orders, the wounded were being lifted up, the damage assessed, order reestablished.

Only one voice went keening on in mindless fear, the voice of one who had not been hurt. Rolf saw Chup draw back his hand and coldly slap his smudge-faced wife. The one blow brought her to a silence of astonishment, utter and open-mouthed.

Now there were only the purposeful noises of workers in the chamber. The fire was dead; Ekuman shut off his foam-thrower and set it down. Nils was still alive, and the tall wizard Elslood seemed unhurt.

Out on the terrace the rain was trailing off to nothing, but daylight was not returned. The sun, Rolf thought, must be already down.

It was not light that burst in next at the exploded window. It was a patch of darkness, darkness not black, but gray-green scale. The reptile flapped to a halt in the midst of the white floor, cawing out to Ekuman:

“My Lawrd! M'Lawwrd! The enemy attacks, acraaws the pass!”

Rolf lunged and twisted in the soldiers' grip, trying to see outside. Peering through a narrow north window into the deep dusk, he managed to see only a few distant sparks, fires or torches, before he was wrenched away.

“Take this one back to his cell,” an officer was ordering. “Keep him alone until the Lord Ekuman has time to question him again.”

Rolf's guards hustled him downstairs. Several times they paused, making way for messengers dashing up or down. Rolf could see nothing but elation among the soldiers at the news that the Free Folk were attacking in force. The Castle-men had no doubt that they could win a battle in the open, even at night.

Each time he passed a window Rolf tried futilely to get a look at what was going on outside. Three, two, one—so the count had gone, aiming at tonight. The signals must have been meant to tell him of something that involved him more directly than the attack across the pass. Something would be expected of him. And now he was going back to his cell, where his friends would expect him to be.

Extra torches had been lighted in the courtyards, which were filled with a confusion of hurrying people and animals. Three, two, one, the time had come, and he was still alive to see it. Rolf was at a peak of alertness, and his ears at once caught the high clear hooting that drifted down to him from above. He did not look up, for on the instant a small object struck the paving near his feet and bounced up right before him. Tied to the missile was a note, a paper—at least a white tail of some kind.

Rolf caught the stone on its first bounce, thinking meanwhile that the bird was mad to drop a message to him in this way. His guards' hands grabbed at him, then unaccountably slipped away as the stone came firmly into his grasp. He twisted free, hoping to gain a moment to discover what words were worth getting him killed in order that he might read them.

“Put that down!” a guard bawled, and followed this urging with a string of demons' names, directed at his mate who for some reason had come blundering awkwardly into him. Rolf skipped away farther, and got the paper open, but before he could try to read it the two men were coming at him, hands outstretched. Rolf raised the rock, on the point of trying to brain one of them with it, but in that instant a door opened in the wall just at his back. The door was left ajar by the soldier who came running through it on some urgent errand; as if he did not see them, he ran right in the way of the two coming after Rolf.

Seizing the opportunity, Rolf dodged through the door. It slammed shut of itself behind him, then creaked with the weight of his shouting pursuers. He was in another courtyard, this one nearly filled with soldiers just forming up for roll call. There were no more open doors in sight. Rolf darted past a gaping officer and then, since there was nowhere else to run, went dodging through the ranks, looking frantically for some way out. Men stared at him, some cursed, some laughed.

“Seize that man!”

“He's greased!”

“Ensorceled!”

“What's up here?
Seize
that man!”

“It's some slave, kill him and have done.”

“No, that's one of those the Satrap wants to question! Take him alive!”

Holding up his arms to shield his face, smarting from the slapping hands that could not hold him, Rolf emerged from the gauntlet—on the wrong side, he saw now. In his confusion he had turned back toward the keep. Aware now that some magic was protecting him from capture, he turned again.

The company of soldiers had turned into a mob, shouting, roaring, floundering into one another's way. Rolf slipped past and through them. Their fingers lashed him like so many branches, powerless to grab. The disgusted officer, even as he bellowed to his men to form a ring, stepped aside himself, as if absentmindedly letting Rolf run by.

A low wall loomed ahead, the side of a one-story shed. Rolf sprang atop a barrel sitting near the wall, and from there leaped again without pausing. The springy wood of the barrelhead seemed to add unnaturally to his momentum. Scarcely did his hands need to touch the eaves before his feet were on the gentle slope of the roof; he bounded on across it, not slowing for an instant. The Stone was tingling in his fingers. A present from Loford; he should have understood that at once.

Between him and the Castle's mighty outer wall was one last courtyard, and at this courtyard's farther end the postern gate—a narrow door, now closed, barred heavily, and guarded on the inside by a pair of sentries. These looked up in astonishment as Rolf came leaping lightly from the low roof, bounced to his feet and raced toward them. He was trusting utterly in the power of the magic that had been given him. As he ran he heard voices raised behind him crying, “Ho, guards! Stop that fugitive! Kill him if you must but stop him!”

One of the sentries began to draw his sword. Rolf came running on, holding the Stone before him in two hands, as if he charged the gate behind a battering-ram. Indeed, the effect seemed much the same. When Rolf was still five running strides inside the gate, the giant bar that held it shut went flying, spinning high into the air. In the same instant, with a booming sound, the door itself flung wide. The sentries cringed away and it took them an instant to recover. As Rolf's strides carried him through the gate the corner of his eye showed him a sword-stroke coming; he felt only the merest touch, below one shoulderblade, and then he was free, flying safe into the enveloping dark.

The descending slope outside the Castle walls soon gentled beneath Rolf's feet. The stars were coming out now, and he very quickly had his bearings. He was on the east side of the Castle. He would have to circle to his left, giving the walls a wide berth, to come to the north side of the pass and the Elephant-cave. Looking that way now, he saw fewer torches than he had seen earlier from the Castle window. Shouting, terrible and vague, drifted to him from that direction. Rolf began to trot, listening each moment for another sound—but the voice of Elephant had not been reawakened yet, for all that he could hear.

Almost at once he was forced to slow down again to a cautious walk. Guarded human voices were audible, not far ahead. As Rolf's eyes adjusted to the night, and the starry sky grew brighter with the clouds' dispersal, he could see human figures, vague and distant shadows, moving in the same general direction as he. He could not see whether they were friends or enemies. Probably the whole valley of the pass was crawling with moving troops belonging to both sides.

“Roolf!” This time the hooting cry was soft, quivering as if with delight, and very near, just above his head. “Well done, well flown, oh heavy egg!”

He looked up at the dark hovering shape. “Strijeef?”

“Yes, yes, it is me. Hurry on, hurry! More to your right. Is Ekuman dead?”

“Not when I saw him last. The lightning missed him, though it did his friends no good. Where's Thomas? Strijeef, you must guide me to the Elephant.”

“I have come to guide you there. Run, the way ahead is clear just now! Thomas is busy fighting. He asks if you can wake the Elephant and ride him into battle.”

“Tell him yes, yes, yes, if I can get into the cave. And get the Elephant out. Is anyone in there now? Is there fighting?”

“Nooo. The fighting has been in front of the big doors; they are still closed. The Stone you carry will help you thrust them open from the inside. Ekuman would trust none of his people to enter the cave without him; so I have been able to fix a rope in the place you carved to hold one. When we get there I will let it down for you to climb.”

Several times Strijeef had him detour around enemy troops, or wait for them to pass. In the intervals when it was safe to talk Rolf could move swiftly, while Strijeef told him much of what had happened; how Feathertip had been killed and himself wounded, helping Thomas, and Rolf therefore left to himself in the cave. How the Thunderstone had been found, and used to cover the Free Folk's passage across the desert today; and when they were hidden at the side of a mountain, how it had been returned, in a captured pouch, to the body of the reptile that had fallen with it, and that body uncovered again for Ekuman's scouts to find.

“And this Stone you dropped to me, Bird. What's this note tied to it? Do you know I was nearly killed trying to get it open to read it?”

“Whoo!” Strijeef thought that was funny. “The note just tells you what the Stone is; you found that out for yourself. Hoo! it was fun to watch the way you flew, over a roof and through a wall!”

By this time Rolf had crossed the road at the bottom of the pass, and now the northern slope was steepening under his feet. He passed a nearly-burned-out signal torch, still casting brightness on the sand in a little circle which included the dead hand of the soldier who had held it. Rolf would have stopped to grope around the dead man for weapons, but Strijeef chided him to hurry. “The enemy is still holding in front of the big doors. The fighting there has stopped right now and our men have pulled back a little. I'll guide you around them all.”

They went on up the northern slope. Once more Rolf had to stop and wait, crouching in silence, listening to a file of the enemy go past him, moving west to east across the slope. When the last sound of them had died away, the hovering bird plucked at Rolf's shirt with a silent claw, and he arose and followed Strijeef on up the hill. Now he recognized the silhouette of the familiar towers of rock against the sky. Now around him in the darkness there rose the pitiful loud moaning of the wounded.

“How has the fighting gone?” Rolf dared to whisper, once when the bird's wing came near enough to brush his face.

“Not too bad, not too good. The Castle-men have no eyes to see for them in the dark, but still they have the greater numbers. Quiet, now.”

Strijeef led Rolf by one of the eastern crevices into the complex of tumbled rocks. Rolf groped his way, climbing over boulders and squeezing between them. At last he felt the canyon's familiar sandy floor beneath his feet, and then the jagged rocks that he knew were right below the mouth of the high cave. Strijeef went rising silently ahead of him, and a moment later the climbing rope came hissing and uncoiling down the cliff to touch Rolf's face.

He gave the rope a hard precautionary tug, then went up swiftly. From the wound on his back there was a light tugging pain, too small to be worrisome. Once having gained the high cave—with Strijeef fluttering nervously just outside, still urging him on—he quickly pulled up the rope. Leaving the anchor-stick in the notch, he crawled through the blackness to the chimney and let the rope down again. On the descent into the lower cave there was no room for the bird to guide him, but he could easily feel his way. Soon he could lay first his hand and then his forehead against the cool solidity of Elephant's flank.

At that moment all exhaustion seemed to drop away; and only as his weariness left him did he realize how great it had become. Now it seemed that some of Elephant's age-old power came flowing into him, the strength of some fantastic metal army descending to his muscles and his hands. His hands, moving caressingly rather than groping over Elephant's cool side, quickly found the recessed steps and grips. Before he tugged open the circular door, he remembered to close his dark-adjusted eyes, and to warn Strijeef to do the same.

The expected shock of light from within came redly through his eyelids. He climbed inside and tugged the door tightly shut behind him, squinting to make sure the massive latch was caught. With an odd feeling of homecoming he made his way to the seat that he had occupied before, meanwhile gradually getting his eyes opened. The familiar whisper of air was moving around him. His hands at once began their half-remembered task of goading Elephant up out of his slumber.

Blinking sleepy panel-lights at Rolf, Elephant uttered his first groan. This wakening was not so shuddering and agonized as his last had been—Rolf supposed Elephant had not had time to sink age-deep in sleep again. The CHECKLIST symbols lighted reassuringly, and once more Rolf began the ritual of wiping out the colored dots. The vision-ring descended as before to make a circle around his head. Through it the cave grew visible around him, and Strijeef flying in the cave in anxious circles. The bird's eyes were open wide, black fathomless pupils dilated as Rolf had never before been able to see them; every feather of the bird's spread wings, and the bandage on one wing, were plain. Elephant's night-seeing was evidently as good as any bird's; if Rolf could once burst from the cave, he would need no guidance to find the enemy.

Dot by dot CHECKLIST vanished. This time the process went much faster than before. Elephant's unbreathing voice roared strong and sure. Strijeef said the sound of that voice had led the enemy to the cave. Well, let them hear it now. Let it shake the ground beneath their feet, all across the valley. Let it vibrate in the dungeons of the Castle, and quiver in the bones of those who stood commanding in the proud tower above!

Suddenly the green tracery of light showed on the two big levers, standing one on each side of Rolf's chair. He reached inside his shirt, to touch again the Stone of Freedom where he had it tucked away. And then he gripped the levers and gently pulled.

Elephant backed up, grumbling, turning at Rolf's direction to aim head-on at the doors that must be opened. Strijeef's flying circle in the air blurred with the speed of his excitement. Rolf shoved both levers hard forward.

His huge mount shouted out, as if in rage and charged like a raging beast. Rolf seemed to feel the Stone he carried twitch inside his shirt. Before Elephant had touched the big doors they were opening, jerking sideways like cloth curtains before the invisible influence of the Stone. Elephant's impatient shoulders caught them even as they parted, and Rolf heard the metal barrier give way, like paper tearing noisily.

The boulders that Ekuman's slaves had not yet been able to remove slowed Elephant as he went tilting out upon the open slope. But they could not stop him; they slid or rolled or bounded, making way.