Генри Каттнер - Lands of the Earthquake

Startled, Boyce glanced at Guillaume, meeting the glare of his own eyes looking back out of that arrogant face so much like his.

“You can serve yourself and us,” Tancred went on. “If you take up the links of Guillaume’s plot I think you may find your way more easily than if you go alone. For only you can go—as Guillaume.”

Blue mist swirled about his knees as he walked slowly across the sandy plains between Kerak and the Sorcerers’ City. Boyce drew the blue cloak about him more warmly, for this air was damp and cold. Beneath the cloak he wore tunic and hose from the store–rooms of Kerak, and across his chest the red Cross of the Crusader blazed.

It was the cross men wore who had set their faces toward Jerusalem six centuries ago. None in Kerak carried the cross upon their backs to proclaim the pilgrimage completed, though all but Tancred still cherished the hope of doing so. For them, time still lingered where they had left it to step into this cloudy oblivion in which no sun rose or set.

Boyce touched his face experimentally for the hundredth time. He was not yet sure how Tancred’s skill had managed to engrave there the arrogance which marked Guillaume’s most sharply in contrast to his own. The drooping moustache of the Crusader was all that remained of the golden beard which had grown during the days—the weeks, the months, perhaps—of his convalescence. To the eye, he passed as Guillaume.

And he was going deliberately—like a fool, he thought—into the same trap which had sprung on Guillaume. He wondered a little why he was risking so much for the sake of these people who were nothing to him except exiles from the same world. True, they had taken him in. He owed them gratitude for that.

But he went into dangers now too deadly to have names. Remembering Hugh de Mandois, he shuddered. To be possessed by a scaled demon such as Hugh’s—to be ripped apart like a garment, body and bone, when the demon chose to stand forth….

No, he had no duty to the Crusaders that could force him to risk a fate like that. He risked it of his own will. He risked it because of—gratitude?—kinship? He knew it was not true. He would have gone if Kerak had never stood here on its crags, if Godfrey and Guillaume were dust in the world of their birth.

He must have gone, and he knew it—because of a woman whose face he did not know, a woman who had looked briefly over her shoulder at him in a fragment of memory and smiled beneath her iron crown.

She dwelt, he thought, in this city before him. Tancred had told him that much. And Tancred had told him of the bond which linked Kerak to the City.

“You have wondered about the Oracle, du Boyce,” Tancred had said an hour ago, sitting in a high–backed chair in his tower room and turning a cup of wine in his jeweled fingers. “Before you go, I think you must hear all I know of her story. She is—” He hesitated, looking down into the wine. “She is the child of my only child,” Tancred said finally.

Boyce straightened in his chair, muffling an involuntary sound of amazement.

“Then she is alive!” he said. “I thought—”

“Alive?” Tancred sighed. “I do not know. I have learned much about science and about magic since we came to this land, and I have seen much in my mirrors of secret things in the City. But about this one thing I know almost nothing. I know only that some terrible wrong has been done, and I think it is resolved, for good or evil, the bond will always hold between Kerak and the City. Unless one or the other is destroyed….”

He sipped his wine.

“Drink,” he urged Boyce. “You will need strength for your journey. The lands between here and the City walls are cold and the mist is like floating rain. Drink your wine and listen.

“The City was much farther away from here when my daughter, who had come to us from Normandy on the Crusade rode out one day and lost herself in the mists. It was the last we saw of her for a long while.” His face grew grim, the black brows meeting above the black eyes.

“Those of the City took her,” he said after a pause. “The Sorcerer King beheld her, and because she was beautiful, he kept her in his palace. He had many slaves. To do him full justice, I believe he held her in high honor. She was a very lovely woman. She bore one child to him—a daughter. Then she died.

“I have never known how. Perhaps poison. Perhaps the bowstring, or some more mysterious way. Or perhaps she sickened, and died of her illness. I never knew. I saw her but once before her death—briefly, outside the City walls.

“The child lived on in her father’s palace, and grew and became a woman. It is very strange, that—” He shook his head, the emeralds glittering in his ears beneath the turban. “Time goes so differently there and here. I think time moves and is counted in the City.

“I know my daughter’s daughter grew to womanhood while here in Kerak there was no time at all. Young pages among us now were young pages before my grandchild’s birth, and now she—she stands in her fiery bower, a woman grown.”

He poured more wine.

“What happened in the City I do not know. She was her father’s favorite, and I think some quarrel came up between them, and for punishment, perhaps, he made her as she is now.

“I only know she came to us like a ghost, like a marble woman, walking with closed eyes and clasped hands, white as snow, and as silent. Some instinct seemed to lead her to her kinsmen when she could no longer endure the City of her birth.

“We took her in and tried to tend her, but she asked only for a room in which she could dwell quietly. We gave her the room you have seen. And when we came in the morning, she stood as she stands now, in that cage of singing fire. She spoke to us from it, with the voice of an oracle.

“There is much power in her. With those closed eyes she can see into men’s souls. Wisdom is in her, but locked behind that silence.

“She is not always caged. There are times when the fire dies down and vanishes, and then she walks from the castle into the mist and is gone awhile. I think—I cannot be sure, but I think she meets someone down among the plains. But always she returns to her room and the bower of fire takes shape around her again.

“It is my belief that so long as she dwells here the bond between her and her father, the King of the Sorcerers’ City, will anchor them to us as a ship is anchored. And if what Guillaume tells us is true, the King will not have all of Kerak destroyed while his child remains here. He would gladly kill us all—but not his daughter.

“That is why I think there is hope for your mission to the City. If Jamai, who is the King’s minister, were king himself, my hopes would be small. I can tell you no more than this. As far as I may, I will watch you. It may be I can help. But I think you came here for a purpose—led by what magic I cannot guess—and I am sure the answer to your coming lies in the City.”

He drained his cup again.

“Do what you can for us there, du Boyce. Remember you have a link with us in Kerak too. Your likeness to Guillaume is no accident.”

A faint drift of music through the mist roused Boyce from his thoughts. He looked up. Above him loomed the high walls which he had first seen from that gateway through the solid rock when he broke his way into this world. Lights gleamed from the heights of the wall. He could hear the tented roofs billow a little in the breeze from the plains and the fog was stained with bright colors where the glow fell upon it.

Boyce turned and went left along the base of the wall. There was a small gateway he must find, marked with a circle of blue lights. Guillaume had told him it was a pilgrims’ gate. Guillaume said the drifting City was for many in this unstable land a holy city, filled with altars to gods that bore strange names. Pilgrims from far away over the plains sometimes came here, by twos and threes, by caravans, sometimes alone.