Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Tancred nodded. He was still almost too breathless to speak. He took the weapon from Boyce’s hand and drew a finger down the length of the blade, and Boyce saw something—some brightness, some strange aliveness—fade and go out in the wake of the moving finger.

  “Yes,” Tancred said. “But without you, I must have failed. My thanks to you, du Boyce.” He slid the sword back into its scabbard and dropped it on the table. “Now as for him,” he said, nodding toward the prostrate Guillaume, “—as for him—I wonder.”

  HE DROPPED to one knee beside the fallen man, reached out a cautious finger to the shattered glass collar which had stopped that deadly final blow. He touched it—and there was a clear, ringing sound like a wineglass shattering. The collar leaped of its own volition and flew into a glittering powder, and was gone.

  Guillaume stirred and moaned.

  Gently Tancred turned the Crusader over. Guillaume’s head fell back and his thick throat worked convulsively.

  “I—it was not I, Tancred—they sent,” he whispered.

  “I know, Guillaume. No matter now.

  You’re safe.”

  Guillaume scowled and shook his head a little, with infinite effort. “No—not safe. Godfrey—I must go back—”

  Tancred laid a ringed hand over the Crusader’s mouth.

  “Hush, Guillaume. You were possessed. You have no strength left even to tell us what happened. Wait.”

  He rose wearily. Boyce, watching, was aware now for the first time of the strangeness of this tower-room. Until this moment he had been too preoccupied with the urgency of what was happening to see any more than the essentials of the place. Now he saw—the magical things.

  There was the pool the castle woman had whispered of. It lay in a little alcove on the far side of the room, round, framed in bright tiles, and a tiny tide of its own surged slowly outward in rings from the center of the circle. And magic hung over it Boyce could not have said why, but he could sense it in the air above the pool.

  Shelves lining the walls were thick with things Boyce had no name for. He saw books in many languages, some of them he was sure not earthly languages. A harp hung on one wall, its bright strings rippling a little now and then as if invisible hands stroked them, giving out the faintest possible humming music, almost below the level of hearing. And in one louvred box in a corner he thought he caught a flicker of motion occasionally, as if some small being moved inside.

  Tancred took a crystal goblet from a shelf. It was empty when he touched it, but by the time he had turned and bent to Guillaume, the goblet was half filled with something translucently red and pungent-smelling.

  “Drink this,” Tancred said, kneeling and lifting Guillaume’s head. The Crusader obeyed. He seemed too exhausted to move of his own will or to question anything the mage might say. It was an unnatural exhaustion. There was about it something almost like the utter emptiness of the Oracle.

  But after he had drunk, a little life came back into his face. He lifted himself weakly on one elbow and looked up urgently at Tancred. His voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

  “Godfrey—” he said. “Prisoner—in the City. Help me, Tancred. I must go back to him.”

  “Your strength is very little, Guillaume,” Tancred told him. “It will not last long. Tell us what happened while you can.”

  Guillaume closed his eyes for a moment before he spoke.

  “We went into the City as we had planned. I met my—my acquaintances there. They were eager to buy the secrets I offered them. We bargained. I—knew there was one close to the councils of the Sorcerer King. I waited for him—too long. I never saw his face, but his name is Jamai—he is a very evil man.”

  Guillaume’s voice faded. He waited, gathering his strength, and then went on in a weaker voice.

  “There are—factions in the City. The King—would not destroy us utterly. He hates us, Tancred. but for some—strange reason—he would destroy us one by one, not all together and Kerak with us. Jamai is his chief enchanter. He hates us too, and he has no scruples.

  “Do you know, Tancred—there is a bond between Kerak and the City? Some bond that keeps the City from drifting on its way? The lands do move. The City has its course, like a ship. Jamai would be off on that course. He longs to cut the bond, whatever it may be, that holds them here.”

  Tancred nodded.

  “I think I can guess what it is.”

  “He—will destroy Kerak,” Guillaume went on. “All this was—his doing. The King—did not guess. I was mistaken about Jamai. I tried to bargain—secretly. He took us both—Godfrey and me. I must go back for him,” Guillaume was silent for a moment, and his eyes clouded as he looked back into the past.

  “He is hostage,” he said. “For my success here. I must release him, Tancred. He lies in—a strange prison. Strange—I cannot tell you how strange.”

  “How was this magic done?” Tancred asked. “Do you know that?”

  Guillaume nodded weakly.

  “The collar,” he said. “I would have sworn it could not be—that I should wear the collar of a master. But I wore it. And the spell—was simple. Sleep ran out before me—as I came. It was not I . . . I think Jamai—or his mind—rode mine as a man rides a horse. He saw through my eyes. Until the collar broke—it was not I.”

  He struggled to sit up.

  “Now I must go back,” he said. “Godfrey—”

  Tancred put out a hand and pressed him back.

  “One will go for Godfrey,” he said. “Not you, Guillaume. But Godfrey shall be saved if mortal man can save him. Rest assured of that.”

  Guillaume was not to be assuaged so simply. He lay back in obedience to Tancred’s hand, but his eyes were fiercely questioning.

  “Who?” The voice was only a breath.

  Across the Crusader’s body Tancred’s eyes met Boyce’s.

  “The answer to your problems, du Boyce, does not lie in Kerak,” he said. “I have known that for many days. Will you seek it in the City?”

  Startled, Boyce glanced at Guillaume, meeting the glare of his own eyes looking back out of that arrogant face so much like his.

  “You can serve yourself and us,” Tancred went on. “If you take up the links of Guillaume’s plot I think you may find your way more easily than if you go alone. For only you can go—as Guillaume.”

  BLUE mist swirled about his knees as he walked slowly across the sandy plains between Kerak and the Sorcerers’ City. Boyce drew the blue cloak about him more warmly, for this air was damp and cold. Beneath the cloak he wore tunic and hose from the store-rooms of Kerak, and across his chest the red Cross of the Crusader blazed.

  It was the cross men wore who had set their faces toward Jerusalem six centuries ago. None in Kerak carried the cross upon their backs to proclaim the pilgrimage completed, though all but Tancred still cherished the hope of doing so. For them, time still lingered where they had left it to step into this cloudy oblivion in which no sun rose or set.

  Boyce touched his face experimentally for the hundredth time. He was not yet sure how Tancred’s skill had managed to engrave there the arrogance which marked Guillaume’s most sharply in contrast to his own. The drooping moustache of the Crusader was all that remained of the golden beard which had grown during the days—the weeks, the months, perhaps—of his convalescence. To the eye, he passed as Guillaume.

  And he was going deliberately—like a fool, he thought—into the same trap which had sprung on Guillaume. He wondered a little why he was risking so much for the sake of these people who were nothing to him except exiles from the same world. True, they had taken him in. He owed them gratitude for that.

  But he went into dangers now too deadly to have names. Remembering Hugh de Mandois, he shuddered. To be possessed by a scaled demon such as Hugh’s—to be ripped apart like a garment, body and bone, when the demon chose to stand forth . . .

  No, he had no duty to the Crusaders that could force him to risk a fate like that. He risked it of his own will. He
risked it because of—gratitude?—kinship? He knew it was not true. He would have gone if Kerak had never stood here on its crags, if Godfrey and Guillaume were dust in the world of their birth.

  He must have gone, and he knew it—because of a woman whose face he did not know, a woman who had looked briefly over her shoulder at him in a fragment of memory and smiled beneath her iron crown.

  She dwelt, he thought, in this city before him. Tancred had told him that much, And Tancred had told him of the bond which linked Kerak to the City.

  “You have wondered about the Oracle, du Boyce,” Tancred had said an hour ago, sitting in a high-backed chair in his tower room and turning a cup of wine in his jeweled fingers. “Before you go, I think you must hear all I know of her story. She is—” He hesitated, looking down into the wine. “She is the child of my only child,” Tancred said finally.

  Boyce straightened in his chair, muffling an involuntary sound of amazement.

  “Then she is alive!” he said. “I thought—”

  “Alive?” Tancred sighed. “I do not know.

  I have learned much about science and about magic since we came to this land, and I have seen much in my mirrors of secret things in the City. But about this one thing I know almost nothing. I know only that some terrible wrong has been done, and I think it is resolved, for good or evil, the bond will always hold between Kerak and the City. Unless one or the other is destroyed . . .”

  He sipped his wine.

  “Drink,” he urged Boyce. “You will need strength for your journey. The lands between here and the City walls are cold and the mist is like floating rain. Drink your wine and listen.

  “The City was much farther away from here when my daughter, who had come to us from Normandy on the Crusade rode out one day and lost herself in the mists. It was the last we saw of her for a long while.” His face grew grim, the black brows meeting above the black eyes.

  “Those of the City took her,” he said after a pause. “The Sorcerer King beheld her, and because she was beautiful, he kept her in his palace. He had many slaves. To do him full justice, I “Believe he held her in high honor. She was a very lovely woman. She bore one child to him—a daughter. Then she died.

  “I have never known how. Perhaps poison. Perhaps the bowstring, or some more mysterious way. Or perhaps she sickened, and died of her illness. I never knew. I saw her but once before her death—briefly, outside the City walls.

  “The child lived on in her father’s palace, and grew and became a woman. It is very strange, that—” He shook his head, the emeralds glittering in his ears beneath the turban. “Time goes so differently there and here. I think time moves and is counted in the City.

  “I know my daughter’s daughter grew to womanhood while here in Kerak there was no time at all. Young pages among us now were young pages before my grandchild’s birth, and now she—she stands in her fiery bower, a woman grown.”

  He poured more wine.

  “What happened in the City I do not know. She was her father’s favorite, and I think some quarrel came up between them, and for punishment, perhaps, he made her as she is now.

  “I only know she came to us like a ghost, like a marble woman, walking with closed eyes and clasped hands, white as snow, and as silent. Some instinct seemed to lead her to her kinsmen when she could no longer endure the City of her birth.

  “We took her in and tried to tend her, but she asked only for a room in which she could dwell quietly. We gave her the room you have seen. And when we came in the morning, she stood as she stands now, in that cage of singing fire. She spoke to us from it, with the voice of an oracle.

  “There is much power in her. With those closed eyes she can see into men’s souls. Wisdom is in her, but locked behind that silence.

  “She is not always caged. There are times when the fire dies down and vanishes, and then she walks from the castle into the mist and is gone awhile. I think—I cannot be sure, but I think she meets someone down among the plains. But always she returns to her room and the bower of fire takes shape around her again.

  “It is my belief that so long as she dwells here the bond between her and her father, the King of the Sorcerers’ City, will anchor them to us as a ship is anchored. And if what Guillaume tells us is true, the King will not have all of Kerak destroyed while his child remains here. He would gladly kill us all—but not his daughter.

  “That is why I think there is hope for your mission to the City. If Jamai, who is the King’s minister, were king himself, my hopes would be small. I can tell you no more than this. As far as I may, I will watch you. It may be I can help. But I think you came here for a purpose—led by what magic I cannot guess—and I am sure the answer to your coming lies in the City.”

  He drained his cup again.

  “Do what you can for us there, du Boyce. Remember you have a link with us in Kerak too. Your likeness to Guillaume is no accident.”

  A FAINT drift of music through the mist roused Boyce from his thoughts. He looked up. Above him loomed the high walls which he had first seen from that gateway through the solid rock when he broke his way into this world. Lights gleamed from the heights of the wall. He could hear the tented roofs billow a little in the breeze from the plains and the fog was stained with bright colors where the glow fell upon it.

  Boyce turned and went left along the base of the wall. There was a small gateway he must find, marked with a circle of blue lights. Guillaume had told him it was a pilgrims’ gate. Guillaume said the drifting City was for many in this unstable land a holy city, filled with altars to gods that bore strange names. Pilgrims from far away over the plains sometimes came here, by twos and threes, by caravans, sometimes alone.

  Guillaume had told Boyce the word that would let him in.

  “Say you come to worship Nain,” he said. “You need only that one name—Nain. Many of the pilgrims do not know the tongue the City speaks, so you will not need to know it. You can make yourself understood. The people of the streets speak a patois of which our own French tongue has become a part in the long time we have lived in Kerak.”

  He hesitated, a look of bewilderment overspreading the exhaustion of his face, but he did not think that idea through. It was as well.

  Kerak and the City must have lain anchored together on the drifting lands for a long time indeed, if the old French had incorporated itself into the street patois.

  “You must ask the way to Nain’s temple,” Guillaume went on. “One will meet you there when you have done, as I told you. After that—” He shrugged. “Dieu lo vult.”

  A gateway in the wall loomed up at Boyce’s right. It was closed. Upon the panels a painted face with staring yellow eyes regarded the fog. Boyce went on by, trying to shake off the illusion that the eyes rolled to watch him pass.

  THE next gate was open, but the insignia painted on the back-flung leaves was a standing dragon, and something about the scaled picture reminded him forcibly of that monstrous thing which had cast aside the garment of Hugh de Mandois’ body in the hall at Kerak. He wondered what he might find if he went in at this gateway—wondered if it was here that Hugh had entered—and passed quickly by.

  The third gate was closed. A ring of blue lights glimmered on its panels. Boyce stood before it in the rolling fog, drew a deep breath.

  This was the gate. Under this arch he must enter the enchanted City and find the answer to the questions which had driven him so long and so far.

  He slipped his hand into his belt and touched the one thing he had brought with him from the outer world—that small, cold crystal which had cast its web of light upon a wall and opened a window for his entrance. It lay there against his side, hard, cold with a faint chill that struck through his clothing. It was his only link with her—nameless and faceless—and the lost year he had sought so long.

  Perhaps he might find his answer soon. He lifted his hand and knocked faintly upon the gate. There was a long silence. Then with a sighing of hinges the blue-lit door swung open. />
  Music drifted through it, and someone’s light laughter from far away.

  Boyce squared his shoulders and stepped forward.

  He entered the City of Sorcerers.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Called Bluff

  “KERAK’S quarrel,” Guillaume had said, “is with the Sorcerer King and the men about him. The common folk of the city know little about us and care less. You can go safely among them—or as safely as anyone may go who enters for a pilgrimage. That is not very safe, du Boyce. Go carefully.”

  The man who looked out of the opened gate bore out Guillaume’s warning. He was a swarthy, small man with shifty eyes and a bandage around his head. He gave Boyce a look of indifferent dislike and said something in a tone of bored inquiry.

  Boyce said, “Nain.”

  The gatekeeper nodded and stood back. Boyce bent his head under the low archway and stepped into the street within.

  It was a narrow street, walled by high, narrow houses. Colored lanterns hung here and there from upper windows, and the pavement was wet with fog, reflecting the lamplight. A curious city, Boyce thought, in which it must seem always just dusk, with the first lamps lighted in the streets.

  This was a street of music and merrymaking, to judge by the sounds that came from the windows he passed. Most of them were set with tiny diamond-shaped panes that distorted the scenes within, but he caught glimpses of confused colors and shifting bodies and heard laughter and the smell of wine drifted from every open door. There was strange, wild music that sent its rhythm echoing involuntarily through his mind.

  The people on the street were a mixed lot. Tall, fair men in striped robes that billowed around their long strides—short men, redskinned, in turbans and tight-fitting coats—women with perfectly transparent veils across their faces, who smiled indiscriminately upon every passerby—women the color of polished ebony, who wore broadswords and swaggered as they walked in their scarlet tunics down the middle of the street.

  Boyce, tall and fair-haired, in his blue cloak and scarlet-crossed tunic, had no reason to feel conspicuous in that crowd. No doubt there were symbols upon the garment of many others with meanings as esoteric as those on his, drawn, perhaps, from the worlds as unknown here as Earth.