Putting on garments and taking them off without for a moment ceasing to hold the Sword was something of an accomplishment, but by now the Crown Prince had had several days in which to practice. For him the necessary maneuvers had already become something like second nature.
Only when Murat was fully dressed and ready did it occur to him that the time had come, according to his own plan, for him to sheathe his Sword. After a momentary pause he did so. Though there was no one in the little room to see him, he performed the act with a ceremonious gesture.
Then the Crown Prince at once left his room. After a perfunctory tap on the door of the adjoining chamber, he entered quickly. Inside he found a sleepless Carlo already up and armed.
The lad looked tired and pale, but bravely he announced his readiness to go.
In the upstairs hallway, father and son encountered Captain Marsaci, who had come for them, bearing a torch, promptly at the appointed time. With the captain lighting the way, all three men proceeded downstairs.
Some hours before Murat had decided that to launch their flight from inside the farmhouse would be impractical. He had chosen the hayloft, in the barn, as offering the best security from observation.
The demonic maiden, who had disappeared from Murat’s room a few minutes earlier, sat waiting upon a bale of straw for the three men as they climbed a wooden ladder. Behind her the big doors through which hay was normally loaded were standing open to the night.
Marsaci sneezed, on entering the dim, dusty space. Then the captain started to sneeze again, but the spasm was aborted when he belatedly caught sight of the demon waiting for them. Despite the demure appearance of the image, Marsaci did not for a moment mistake it for a real girl.
“Are you ready, my lord?” the maiden asked, addressing Murat as she got to her feet.
“Ready.”
In an instant her form had swollen to several times the maiden’s size, and changed into the shape of a giant, winged reptile, crouched on two hind legs that looked too heavy for anything that could fly. A wicked head, armed with long yellow fangs, turned on a long neck to grin at the waiting men. The torch shook in Marsaci’s hands, and he mumbled something.
Blaspheming various gods, Murat clapped his hand on his Sword-hilt and snarled an order.
“A bird! Let us have a bird, vile creature!”
“As you say, Master.” And in a twinkling rough scales were replaced by sable feathers. A giant black bird, with yellow eyes and curved raptorial beak, crouched ready to be mounted. No saddle or bridle were in evidence; perhaps that meant none would be needed.
Boldly Murat stepped forward, and without hesitation straddled the creature’s back. He turned his head to stare at his son.
Reluctantly Carlo clambered aboard behind his father, clutching the older man around the waist with both arms.
There was no delay. The Crown Prince barely had time for a last word to Marsaci before father and son were swiftly carried into the air.
Carlo groaned and gasped.
Murat gasped too, a sound of triumph rather than of fear. Then he let out a loud yell of exultation. They were being borne upward at breathtaking speed, into an aerial realm of clouds, sluiced with cool mist and shot with intermittent moonlight.
The night air howled past the travelers at a terrific velocity, but the Crown Prince soon discovered that his journey was not, after all, going to be swifter than the wind. Carlo behind him was suffering a fit of terror, and came near plunging to his death and dragging his father with him.
His father, getting little or no help from Akbar, was forced to struggle awkwardly to hold his son on the bird’s back.
Shouting at Carlo did no good, and Murat directed his yells at the demon. “Stop! Return to the earth! Land, I command you!”
At last, in response to bellowed orders from the Crown Prince, the rush of air diminished. The dark earth rose to meet them, and a landing was effected in some farmer’s field.
Disembarking from his black, feathered mount, Murat dragged Carlo whimpering and almost sobbing aside, the pair of them trampling waist-high corn. In the distance, toward the city, thunder grumbled and rain was threatening.
The Crown Prince shook his son, and cursed him.
“What are you afraid of? Not heights, don’t tell me that. I have seen you stand on a clifftop without whimpering, and climb a castle wall where there were no stairs.”
“It is the demon—the demon, Father—the touch of it is horrible—”
“Nonsense. The touch of defeat, of failure, is the only real horror. Pull yourself together, be a man!”
Carlo managed to establish some measure of self-control. “I can only try, Father.”
“You can do more than that. You can succeed!”
They were on their way back to where they had left Akbar, when Carlo suddenly put a hand on Murat’s arm.
“Father, I have a confession to make. Something you must know, in case I die before I have another chance to tell you.”
Murat stopped in his tracks. “What is it?”
“Once, on patrol—the time we fought the skirmish—I once used the Mindsword.”
Stopping in his tracks, the Crown Prince stood for a moment as if paralyzed. Then he screamed: “How could you lie to me? How many converts did you make? Where are they now?”
“Only one—only one, Father. The man they call Ben of Purkinje. I do not know where he is now.”
Murat started to choke out more abuse, then paused. “There is no time now to settle this. How could you betray me in such a way?”
“No, Father! There was no betrayal! I swear it! I ordered him to help you.”
“To help me? How?”
But his son did not answer. The Crown Prince could see Akbar, at a little distance, still in bird-form, crouched and undoubtedly listening.
“Later we will settle this,” Murat grated at his son. “Mount! We are going on.”
Carlo, almost fainting, once more climbed aboard the silent demon. In moments they were airborne again. This time the Princeling did not struggle in the air, or show any signs of terror. Rather he rode as an inert weight, as if he were already dead.
The rushing flight continued, in darkness and near- silence. Presently Akbar turned back his bird’s head to announce that they had almost reached their destination. Neither of the human passengers was quite able to believe this. But before either of them really thought it possible, the city appeared.
“Sarykam,” the demon informed them, its voice a guttural grinding through the rush of air.
Indeed, there lay ahead, still far below the sable masses of those mighty wings, a vast sprawling darkness beneath the clouds, a region vaguely distinguishable from the ocean to the east, and from the fields and farms and orchards to west and north and south, picked out by specks of random firelight.
The distance to the capital was diminishing at a speed that seemed incredible to Murat. Already individual structures could be distinguished. Lower and even more swiftly flew the demon. The walls of the city took shape out of the darkness and rushed beneath the demon’s wings. And now more stone walls, even higher barriers, loomed just ahead.
These, unmistakably, formed the south flank of the palace.
Both passengers flinched involuntarily as the massive construction hurtled closer. The ramparts were marked with a few high narrow windows that looked too small to admit their flying bodies. One moment a violent crash seemed unavoidable. In the next—Carlo closed his eyes and did not see how the trick was done—the outer wall and its open windows were behind them, and he and his father were enclosed within a high and otherwise deserted corridor. Already they were on their feet, staggering to establish their balance upon a solid floor as the great black shape of their carrier dissolved to nothingness beneath them.
Murat barely had time to deliver a last command, in a fierce whisper, before the demon vanished utterly.
The two Culmians were alone in a long hallway of wood and stone, lighted at intervals
by high lamps. The palace was quiet around them, and it seemed that their arrival must not have been observed.
Murat, hand on Sword-hilt, needed only a moment in which to get his bearings. “This way!” he muttered, and directed Carlo with a nod.
But the Crown Prince and his son had taken only a few steps in the indicated direction before a door opened ahead of them, and they stood face to face with a maidservant, her arms piled high with linen. Her eyes opened wide, enormously, and her mouth worked as if she might be about to scream.
Murat backed up a step, ready to draw his Sword at once. “If you are holding the Sword of Stealth,” he growled at the maid, “drop it at once, or—”
Before Murat could finish speaking, Carlo reacted more practically, stepping forward and striking the woman down with the butt of his own sword.
The two men stared at the maid, who now lay dead, or unconscious, on the floor.
Then Murat pulled his suspicious gaze away from her. “Come!”
Father and son moved on toward Kristin’s quarters. Then, peering warily round a corner, Murat discovered guards posted in a place that would make a final approach through the corridor impossible.
When he relayed this information to his son, Carlo whispered: “Father, now is the time for you to draw—”
“Quiet. This way.”
Murat pulled his son down another angle of hallway, then through a door, into a room which proved dark and untenanted. In another moment they were leaving this room again, through a window opening to a balcony.
From this balcony others to right and left on the same high level were visible, and accessible, if one was not discouraged by the need to cross sections of sloping, slate-tiled roof.
“The Princess’s suite connects to at least one of those balconies,” Murat whispered. “Follow me.”
The passage across the slippery roof had to be carefully negotiated, but it was quick. Then Murat and Carlo were on another balcony, then boldly entering what the Crown Prince proclaimed to be the Princess’s room.
It was a large, well-furnished bedroom, simply decorated, well lit by several candles. The bed was empty, though covers had been turned back, and Kristin was not to be seen. A middle-aged woman dropped her knitting and rose from a rocking chair to stare at the intruders.
She had time to utter only a slight preliminary noise before Carlo was beside her, holding his knife to her throat.
The Crown Prince, hand on Sword-hilt, stood frozen, gaze focused in the distance, obviously listening for something with a full intensity of concentration.
Carlo heard a small noise, as of a hastily closed door, from one of the connecting rooms.
“Kristin?” Murat, calling the name softly, lunged through a curtained doorway toward the sound.
Carlo suddenly found himself holding the body of an unconscious woman; the attendant had fainted. He lowered her body to the floor, and leaped to bar the door that he assumed led from this bedroom out to the corridor. A moment later he had followed his father into the next room. This was another bedroom of some kind, too dark for him to be able to make out much of its contents. Here a door stood partially open to another balcony, and to the summer night.
The young man hastened to bar the hall door of this room too; almost immediately afterward the handle was tried from the outside, and immediately after that someone out there began a heavy pounding on the door. Now the alarm was being raised in earnest.
Murat was looking warily out onto the balcony of the darkened bedroom. Now he stepped out onto it.
“My love,” his son heard him breathe.
In the next moment the Crown Prince began to draw his Sword. Carlo, approaching his father from behind, saw with astonishment a half-grown boy, wearing only a long nightshirt, step from behind some draperies beside the doorway and hurl his body on Murat’s right arm.
The Crown Prince was taken by surprise, and the Sword of Glory, glittering faintly in the light of candles in the room, escaped from his grip.
Immediately magic informed the air. The voices of a multitude, inspired and invisible, sounded in the mind of every human near. Murat could only watch as the naked Mindsword described a smooth arc, clattered briefly on the dark slates of the nearby roof, and then went sliding swiftly down out of sight.
Before the Sword had struck the roof, Murat went lunging after it. The unreal voices, chanting glory, mocked him. His convulsive effort to catch or retrieve Skulltwister knocked the night-shirted child aside into a corner.
The Princess Kristin, dressed in a delicate robe, stepped into Carlo’s field of vision, clutching at the arm of the Crown Prince. But Murat, groaning and muttering, thrust her roughly aside too, and in the next moment had vaulted lithely over the balustrade. There he crouched, in an exposed position on the roof’s edge, staring intently down into the near-darkness of a courtyard, trying to see where his Sword had fallen.
The Princess, murmuring and crying, would have climbed after him, but Carlo stepped forward to hold her back. Then for a moment neither of them was able to act effectively. Both were stricken, stunned, half-entranced by the wordless, soundless flow of the freed Sword’s magic.
Others, all around them, were affected too. And the mundane silence of the night had been irretrievably shattered. Whether from one source or several, the alarm against intruders was spreading.
Carlo, holding the Princess with one arm, looked around and drew his own sword, momentarily expecting a rush of guards from somewhere. But as yet nothing of the kind materialized.
In the next instant Kristin, with a surprisingly strong effort, had broken free from Carlo’s grasp and was bending over her son. The bare-legged boy in the nightshirt lay moaning, half-stunned, his upper body leaning against the wall in a corner of the balcony.
Murat, maintaining his precarious position a few meters away, at the very edge of a section of roof, had just turned his head to call to his own son, when a crackling noise and a brief glare of light roiled the air eight or ten meters above their heads.
Carlo looked up to see an image of the wizard Vilkata, borne in midair amid a small swarm of half-visible demonic shapes. These descended with their burden, as the Princeling watched, to deposit the Dark King upon an angle of roof. The Eyeless One’s landing place was one level down from where Carlo and his father were watching, that much closer to where the fallen Sword had lodged.
Having conveyed their wizard-master to the place of his choosing, the demonic forms melted away into the damp air.
Vilkata—there was no doubting the solidity of his body now—straightened up, his fists on his hips in a royal pose. He called out mockingly to Murat: “Have you lost something, Great Master?”
There was no answer.
A moment later the eyeless man went on: “My ethereal servants, who dwell in air and darkness, inform me that within the last minute a certain treasure has ceased to belong to you, Crown Prince.” The magician laughed, and made a pretense of peering around him. “Where can it have gone, I wonder?”
Before Vilkata had finished speaking, the rain that had been threatening broke from low-flying clouds, a steady downpour certain to make the footing on slate tiles even worse.
“Don’t fall, Murat! Careful, glorious Master! Ha ha!” Murat, hanging awkwardly at the brink of the perilously steep and slippery roof, finally answered his quondam magician—with a curse.
Then, for the moment ignoring the wizard’s threatening presence as if Vilkata did not exist, he turned back to his son. In an almost conversational voice he said: “I can see the Sword, Carlo! It’s only a little way down. Guard me while I climb down and claim it.”
“Father, don’t—”
“I can reach it, and I will. None of these swine can keep me from it.”
But Vilkata, starting from his lower level, was already moving toward the prize, and was plainly in position to reach it first. The man descended carefully, with a certain unnatural slowness in his downward movements, as if he had provided himself
with magical protection against a fall.
The Crown Prince looked up at his son again, in desperation. “Carlo, your sword! Throw it! Stop him, kill him!”
Abandoning the Princess, whose attention was still focused on her son, Carlo obediently climbed over the balustrade. He had no particular fear of heights.
“Stop him!” It was a scream of agony.
Carlo, only having got down a meter or two, stopped where he was, clinging by one hand to a drainpipe, his feet braced precariously on small stone knobs he could not really see. With his free hand he drew his sword, and hurled the weapon at the Dark King five or six meters distant; a drawn blade was one of the strongest moves any nonmagician could make against any magical operation in progress. But either Vilkata’s magical protection was equal to the challenge, or else the missile simply missed him. In any event it fell harmlessly. And for a long time. They all heard it strike, at last, on pavement far below.
Vilkata was within two meters of being able to grasp the Sword of Glory when the demon Akbar appeared, standing on another balcony, on the far side of the fallen Sword from the magician, but as close to it as he was.
* * *
Murat, slowest of the three active contenders, remained hopelessly distant from his prize. Now the Crown Prince paused in his slow progress, just as he was about to lower himself from a roof drain, to see the outcome of this new confrontation. In a moment Murat had hurled his own knife in the direction of the wizard, with no effect. His shouted orders to the demon were ignored.
Now Murat, gesturing fiercely, shrieked again for his son to go and seize the Sword, to sheathe it and bring it back to him, to fight the demon, to do something.
Carlo smiled vaguely, nodded his perfect obedience to his father, and moved as quickly as he could toward the Sword. He could see Skulltwister, caught from its fall by a small projecting cornice, leaning hilt uppermost against a wall in a precarious position.
In the next instant his feet slipped from an impossible foothold, and then his grasping fingers slid from the edge of the slick roof.
Falling, he had several seconds in which to think, to fully realize his failure.
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