by Brian Lumley
Gemal puffed more smoke in Tarra’s direction, smiled in his skull like fashion, said: ‘More of your thoughts, Hrossak, for they’re refreshing and they interest me greatly.’
Tarra paused a moment before answering, sniffed the smoke and thought: That’s Zha-weed he’s puffing on, which wizards use in their magicks, and less able addicts to lighten their burdens. It brings pleasing illusions and loosens the tongue … And he also thought: Perhaps I’ll feed my big lizard a little of your Zha-weed, Cush Gemal, then set him free to create a diversion, and finally—
‘Well?’ Gemal frowned, however slightly. His eyes had fastened on Tarra, and now their concentration grew intense.
‘I intend—’ Tarra began, automatically and out loud this time – at which moment the tent’s flap was drawn back, pungent smoke blown aside and fresh air wafted in. It brought mouth-watering smells with it, and the Hrossak’s mind cleared in a moment. ‘—to enjoy this good food you’ve offered me, Cush Gemal!’
Gemal scowled at the black who stood there with silver platter, sizzling meat, razor sharp carver, and scowled not a little at Tarra, too; but then, in another moment, he laughed out loud. The frizzy departed and for a little while they ate in silence. Then Gemal said:
‘And have you no questions for me? Don’t you even care about your fate? Surely you’re curious about your destination, and what’s to become of you there?’
Tarra shrugged. ‘I’ve always been a wanderer,’ he said, ‘an adventurer – though as you see for yourself, not so much from choice as by accident. Indeed in this respect it seems I’m accident prone! But it has to be said that this is something of an adventure, and entirely in keeping, even if it’s not in accordance with my plans. What’s more I’m on the move again, albeit in a direction which could be improved upon! So all in all, p’raps I’m not so badly off.’ He shrugged again. ‘As for my fate: the fates of all men are wont to change from day to day. I was a slave; now I drive a lizard and eat with a Chief of Chiefs; who can say what’s waiting for me tomorrow? You mentioned our destination, which I believe to be Shad. Ah, but Shad’s still a long way off …’
‘What?’ Cush Gemal raised thin, slanting eyebrows. He smiled, but warningly. ‘That sounds close to a threat, Tarra Khash, however veiled! Should I put you in chains again, or do you choose to serve me well and faithfully for another day or two – and then go free?’
‘My freedom?’ Tarra stopped eating. ‘That’s tempting. And all I must do is drive the big lizard?’
Gemal watched his face. The steppeman’s eyes flickered briefly – perhaps longingly? – over the glittering, serrated edge of the carver where it lay on the silver platter between him and his host. Try as Tarra might, he couldn’t keep from glancing at it. Gemal noticed but made no comment. Instead he answered the other’s question:
‘We’re heading for the shallow salt lochs where they wash in from the Eastern Ocean. We came in by that route and it’s how we’ll go out. Another day and a half, two days at worst speed, and we’ll be there. But it’s important that there’s no delay. These are momentous, world shattering times. Soon, in Shad …’ He paused abruptly, blinked, flared his nostrils. And Tarra thought:
‘What?’ Cush Gemal! It’s the Zha-weed, my friend!
‘Let it suffice to say,’ Gemal continued, ‘that I can brook no delay – and that the loss of a good Hrossak drover would inconvenience me. Of course, I could simply abandon one wagon and boat. But that would also mean abandoning a fifth of the slaves I’ve taken. Indeed it would mean slaughtering them! Black Yoppaloth has no plans at present for war with the mainland, and so there can be no survivors from this little trek, no wagging tongues carrying tales to mainland cities. We want no armadas sailing out of Klühn and Thandopolis on missions of red revenge against Shad!
‘So you see I’ve a neat and tidy mind, Tarra Khash, the very opposite of yours in that I demand that things go exactly according to plan! I planned to take a certain number of male slaves and female beauties back across the water to Shad, and I’ll do my utmost to make that plan work. Also, I planned to ship at least four Hrossak lizards, which are unknown in Shad and will make for magnificent parades in the arena. And so, if you’ll continue as you’ve started and drive your beast to the water – and give me no problems along the way – there I’ll pay you off and let you and beast both go free. That will leave me with a vessel to carry myself and Black Yoppaloth’s brides, and four more for slaves and lizards.’
‘Why turn me loose?’ asked Tarra, ingenuously. ‘That hardly seems the way of a slaver to me. Why take only four lizards when you could take five? Why attempt to strike a bargain with me when I’m in your power? And as for paying me …! Why even bother to explain anything to me when there’s nothing I can do to change a thing, what- and whichever you decide?’
Gemal looked at him, nodded, smiled a wry smile. ‘You called me a Chief of Chiefs,’ he said. ‘But even a Chief of Chiefs can be lonely; aye, and especially he can grow sick of power. With these men you see around you: my every word is their command – which bores me utterly! It pleases me to have someone I can bargain with! Do you see? These men look on me as their master, and others see me as a monster, but I’m rarely seen simply as another man. You look on me with some curiosity, but with little or nothing of fear. However different you sense me to be, however strange, you know I am just another man. And I suspect you acknowledge no mere man as your master. But at the same time, I don’t think you’re incapable of humility. Perhaps in this we have something in common, perhaps not …
‘Anyway, I like you for what I’ve seen in you – so much indeed that I might easily have taken you back to Shad simply to keep you with me, eventually to become my companion and friend. Aye, and I might still do it, so don’t force my hand! Accept what I offer and leave it at that.’
Tarra glanced at the knife again, then let his eyes linger there and deliberately drew Gemal’s eyes to that same spot. The slavemaster looked at the shining blade, looked at Tarra, raised an inquiring eyebrow and waited.
‘Why have you tempted me, Cush Gemal?’ said Tarra. ‘Oh, only a fool would attempt to kill you here, I know…but still I might have tried. Or was this a test of some sort?’
Gemal smiled a thin, knowing smile and returned his gaze once more to the razor-honed carver. ‘Not so much a test as a trial,’ he eventually answered. ‘Or perhaps a lesson? – but only if you had taken the bait. If you had…then I would know we could never be friends, and by now you’d be dead.’ It wasn’t a threat but a statement of fact, as Cush Gemal saw it.
‘A trial? A lesson?’ Tarra looked bemused. ‘What sort of lesson?’
‘A lesson in trust. I was showing you how much I’d be willing to trust you. Or maybe I wasn’t.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Tarra shook his head.
‘Reach for the knife, Tarra Khash,’ Gemal invited. ‘Do it swiftly. Take it up as if…as if to kill me!’
‘What?’
‘Do it!’ the slaver insisted.
‘But I have no desire to—’
‘I know that, now,’ said Gemal, ‘but do it anyway. Go on! Test your mettle against mine – if you dare.’
Tarra’s father had used to say: ‘Never dare a madman or a fool, and never accept one from either!’ His hand blurred into action, came to rest atop Cush Gemal’s where it was there first!
‘Yibb!’ said Tarra, merely breathing the word. ‘And I thought I was fast!’
‘You are,’ said the other, ‘and if your joints weren’t quite so stiff you’d be faster still.’ He turned his hand on its back to clasp Tarra’s in strong, slender fingers. ‘So now you see there’s no subterfuge. I’d merely caution you against making trouble for yourself. For if you do I’ll be obliged to chain you again, and kill you where the land meets the water. Or take you to Shad as a slave, which I’ve no wish to do. I’d have you as a friend, Tarra Khash, but never as a slave; for as a slave I’d need four others just to watch you! And anyway, I’ve read
it in your eyes that Shad’s not the way you wish to go, not in any event.’
He stood up, drew the steppeman up with him. ‘So be it,’ he nodded. ‘When we reach the water I’ll give you gold, enough to repay your costs, and turn you loose. For I have to agree: Shad’s not the place for you. It’s in my bones that there’d be trouble for you in Shad, perhaps for both of us.’
They stepped from the tent. Outside, across a sky so blue it seared the eyes, faint wisps of cloud were drifting from the east. In that same direction but as yet far away, the sky was patterned like the scales of a fish; also, at the very edge of vision, it seemed that nodding dust-devils cavorted and careened, astir on the horizon’s rim.
‘Bad weather ahead,’ Tarra pulled a wry face. ‘It’ll make the big lizards unruly.’
Gemal nodded. ‘The season of storms approaches,’ he replied, frowning. ‘All the more reason to make haste.’ Suddenly he staggered, drew a sharp breath, grasped Tarra’s shoulder with shaking claw, purely to steady himself. All his limbs were at once atremble. Close by, a pair of blacks saw, took fright and would have hurried away. Tarra wondered at their terror; but Gemal saw them, beckoned them to attend him. Trembling more than he, they crept close.
‘Go,’ Gemal croaked in Tarra’s ear as the frizzies took hold and gave him their support. ‘Get away from me. Back to your lizard and safety.’
Safety? thought Tarra. From what?
The two shivering Yhemnis, eyes bugging and obviously mortally afraid, helped Gemal back to his tent. He went like an old man, seeming strangely shrivelled and drawn down into himself. But at the flap of the tent he caught his blacks by their wrists and drew them in after him.
Tarra wondered: A contagious fever? Is that what’s wrong with him? … Or was it something else? ‘Cush Gemal!’ he called out. ‘I’ll drive the big lizard to the ocean lochs, never fear.’
‘I know it well enow, Tarra,’ came back the answer from inside the black tent. But it was a harsh, gasping croak, in no wise Gemal’s previous voice, and there was more of pain than strength in it …
By the time Tarra got back to his monstrous beast and drew its hoods up over ridgy eyes, a wind had sprung up that drove the sand with stinging force. It would be a short blow, Tarra guessed, but a bitter one. The clouds were scudding now and beginning to pile one into the next; behind them, the sun a fading orange blob, growing ever more dim.
Tarra spoke words of reason to his beast and it huddled down. Then he crept under the big wagon, found Loomar Nindiss cowering with the rest of the slaves. The sand flurries weren’t so bad under here. He called the lad to him and Loomar came crawling and clanking, shouted: ‘What’s up?’
‘Eh?’ said Tarra. ‘The storm, d’you mean?’
Loomar shook his head. ‘I saw you go to Gemal’s tent. Is all well?’
‘Maybe better than that,’ said Tarra. And he began to relate all that had happened. But—
‘Ahhh!’ a concerted sigh went up from all the slaves crouched under the wagon. They all stared wide-eyed and slack-jawed toward Cush Gemal’s black tent. Tarra and Loomar peeped out from under wagon’s rim, followed the massed gaze of the others.
A dust-devil – but a giant, almost a tornado – picked its way through a gap between two wagons and closed with Cush Gemal’s tent. For a moment the tent belled out a little like an inflated lung, then fell slack as the wall of the twister enveloped it; but the tent was not drawn aloft, nor even caused to strain at its guys. And where the wind gusted all about, and smaller dust-devils raced here and there, in and about the ring of wagons – and where canvasses flapped in the spiteful wind, and beasts and men cowered from the sting of whirling sand – Gemal’s tent stood as before, unflustered, becalmed, black tassels hanging slack! The tent was in no wise affected, for indeed it stood central in the silent ‘eye’ of the twister! And there the great funnel of whirling sand remained, with Gemal’s tent untroubled at its centre, while all about was a chaos of wind and rushing, circling sand.
But the frenzied rush of sand-laden air had seemed to create electrical energies, trapping them in the core of the twister; for while Gemal’s tent remained untroubled, it was not unaffected. No, for ephemeral green fires shivered and danced in its silken, scalloped eaves and dripped like phosphorescent rain from its tassels – but only for a little while longer. Then—
In a matter of moments the uproar lessened and the swaying column that reached from dunes to sky broke up, hurling its tons of sand afar to fall like stinging rain; the clouds began to break up and beams of sunlight blazed through; lesser dust-devils dwindled and departed, racing off to extinction somewhere across the desert. Finally, blacks, Hrossaks, Northmen began to move again, emerging from various boltholes, mostly under canvas. But all eyes remained glued to Gemal’s tent, from which the dancing green fires had now departed, where at last the flap was thrown back and tall, crested slavemaster emerged, began shouting orders. All appeared to be back to normal.
Tarra Khash marvelled. Five minutes ago the half-caste had seemed all in, gripped in the spasms of some mortal illness. Now he looked and sounded stronger than ever! What’s more, he even seemed less emaciated, if that were at all possible.
The drive resumed almost at once, with Cush Gemal riding beside the lead wagon, but this time his tent was left standing till last. Tarra made a great show of removing sand from his lizard’s eyes and nostrils, sat upon the beast’s feet and cleaned its claws, generally made hard work of getting under way; and thus he contrived to be at the very end of the line when the caravan stretched itself out toward the east. And in this way, too, he could look back a little way to where shuddering frizzies decamped Gemal’s tent and packed it away on a camel.
Then they scooped a shallow hole in the sand, in which they dumped a couple of former colleagues, covering them quickly before mounting up. This could only be the pair Gemal had drawn into the tent with him. So Tarra surmised. Difficult to say for sure, for from the one or two glimpses he’d managed to get they now seemed little more than bags of bones, shrivelled and sere as mummies.
And Tarra Khash knew he’d made a queer, queer friend indeed …
A WIZARD’S QUEST – IN GEMAL’S CAMP
In one corner of the Primal Land, Cush Gemal’s caravan of slaves lumbering for the salt water lochs now only forty miles away; and in another …
Teh Atht arrived at Orbiquita’s castle in the mainly shunned Desert of Sheb and flew in through a high window. His flying carpet bore him down a vast, winding stone stairwell which opened into a great hall on the ground floor; and here he stepped down into dust and cobwebs, small drifts of sand blown in through various cracks, and the long accumulated litter of myriad mice and bats. He sighed and wrinkled his nose, carefully lifted the hem of his rune-embellished robe, looked all about in the gloom.
He sighed again. Lamias were less than fastidious, he knew, but Orbiquita must be slattern of all slatterns. Aye, and the slovenly creature his cousin, at that! But this wouldn’t do; he could hardly entertain guests with the place in this condition.
‘Go,’ he told the carpet in a tongue only it understood. ‘Fly fast to Klühn, return at once with the one who hops and the one who flits – but leave the one who seeps there, for he’ll only slow you down.’
The carpet rippled itself gracefully in acknowledgement of its master’s command, backed swiftly away, spiralled up the corkscrew stairwell and disappeared.
And now the great white mage of Klühn thought back a little on how he came to be here …
Leaving Orbiquita in her lava lair, he’d first thought to pay a visit to the Suhm-yi man and maid who’d known Tarra Khash in Klühn and with him destroyed Gorgos’ temple there. But that were easier thought than acted upon. Suhm-yi means ‘rarely seen’, and if Amyr Arn and his love did not desire to be found, then it would prove singularly difficult so to do.
When last seen, Amyr and his Ulli were heading west toward the Desert of Sheb, first leg of their long trek home to Inner Isles. Ver
y well, and Teh Atht had set off in that same direction. But as time crept on and the tired sun began to sink toward ever watchful Cthon beyond the rim of the world, where he waits out the day with his nets, so the wizard had wearied of hit-and-miss aerial surveillance. Then, too, in a small oasis far below, at the edge of Sheb’s rolling dune expanse, he’d spied the tiny camp of some lone traveller.
Descending in a tight circle, Teh Atht had then made out a five pointed Star of Power footprinted into the sand, with shimmery pool and shady palms nestled at its centre; at which he’d wagered with himself who this must be. None other but Moormish of the Wastes, whose simple protective device had backfired on him. At ground level it would scarce be noticed, but from up here it was a dead giveaway!
At first delighted, now Teh Atht soured a little as he circled lower. His mood was governed by what he knew of the man in the flat, nomad-styled tent below.
There were two such hermit sorcerers among Theem’hdra’s fraternity (?) of wizards: Moormish was one and Tarth Soquallin the other, but the latter was off somewhere far to the west and hadn’t been heard of for many a year. So this must be Moormish of the Wastes, who’d been named after his predilection for forlorn and perilous wastelands. It could be a common man, of course, but that seemed unlikely. First there was the protective star tramped meticulously in the sand, and second the location of the camp itself. Common men weren’t much given to wandering here, where lamias were wont to dwell, and Chlangi the Doomed swollen like a ripe boil scant fifteen miles away, full of the scum of the land.
Naturally (for reasons which will be seen) if Teh Atht had a choice, it would have been Tarth Soquallin he’d choose to find here; old hermit Tarth had always been his close friend and confidant, ever since the time they’d served together under tutelage of Imhlat the Teacher. Moormish, on the other hand, was sour as a green lemon and much given to grumbling; he’d hardly welcome the unannounced arrival of any wizard here in his private place, not even one white as Teh Atht. But…beggars can’t be choosers; a wizard is a wizard, even if he’s a notorious grouch; and right now Teh Atht was sore in need of a reliable shewstone. Moormish, habitual wanderer that he was, would doubtless have his with him.
