Empire of the East

by Fred Saberhagen

  The first balloons were loaded; the crews who were to do the launching were moving about briskly and capably in the gloom. Rolf did not see when Thomas gave the final signal for the attack, but those who were required to see did so. Two men standing by the mooring ropes each tugged and released a knot, and Rolf beheld the dim cliffside, ten meters from his face, begin abruptly to slide down in silence. Gray’s balloon kept pace, its basket rocking gently, the dim fire of the image of the djinn suspended near it. The line connecting Rolf’s balloon to Gray’s drew gently taut, then slackened again. The longer lines, that the next craft were to follow up, were paid out from their reels outside the baskets.

  The edge of sky that Rolf could see past the bottom of his balloon was now brightening with a hint of dawn. Higher the two baskets swung, moving in the perfect silence of a dream, emerging now from the deeper shadows at the base of the cliffs, so that the rocky walls before them rapidly grew more distinct. Turning for a moment to the west, Rolf could see the plains and desert, night-bound still, stretching far into vague, retreating darkness. His homeland, and the ocean, would be visible from here by day. But there was no time now to think of that.

  Up and up…

  Rolf’s drawn sword snapped up in his hand to guard position, as the utter quiet was shattered by the strident cawing of a reptile. The creature had been dozing on the cliff face, a pebble’s toss from the balloons, and it had wakened to see the strange shapes soaring past. Sluggish with chill, wings laboring, it came out in a dark, slow explosion from the rocks, and fled them upward strainingly. Mewick and others who had their arrows nocked were quick to draw and loose at it, and it was hit but not brought down. Clamoring all the louder, it flew on up above the great gasbags and out of sight.

  From somewhere farther up there came a slow-voiced, cawing answer, and then another, higher yet. Then there was silence once more, until it almost seemed that the citadel might have returned to sleep.

  Up and up. The men hanging in the baskets, straining to see and hear, had little to say to one another. Rolf found himself gripping the wicker rim inside the quilted armor-padding, trying to lift the craft into a faster climb. He could see Gray murmuring to the djinn.

  Rolf was expecting that at any moment they would top the cliff, but they had not done so before there came sure proof that the enemy had awakened. It was a small squadron of reptiles on reconnaissance. Their cawing and snarling was heard above, and then the soft thumps of their bodies striking atop the gasbags. The craft continued to rise steadily. The mail of plastic links had proven too tough for reptilian teeth and claws, and their bodies were not weighty enough to hold down the balloons.

  When the reptiles flew down below the bags to find the baskets, arrows and slung stones bit at them accurately. They screamed and raged and fled; some fell, transfixed by shafts, turned into weights with fluttering fringes dropping through the brightening sky.

  Now came the first sign that Som’s fighting men were reacting to the attack. Rolf saw black-trimmed uniforms running on ledges on the cliffs. A slung stone thunked on the padding-armor right in front of him, and he crouched lower. A fur-clad Northman in Rolf’s basket loosed an arrow in reply, and on the cliff face a man dropped, toppled and slid on the steep slope, trying to cling to it with the shaft in him, plowing up a little avalanche.

  Rolf knew they could not have much farther to ascend, but still the top came as a surprise. The cliff face fell back abruptly into a tableland, rough and split by many crevices, but essentially flat. At the rear of this horizontal reach, Som’s low-walled citadel sprawled, backed by the next leap upward of the mountain. Across the little distance that separated his balloon from Gray’s, Rolf heard the wizard barking orders to the djinn. The two balloons, each trailing a long spider-filament of line, slowed and stopped their ascent just above the rim of the cliff. Just here, almost beneath Rolf now, the narrow pass delivered the road it had caught up on the plain below.

  Modest earthworks on one side of the debouching road defended the pass against a climbing army, and in fact formed the only real defense short of the citadel’s own walls. These works manned by half a hundred men might easily hold the road, it seemed, against Thomas’s four thousand, so great was their advantage of position. Ten or twelve men were in the trenches now, pulling on black helmets and gaping confusedly at the balloons. Their fortification offered no protection against attackers dropping from the sky.

  Gray was smoothly ordering the operations of the djinn. Gas hissed from the bag above Rolf’s head; the basket he was riding skimmed rock, just in from the cliff’s edge. He pitched out a metal grapple on a line, and leaped right after it. The balloon bobbed up with the removal of his weight; for a moment he stood there alone, the sole invader of Som’s stronghold. But in the moment it took him to catch the grapple and fix it in one of the many crevices in the rock, Mewick was standing beside him, short sword and battle-hatchet at the ready. Then with thudding sandals others were landing, at their right and left. Gray swung from his bobbing basket, agile as a youth. Across ten meters of empty ground the ten invaders faced the unfortified rear of the strong point that looked so indomitably down the pass; ten black-helmed Guardsmen, more or less, stared back as if uncertain they were real.

  Excepting Rolf and Gray, the aerial troops had been hand-picked for guts and viciousness, and those proved first in fighting skill had been selected for the first balloons. The struggle for the earthwork began without an order, in the space of one short breath, and it was over in the time one might draw a long breath and release a sigh; only one fighter of the West had been cut down. Rolf sprang forward with the rest, but all the enemy were slaughtered before he had a chance to strike a blow. Still gripping his unmarred sword he turned to Gray; the towering wizard with a motion of his arm was already sending out the signal of green fire, bright as a small sun in the morning sky, leaping and shining in the air above the pass.

  Rolf turned and cried out: “Sound the horn!” A Northman, blood from a scalp wound running in his eyes, had the twisting beast-horn already at his lips; he gave a nod, and winded it with all his might.

  Sheathing his weapon, Rolf ran back to his balloons, made them secure with double grapples, and deciding where the second pair should land. He was none too soon, for they were close below and rising rapidly. When they arrived, he helped to land them, pulling on the thin ropes that the first balloons had trailed, while their fierce passengers leaped out and set themselves to hold the pass and landing place. Rolf stayed at the landing place, seeing that the new balloons were tied down, and looking for the next. When he glanced toward the citadel, he heard alarms and signals there, and saw folk running on the walls, and reptiles in a sluggish swarm above them. The main gates had been open, and still were; at any moment a force must sally out to push the Westerners from the cliff. Rolf looked the other way, down the road that became a twisty ribbon marking the bottom of the pass, but the army of the West was still invisible. It would be hours before their legs could bring them to this height.

  In the earthworks, men had already methodically separated the slaughtered Guardsmen’s heads from their bodies, gathered the freed collars and thrown them down the cliff; the valkyries, coming down from the high mountain, hovered and sniffed but could find no one to save. Rolf and the others, taught by Gray to expect the flying things, still stared at them, Rolf with particular fascination.

  “Demons!” someone called out. It was not an expletive, but a warning.

  Faces turned to Gray. He had already seen the disturbances in the air a little way from the citadel, hanging low, more like the roiling of heat above fires than like rainclouds. Opening his satchel, he pulled out of it a flowery little vine, wrapped as if for sustenance around a piece of damp and maggoty wood. In Gray’s other hand was a silvery-gleaming knife.

  As the two presences drifted nearer in the lower air, sweeping reptiles in a timid swarm before them. Gray brought the blade near the tender, innocent green tendrils of the vine. He muttered a
few words in a low voice—and cut.

  Silver flashed in the sky above the citadel, like a reflection or mirage of an enormous axe. The blow that struck one of the demons came in utter silence, but was irresistable nonetheless; its image in the air split in two spinning halves. Gray scarcely looked up; his hands, those of a gardener, kept at their work, severing and plucking leaf from stem, slicing, splitting, and demolishing the vine. Gray breathed upon the rotten wood, and green flame sprouted from it. In unburned hands he held it up, watching the clean flame devour the clinging fragments of the petals, leaves and stems. “Yiggul,” he said with feeling, “trouble our fair world no more.” And he chanted verses in a language Rolf did not know.

  Fire burned now in the sky as well consuming the scattered pieces of the demon. Its companion paused in his advance, but then came drifting on again.

  “Now, Kion, let us say farewell to you.” Gray reached into his satchel once more.

  The roiling disturbance in the air, the size of a small house, shook for a moment as if with fear or rage, then came toward Gray like a hurled missile. Some of the men around the wizard threw up their arms or ducked their heads; others, just as uselessly, raised shield and blade. Gray shot forth his arm, and the object he had pulled from his satchel—it looked like some trinket of cheap metal—was held above the chunk of burning wood. The hurtling demon was transformed into a ball of glowing heat. Rolf heard, more in his mind than in his ears, a scream of pain beyond anything he had yet heard upon a field of war. Kion’s course was bent from what he had intended. He struck the earth far from the Western men, spattering flames and rock about his point of impact, where he left a molten scar; he bounded up again, twisting and spinning like an unguided firework, and all the while the scream went on unbreathingly, and Gray’s unburning hand continued to hold the bauble in the fire. The metal of it, tin or lead mayhap, melted in beautiful silvery drops that fell into the flame and there unnaturally disappeared. And as the bauble melted, so diminished the fireball that had been the mighty demon Kion, flashing madly from one part of the sky to another until it vanished in a final streak of brilliancy.

  Gray pressed his hand down on the fiercely burning wood, and it went out like a candle. “What are these others here?” Gray asked in a low voice. “Do they propose to try our strength, after what we have just done?” Rolf saw that there were indeed a scattering of other disturbances in the air, man-sized waverings visible to him only now when the larger two were gone. He heard, or felt, the thrummings of their power. Alone, he might have fallen down or fled before the least of them. Standing here with Gray and Loford, now, he found he minded these minor demons no more than so many sweat-bees or mosquitoes. And now as if they had heard Gray’s challenge, and chose not to accept it, the swarm of them began to disappear. Rolf could not have said just how; one moment the air above the citadel was thick with them, then they were fewer, and soon they were no more.

  “So, then, masters of the Black Mountains,” mused Gray, still in the same low tone of conversation, that you would not think was audible ten meters off. He stood straight, dusting his hands absently against one another. “So. Do you mean then to let our differences be settled by the sword? In the name of my bold companions here I challenge you: march out and try with blades to pry us from this rock!”

  Rolf heard no answer from the citadel, only a shouting from behind him, where more balloons were ready to discharge their fighting men. He ran back to take charge of the docking. Thomas, in a gleaming barbut-helm, was arriving in the ninth pair of airships, a position he had hoped would allow him to oversee both ends of the operation.

  When Rolf turned back toward the citadel he could see through the open gates that men were marshalling inside as if to sally out in strength. Confusion had been replaced by the appearance of purpose.

  “Som is on the battlement,” said someone. “See, there. I think he wears a crown of gold.”

  Rolf shivered. The day was chill. Winter was near at hand, and this place was high.

  “If he takes the field,” warned Loford, “do not strike at him, but only ward his blows. The wound you would inflict on Som the Dead is likely to become your own to bear.”

  Gray, too was shivering, calling for a cloak.

  Why should the sun seem dimmer, when there were no clouds? And Rolf had a feeling in his guts like that of being lost, alone, at night amid a host of enemies…and now, why should he think there mighty be something wrong with the mountain, that it might crumble and collapse beneath his feet? Loford, Thomas, all of them, were beginning to look at one another with dread.

  Gray said softly: “Zapranoth is coming.”

  VIII

  Chup’s Pledging

  Chup nodded once to the expectant-looking jailor—who stood near the door of Charmian’s cell. The man responded with a facial contortion that might represent a smile, and took two steps backward to a spot well shaded from the feeble glimmerings of dawn now probing down the demons’ chimney. There he let himself down carefully and lay still. Only his feet remained clearly visible, like those of a man laid low by stealthy violence.

  At the cell door, Chup paused a moment to try to seating of his new sword in its sheath, and give a loosening shake to the nerve-tight muscles of his shoulders. He thought in wonder that if he were plotting a real escape for Charmian, instead of this safe pledging trickery, he would not be quite as tense as this.

  The heavy bar grated as he raised it from the cell door, and he reminded himself to strive more realistically for silence. Cautiously he turned in the lock the key he had been given. The massive door swung outward at his pull. Chup’s shadow fell before him into the uncleanness of the cell. There Charmian huddled on the floor, wearing the same black clothing of her audience with Som, shimmering garments, slit revealingly, foolish now as rags would have been at the Emperor’s court.

  When she recognized Chup, the sharp terror in Charmian’s face turned dull; she had evidently expected visitors even more menacing than he.

  He stepped back from the doorway and said in a low voice: “Come out, and quickly.” When she did not move at once he added: “I’m going to try to free you.”

  The words sounded so utterly false in his own ears that it seemed impossible that clever Charmian could believe them for a moment. But she stood up and came toward him, though hesitantly at first. Her blond hair hung disheveled, half-concealing her face. Without a word she came out of the cell, and stood against the wall, her face averted, while Chup played the game of dragging the shamming guard into the cell and barring up the door again. Then at a motion of Chup’s head she followed close behind him as he set foot upon the downward path.

  They had gone down perhaps two hundred paces, when Charmian in a small voice broke the silence: “Where are we going?”

  He answered, without turning. “We must go down, in order to get out.”

  Her footsteps behind him stopped. “But down there is where the demons nest. There is no way out, down there.”

  Startled, he too stopped, and turned. “How do you know? Have you come this way before?”

  She seemed surprised by the question. “No. No, how could I have?” Still she was not looking directly at him.

  “Then follow me,” he growled, and started down again. After a moment her soft footfalls followed. She must believe his masquerade, or she would be screaming at him or pleading. But the evidence of success brought him no satisfaction.

  Pretending to be cautious and alert, looking this way and that, pausing now and then as if to listen, he led her down toward the pit. He felt weary and awkward as if he had been fighting to the point of physical exhaustion. It will mean changing yourself, Som had said, you must do violence to your old self. Yet what Chup was supposed to do was basically quite simple, and on the surface there was nothing in it difficult for a bold man. He was to bring her down (by fair words and promises, not by force—that had been emphasized) to the Demon-Lord’s chamber at the bottom of this hole. There where she expecte
d a door to freedom he was to give her to the demon. And then he was to run away. If he did not run away, and briskly, the chamberlain had warned him, Zapranoth in his demonic humor might nip him too.

  His pledging was a task for one who giggled and ran away, and Chup now liked it less than ever. He did not see how he could succeed, how Charmian could fail from one moment to the next to guess the truth. Well, let her. But no, she still followed him obediently. He realized suddenly how desperate she must have been, how ready to grasp at any hope.

  His pretended alertness suddenly became real. From below, where all had been ominous silence, there arose now a murmuring strange sound which he did not at once identify but which he did not like.

  The first whisper of it froze Charmian in her tracks behind him. “Demons!” she whimpered, in a voice of certainty and resignation.

  Chup had been assured there would be no interference, no distractions, while they were going down. He took a step back, fighting his own fear of demons, trying to think. Thinking was not easy; the sound grew rapidly louder, and at the same time more plainly wrong. It put Chup in mind of the gasping of some unimaginable animal; it made him think of a terrible wind sent blowing through the solid earth.

  Now there was light below, a pinkish glow, as well as sound. Chup could make no plan. As if seeking each other’s humanity, by instinct he and Charmian put their arms around each other and crouched down on the narrow path. The sound was almost deafening now, a climbing clamor flying upward from the pit. With it came the aura of sickness that accompanied demonic power, an aura stronger than Chup had ever felt before. The brightening roseate light seemed to drive back the feebly growing glimmerings of the sun. He clenched his eyes shut, held his breath—and the rush, as of a multitude of beings, passed by them and was gone.