Empire of the East (28 page)

“I don't mean that.”

The chamberlain looked at him blankly. “What, then?”

Chup struggled to find words. But he could not make it clear in his own mind what was bothering him. “The whole business is not to my liking. I think there must be some mistake.”

“Indeed? Not to your liking?” The chamberlain's haughty glare could have withered many a man.

“No, it is not. Indeed. Something is wrong with this scheme.
Why
am I to do this?”

“Because it is required of you, if you wish to participate fully in the powers of the East.”

“If you cannot give me any more definite reason, let us go back to Som, and I will question him.”

It cost Chup some further argument, and the nearly incredulous displeasure of the chamberlain, but at last he was led upward again, and admitted to see Som once more.

This time he found the viceroy apparently quite alone, in a small chamber below the audience hall. In spite of half a dozen torches on the walls, the place seemed dim and cold. It was a clammy room, nearly empty of furniture except for the plain chair Som was sitting in, and the small plain table before him. On that table there stood upright mirrors, and at the focus of the mirrors a candle guttered, topped with a wavering tongue of darkness instead of flame, casting all around it an aura of night instead of luminance. Som's face turned toward the candle was all but invisible, and what little Chup could see of it looked less human than before.

In answer to the silent interrogation of that face turned toward him, Chup came to attention. In a clear voice he said: “High Lord Som, I have taken and given orders enough to understand that orders must be followed. But when I think an order is mistaken, then it is my duty to question it, if there is time. I question the usefulness of this initiation, in the form I am told it is to follow.”

Som the Dead was silent for a little time, as if such an objection were outside his experience, and he had no idea how to deal with it. But when he answered, his dry voice was hard to read. “What is it you dislike about the pledging?”

“Excuse me, High Lord Som. That I dislike it is beside the point. I can carry out orders that I find unpleasant. But this…I see no benefit in this, for you, for me, for anyone.” That sounded weak. “Excuse me if I speak clumsily, I am no courtier…That's just it, High Lord. I am a fighter. What can a thing like this prove of my ability?”

Som's voice did not change; his face remained unreadable. “Exactly what did my chamberlain tell you was required of you?”

“I am to take the woman Charmian from her cell. Tell her that I'm helping her escape. Then I am to lead her down into the pit, where dwells our High Lord Zapranoth. There I am to give her to the demon, to be devoured—possessed—whatever Zapranoth may do with human folk.”

The answer was quick and cold. “The chamberlain spoke our will correctly, then. That is what we require of you, Lord Chup.”

A good soldier, if he had ever got himself in this deep, would know that this was the moment to salute, turn and leave. Chup knew it; yet he lingered. The hollows of darkness that were Som's eyes remained aimed at him steadily. Then Som said: “The strong magic of a love-charm once bound you to that woman, but my magicians tell me you are free of that. What are your feelings for her now?”

In a flash of relief Chup understood, or thought he did. “Demons! I'm sorry, lord. Do you mean, have I affection for her? Hah! That's what you're testing.” He almost laughed. “If you want me to feed her to the demons, well and good. I'll drag her to the pit and toss her in, and sing about my work!”

“In that case, what is your objection?” Som's voice was still cold and hard, but reasonable.

“I…High Lord, what good will it do to test my skill in lying and intrigue? To see if she believes me when I promise to help her? You'll have other men in your service far more cunning in such matters than I am. But you'll have few or none who'll fight like me.”

“The test seems useless to you, then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Does a good soldier argue all orders that seem to him useless? Or, as you said before, only those that seem mistaken?”

Silence stretched out following the question. Chup's stubborn dissatisfaction remained, but his will was wavering. The more he tried to pin down what was bothering him and put it into words, the more foolish his objections seemed. What harm could he suffer, in obediently carrying out this test, that could compare with all he stood to gain from it? Yet, encouraged by Som's seeming patience, he made an effort and tried once more to speak his inner feelings.

“This thing that you would have me do is small, and mean…” Then try as he might he could not form his shapeless revulsion any further. He made a weak and futile gesture and fell silent. Despite the clamminess of the chamber, sweat was trickling down his ribs. Now his coming here to argue seemed a hideous blunder. It wasn't that he cared what happened to her…the face of Som was growing hard to look at. And there were no perfumes here…but Chup was long used to the air of battlefields.

The viceroy shifted in his seat, and lo, was very manlike once again. The dark flame had burned down to only a spark of night. “My loyal Chup. As you say, your talents are not those of a courtier; but they are considerable. Therefore will I not punish you for this insolent questioning; therefore will I condescend this once to explanation.

“The test you do not like is given you
because
you do not like it, because you have shown reluctance to do things that you think of as ‘small and mean.' To pledge yourself formally to the East is no meaningless ritual. In your case it will mean changing yourself, importantly, and I realize full well it can be very difficult. It is to do violence to your old self, in the name of that which you are going to become.”

Time was stretching on in the odd little room. Like a man dreaming or entranced, Chup asked: “What am I going to become?”

“A great lord with the full powers of the East to call upon. The master of all that you have ever craved.”

“But. How shall I change myself? To what?”

“To become as I am. No, no, not dead and leathery; I was playing with the woman when I told her she would be so. That is given only to me, here in the Black Mountains. I mean you shall become as I am in your mind and inward self. Now will you take the test?”

“My lord, I will.”

“You are obedient.” Som leaned closer, looking intently from his sunken eyes. “But in your case I wish for more than that. Loyal Chup, if you still had some affection for the woman, then merely to throw her to the demons might well suffice for your initiation. But as things are, it is not the woman, it is something else, within yourself, you must destroy ere you are ours completely.”

Som rose from his chair. He was not tall, but he seemed to tower above Chup as he leaned yet closer, with his smell of old death. “You must be for once not brave, but cowardly. Small and mean, as you describe it. It will be difficult only once. You must learn to cause pain, for the sake of nothing but causing pain. Only thus will you be bound to us entirely. Only thus will there be opened for you the inner secrets of power and the inner doors of wealth. And how can I give command of my Guard to one who is not bound to me and to the East?”

“The Guard…”

“Yes. The present Guard commander's aged and scarred well past his peak of usefulness. And you know Thomas of the Broken Lands, who is planning to assail us here, you know him and how he thinks and fights.”

Not only an officer, but once again the commander of an army in the field…“My High Lord, I will do it! I hesitate no more!”

When Chup had gone, the viceroy returned to brooding on his other problems. What power was it, almost equal to his own, that dwelt in the circlet of gold hair and almost awoke in him the old desires of life?

His wizards would find out, in time.

In all their divinations lately, a threatening sign, the name of Ardneh, loomed up from the West. A name, with nothing real as yet attached to it. But it was in that sign, they said, that the Broken Lands and other satrapies along the seacoast had been lost…

Thomas had been right about the reptiles, Rolf was thinking now, as he trudged up a small hillock to where his commander stood looking upward at the black, night-shrouded cliffs. Rolf's breath steamed in the air before his face. The onset of winter's chill, more noticeable at this altitude than it had been near the seashore, had kept the reptiles close to their roosts, had prevented their scouting out the army of the West during the days as it lay hiding in a hundred fragments. Night by night they had crept closer to Som's citadel.

Rolf reached the spot where Thomas stood, alone for once, his head tipped back. There seemed little to be seen, gazing upward, except the stars above the cliffs, whose tops seemed but little below the twinkling sparks.

“I think it's going to work,” Rolf reported. He had recently been given his first command, a work party to set in order and inspect the balloon-craft that the djinn produced. All through this night the technology-djinn had labored at Gray's direction, making airships. Loford and the other wizards had concentrated on preventing the army's discovery by demon or diviner dwelling on the cliffs above.

Gray had now learned to manage the djinn successfully, Rolf reported. At the foot of the cliffs were twenty balloons tugging gently at their mooring ropes, each of the twenty capable of carrying five armed humans. The balloons were to ascend connected in pairs by stout lines, and longer cords would fasten each pair to the ones behind it and ahead, so the hundred riders would find themselves together at the top.

“Once we begin it, it had better work,” said Thomas, nodding, when Rolf had finished detailing his report. Thomas himself was one of the hundred ascending by balloon to seize a foothold on the cliffs. Rolf was going up, to order the maneuvering and landing of balloons, and Gray, as wizard and technologist both. The other ninety-seven had been hand-picked from the fiercest warriors. At first Thomas had contemplated lifting his whole army in an aerial assault. But testing and maneuvering, by night and day, on various smaller cliffs between here and the Broken Lands, had dissuaded him. The number of things that could go wrong had proven almost limitless, and the time available for practicing was not. In maneuvers, the stunt had been worked successfully with as many as fifteen balloons. He had decided to risk twenty to seize the upper ending of the pass.

Thomas now had nothing more to say. Rolf, who had known him from his earliest days of leadership—not so long ago—wanted to offer more encouragement, but hesitated to interrupt what might be a necessary pause for thought. The pause was not long before Thomas turned suddenly and strode off down the hill. Rolf hurried after.

Most of Thomas's other officers were waiting for him, in a body, and he strode in among them briskly. “All here who are supposed to be? Once more: our flares will burn with a green fire, to signal you to start to climb the pass. We'll sound horns at the same time, as we've rehearsed. Once you get the word, by sound or light or both, that we've seized the top of the pass, come up as if a hundred demons were behind you.”

“Instead of waiting for us at the top, aye!” There were sounds of nervous laughter.

Gray's tall figure loomed up. In one hand he raised what appeared to be an ordinary satchel. “The demons at Som's command number far fewer than a hundred. And I have the lives of two of the strongest of them in here.”

“Zapranoth? Zapranoth's life?” The murmured question came from several at once.

Gray, perhaps irritated, raised his voice slightly. “These are the lives of Yiggul, and of Kion. I have had them in my possession for some time, though for the sake of secrecy I have said nothing about them until now. And I have let them live, so I can destroy them when Som has called them up, thrown them into battle, and is depending on them. I am sure many of you know their names: they are both formidable powers.”

There was silence.

Gray lowered his satchel. “You will see me blow them away like clouds of mist, before they have had time to do us the least harm.”

“Not Zapranoth's life,” one low-voiced listener said.

“No!” Gray snapped. “His life eludes us still. But these two are the strongest of the other demons. With these two gone, my brother and I can beat off the smaller fry like insects. We will not need the lesser demons' lives to drive them off.”

There was no comment.

Gray went on, a little louder still: “Then, with all the others gone, we will be free to deal with him. Myself, Loford, the other stout wizards here. Zapranoth is mighty, well, so are we. We will hold off him or any other power, until your swords have won the day.”

“And that we will do,” Thomas put in with great firmness. “Any questions? Remember what you've been told about the valkyries. Let's move, the light is coming.” He gripped hands all round with his officers, and led the way toward the moored balloons.

Rolf trotted to take his place in the basket of the leading balloon. He felt weak in the knees, as usual before a fight, but he knew that it would pass. It crossed his mind as he and Gray were boarding their separate balloons that he had never seen the wizard sleep. If Gray felt any fatigue from his night-long supervision of the djinn, he did not show it. Gray was compelling the djinn to accompany his balloon, and had even forced it somehow to dim the intensity of its fiery image; Rolf could see it like a floating patch of campfire embers in the shadow of the great hulking gasbag of Gray's balloon, some thirty meters distant. Tests had shown that the lifting gas provided by the djinn would not burn, but the problem of arrow-proofing the bags had not been entirely solved. They were protected to some extent by draped sheets of chain-mail whose rings were lighter than metal, made, as were the bags themselves, of something that the djinn called
plastic
.

Rolf had argued at some length for using to the full the tremendous powers of the djinn, delaying the campaign as long as necessary to exercise its abilities and try out the results; it seemed to him that in a few months enough Old World arms, armor, and techniques might be acquired and understood to give the army an overwhelming advantage against the East.

But Gray had vetoed such a plan. “For two reasons. First, not all Old World devices will work now as neatly and reliably as they did in the Old World. This is true in particular of certain advanced weapons. I do not fully understand why this should be; but I have my means of knowledge, and it is so.”

“We could experiment—”

“With devices far more perilous than balloons? No, I do not think that we are ready. The second reason, and perhaps the stronger”—here Gray paused for a moment, looking round as if to make sure that he was not overheard—“is the chance that our djinn will perish in this battle. We are facing Zapranoth, and such a blow is far from impossible. It would leave us without help in operating and maintaining our Old World weapons. No. Better that we fight with means we understand, depending on no one but ourselves.”

Waiting now in the basket for the signal to ascend, Rolf grinned nervously at the impassive Mewick at his side. “Mewick, will you one day teach me to use weapons?” he asked in a low voice. It was something of an old joke between them, for Rolf at least. Mewick shook his head at Rolf in faint reproach and let his expression deepen into gloom.

The first balloons were loaded; the crews who were to do the launching were moving about briskly and capably in the gloom. Rolf did not see when Thomas gave the final signal for the attack, but those who were required to see did so. Two men standing by the mooring ropes each tugged and released a knot, and Rolf beheld the dim cliffside, ten meters from his face, begin abruptly to slide down in silence. Gray's balloon kept pace, its basket rocking gently, the dim fire of the image of the djinn suspended near it. The line connecting Rolf's balloon to Gray's drew gently taut, then slackened again. The longer lines, that the next craft were to follow up, were paid out from their reels outside the baskets.

The edge of sky that Rolf could see past the bottom of his balloon was now brightening with a hint of dawn. Higher the two baskets swung, moving in the perfect silence of a dream, emerging now from the deeper shadows at the base of the cliffs, so that the rocky walls before them rapidly grew more distinct. Turning for a moment to the west, Rolf could see the plains and desert, night-bound still, stretching far into vague, retreating darkness. His homeland, and the ocean, would be visible from here by day. But there was no time now to think of that.

Up and up…

Rolf's drawn sword snapped up in his hand to guard position, as the utter quiet was shattered by the strident cawing of a reptile. The creature had been dozing on the cliff face, a pebble's toss from the balloons, and it had wakened to see the strange shapes soaring past. Sluggish with chill, wings laboring, it came out in a dark, slow explosion from the rocks, and fled them upward strainingly. Mewick and others who had their arrows nocked were quick to draw and loose at it, and it was hit but not brought down. Clamoring all the louder, it flew on up above the great gasbags and out of sight.

From somewhere farther up there came a slow-voiced, cawing answer, and then another, higher yet. Then there was silence once more, until it almost seemed that the citadel might have returned to sleep.

Up and up. The men hanging in the baskets, straining to see and hear, had little to say to one another. Rolf found himself gripping the wicker rim inside the quilted armor-padding, trying to lift the craft into a faster climb. He could see Gray murmuring to the djinn.

Rolf was expecting that at any moment they would top the cliff, but they had not done so before there came sure proof that the enemy had awakened. It was a small squadron of reptiles on reconnaissance. Their cawing and snarling was heard above, and then the soft thumps of their bodies striking atop the gasbags. The craft continued to rise steadily. The mail of plastic links had proven too tough for reptilian teeth and claws, and their bodies were not weighty enough to hold down the balloons.

When the reptiles flew down below the bags to find the baskets, arrows and slung stones bit at them accurately. They screamed and raged and fled; some fell, transfixed by shafts, turned into weights with fluttering fringes dropping through the brightening sky.

Now came the first sign that Som's fighting men were reacting to the attack. Rolf saw black-trimmed uniforms running on ledges on the cliffs. A slung stone thunked on the padding-armor right in front of him, and he crouched lower. A fur-clad Northman in Rolf's basket loosed an arrow in reply, and on the cliff face a man dropped, toppled and slid on the steep slope, trying to cling to it with the shaft in him, plowing up a little avalanche.

Rolf knew they could not have much farther to ascend, but still the top came as a surprise. The cliff face fell back abruptly into a tableland, rough and split by many crevices, but essentially flat. At the rear of this horizontal reach, Som's low-walled citadel sprawled, backed by the next leap upward of the mountain. Across the little distance that separated his balloon from Gray's, Rolf heard the wizard barking orders to the djinn. The two balloons, each trailing a long spider-filament of line, slowed and stopped their ascent just above the rim of the cliff. Just here, almost beneath Rolf now, the narrow pass delivered the road it had caught up on the plain below.

Modest earthworks on one side of the debouching road defended the pass against a climbing army, and in fact formed the only real defense short of the citadel's own walls. These works manned by half a hundred men might easily hold the road, it seemed, against Thomas's four thousand, so great was their advantage of position. Ten or twelve men were in the trenches now, pulling on black helmets and gaping confusedly at the balloons. Their fortification offered no protection against attackers dropping from the sky.

Gray was smoothly ordering the operations of the djinn. Gas hissed from the bag above Rolf's head; the basket he was riding skimmed rock, just in from the cliff's edge. He pitched out a metal grapple on a line, and leaped right after it. The balloon bobbed up with the removal of his weight; for a moment he stood there alone, the sole invader of Som's stronghold. But in the moment it took him to catch the grapple and fix it in one of the many crevices in the rock, Mewick was standing beside him, short sword and battle-hatchet at the ready. Then with thudding sandals others were landing, at their right and left. Gray swung from his bobbing basket, agile as a youth. Across ten meters of empty ground the ten invaders faced the unfortified rear of the strong point that looked so indomitably down the pass; ten black-helmed Guardsmen, more or less, stared back as if uncertain they were real.

Excepting Rolf and Gray, the aerial troops had been hand-picked for guts and viciousness, and those proved first in fighting skill had been selected for the first balloons. The struggle for the earthwork began without an order, in the space of one short breath, and it was over in the time one might draw a long breath and release a sigh; only one fighter of the West had been cut down. Rolf sprang forward with the rest, but all the enemy were slaughtered before he had a chance to strike a blow. Still gripping his unmarred sword he turned to Gray; the towering wizard with a motion of his arm was already sending out the signal of green fire, bright as a small sun in the morning sky, leaping and shining in the air above the pass.

Rolf turned and cried out: “Sound the horn!” A Northman, blood from a scalp wound running in his eyes, had the twisting beast-horn already at his lips; he gave a nod, and winded it with all his might.

Sheathing his weapon, Rolf ran back to his balloons, made them secure with double grapples, and deciding where the second pair should land. He was none too soon, for they were close below and rising rapidly. When they arrived, he helped to land them, pulling on the thin ropes that the first balloons had trailed, while their fierce passengers leaped out and set themselves to hold the pass and landing place. Rolf stayed at the landing place, seeing that the new balloons were tied down, and looking for the next. When he glanced toward the citadel, he heard alarms and signals there, and saw folk running on the walls, and reptiles in a sluggish swarm above them. The main gates had been open, and still were; at any moment a force must sally out to push the Westerners from the cliff. Rolf looked the other way, down the road that became a twisty ribbon marking the bottom of the pass, but the army of the West was still invisible. It would be hours before their legs could bring them to this height.