The Book of Silence

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  She was unsure what to do; she did not know where Garth had gone, whether he was still in the temple of Death, whether it would be safe to enter the temple. She stood for a long moment, glancing about indecisively, trying to decide upon a course of action.

  Finally, as she was about to try to coax Koros into hunting down its master for her, Garth emerged from the shadows of the temple cave, running unsteadily. She let out a glad cry at the sight of him, happy to see him still alive, and then noticed that the Sword of Bheleu was gone. She started to say something about it, concerned lest it fall into the wrong hands.

  Garth ignored that; he stopped, stared in surprise at the sight of Frima alive, saw Koros, and called, “Mount up! Quickly!”

  Confused, Frima obeyed; she had learned not to argue with Garth when he gave her direct orders so urgently. She clambered awkwardly onto the warbeast’s back.

  An instant later the overman leaped up behind her and called a word to the beast. Koros growled in response, then bounded forward and set out at full speed for the city gate. It seemed unhindered by its recent injuries, or by the two crossbow quarrels that still protruded from its shoulder. One had come free from the shoulder, and Koros had worked out the one in its paw, leaving an oozing wound.

  For a long moment Frima had no time to do anything but hang on, as Koros moved at incredible speed through the city’s deserted streets.

  The rumbling sound grew and deepened, and she could feel the ground shaking whenever the warbeast’s paws touched it for more than an instant. The air had turned very hot and dry and was full of sound and vibration; black dust was rising from the ground and vibrating off the buildings on either side. Something terrible was obviously happening, or perhaps was about to happen, but she did not know what it was.

  The street in front of them cracked open, and a stone house at one side fell inward with a roar; undaunted, the warbeast leaped the crack and bounded onward. It seemed untroubled by the trembling of the earth. When it reached the open ground of the market, it charged across at a speed that forced Frima to close her eyes and gasp for air.

  Then they were out of the city, past the broken gate, and still Koros ran, headlong down the slope of ancient black lava.

  Finally, when they had left the stone surface behind and reached the end—or the beginning—of the highway that led eastward through the site of Weideth, Garth leaned down and signaled to the beast with a blow on its flank. It slowed to a limping walk, its head low. Even its huge supply of energy was not inexhaustible. Frima struggled up into a sitting position, releasing her armhold around its neck, and peered back under Garth’s arm.

  A column of thick black smoke was pouring up from Dûsarra, from every part of the city, as if the black walls were the rim of a vast chimney; an orange glow lit the sky. More smoke and more of the orange light streamed from the crater above the city. As Frima watched, she saw one of the temple towers sway and then collapse. The rumbling was now a steady roar, but comfortingly distant.

  Nobody emerged from the gate. She watched, expecting a fleeing multitude, but no one appeared; instead, the walls on either side of the ruined gate abruptly tottered and fell inward. Something red and glowing poured forth where they had stood, and she realized at last that the volcano had awakened and was consuming Dûsarra.

  Garth glanced back at the crumbling black city and the lava that was devouring it. “So much, then, for the cult of Aghad,” he said.

  “Do you think they’re all in there?” Frima asked.

  Garth shrugged. “Enough of them are. Their god is dead and their temples destroyed; I won’t trouble myself about any who may have survived.” Without the Sword of Bheleu driving him on, he was no longer obsessed with the cult’s destruction to the last man. He had his revenge.

  Frima looked up at the overman’s leathery, noseless face, then back at her vanishing birthplace. She did not understand what Garth meant about the god; gods did not die, she told herself.

  Still, she, too, felt that she had had her fill of vengeance. She was ready to begin finding herself a new life. She suspected, as well, that she might be carrying more than her own life; she was beginning to notice other indications, in addition to her bouts of nausea, that she might be pregnant. The prospect delighted her. She turned away from Dûsarra and looked eastward toward the rising sun.

  Appendix A

  A History of This Novel

  The Book of Silence is the fourth and final volume in the “Lords of Dûs” series. There are no published spin-offs or related series outside the four volumes, nor are any presently in the works, so unless you skipped ahead you’ve now finished the whole thing—but the possibility of adding more eventually hasn’t been totally ruled out.

  I described the origins of the series as a whole in the appendices to the previous volumes, but I deliberately skimmed over certain things with only the very briefest of mentions until now. The time has come to reveal those, along with the other sources The Book of Silence came from.

  The first and most obvious source is simply the need to finish up the series and tie up everything I had set up in the first three volumes. I always knew I was going to end the series with the events of Chapter Twenty-Eight—I won’t be more specific in case you’ve skipped ahead to read this. In the very earliest version, believe it or not, that was just going to be an epilogue tacked onto the end of the planned collection of short stories, but I quickly realized that was a stupid idea; I needed to build up to it more than that.

  It’s almost tempting to include that original epilogue here—yes, I wrote it—but I’m going to resist the temptation. I was nineteen when I wrote it, and I wrote about as well as you might expect a reasonably-bright nineteen-year-old obsessed with sword and sorcery to write, which is to say, badly.

  At any rate, I realized early on that I needed to do it right, in a climactic story describing Garth’s last errand for the Forgotten King, and that was to be a novelet called “The Last Quest,” in which Garth would fetch an item of great magical power from the crypts of Ur-Dormulk and bring it back to Skelleth for the Forgotten King. The central menace would be Dhazh; back then the cult of Aghad had not yet developed into anything like its final form, and I had not yet worked out any details of the Age of Destruction. The nature of the desired object was not yet determined; I think my preferred theory at that point was that it would be some of that blood oozing from Dhazh’s truncated horn. I’m really not sure when it became the Book of Silence.

  And the final scene—the epilogue—would have taken place in the King’s Inn, rather than in Dûsarra.

  When I revamped the whole project to be mostly novels, I decided that this should all be combined with “Return to Dûsarra,” which was to have been the story tying up all the loose ends from “City of the Seven Temples,” such as dealing with the cult of Aghad. The two stories blended nicely, becoming what wound up as Chapters Five through Twenty-Eight of The Book of Silence.

  When I gave up the idea of including any short stories in the series, the already-written “The Dragon of Orgûl” became Chapters One through Four and part of Five—well, except that the scenes involving Haggat were added later.

  And Chapters Twenty-Nine and Thirty were added when Lester del Rey pointed out that ending the series with Chapter Twenty-Eight would be a really bad idea—bad enough that he wouldn’t buy the novel if I stopped there. That was a very, very convincing argument, especially since I had largely outgrown my adolescent morbid streak by the time I got around to actually writing the book.

  So those are the sources in my own plans for The Book of Silence, but there was another source for the whole series that had been just background before, but came to the fore in this volume. I refer to the works of Robert W. Chambers and Ambrose Bierce, specifically the collection The King in Yellow and the short story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.”

  This all starts with the Bierce story. “An Inhabitant
of Carcosa,” written in 1887, describes a citizen of the great city of Carcosa who finds himself in an unfamiliar place that he eventually recognizes as the ruins of Carcosa, where he finds his own gravestone. It’s a nice little ghost story that somehow caught the fancy of several later writers, most notably Robert W. Chambers, who in 1895 published a collection of short stories under the title The King in Yellow. Several of the stories in the collection, though not all of them, were tied together by mention of certain mysterious objects, apparently all related, chief among them a blasphemous, madness-inducing play entitled “The King in Yellow” and a strange symbol called the Yellow Sign.

  And the play, “The King in Yellow,” is set in Carcosa, and mentions several of the names Bierce invented for his story. We get tantalizing hints of the play’s setting, characters, and content, but never anything even remotely resembling an actual explanation. Chambers (perhaps deliberately, perhaps not) appears to be not entirely consistent with Bierce’s story; for example Bierce created the name “Hali” but applied it to a person (or perhaps a deity), while Chambers applies it to a lake.

  At least two other writers then borrowed from Chambers, much as he had borrowed from Bierce; H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos drew heavily on the horrific aspects of Chambers’ creation, while Marion Zimmer Bradley adapted the hinted court intrigues and psychic powers from “The King in Yellow” into her Darkover series. (In case you’ve ever wondered why, for example, the name Hastur appears in those very dissimilar works, now you know—they both got it from Chambers.)

  Right from the very start, I borrowed Chambers’ King in Yellow as my mysterious mentor figure, the Forgotten King; as the series progressed, though, I decided that I would borrow considerably more than that. I went through The King in Yellow end to end, noting every detail, every name, every vague hint Chambers gave about the play, the Yellow Sign, and all the rest of it. I assembled all this into my own grand theory of just what the heck was going on, and then used that as the background for my own story.

  I had already created my own gods and my own maps, but Chambers had never dealt with those, so there was no contradiction. I decided that the play, “The King in Yellow,” was set during, and written during, the Eighth Age of my invented chronology, the age when light and darkness were in balance, and that it was the events described in the play that tipped the balance and began the world’s long, slow, inevitable slide into despair, destruction, and death.

  And I went to great lengths to make my descriptions of the city of Ur-Dormulk match the descriptions Chambers gave of Carcosa—or rather, what his Carcosa would have been if it were sacked by barbarians, left in ruins as Bierce described, and then rebuilt atop the ruins. The strange deep lakes, the mysterious fogs, an illusion of twin suns, doors sealed with the Yellow Sign...

  It was great fun working all this in—and I’m sure the vast majority of readers never noticed.

  Oh, lest anyone wonder about plagiarism, it’s certainly not an issue legally, since The King in Yellow went into the public domain long before I was born; ethically it’s perhaps slightly less clear-cut, but building on the work of previous authors is a tradition going back millennia. Had Chambers still been alive I would have asked his permission, but he was not.

  Other influences on the series that I should probably mention, as long as I’m at it, would include Michael Moorcock’s Elric and his sword Stormbringer; I admit that the Sword of Bheleu owes something to Stormbringer. Fritz Leiber’s stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were part of the inspiration for the crypts of Ur-Dormulk, and specifically for the pillar/fountain, which was my own version of the fountain in Lankhmar’s Plaza of Dark Delights.

  And I think that covers it.

  The Book of Silence was first published January 1984 by Del Rey Books, ISBN 0-345-30880-8. The original cover art was by Darrell K. Sweet. There were at least four Del Rey printings. The novel has been translated into German, Spanish, and Italian.

  The Del Rey edition went out of print in the early 1990s, and I reclaimed the rights. In 2001 I signed a contract with Wildside Press to publish this new edition.

  In preparing the Wildside Press edition I’ve generally followed the Del Rey edition. A few typos and other small errors have been corrected, and I’ve modified some punctuation I thought was off, but no significant editing has been done.

  The only significant differences are in these appendices, and the new map. The map in the Del Rey edition, although based on my own original map, was drawn by Chris Barbieri, and Wildside was unable to obtain the rights to it. We are therefore using the revised map I drew for the new edition of The Lure of the Basilisk, as adapted by Alan Rodgers at Wildside.

  The Appendices are new for this edition.

  —Lawrence Watt-Evans,

  Gaithersburg, MD, March 2002

  Appendix B

  The Histories of Garth of Ordunin, Written and Unwritten:

  The original 1974 plan for the Garth series was for twelve stories, ranging from 3,300 words (“The Dragon of Orgûl”) to novel length (The Lady in the Jewel). In chronological order, they were to have been:

  1. “The Master of Mormoreth”

  2. “City of the Seven Temples”

  3. The Lady in the Jewel

  4. “The Scepter of Dor”

  5. “The Eyes of Kewerro”

  6. “The Dragon of Orgûl”

  7. “The Decision of the Council”

  8. “The Fall of Fortress Lagur”

  9. “Skelleth”

  10. “Return to Dûsarra”

  11. “The Jungle by Night”

  12. “The Last Quest”

  “The Master of Mormoreth” was to start with a prologue explaining the series premise, and “The Last Quest” would end with an epilogue wrapping the whole thing up. The theory was that these could eventually be gathered into two volumes—a collection and a novel. Or possibly, if they ran longer than expected, two collections and a novel.

  All the stories except “Skelleth” and “Return to Dûsarra” were begun; four of the first six were completed, but never published.

  In 1975 or early ‘76 the plan was modified slightly—”The Decision of the Council,” “The Fall of Fortress Lagur,” and “Skelleth” were to be combined into a novel called The Decision of the Council.

  In 1976 I decided that I should focus on novels, and the list was revised again, becoming primarily a series of novels. The first, The Overman and the Basilisk, incorporated “The Master of Mormoreth,” but expanded and extended the story, and was completed in 1978. The other novels were left unwritten until the first sold.

  In 1979 The Overman and the Basilisk sold and was retitled The Lure of the Basilisk, and the series was continued, now planned as five volumes:

  1. The Lure of the Basilisk

  2. The City of Seven Temples

  3. The Eyes of Kewerro & Other Stories (short story collection)

  4. The Decision of the Council

  5. The Last Quest

  The Lady in the Jewel was dropped from the series as no longer really fitting in properly; the possibility of inserting it somewhere later was kept open.

  The proposed novel version of The Last Quest would combine “Return to Dûsarra” and “The Last Quest.”

  The second novel, The City of Seven Temples, was written, expanding the 12,000-word novelet “City of the Seven Temples.” Lester del Rey was not satisfied with it, and felt that it was too slow in getting to any sort of action or magic, so it was extensively revised, incorporating a piece of “The Eyes of Kewerro” into an early portion of the novel, resulting in The Seven Altars of Dûsarra.

  That also resulted in rethinking some of the series structure, since there were loose ends in The Seven Altars of Dûsarra that were to be tied up in The Decision of the Council, and waiting an entire volume to address them seemed to be a mistake. Besides, t
he intended title story of the collection had been cannibalized and was therefore no longer available.

  The revised plan was this:

  1. The Lure of the Basilisk

  2. The Seven Altars of Dûsarra

  3. The Decision of the Council

  4. The Dragon of Orgûl & Other Stories (short story collection)

  5. The Last Quest

  The Decision of the Council was written in 1981, and retitled The Sword of Bheleu. Its resemblance to the original fragment from 1975 was very faint, and although much of the intended plot of “Skelleth” did wind up incorporated into it, virtually no trace of “The Fall of Fortress Lagur” remained. In fact, by that point I think I’d forgotten “Fall” had ever existed, though one or two minor elements survived.

  And after that was done, I looked at what I had left to work with, looked at the short fantasy markets, thought about how the series had developed, and decided that the only short story I still cared about at all was “The Dragon of Orgûl,” which could hardly be a fourth volume all by itself.

  So it was expanded into the first four and a half chapters of The Last Quest, which was retitled The Book of Silence, and the series was completed in four volumes, rather than five.

  The astute observer will have noticed that this means the following stories were not included anywhere in the final version: The Lady in the Jewel, “The Scepter of Dor,” “The Fall of Fortress Lagur,” “The Jungle by Night,” and a fraction of “The Eyes of Kewerro.”

  “The Fall of Fortress Lagur” and “Eyes of Kewerro” could still have fit into the series reasonably well; the other three just didn’t belong in Garth’s adventures as they eventually developed. I may yet re-use some of the premises, though.

  Here are quick summaries:

  The Lady in the Jewel: The Forgotten King wants a sorceress named Sharatha, who rules the city of Ilnan, removed from the world. Garth initially assumes that this means she must be killed, but learns that in fact she is from another universe, a world inside a magical gem, and was exiled to Garth’s world by her enemies. He agrees to escort her home, but finds himself entangled in the same web of feuds and power struggles that caused her exile in the first place.