The Compleat Traveller in Black

by John Brunner

  The chief source of his resentment, however, so far as baseless scandal was concerned, was that he would never dare admit the real reason why he did not abuse his youthful charges. In the lands ruled by Garch, claims of unalloyed morality rang false; on the other hand, the exercise of magic was a jealously-guarded monopoly, so were he to admit the truth he would most likely be haled forth and hung from a gibbet for the crows to pluck.

  One further door remained at this level, and beyond it lay his secret. He opened it with the smallest of his many keys. Revealed was a steep flight of steps, hardly more than a slanted ladder, which he climbed. Despite the effort it required to haul his bulk to the top without dropping his lamp, he was humming a cheery strain when he emerged into the attic that it led to: a large open space lighted by two dusty dormers, lately refloored with well-planed boards that did not creak.

  Below, although they applied themselves to their work, the apprentices found time – as usual – to whisper and make gestures with offensive import. One boy of fourteen, bolder than the rest, well inured to being beaten for his obduracy, filched a finger-sized piece of wax and began to shape it into human form. Pausing beside him, a girl offered criticism and comment; she had been pretty before a spill of boiling tallow seared a puckered scar down her left cheek. Others gathered to see what was happening, and suggested improvements. In a little while the likeness to their master was unmistakable, and they chuckled and clutched at one another in delight.

  When the doll was perfected, they hid it in a chink between the planks of the wall, to furnish more amusement at some future time.

  Overhead, unaware of this, Buldebrime approached the center of his attic room. There stood a stool adjacent to a table bearing five thick books, bound in leather from unconventional sources. Also there was a brazier, and a locked aumbry with carven doors hung from a mainpost of the roof. This last the lamp-seller opened, and removed from it a number of small articles: a bunch of feathers, a bag of herbs, and some vials of powder.

  Watching from deep shadow, the traveller in black repressed a sigh. He hated these hole-in-corner enchanters, not merely because they were victims of the same paradox that had misled their more distinguished predecessors – desiring to control chaos for the sake of the power to be had from it, yet anxious not to destroy it by exerting overmuch control – but also because he’d found them mostly ignorant, discourteous and braggardly. Buldebrime seemed all too typical: having learned how to make his lamps burn bright against unusual dark, he thought himself a master of all magic arts, and was restrained from boasting solely by fear of a scandal that might deprive him of apprentices.

  He did not attempt to make himself known. Had Buldebrime been half the adept that he liked to think he was, he would not have needed to be told there was a Presence in the room.

  The lampmaker set out what was requisite for the sorcery he intended, bar one crucial item: a candle. …

  And then, in the instant before he discovered that that candle was not where he thought it was, there came a thunderous hammering from the entrance to the shop, followed by a shouted order.

  “Buldebrime! Buldebrime! Open in the name of Garch, the thegn of Cleftor Heights!”

  So far, so good. The traveller gave a nod and took his secret leave.

  V

  There was a certain spot, a fair sward set with rocks flat-topped as though designed expressly to be sat upon, commanding a fine view of the thegn’s mansion and within lazy strolling distance of the villages nearest thereto. In any other community it might safely have been predicted that on the evening of a fine clear day, such as today had proved, local folk would tend to congregate here, bringing provender and beer and possibly a tabor and some fifes, to enjoy the pleasant outlook and reflect on their luck in serving so notably able a ruler.

  Here, however, the safe prediction was that by late afternoon all who did not have utterly unavoidable business out of doors would have retreated to their homes, bolting and shuttering them against the onset of that unnatural dark which soaked up star- and firelight and bit into the bones with vicious teeth.

  So indeed the case eventuated. The last herds were driven to their byres, the last flocks were folded, long before the sun touched the divided peaks of the Cleft Tor. As the shadows lengthened, the air grew thick, and a distasteful aura which had infected even the sunniest hours of the day curdled into a foretaste of the night to come.

  Seated alongside a curving track, his staff across his knees, the traveller gazed towards Garch’s residence. It was a handsome edifice, if uninspired. Girdling it in the place of a curteyn wall there were low-roofed outbuildings perhaps two hundred paces by a hundred, constructed of grey stone, interrupted by a gate and speckled with windows. These enclosed a courtyard above ground level, whose cobbled surface concealed dungeons and other subterranean chambers, and from the center of this yard upreared a tower, or rather frustum, its sloping sides approximating the base of a cone. There were the private quarters of the thegn. Terminating its truncated top, there was a wooden winch-house, where by shifts a score or so of muscular deafmutes waited the signal to save Garch the effort of climbing stairs, by hauling on ropes to hoist a kind of palanquin steadied by greased poles and capable of being halted at any floor of the tower.

  As the traveller studied the mansion, he saw servants emerge to set torches by the gate, though considerable time remained before sundown.

  Eventually there came in sight around the bend of the road a sort of small procession. It began with a striding man-at-arms, staring suspiciously this way and that. It continued with a personage in the garb of a Shebya: blue cap, green coat and hose, black boots and silver spurs. He rode astride a palfrey. Then came a girl on foot, attired in pink as a page, but bosomed too conspicuously for there to be much chance of mistaking her sex, leading the first of a pair of pack mules whose wooden saddles were half empty, and lastly another man-at-arms leading the second mule. Such was a common spectacle in any well-governed realm; the Shebyas were the greatest traders of the age, and even the poorest among them possessed at least a couple of beasts and an attendant.

  The leader of this party, however, was clearly not overjoyed with whatever business he had most recently transacted. He frowned as he rode, and uttered not-infrequent objurgations.

  Which he redoubled for fluency and loudness when, on spotting the black-clad figure by the track, the leading man-at-arms dropped his spear to an attack position and cried, “Halt!” The palfrey obeyed with extraordinary promptness, and thereby almost spilled his rider to the ground.

  “Good morrow,” said the traveller mildly. “Sir, would you instruct your man to put up that overeager point? It’s aligned upon a portion of my carcass that I am anxious to preserve intact.”

  “Do so,” the Shebya commanded, and pulled a face. “Forgive him,” he continued, doffing his cap. “But we’re collectively upset, I’d have you know, and extremely edgy, as it were. We’ve done so poorly on our errand to this famous thegn – of which we had, admittedly, high hopes.”

  “The saddles of your mules seem light enough,” the traveller observed.

  “Oh, ordinary pack-goods one can dispose of anywhere,” the Shebya said. His keen eyes were fixed on the traveller’s curious staff, and one could almost hear the logical, though erroneous, deductions he was making. “But … Well, sir, might I hazard a guess that you too are bound to call on Garch?”

  “That possibility,” the traveller conceded, “should not be totally ruled out.”

  “I thought so!” the other exclaimed, leaning forward on his palfrey’s withers. “Might I further suggest that you would welcome information concerning the thegn’s alleged willingness to purchase – ah – intangibles and other rare items at a respectable price?”

  “It would be rash to deny that I have heard reference to some such habit of his.”

  “Then, sir, save your trouble. Turn about, and evade the oncoming night – for, truly, the nights they have hereabout are not of the co
mmon cozy kind. The tales you’ve likely heard are arrant nonsense.”

  “Nonsense, you say?”

  “Yes indeed!” The Shebya grew confidential, lowering his voice. “Why, did I not bring him an object virtually beyond price? And did I not in the upshot have to peddle it door to door, for use in some lousy household enchantment instead of the grand ceremonials of an adept? That it should keep company with pollywogs and chicken-blood – faugh! I ask you! Would not dragon-spawn have been meeter?”

  “And was the article efficacious?” the traveller asked, hiding a smile.

  The Shebya spread his hands. “Sir, that is not for me to determine. Suffice it to say that tomorrow will tell. For the sake of insurance, as it were, against the risk that the purchaser may prove inadequately skilled in conjuration to derive maximum benefit from her acquisition, I purpose to be some distance hence.” His mask of annoyance, willy-nilly, gave place to a grin; it was granted by everyone that, rogues though the Shebyas might be, they were at least engaging rogues.

  “Howbeit,” he appended, “do take my advice. Don’t go to Garch expecting to sell him remarkable and unique artifacts or data at such price as will ensure comfort to your old age. Apart from all else, the mansion is in a turmoil. Someone, so to speak, would appear to have laden the thegn’s codpiece with live ants, and he gibbers like a man distraught, ordering all who displease him to be shortened by the head without appeal. Another excellent reason for departure – which, sir, if you will forgive the briefness of this conversation, inclines me forthwith to resume my journey.”

  After the Shebya and his companions had gone, the traveller remained. The air thickened still further. It grew resistant to the limbs, like milk on its way to becoming cheese. Lost on a high outcrop, a kid bleated hopelessly after its nanny. Chill that one might have mistaken for agonizing frost laid a tight hold on the land, yet no pools crisped with ice. The traveller frowned and waited longer still.

  At last, over the high tower of the mansion, the coffin black of night started to appear: solid-seeming blotches on the sky. At roughly the same time, there were noises to be heard along the road again, coming from the direction which the Shebya and his troupe had taken. Into sight came a party of hurrying horsemen, full-armed, glancing apprehensively at the gathering dark. Some had equipped themselves with torches, and kept making motions toward their flint and steel.

  In their midst, tied face to tail on a dirty donkey, was Buldebrime moaning and crying out, hands lashed at his back and his grease-bespattered smock in rags.

  Some distance behind, unable to keep pace, a furious driver cursed a pair of shaggy-fetlocked horses drawing a cart loaded until the springs sagged with candles, lamps, and articles in bags whose nature could not clearly be discerned.

  Of itself, the parade might have been amusing. Given the circumstances which had led to it, the traveller could not find it other than appalling.

  The darkness spread, and yet it did not move. Rather, it occurred, moment by moment, at places further from its source.

  VI

  “Be calm!” Lady Scail adjured her brother, for the latest of countless times.

  “Be calm?” he echoed, mocking her. “How can I? Are they not deserting us, the traitors, deserting me who won them prosperity from this lean harsh country and made them the envy of folk in richer lands?”

  It was true: news was arriving every few minutes of some trusted serving-man, soldier or steward who had surreptitiously crept away from the household.

  “Is it not, moreover,” Garch pursued, “the night before full moon? At midnight must I not go into the prescribed retreat? And how can we tell as yet how greatly we’ve been deceived by Buldebrime? Perhaps he miscalibrated our time-candles, so we’ll have no means to judge the proper hour!”

  Admittedly, it was impossible to make astronomic observations under such dark as this.

  Nonetheless, Scail blasted the same injunction at him, saying, “You fool, you have to keep your head at any cost! Countless enchanters, so they say, have met their doom because an elemental took advantage of just that weakness in their character!”

  Sweating, gulping draft after draft of wine to lend him courage, he did his best to comply, since reason was on her side. However, self-mastery was hard. The mansion – and not only it but the entire surrounding countryside – was aquiver. The jagged range of Cleftor Heights was thrumming to a soundless vibration of menace, as though some being incarcerated in a restless star had found the means to transmit terror down a shaft of light and struck the bedrock into resonating the keynote of a symphony of disaster, against the advent of the instrumentalists.

  Moreover, it is not good for one who invokes the forces of chaos to pay any attention whatsoever to reason. …

  “Where’s Roiga?” Garch demanded of a sudden.

  “Where she should be: making ready in your room.”

  “And Runch?”

  “They called him to the gate a while ago. They’ve sighted the party bringing Buldebrime.”

  “Then I’ll go down to the dungeons,” Garch declared, and drained his goblet. “I must be first to learn what that traitor’s done!”

  There was routine in this mansion, as in the household of any great lord, and to outward appearance it was being maintained. At the intersection of two echoing corridors the traveller in black saw proof of this. Thump-thump down the passages to the beat of drums came provisions for the nightly company at dinner: pies stuffed with game, so heavy two men staggered under the load, and the whole roasted haunches of oxen and sheep; then trays of loaves; then serving-girls with jugs of wine and beer, and butlers carrying fine white linen napkins on their arms, and boys with ewers and basins that the diners might wash their hands in scented water, and harpists, and flautists, and a female dwarf. This last hobbled awkwardly in a floor-length gown, designed to make her trip often on its hem for the amusement of the gathering.

  One could not reasonably foresee there being much laughter in the banquet-hall tonight. The stones from which the building was constructed shared the incipient convulsions of the landscape, and overmuch dust danced in the light of the torches.

  Intermittently, from beneath the floor, issued screams.

  Orderly, with professional niceness, the least spoken-of among Garch’s retainers – Tradesman Humblenode, the torturer – had set out the various equipment of his calling: here whips and fetters, thumbscrews there; tongs, knives and nooses at another place; and in the center of all a brazier, at which a little dirty boy worked a blacksmith’s bellows in a vain attempt to make the fuel burn as bright as was required. Even here beneath the courtyard, where the walls oozed continual damp, the pervasive obliterating light-absorption of the strange night might be perceived.

  At the mere sight of Humblenode’s instruments Buldebrime had collapsed into snivelling, and it was long after the thegn’s intrusion into the dungeon that they contrived to make him utter coherent words.

  “No, I did not filch any such candle! I have no knowledge of enchantment – none!”

  “Try him with a little red iron,” Garch proposed, and Tradesman Humblenode set a suitable tool to the fire.

  “Have pity, have pity!” Buldebrime whimpered. “I swear by Orgimos and Phorophos, by Aldegund and Patrapaz and Dencycon –!”

  “I thought you had no knowledge of enchantment?” murmured Garch, and gestured for Humblenode’s assistants to stretch the lamp-seller on a rack.

  But in a short space from the application of the first iron he escaped into unconsciousness, and not all Humblenode’s art sufficed to waken him.

  “Is Runch meantime testing all the lamps and candles that were brought from his shop?” Garch remembered to ask, somewhat belatedly. He had given that instruction, and not checked that it was carried out – though Runch and Roiga, of all his retinue, had most to lose by neglecting his requirements.

  “I come from him, sir,” a nervous waiting-maid reported, who was trying not to look at the limp body of Buldebrime, or
anything else present in the cell. “He assures you he has tested every one, and whatever you are seeking isn’t there.”

  Garch drew himself up to his full height. “So the treacherous lamp-maker has tricked me,” he muttered. “Can he not be forced awake by midnight?”

  “By no art known to me,” said Humblenode apologetically. It was the first time he had failed his master. He braced himself as though to endure treatment after his own style in consequences.

  But Garch spun on his heel and strode away.

  He came upon Runch, together with his sister and attendants, at the head of the dank noisome stairway to the dungeons; his private means of vertical transportation did not, for logical reasons, descend to that level.

  “Have you succeeded?” Scail demanded.

  “Failed!”

  “And time is fast a-wasting,” muttered Runch.

  “What must be done, must be done,” Garch answered. “Prepare me for my watch alone.”

  “But surely tonight it was imperative to conjure Wolpec, and ask his earnest of your ultimate success!” Under her face-mantling layers of rouge and powder, the Lady Scail turned pale.

  “What’s to be done will be done now!” Garch snapped. “Like it or not! You have tomorrow’s daylight to run away by, if that’s your plan. For the moment, leave me be!”

  Without so much as a brotherly embrace, let alone that other kind which had in the past lent crucial potency to his doings, he pushed by them both and was gone.