Генри Каттнер: Lands of the Earthquake

“Wait a minute,” Boyce said abruptly.

Heads turned, murmurs rose. The people on the dais stared at him out of angry, suspicious faces, Guillaume’s nearest and glaring with that inner hatred which the two men who bore the same name and the same face had felt so instinctively for one another.

“I’m no spy,” Boyce said, stumbling over the archaic French. “The Huntsman should have proved that—he tried to kill me. But I didn’t come here by choice. And I won’t—”

Tancred laughed.

“Prove your point by the way the mist blows,” he said, “but not by anything the Huntsman does. His ways are more uncertain than the clouds. Still, if he hunted you here and failed to kill you, be sure he had a reason of his own.”

“Who is the Huntsman?”

Tancred’s face darkened. The black brows wrinkled together above the black eyes.

“Perhaps you know better than we.”

“All right,” Boyce said in sudden anger. “Take me to your Oracle, then. Let’s have it over with whatever it may be, and then I’ll have some questions of my own that demand an answer.”

“Well spoken, stranger.” Tancred was smiling again. “Come.”

He swung aside with a sweep of the cabalistic black robes and waved a commanding arm.

Boyce moved after him half doubtfully. But Guillaume, grinning a wolfish grin beneath his drooping moustache, walked on one side of him, and Godfrey Long–shanks stepped up on the other.

“Now we shall know the truth about you, spy,” Guillaume said. “March!”

Beyond the door through which Tancred had first entered a narrow stairway rose, winding in the thickness of the wall. Glancing behind him, Boyce saw that everyone who had been lounging on the dais was following them. The women picked their way up the steps delicately, holding their long skirts in ringed hands. The men shouldered after, whispering among themselves. The walls echoed with their voices and the shuffle of feet on stone.

They went up a long way. Boyce began to suspect that they might be mounting to the top of the donjon–keep that towered highest of all over Kerak. Through slit–like windows he caught glimpses of the misty plain spread out far below, of the last rings of magical fire dying away around the foot of the crags like fading rainbows in the fog. And across the valley the City was a blur of colored lights veiled and revealed again as the blue–green clouds drifted over it.

The light had not changed here since his wakening. He wondered if they had day and night in this mysterious, incredible land, or if the same dim half–brightness dwelt always over the fog and the mountains.

An arched hallway opened up before the climbers. Boyce, between his two guards, cleared the last of the steps and followed Tancred’s broad back down the hall. A hush had fallen over the crowd now. Even their feet no longer shuffled. They walked almost on tiptoe, and he could hear Godfrey breathing fast beside him. Whatever the Oracle might be, the castle people seemed to hold it in something like dread.

There was a curtained doorway at the end of the hall. Purple velvet hangings embroidered all over in a pattern of silver webs hid what lay beyond. Tancred laid one big hand weighted with rings upon the heavy folds. He turned then, his eyes searching the crowd. There was a rustling among them, and one quickly drawn breath seemed to sweep the throng.

“Stand forth, stranger,” Tancred said in his deepest voice. “Stand forth and face the Oracle!”

The velvet curtains swept back. Boyce had one moment of wonder and involuntary dread, as he realized that Guillaume and Godfrey had released his arms and stepped quickly back so that he stood alone, facing Tancred and the door. Then he saw what the doorway framed and all other thought went out of his mind.

He did not know what he had expected. Certainly not this—this small stone room beyond the curtains, nor that which filled it. That delicate webbing of fire….

It was the webbing that caught his eye first. The fiery strands were woven into a hollow framework of exquisite pattern that moved as he watched. A living framework—a living cage.

And in the cage of animate fire—a woman. No, a figure of marble. No—a woman, after all. Wax, or marble, or flesh—he could not be sure. She was not alive. That much the quickest glance assured him. The cage around her was living and fiery, but the woman within had neither life nor warmth.

She stood as a statue might stand, motionless, hands clasped before her, facing the crowd. Her long white robe was no whiter than her face and her hair fell in a cascade of pure marble pallor, straight and unbroken over her shoulders.

The face had a purity of line that seemed to rob it of all likeness to humanity. No mortal face ever turned such flawless planes to the beholder. The eyes were closed. The lips were closed too, on a lovely line that looked as if it could never have parted. Boyce thought he had never seen a figure so coldly remote, so utterly empty of life.

For a long moment there was no sound in the hall. Very faintly, standing this near, Boyce could hear a fine, thin humming from the cage, as if the fiery bars of it sang among themselves. But from the crowd came only the silence of caught breath, and from the woman—the statue—no sound could ever come.

“What do you ask of me?”

Boyce had to look again to be sure the voice had come from those marble lips. They scarcely moved. The eyelids did not move at all. But surely no other lips in the world could have spoken in such a voice of cold remoteness. Such infinite, distant calm. A chill went over him at the sound of that gelid tone.

Tancred’s voice was soft and strangely tender.

“We have reason to think a spy may stand here among us,” he said. “We bring him before you that you may judge if he speaks the truth.”

No sound, no motion, as his voice fell silent. The marble girl faced them with closed eyes and clasped hands, not moving even to breathe. But the wait was a listening, searching wait. Even Boyce held his breath, half–believing against his own reason that this waxen thing could see and know and answer—if she would.

The wait lengthened. She stood there deathly in her coldness and her pallor—no, not even deathly, for nothing can die that has never known life, and it was impossible to believe that breath had ever stirred those marble nostrils or blood ever pulsed beneath that marble skin.

Then with barely perceptible motion, the waxen lips parted. The voice that chilled the listener like a breath of wind over ice was clearly.

“Yes, the man lies.”

Behind him Boyce could hear Guillaume’s deep rumble of triumph, instantly hushed. An involuntary ripple went over the crowd, and he heard feet shuffle with angry, impulsive motion and the whine of steel half–drawn from scabbards by quick hands.

“Wait,” the Oracle said coldly. “Wait.”

Instant hush. In the silence, the icy voice spoke on.

“One stands among you as envoy from the City. He came to kill. He waits now to kill.”

The anger among the crowd surged up again and its rumble of fury drowned out the thin, cold voice. Boyce braced his feet wide and wished ardently for a weapon.

“It’s not true!” he shouted desperately. “I’m no spy! I didn’t come to—”

The rising roar drowned out his voice too, and he knew one instant of that shattering self–doubt, that old wonder whether he himself knew what the truth might be. But there was no time for that now. Guillaume with both great arms lifted and a grin of triumphant hatred on his face was half a dozen paces away, and coming fast, and the crowd behind him was a swirl of shouting faces and angry eyes.