The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (14 page)

In Mouse’s face Ivrian saw the living example of those words. Step
by step she moved toward him, feeling no more power to control her
movements than if she were in a nightmare. She became aware of
shadowy presences, as if she were pushing her way through cobweb
veils. She came so near that she could have reached out her hand and
touched him, and still he did not notice her, as if his spirit were out
beyond the stars, grappling the blackness there.

Then a twig snapped under her foot and Mouse sprang up with
terrifying swiftness, the energy of every taut muscle released. He
snatched up his sword and lunged at the intruder. But when the green
blade was within a hand’s breadth of Ivrian’s throat, he checked it
with an effort. He glared, lips drawn back from his teeth. Although
he had checked his sword, he seemed only half to recognize her.

At that instant Ivrian was buffeted by a mighty gust of wind,
which came from the mouth of the cavern, a strange wind, carrying
shadows. The green fire burned low, running rapidly along the sticks
that were its fuel, and almost snuffing out.

Then the wind ceased and the thick darkness lifted, to be replaced
by a wan gray light heralding the dawn. The fire turned from green
to yellow. The wizard’s apprentice staggered, and the sword dropped
from his fingers.

“Why did you come here?” he questioned thickly.

She saw how his face was wasted with hunger and hate, how his
clothing bore the signs of many nights spent in the forest like an
animal, under no roof. Then suddenly she realized that she knew the
answer to his question.

“Oh, Mouse,” she whispered, “let us go away from this place. Here
is only horror.” He swayed, and she caught hold of him. “Take me
with you, Mouse,” she said.

He stared frowningly into her eyes. “You do not hate me then, for
what I have done to your father? Or what I have done to the teachings
of Glavas Rho?” he questioned puzzledly. “You are not afraid of me?”

“I am afraid of everything,” she whispered, clinging to him. “I am
afraid of you, yes, a great deal afraid. But that fear can be unlearned.
Oh, Mouse, will you take me away?—to Lankhmar or to Earth’s End?”

He took her by the shoulders. “I have dreamed of that,” he said
slowly. “But you...”

“Apprentice of Glavas Rho!” thundered a stern, triumphant voice.
“I apprehend you in the name of Duke Janarrl for sorceries practiced
on the Duke’s body!”

Four huntsmen were springing forward from the undergrowth with
swords drawn and Giscorl three paces behind them. Mouse met them
halfway. They soon found that this time they were not dealing with
a youth blinded by anger, but with a cold and cunning swordsman.
There was a kind of magic in his primitive blade. He ripped up the
arm of his first assailant with a well-judged thrust, disarmed the
second with an unexpected twist, then coolly warded off the blows
of the other two, retreating slowly. But other huntsmen followed the
first four and circled around. Still fighting with terrible intensity and
giving blow for blow, Mouse went down under the sheer weight of
their attack. They pinioned his arms and dragged him to his feet. He
was bleeding from a cut in the cheek, but he carried his head high,
though it was beast-shaggy. His bloodshot eyes sought out Ivrian.

“I should have known,” he said evenly, “that having betrayed
Glavas Rho you would not rest until you had betrayed me. You did
your work well, girl. I trust you take much pleasure in my death.”

Giscorl laughed. Like a whip, the words of Mouse stung Ivrian.
She could not meet his eyes. Then she became aware that there was
a man on horseback behind Giscorl and, looking up, she saw that it
was her father. His wide body was bent by pain. His face was a death’s
mask. It seemed a miracle that he managed to cling to the saddle.

“Quick, Giscorl!” he hissed.

But the thin-faced henchman was already sniffing around in the
cavern’s mouth like a well-trained ferret. He gave a cry of satisfaction
and lifted down a little figure from a ledge above the fire, which he
next stamped out. He carried the figure as gingerly as if it were made
of cobweb. As he passed by her, Ivrian saw that it was a clay doll
wide as it was tall and dressed in brown and yellow leaves, and that
its features were a grotesque copy of her father’s. It was pierced in
several places by long bone needles.

“This is the thing, oh Master,” said Giscorl, holding it up, but the
Duke only repeated, “Quick, Giscorl!” The henchman started to
withdraw the largest needle which pierced the doll’s middle, but the
Duke gasped in agony and cried, “Forget not the balm!” Whereupon
Giscorl uncorked with his teeth and poured a large vial of sirupy
liquid over the doll’s body and the Duke sighed a little with relief.
Then Giscorl very carefully withdrew the needles, one by one, and
as each needle was withdrawn the Duke’s breath whistled and he
clapped his hand to his shoulder or thigh, as if it were from his own
body that the needles were being drawn. After the last one was out,
he sat slumped in his saddle for a long time. When he finally looked
up the transformation that had taken place was astonishing. There
was color in his face, and the lines of pain had vanished, and his voice
was loud and ringing.

“Take the prisoner back to our stronghold to await our judgment,”
he cried. “Let this be a warning to all who would practice wizardry
in our domain. Giscorl, you have proved yourself a faithful servant.”
His eyes rested on Ivrian. “You have played with witchcraft too often,
girl, and need other instruction. As a beginning you will witness the
punishment I shall visit on this foul wizardling.”

“A small boon, oh Duke!” Mouse cried. He had been hoisted onto
a saddle and his legs tied under the horse’s belly. “Keep your foul,
spying daughter out of my sight. And let her not look at me in my
pain.”

“Strike him in the lips, one of you,” the Duke ordered. “Ivrian,
ride close behind him—I command it.”

Slowly the little cavalcade rode off toward the stronghold through
the brightening dawn. Ivrian’s horse had been brought to her and she
took her place as bidden, sunk in a nightmare of misery and defeat. She
seemed to see the pattern of her whole life laid out before her—past,
present, and future—and it consisted of nothing but fear, loneliness,
and pain. Even the memory of her mother, who had died when she
was a little girl, was something that still brought a palpitation of panic
to her heart: a bold, handsome woman, who always had a whip in her
hand, and whom even her father had feared. Ivrian remembered how
when the servants had brought word that her mother had broken her
neck in a fall from a horse, her only emotion had been fear that they
were lying to her, and that this was some new trick of her mother’s to
put her off guard, and that some new punishment would follow.

Then, from the day of her mother’s death, her father had shown
her nothing but a strangely perverse cruelty. Perhaps it was his
disgust at not having a son that made him treat her like a cowardly
boy instead of a girl and encourage his lowliest followers to maltreat
her—from the maids who played at ghosts around her bed to the
kitchen wenches who put frogs in her milk and nettles in her salad.

Sometimes it seemed to her that anger at not having a son was
too weak an explanation for her father’s cruelties, and that he was
revenging himself through Ivrian on his dead wife, whom he had
certainly feared and who still influenced his actions, since he had
never married again or openly taken mistresses. Or perhaps there
was truth in what he had said of her mother and Glavas Rho—no,
surely that must be a wild imagining of his anger. Or perhaps, as he
sometimes told her, he was trying to make her live up to her mother’s
vicious and blood-thirsty example, trying to re-create his hated
and adored wife in the person of her daughter, and finding a queer
pleasure in the refractoriness of the material on which he worked and
the grotesquerie of the whole endeavor.

Then in Glavas Rho Ivrian had found a refuge. When she had first
chanced upon the white-bearded old man in her lonely wanderings
through the forest, he had been mending the broken leg of a fawn
and he had spoken to her softly of the ways of kindness and of the
brotherhood of all life, human and animal. And she had come back
day after day to hear her own vague intuitions revealed to her as
deep truths and to take refuge in his wide sympathy...and to explore
her timid friendship with his clever little apprentice. But now Glavas
Rho was dead and Mouse had taken the spider’s way, or the snake’s
track, or the cat’s path, as the old wizard had sometimes referred to
bale magic.

She looked up and saw Mouse riding a little ahead and to one side
of her, his hands bound behind him, his head and body bowed forward.
Conscience smote her, for she knew she had been responsible for his
capture. But worse than conscience was the pang of lost opportunity,
for there ahead of her rode, doomed, the one man who might have
saved her from her life.

A narrowing of the path brought her close beside him. She said
hurriedly, ashamedly, “If there is anything I can do so that you will
forgive me a little...”

The glance he bent on her, looking sidewise up, was sharp,
appraising, and surprisingly alive.

“Perhaps you can,” he murmured softly, so the huntsmen ahead
might not hear. “As you must know, your father will have me tortured
to death. You will be asked to watch it. Do just that. Keep your eyes
riveted on mine the whole time. Sit close beside your father. Keep
your hand on his arm. Aye, kiss him too. Above all, show no sign of
fright or revulsion. Be like a statue carved of marble. Watch to the
end. One other thing—wear, if you can, a gown of your mother’s, or
if not a gown, then some article of her clothing.” He smiled at her
thinly. “Do this and I will at least have the consolation of watching
you flinch—and flinch—and flinch!”

“No mumbling charms now!” cried the huntsman suddenly,
jerking Mouse’s horse ahead.

Ivrian reeled as if she had been struck in the face. She had thought her misery could go no deeper, but Mouse’s words had beaten it down a final notch. At that instant the cavalcade came into the open, and the stronghold loomed up ahead—a great horned and jag-crested blot on the sunrise. Never before had it seemed so much like a hideous monster. Ivrian felt that its high gates were the iron jaws of death.

Janarrl, striding into the torture chamber deep below his stronghold, experienced a hot wave of exultation, as when he and his huntsmen closed in around an animal for the kill. But atop the wave was a very faint foam of fear. His feelings were a little like those of a ravenously hungry man invited to a sumptuous banquet, but who has been warned by a fortuneteller to fear death by poison. He was haunted by the feverish frightened face of the man arm-wounded by the wizardling’s corroded bronze sword. His eyes met those of Glavas Rho’s apprentice, whose half-naked body was stretched—though not yet painfully so—upon the rack, and the Duke’s sense of fear sharpened. They were too searching, those eyes, too cold and menacing, too suggestive of magical powers.

He told himself angrily that a little pain would soon change their
look to one of trapped panic. He told himself that it was natural that
he should still be on edge from last night’s horrors, when his life had
almost been pried from him by dirty sorceries. But deep in his heart
he knew that fear was always with him—fear of anything or anyone
that some day might be stronger than he and hurt him as he had hurt
others—fear of the dead he had harmed and could hurt no longer—
fear of his dead wife, who had indeed been stronger and crueler than
he and who had humiliated him in a thousand ways that no one but
he remembered.

But he also knew that his daughter would soon be here and that
he could then shift off his fear on her; by forcing her to fear, he would
be able to heal his own courage, as he had done innumerable times
in the past.