The Book of Silence

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  With that in mind, he quickened his pace, so that it took him a moment to stop when he turned a corner and found himself facing a scene out of a nightmare.

  The city was ablaze ahead of him, or as much of it as could burn in a community built primarily of raw granite. Towering over the burning buildings stood the monster from the crypts, upright on two legs, with a wagonload of screaming hogs clutched in its claws, the traces whereby the wagon had been drawn dangling from one side. As Garth watched, the behemoth jammed the animals into its gaping mouth and bit down; the remaining fragments of the wagon fell out of sight with a distant crashing.

  The horn on the creature’s nose gleamed a sickly reddish yellow in the firelight, a thin line of black trailing down one side where its ichor ran. Its eyes blazed golden and seemed to Garth to be alight with madness. Its hide was wrinkled and black, its body shaped like nothing the overman had ever seen before. It was vaguely humanoid, in that it stood upright and used its forward limbs to grasp, but it had a hunched, ugly shape, its body proportions closer to those of a bull than to those of a man—though no bull had ever stood upon such hind legs, each as thick around as a castle tower, and no bull had such talons, long, agile fingers ending in vicious, curving claws.

  The thing stood easily a hundred feet high; in fact, Garth estimated that it must have had to crouch down, badly cramped, to fit into the chamber that had held it for so long. The rumbling sound that had drawn him issued from the creature, though whether from its heart or its belly Garth was unsure.

  With the hind legs of a pig still trailing from its jaws, the monster turned and reached down toward something Garth could not see over the intervening buildings. It seemed to struggle, like a man pulling at a stubborn root; then, with a tearing, crumbling roar, it lifted up the complete upper floor of a house.

  The stones held together for a brief moment, then crumbled and fell through the creature’s claws like sand through the fingers of a child, leaving it holding a pitiful assortment of roofing tiles, bedroom hangings, and broken furniture. It flung them aside and reached down again.

  Garth had seen enough. He could do nothing at all against this monster by himself; it would take magic to destroy it.

  He was determined, however, that it had to be destroyed. He had not seen it kill anyone since it first burst up through the floor, but it was doing incredible amounts of damage, and he could scarcely doubt that it had killed any number of people, perhaps without even meaning to, in making its way through the city. The creature was his responsibility, the overman told himself; he had ventured where he should not have gone, and it had been awakened as a result. He had brought destruction again, as he always did when he agreed to aid the Forgotten King.

  He knew what could destroy it, he was sure; nothing could stand against the Sword of Bheleu. That would be fitting, using the tool of the god of destruction to kill such a destroyer. That would not atone for freeing the thing in the first place, but it would put the Sword of Bheleu to constructive use. If for any reason the sword should fail, the Forgotten King might well be able to use the Book of Silence against the monster.

  He, Garth, could not use the book; he could not read it. He did not have the sword. The sword and the one who could read the book were both in Skelleth. Any doubts he had about swapping the book for the sword had vanished. He was still concerned about the possibility of the King’s bringing on the Fifteenth Age, but that was mere theory, while this rampaging beast was a fact. Furthermore, he was certain that the King required more than the Book of Silence for his final magic.

  He had to get to Skelleth without delay. His campaign against the cult of Aghad could wait; this monster was a far more immediate threat to the safety of innocents. The time he had spent in making his way through the crypts, or in his leisurely exploration of the creature’s prison, or in the King’s little chapel, now seemed to have been horribly wasted; the monster had probably killed dozens or even hundreds of people during that period. Even the time he had lain unconscious now seemed unforgivable.

  He wondered how he could have been so thoughtless as to have not given the monster’s whereabouts and behavior his immediate attention. Even as he spun and headed eastward on a side street, he berated himself for allowing such destruction.

  He did not know the city, nor where in it he had found himself, but he knew that the gate where he had left Koros was near the easternmost extremity; for that reason, he kept heading east whenever possible. Almost immediately he passed through an area where the creature had obviously already been; many of the buildings were stamped flat, the rubble ground into powder against the granite streets. In places, the streets were indistinguishable from the buildings. Garth marveled that none had collapsed into the crypts which, he knew, honeycombed the entire area beneath the city.

  He passed several fires, varying from a few smoldering curtains thrown in an alley to conflagrations consuming entire blocks. Only very rarely did he see any humans, and then it was merely a fleeting glimpse of someone vanishing behind a closing shutter or fleeing around the corner of a building. Nowhere were the streets lighted by the usual torches or lanterns, and the shops and houses were dark.

  This both reassured and disturbed him; most of the population had obviously fled from the city, which was probably a very good thing, but why, he wondered, were the few stragglers avoiding him? Did they assume him to have some connection with the monster, or to be a threat in his own right by virtue of his species?

  Finally he reached the steep slope that led up to the eastern wall of the city, but he had not managed to arrive at the gate. After some study of the surrounding buildings, the firelit rooflines and the parapet of the city wall in particular, Garth decided he was north of his intended destination and turned right.

  A walk of four blocks south, complicated by dodging around in the tangled web of streets, brought him to the central avenue and the remembered steps. There, however, he stopped, hanging back out of sight around a corner.

  The steps were not deserted, as the streets had been. Instead, what looked like the entire city guard was ranged on them, illuminated by hundreds of torches. Perhaps half were just standing and looking watchful, while the other half were coming and going and bustling about. Garth could not decide what they were doing; part of it seemed to be gathering in stragglers and escorting them up to the gate, but that did not account for all the movement.

  Crowds of civilians were still in the area; the overman noticed them streaming in and out of one large building, under the gaze of a row of torch-bearing soldiers.

  Whatever was happening, there seemed to be a fair measure of order and organization to it; Garth saw no signs of screaming panic and no bodies lying in the streets. That was promising.

  It was important that there should be order, because this was the only way he knew that would get him out of the city; he would have to pass through that array of soldiery and do it peacefully. Had it been a desperate mob, that would have been virtually impossible. They might well have panicked at the sight of him.

  Having assessed the situation, he saw no reason for further delay. He stepped from concealment and marched purposefully toward the gate.

  As he had half expected, several people noticed him immediately, and a cry went up. “An overman! There’s an overman here!”

  To Garth’s dismay, he could also make out shouts of “Kill the overman! It’s another monster!” Other voices muttered and babbled, and he was sure that, despite the outward semblance of calm, this crowd could easily degenerate into a raging mob.

  Several of the soldiers had noticed him as well, and one, an officer, was approaching.

  “Ho, there!” Garth called. “How goes it?”

  “Who in hell are you?” the soldier replied.

  “I am Garth of Ordunin; I was a guest of your overlord, but became lost and have only now found my way here.”

  The man looked uncerta
in. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “To pass through the gate.”

  The soldier nodded, as if that were what he should have expected. “You’ll have to wait your turn,” he said.

  That was disconcerting. “I think,” Garth said carefully, “that it would be wise to let me through immediately.” He did not want to seem arrogant, or to take any action that might start trouble, but he also did not want to wait in line; every minute he was delayed from returning to Skelleth meant another minute of the monster’s rampage.

  “You can wait like anybody else, damn you,” the soldier replied.

  Garth started to protest, but a call from the dark at the top of the stair interrupted him.

  “Have you got an overman down there?” someone yelled.

  Startled, the soldier who had stopped Garth turned and looked. The call was repeated.

  “We’ve got an overman here, yes,” the officer called back.

  “Is it the one who owns this damned animal out here?”

  The soldier started to turn back to Garth, who said, “That is my warbeast, yes. I left it there because it was not allowed in the city.”

  “He says it’s his,” the soldier bellowed.

  “Then get him up here and tell him to get the thing out of the way! It won’t move, and it’s slowing up the whole evacuation!”

  The officer turned back toward Garth with a sour expression. The overman tried to smile ingratiatingly and avoided saying anything that might annoy the soldier.

  “Go on up,” the man said, waving him on.

  Garth obeyed with alacrity, bounding up the worn steps as fast as he dared. At the top he was waved through, and another officer pointed out the warbeast, standing quietly in exactly the spot where Garth had left it.

  The problem was that the entire eastern side of the ridge, from the wall down to the plain, was ablaze with torchlight and jammed with people—except for a wide circle, perhaps thirty feet across, around Koros. That circle happened to take in the only easy path around the south tower, and its north edge skimmed the main highway.

  “Can you get it out of here?” someone asked.

  Garth nodded.

  “Then do it, please.”

  Garth nodded again, then paused. He was rather overwhelmed by the vast crowd of people; he had never seen so many individuals of any major species gathered together before. He had known, in an intellectual way, that Ur-Dormulk held tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, but that had not prepared him emotionally for seeing most of the population packed together on a hillside at night without shelter or much of anything else but a few personal belongings.

  “What are you going to do with them all?” he asked the officer.

  “How should I know?” the man replied. “I just follow orders. With any luck we’ll be able to start letting them back into the city by daybreak.”

  “You will?” Garth was startled. “How can that be? What of the monster?”

  “The court wizards are trying to drive it into one of the lakes, I understand—probably Demhe, but Hali if they have to. I doubt anything that big can swim.”

  “How can they do that?”

  “How would I know? I’m no sorcerer. They’ve kept it from chasing the crowds so far; they should be able to handle it.”

  Garth was far less optimistic, but did not say so. Instead, he asked, “These wizards—do you speak of Chalkara of Kholis and a person called Shandiph?” He had forgotten the cognomen attached to the latter name, if he had ever in fact heard it.

  “Those names sound right,” the soldier replied. “The two from the prince’s court, whoever they are. They were about to flee the city themselves, I hear, when they got ordered to deal with the thing.” He was obviously not interested in such details. “Now, could you move your animal?”

  “Yes, of course,” Garth said. He considered telling the man that he would be returning shortly with the means of dispatching the monster, but decided against it. This fellow did not appear to have much authority, and even if he had some, what good would such a message do? Besides, the possibility of something going wrong was always present; Garth might be delayed or might have difficulties with the Sword of Bheleu, or with the cult of Aghad, that would prevent his return. There was no point in raising hopes that might go unfulfilled.

  He said nothing, but marched down to the side of the waiting warbeast. The crowd parted reluctantly before him, pressing back upon itself.

  He stowed his possessions, including the Book of Silence, and made certain they were secure. A moment later he was in the saddle again; he shouted a warning to the people gathered before him, then gave Koros the command to advance.

  Those immediately in the beast’s path moved back as quickly as they could, eager to stay out of its way, but the resistance of the mass behind them ensured that Garth’s progress remained slow until the crowd thinned out, a hundred yards farther down the slope. At that point Koros began picking up speed, and when rider and mount passed the line of soldiers that marked the outer perimeter of the clustered refugees, Garth gave the warbeast the order to run.

  Koros obeyed magnificently, hurtling forward so fast that the overman’s eyes stung and watered with the wind of their passage. He was able to do little but cling desperately to the harness, casting an occasional glance back to be sure that the pack behind the saddle that held the Book of Silence remained secure.

  He rode on thus for hours, pausing only at a roadside tavern for a long-overdue drink and a hearty meal.

  It was this scene, of Garth bent over his warbeast’s neck, charging onward at top speed, that Haggat conjured up in his scrying glass when he found time to check again on the overman’s whereabouts. He was startled; he wondered what urgency drove Garth to maintain such a pace. He had not bothered to follow events in Ur-Dormulk personally, relying instead on reports from the cult’s many agents there; half a dozen had been equipped with the communication spells acquired from murdered wizards, which provided almost instant news—a great improvement on the old system of relays and carrier pigeons that they had relied upon before the breaking of the Council of the Most High.

  No reports had reached him from Ur-Dormulk, which could mean many things; he told himself that he would have to look into that later.

  For the present, Garth was obviously returning to Skelleth with all possible haste, and if the cult were to maintain its image and its hold upon him, then a greeting of some sort would have to be arranged. The overman’s homecoming—Haggat thought of Skelleth as Garth’s home, even though Garth did not—could not be allowed to go unheralded.

  The high priest had already considered this matter in his planning and had devised two possible unpleasant surprises. The better one, unfortunately, was the more difficult and time-consuming, and at the rate Garth was moving, it might not be ready in time; therefore, the other would have to do.

  Haggat paused before giving the signal, however, and studied the image in the globe thoughtfully. The warbeast had to be taken into consideration. He was determined that his people would maintain an appearance of total invulnerability, and the warding spells that he had provided his last group of tormentors would not serve against so powerful a creature as a warbeast.

  Well, he told himself, he had a device that would. It was one of his most prized possessions, acquired by careful planning and considerable craft from the wizard who had pocketed it in that mysterious vault beneath Ur-Dormulk, whence so much of the cult’s pilfered magic was derived. It was truly a shame that the chamber was lost and that all attempts to locate it had failed; if a score of magicians had brought out so much worthwhile magic just by retaining what they had casually picked up in a few hours’ stay, what other treasures might still lie there, undiscovered?

  One of Haggat’s dreams was to find and reopen that vault; another was to obtain and use the Sword of Bheleu. Accomplishing
either feat would give him, he was sure, mastery of the entire civilized world. He did not wholly understand why he had made no progress toward either goal. Divinations that were usually infallible came to nothing; spies vanished mysteriously and were never heard from again; healthy agents died of sudden heart failure while climbing the stairs of the King’s Inn. It was obvious that some other power was blocking him. He was determined not to be thwarted; once Garth had been dealt with, he would track down and destroy whoever was responsible for the interference.

  First, though, he had to deal with Garth, and for that, he wanted to provide the appointed agents with an infallible protection. He had only one, apparently unique in all the world, a simple metal rod that could, if properly used, temporarily render up to half a dozen people immune to all harm. After taking it from Haladar of Mara he had intended to keep it solely for his own personal use, but this situation was special, and called for special measures. He would, he decided, loan it to the chosen cultists.

  That, he was certain, when combined with the other magic at his disposal, would ensure that Garth received the greeting the followers of Aghad thought he deserved.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After further hours of traveling at high speed, with its rider clinging to its neck, Koros slowed as it approached the crumbling walls of Skelleth. Garth rose from his crouch into a more comfortable and dignified posture; thus he was able to see clearly, in the gray light of morning, what awaited him at the gate. He had time, also, to hide his shock and dismay.

  Three red-robed figures were slouched comfortably on the broken battlements, gathered around a pole that stood ten or twelve feet high, leaning at a jaunty angle and topped with Kyrith’s severed head.

  Lying crumpled against the wall below was the dead body of the man assigned to guard the southwestern gate; a long, crooked streak of blood ran from his slit throat down his arm to the ground.

  Garth was as much appalled by the pointless murder of the sentry as by the defiling of his wife’s corpse. After all, Kyrith had already been dead, insensible to further indignity. Even though she was his own species and his own family, the awful waste of killing the man simply because he was in the way—and Garth was quite sure that was the only reason the Aghadites had slain him, to remove him from the chosen site for their little display—was sickening.