Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Alarm grew in him as he went through the silent castle, finding no waking man or woman or animal as he went. Only Boyce himself moved and was awake. And that in itself was frightening. There was a purpose so sure and grim behind all that had been happening to him since he broke the crystal window and heard the Huntsman laugh—no, since before that. Since the beginning of the year he had lost.

  In all that while, he sensed now, he had been moving inexorably along some path predestined for him by an unseen planner. Nothing happened to him that did not move him nearer whatever relentless goal the planner meant him to reach.

  Today, he thought, he had come to a milestone of that progress. Today, surely, he alone of all the castle was awake for a purpose not his own. The air whispered with the passage of invisible people as he went up floor by floor, searching the silent building.

  Tancred, in the topmost tower, he did not seek until the last. He was not sure about Tancred. In that room of magic, there must surely have been a screen to protect the castle’s wisest man from the onslaught of the City.

  UP AND up Boyce went through the sleeping castle.

  “Sleeping Beauty,” he thought. “Sleeping Beauty in the enchanted castle—a spell like this. I wonder—it might have been just such a castle. And there may be more precedents than we know for the old tales. Sleeping Beauty—”

  He paused on the stairs. Until that moment he had not thought of the real sleeper in this castle. Whether Kerak waked or slept or lay under an all-embracing enchantment, the Oracle would surely stand as she always stood, locked in her strange sleep.

  Tancred had told him nothing of her. And the rest of the garrison folk were too much in awe of this marble girl to say even what little they knew. “I’ll try it, anyhow,” he thought. “I’ll go to her and ask—”

  In the center of his brain that small, coiled, alien censor seemed to stir to life. Weariness that had not let him listen when Tancred spoke of certain things. Something was not willing for Boyce to speak with the Oracle.

  But this time he fought it. This time he would not surrender. A deadly weariness weighted his limbs as he climbed, but he set his jaw and climbed grimly on.

  “You,” he thought, “whoever you are—this time you’ve got to fight.”

  Was it that nameless, formless being who had moved him like a pawn on the chessboard for the forgotten year in his own world and the uncountable days he had spent in this? Had that chess-player taken up a citadel in the center of Boyce’s own brain?

  “If you have,” he promised doggedly, “from now on, you’re going to have trouble with me.”

  Weariness was a weight like death itself on his shoulders. His eyelids drooped. Sleep was in the castle, brimming it from barbican to donjonheight. He was all but drowning in it. The stone stairs wavered before him like stairs seen under water.

  But the weariness in itself spurred him on. For now he knew he had guessed correctly. They had left him awake for a purpose of their own when they deluged Kerak with sleep. But if he meant to fight, then he too must slumber while they accomplished whatever deadly thing they planned.

  He would not sleep. The stairs were mountains under his stumbling feet. His brain swam with the fragments of dreams. But grimly, step by step, his feet carried his reeling body on. And at last, after a time more fluid even than normal even in this floating world, the stairs no longer rose under him.

  Here was the hall of the Oracle. And there, far away, hung the purple curtains netted with silver threads. Far, far away, down an endless corridor that dissolved before him . . .

  He had no memory of walking that hall. He knew his relentless body must have carried his spinning head forward, but he did not know at the time what went on. He only knew, at the last, that something soft touched his outstretched hand, waking him out of a troubled nightmare.

  For this moment, at least, he was his own man again. Sharply and clearly the world came back into focus and he was awake once more. The castle still brimmed all around him with sleep and the smell of magic, and the air now and then swirled as if invisible beings went quickly by. But Boyce, at last, was vividly alive.

  He put out a firm hand and pulled the curtain back.

  There was the cage of fire, alive and softly humming with its own vitality—and within it, the marble girl. It had not occurred to him to wonder if he would find her here. To his mind she was as fixed as a statue in her niche, and he was not surprised to find that so far as the eye could tell she had not moved or breathed or spoken since that hour in this same hall when the hand of the enemy had last fallen upon Kerak.

  Now, in the presence of the enemy again, with the hall swimming in alien magic, Boyce stood quiet, breathing hard, and waited.

  It seemed a long while. She stood facing him, ice-pale hands clasped before her, her ice-white hair and ice-white robes falling in unbroken lines to her feet. He felt a moment’s almost irresistible temptation to put out an exploring finger and touch the robe, the clasped hands, to learn if he could whether she and the robe were of the same marble, if this were a statue or an image of half-living wax or a woman incredibly empty of life.

  He did not quite dare. He stood watching the closed eyes, the closed lips with their line of pure, flawless beauty as inhuman as the beauty of a stone image. And he saw, almost imperceptibly, the lips part.

  “What do you ask of me?” the cold, clear, distant voice inquired.

  And for a moment, hearing that voice he was struck as he had not been struck before by his utter loneliness here. It took this voice from the chill, inhuman lips to remind him most clearly that he was the only living, waking human in Kerak—unless Tancred had been spared.

  All around him the air flowed with hostile magic. The castle was a great chalice brimmed with sleep, a tomb for the half-dead slumberers whose lives hung upon the caprice of the conquering City. Only he stood here alive and awake, and all his hopes were pinned on this marble being which was surely neither awake nor alive.

  “Tell me what to do to save Kerak,” he said, his voice a little unsteady.

  IF SHE understood, she gave no sign. He was assuming, somehow, that she knew what was happening around her, that the closed eyes did not need mortal vision to tell that closed and marble brain of Kerak’s danger. He wondered if she cared at all.

  In the silence, watching those closed lids, he thought the air had begun to shake a little, to a deliberate rhythm. It was the faintest possible pulsing through the hall, but his senses were strained to their highest pitch just now and he was almost sure of what he heard.

  Then the Oracle spoke.

  “Hear me,” she said in that clear, indifferent voice. “Hear me. There is one who comes to Kerak.”

  Now he was sure. The strong rhythm beat out its measure and the air quivered in response. Someone was left alive then, after all. Someone who—who marched upon Kerak? For the rhythm was like the tramp of heavy feet, measured, relentless coming nearer with every succeeding beat.

  “One man comes,” the Oracle fold him. “The magic comes before him. He is a man who must die, or Kerak dies.” She paused. Then, with chilly indifference, she said, “The man’s name is Guillaume du Bois.”

  Tancred’s door was studded with iron Stars. Boyce paused before it, hand lifted to knock, and listened to the heavy beat like thunder in the air that echoed the footfalls of the man who was coming to destroy Kerak. He could still not quite believe what the Oracle had told him.

  His own queer, spontaneous hatred for Guillaume made him distrust his own reactions. The thought of killing Guillaume—if he could—was a dangerously exhilarating thing. But Guillaume had gone out to risk his own life for Kerak’s sake, and Guillaume was Kerak’s lord.

  His knuckles on the star-studded door made hollow echoes that rolled down the hall behind him. There was no sound from beyond the door. He knocked again, and waited, while the coming footfalls of—Guillaume?—shook the air through all of sleeping Kerak.

  Then Boyce lifted the latch of Tancred’
s door and pushed it slowly open.

  A curl of rosy smoke drifted past him as the door swung back. It smelled of flowers. Fanning it away from his face, Boyce looked into the room which no eyes but Tancred’s had ever seen since the builders left six hundred years before? An hour, a day, a century—time had no meaning in Kerak.

  This was a room of magic, but its magic had not saved the man who lay here, fallen forward across a low table with his head resting on his arm and his white beard streaming across the carved edge of the table. With all of Kerak, Tancred slept. On the painted surface before him a heap of silvery ash in a black dish smouldered slowly, giving out the flowery smoke that floated in layers through the air. It shuddered rhythmically now to the increasing footfalls of him who walked toward Kerak.

  “Tancred!” Boyce said hopelessly. “Tancred!”

  To his amazement, the lolling head moved a little. Very slowly, with infinite effort, the big shoulders drew themselves up and the magician rolled his head sidewise slightly and groaned.

  Boyce found himself on his knees beside the low table, shaking Tancred’s shoulder.

  “Can you hear me?” he demanded. “Tancred, are you awake?”

  He was not awake. But neither was he wholly asleep. Somehow, in the few moments between the coming of the magic and the conquering of Kerak, Tancred had managed to perform some averting spell which partly nullified the effects of slumber. Probably, Boyce thought, it was this smouldering ash that filled the room with rosy layers of cloud and the fragrance of flowers.

  “Tancred!” he repeated. “Can you hear me?”

  This time Tancred’s eyes opened a little and his black eyes looked out through a film of sleep into Boyce’s face. It was as if the mage looked at him through a curtain, standing alive and wakeful and impatient behind the veil which he could not lift.

  “Shall I trust the Oracle, Tancred?” Boyce demanded urgently, shaking the black-robed shoulder. “There’s a spell over Kerak—you know that? The Oracle tells me I must kill Guillaume. Does she speak the truth, Tancred?”

  LIGHT came briefly into the half-lidded eyes of the mage. The bearded lips stirred. Tancred made a mighty effort to break the bonds which magic had forged upon him. Boyce saw the veins stand out in his heavy neck, and the dark face which the suns of the Holy Land had tanned too deeply ever to fade grew livid with strain.

  But he could not speak. The bonds of sleep were too heavy. He gave one last convulsive effort that lifted his head a little way off his bended arm, and Boyce saw him nod—once, twice. It was enough. He had his answer.

  Then the magician’s breath ran out in a sigh and he collapsed again in slumber upon the table top while the futile, flower-smelling smoke wreathed about him unnoticed.

  “Kill Guillaume,” Boyce heard himself saying softly in the quiet room.

  The air shuddered around him. No—this time, not the air alone. The floor shook underfoot. There was the sound of heavy boots on stone, and each footfall made the whole of enchanted Kerak tremble to its foundation.

  Suddenly Boyce felt his heart beginning to thud in quickening beats that matched the approaching steps; the breath was thick in his throat and exultation filled him as the enchanted sleep brimmed in Kerak Castle. His hatred for Guillaume was a tangible thing. He knew now, in a flash of understanding, that he had lived every hour in Kerak toward this one moment—toward the killing of Guillaume. For that purpose, it seemed to him now, he had been born, and lived to this one exultant hour.

  There was no reason behind it. Dimly he knew that it must have been foreordained to happen so—or why was only he awake in Kerak when the destroyer came? But he would not think of it now. He would not try to reason why Kerak’s lord had come back to Kerak as its destroyer. Reason was not in him. Hatred was all that remained, and the exhilaration of battle.

  The footsteps, like the tread of a giant shaking the stairs they mounted, were very near him now. The air was thunderous with its echoes of that tread. Dimly Boyce thought there were moving shapes about him, brushing his garments as they went invisibly by. He had no time to wonder.

  There was a sword lying across Tancred’s table, close by his limp, outflung hand. Boyce snatched it up, stripped the sheath away, balanced the great blade in his fist. And is he did so, a sort of electrical shudder ran up his arm from the hilt, and Tancred, lying across the table behind him, stirred and sighed. The sword moved of itself in Boyce’s grasp. It made an arch through the flower-scented air and brought itself up into position.

  It was a magical sword, he knew then.

  Laughter sounded in the hall, deep, wild laughter that was not wholly Guillaume’s. More subtlety was in the sound than Guillaume had ever known. Then, for the first time since enchantment had fallen upon Kerak, Boyce remembered Hugh de Mandois, and how strangely changed he had come back to the Crusaders.

  CHAPTER VII

  False Crusader

  THE star-studded door flew open with a crash that echoed and re-echoed in Tancred’s tower-room. The rosy smoke-layers swirled wildly. Guillaume’s great bulk filled the doorway. He was laughing as he came, in deep, shaking gusts that Boyce thought must ring through all of the silence and the magic that brimmed Kerak.

  Guillaume’s huge sword, bare in his mighty scarred fist, flashed in the dim air of the chamber. His face was not mirthful. Though he laughed, it was his mouth alone that laughed. His eyes had the veiled look that Tancred’s showed. A shadow was over his arrogant, stubborn face, and it was a terrifying shadow.

  “Tancred!” Guillaume roared, in a voice that should have wakened every sleeper in the castle. “Tancred, this is the hour you die!”

  He took one ponderous step forward—the whole room shook to that inhuman tread—and the great two-edged sword swung up over the mage’s head.

  In some remote comer of his brain Boyce knew suddenly and certainly that this was not the true Guillaume. The enmity between them was an enmity of the blood, a bond like kinship which neither could have broken by himself.

  The Guillaume who had left Kerak would never have ignored Boyce standing here with a sword in his hand, to roar threats at a sleeping Tancred. No—this Guillaume was not the same man who left the castle.

  Of its own will the blade in Boyce’s grasp swept up in a glittering arc. And it rose not an instant too soon. Guillaume’s sword was already falling, and in another moment the mage’s head would have rolled from its shoulders across the painted table.

  There was a clash in mid-air like the clash of meeting thunder-bolts. Fire sprang out as steel screamed against steel. Guillaume thundered a ponderous curse in a tongue Boyce had never heard before (the tongue they speak in the Enchanters’ City? he wondered wildly) and the great blade rose again, shearing through the wreaths of colored smoke above Tancred’s head.

  It was a strange battle. They were iron men in the days of the Crusaders. The mighty swords they swung were so heavy a modern man could scarcely lift them in both hands. Magic alone made it possible for Boyce to meet the terrible, crashing blows Guillaume was raining upon his blade. Magic and the cunning of the sword which fought of its own enchanted will—and the fact that Guillaume never once really turned his blows against Boyce himself.

  Guillaume—walking in magic, and with the shadow on his face that was not wholly the face of Guillaume—had come for one purpose only to Kerak. He had come to kill Tancred the Mage. All his sword-strokes were bent upon the sleeping Tancred. It was Boyce’s part to keep the steel shield of the magical blade between Guillaume’s and the magician. He did not have to fight to protect himself, but the fight to protect Tancred was a desperate battle indeed.

  Lightning leaped through the chamber whenever the great blades screamed across one another. And Guillaume’s footsteps thundered impossibly upon the flagstones, every tread shaking the whole castle. He was more than a man—he was a sorcerer’s godling, walking in thunder and wielding the lightning. But he fought blindly, and he walked blindly, and it was not Guillaume behind that arrogant, sh
adowed face.

  The end came suddenly. Boyce knew he had no part in it He felt the blade he wielded shift itself in his grip, leap as if with abrupt triumph and dart at last in a flickering lateral stroke that snaked in under Guillaume’s blow and struck the Crusader hard, edge-on, against the corded thickness of his neck.

  It was a clean blow. It should have lifted Guillaume’s head clear of his shoulders. But it did not Sparks leaped out as if the blade had struck steel instead of muscle and flesh. There was a dazzling coruscation of jagged lights, and a ringing sound like a gong struck heavily, and Guillaume cried out in a strange, breathless voice, “Dieu lo vult! Dieu—” as if that blow were what he had prayed for.

  Then everything shifted inexplicably, indescribably, before Boyce’s eyes. The chamber that yet rang with lightning and thunder from the battle of enchanted blades fell suddenly silent. Guillaume was falling.

  He fell slowly. The two-edged sword dropped from his slackened grip and clanged upon the flagstones. He sank to his knees and very deliberately seemed to float forward until he lay face-down upon the floor. Boyce heard the great sigh he gave as he collapsed.

  It was as if deafness had suddenly been lifted from Boyce’s ears, then—for Kerak Castle awoke.

  And on the painted table, Tancred sighed and stirred. All through the castle beneath them were stirrings and startled voices as the slumberers awoke. The air no longer shuddered to every motion Guillaume made. He was a normal man again, with only a human’s powers. And looking down at him, Boyce was surprised—but not entirely surprised—to see that from his neck a broken collar hung.

  It was a collar of glass.

  Tancred rose. Boyce, turning to face him, saw that the magician was breathing heavily as if he and not Boyce had fought that battle of the enchanted swords. Sweat was bright upon his brown forehead above the meeting brows, and his great chest heaved.

  “It was you,” Boyce said softly, holding out the sword.