Swords & Dark Magic (53 page)

As no men were in the clearing, but rather lions, that analysis did not occur. The lions saw a cave-like mass, cool in the day’s heat, and having to it an olfactory tang of human flesh and blood. In other words, recent fresh corpses.

Pausing only to dip cautious paws into the lake which surrounded the caves, and so learn it was solid, they sprang forward, and vanished through the entrance.

Izer, the lion who had been Zire, darted through a succession of lowering, gaping, all-black vistas. Space led into space, some more narrow, others wider or more winding. Izer galloped blithely through them all. Their enormity, and cranky arboreal sculpting, did not faze him. He did not feel made small and vulnerable, as a man might. Instead, curious as a young cat, he climbed where able up the malformed sides of the stone trees, and stuck his long, big nose into holes and fissures. He raised his paw and scraped the petrified material with a single claw. At which blue sparks flew and he veered away.

From the guts of this inert yet nastily intestine-suggestive labyrinth, came the most insidious wavering drone of sound. It was the sound of utter
soundlessness,
disturbed only in the ear of the listener by the tempo of pulse and heart. Izer paid it little attention.
His
hearing was honed for more informative noises. Of these there seemed to be none.

Then with no warning, something rushed sharply through the air, about three lion-lengths above him. Izer raised his head.

It was a bird. But a bird Izer had never seen, nor been self-trained to expect. It had no beak, nor even a head. Its outflung, fluttering wings were dark above, with complex paler featherings below, but they supported nothing. The bird had no body either.

Izer did not identify the flying object as a book, which, to a human, it would appear to be. For him it was only logical to classify it as a bird. And as lions are generally a match for most birds, save those of supernatural size, such as a roc, he leapt straight at it, bore it to the earth and smashed it there. The book’s spine broke. Izer tore at its feather pages, champed and spat them out. The bird was not good eating, good for nothing, aside from a bit of swift exercise. When the next one came flapping at him, Izer took this in sporting spirit, sprang at it and batted it about a while, before destroying it on the ground. Other books followed in streamers, though not very many. Izer danced about with them, enjoying himself. When the last was felled, he noted tiny scurrying things that were spilling from the carcasses. He put his paws on them, bit and squashed them. They were written words, yet Izer did not know this. They meant nothing at all to him beyond a playful moment or two. They tasted only of ink anyway. He also spat their shredded bodies forth, rolled on his back, shook his henna mane, and trotted off deeper into the petrified maze.

Elsewhere, Ibfrelt, the lion who had been Bretilf, was nosing around some knots in the floor that might, once, have been edible fungi. He, too, was uninterested in the persistent yodel of the silence. However, presently he heard a curious scraping noise, and looking around saw some sharp implements worming out of a wall. No sooner were they ejected than they began to crawl over the floor, scratching irritatingly as they did so. Ibfrelt went to examine them, batting at them rather as Izer had at the books. Their steel edges made no impression on his well-toughened lion pads. In the end, he became bored with the things and loped off. He did not actually realize that they then pursued him in a highly sinister manner. To Ibfrelt, there could be nothing sinister about them. Nor did he see when, by then some way behind him, they lost momentum, rusted, flaked, and fell apart.

Wandering on into another chamber of the building, Ibfrelt paused only when a sudden form reared up from the floor. A man would have known this figure at once for a fellow man—a sword fighter for a fellow swordsman, and a dangerous one. He was tall, and laden with muscle, clad in mail, and armed both with a broadsword of considerable size and a dagger of extraordinary length. At Ibfrelt, he glared with flashing, maniacal eyes, and from a sneering gob let out a challenge: “Match me then, you damnable nonentity!”

But Ibfrelt evidently only knew men—when he
had
known them—as menu-worthy pieces of prey. Shows of weapons, of aggression, protective armorings—they meant nothing at all, to a lion. Ibfrelt smelled live meat, and he gave a snarl of appetite, then launched himself, like a vast ginger firework, at the threatening hulk.

Over went the hulk, amid a resounding bash and clamor, sword flying one way, and dagger doing no more damage than to shave four of Ibfrelt’s impressive whiskers, before a couple of jaws, equally impressively toothed, met in his esophageal tract.

Ibfrelt was already feeding greedily when, to his disgust, his kill dissolved like a mist and faded into thin air.

Some snaggle of labyrinthine turns away, Izer was just undergoing a similar disillusion.
His
adversary had been a rapier-brandishing swordsman, with a back-up ax. But Izer had simply jumped on him in the midst of the fellow’s posturing, fangs seeing to the rest. When this nice hot meal vanished, Izer let out a complaint so loud even Ibfrelt paid attention, and rumbled back.

Rising from the teasing absent carcass, Izer padded through the maze and, with leonine instincts of scent, vision, hearing, and
sub
thought, located Ibfrelt inside two minutes.

The lions commiserated with each other. This was a poor place after all. It would be better to depart instantly.

It was then that a blazing light flared up in the next cave or chamber. They were lions; they took it for the undoing of an exit into the afternoon forest. Shoulder to shoulder, they flung themselves toward it—

They found themselves contrastingly inside a gargantuan inner region of the complex. The compartment would have evoked, to most human eyes, a colossal temple hall. To the lions, it was just an especially oversized cavern. Yet light from some invisible source filled it full.

In the very middle of the space stood a solitary
living
tree, or so it appeared. The tree was a sort of maple, but of absurd dimensions, and with autumnal leaves colored raspberry, orange, and ripe prune. From the boughs hung a dowdy banner—or a garment? It seemed stranded there, whatever it was, by mistake, shoddy and threadbare, stained, and itself the hue of over-cooked porridge.

Neither lion glanced at it. A spectacle of greater fascination pended. The living trunk was slowly splitting along a hinge of softer, more elusive light. When the gap was wide enough, a form burst from within. It cantered into the cavern, a sight to render any warrior numb with astonished horror.

Directly before the lions epically bulged a stag of unusual size. It was almost spotless white, its antlers like boughs, its eyes glittering like fires. It snorted, and from its nostrils black smolders gushed out.

Lions do not shake hands, or smite paws together to announce brotherhood. If they did, these two would have done.

Without preamble, both vaulted headfirst at the stag. They hit it square, one to each side of the breast. Fearful splinterings, jangles, cracks, and clangs engulfed the air. In a thousand shards, the stag, which seemed fashioned from one house-huge bone, collapsed. The giant maple shook at the detonation. Leaves rained like—
rain
. One other item was dislodged and drifted foolishly down, like dirty washing. Izer and Ibfrelt, Ibfrelt and Izer, ignored this. They were busy. The bone of which the monster stag had been constructed had once belonged to some improbably prodigious roast. They were engaged in extracting the marrow, any shreds of meat, savoring the cooked tastes, finding every splinter on the ground.

In this way, they missed the dim phantasmal wailing of something, which, seeing all its ploys, even those untried, would never work, lamented in the stony masonry. They missed the dislodgement of the building, too, and how its walls and halls, openings and enclosures, came apart and smeared into nothing. They even missed the last descent of the unappealing porridge-colored garment, until it fell over both their heads.

“So, what do you make of it?”

Trudging back through the forest, stark naked, and with the fall weather turning a touch more chilly, Bretilf put this question to the matchingly unclothed and chilled Zire.

Zire said, “It seems, now, perfectly obvious.”

“To me also. Yet maybe we’ve drawn two different conclusions.”

Bretilf carried the item from the cave-labyrinth, bundled up and tied tight with grasses.

From the trees, which overnight seemed themselves partly to have disrobed, leaving great swathes of cold and unclad sky and blowing wind, birds and squirrels threw nutshells at them. Foxes and wild pig distantly passed, snorting as if with scornful laughter. Snakes seemed embarrassed by the stupidity of men and slipped down holes.

Bretilf and Zire had not decided what they
made
of anything, despite their exchange. And some hours on, when they reached the mansion of the witch Ysmarel Star, and found only the hill—they made not much of that, either. The gray and the bay horses were tethered nearby, however, and adjacent were neatly folded clothes, swords, and so on. Bretilf examined the part-finished carving he had begun of a stag.

“Just as I thought,” said Bretilf.

“Oh, indeed,” concurred Zire.

There followed a short conversation then, on whether it was worse to eat men or words, not mentioning meat bones. The consensus on this was that probably none of those items had been strictly real, more elemental, if potentially fatal, and so no moral issue was involved.

They rode the rest of the way to the city of Cashloria. Zire had taken his turn at carrying the rolled-up wretched rag from the maple. Neither man had wished to try it on, not even when naked in the woods. Just the first swipe of it across their heads had changed them back into men. That was enough.

Even so, sitting once more above the crazy River Ca, they held their horses in check and stared at nothing.

“It seems to me,” said Bretilf, “the witch Ysmarel—”

“Yes?”

“Ensorcelled us into animal shape less to cause us trouble in the manner of ancient legends—”

“—than in order we might survive the maze and regain the Robe. Any intelligent or gifted man or woman who intruded on that spot,” Zire went on, “was seemingly destroyed by demons conjured from their own abilities.”

“The singer found her song turned against her in so dreadful a way, it tore the ears from her lovely head.”

“The charmer of snakes found a snake he could not charm, which poisoned him.”

The horses cropped the grass. Both men digested the effect of the beautiful witch’s spell. By making them beasts, she had released them from any true engagement with their everyday beliefs. Though ghosts of their human preoccupations were yet accessible to the sorcery in the labyrinth, when presented with nightmare elements of them, as lions, they had either had no interest, or made short work and dined.

The humanly superior had perished in that place. But they, as lions, had had another agenda,
another
superiority. Which was why, too, they had gained the Winning-of-War-Robe. It had meant nothing to them; they had only run out growling with it tangled in their manes—then hair.

Modestly, Zire and Bretilf reentered the city. Yet on the streets people swarmed to gape and cheer. At the False Prince’s villa, they were admitted after a wait of only an hour.

The prince lay on a couch like one almost dead. He gazed up with weary dislike. “Who are these ruffians?”

“Highness,” said the affronted servant, “can’t you hear the joyful uproar outside? These—
ruffians
—have won back the Robe—the Robe of the Winning of War With Oneself.”

“Garbage,” said the prince and turned over on his face.

Another hour on, when he had been, rather roughly, convinced by his attendants, Zire and Bretilf had the dubious pleasure of beholding the transformation. With some revulsion, they saw how the War-Robe, when the prince had put it on, altered from a sartorial nonevent to a glowing sumptuousness of colors and gems. The prince was also changed. In a matter of seconds, he grew young and strong, handsome and profound, pristine, pure, and kingly. And then, with pleasing open-handedness, from the coffers of the city, stunning riches were obtained and loaded on to mules, all for Bretilf and Zire.

They were by then incorrigibly drunk. They had sampled much of the royal cellars, and also rambled about the city, where everyone was eager to stand them a drink. Sometimes they drew into corners and spoke in low tones of the anomaly of such a man as the prince, so sticky with cruelty and crime, now entirely changed into a genuine paragon, worthy only of loyalty and praise. But they heard, too, a rumor of a kitchen girl, named Loë, who had that very day ridden off in a carriage that sparkled like a diamond, and with her many animals, owls, and crows from neglected temples, rabbits kept for the pot, cats and dogs who had earned their keep in various inns. Loë, or Weasel as she was sometimes called, or Ermine, was now said to be one of the Benign Guardians of Cashloria, who had lingered on the premises in disguise during the city’s troubles. The Robe’s return had freed her, it seemed, to go back to her own mysterious life on a distant star.

“I could sleep a million years,” said Zire. “Alas, it’s farewell now between us.”

“Perhaps neither, yet,” said Bretilf. “I’ve heard another rumor—that those villainous guards the prince is about to expel have vengefully scored our names on their swords. Will we fare better alone or in tandem?”

“Where are the horses and mules?” asked Zire, with respectable common sense.

“Below,” said Bretilf, ditto.

As they jumped from the window to the backs of bay and gray, they picked up the nearby threatening roar composed of rejoicing, rage, and river. But soon the happy pounce of hooves, blissful jingle of coins and jewels, rumble of determined mules and carts, muffled all else. Heed this, then. The more noisily and threateningly the torrent bellows below and around, the louder make your song.