Генри Каттнер - Lands of the Earthquake

He did it almost without reason, driven only by a sudden, instinctive revolt against the cobweb–soft, clinging bonds of enchantment that had wound about him since he had entered this alien world—and even before that.

To have the Huntsman use him, mind and body, with that contemptuous disregard for his own demands, was suddenly unendurable. And that molten, rising rage culminated in the blow that caught the Huntsman by surprise and sent him crashing back, stunned, against the wall.

“Magic!” Boyce said, his voice a snarl of hatred. “There’s the cure for that!”

But the Huntsman could not answer. He was a crumpled, silent figure, red blood trickling down his jaw.

A wordless, eerie cry made Boyce turn. He had forgotten the pack. The tiger–cats were shifting uneasily, their bright, dappled bodies sliding soundlessly in an intricate pattern, backward and forward. The beautiful mad faces watched him.

He glanced quickly around the room. A breath of wind rippled down a tapestried hanging bright with black and gold. Boyce took a cautious step in that direction.

And another. Still the pack hesitated.

Boyce reached the tapestry and slipped beneath it. As he had guessed, there was an opening in the wall. A metal door was ajar, and a soft wind blew on his sweating face.

Mournfully, with inhuman sweetness, from the room he had left rose a wailing scream from a beast’s throat. It was echoed and re–echoed.

Boyce put his shoulder to the door and slammed it shut. There was no bolt, only a latch that could be lifted from either side. If the Huntsman recovered—

Boyce’s teeth showed in an unpleasant grin. His heavy shoulders squared.

He turned to stare down the dim, blue twilight of the tunnel.

Briefly he thought that the walls were hung with arabesque curtains. Then he saw them more clearly. Bas–relief carvings had been laid with a lavish hand on these walls. It was a design of roots, or branches—or, perhaps, serpents—intertwined in a jungle tangle that the eyes could not follow. The stone was varicolored, marked with brighter striations, glittering with mica and gem–chips. The passage seemed to be walled and roofed with a twining barrier of twisting roots.

A faint bluish light filtered through the tiny interstices between the carvings, as though they had been overlaid on a surface that held a light of its own.

Some instinct made Boyce move his hand to his hip, but the sword was gone, taken from him, no doubt, during his captivity to Irathe. But he did not want to think of her.

He could not go back. And the Huntsman might soon wake, unless the blood–scent had roused the pack to hunger.

Quietly Boyce moved along the passage. The twining coils on the wall and ceiling were motionless. Yet a feeling of tingling awareness, of the presence of some monstrous danger, never left him for a moment. As though he walked close beside a veil that might at any moment be ripped aside, that already rippled with a little wind that blew from an unknown and very terrible place.

Nerves—well, he had reason to feel nervous! His harsh grin broadened. To be plunged from his normal life into the maze of ancient, alien sorcery and intrigue—suitable enough for a Norman of Guillaume’s era, who walked amid witches and warlocks and Saracen magicians and believed in them devoutly. But Boyce did not believe. What a superstition–reared Crusader might accept blindly, a modern man could not.

Perhaps, Boyce thought he had been accepting too much on faith. He should have questioned more from the beginning. Yet his mind had not been entirely his own. He had been, for the most part, a tool in Irathe’s skilled hands, and the Huntsman’s.

The stone carving of a beast’s head was set amid the tangled root–carvings at his right. The stone eyes watched blindly. Into it—through it—the glittering coils seemed to grow.

Still the silence deepened.

He went on. There were more carvings to left and right. Some were animal, others human.

In the end he paused for a moment before one of the stone masks. He studied it. A root grew through the jaw, deforming the face curiously, but it was carved from a different material than the other gray, granite masks Boyce had seen. And, under the coiling tendrils, he could trace the shadowy outline of a body.

The sculptor had even suggested the details of iris and pupil in the open eyes of the mask. It looked like…It was like…

The stone lips moved.

Painfully, half–articulately, with a dry, stone clicking that was infinitely horrible—the head spoke.

“Boyce,” it groaned—and the stone tongue clicked on the name against stone teeth. “ Boyce! ”

Now Boyce knew the face, and realized what end had come to Godfrey Morel. Though the end had not yet quite come.

He reached for the loathsomely clinging root–carvings, but that inhuman voice halted him.

“Stay! Do not touch the walls! Do not !”

Boyce knew that he was shivering. He licked his dry lips.

“Godfrey,” he said. “What—isn’t there—”

“Listen,” Godfrey Morel said with his stone tongue. “Very soon I shall be—silent. Before then….” The clicking died.

“What can I do?” Boyce asked hoarsely. “Those things—”

“I am part of them already,” Godfrey said. “Part of it . It is a plant. Hell–spawned. A devil’s plant. Here are its roots, but through all the City, within the walls, beneath the floors, the tendrils have grown secretly. It is Jamai’s plant—his spy.”

“Jamai?”

“A devil–thing,” Godfrey said, his voice strengthening. “With its aid he knows all the City’s secrets. Within the walls its tendrils grow—listen—see—and when Jamai comes here, it answers his questions. I have seen that happen! It must be fed sometimes on the brains of living things, or it will relapse into an ordinary plant. He made it, long ago—with his sorceries.”

Sorcery? It was easy to accept that explanation, in this haunted blue twilight, but since Boyce had seen the Huntsman’s vulnerability, he was not so ready to believe. There were tropisms in plants—hypersensitivity—plants that could, in effect, see and hear and sense vibrations. Even in Burbank’s day the study of plant–mutations had been understood.

Under certain abnormal stimuli, such a monstrous thing as this was theoretically possible—a hypersensitive plant, amenable to directed control, that absorbed brain–tissue and perhaps the energy of the mind itself. A specified plant that could be controlled like a machine!

Theoretically it was possible. But that did not lessen the horror of the monstrosity. Boyce felt faintly sick as he stared at the chalky, stiff face on the wall above him.

“I am nearly a part of—this thing,” Godfrey Morel said. “I have learned—something of what it knows. Only in a few parts of the City does counter–magic keep this hell–thing away. It cannot enter the King’s palace.

“The Oracle comes here. Jamai will try to kill her. Irathe—hates the Oracle. There is one power in the City that….” The voice stopped. After a moment it began again, less clearly.

“Hard to—speak. Go to the King. I think—he can help—hates Irathe as she—hates him. Tell him—Jamai is bringing the Oracle here….”

“Wait,” Boyce said. “It’s the Huntsman—”

“You have just come—from Jamai.”

“No. Godfrey, you’re wrong. I’ve come from the Huntsman.”

“The Huntsman—is Jamai. The same….”

A cry burst thickly from the mask’s gaping mouth.

“Under the dragon mask—secret way! To the King—quick! Quick! ”