The Compleat Traveller in Black

by John Brunner

  The lake being sluggish, however, the stench grew appalling; moreover, it was the only source of drinking and cooking water. His son peremptorily removed the shambles to the very edge of the plateau, and for a long while his grandson Lashgar saw no grounds for disturbing this arrangement. Now and then in the old days one had seen, on the delta below, people shaking fists and shouting insults, but they were too far away to be heard, and none of the lowlanders had the temerity to climb the ancient stairs and argue. Not since before Orrish was born had it been deemed advisable to maintain double guards along the rim of the cliffs.

  Maybe if that old custom had been kept up …

  Perhaps, yes, things would not have taken such a horrifying turn around Taxhling. He would naturally not have been able to do what he was doing – deserting his post by night – without silencing his co-sentry or persuading him to come along; on the other hand, the necessity would not have arisen. …

  Too late for speculation. Here he was, scrambling down the cliff, repeating under cover of darkness his climb of five years ago, wincing at every pebble he dislodged, for the steps rocked and tilted and some had vanished for five or ten feet together, and he had had no chance to assess which of the nearby creepers were most securely rooted. His muscles ached abominably, and though the night was frosty rivulets of perspiration made him itch all over. However, there was no turning back. He must gain the safety of the level ground below. He must let the people of Stanguray know what enormities one of their number was perpetrating, rouse them to anger and to action!

  Under his cold-numbed feet a ledge of friable rock abruptly crumbled. Against his will he cried out as he tumbled into blackness. His memory of the climb he had made when he was fifteen was not so exact that he knew how high he was, though he guessed he fell no more than twenty feet.

  But he landed on a heap of boulders, frost-fractured from the cliff, and felt sinews tearing like wet rags.

  How now was he to bear a warning to Stanguray?

  And if not he, then who?

  There was nothing else for it. Despite his agony, he must crawl onward. Even though the witch Crancina had been spawned among them, the folk of Stanguray did not deserve the fate she planned. They had at least, presumably, had the sense to drive her out, instead of – like that damned fool Count Lashgar! – welcoming her and giving in to every one of her foul demands.

  V

  Autumn had begun to bite when the traveller returned to Stanguray. It was a clear though moonless night. Mist writhed over the marshes. The mud was stiff with cold, and here and there a shallow puddle was sufficiently free from salt to form a skim of ice.

  Despite the chill, blood-reek was dense in the air.

  But in the village of marble pillars and gaudy tilework there was no sign of life, save for suspicious birds and rats.

  Unable at first to credit that the place was totally deserted, the traveller slacked the grip of the forces that held together his staff of curdled light. A radiance bright as the full moon’s revealed it was only too true. Everywhere doors and shutters stood ajar. No chimney, not even on the wealthiest homes, uttered smoke. From the quay all the boats were gone, and some few poor household items lay on its flags, abandoned.

  Yet this did not smack of, say, a pirate raid. There was no hint of violence – no fires had been started, no dead bodies lay untidy on the ground. This had been a planned and voluntary departure.

  Moreover, as he abruptly realized, something else was amiss. He was immune to the night’s freezing air, but not to the chill of dismay which the discovery evoked in him.

  Litorgos was no longer penned between salt and silt. The elemental too was absent from this place.

  Until this moment the traveller had believed that in all of space and all of time none save he had been granted power to bind and loose the elemental spirits. Could it be that to another the mirror of his gift had been assigned? Surely the One Who –

  But if that were so, then Tarambole had lied. And if that were so, then the universe would become like the pieces on a game-board, to be tipped back in their box and redeployed with different rules. There was no sign of such a catastrophe: no comets, no eruptions, no dancing stars …

  A new enemy.

  More at a loss than ever before, he pondered and reviewed his knowledge, standing so immobile that hoarfrost formed on the hem of his cloak. With all his powers of reasoning he was still far from an answer when he heard a thin cry, weak as a child’s but far too baritone.

  “Help! Help! I can go no further!”

  Half in, half out, of a muddy channel, some three or four hundred paces towards the escarpment, he came upon the one who had shouted: a young man in leather jerkin, breeches and boots, whimpering for the pain of torn leg-ligaments.

  “Who are you?” the traveller challenged.

  “Orrish of Taxhling,” came the faint reply.

  “And your mission here below the plateau?”

  “To warn the folk of Stanguray what doom’s upon them! I never dreamed such horrors could be hatched in a human brain, but – Ow, ow! Curses on my injured leg! But for it, I’d have been there long ere now!”

  “To small avail,” the traveller said, extending his staff so that Orrish might use it to haul himself clear of the icy water. “They’re gone. All of them.”

  “Then my errand of mercy would have been in vain?” said Orrish blankly as he gained the bank. Of a sudden he began to laugh hysterically.

  “Not so,” the traveller returned, probing with his staff along the painful leg. At every contact a light shone forth, the color of which humans have no name for. “There, how does that feel? Has the pain gone?”

  Orrish rose incredulously to his feet, testing the damaged limb. “Why, it’s a miracle!” he whispered. “Who are you, that can work such magic?”

  “I have many names, but a single nature. If that means aught to you, so be it; if not, and increasingly I find it doesn’t, well and good, for either way it is the truth. … With a name like Orrish, I take you to be of ancient Taxhling stock.”

  “You know our people?”

  “I dare say I’ve known them since before you were born,” the traveller admitted. “What’s amiss, that sent you on your desperate mission?”

  “They’ve gone insane! A witch has come among us, dedicated to the service of Ts-graeb – or so she says! – claiming to know how to make our lord Count Lashgar live forever! Now me, I hold no brief against the worshippers of Ts-graeb, or anyone else, although in truth …” Orrish’s tongue faltered.

  With a hint of his customary dry humor the traveller said, “In truth you adhere to the cult of Frah Frah, and you wear his amulet in the prescribed invariable place, and because your belt has come adrift from your breeches the fact is plainly discernible. I am pleased to learn that Frah Frah is not wholly devoid of followers; his ceremonies were often very funny in a coarse sort of way, and among his favorite offerings was a hearty laugh. Am I not right?”

  Frantically making good the deficiencies in his garb, Orrish said in awe, “But that was in my grandfather’s day!”

  “More like your three-times-great-grandfather’s day,” the traveller responded matter-of-factly. “Now gather your wits, if you please. I need to know precisely why you were so desperate to bear a warning to the folk of Stanguray.”

  Piecemeal, then, he extracted the whole story, and from what he was told was able to deduce that Tarambole, while of course he could not lie, did have access to the gift of ambiguity.

  That discovery was a vast relief. But it still left an unprecedented situation to resolve.

  “The witch is called Crancina,” Orrish said. “She came among us recently – last spring – and brought with her a familiar in the guise of a hunchbacked boy. They said they hailed from Stanguray, and at once everybody was prepared to accept them as marvel-workers, for in living memory none save I ever attempted to scale the face of yon escarpment. … And,” he added bitterly, “my schoolfellows whom I shamed by makin
g both the descent and the ascent when they said it was impossible now deny I ever made the climb! How flimsy memory must grow in five short years!”

  The traveller prompted Orrish with a gentle cough.

  “Ah … yes! We’d always regarded Count Lashgar as a harmless, bookish fellow. In shops and taverns one might hear the people say with nods and winks, ‘You could do worse than endure such an overlord!’ Confessedly, I’ve often said the same.

  “Little did we guess that he was plotting with his books and incantations to find a means of adding our lives to his own, so as to outlive us all! But she did, the witch Crancina, and she came to Lashgar and said she knew a use for the blood spilled from the beasts we kill each month at the dark of the moon. She told him to move the shambles back to their old site, because only if there were enough blood in the water of the lake – Sir, are you well?”

  For the traveller had fallen silent and stock-still, gazing into the past.

  In a little he roused himself enough to answer, “No! No, my friend, I am not well, nor is anything well! But at least I now comprehend what is the nature of my unprecedented enemy.”

  “Explain, then!” pleaded Orrish.

  “First tell me this. Crancina made out that once enough blood was in the water, it would become an elixir of long life: is that the case?”

  “Why, yes! Moreover, she asserted it would be ample for us all to drink, giving us each an extra span of years!”

  “In that she lied,” the traveller declared, flat-voiced.

  “I have suspected so.” Orrish bit his lip. “I won’t presume to ask how you know. That you’re a strange and powerful personage, my well-healed leg declares. … Would, though, I might give the witch the lie direct, on your authority! For what they propose up yonder, in my name, is so ghastly, so horrid, so disgusting …!”

  “You speak of what drove you to desert your post?”

  The young man gave a miserable nod. “Indeed, indeed. For, lacking as much blood as she claimed was requisite, folk began to say, ‘Are there not those who bleed at Stanguray? And must not human blood be more effective? Let us set forth and capture them, and drag them hither, and cut their throats to make the magic work!’ ”

  “And what said Count Lashgar to this mad idea?”

  “Unless Crancina’s rites succeed today, he’ll give his soldiers orders for the mission.”

  “Hmm! Who’s making rope?”

  The question took Orrish aback for a second; then he caught on and burst out laughing, not as before – halfway to hysteria – but with honest mirth, making as it were an offering to Frah Frah.

  “Why, I’m as dumb and blind as they! Surely it will call for miles of rope to drag hundreds of unwilling captives over level ground, let alone haul them up the cliff!”

  “Such work is not in hand?”

  “Why, no! Drunk on promises, the people care only for butchery. Now it’s reached such a stage, those who set snares by night are ordered to bring their catch, still living, to be included in the daily sacrifice. And woe betide those whose rabbits, hares and badgers are already dead!”

  “I understand,” the traveller said somberly, and thought on an ancient ceremony, practiced when the forces of chaos were more biddable than now. Then, one had taken a shallow bowl, ideally of silver, incised with the character harst, midmost of those in the Yuvallian script, and filled it with water, and laid therein the germ of a homunculus, and pricked one’s finger and let fall three drops, whereupon the homunculus set forth to do one’s bidding. Kingdoms had been overthrown that way.

  What would transpire when the ceremony was expanded to a whole wide lake?

  And, particularly and essentially: this lake of all …!

  “Sir,” Orrish ventured anxiously, “you spoke just now about an enemy. Is it the witch? Is your enemy the same as ours? May we count you as an ally?”

  The traveller parried the question. “What drove you to climb down the cliff by night? Fear that you, not worshipping Ts-graeb, would be excluded from the universal benefit of immortality?”

  “No – no, I swear on my father’s honor!” Orrish was sweating; the faint light of the false dawn glistened on his forehead. “But – well, in the cult of the god I have been raised to worship, it is said that pleasure bought at the cost of another’s suffering is no pleasure at all. So it seems to me with this pretended immortality – even given that this is the goal of those cruel ceremonies, which you contest. How can a life worth living be purchased at the expense of so much brutality?”

  “Then let us return together to Taxhling,” the traveller said with decision. “Your wish is granted. You shall give the witch the lie direct.”

  “But is she your enemy?” Orrish persisted.

  “If you asked her – assuming she has not forgotten my existence – she might very well say that, on the contrary, she has good reason to be grateful to me.”

  “Then – who?”

  Because the question was posed with an honest need to know, the traveller was constrained to answer, after long reluctance.

  “That which is against me is within me.”

  “You speak in riddles!”

  “So be it! I had rather not let it be noised abroad that I overlooked so crude a truth: this is my fault. For the first time, I set forth to fight myself.”

  VI

  Blessedly warm in the room assigned to her at Count Lashgar’s residence-here on the plateau they could afford to be prodigal with fuel, and a log fire had burned all night two steps from her bed – Crancina woke with a sense of excitement such as she had only felt once before: back in the spring, when it dawned on her what use could be made of all that blood fouling Stanguray’s river.

  A serving-maid drowsed on a stool in the chimney corner. Shouting to rouse her, Crancina threw aside her coverlet.

  Today, yes, today, her efforts were sure to be rewarded! Then let that slimy count go whistle for his dreamed-of immortality! He was on all fours with the greedy men who had sought her hand in marriage when what they wanted was not her, but the profits of her cookshop and her sweet-water spell.

  Today would teach him, and tomorrow would teach the world, a lesson never to be forgotten.

  Humming a merry tune, she wrapped herself snug in a sheepskin cape against the early-morning chill outside.

  * * *

  “My lord! My lord, wake up!” whispered the valet whose duty it was to rouse Lord Lashgar. “Mistress Crancina is certain of success today, and sent her girl to tell me so!”

  Muzzily peering from among high-piled pillows, the count demanded, “What’s worked the trick, then? The extra animals I ordered to be brought from snares and gins?”

  “My lord, I’m not party to your high councils,” was the reproachful answer. “But surely in one of your books the secret’s explained?”

  “If that were so,” Lashgar sighed, forcing himself to sit up, “I’d not have waited this long for the fulfillment of my lifelong dreams.”

  Through the mists that haunted the edges of the lake a band of shivering soldiers marched with drums and gongs, and on hearing them people turned out enthusiastically, forgoing breakfast save for a hasty crust and a mouthful of strong liquor. In the old days the morning of a shambles was one to be avoided; now, amazingly, it had been transformed into the signal event of the month … today more than ever, for the rumors had already taken rise.

  “Today’s the day! Crancina told the count – it’s bound to work today! Just think! Maybe some of us, maybe all of us, will be deathless by tonight!”

  Only a few cynical souls were heard to wonder aloud what would happen if it proved there was power enough in the bloody water to make one person live forever, and no more. Who would benefit, if not the witch?

  But those were generally of the aboriginal lakeside stock, whose ancestors had had their fill of magic long ago. Those who worshipped Ts-graeb the Everlasting, as Lashgar did – and his adorers had grown vastly more numerous since the witch arrived – clamored
loudly for the favor of their deity, and arrived at the lakeshore singing and clapping their hands.

  They raised a tremendous cheer when Lashgar and Crancina appeared, preceded by the image of Ts-graeb in the guise of an old bearded wiseacre, which was borne on the shoulders of six men-at-arms. The procession was flanked by the priests and priestess of Yelb the Comforter, portrayed as having nipples all over her naked bulk from toes to hairline, and also the handful who still adhered to Honest Blunk, whose image and symbol was a plain white sphere. No professors of Frah Frah were bold enough to parade their creed, and indeed only a handful remained.

  But, bringing up the very tail, here came a hunchbacked boy in jester’s garb, with bells on hat and heels, capering and grimacing as he feigned to strike the onlookers with his wand of office: a pig’s bladder on a rod tied with gaudy ribbons. Even the followers of Honest Blunk were glad to crack a smile at the sight of his antics, for a bitter wind soughed over the plateau.

  “And where,” the traveller murmured as he contrived to fall in beside Jospil, “did you obtain that particolored finery?”

  “It’s not stolen, if that’s what you’re thinking,” came the sharp reply. “It belonged to the jester whom Count Lashgar’s father kept, and I received it from the mistress of the palace wardrobe. Who are you that you put such a question to me –? Why, I recall you, and only too well.” At once the boy ceased his awkward parody of a dance. “It was the very day after you spoke with her that my sister took this crazy notion into her head, and forced me hither up the cliffs! More than once I thought I would die, but my deformity has luckily left my torso light enough for my arms to bear its weight, so where she almost fell I could cling on for us both. … But often I feel I’d rather have let her fall than be condemned to my present lot!”