The Creatures of Man (40 page)

He was indifferently aware of Jonker coming into the hallway, looking at them for a moment, then returning to the lighted room. Later he heard the thud of stones being moved about, accompanied by the magician's effortful gruntings. But he did not move until the touch of Eanna's body began to stir his desire once more. Then he rose, lifting the girl in his arms, and returned to the room.

The light that had formerly filled it now gleamed through the hole Vishan had been pounding in the wall. Basdon guessed the magician, after enlarging the hole, had taken the light through to search for the buried talismans of The Art.

After a glance at the inert form of Vishan, Basdon carried the girl to the spot where she had dropped her dress. He picked it up and clumsily slipped her into it, then sat cradling her in his arms. Her stained face was peaceful in semi-consciousness; it was a face to remind him forcefully that, in many important respects of mind, this beautiful, demolished woman was in actuality still a child of six years.

He was still sitting there brooding half an hour later when Jonker struggled through the hole in the wall, carrying Vishan's light in one hand and what appeared to be a small, double-handled gold vase in the other.

"Well, I found it," puffed the magician with satisfaction as he brushed himself off. "Now, swordsman, if you can bluff us past the guards with the ease you did before, we will
be on our hurried way home."

"What about . . . Eanna?" asked Basdon.

"Um, yes. Well, if she remains as she is now, you could say the god had his way with her, that she will
await his future pleasure elsewhere when she recovers." The magician moved closer to touch the girl's forehead and feel her wrist. "However, I fear she will not remain as she is. She's growing alert now, and will certainly betray us to the guards if she has the chance." He shook his head regretfully. "We must leave her here, Basdon."

"I cannot," the swordsman said. "You go, and I will stay."

"Be sensible!" exploded Jonker. "There is nothing she wants from you, nothing you can do for her! Leave her to the morbid pleasure of mourning herself to death over the body of her slain god! It is urgent to the completion of our highly important quest that you come with me, to help protect the talisman on the return to Nenkunal! You must not let us fail now, swordsman, for no good cause!"

"I have no stomach left for good causes, including your own," snapped Basdon. "I'll stay—and mourn for her while she mourns for that hunk of carrion."

Jonker sighed. "You fought the geas within yourself with valor and determination, swordsman," he said sorrowfully. "But fighting at length wears away strength. Yours is now gone, and the geas controls you as surely as it controls that poor child in your arms."

Basdon realized this was true. He said nothing.

With another sigh Jonker turned away. He walked to where a large block of stone provided a makeshift table, and placed the light on it along with some other odds and ends which he drew from beneath his robe. Basdon watched with dull interest as the magician began working with the stuff.

"You are obliging me to use something very precious—and very consumable—that I found while seeking the talisman a moment ago. I had no idea such an item still existed. Certainly it is the last, and was preserved only by the proximity of the talisman. I would have kept it for an occasion of great need, but . . ." the magician shrugged his shoulders, " . . . perhaps no greater need than that of this moment will arise. For once, I wish I could envision the near future, the years of my own life . . ."

"What are you talking about?" demanded Basdon, half in worry and half in annoyance, rubbing hard at his eyes which were paining mercilessly.

"This," said Jonker, pulling a small ball of translucent green from his robe and placing it carefully on the rock. "And this!" He tapped a protuberance on the support of the light, which flicked out immediately.

But there was no darkness. Whiteness was everywhere. Not whiteness to see by. In fact, Basdon's surroundings were totally invisible to him. There was just whiteness . . . in front of his eyes, above his eyes, below them . . . in
back
of them . . . everywhere whiteness . . . that kept getting whiter.

The location of the whiteness, he realized, was in his mind. And there, in the midst of all that brilliance, pictures began to race fleetingly past. He recognized none as being events from his life, but he sensed they were all experiences his spirit had known somewhere in the vastness of time:

He was confronting a huge spear-bearing gladiator who (for some unseen reason) it was absolutely vital that he slay. But before he could set himself with sword and shield the enemy had plunged the spear through him. He was dying, but could not let himself die. Defeat was unthinkable. Thus, in his agony, his identity suddenly twisted and shifted to become the spearman and victor.

Ah! he thought in the instant between the vanishing of that scene and the appearance of the next. So
that
is why I foolishly thrust with my sword, as if it were a spear, when I should slash! In his fight with Laestarp's weredogs and again in the battle with Vishan, that habit had nearly gotten him killed. He realized it would not happen again.

The scenes flashed by, too numerous to count, often too hurried to be clearly defined. Then:

Whiter than white, the glowing form of a woman . . . Eanna? . . . Belissa? . . . She was both and neither, a composite of all feminine beauty. But she was not his; rather, he was hers! Her property. Her worshipper, along with dimly sensed legions of others. He lusted for but could not touch her perfection, and his lust was her excuse. The arm of the goddess reached down, and two fingertips, hotter than all the suns, touched and seared his eyes. He fled into blind, pain-filled darkness.

The bitch! he cursed. But . . . but . . . He grunted with the realization. She hadn't been a woman at all! She was a hypnotic construct, a product of outrageously advanced and depraved magic, used to enslave through false beauty!

Shortly thereafter the whiteness faded to gray, then went black. Basdon was aware of the girl stirring in his arms, and of fumbling sounds from Jonker. Then Vishan's light came on.

The swordsman looked down at the girl's face, and saw her eyes were open and looking at him. He smiled at her, wondering why, if she were conscious, she was not pulling away from him.

"Your eyes are blue and white," she said wonderingly. "They used to be red."

He had not noticed before. The burning was gone. That did not seem of any importance. "Your eyes are also blue and white, and beautiful," he replied.

"Do you know you hurt me, out in the hall?" she asked.

"Yes, I know. I'm very sorry. I won't do that to you again, I promise."

"You will, too," she contradicted him. "Or you better. I'll get mad at you if you don't."

She pulled herself up to him and kissed him on the mouth, then giggled.

In delighted wonder, Basdon threw Jonker a questioning look.

"All geases are broken for both of you," said the magician, looking regretfully at a small pile of greenish ash on his makeshift table. "I wonder how many thousands of years will pass before that can be said of any other human beings."

Basdon and Eanna would have dallied endlessly along the return route to Nenkunal, but for the pressing anxiety of the magician.

"We may run out of time at any instant," Jonker warned and pleaded. "I fear that They Who Own All have learned by now that Vishan met with disaster in Oliber-by-Midsea. And doubtless they are trying to learn or guess the cause of it. So far we have survived, but only because Vishan's soul was too inturbulated to tell of us. Surely they will guess soon, and raise the countryside against us. Let us hurry!"

So they pushed their mounts hard, through the days and long into the moonlit nights. But the farms and villages of the worshippers remained calm, the people obviously unaware that they no longer had a living god. The Hif Hills loomed in the gray distance ahead of them.

"I'm puzzled by some things, magician," said the swordsman as they jogged along one morning. "Most of all by the geas-breaker you used on Eanna and myself in Oliber."

"That was a device for the production of spiritual energy in its purest form," explained Jonker. "It supercharges any spirit within range of its radiance, and enables the spirit to shatter all the geases that bind it, even those imposed on it a thousand lifetimes ago."

"Very well. My question is this: With that kind of a defense on earth, how did it happen that the necromancers from between the stars enslaved us?"

Jonker lowered his face. After a while he said, "Our world has known no perfect age, swordsman. The age of magic was our most glorious, but it had its failings. As you know, we had our own black-spellers. And even honest magicians were selfish, as all men are. Thus, we restricted very tightly the fabrication and use of the white-energy generators, so that our own geas-making would not be compromised. When the universal necromancers made their assault, we were . . . we were too late in mending our ways."

Basdon nodded. "My other puzzle is this: The souls of each of the three of us will be taken upon our deaths by They Who Own All, will they not?"

"Yes," said the magician.

"Then how will we hide that talisman you are carrying in your saddle-pack?" Basdon demanded. "Can they not probe the truth out of our spirits, and discover the hiding place?"

Jonker grinned. "Not if we do not know the place ourselves. Are you familiar with the River Heralple?"

"I've heard of it, while in Nenkunal, but I have not seen it."

"It flows down swiftly from the Fogfather Mountains to the Eastern Ocean. But before emptying, the main stream divides into thousands of rivulets that move sluggishly through a vast swampy deltaland. There the River Heralple's burden of mud and silt is dropped. I propose that there, too, will the talisman of favoring destiny be dropped. I've thought long on this matter, swordsman. If the talisman is thrown into the swift portion of the river above the delta, no man nor magician will be able to guess which of those thousands of rivulets will receive it, nor where along their windings it will come to rest and be covered, as the centuries pass, by layers of the earth of Nenkunal. It will be safe from everyone's knowing, including our own."

Basdon could see no flaw in the plan. "Then all we need do is reach that river," he remarked. "For that reason, I hope the storm over the Hif Hills gentles before we reach them."

"Storm?" asked Jonker, peering suddenly ahead. "Yes . . . yes . . . I see. My eyes are less sharp than they once were."

Eanna said, "I see it. Big black clouds, and lightning shooting out."

"It is most unseasonal," Jonker commented with a worried frown.

The clouds, hanging low over the hills ahead, roiled and twisted with a velocity Basdon had never before observed in any storm. And their coloring was a peculiar yellow-gray, rather than white, where sunlight struck their upper edges. Below, they were an impenetrable purple-black.

The farmers the riders passed along the way were viewing the distant turmoil with dumb alarm. If the storm moved down on them, now in early harvest season, its havoc could leave them to starve in the months ahead.

However, the clouds seemed to be holding their position over the hills, neither advancing nor retreating.

That night the travelers camped short of the hills, with gusts of wind flapping their tents and making a fire impossible to maintain. The darkness was filled with noise, loud even at a distance, of the roaring wind and clashing thunder. Several times they felt the earth quiver beneath them.

With the dawn the fury abated somewhat. The horses were mounted and the journey resumed. Soon the Hif Hills were reached, and the riders stared about in shocked dismay.

It was plain to see that the storm had brought no rain. The clouds had been dust and dirt, a pall of which still lingered in the fitful morning gusts. And the hills, desolate before, were now a tumbled ruin. Trees were splintered or uprooted. Hardly a shrub had its roots in soil. In places the wind had scrubbed away everything, down to bedrock. In other places, logs and brush were piled in high, dusty drifts. Here and there, smoke rose from a lightning-set fire.

"That was no natural storm," murmured Jonker.

"I can see that," replied Basdon.

Nothing more was said as they made their halting way over the broken land. Going was slow and difficult, and kept them too busy watching their horses' steps to brood over the question which, Basdon guessed, had occurred even to Eanna:

If the hills bordering Nenkunal had been tormented thus,
what had happened to Nenkunal itself?

They learned the answer when they reached the highest crest.

Here the air was clear of dust and they could see ahead for tens of leagues across the valleys of Nenkunal . . . across, but not down into, because all was dust below.

The storm the travelers had seen over the Hif Hills, they now realized fully, was only the blunted edge of destruction. All the wide land of Nenkunal had been shaken, lashed, and scoured by awesome forces. Indeed, the fury was now only partly abated. Cubic leagues of earth were still windborne over what had been green and happy landscapes.

"Sand," muttered Jonker. "I knew it to be Nenkunal's destiny to lie its full length under waterless dunes, but I never dreamt it would come so soon, so suddenly."

"I suppose we know why," said Basdon.

"Yes . . . They Who Own All have struck."

"But why didn't they strike us instead?" asked Eanna her eyes wide with horror.

"Because, being what they are, they assumed wrongly," said the magician. "They guessed that we, like Laestarp, wanted to use the talismans of Oliber that would give us power to dominate—talismans that I found and destroyed as objects of more potential harm than good in the new age. With those talismans we could have traveled more swiftly, and would have been here in time to be included in this ruin. And to make doubly sure that earth-magic would never rise against them, they destroyed the entire country which would be the base of operations for such magic."