My would-be executioner—and he still stared fearfully at me—had thrust his trembling sword toward my throat. But it touched me not. In his very closeness to me his movements had become awkward, weak, without control, so that his weapon was like a straw in his hand and could harm nothing. I doubted that he could successfully part my hair with it. So was it likewise with the others.
They shouted back to the prince, their voices trembling, that the magic of Om was truly great in that the enchantment reached out to touch them, too.
“Then leave them,” the prince screamed, “for they will be long dead of cold ere ever strength returns. Come! We must not tarry longer.”
At that the great Vuun slowly spread his leathern wings, which when fully expanded measured two hundred feet or more. Those who would have killed us left and ran to him, and climbed the webbed harness around his middle, to which the others clung and to which Murie and Caroween were tied.
And it literally leaped into the air, a full hundred feet or more before the first thunderclap of monstrous wings seized upon the leaden air to drive it skyward… . Then all was quiet.
The snow fell and the black patina waned and died. I wondered if the prince of Kelb had not been right in that we would soon freeze to death in the now bone-biting chill. We could not even whistle for the protective warmth of dottles, which were clearly peeking at us from their archway. No doubt they thought us dead.
And then, within the space of the opened doors of Goolbie’s keep, a small figure appeared. The candle, torch, or firelight from within outlined him perfectly where he stood: small, brown-furred, inoffensive. It was the Pug-Boo, Pawbi— a mirror image of Hooli. And as he casually walked toward us and the tingling nerve paralysis waned, I thought, You little bastard. You miserable, fat-fannied cowardly little bastard….
And that, for the moment, was the end of it, for suddenly I, and the others, too, were encompassed in a veritable aura of well-being and encroaching Lethe, bringing clouds of relaxed “goodness.” But before I fell into line and accepted it completely, I had time to hear the Pug-Boo’s voice inside my head. He said bluntly, “You’re not so smart yourself, you know. Indeed, in my book you’re something of an idiot …”
It took but seconds for release from the sorcery of the Kaleen of Om. The accompanying memory lapse was negligible; the therapy, excellent. It was as if we had awakened from a long sleep, refreshed, rested—and famished.
We arose, the five of us, from the bloodied flagstones, to stare curiously, almost in awe, at each other. For we knew what we had accomplished, and that now there was a bond between us such as few men would ever know. We grasped hands, gave each other the arm-to-shoulder simile of the Terran embrace. Words would come later. The smell of blood, despite the cold, still lay heavy upon our nostrils.
Then we whistled the wide-eyed, skittish—they had thought us dead—dottles to us, retrieving our saddlebags and furred cloaks. Henery trembled when I touched him and he would not meet my eyes. Dottles most definitely possessed a much higher intelligence quotient than most animals. But though they had the average destrier’s modicum of courage, to face a Vuun, or the carnage all around us, was something else again.
I gave Henery a friendly pat on the rump to help assuage his guilt. Then he trotted off with the others to the warmth and food of the stables. The muscular Tober offered himself as dottle-warden. He held them in the courtyard until he had opened the gates so that the remainder of our herd could join them.
In the hall we found tables laid for a feast. And indeed, such would have been the case had we simply surrendered our throats to the fal-dirk and allowed the princess to be taken without a struggle. Our coming had caught them at the very moment of dinner, for the table groaned with still warm tureens of gog-stew, vegetables, bread, and sviss….
We staggered then to the great room of the Chirurgeons, masseurs, and gnostics—and found what we had hoped for: baths with heated water from great ceramic cisterns. We soaked, bathed, and tended each other’s wounds. Mine were a shallow gash across right forearm and shoulder—our armor was slashed, torn, and otherwise in sad shape—and a deep sword thrust through the thigh muscles of my left leg. It was just now beginning to stiffen. The soaking, the mutual massaging, and the salves and unguents—plus, I am convinced, some of the Pug-Boo’s juggling about with our cell structure and blood chemistry—did wonders for all of us. Tober and Hargis had fleshwounds like myself. Not so Charney and Griswall. Besides bleeding from a dozen gashes each, they had also sustained a number of dangerous sword thrusts: Charney, through chest and body; Griswall, a deep thrust to midriff, and an ax bite to sever the shoulder muscles of his left arm.
… We were dexterous indeed with gut and needle. No seamstress, I thought, had ever sewn a neater line than I in putting Oriswall back together, this after all cuts had been cleansed, treated, and salved. Neither of the two complained of internal bleeding—only of a soreness, which was to be expected. And again, I thought, This is the Pug-Boo’s doing. Since, if it were not, both of them would be well on the way to being dead by now.
The proof of the pudding here, I think, was that after these attentive and thorough ablutions we went straight to the hall and quite deliberately sat down to table to eat our fill.
There were three draped and fur-strewn chairs at the center table which, I thought, had doubtless been the seats of the Prince of Kelb and his favorites. Pawbi, the Pug-Boo, now lay on his back in the seat of the center chair. His little round feet were draped over one arm, his head against the other; his little raccoon-teddy-bear arms were folded across his fur-dimpled belly—and he was sound asleep.
Tober, coming from the stables, made a point of brushing snow from his surcoat so that we would know that a storm now raged without. He quickly returned from the baths to join us. We continued to eat in silence. I had the most peculiar sensation, as the warm stew entered my belly, of being recharged with energy. It was as if my stomach and sundry auxiliary organs were miraculously converting the gog-meat to “instant blood.”
After that we retired to the fire-blazing warmth of an anteroom, replete with fur-blanketed couches. We built up the fire with dottle briquettes and then, without further ado, and regardless of the fact that the fire might die so that the cold of the storm would penetrate each nook and cranny of our retreat, we slept.
I awoke a number of hours later. I knew this, for though it was still dark beyond the heavily draped windows, the fire had been replenished more than once. Indeed, the stack of dottle briquettes had dwindled considerably. I felt possessed of a fantastic euphoria of well-being. The fire, my relaxed state, the added warmth of the sleeping furs, the knowledge that we had survived and that our myriad wounds were as pinpricks in the rapidity of their healing—all served to enhance this feeling. Then I thought of Murie and what I must do; though, indeed, my thoughts had never left her. I had made no idle promise. I still had the lifeboat from the Deneb-3 hidden at the spot where I had first met them on the road. True, it had been damped from temporal space. I had but to say the numbers aloud—Hey! Ah, hah! the numbers—the words— the words! Hey! and hey again… . Sleep had indeed cleared my brain! I had, perforce, found Camelot’s Rosetta Stone, and more, perhaps. And now in effect, and for sure, Kelb, Vuunland, the Kaleen himself—whoever, in fact, held the princess Murie Nigaard and the lady Caroween in thrall—would have a visitor, and soon.
My newfound knowledge spurred me to instant action. I sat up on the couch, thrust out my sword-pierced thigh to find it not so stiff at all, and stood up. I tested the leg. Good! There would be no problem there. The sleeping couches of my companions, illuminated by firelight only, for we had doused our candles and our oil lamps, were still occupied.
We had changed to fresh, warm clothing after bathing and dressing our wounds, so that I was fully dressed now. I reached for my cloak, drew it tight around me, attached sword and scabbard to belt, and silently left my companions to continued, healing sleep.
In the hall and in the
center chair at the great table, Pawbi was now wide awake. I marched directly forward to confront him across the boards. I said deliberately, “I would visit the rooms of Goolbie, the great sorcerer. I would see the place where he died.”
Pawbi merely stared at me.
“No more games, you little bastard.” I grasped my sword’s haft. “I would visit Goolbie now!”
Pawbi then leaped to the flagstones and rushes, where he remained on all fours, though I knew he could just as easily walk erect. For minutes he darted this way and that, as a puppy would, or a kitten with a plaything. He even stopped once to worry a gog-bone, staring stupidly up at me over knobbed protuberances. I simply waited.
Then suddenly he stood up and left the hall. I followed. We went by a narrow passage directly to the south tower where we climbed a spiral stone stair without handrails to the very top of its hundred-foot-height. The room we entered was small, round, with two windows, open now to the chill of black night and white storm. The room, or study, included a sleeping couch with furs, a desk, a chair, a table, and sundry shelves with all the paraphernalia of the practicing warlock, the sorcerer, the alchemist. Other shelves around the interior of the walls were lined with books.
And there was Goolbie!
He lay where he had fallen, beneath the eerie dark south window. His corpse was blackened, twisted. He looked as if he had been hit with a hundred thousand volts. The room still stank of ozone.
I wasted no time. I had none to waste, and Goolbie helped. The information I sought was a part of Goolbie’s treasure: the last thing he had touched before being blasted by the Kaleen—his Great Book. His findings. His conclusions and summations.
It lay now upon the table, opened to the very page of his last entry. I risked laser heat from my belt to light two lamps and to get a fire going. I did this in Pawbi’s presence. There was no time for tedious flint and steel and shavings. He had seated himself upon Goolbie’s couch and his eyes had slitted; he dozed.
I pulled my cloak around me and settled to the contents of Goolbie’s book.
He had given it a grondoise title, typical of the times. It was something like: A historee and an encyclopeedee of the Fregisian world and the inhabitants thereof; and the Two Lands and the Great Water. And all that otherwise therein do dwell and do have converse and effect, one to the other—plus the Gods and the things of magick and from whence it comes....
Goolbie was, without a doubt, Camelot-Fregis’s first librarian, first true encyclopedist, and first true “Webster,” since, unlike the few Fregisian notes or signs I had read to date, his spelling had some consistency.
He had divided his great book into what he presumed were pertinent and specific sections. The sections were subdivided to points of information in alphabetical order. Each subdivision remained incomplete, however, indicating that he was still adding to everything.
I spent the remaining time between black night and pearling dawn studying Goolbie’s work. I journeyed through his eyes and thoughts, to Gheese, Ferlach, the Seligs of the river-sea, the great jungles, and beyond those far Dark Lands—to the world of Om, The two great continents, north and south, which spiraled around the water-world of Fregis-Camelot, were landmasses to be considered. Marack and the countries to the north ranged three thousand miles from snowcap to river-sea tropics. The sea—or section of the total ocean dividing the two continents—was another three hundred to five hundred miles in width, with a myraid of islands dotting its expanse. Then came the two lands of the southern continent’s northern shores, Seligal and Kerch, each a thousand miles in length and breadth. They were mostly jungle. Beyond them were the savannahs, the mountains, the moorlands and tundras of Om… . From the river-sea to the southern pole, another three thousand miles could be counted.
The history of Fregis was the history of its wars and of its trading ships: most of this but recent, in the last thousand years. Like most worlds of plus-ten sentients, it was most difficult to spearate myth from fact and Goolbie’s depiction of things was a most wonderful admixture of both… . Had Om always been the center of evil? No. Only in the last three hundred years or so. Men of the north had been to Om; those of Om had sailed to the north. The river-sea itself precluded, at least in the past, any truly large-scale war. Cities dotted the lands of Om, Seligal, and Kerch, just as they dotted Ferlach, Kelb, and Cheese, and the island empire of the Seligs. Most all, at one time or another, had been raided by war parties, fleets, and armies, so essentially all knew of each other as either the looter or the looted. Only Marack and the lands of the north, however, had shown the first faint signs of a socioeconomic evolutionary process—the Collegiums and the rising tradesmen and guildsmen. Beyond the river-sea there was little or none of this. And each time such possibilities arose—philosophers creating schools of discourse; artisans going beyond the accepted crafts work: daring to invent, to explore, to indulge in primitive research—all was destroyed. The god, Ormon, was but one of many in Seligal and Kerch. But in Om itself there ruled the living god, the Kaleen, seen by no one; administered to only by his priesthood and the subordinates of his governing class, themselves kings and princelings and petty lords… . The Kaleen ruled from the Dark Lands, so named, according to Goolbie, because of the black earth, moors, fens, and mists of its great rolling hills and deep valleys. The Kaleen ruled in Hish, city of silence, city of priests, of warriors, of slaves; wherein all that was planned for Om and Fregis was brought to fruition, and where the thoughts of the Kaleen prevailed above all else.
Despite Goolbie’s reference to the cities of the world of Fregis, imparting to the gentle reader a picture of a great and metropolitan world, such was not the case. I knew this better than he, for I had seen the greater part of it. Fregis-Camelot was simply a water-world of two great continents, each with but a few million humanoids at best, and each a generally savage, unexplored, and primitive world of endless forests, mountains, and dark rivers. The great cities of Goolbie’s book were, like Glagmaron of Marack, populated at most with fifty thousand people. And if a dozen of these existed, inclusive of Hish in Om, all else were villages, seacoast and river-mouth habitations, dependent upon trade and a minimum of agriculture in the hinterland. -:
All below the river-sea were controlled by Omnian warriors and Yorns, plus the dead-alives of the priesthood, and a black pall of death-dealing magic—which I now knew was but the adroit manipulation of the planet’s magnetic field.
For how did Goolbie handle this fact of Fregisian magio— Omnian or Marackian? ” Tis a thinge,” he wrote, “of sounde. For if one do not save the words aloude, the effect of the witchery is not sooth—’twill come to naught… .”
He had truly hit upon the secret. For, as I myself now knew, other than the admixture of simple chemistry to the words and their proper pronunciation, Camelot-Fregis magic was just so much mishmash. That it existed at all was because of its singular role in plans formulated across the ages—in this case by forces which were active now. Right now! The Kaleen was but a part of it all. What, or who was behind it, I had yet to find out. The answer, in part, was obviously the Pug-Boos. But could one really trust the obvious? Could not that other power simply be using the Pug-Boos as the medium whereby its will or plan, or counterplan, was put to action? After all, what, really, was a Pug-Boo? I looked up to check the sleeping figure of Pawbi, that fat, furry, daintily snoring “rodent,” as he had been strangely called by Prince Keilweir. He continued snoring, but in my mind’s eye I remembered him walking toward us through all that horror of the courtyard, and the feeling of goodness and protection that accompanied his every step, when all seemed lost.
I remembered, too, the voice of Hooli, soothing, assuaging. Why Hooli? Hooli’s voice was also my voice, though it was his, too. Could the voice have been Pawbi’s? Was Pawbi, Hooli? Were there any other Pug-Boos than the ones we knew to exist? Could they somehow be a single entity, a collective? It was obvious that they knew of the Kaleen and, in their way, opposed him. Did the Kaleen, in turn, k
now of Pug-Boos? I was willing to bet, remembering the prince’s statement, that the Kaleen did not. So then, in the midst of this world magic, created by the Kaleen, worked as a series of events operative when the proper sounds were emitted. As a result whole fields of force, matrices of energy, were rearranged in finest detail: water became wine; gog-milk became sviss; force fields protected kings from harm; material and living things were atomized and recreated according to their original structures; the transmutation of metals became a fact; the dead were, activated; love potions in the form of hyperactivated genitalia were real; storms were childish games. And in all this the equally powerful (?) Pug-Boos remained hidden… . Why had not the Kaleen prevailed over these many centuries? After a period of pondering, I almost had the answer to that, too. I had learned a lot, enough to know where I must go now, and what I must do and how I would do it. I woke Pawbi, took his paw in mine. Together we descended the winding stairs of the great tower and made our way through the deserted hall to the others.
Outside was a white hell of bowling wind and snow. Despite this we managed to bury our dead with honor. And we erected a great stone cromlech to mark their heroes’ graves. The Yorns and men of Kelb were left for another time. They would keep well in that natural refrigerator of a courtyard.
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