Quag Keep (5 page)

Milo glanced about the half-circle of his unsought companions in this unbelievable venture. Ingrge's face was impassive, his eyes veiled. The elf stared down, as if he were not looking outward at all, at the hand resting on his knee, the bracelet just above that. Naile scowled blackly, still pulling at his band as if strength and will could loose it.

Gulth had not moved and who could read any emotion on a face so alien to humankind? Yevele was not frowning, her gaze was centered thoughtfully on the wizard. She had raised one hand and was running the nail of her thumb along to trace the outline of her lower lip, a gesture Milo guessed she was not even aware she made. Her features were good, and the escaped tress of hair above her sun-browned forehead seemed to give her a kind of natural aliveness that stirred something in him, though this was certainly neither the time nor place to allow his attention to wander in that direction.

The cleric had pinched his lips together. Now he shook his head a little, more in time, Milo decided, to his own thoughts
than to what the wizard was saying. The bard was the only one who smiled. As he caught Milo's wandering eyes, the smile became an open grin—as if he might be hugely enjoying all of this.

“We have been taught many things,” the cleric replied with a faint repugnance. He had the countenance of one forced into speaking against his will. “We have been taught that mind can control matter. You have your spells, wizard, we have our prayers.” He drew forth from the bosom of his robe a round of chain on which dull silver beads were set in patterns of two or three together.

“Spells and prayers,” Hystaspes returned, “are not what I speak of—rather of such power of mind as is lying dormant within each of you and which you must cultivate for yourselves.”

“Just when and how do we use this power?” For the first time, the bard Wymarc broke in. “You would not have summoned us here, Your Power-in-Possession,” (he gave that title a twist which hinted at more than common civility, perhaps satire) “unless we were to be of use to you in some manner.”

For the first time the wizard did not reply at once. Instead he gazed down into the goblet he held, as if the dregs of the liquid it now contained could be used as the far-seeing mirror of his craft.

“There is only one use for you,” he stated dryly after a long moment.

“That being?” Wymarc persisted when Hystaspes did not at once continue.

“You must seek out the source of that which had drawn you hither and destroy it—if you can.”

“For what reason—save that
you
find it alarming?” Wymarc wanted to know.

“Alarming?” Hystaspes echoed. Now his voice once more held arrogance. “I tell you, this—this alien being strives to bring together our two worlds. For what purpose he desires that, I cannot say. But should they so coincide—”

“Yes? What will happen then?” Ingrge took up the questioning. His compelling elf stare unleashed at the wizard as he might have aimed one of the deadly arrows of his race.

Hystaspes blinked. “That I cannot tell.”

“No?” Yevele broke in. “With all your powers you cannot foresee what will come then?”

He flashed a quelling look at the girl, but she met that as she might a sword in the hands of a known enemy. “Such has never happened—in all the records known to me. But that it will be far more evil than the worst foray which Chaos has directed, that I can answer to.”

There was complete truth in that statement, Milo thought.

“I believe something else, wizard,” Deav Dyne commented dryly. “I think that even as you had us brought here to you, you have wrought what shall bind us to your will, we having no choice in the matter.” Though his eyes were on the wizard, his hands were busy, slipping the beads of his prayer string between his fingers.

Ingrge, not their captor-host, replied to that. “A geas, then,” he said in a soft voice, but a voice that carried chill.

Hystaspes made no attempt to deny that accusation.

“A geas, yes. Do you doubt that I would do everything within my power to make sure you seek out the source of this contamination and destroy it?”

“Destroy it?” Wymarc took up the challenge now. “Look at
us, wizard. Here stands an oddly mixed company with perhaps a few minor arts, spells, and skills. We are not adepts—”

“You are not of this world,” Hystaspes interrupted. “Therefore, you are an irritant here. To pit you against another irritant is the only plausible move. And remember this—only he, or it, who brought you here knows the way by which you may return. Also, it is not this world only that is menaced. You pride yourself enough upon your imaginations used to play your game of risk and fortune—use that imagination now. Would Greyhawk—would all the lands known to us—be the same if they were intermingled with your own space-time? And how would
your
space-time suffer?”

“Distinctly a point,” the bard admitted. “Save that we may not have the self-sacrificing temperament to rush forth to save our world. What I remember of it, which seems to grow less by the second, oddly enough, does not now awake in me great ardor to fight for it.”

“Fight for yourself then,” snapped the wizard. “In the end, with most men, it comes to self-preservation. You are committed anyway to action under the geas.” He arose, his robe swirling about him.

“Just who stands against us, save this mysterious menace?” For the first time Milo dropped his role of onlooker. The instincts that were a part of the man he had now become were awake. Know the strength of your opposition, as well as the referee might allow, that was the rule of the game. It might be that this wizard was the referee. But Milo had a growing suspicion that the opposition more likely played that role. “What of Chaos?”

Hystaspes frowned. “I do not know. Save it is my belief that
they may also be aware of what is happening. There are adepts enough on the Dark Road to have picked up as much as if not more than I know now.”

“What of the players?” Yevele wanted to know. “Are there dark players also?”

A very faint shadow showed for an instant on the wizard's face. Then he spoke, so slowly that the words might have been forceably dragged from his lips one by one.

“I do not know. Nor have I been able to discover any such.”

“Which does not mean,” Wymarc remarked, “that they do not exist. A pleasant prospect. All you can give us is some slight assurance that we
may
learn to control the roll of these”—he shook his hand a little so that the dice trembled on their gimbals but did not move—“to our advantage.”

“It is wrong!” Naile's deep voice rang out. “You have laid a geas on us, wizard. Therefore give us what assistance you can—by the rule of Law, which you purport to follow, that is our right to claim!”

For a moment Hystaspes glared back at the berserker as if the other's defiant speech offered insult. Visibly he mastered a first, temper-born response.

“I cannot tell you much, berserker. But, yes, what I have learned is at your service now.” He arose and went to one of the tables on which were piled helter-skelter the ancient books and scrolls. Among these he made a quick search until he located a strip of parchment perhaps a yard long that he flipped open, to drop upon the floor before their half-circle of stools. It was clearly a sketchy map, as Milo began to recognize by that queer mixture of two memories to which he privately wondered if he would ever become accustomed.

To the north lay the Grand Duchy of Urnst, for Greyhawk was clearly marked nearly at the edge of the sheet to his right. Beyond that swelled the Great Kingdom of Blackmoor. To the left, or west, were mountains scattered in broken chains, dividing smaller kingdoms one from the other. Rivers, fed by tributaries, formed boundaries for many of these. This cluster of nations ended in such unknown territories as the Dry Steppes which only the Nomad Raiders of Lar dared venture out upon (the few watering places therein being hereditary possessions of those clans). Farther south was that awesome Sea of Dust from which it was said no expedition, no matter how well equipped, had ever returned, though there were legends concerning its lost and buried ships and the treasures that still might exist within their petrified cargo holds.

The map brought them all edging forward. Leaning over the parchment, Milo sensed that perhaps some of this company recognized the faded lines, could identify features that to him were but names, but that existed for them in the grafted-on memories of those they had become.

“North, east, south, west!” exploded Naile. “Where does your delving into the Old Knowledge suggest we begin, wizard? Must we wander over half the world, perhaps, to find this menace of yours in whatever fortress it has made for itself?”

The wizard produced a staff of ivory so old that it was a dull yellow and the carving on it worn by much handling to unidentifiable indentations. With its point he indicated the map.

“I have those who supply me with information,” he returned. “It is only when there is a silence from some such that I turn to other methods. Here—” The point of the staff aimed a quick, vicious thrust at the southwestern portion of the map, beyond
the last trace of civilization (if one might term it that) represented by the Grand Duchy of Geofp, a place the prudent avoided since civil warfare between two rivals for the rule had been going on now for more than a year, and both lords were well known to have formally accepted the rulership of Chaos.

The Duchy lay in the foothills of the mountain chain and from its borders, always providing one could find the proper passes, one might emerge either into the Dry Steppes or the Sea of Dust, depending upon whether one turned either north or south.

“Geofp?” Deav Dyne spat it out as if he found the very name vile, as indeed he must since it was a stronghold of Chaos.

“Chaos rules there, yes. But this is not of Chaos. Or at least such an alliance has not yet come into being. . . .” Hystaspes moved the pointer to the south. “I have some skill, cleric, in my own learning. What I have found is literally—nothing.”

“Nothing?” Ingrge glanced up sharply. “So, you mean a void.” The elf's nostrils expanded as if, like any animal of those woods his people knew better than Hystaspes might know his spells, he scented something.

“Yes,
nothing
. My seekings meet with only a befogged nothingness. The enemy has screens and protections that answer with a barrier not even a geas-burdened demon of the Fourth Level can penetrate.”

Deav Dyne spun his chain of prayer beads more swiftly, muttering as he did so. The wizard served Law, but he was certainly admitting now to using demons in his service, which made that claim a little equivocal.

Hystaspes was swift to catch the cleric's reaction and shrugged as he replied. “In a time of stress one uses the weapon to hand and the best weapon for the battle that one can produce, is that
not so? Yes, I have called upon certain ones whose very breath is a pollution in this room—because I feared. Do you understand that?” He thumped the point of his staff on the map. “I feared! That which is native to this world I can understand, this menace I cannot. All non-knowledge brings with it an aura of fear.

“The thing you seek was a little careless at first. The unknown powers it called upon troubled the ways of the Great Knowledge, enough for me to learn what I have already told you. But when I went searching for it, defenses had been erected. I think, though this is supposition only, that it did not expect to find those here who could detect its influences. I have but recently come into possession of certain scrolls, rumored to have once been in the hands of Han-gra-dan—”

There was an exclamation from both the elf and the cleric at that name.

“A thousand years gone!” Deav Dyne spoke as if he doubted such a find.

Hystaspes nodded. “More or less. I know not if these came directly from a cache left by that mightiest of the northern adepts. But they are indeed redolent of power and, taking such precautions as I might, I used one of the formulas. The result”—his rod stabbed again on the map—“being that I learned what I learned. Now this much I can tell you: there is a barrier existing somewhere here, in or about the Sea of Dust.”

For the first time the lizardman croaked out barely understandable words in the common tongue.

“Desert—a desert ready to swallow any venturing into it.” His expression could not change, but there was a certain tone in his croaking which suggested that he repudiated any plan that would send them into that fatal, trackless wilderness.

Hystaspes frowned at the map. “We cannot be sure. There is only one who might hold the answer, for these mountains are his fortress and his range. Whether he will treat with you—that will depend upon your skill of persuasion. I speak of Lichis, the Golden Dragon.”

Memory, the new memory, supplied Milo with identification. Dragons could be of Chaos. Such ones hunted men as men might hunt a deer or a forest boar. But Lichis, who was known to have supported Law during thousands of years of such struggles (for the dragons were the longest lived of all creatures) must have a command of history that had become only thin legend as far as men were concerned. He was, in fact, the great lord of his kind, though he was seldom seen now and had not for years taken any part in the struggles that swept this world. Perhaps the doings of lesser beings (or so most human kind would seem to him) had come to bore him.

Wymarc hummed and Milo caught a fragment of the tune. “The Harrowing of Ironnose,” a saga or legend of men, once might have been true history of a world crumbled now into dust and complete forgetfulness. Ironnose was the Great Demon, called into being by early adepts of Chaos, laboring for half a lifetime together. He was intended to break the Law forever. It was Lichis who roused and did battle. The battle had raged from Blackmoor, out over Great Bay, down to the Wild Coast, ending in a steaming, boiling sea from which only Lichis had emerged.