Roger Zelazny - Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming

"Why you got your fist half-clenched like 'at, Angus?" the others cried.

"Because within it, my friends, I've got holt of an invisible spy."

"I'm not a spy!" Charming cried.

"But you are invisible, won't try to deny that, will you?"

Charming broke free and ran. The knights got up and chased after, awakening others with their loud hoots.

From behind him came their cries. These were answered by shouts from ahead. At first Charming thought it was an echo. But then the fact that the cries from before him were becoming louder tipped him off to the real situation. There were demon knights ahead as well as behind. They must have moved quickly to cut him off. He saw that he was going to have to pass through their ranks.

Pausing to re-drape the cloak of invisibility, he was fas­cinated to see his hand disappear as soon as the cloth was passed over it. Charming could look through the cloak and through his hand that it covered and see the ground beneath it.

Of course, the part of his hand that was not covered remained as visible as always. More visible, in fact, since the existence of an arm in which the hand terminated blood­lessly and at a slant did nothing to make it more imper­ceptible.

Quickly, he draped himself as best he was able and set off running again. He plunged into a broad grassy field. Horsemen appeared by moonlight on the edge of the meadow. Then one of them pointed and waved, saying, "There, where the grass is parted, that's where he must have gone!" Immediately a squad­ron went out in pursuit.

Charming dodged back into the woods, and there, finding a shallow cave, concealed himself long enough to tear out the cloak's lining. As he had hoped, this material, thin though it was, had the same qualities as the cloak itself. And so Charming could devise a mask for himself, a full-length wraparound mask, and thus even his head was concealed.

He could do nothing about the movements of his passage, however. Every footfall was marked by a bruising of leaves and bending of small boughs and grasses. At least hiding his head was rendering the finding of him more difficult.

He hurried, even knowing that he was kicking up a con­siderable trail. It occurred to him that he might do better if he could get himself to move slowly and carefully, thus eluding his pursuers while he was among them. That was how a fairy­tale prince might act, he thought, but that was not the way he was at all. He was running, his long legs exulting in stretching and striding, hurrying away from danger. Viewing himself from the viewpoint of his legs, he was a soaring creature proceeding by leaps and bounds. But the fact was the horses of his pursuers were moving faster. They were coming up on either side of him, the riders only slightly impeded by the necessity of having to sight his movement through the bending branches that marked his passage.

They closed in, their steel lance points winking at him. He could see a clearing ahead, but doubted that he could make it. It was all the more tantalizing because it contained a long lime­stone shelf. The stone would neither retain his footprints nor reveal his passage. It was going to be close.

One of the knights took aim with his lance and came charging.

It was only at this moment of extremity that his salvation came. He did not know whether it was natural, or induced somehow by Azzie. Where before the air had been still, now a wind rose up. Not just a little wind, but a full-blown gale, bearing drops of icy water and a scattering of hail.

On all sides, the foliage blew into wild disarray, making his movements undetectable.

The leading knight missed him by five feet. The second wasn't even close. The knights spread apart, trying to contain him within their circle. But Charming easily slipped between them and hurried down to the limestone shelf. This he was able to traverse without leaving a trace. When he stopped, the wind had died again, and there were no sounds of pursuit. He realized he had eluded the demons.

Prince Charming ran until his legs grew numb and his lungs fiery. At some point, he collapsed and slept.

When he awoke, he saw himself to be in a sunlit meadow. At the far end of it a mountain rose into the sky, a gigantic Matterhorn of the Imagination, a dream mountain of multicolored glass. In front of the mountain, and block­ing further access to it, was a dense forest of what looked like metal trees. Charming advanced upon the strange forest and regarded it. The trees were made of thorned stovepipe, and the tallest of them was not over seven feet in height. As he approached, the trees began to emit a yellowish gas which quickly caught fire, sparked by igniters located below-ground.

Prince Charming might not have known what these were, save that he recalled seeing Azzie studying a slip of paper which he later left lying upon his desktop. Curious, Charming had looked at it. It proved a receipt from the All Spiritual Regions Gas Company for payment for gas to power flame trees.

If Uncle Azzie "was indeed paying the bill to fuel the trees - and Charming could draw no other inference from the evi­dence- then the signs of manipulation were unmistakable. He felt strange now when he considered the ramifications. It made him feel as if he were painted cardboard, a cutout figure pinned to the background. This was frightening, but it came at a time when there was an urgent need to get on through the place. So he saved it for later consideration and moved ahead.

If the things could be turned on, they could be turned off. He sought for the better part of an hour before he located the valve in a ditch. The trees went out when he turned it. How very strange, to set up a thing like this in the first place.

He passed among them.

And so he came to Glass Mountain Village, final base camp and source of provender, sustenance, and souvenirs for those who would climb to the sun-dazzled summit of the great moun­tain, where, it was said, stood the enchanted castle within which lay the sleeping Princess Scarlet.

The principal industry of the town was to serve those who sought to climb the Glass Mountain. Here came explorers and glass-mountain climbers from all over. The lure of the thing was irresistible.

Charming walked down a line of shops on Main Street in Glass Mountain Village. Many of the shops specialized in glass-mountain-climbing equipment. Glass is a tough substance to scale. To hear the townspeople talk you'd think the glass changed qualities every time a cloud came over the sun. The mountain boasted every kind of glass to be found: Swift Glass and Devious Glass, Tricky Glass and Swamp Glass. There was High Mountain Deadly Glass and Low Plain Bed Glass. Each kind of glass (and Glass Mountain was said to be composed of all of these kinds and more) had its own difficulties, and booklets were available at the shops dealing with the remedies for every variety.

Although some believed that this Glass Mountain was the only place of its kind in the world, unique and unduplicatable, there were intellectuals who insisted that the perennial human custom of climbing glass mountains could only be accounted for by deep historical memories, practically universal to the race of man, of doing so countless times and places in the past. These theorists would have it that Glass Mountain was an archetype of human experience whose physical corroboration was always taking place on innumerable levels, from the first moment of the beginning of the past to the last instant of the furthest unrolling of the future.

The bookstores of Glass Mountain Village were also filled with technical books on how glass mountains had been climbed in this year or that. There were histories, guidebooks, books of interviews with climbers and theorists. There were several shops in town that sold nothing but crampons of all types and descriptions, including diamond-studded ones.