Mouseglove thought for a moment.
“There is a room off the main courtyard,” he said, sending along the image. “I will return and look over the tools there. Meet me in the yard.”
It will be faster for me to take you there.
“Well . . . ”
Mount!
Mouseglove scrambled onto his back. Minutes later, they were gliding through the darkness.
XI
Pol was awakened by the light shining upon his face. He tossed his head several times to avoid it, then sat suddenly upright, eyes opened.
The door of his cell stood wide.
Had someone come for him, then met with some momentary distraction? He listened. There were no sounds from the corridor.
Cautiously, he rose to his feet. He crossed the cell to the place where he had stood earlier, conjuring ineffectively, eyes throbbing.
Some illusion? To torment him?
He extended his hand beyond the door frame, touched the door. It moved slightly. At that moment, he felt the essence of mocking laughter, soundless. It was as if something vaguely sinister were amused at his puzzlement, his trepidation—something inhabiting a level of reality which did not coincide with his own. He stood frozen, waiting, but it did not occur again.
Finally, he moved forward, passing out into the corridor. It was deserted.
What now? he thought. Should he set out upon the route along which he had followed Larick? Should he strike out and explore elsewhere within the castle? Or should he head back to the courtyard, take one of the flying beasts and flee?
The latter course struck him as the most sensible: Flee, hide and wait for the return of his powers. Then he could go back to Rondoval, rouse his bestial minions and come back here as he had come to Anvil Mountain—to tear the place apart. It made better sense than remaining, powerless and outnumbered, in the citadel of an enemy.
He turned in the direction of the courtyard with the cages. Then he stood still.
His way was barred by a sheet of pale flame.
“And so my choice is not really a choice,” he said softly.
Is it ever? came the familiar, ironic notes in his head.
“I guess that remains to be seen.”
Like most things, came the reply, accompanied by slightly conciliatory sensations.
“I’ve never been able to figure out whether you’re an enemy or an ally.”
We are agents. We aided you once.
“And the next time . . . ?”
Why should you have any reason to doubt those who have helped you in the past?
“Because I came away with the feeling that I’d been pushed into something.”
I would say, rather, that we pulled you out.
“That is a debatable point. But you say that you are agents. Agents of what?”
Change.
“Much is encompassed by that word. Could you be more specific?”
Two of the forces at work upon this world are science and magic. At times they are opposed to one another. We are on the side of the magic.
“This place hardly seems a stronghold of technology.”
It is not. There is no direct confrontation involved here.
“God damn you! Getting a straight answer out of you is like milking a wildcat! Why can’t you just tell me what is involved?”
The truth is such a sacred thing that we guard it well.
“I believe that you want my cooperation.”
That is why we are assisting you again.
Pol tried shifting to the second seeing. This time it seemed to work smoothly. With it, he detected the outline of a human form within the flame—small, masculine, head bowed, hands hidden within the long sleeves which overlapped near its dark center. An orange strand drifted near Pol’s right hand, the far end of it vanishing within the flame. He caught it with his fingertips and twirled it. The dragonmark throbbed upon his forearm.
“Now you will tell me what I wish to know—” he began.
His hand felt as if it were on fire. He stifled a scream and dropped to one knee in his agony. His second vision departed. His entire arm ached.
We will not be coerced in such a fashion, came the reply.
“I’ll find the right way,” he said through clenched teeth.
It would be so much easier and would save so much time if you would let us show you rather than spend the night telling you what is involved.
Pol rose to his feet, holding his aching right hand in the other.
“I suppose that’s the best deal I’ll get from you tonight.”
It is. Turn and follow the other.
Pol turned and beheld another tongue of flame. This one was only the size of his hand, and it hung in the air in the middle of the corridor about eight paces before him. A moment after his gaze fell upon it, it began to drift away from him. He followed.
It led him through a hall filled with grotesque statues, both human and non-human, a low, red brilliance, a soft, almost vibrant glow lying upon the whole setting, cast perhaps by the flame itself, giving the impression that all of the stone forms were beginning to stir. The air there was stale in his lungs, and he found himself holding his breath until he had departed the place. The luster was present in some of the other chambers and hallways, yet somehow it lacked the sinister character it had given to that room and those representations. The dragonmark had begun throbbing when they had entered the place and did not grow still until they were well away.
He moved down a series of stone stairways, each rougher than the preceding one, passing through damp chambers and long passageways, which, judging from the descent he had made, must be well beneath the castle itself and hacked from the living stone of the mountainside. At some point, Pol ventured a look behind him and saw that the other flame was nowhere in sight. He also saw, however, that the shadows seemed to slide in a liquid, almost sentient fashion at his back, in a manner he found more than a little unsettling. He hurried to keep pace with his guide.
The rooms and corridors through which he passed bore the dust of disuse in heavy layers, a thing he found mildly heartening when he moved through a series which could only be torture chambers—equipped as they were with chains, racks, tongs, pincers, weights, flails, whips, mallets and a great variety of oddly shaped blades. All of these bore stains, rust marks or both, along with the comforting coatings of dust. There were bones in odd corners, all of them gnawed long ago by rodents, now dry, brittle, cracked and discolored. Pol brushed a wall with his fingertips and heard the echoes of screams from long ago. When he switched to the second vision, he caught near-subliminal glimpses of atrocities enacted in times gone by, the traumas of which had etched themselves into the setting. Hastily, he reverted to the normal mode of seeing.
“Who . . . ” he whispered, more to himself, “was responsible for these things?”
The present lord, Ryle Merson, came the reply from ahead.
“He must be a monster!”
Once, such things were routine here. But he ceased all such activities nearly a quarter of a century ago, claiming that he had repented. It is said that he has led a relatively blameless, possibly even virtuous life since.
“Is it true?”
Who can say what lies in a persons heart? Perhaps he cannot even say himself, for certain.
“You are making this all totally enigmatic to me. I confess to being prejudiced, but in no way can I see his treatment of me as virtuous or blameless—and that goes for his lackey, Larick, as well.”
People have reasons for things that they do. Motives and objectives are seldom of matching moral color.
“And what of yourself, whatever you are?”
We are neither moral nor immoral now, for our actions contain no element of choice.
“Yet something set you upon the course you follow. There was a decision there.”
So it would seem—a touch of irony to these words?
“Still not giving anything away, are you?”
Noth
ing.
They moved past a fetid-smelling cistern in which something was splashing. The floor of a recess near an adjacent airshaft was heavy with the droppings and fragile, hieroglyphic skeletons of what might have been bats. Indentations in the floor contained small pools of water. The walls were slimy in this area, and Pol felt as if a great weight of earth and rock hovered just above his head, groaning the long, slow notes of timeless stresses.
He wondered at the brief conversation, recalling the allegations of the Seven after the battle at Anvil Mountain, giving the impression then that their actions were determined. At least they were consistent in what little they did say. There was something more about them which he felt that he should remember, something almost dream-like in texture . . .
His efforts at recollection ended as he turned a corner and halted. Whether it was a corridor or a room which he now faced, he could not tell. The way ahead was misty—almost smoky—though he detected no odors about it. The flame had halted when he did, and it seemed much nearer now; its brightness had increased, and it had acquired something of a greenish cast.
“What the hell,” Pol asked, “is that?”
Just a local etheric disturbance.
“I don’t believe in ether.”
Then call it something else. Perhaps you will be footnoted by some future lexicographer. We know that things were different where you grew up.
“I’ll be damned. That’s the closest I’ve come to getting a rise out of you. So you know my history?”
We were present when you departed this world. We were present when you returned.
“Interesting. Your remarks almost lead me to believe that you do not know what things were like in the place where I was raised.”
True, though we are able to conclude a number of things about it from examining your actions and reactions since your return. For example, the familiarity with technology which you demonstrated—
The light before him was extinguished. Pol stood still in the semi-darkness, staring into the faintly luminous mist. He listened to his heartbeat and considered calling upon the dragonlight.
An instant later a blue leaf of flame appeared in the air before him, near to the place where the other had been.
Come now!
The tone was feminine, imperious.
“What became of my other guide?” he asked.
He talked too much. Come!
Pol wondered at this. Had he finally glimpsed a chink in their armor?
“Getting near something you don’t want me to know, eh?”
There was no reply. The blue flame began drifting slowly away from him. Pol did not move to follow it.
“Do you know what I think?” he said. “I think that you’ve got to use me because I am my father’s son and he created you. You have some special connection with Rondoval, and only I can serve your purpose.”
The flame halted and hovered.
You are wrong.
“I do not believe that you like this,” he went on, ignoring the response, “because, for all your talk of determinism, I was raised on another world about which you know little or nothing, and you cannot account for me as you might someone who’d spent his life in this land. I am more of a random factor than you would like me to be, but you have to deal with me anyway. Tonight you will attempt to impress me in some fashion so that I will be more amenable to your purposes. I tell you now that I have seen things beside which the display at Anvil Mountain was very small beer. I am prepared to be unimpressed by any efforts on your part.”
You have finished?
“For now.”
Then let us continue this journey.
The flame drifted on, slowly. Pol followed. It seemed to be bearing to the left, but there were no other objects in his field of vision against which he might track its motion. He plodded along, and the palely illuminated mist rolled and boiled about him. Unaccountable shadows began to move within it.
He kept changing direction. Echoes were muffled. Pol could not tell for certain whether he was moving through a long, twisting corridor or whether he was backtracking, turning, wandering within one large room. As he was unable to locate any walls, he suspected the latter. But there seemed no way to tell for certain.
The shadows which tracked him grew darker, their outlines becoming more distinct. Some were definitely human in form; others were not. The silhouette of a dragon flickered overhead as if passing at a great height. It seemed as if a great number of people were now moving, silently, at various distances, about him. He tried turning to the second seeing, but there was no change in the prospect.
Suddenly, a figure loomed directly before him—big, ruddy, balding, with large, capable hands. The flame darted past, and perhaps it took up a station somewhere nearby.
“Dad!” Pol said, halting.
His step-father’s mouth twisted into a half-grin.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing in this backward place?” he said. “I really need you at home, in the business, right now.”
“You’re not real . . . ” Pol said.
But Michael Chain looked solid. His facial expressions—his speech inflections—were exactly those of Michael Chain with a few drinks under his belt and a load of impatience about to break loose.
“You’re a disappointment to me. Always were.”
“Dad . . . ?”
“Go on with your silly games then. Break your mother’s heart.”
A gesture of dismissal. The large man turned away.
“Dad! Wait!”
He vanished into the mist.
“It’s a trick!” Pol said, glaring at the flame. “I don’t know how you did that or what it’s all about, but it’s a trick!”
Life is full of tricks. Life itself may be a trick.
He turned away.
“Why are we standing here in the gloom? I thought you were taking me someplace important?”
You are the one who halted.
“Okay! Let’s get going!”
He turned back.
Betty Lewis, wearing a tight, low-cut dress, stood frowning at him off to the left. The texture of her familiar flesh looked so real . . .
“You could have called,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t that big a thing between us, but you might at least have said good-bye.”
“I couldn’t,” he answered. “There was no way.”
“Just like all the others,” she said, and the mists moved between them and she was gone.
“I see what you are doing,” Pol said to the flame. “But it won’t work.”
Is is the condition of this place. You are doing it to yourself.
Pol took a step forward.
“You brought me here!”
“Pol?” came a familiar voice from his right, sending a shiver along his arms.
“The hell with you!” he said, not turning. “Let’s go, flame!”
Obediently, the bluish light moved away, and he followed it. The shadow remained to his right, drew nearer.
“Pol!”
He did not look. But an arm was extended into his field of vision—muscular, covered with heavy, rust-colored hair, a thick, wide bracelet at the wrist, studded with control buttons, indicators, lights—and even when he saw it, he did not believe that it was real.
Until the hand fell upon his arm, gripping it, halting him, turning him.
“I feel your hand,” he said slowly.
“I felt your wrath,” said the other.
Pol raised his eyes to regard the once handsome, rugged features of Mark Marakson, marred by the eyepiece to the left, its lens a deep, glittering blue.
“You gave me no choice,” Pol replied.
“You had my name, my parents. You took my girl . . . ”
“This can’t be!” Pol said.
“ . . . my life,” Mark finished, and then the lens went black and his flesh reddened and charred and began to peel away.
Pol screamed.
The hand, through which the bones were
now visible, fell away from his arm. The figure backed off into the mist—the black-lensed prosthetic now affixed to a skull—and then it was gone.
Pol began to shake. He raised his hands to his face and lowered them again.
Nora now stood where Mark had been. Her face was expressionless.
“It is true,” she said. “You killed the man I loved.”
She turned and walked away.
“Wait!”
He ran, reaching for her, but her shadow was lost among others. Still he groped, turned, moving in one direction and then another.
“Come back!”
Pol! Stand still! Do not lose yourself in this place!
He turned again, and old Mor stood before him, leaning upon his staff.
“For that which I see before you, I wish that I had never brought you back,” the sorcerer said. “Better Mark had prevailed than that you do the thing you would do.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Pol said. “Tell me, if there is something I should know!”
Mor vanished in a burst of fire.
Stay with me! came the words out of the flame. This could get out of control!
“Whose control?” Pol asked, turning away.
Stel, the centaur, stood looking into his eyes.
“You would break faith with us,” she said, “though you swore by your scepter not to.”
“I have not broken faith with you,” he replied.
“ . . . And the doom which walks always at your back will move forward.”
“I have not broken faith,” he repeated.
“Evil son of an evil father!”
Pol turned and strode away.
Come back!—almost, a pleading note now.
The giant dog-headed figure he had faced beneath the pyramid rose suddenly before him.
Thief! Breaker of the Triangle of Int! came its mental message.
“I stole nothing. I took what was mine,” Pol said.
I’ve curses for thieves, to hound them to the ends of the earth!
“Piss on your curses!” Pol replied. “I beat you once. I’m not afraid of you now!”
He took a step toward the menacing figure.
Stop! They’re gaining power! It really can hurt you! came the words out of the flame which had just appeared between them, sounding frantic now.
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