Генри Каттнер - Lands of the Earthquake

To his amazement, the lolling head moved a little. Very slowly, with infinite effort, the big shoulders drew themselves up and the magician rolled his head sidewise slightly and groaned.

Boyce found himself on his knees beside the low table, shaking Tancred’s shoulder.

“Can you hear me?” he demanded. “Tancred, are you awake?”

He was not awake. But neither was he wholly asleep. Somehow, in the few moments between the coming of the magic and the conquering of Kerak, Tancred had managed to perform some averting spell which partly nullified the effects of slumber. Probably, Boyce thought, it was this smouldering ash that filled the room with rosy layers of cloud and the fragrance of flowers.

“Tancred!” he repeated. “Can you hear me?”

This time Tancred’s eyes opened a little and his black eyes looked out through a film of sleep into Boyce’s face. It was as if the mage looked at him through a curtain, standing alive and wakeful and impatient behind the veil which he could not lift.

“Shall I trust the Oracle, Tancred?” Boyce demanded urgently, shaking the black–robed shoulder. “There’s a spell over Kerak—you know that? The Oracle tells me I must kill Guillaume. Does she speak the truth, Tancred?”

Light came briefly into the half–lidded eyes of the mage. The bearded lips stirred. Tancred made a mighty effort to break the bonds which magic had forged upon him. Boyce saw the veins stand out in his heavy neck, and the dark face which the suns of the Holy Land had tanned too deeply ever to fade grew livid with strain.

But he could not speak. The bonds of sleep were too heavy. He gave one last convulsive effort that lifted his head a little way off his bended arm, and Boyce saw him nod—once, twice. It was enough. He had his answer.

Then the magician’s breath ran out in a sigh and he collapsed again in slumber upon the table top while the futile, flower–smelling smoke wreathed about him unnoticed.

“Kill Guillaume,” Boyce heard himself saying softly in the quiet room.

The air shuddered around him. No—this time, not the air alone. The floor shook underfoot. There was the sound of heavy boots on stone, and each footfall made the whole of enchanted Kerak tremble to its foundation.

Suddenly Boyce felt his heart beginning to thud in quickening beats that matched the approaching steps; the breath was thick in his throat and exultation filled him as the enchanted sleep brimmed in Kerak Castle. His hatred for Guillaume was a tangible thing. He knew now, in a flash of understanding, that he had lived every hour in Kerak toward this one moment—toward the killing of Guillaume. For that purpose, it seemed to him now, he had been born, and lived to this one exultant hour.

There was no reason behind it. Dimly he knew that it must have been foreordained to happen so—or why was only he awake in Kerak when the destroyer came? But he would not think of it now. He would not try to reason why Kerak’s lord had come back to Kerak as its destroyer. Reason was not in him. Hatred was all that remained, and the exhilaration of battle.

The footsteps, like the tread of a giant shaking the stairs they mounted, were very near him now. The air was thunderous with its echoes of that tread. Dimly Boyce thought there were moving shapes about him, brushing his garments as they went invisibly by. He had no time to wonder.

There was a sword lying across Tancred’s table, close by his limp, outflung hand. Boyce snatched it up, stripped the sheath away, balanced the great blade in his fist. And as he did so, a sort of electrical shudder ran up his arm from the hilt, and Tancred, lying across the table behind him, stirred and sighed. The sword moved of itself in Boyce’s grasp. It made an arch through the flower–scented air and brought itself up into position.

It was a magical sword, he knew then.

Laughter sounded in the hall, deep, wild laughter that was not wholly Guillaume’s. More subtlety was in the sound than Guillaume had ever known. Then, for the first time since enchantment had fallen upon Kerak, Boyce remembered Hugh de Mandois, and how strangely changed he had come back to the Crusaders.

The star–studded door flew open with a crash that echoed and re–echoed in Tancred’s tower–room. The rosy smoke–layers swirled wildly. Guillaume’s great bulk filled the doorway. He was laughing as he came, in deep, shaking gusts that Boyce thought must ring through all of the silence and the magic that brimmed Kerak.

Guillaume’s huge sword, bare in his mighty scarred fist, flashed in the dim air of the chamber. His face was not mirthful. Though he laughed, it was his mouth alone that laughed. His eyes had the veiled look that Tancred’s showed. A shadow was over his arrogant, stubborn face, and it was a terrifying shadow.

“ Tancred! ” Guillaume roared, in a voice that should have wakened every sleeper in the castle. “Tancred, this is the hour you die!”

He took one ponderous step forward—the whole room shook to that inhuman tread—and the great two–edged sword swung up over the mage’s head.

In some remote corner of his brain Boyce knew suddenly and certainly that this was not the true Guillaume. The enmity between them was an enmity of the blood, a bond like kinship which neither could have broken by himself.

The Guillaume who had left Kerak would never have ignored Boyce standing here with a sword in his hand, to roar threats at a sleeping Tancred. No—this Guillaume was not the same man who left the castle.

Of its own will the blade in Boyce’s grasp swept up in a glittering arc. And it rose not an instant too soon. Guillaume’s sword was already falling, and in another moment the mage’s head would have rolled from its shoulders across the painted table.

There was a clash in mid–air like the clash of meeting thunder–bolts. Fire sprang out as steel screamed against steel. Guillaume thundered a ponderous curse in a tongue Boyce had never heard before (the tongue they speak in the Enchanters’ City? he wondered wildly) and the great blade rose again, shearing through the wreaths of colored smoke above Tancred’s head.

It was a strange battle. They were iron men in the days of the Crusaders. The mighty swords they swung were so heavy a modern man could scarcely lift them in both hands. Magic alone made it possible for Boyce to meet the terrible, crashing blows Guillaume was raining upon his blade. Magic and the cunning of the sword which fought of its own enchanted will—and the fact that Guillaume never once really turned his blows against Boyce himself.

Guillaume—walking in magic, and with the shadow on his face that was not wholly the face of Guillaume—had come for one purpose only to Kerak. He had come to kill Tancred the Mage. All his sword–strokes were bent upon the sleeping Tancred. It was Boyce’s part to keep the steel shield of the magical blade between Guillaume’s and the magician. He did not have to fight to protect himself, but the fight to protect Tancred was a desperate battle indeed.

Lightning leaped through the chamber whenever the great blades screamed across one another. And Guillaume’s footsteps thundered impossibly upon the flagstones, every tread shaking the whole castle. He was more than a man—he was a sorcerer’s godling, walking in thunder and wielding the lightning. But he fought blindly, and he walked blindly, and it was not Guillaume behind that arrogant, shadowed face.

The end came suddenly. Boyce knew he had no part in it. He felt the blade he wielded shift itself in his grip, leap as if with abrupt triumph and dart at last in a flickering lateral stroke that snaked in under Guillaume’s blow and struck the Crusader hard, edge–on, against the corded thickness of his neck.