The Complete Compleat Enchanter (37 page)

The baboon-head reached the outer edge of the table, sniff, pull, sniff, pull, as loud as a locomotive in the oppressive silence.

Hell suddenly broke loose in the castle. A chorus of shouts and hangings echoed through the halls. The baboon-head paused for a moment, then ran to the door on almost soundless feet and out. Shea forced himself to count seven, then scrambled up and followed. The servitor had rounded the corner and the sound of its running still echoed metallically.

Shea turned toward the entertainment hall in the direction of the noise, pausing only in the side passage long enough to catch the sword on the belt beneath his flowing aba. It made him feel better.

As he approached the entertainment hall, he realized that the noise was coming from beyond. He ran past to a big winding staircase, and from where it spread to a landing he could see Atlantès and his guests coming up with swords, maces, and even musical instruments, chasing a wolf the size of a heifer. It came straight toward Shea, but with its tail between its legs and looking utterly miserable.

Shea tried to dodge, then remembered the sword, but before he could dig it out of its hiding place the creature was upon him. However, instead of leaping for his throat the wolf threw itself on the landing and rolled over, scrubbing its back along the iron floor. It waved its paws in the air, letting out an unwolflike “Wah-wah! Wah-wah!” Then it rolled back again and, keeping its belly to the floor, licked at Shea’s shoes.

“Hey, wait a minute,” said Shea to the crowding pursuers, who were trying to take swipes at the beast. “This is a rummy kind of wolf. It wants to be a pet. Atlantès, would you mind taking a look at it?”

The sorcerer dropped one of the singers’ lutes and came forward. “Verily this is a most unfortunate rare creature, a wonder of wonders. Now shall you grant me room, Sir Harold.” He squatted down and peered closely into the animal’s eyes; it moaned. “There is no god but Allah! There is surely a werewolf. Oh, my lords, an evil hour has brought such a shape to Carena!” He reached to the neck of his robe and made a little tear in it. “Now I must seek by my arts to find how such a creature has passed our defenses. There is no doubt but that this is the work of the Christian enchanter, the paladin Malagigi, son of a hog and a she-dog, though I had heard of him imprisoned in Albracca.” He looked round the circle. “My lords, we must seek a silver weapon for one of you to slay this brute, for being myself an enchanter I cannot.”

Apparently silver weapons were in short supply. “O greatest of enchanters,” advised Margéan, “shall we not affix silver monies to a wooden club and beat it to death?”

The wolf howled piteously. Chalmers, who had popped out of his own room at the sound of the commotion, had arrived in time to hear the last remarks. Now he put in a word: “Ahem—wouldn’t it be the part of—uh—wisdom to attempt disenchanting the animal first? If I am correct in my understanding, it would then lose any previous invulnerability.”

Atlantès bowed. “O fortunate hour that has brought your father’s son among us, Sir Reed! This is nothing less than the truth. Yet I am but a stick set in the sand beside you in such matters. As your head lives, you shall now do this for us.”

“Um—if we had some holy water, it would be a—uh—comparatively uncomplicated matter, but I will try.” Chalmers turned his back, put one hand to his chin, and meditated. “I am not sure the versification will prove adequate, but we shall see:

“Wolf, wolf, wolf of the windy mountain,

Wolf of fear;

I conjure you by the bitter fountain

Disappear!”

His fingers moved rapidly. The wolf shuddered and turned into Vaclav Polacek rolling on the floor, clothes and all.

“Holy Saint Wenceslaus!” he cried, getting up. “Might as well shoot a man as scare him to death. Why didn’t you lay off when I told you who I was?”

“You didn’t tell us,” said Shea.

“I did so. I kept saying, ‘For the love of Mike, Harold, it’s me, Votsy,’ as clear as anything.”

“Maybe it would have sounded like that to another wolf, but it didn’t to us,” replied Shea. “How did you get into that mess anyway? Did you run into this Malagigi that Atlantès is talking about?” There was a murmur of agreement through the group, as Atlantès’ eyes darted back and forth.

“Well,” said Polacek. He cleared his throat once or twice before he could get going. “It’s like this, see? Roger isn’t such a bad guy when you get to know him. He wanted to go hunting or something, and we were talking about it, but he said as how there was some kind of spell so he couldn’t get out the door, and I said I’d been studying some magic, and so we went down there together, and he had the right dope; the door wouldn’t open. Well, you see, I remembered these somatic passes Doc was talking about and made a few of them, and boy, the door flew open just like that!” He paused. Shea stared a little, then hoped Atlantès hadn’t noticed.

“Go on, Vaclav,” said Chalmers severely.

“Well, then I figured I knew enough about magic to maybe—uh—get that babe back—you know, the one you were going to introduce me to.” He appealed to Atlantès. “So I worked a little spell, just like you said, but it turned me into a wolf instead. I’m sorry I made so much trouble.”

“Must be your Slavonic ancestry,” said Shea. “The Czechs are full of werewolf stories, and—”

He had not noticed the gathering clouds on Atlantès’ forehead. Now the storm burst. “Son of a dog!” he shouted at Polacek. “Where is the pride of chivalry, the noblest of his race, who is worth ten thousand such as you?”

“Why, he went out to do a little hunting, like I said,” said Polacek. “He said he’d be back before morning with something good.”

This time Atlantès really did beat his chest. “Ah, woe to me! The doom has stricken!” Then he swung around to the three Americans. “But as for you, Nazarene dogs, who have plotted against me by the hand of your servant while partaking of my bread and salt, you deserve nothing more than to be flayed alive and to have your bodies buried in a pit with the excrement of hogs!”

“Hey!” said Shea, reaching forward to take Atlantès by the arm. “Those are fighting words where we come from. If you want to get tough about it—”

“Harold!” said Chalmers. “Let me handle this. We don’t want—”

“We don’t want anything to do with this thrip except to hand him a sock in the puss. D’you know what he’s up to?”

Chalmers said: “Never mind, Harold. You have already informed me sufficiently. I’ll defend—uh—myself and the young lady to any extent necessary.”

Atlantès’ fury had burned down to a glower. “O ill-omened sorcerers! Know that this castle was wholly established by the arts of which I am master, and within its walls I have such power that I could turn you to beetle grubs in less time than the snapping of the fingers. Yet in the name of Allah, the omnipotent, the merciful, will I spare your lives to the undoing of the harm you have done, for it is written that once in his lifetime may the just man prefer mercy to justice without endangering his hope of paradise.”

He extended both arms, closed his eyes, and cried in a high voice:
“Beshem hormots vahariman tesovev he-esh, asher anena esh, et metzudat habsitel!”

There was a whoosh and a buzz, like an electric fan in the adjoining room. Atlantès’ permanent smile came back; so did his bow. “Behold, fellow practitioners of the noblest of the arts, if you will look beyond the walls of this castle, you will see it circled by an outer barbican of flame, sufficient to roast a sheep in less than a minute. For the hardiest of men to try to pass it the punishment would be no less than death. Yet if the Lady Florimel attempt it, who is a woman and yet no woman, she would leave no more memory than steam from the coffee cup. My gracious mercy extends so far that the fire shall instantly be removed when by your arts you bring Lord Roger back; and I will add to that bags of jewels so great that three men can hardly carry them. The peace of the one true God be with you in your meditations.”

He bowed again and turned his back. The lords looked sullenly at the three (except Audibrad, whose sympathies, judging from the fact that he was trying not to smirk, were evidently in the other direction) and Chalmers began to dither. “I—uh—am unsure whether I am sufficiently advanced in the science of apportation, which I had presumed something of a specialty—”

“Sst!” said Shea. “If magic doesn’t work, I’ll take a running jump through and go hunt Roger myself. I don’t mind having my eyebrows singed a little.”

Atlantès, who seemed to have sharper ears than a cat, turned back. “Learn, rash youth,” he said, “that the very marrow of your bones would be incinerated; and yet, of a truth, you say a thing I had not thought on; for it will be far easier to remove the Pearl of the Orient from thence to hither if he be found by human eyes than only by arts magical; and it will greatly pleasure my brother’s son to cut your throat from ear to ear beyond these walls. Go, then; I undertake to pass you unharmed through the flame.”

“I’d like to go, too,” said Polacek. His expression showed that he did not look forward to pleasant time at the castle after his venture into wolfishness.

“Go, then, and Allah give you neither peace nor a long life unless you bring my nephew home again.” He turned away again, this time for keeps.

Shea found Chalmers looking at him keenly. The doctor said: “I wonder, Harold, if helping me and Florimel was your most important motive in offering to find Roger?”

Shea grinned. “It’s the only one you know about officially, Doc.”

Seven

The whole castle turned out the see Shea and Polacek off on their Roger-hunt the following morning. During the evening, Chalmers had tried to establish the thought-contact with the peerless chevalier as a preliminary to getting back by magical means, but he had been forced to give up with the remark that Roger had about as few thoughts as the human brain could hold. In any case there seemed to be interference, either from Atlantès himself or from the curtain of flame he had thrown around the castle, so the job clearly devolved upon Chalmers’ two juniors.

He did not believe that the threat of Atlantès’ plan to exchange the shapes of Florimel and the prophesied woman knight represented an immediate danger. Perhaps later.

“But let us take first things first, Harold,” he said cheerfully. “I think I can profitably employ my time in study and in attempting to establish communication with this Christian sorcerer Malagigi. It was—uh—remiss of me not to have thought of him before coming to Carena. I presume it would be superfluous to express a wish for your good fortune?”

Beyond the gate and a drawbridge over a dry ditch, the flames rose in a wavering wall, obscuring the nearby peaks. Shea could feel their heat on his face as he stood at the break of the drawbridge while Atlantès dipped a finger in a small bottle of oil and drew an isosceles triangle on his forehead and then a right triangle over the first, muttering a small spell as he did so. He repeated the process with Polacek and with the chief huntsman of the castle, a broad-shouldered, swarthy man named Echegaray. Atlantès was all smiles as though they had had no hard words the previous evening, although Shea overheard the other lords making up a small pool as to who would find Roger and when.

Echegaray strode beside them towards the flame, a crossbow over his shoulder. When he came to the magic barrier, however, he stopped and looked inquiringly at Shea. The flames streaked soundlessly far over their heads; the light was so intense that it hurt their eyes and looked altogether real and terrifying, though the grass from the flames sprang seemed unharmed. Shea felt like stopping too, but with Echegaray watching, and the eyes of the whole castle boring into his back, he threw out his chest and marched straight through. Two steps did it, and the fire only tingled.

For a moment his companions did not appear. Then there was a half-choked yell and Echegaray came through, dragging Polacek behind him. The hunter looked at Shea, spat, and jerked a thumb at Polacek, who was swelling with indignation that had not yet quite reached the stage of words. “Tried to change his mind,” said the hunter. “This way.”

The road was no more than a track down the mountain whose peak the castle occupied, a track so steep moreover that one had to walk with care, watching the skirts of one’s jelab. They were already below timberline, and had to duck under the branches of all trees along their way. A cool mountain breeze hissed through the pines and ruffled the brushes on Shea’s and Polacek’s turbans.

Shea unhooked the sword he had taken from Atlantès’ cabinet, drew it out, and looked it over before fastening it to his outside sash. Like the one he had used in the courtyard, this sword had a rounded point and a thick, heavy blade—useless for thrusting and awkward on the parry, altogether better suited to a slashing fanatic on horseback than to a methodical épée fencer.

“Think we’re gonna run into anything?” asked Polacek with wide eyes. “I ought to have something like that if we are.” He turned to Echegaray and pointed to the huge broad knife in the latter’s belt. “Hey, how about lending me that thing for a while? If we have any trouble it would be better to have all of us armed.”

“No. Mine,” said the hunter shortly, and took up the way again. Three hours brought them to the foot of the main peak. There the path began climbing and dipping across a series of spurs reaching down from another crest that thrust in from their right. The forest grew thicker here. Echegaray led them into the throat of a valley where a stream dropped past in a series of waterfalls and the ten-a.m. sun failed to reach the bottom. The gorge widened to a valley which held a patch of swamp, where they had to squish almost ankle-deep along the edge of a pond. Shea jumped and Polacek stopped at a glimpse of white skin and gauzy wings as the waterfays, or whatever they were, ducked out of sight. Echegaray pushed ahead without looking back and they had to follow.

Beyond, the valley narrowed again. The mountain wall closed in so sharply on their side of the stream that they had to cross on a bridge which was formed of a single log. Echegaray simply walked across as if the log had been level land. Shea followed with difficulty, waving his arms for balance, and just barely making it with a leap at the end. Polacek stuck his thumbs into his sash and tried to imitate the hunter’s jaunty step, but failed to watch his footing and fell in.