Генри Каттнер - Lands of the Earthquake

“ Wait! ” The clear voice, like an icy lash, cut through the noise in the hall. The marble girl’s face had not changed. The lips were parted no farther than before, the eyes were still closed. But the voice had the volume of a shout, yet was still a cold, thin murmur only.

Boyce saw the eyes of the crowd leave him and fasten on the white figure in the fiery cage. They paused, flushed and angry—but they paused.

“I did not name the man,” the chilly voice reminded them.

Bewildered murmurs answered that.

“He stands among you in a guise you know,” said the voice of ice. “He is no stranger. He is not this man before me.” She paused again. Then with an emphasis so biting that Boyce could all but feel the sear of cold upon his flesh, she said, “ Must I name you, spy? ”

The thing that happened then stunned them all. Boyce saw it most clearly, for he was half–facing the crowd. The others had to turn and were jostled when the first wild sound rang upon them from the back of the hall.

The sound was laughter.

A huddled figure standing in the mouth of the stair–door shook with sudden, desperate mirth, flinging up a wild, pale face to stare at them. It was Hugh de Mandois, the half–mad refugee from the terror of the City.

In the first moment Boyce thought the lad was shaken with something like hysteria from the tenseness of the scene. Then he saw the bowed body under the heavy robe straighten—straighten and rise. His eyes refused to accept the height of the figure. They carried no message for a moment to his startled brain. He gaped blankly at that which stood in the stairway door.

For Hugh de Mandois was rising to a full stature that towered impossibly over the highest head in the crowd. The cloak fell back. The garments the young Hugh had worn were ripped and fell away, and it was no human figure that rose from the huddle which had been Hugh of Mandois.

What it was he could not be sure. Boyce saw it most clearly of them all, and not even he could give a name to it. None of them saw it for longer than an instant. In that brief interval the thing stood up before them, towering, terrible, a monstrous laughing figure mailed in something that might have been glittering scales or glittering armor, something so strange the eye could only translate it into familiar things like these.

Its laughter rang like a trumpet under the arched ceiling, filling the hall with sound. And then the creature leaped….

Afterward some said it fought with a sword and some said it wielded a flame instead of a blade. Certainly wounds were later dressed that looked like the ripping of heavy claws. And the smell in the hall was of scorched flesh as well as of blood. For the fight was terrible before they subdued the—the spy the City had sent among them.

Boyce fought with the rest. It seemed incredible that one being, however large, could have engaged them all. Its speed was that of light itself, its strength beyond imagining. The strange thing was that they did, in the end, after a desperate struggle, manage to prevail.

Boyce remembered only the feel of cold, smooth limbs tossing him aside and falling after him, and crushing him with great, careless blows. How he fought he was not sure. Bare fists seemed little enough against that fabulous being, and yet he remembered the feel of his knuckles sinking into the scaled body, the sound of a groan as the blows sank, the reek of a scorching breath in his face.

He remembered the numbing coldness of an edged something sinking into his flesh, the sound of ripping skin and the hot gush of his own blood flowing down over his chest. He remembered a heavy blow at the base of the skull, and after that he floated in a whirling of stars that closed over his head in fathomless darkness….

“And your coming here was no accident, William Boyce.” Tancred leaned back in the window seat and looked at Boyce under meeting brows, his black eyes piercing.

Boyce looked away. His glance wandered about the small stone room, the canopy above the bed in which he lay, the tapestries on the walls, all of it very familiar to him now, after this long, long while of convalescence. He was tired still. He did not really want to delve any deeper into the mysteries that had brought him here.

The deep scar upon his shoulder had all but healed by now, but there was a deeper weariness in his mind. Perhaps it was the sight of the drifting mists beyond his window, changeless, grey clouds rolling eternally over a weary land.

He could see the mirages from here, too. Behind Tancred now the unreal towers of a mosque–like city were taking shape in the fog. At first he had thought it delirium when he saw these visions forming and fading again upon the mist. But others saw them too. And no one could tell him certainly whether or not the visions were wholly unreal.

“No one dares go far from Kerak,” Godfrey had warned him. “The land—changes. Perhaps it is sorcery that makes the pictures in the fog. Perhaps they are mirages like those we saw in the desert before Jerusalem. Or perhaps— Dieu lo vult —these are real things we see. Cities that drift like the mist. Gardens and orchards going by like ships in a sea of fog. There is no way to be sure—and return to tell of it.”

He would not think of the mirages now. Tancred was speaking, and he would have to listen.

“I say it was no accident that sent you among us with Guillaume’s face and name,” Tancred repeated, stroking his beard with a jeweled hand. “The story you tell is such a strange one I am inclined to believe it. I believe much, because of the things I know, which my companions would think rank heresy.”

He hesitated, turning a ring upon his finger, then shot a keen glance at Boyce lying among the bed–cushions.

“I could even guess,” he said, “what it is that lies hidden in that lost year you speak of. But I am not free to tell you what I suspect. This much I can say—I think you were a tool for someone stronger and less scrupulous than I. Perhaps this woman you tell me of. And if you were a tool, then tool you remain!

“For you have not yet performed whatever function they meant you for. And I think you may have been chosen for that function because of your kinship with Guillaume.” The black eyes narrowed. “That means, you see, the City.

“Someone chose you from among all the men of your world, someone used you for a year there, in ways so terrible your mind has closed up against remembering. And in the end, someone made it possible for you to follow your forgotten memories into this land, where a timeless struggle still is waged between Kerak and the Sorcerers’ City.”

He was silent awhile, his face creased in lines of worried thought, his big ringed hand moving with a steady, unconscious motion over his white beard.

Something in Boyce’s mind did not want to follow that thought. It was like an alien thing, curled in the center of his brain, trying to shut his ears and his eyes to the things Tancred was saying. An alien thing? Some other mind reaching out from distances across the mist to quiet his questioning, keep him in ignorance of things the alien creature did not wish him to know?

“Tell me,” he said uncomfortably, not entirely sure the words came from his own mind, and not that half–sensed invader in his brain. “How did your people come here? I—Godfrey asks me so many questions about the countries he remembers, and I find it hard to answer him. You see—”

Tancred laughed.

“I know. I think I alone among us knows the truth. It has been a very long time since we Crusaders rode to Jerusalem, has it not? You were wise not to answer Godfrey too truthfully. How long in the years of our old world has it been, William Boyce?”