Empire of the East

by Fred Saberhagen

  This time, however, Charmian did not resume her noise-making, nor did she try to flee. Instead she stood with bright eyes smiling past Chup’s shoulder. He heard a foot crunch gravel behind him on the path.

  It was Tarlenot who stood there. He had already drawn his sword, at sight of the lawn littered with writhing, groaning men. His eyes lighted unpleasantly in recognition as Chup turned round to face him. Tarlenot was not a tall man, but powerful and long of arm. His short pink tunic showed bare legs as muscular as Chup’s had been in his days of full strength. Around his thick neck was clasped a thin collar of some dark, plain metal, a strangely poor-looking thing for one to wear who was otherwise garbed luxuriously. Tarlenot’s face was haughty now, more so than Chup remembered; the countenance of a pouty child grown big and muscular; his fair hair fell with a slight curl round his ears. He nodded his head lightly in recognition to Chup, and gave him a little smile. But he made no move to sheathe his sword.

  “Tarlenot,” said Charmian’s ethereal and tender whisper. “Make this one a gardener for us.”

  Chup bent and picked up the sword dropped by the wizard Hann, who still sat moaning, bleeding lightly, on the flagstones. The sword seemed stout enough, though its twisted fancy hilt was not much to Chup’s liking. It did feel better than it looked.

  “That is no gardener’s tool,” Tarlenot observed. “And here we do not need another lord.”

  Charmian giggled quietly. “Tarlenot, his legs have grown too straight. Bend his knees for him. We will get him a little cart, and he will tend our flowers.”

  Chup sighed faintly and moved a step farther from his lady. It was hard, when the woman you were devoted to might stick a knife between your ribs. She was his bride, and the only woman he wanted, but there would be no trusting her.

  “Tarlenot,” he called, waiting while the other made up his mind. “One questioned me about you. Only a few days ago.”

  “Oh? In what connection?” The mind had been made up. “First, though, would you rather I only cut your tendons, or took your legs clean off? They say that useless limbs are worse than none at all. You should know, is it so?”

  “He was one who meant to do things to you that you would not like.” Chup stepped slowly and easily forward. “Now he will never have his chance.” His legs were working very well, but he could have wished to give them their first real test in practice. He raised his blade as he advanced, and Tarlenot’s sword came up in a motion quite gentle and controlled, and with a careful metal touch the duel was joined.

  With the first preliminary touches and feints Chup knew that he had met a formidable enemy, and one cautious enough not to be deceived by Chup’s scarecrow appearance into taking the scarecrow lightly. And when Chup had to make a really quick hard parry for the first time, he realized there was no great endurance left in his own body, long underfed, but newly healed, and just finished with a long ride.

  Tarlenot was fresh and vigorous. Had it not been for the residual effect of the healing elixir—fading now, though the good work it had done remained—Chup might have been quickly beaten. His muscles were left aching and quivering by two or three exchanges at full power and speed.

  They circled slowly on the gravel path and flagstones, and felt for cautious footing amid the flowers between the tinkling fountains. Chup as he turned saw Charmian pass within his range of vision; he saw her with a gesture stay her other attendants, now running up, from any interference. He saw how bright her eyes were, and the expectant parting of her perfect lips. She would take the winner, but only to use him and discard him when it was to her advantage or merely suited her whim. Chup knew that, if Tarlenot perhaps did not. But she was Chup’s…

  And then in front of her face came Tarlenot’s. “Let me see,” said Tarlenot, “if I can hit the old wound on your spine, within a finger’s breadth. How was it done? Like this?” And he attacked.

  Chup parried desperately, and riposted; his weary arm thrust wide. “Not like that, no,” he said. “But with some skill.” Demons and blood, but he was tired.

  And Tarlenot knew it. He was now carefully making sure that Chup’s tremulous near-exhaustion was no sham. Now that Tarlenot had measured Chup’s reach and something of his style, he began to push the fight harder. Harder, till he himself began to puff.

  Now Chup gave ground steadily as they circled. Sheer desperation kept him going, now. He might back into a corner…he saw before him the gardener on his cart, with lifeless eyes…

  No, he was the Lord Chup, and he would win or die. And just then Tarlenot’s sword came flicking in a little faster than before. Chup saw the danger but his weary, tardy arm could not make the parry quite in time, and he felt the hot bite of the wound along his side.

  With that hurt there came before Chup all the blackness of the past half year, all of it seemingly alive before him in the person of his foe. The hurt was rage, the rage was fuel, the only hope and power he had left. He let his fury drive him forward, striking fast and hard, stroke after stroke—and then he staggered, halting. He feigned a final exhaustion before his ultimate reserve of energy was quite gone. Tarlenot, with triumph too early on his face, came thrusting in as Chup had thought he would. Chup parried that thrust and spent his final strength in one last blow, straight overhand, cleaving downward at the angle of his enemy’s shoulder and neck.

  The sword touched glancingly the blackish metal collar, and then bit down through garments, flesh, and bone. He saw Tarlenot’s eyes bulge out, and the red fountain leaping from the wound. Clear down to the breastbone Chup’s sword smote, and Tarlenot was driven to his knees, and then fell backward dead, his arms flung wide.

  Chup found the strength to set his foot upon the ruined tunic that had once been silken pink, and wrench to get his swordblade free. He staggered back, then and got his back against a wall. He leaned there choking while the world grew gray and dim before him with the throbbing of his heart, as if it were his own blood puddling up the walk.

  But he was not bleeding much. His searching fingers told him that the cut along his side had parted little more than skin.

  Charmian…but she was gone. That was all right. Let her play any game she wanted, but he was going to have her now. As soon as he had rested for a bit. A sound made him turn. A small mob of lackeys were goggling timidly at him from a distance. The odd sound did not emanate from them. From where, then?

  Straight up. A flying reptile had emerged from one of the windowlike openings that marked the mountain’s dead black upper slope. It was winging down toward where Chup stood—but not on reptile’s wings, he realized. Its rounded, headless body, dead and rigid, considerably bulkier than a man, hung beneath a speed-blur such as the wings of hummingbirds drew in the air. But this blur was a thin, horizontal disc, a spinning, not a vibration up and down. The noise it made, growing now into a whining roar, was like no sound of life that Chup had ever heard. The thing came rushing, almost falling, down toward the garden.

  Chup pushed himself away from the wall. He had seen something of the magic that the Old World had called technology (though never a machine that flew), and knew the hopelessness of fighting with a sword against machines. He moved toward the doorway beside Charmian’s empty divan; the flying thing looked too big to get in there. But before Chup reached the door, the wizard Hann was coming out to meet him, not as a foe but welcoming, with a flushed maidservant skipping beside him awkwardly, trying to finish tying a bandage on Hann’s arm.

  “The Lady Charmian sends you greetings…” Then Hann noticed the flying machine’s approach, and Chup’s attention to it. “No, no, Lord Chup, do not concern yourself; it is not a fighting device. Put up your sword. Come in! The Lady Charmian greets you, as I said, and expresses her apologies for all of this unfortunate…she will soon receive you. You have the golden charm with you, I trust? She begs you, let her maidens tend you now. When you are rested and refreshed…”

  Chup was not really listening as he went on with Hann inside the door. Anyway the machine
was not coming to Chup. Instead it descended close beside the corpse of Tarlenot. Just above the ground, the flyer hovered, while the shining whirl of speed on top roared down a blast of air that pressed down bushes, kicked up dust, and rippled grass. Along the headless metal body there stood symbols, meaningless to Chup:

  VALKYRIE MARK V

  718TH FIELD HOSPITAL BATTALION

  In another moment the rounded metal body opened six secret holes, three on a side, and from them came extending hidden legs, sliding jointed things like insects’ feelers grown monstrously large. These reached for Tarlenot and probed him, one delicate leg-tip clinging to the dull metal collar beside the great leaking leer of his wound. Then suddenly and effortlessly the flying thing gathered up Tarlenot’s dead weight with its slender legs, drew it up and swallowed it into a coffin-sized cavity that gaped suddenly in the metal belly and as suddenly closed again. The six legs retracted and the Old World thing shot upward once again, roaring a louder noise and blasting the garden with a greater rush of air. It raced up toward the place whence it had come. Turned insect-sized again, it vanished into one of the windows where, according to Jarmer, the Beast-Lord Draffut dwelt.

  Chup had stepped outside again, and remained gaping upward until prompted by Hann’s diplomatic voice. “When you have rested and refreshed yourself, Lord Chup, and dressed in finer garments, your lady waits to see you.”

  Lowering his eyes, Chup saw six serving girls approaching. All were young but ugly; his lady preferred her servants so, he knew, to heighten by contrast her own beauty. Carrying towels and garments and what might be jars of ointment, the girls advanced very slowly, looking almost too frightened to put one foot before another. Chup nodded. He would have to relax his guard sometime. “I would put down this sword that I have won, but I seem to have no scabbard.”

  Hann hastened to amend this lack, unburdening his own waist, wincing when he moved his wounded arm. “Here, take all. Indeed I think I am well rid of it. Let the shoemaker stick to his last.”

  When he had wiped and sheathed his sword, Chup let the servants of Charmian lead him along a short path into another garden, and from that into another wing of the same low, sprawling building that Charmian had entered. He could not yet see its full extent; perhaps all of Som’s court lived in its separate apartments. In a luxurious room the servants stripped away Chup’s filthy rags, and tended the light cut along his side with what seemed ordinary ointments, not the demon’s cure. The girls’ fear of him abated rapidly, and by the time they had immersed him in hot water in a sunken marble tub, they were talking almost freely back and forth among themselves. After serving Charmian, he thought, any other master must be a relaxation and a pleasure.

  He hung the love-charm of springy golden hair upon the twisty hilt of his captured sword, and set both close beside him as he soaked and washed and soaked again. He was too weary to give the least thought to his attendants as females. Amid their nervous chatter, though, he caught their names: Portia, with the blackest skin and hair that he had ever seen, and a bad scar on her face; Kath, blond and buxom, with eyes that looked in different ways; Lisa, shortest and youngest, nothing quite right about her looks; Lucia, shaped well enough except for her huge mouth and teeth; Samantha and Karen, looking like sisters or even twins, with sallow skins, pimples, and stringy hair bound up in the same peasant style as that of the other girls.

  When Portia and Kath had finished scrubbing his back, Lisa and Lucia poured on rinse water, and Samantha and Karen held a towel.

  When he had been clothed in rich garments, Karen and Lucia fed him soup and meat and wine. Between mouthfuls he touched the golden charm, safe now in an inner pocket of his tunic of soft black. He only tasted the wine, for already sleep hung like weighty armor on his eyelids. “Where is my Lady?” he demanded. “Is she coming here, or must I go to her?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation before Kath, with noticeable reluctance, answered: “If my Lord permits, I will go and see if she is ready to receive you.” At this the other girls relaxed perceptibly.

  His weariness was great, and he reclined on a soft couch. Though he had much to think about, his eyes kept closing of themselves. “Keep talking,” he ordered the five girls. “You there, do you sing?” And Lisa sang, and Karen fetched out an instrument with strings. The music that they made was soft.

  “You sing quite well and easily,” Chup said, “for one who serves the Lady Charmian. How long have you been her servant?”

  The girl paused in her song. “For half a year, my Lord, since I was brought to the Black Mountains.”

  “And what were you before?”

  She hesitated. “I do not know. Forgive me, Lord, my head was hurt, my memory is gone.”

  “Sing on.”

  And then he was waking, with a start, the golden charm clenched in his hand inside his pocket. It seemed that no long time had passed, for the sun still shone outside, and the young girls still made their soft music.

  His tiredness was like the hands of enemies gripping all his limbs, but he could not rest until he had made sure of her, at the very least seen her once again. He arose and walked out of the building, into the garden under the upper mountain’s looming bulk. On legs that pained but could not rest, he paced the paths and lawns, emptied now of men and cleaned of signs of violence. He entered the building where she had gone in. In a narrow passage he caught a whiff of perfume that woke old memories clamoring, and at a little distance heard Charmian’s well-remembered laugh. He put aside a drapery.

  Some distance inside a vast and elegantly female room, Charmian sat on an elaborate couch. She was facing Chup expectantly, though his coming had been soundless. The man who sat there with her, facing her, had fair hair that fell with a slight curl around his ears. His long, strong arms emerged from the short sleeves of a lounging suit of black and pink. As this man arose, turning toward Chup the wary, pouting eyes of Tarlenot, Chup could do nothing but stand frozen in the doorway, marking well the scar, wide and long but neatly healed, that ran down from the joining of neck and shoulder to vanish on the hairy chest—ran down from just below the metal collar that bore a little shiny spot left by a sword.

  IV

  Djinn of Technology

  The army of the West lay camped for the night, a day’s march to the northeast of the Castle. Around them the plain was no longer a true desert, but a gentle sea of sparse grass, now drying and dying before the approaching winter. Once long ago the flocks of peacetime had grazed here.

  Thomas now had with him more than four thousand soldiers, all holding in common a hard hatred of the East. The ranks of his own fighters of the Broken Lands had been greatly swollen by volunteers from Mewick’s country and others in the south, from the offshore islands, and from the north, whence came warriors who wrapped themselves in unknown furs and made strange music from the horns of unknown beasts.

  In the early evening the camp murmured with the feeding of the army and the digging of temporary defenses for the night, with the hundred matters of organization and repair that must be tended to before the second day’s march. Inside Thomas’s big tent were crowded the score of leaders he had called into a meeting.

  The first matter that Thomas raised with them was the golden charm, and its sudden departure to the East. That the charm was magic of great power was obvious to all, and none blamed Rolf for having fallen so deeply under its influence that he had not spoken of it during the long months since he had found it, while it forced him to cherish secret thoughts of a woman he would otherwise have hated. Still he was downcast and somewhat ashamed as he sat at one side of the circle in the tent. Thomas, Gray, and a few others were at one end of the long test, their chairs around three sides of a plain table, the fourth side being open to the wide circle of onlookers who made themselves comfortable upon the matting of the floor. Thomas sat at the center of the table looking up at Gray who was on his feet and holding forth.

  “Some of you know, but some do not,” Gray was saying, “tha
t I and other wizards of the West have for some years spent most of our time in a desperate search for the life of Zapranoth, the Demon-Lord in the Black Mountains.”

  There was a faint murmur round the tent. Rolf felt a little better, seeing how many of the others’ faces mirrored his own ignorance of what the higher wizards did.

  “It now seems possible,” continued Gray, “that I stood next to the life of Zapranoth where I had scarcely thought to look for it: inside the walls of that strong Castle we left yesterday. It is possible—I think not likely—that the Demon-Lord’s life was hidden in that twist of hair.”

  Eyes turned to Rolf, enough of them so that he felt he had to speak. “I had no thought or feeling of any demon near me, before or after the charm was taken from me.”

  Gray had paused to survey his audience. Now he said: “A number of you are still looking at me blankly, or frowning suspiciously at that young man. I am convinced that a short lecture on the ways of demons is in order.” Having received a nod of agreement from Thomas, he went on. “The ordinary layman, soldier or not, has little hard knowledge of magic, though it almost daily influences his life. And to him the ways of demons are as unaccountable as those of earthquakes.

  “I must make sure you understand me when I speak of our search for the life of Zapranoth. Now that we are on the march and can hope that spies have been left behind us, I can speak somewhat more freely. If you understand it may be that you can help, and if you help we may still succeed, and if we succeed in slaying the Demon-Lord of the Black Mountains it will count for more than would grinding the walls of Som’s citadel to powder. Depend on that.

  “Now. When I speak of finding a demon’s life, I do not mean his active presence but his essence, secret and vulnerable—what the Old World seems to have called the soul. A demon’s soul is separable in space from his personality. It is invisible, impalpable, and of vital importance, for only through it can he be destroyed. To keep his soul safe, he may hide it in any innocent thing: a flower, a tree, a human’s hair, a rock, the foam of the sea, a spiderweb. He may keep it far away from him, where his enemies will not think to look for it, or near at hand where he will more easily know when it is threatened, and take steps in its defense. What is it?”