The Black Mountains
by Fred Saberhagen
Version 1.0
A #BW Release

CHAPTER    1

The great demon came to Chup in the middle of an
autumn night of howling wind. It came amid a torrent of
air whose vortices, shrieking round the castle, rose seeming-
ly within a single howl or gasp of attaining life; it came
with a blast that rattled and shook Chup's hovel of a shelter
pitched against the inside of the castle's massive outer wall.
Lying sleepless with the nagging of his ever-painful wound,
Chup had heard time and again the screaming passage of
things that from their sound were on the verge of becoming
elementals of the air.

So it was that he paid little heed to the demon's first
shaking of his lean-to. But soon the shaking grew more
violent, a prolonged pounding as of air made heavy against
one end of his little shelter, bouncing its rickety boards
against the wall of enormous stones. Stirring on his pallet,
raising his upper body on his elbows, Chup looked down
the length of his paralyzed legs in the direction of the sound.
And in the midnight darkness he saw the demon coming in,
like faintly luminescent smoke, through the cracks of his
patchwork shelter.

Involuntarily he stiffened. The thing come from the East
was Chup's ally, or it would have been in his days of power,
when he had been Lord Chup and had held a satrapy and
castle of his own in fief from the dread Eastern overlords
who dwelt in the Black Mountains. But even a strong man,
thinking demons were his allies—even such a man, when a
demon came to him at midnight, and at hardly more than
arm's length distance—might know himself strong indeed if
he resisted the urge to run, or to cover his eyes and flatten
his body to the ground.

Chup was Chup. He did not cover bis eyes. As for fleeing,

or flattening on the ground, Mewick's maiming battle-hatchet
had settled that question for him half a year ago. Raised on
his elbows, he kept his eyes fixed steadily on the smoky
image coalescing in the close, dark space before him. Out-
side, the wind moaned lowly now, and soft, relieved of bear-
ing that which had come in to Chup. Rain began to spatter
on the lean-to.

Inside the hovel, space changed and distance grew as the
face of the demon began to take its shape. Chup could see
scarcely anything like a human feature on it, yet he knew it
was a face. In the altered space there was nothing by which
to judge its size, but he knew that it was huge. As it be-
came a little more distinct there quickly grew in Chup the
fear that he might understand what he was looking at, that
he might perceive the features rightly and they would be
too horrible to face.

Nothing but demons could shake him so. Now his eyes
demanded, if not closing, at least to be allowed to slide out
of focus. With a sighing breath he at last let them do so.

Only then, as if it had waited for that yielding, did the
demon speak. Its voice was a skeletal hand, searching fur-
tively through dead leaves.
"Lord Chup."

The power tapped by this pronouncing of his name made
its image once more plain in his sight. With a shudder he
gave up trying to face it down, and let himself sprawl back
on his rough bed, a forearm flung over his eyes. But he
could still speak steadily enough. "I am Chup. Lord no
longer."

"But lord again, mayhap." The dry leaves rustled, stirred
by finger bones. "Your unclaimed bride, the Lady Charmian,
does send you greeting now through me."
"A greeting—from where?"

"From her place of power and safety in the Black Moun-
tains to the east."

It was no surprise that she should be there. Many had
been luckier than Chup, had gotten away on the day that
this, her father's castle, had fallen to the West.

Of course, the demon could be lying to him. It could have
come from the Black Mountains merely to torment a crip-
ple, like some nasty child on a romp; sometimes no mean-
ness was too small for them to bother with. But no, on sec-
ond thought. It would not have come so lightly to this

castle now, filled as the place was with an army of wizards
and warriors of the West; even demons had to heed some
dangers. It was here, then, on important business.

Without lifting his arm from his eyes, Chup asked: "What
does my lady want of me now?"

The image of the demon's face began to form inexorably
inside Chup's eyelids, under his forearm that could not keep
it out. Moving what did not seem to be a mouth, it said:
"She wishes to share with you, as with one worthy of her,
her present power and glory and delight."

Now whether he opened his eyes or shut them, the
demon's face, like some hideous afterimage, remained the
same. "Power?" Suddenly shaking-angry, Chup raised his
head and glared. "Power is mine, you say?" His enemies had
not heard a groan or a complaint from him in half a year,
but now the fullness of his bitterness burst out. "Then show
me that I have just the power to move my legs—can you
do that?"

Below the monstrous face the darkness worked, and there
appeared a pair of hands, roughly manlike but deformed and
huge. They were visible in the light that sprang out when
a cover was removed from an object held in one of them. It
was a large, thick goblet or bowl, dark itself but holding a
bursting warmth of multicolored light. That glow seemed
to eat away the darkness, and to half-obliterate the demon's
image, and yet it did not dazzle when Chup looked directly
at it.

The demon's free hand reached for Chup. He uttered an
involuntary grunt, but did not feel the repulsive contact he
expected. There was only an impersonal force that spun his
body halfway round, like a log. Now he lay face down, with
his dead feet still pointed at the demon. On his back, right
in the old unhealthy wound where Mewick's hatchet had
bitten at his spine, Chup now felt a cold touch as of icy
water. A moment later there followed something, some kind
of shock, that might have been pain of terrible intensity but
was ended so quickly that even the timidest man could
scarcely have cried out.

When that clean shock had passed, Chup realized that it
had burned away the nagging gnawing that had lived in the
wound almost since it was made. Before he could think
beyond that point, or speak, the next change came, a daz-
zling tingling down the great nerves of both thighs. Auto-

matically he tried to move the legs that had been quite in-
sensible. Still they would not stir; it was long months since
those wasted, shrunken muscles had contracted, save for
painful and uncontrollable twitchings. But even now he felt
those muscles try.

With his arms he turned himself again upon his back. The
demon, withdrawn slightly, was recapping the vessel from
which it seemed to have poured out his healing. Warmth
and light vanished. Chup again faced only a distorted
presence, dim in darkness. The only sounds in the hovel were
those of rain and autumn wind, and Chup's lonely, ragged
breathing that now gradually grew steadier.

"Is this a true healing?" he asked at length. And then:
"Why have you done it?"

"A true healing, sent to you by your bride, that you may
come to her."

"Oh? Why, then, she is very gracious." Chup could feel
the coursing We down to his toes; he tried them, but they
were still too stiff to move. He did not dare accept this
miracle as true; not yet. "She is full of unexpected kindness.
Come, messenger, I am no child. This is some prank. Or—
what does she need me for?"

With the speed of a blow, the demon-face came looming
over him. He was Chup—but he was no more than human.
He could not, with all his will, keep from turning his head
away and lifting up an arm as if to ward a blow. His
stomach, that had never troubled him before a fight, or on
a week-old battlefield of unburied men, now knotted in a
retching spasm. His eyes clenched uselessly upon the demon-
image looking through their lids.

Unhurriedly, the voice of dry leaves scraped at him. "I am
not to be mocked, lord though you were, and lord you are
to be. Not to be called 'messenger' in insolence. Much less
shall you scorn those who sent me here."

Those? Of course, Charmian herself was no magician, to
have the ordering of demons. She would, as she had before,
have charmed a wizard or two into helping her, with what-
ever scheme she played at ... The demon would not let
him think. He was to be punished for his disrespect. He
had the sensation that the demon was starting to peel away
the outer layers of his mind, with no more effort or concern
than a man toying with an insect. They could change men.
If it kept on it would turn him into something far less than

a cripple. Unless they really needed him—he cried out. He
could not think. He was Chup, but he could not stand against
an avalanche.

"You are not to be mocked," he whispered, through
clenched teeth. "Nor are your masters to be scorned."

The effortless onslaught faded. When he was master of
his eyes again, and made himself look, there was nothing to
be seen but the bearable dim face.

The demon then began impersonally to tell him why he
was needed. "Among the forces of the West now gathering
in this castle, there is a peasant youth named Rolf, born
here in the Broken Lands."

There could have been more than one fitting that descrip-
tion, but Chup had no doubt who was meant. "I know him.
Short and dark. Tough and wiry."

"That is his appearance. With him he now carries, al-
ways and everywhere, a thing that must be taken from him.
It must be brought to the Lady Charmian—and to no one
else—in the Black Mountains, and soon. When the youth
goes with his army into battle, what we seek may well be
destroyed or lost. Here the power of the West is too strong
for me or any other to take the thing by force; stealth must
be used."

"What is it?"

"A small thing in size. A woven knot, made from a wom-
an's yellow hair. A charm of the kind that men and women
use when they seek from one another what some of them
call love."

Yellow hair. Charmian's own? He waited in silence for
the demon to go on.

It rasped: "Tomorrow your legs will bear your weight,
and soon they will be strong enough for battle or running.
You are required to get this charm before the Western army
marches—"

"They may move any day!"

"—and bring it to your lady. Men in her service will be
patrolling in the desert, a few kilometers to the east, and
watching for you. Beyond that you must expect no further
help." The hugeness of the demon's face was growing less;
Chup saw how far the space beneath his slanting roof had
stretched, now it was coming back.

The dry voice too was fading. "I will not come to you
here again. Except to punish you for failure." And then the

face and voice were gone, the hovel and the darkness that
it held were still and ordinary. The wind outside went howl-
ing loud again. Chup lay without moving until it had be-
come an ordinary sound, burdened with no more than the
rain.

The rain and clouds, rare here on the very edge of desert,
made late the first entry of the morning's light into the long
and crowded barrack-room that occupied one whole side of
the ground level of the castle. Rolf woke when all was still
in darkness, round him the familiar jumble of packs, equip-
ment, weapons, and bunks and hammocks with their load
of snoring bodies.

He who had roused him, without touch or word, stood
at the foot of Rolf's bunk, a tall and bulky figure in the
gloom.

"Loford? What-?" And then Rolf guessed what had
brought the wizard to him. "My sister? Is there some-thing?"

"There may be something we can learn. Come." Loford
turned away. He looked the part of a warrior rather than
a wizard, until you saw his clumsiness. Rolf was into his
clothes and had caught him up before Loford had started
up the stair outside the barracks door.

As they climbed together the rising turns of stone toward
the castle's roof, the wizard explained in a low voice. "My
brother has arrived, as we expected. He is speaking much
of technology, and how we may be able to use it. Of course
I mentioned your experience, and your handiness along that
line. He was interested. I told him also how I have tried
with my poor spells to find out what happened to your
sister. Beside my brother I am a backwoods dabbler. Any-
way, we have tried a thing or two together, working through
the night. Certain powers that I never could have com-
manded, he has called up and set to work. Understand,
the answer we get may be incomplete, or . .."

"Or it may not be one that I want to hear." They started
up the last steep stair, leading to the battlemented roof.
"Still I thank you and your brother; it will not be your
fault if the news is bad."

Now at last they stood atop the flat, paved roof of the
castle's single, modest tower. Rolf pulled his jacket tighter
against the drift of dying rain, and through habit, without

thinking, made sure that something in his jacket pocket was
safe. He was a little less than average height, and, at seven-
teen, no doubt nearly done with growing taller. His hands
and feet were large, and his face under wild black hair
looked intent rather than either handsome or ill-favored. The
wiry leanness of his adolescence was filling out, to some
degree, with solid, active weight.

Mist hung like wet garments round the tower. It made
an excellent lookout post during the day, but there was no
sentry here in this hour before the dawn. A green, unearth-
ly looking fire glowed in a brazier on a tripod near one
battlement. Beside it a single figure stood, in wizard's robes,
motionless, looking out and away into the rainy night across
the chest-high barrier of stones.

Loford raised one finger to his lips, then led Rolf forward.
The green fire flared up once, and the waiting figure turned.
The light was such that Rolf could not well judge the face
of Loford's brother, but he was tall and spare of build. He
held out his hands a little from his sides, fingers moving as if
testing some invisible quality of the air. Arrayed on the
paved roof around him, Rolf now saw, were some of the
things that good magicians sometimes used: the fruits and
flowers of autumn, what might be water and milk in little
jars, small heaps of earth and sand, plain wooden twigs
both bent and straight. The green unsteady light had
changed them all, but they looked innocent and simple still.

Loford's brother—Rolf still had not heard him named-
conveyed somehow, by turn of head or hand perhaps, that
Rolf should come to stand beside him. Rolf moved to do so,
still keeping silence as he had been signed to do. As soon
as he stood beside the wizard, looking out across the battle-
ment in the direction from which the rain was drifting—east
—he saw the clouds and tendrils of lethargic mist speed
faster. In a moment it seemed as if he stood upon the prow
of a racing ship of stone, somehow driving into a gale. A
holder full of the wizard's flowers came toppling inward
from the parapet, to make a tiny smash.

Rolf put out his hands and gripped the stone before him.
The man beside him slowly raised one long lean arm, and
pointed with it, nearly dead ahead. Just at that point the
driving mist flew faster, became a gray smooth blur that
was not mist, and then tore soundlessly from top to bottom.
Rolf peered into the opening, leaned into it, and then for

him the wind and rain were gone. A vision engulfed him
while it seemed that he hung bodiless in space.

It was a forest clearing that he saw, fresh with the greenery
of spring or early summer—a place completely familiar to
him, that he had never thought or hoped to see again. The
trees, the open grass and garden, a path, a simple small
dwelling of thatch and poles. The vision was utterly silent,
but it held life and movement; sun and shadow shifting with
a breeze; fowl strutting in their little pen beside the house.
And now, in the shaded doorway a dun figure moved, and
Rolf as in a nightmare knew that his legs could not impel
him forward, his voice could not cry out a warning. There
was his mother in the doorway, one hand with a gesture he
had seen a thousand times wiping itself on her familiar
ragged apron. The other hand she raised to shade her eyes
as she looked outward, past Rolf's disembodied viewpoint.
She would be looking toward the road. And now a stiffening
of her body showed alarm.

Rolf did somehow cry out then, as in a nightmare knowing
and enduring the worst before it happened. His mother
heard him not. But someone, disembodied too, or at least
invisible, was gripping his arms, speaking with Loford's kind
of roaring whisper in his ear: "It is all written! It is all
unchangeable, what happened then! They cannot see or
hear you. You can only watch and learn."

His mother hurried inside the house, and shut the use-
less door. It was all more than half a year past He had
thought himself healed and scarred, but now he did not
know how he could watch any more. But he must watch,
he must find out if Lisa, his sister, was still alive, and he
must learn who they were, the ones who came. Soldiers of
the East, of course. But Rolf wanted their faces and their
names.

There. In the foreground of the vision now the first of
them appeared, a mounted trooper wearing black and bronze,
his back to Rolf. Slowly and alertly he rode toward the
house. And behind him came another and another, the
beginning of a mounted line.

Rolfs father on that day lay in the house, helpless, his
foot mangled while doing forced labor on the oppressors'
roads. Lisa had been at home. Rolf himself, when the
soldiers came, had been plowing in a distant field, all un-
aware.

There were six of the soldiers now. Still on their riding
beasts, they made a semicircle before the peasants' door.
The mouths of some of them were wide, with soundless
shouts or laughter, their weapons were held ready. And
now the door was opening, Rolf's mother standing there
again.

He watched until his mother turned and tried to flee, and
then he could not look. He shut his eyes and floated in a
void, but could not flee the thought of what was happening.
At length there came what must be Loford's hand, huge
and unseen, to clamp his chin and shake his head, trying
to force him now to see.

Rolf saw when he looked that the flimsy peasants' hut
had already been contemptuously kicked to bits. In its small
ruin, he knew, were the bodies of the mother and father,
for the son to find when he came running home. And here
was Lisa, twelve years old, her long hair still bound neatly
up in peasant style, but her garments now torn and smeared.
As limp and pale as death, she had been hoisted awkward-
ly before the saddle of a soldier. The marauders were almost
ready to leave, it seemed, wiping blades and straightening
clothing. He who carried Lisa must be their officer, for he
alone wore half-armor, and he rode the tallest steed. Turn-
ing his mount now, out of the yard toward the road, he
showed Rolf his youthful, unlined, and harmless-looking
face. There was a soft, proud, almost pouting look about the
mouth. He turned back in the saddle to urge his men, then
came on, now seemingly only a body's length from Rolf. He
glanced down once, indifferently, at the still body of the
girl he carried.

They would not have bothered to carry her off if she were
dead or dying.

". . . alive?" So choked was his throat, Rolf had to try
twice to speak intelligibly. "Is she still alive now? Will I
find her?"

He heard Loford, at a little distance, murmuring some-
thing, first low, then more insistently. Rolf understood that
his question was being passed on. The vision meanwhile
faded to a shifting blur of fog and light. Then Loford
brought back the answer, which he whispered to Rolf slow-
ly, and not like one who understood: "She lives. You must
get help from the tall broken man."

"What? Who?"

Loford's silence seemed to say that no further reply was
possible. Was Loford or anyone with him anymore? Rolf
drifted, bodiless and alone. But he would not be quieted,
not yet

"Then what of those who took her?" he demanded. "There
were six soldiers of the East, in Ekuman's black and bronze.
How many of them still breathe?"

Coherence returned to the forms that moved before Rolf's
sight. The scene had changed. He now beheld a portion of a
simple, unpaved road, turning through that same green
wooded land. Rolf recognized the place as one near where
his home had been. At first there was no one in sight.

A trooper in bronze and black—not the officer—came
riding abruptly into Rolf's field of view. The man rode easily,
looking back toward his fellows, and he laughed—or per-
haps he shouted, or only yawned. The vision was still silent,
and the man's cheeks and eyes and nose were gone. His
jaws of weathered bone gaped, showing missing teeth. What
might have been dried leather clung in odd fragments to
his skull and to his skeleton's hands. But his garments were
still as taut as if there were solid flesh inside to fill them out,
and he rode as jauntily as if he were a living man; his collar
stretched to compass a thick neck, where there was nothing
but a stack of vertebrae. Rolf understood that he was an-
swered as regarding this man's present fate.

The second trooper hove into view, astride his beast. He
grinned—for he too was a skeleton—but did not laugh. As
if he knew his doom, he rode slouched forward, in a some-
how morose and sulky attitude. Good grounds he had for
peevishness; straight before him, bobbing weightlessly, there
extended the long handle of a farmer's pitchfork. The long
tines vanished in his tunic's front, came out again as fine
sharp points protruding from his back. Rolf had one third
his answer now.

The third man next appeared, and he wore flesh upon
his bones, and breathed. But only in a vision could anyone
so ill and wasted sit on a beast and ride. His eyes rolled
vacantly, and now Rolf saw that a savage wound had
cracked his skull. The surface gash had healed, leaving a long
twisty scar along the scalp, marked by a streak of grayness
in the hair. But it was plain from the man's appearance that
the damage done inside the head had never healed and
never would.

The fourth man came, a skeleton with no hand bones
depending from his sleeves. Perhaps someone had fore-
stalled Rolf by taking revenge on this man for some other
crime, and he had bled to death when they were finished
lopping him. Or he might have survived his wounds, how-
ever they had been suffered, and fled with other of Ekuman's
people to the East, there to discover no one could be both-
ered feeding him.

And now here came the fifth man, riding jauntily, a
hatchet buried in his fleshless skull. The overthrow of the
Eastern power in the Broken Lands had taken heavy toll.
The tallest beast came last, with Lisa still carried living
but unconscious before the saddle. Rolf saw with a shock
that she was changed. Her ragged garments and her body
looked the same, and her dark brown bound-up hair. But
her face had been transformed, from its familiar homeliness
to beauty that awoke an echo from Rolf's dream and made
him catch his breath. This was the girl whom he had called
his sister, yet it was not. He called her name out, once, and
then fell silent, marveling.

Her  captor,   too,   was  live  and  whole.   His   full-fleshed
image with its proud, bored face watched indifferently the
ghastly capering before him of his slaughtered men.
"Does he live, then?" Rolf demanded of the air.
He will be slain and he will live, he thought the answer
came.

"Loford?" The vision was suddenly spinning before Rolf
like a reflection in a whirlpool. He staggered, drew in a
deep breath, and found himself firmly in his own body once
more, standing on the solid castle stone, leaning with numbed
hands against a crenelation. Loford and Loford's brother
were close beside him, and the light of day had come, to
make the green fire ghostly dim. The last torn ribbons of
the fog were swirling far above them now, borne by what
seemed no more than a natural wind.

A wizard's or a statue's face, that of Loford's brother, lined
but somehow ageless, came looming over Rolf. "Call me
Gray," the statue said. "You will understand I cannot casual-
ly use my real name. How is it with you?"

"With me? How would it be? Did you not see?" Then
Rolf felt Loford's grip upon his arm, and fought to calm
himself. "I am sorry. I give you thanks, and ask your
pardon, Gray."

"I grant it," Gray said solemnly.

Rolf turned from one of the wizards to the other. "She
lives, then. But where? Tell me, could he still have her with
him? The one who took her?"

"I do not know," said Gray. "You heard the only guide
that we were given, to further information: 'get help from
the tall broken man.' I expect that will prove decipherable
to you. I am not sure what powers we reached today, but
at least they were not definitely evil, and I would tend to
trust them. Though they were strange ... it seemed to me
I spoke with one who held the lightning in his hands ... be
that as it may, however. 'Get help from the tall broken

man.'"

A little later, Rolf stood on the tower alone save for the
sentry who had come with day to scan the desert. While he
was deep in thought, gazing out over the complex crowded
courtyards of the castle, Rolf saw a familiar figure by the
newly rebuilt main gate in the outer wall, dragging crippled
legs out of a beggar's lean-to.

A broken man, who once was tall.

After the day of battle in which the castle and the Broken
Lands it dominated had passed from East to West, Chup
had lain for days near death. When it became apparent
that he was not going to die, he had been placed under
close guard by the new masters of the land. Thomas and
other lesser leaders of the West had come many times to
question him. Chup had told them nothing. They had not
tried to force answers from him; new to revolution and to
power, they probably were not sure what questions needed
answers, nor what information Chup was likely to possess.
In fact he could not have told them much of any use. He
knew little of Som the Dead, of Zapranoth the Demon-
Lord, and of the Beast-Lord Draffut, the powers of the
Black Mountains, two hundred kilometers distant across the
desert. They were the powers of the East that the men of
the Broken Lands and the other newly freed satrapies must
fear, and must eventually defeat if they were to retain their
freedom. Chup, unlike most others of his rank in the Eastern
hierarchy, had never formally pledged himself to the East,
never passed through the dark and little-known ordeals and
ceremonies. He had never visited the Black Mountains.

A few of the Free Folk, as the successful Western rebels

in the Broken Lands did sometimes call themselves, had
perhaps been willing to show some mercy to a fallen enemy,
at least to one who had never been known to dabble in
pointless cruelty himself. Perhaps for that reason Chup's life
had been spared. Chup himself thought it more likely that
after the physicians and the wizards had looked many times
at the ill-healing wound on his back, had jabbed pins and
burning sticks at his useless unfeeling withering legs, and
had decided that no herb nor surgeon's knife nor wizard's
spell could ever mend what Mewick's flashing hatchet-blade
had severed, then the Free Folk of the West were quite
content for him to live. Existence as a cripple among enemies
should be a punishment worse than death.

So they let him go, or rather one day they dragged him
out of the cell in which he had been guarded. Explaining
nothing to him, they simply dragged him out and let him
go, in an outer courtyard. When he was left alone, he used
his hands to drag himself somewhat farther. When he got as
far as the great new gate where the road came in through
the massive outer wall, he could see the empty distances
the road ran to, and found no point in trying to crawl on.
When Chup had been sitting for half a day beside the
gate, preparing himself to starve, there came one he had
never seen before, an old man, to leave beside him a chipped
cup with some water in it. The old man, having set this
down as if he were doing something shameful, and hardly
looking at Chup, walked quickly on.

Thinking it highly unlikely that anyone would trouble to
poison him in his present state, Chup drank. Somewhat
later, a passing wagoneer, perhaps a stranger, looked down
from his high seat, perhaps saw only a beggar instead of a
fallen enemy, and tossed Chup a half-gnawed bone.

Chup propped his torso erect against the castle wall and
chewed. He had never been too finicky about his food when
in the field. Turning his head to the right, he could squint
across two hundred kilometers of desert to a horizon dark-
ened by the Black Mountains. Even if he could somehow get
there, the East that he had served had little use for the
crippled and the failed. That was of course quite right and
realistic, fitting with the way the world was made. Where
else? A few kilometers to the west was the sea, to north
and south, as here, his former enemies were in power.

The village just below the castle was in ruins from the

fighting, but people were already moving back and rebuild-
ing. The road here promised to be a busy one. It seemed
that if he must try to live on handouts he was not too likely
to reach a better place than this.

By the night of that first day he had gathered scraps of
wood and had begun to build his lean-to near the gate.

On the morning after the demon's visit, Chup had Hie
back in his legs. Before emerging from his shelter he had
tested them, gritting his teeth and laughing with the glorious
pain of freely coursing blood and thawing muscles. What-
ever the source of the healing magic, it was extremely pow-
erful. He could bend each knee slightly, and move all his
toes. His fingers told him that the wound upon his back had
shriveled to a scar, as smoothly healed as any of his other
battle marks.

Now he must earn what the East had given him. He knew
them too well to think for a moment that the demon's part-
ing threat of punishment for failure had been an idle one.
Emerging at the usual hour from his shelter, he took care
to give no slightest sign that anything of moment had oc-
curred during the night. The light drizzle was fading as he
dragged himself to his usual station at one side of the great
gate, which had just been opened for the morning. As usual,
he held in his lap his beggar's bowl, chipped pottery sal-
vaged from a dump. His pride was too great to be destroyed
by taking alms; it had been easier because he had never
been forced to really beg. The weather had been good, and
food plentiful throughout the summer. People came to look
at him, a lord humbled, a villain punished, a terrible fighter
beaten. People whom he never asked or thanked put in his
bowl small coins or bits of food. There were no other beg-
gars at the gate, and not many in the land. Western soldiers
maimed in the fighting were still being cared for as heroes,
and the others of the East, of less importance than Chup, had
evidently been slain to the last man.

Sometimes people came to gloat, silently or loudly, at his
downfall. He did not look at them or listen. They were no
great bother. The world was like that. But he was not going
to give them the satisfaction of dying, starving, or even
showing discomfort, if he could help it.

Often it was the soldiers, even those who had fought
against him, who gave him food and drink. When they

spoke to him civilly he answered them in the same way.
Daily he dragged himself to get water at their barracks well
inside a courtyard, and only once was he hindered in doing
so.

A pair of fat legs had come walking to stand, with great
deliberateness, astride his way. Chup, swinging along on his
arms, his own legs bound up beneath him on a pad of rags,
had stopped, squinting up into the sun. A fat soldier's face
glaring down asked loudly if there was anything it could do
for the great Lord Chup.

"You might cease to block my pathway to the well."
There was no trace of crippling in Chup's voice.

"You want water? Why, we can't allow that. No, not a
mighty lord like Chup, drinking out of the same well as
lousy soldiers. A mighty lord should have wine. Let's see,
now, how can we get him some?"

By that day Chup's arms had, by serving him as legs, re-
gained something of their old strength. He considered that
if he could get the right grip on the soldier he could pull
him down and strangle him; without strong legs it would
probably be impossible to break his back. Of course the
soldier's loitering companions, watching silently, might not
continue to do so while the fat one was being killed. But
Chup had little indeed to lose. He was waiting patiently for
his best chance to try for the grip he wanted, when Mewick
came to stop the baiting.

Mewick had a soft, foreignly accented voice, that some-
how contrasted with and yet suited his mournful, hawk-
nosed face. "Oh, please, good soldiers, let us not have quar-
reling here, and fighting. It leads to injuries, yes, and pain,
and many sadnesses. Oh, let us have no quarreling!''

The soldier who had been trying to torment Chup had
not known who Mewick was. Mewick had no battle-hatchet
with him at the moment, and the fat one had probably not
been here for the fighting. He had started to say provoking
things to Mewick, but some of his comrades had come to
haul at him and whisper enlightening things. He fell silent
and let himself be pulled to some distance before he began
to scowl again and tug aggressively at his belt.

Mewick had stayed a little longer, but Chup had not
bothered to look up again at his old opponent. He had
dragged himself on to the well, and had gotten his drink

as usual. Whether through luck or for some other reason, he
had not been bothered there again.

This morning, Chup had hardly taken his place beside
the gate, when he saw the youth Rolf pacing across the
outer courtyard toward him. Rolf stepped quickly but de-
liberately, frowning at the puddles, evidently on serious
business. Yes, he was coming straight toward Chup. The
two of them had not spoken since Chup was a lord and the
other a weaponless rebel. This visit today could not be co-
incidence; the demon must have somehow arranged it.
Chup's chance was coming sooner than he had dared to
hope.

Rolf, looking preoccupied, halted a couple of meters away,
and wasted no time in preliminaries. "It may be you can tell
me something that I want to know," he began. "About a
matter that is not likely to mean anything to you, one way
or the other. Of course I'll be willing to give you something,
within reason, in return for information."

Not for the first time, Chup found himself somewhat taken
with this youth, who came neither bullying the cripple nor
trying to be sly. Chup said: "My wants these days are few.
I have food, and little need of anything else. What could
you give me?"

"I expect you'll be able to think of something."
Chup almost smiled. "Suppose I did. What must I tell
you in return?"

"I want to find my sister." Speaking rapidly, saying noth-
ing of his sources of information, Rolf described briefly the
time and circumstances of Lisa's vanishing, her appearance,
and that of the proud-faced officer.

Chup scowled. The tale awoke real memories, a little hazy
though they were. Better and better, he would not have to
invent. "What makes you think that I can tell you any-
thing?"

"I have good reason."

Grunting in a way that might mean anything or nothing,
Chup stared past Rolf again as if he had forgotten him. He
must not seem at all eager to do business.

The silence stretched until Rolf broke it impatiently. "Why
should you not help me? I think you no longer have any
great love for anyone in the East—" He broke off suddenly,
like one aware of blundering. Chup did not look up. Rolf,

in a slower voice, went on. "Your bride is there, I know. I
didn't—I didn't mean to say anything about her."

Here was a peculiar near-apology. Chup looked up. Rolf
had lost the aspect of a determined, bitter man. Abruptly
he had become an awkward boy, speaking of a lady in the
manner of one who cherished secret thoughts of her.

Rolf stumbled on. "I mean, she—the Lady Charmian—
couldn't be harmed in any way by what you tell me of my
sister or her kidnapper." One of Rolf's big hands rose, per-
haps unconsciously, to touch his jacket, as if for reassurance
that something carried in an inner pocket was safe. "I know
you were her husband," he blurted awkwardly, and then ran
out of words. He stared at Chup with what seemed a mix-
ture of anxiety, hatred, and despair.

"I am her husband," Chup corrected drily.

Rolf came near blushing, or did blush; it was hard to
tell, with his dark skin. "You are. Of course."

Though Chup loved best the sword, he could use clever-
ness. "I am so in name only, of course. You and the rest of
the West came breaking in the castle gates here before
Charmian and I could do more than drink from the same
wine cup."

Rolf looked somewhat relieved, and utterly distracted now,
despite himself, from the business that had originally brought
him to Chup. He sat down facing Chup. He wanted, needed,
to ask Chup something more, but it took much hesitation
before he could get it out.

"Was she really ... I mean, there have always been bad
things said about the Lady Charmian, things I can't be-
lieve ..."

Chup had to conceal amusement, which was a problem
he had not faced in quite a while. He managed, though.
"You mean, was she as evil as they say?" Chup looked very
sober. "You can't believe all that you hear, young one.
Things were very dangerous for her in the castle." Though
not as dangerous as they were for others, living with her.
"She had to pretend to be something different than what
she truly was; and she learned to dissemble very well." Rolf
was nodding, and seemed to some extent relieved; it amused
Chup to have answered him with perfect truth.

"So I have thought" said Rolf. "She seemed so ..."

"Beautiful."

"Yes. So she could not have been like her father and the
others."

Of course, Chup thought, suddenly understanding the
boy's monumentally innocent stupidity about the Lady Char-
mian. He was befuddled by the love-charm that he carried;
the same that Chup would have to carry, later. However,
time enough then to cross that bridge . . .

Rolf was saying, more calmly: "Nor were you, I think, as
bad as Ekuman and the others. I know you were a satrap of
the East, oppressing people. But you were not as vile as
most of them."

"The most gracious compliment I have enjoyed in some
time." Chup rubbed a flea-bitten shoulder against the cool,
damp stone of the sunless wall. The moment seemed favor-
able to get down to business. "So, you would like me to
tell you where your sister may be found. I can't."

Much of Rolf's original businesslike manner returned. "But
you know something?"

"Something that you'll want to hear."
"Which is?"

"And, since you are in earnest, I will tell you what I
want in return."

"All right, let's hear that first."

Chup let his voice fall into a grim monotone. "If I can
help it, I do not want to die like this, rotting by centimeters.
Give me a rusty knife blade, so I can at least feel like an
armed man, and take me out into the desert and leave me
there. The great birds are gone south on their migration, but
some other creature will find me and oblige me with a finish
fight. Or let thirst kill me, or a mirage-plant. But I am loath
to beg myself to death before my enemies." It came out quite
convincingly, he thought. Yesterday, there would have been
more truth in it than fiction.

Rolf frowned. "Why must it be the desert, if you can't
bear to live? Why not here?"

"No. Dying here would be giving in, to you who've made
a beggar of me. Out there I'll have gotten away from you."
So long did Rolf sit silent, pondering, that Chup felt sure
the bait was taken. However, the fish was not yet caught.
Chup volunteered: "If you want to make sure of my finish,
bring along a pair of swords. I think the chances would be
somewhat in your favor. I'll tell you what I can about your
sister before we fight."

If Rolf was outraged by this challenge from a cripple, he
did not show it. Once away from the subject of Charmian,
he was adult again. Again he was silent for a time, watch-
ing Chup closely. Then he said: "I'll take you to the desert."
He paused. "If you lie to me about my sister, or try any
other sort of foolishness, I won't leave you in the desert,
dead or living. Instead I'll drag you back here, dead or
living, to be displayed beside this gate."

Chup, keeping his face impassive, shifted his gaze into
the distance. In a moment Rolf grunted, got to his feet, and
strode away.

CHAPTER   2

It was midafternoon before Rolf came back, leading a
loadbeast. The look of the animal suggested it might be a
reject from the castle stable, that could not be expected to
give useful service in the coming campaign. Slung on the
animal were several containers that might hold food and
water. Rolf had also armed himself, but not with two swords.
A serviceable sword and a long, keen knife hung from
separate belts cinched round his waist.

The time since morning had been an ordeal for Chup,
testing his patience to the limit. First, of course, because he
was not sure his fish was wholly caught. Secondly, the
urge to move his legs had become almost overwhelming. Un-
der his ragged trousers their muscles were far looser, and
even seemed thicker, than they had been yesterday. The
ache and tingle of returning life had turned into an itch for
movement.

Rolf, coming back, said nothing but halted his feeble-
looking animal just beside Chup. Then he came to catch
Chup under the armpits, and with wiry strength heave his
half-wasted frame erect. The gate sentries turned their heads
to watch, as did some passersby. But no one seemed to care
if Chup departed. He was a prisoner no more, but only
beggar.

Once standing, Chup with his strong hands gripped the
saddle and raised himself, while Rolf guided his dangling
legs into the stirrups. Rolf asked: "Are you going to be

able to hang on, there? I wouldn't want you to fall and split
your head. Not just yet"

"I can manage." And Chup with his arms alone could
keep his balance in the saddle. He had forgotten how high
one raised a man. Rolf took the loadbeast by the bridle, and
they were off, down the sloping switchback road that led
first to the village and then the world.

Rolf walked with long strides beside the loadbeast's head:
a position that let him keep the corner of one eye on Chup.
Chup, for his part, breathed deeply with the joy of seeing
the castle gradually recede behind him, and the greater joy
of surreptitiously testing his legs in the stirrups and feeling
them respond.

Before they reached the village, Rolf turned off the road.
He led the animal down a slope of wasteland to the be-
ginning of the desert. The autumn day had cleared, and
had grown almost hot. Ahead of them, gently rolling flat-
ness shimmered with mirage. Sparsely marked with vegeta-
tion, it stretched on to the horizon, where towered the
Black Mountains, jagged and enigmatic. Rolf had chosen
the only direction which led quickly to solitude, and was
heading straight east from the castle.

Men in the service of the Lady Charmian were to be
patrolling in the desert. That might or might not mean some
help for Chup. He could not count on any.

Neither Chup nor Rolf spoke again until the castle had
fallen nine or ten kilometers behind them. At this distance
it plainly overlooked them still, from its perch on the low
flank of a mountain pass. But the eastward of this point
where they now were, the lay of the land was such that a
man going east could take advantage of declivities and brush,
and perhaps never see the castle or be seen from it again.

Here Rolf stopped the beast, and, still warily holding its
bridle, turned to Chup. "Tell me what you know."

"And after that?"

Touching a water bag slung on the animal, Rolf said:
"This I'll leave with you, and the knife. The beast goes
back with me, of course. You won't be able to get any-
where, or to stay alive out here for very long, but that's
what you asked for."

Chup was curious. "How do you plan to judge whether
or not what I tell you is the truth?"

"You have no cause to seek revenge on me in particular."

Rolf paused. "And I don't think you lie just for the sake
of lying; do harm just for the sake of doing it." He let an-
other moment pass. "Also, I already know, on good authority,
a few things more than what I've told you about what hap-
pened to my sister. Whatever you tell me should match
with that."

Chup nodded several times. He had intended anyway to
tell Rolf the truth; he could almost regret that Rolf would
not live long enough to benefit.

"The name of the man you want is Tarlenot," Chup said.
"He served as an escort commander and a courier between
the Black Mountains and outlying satrapies. He may still;
whether he is still alive I have no idea."
"What did he look like?"

"His face, as you described it. I've heard that women
found him handsome, and I think he shared their view. He
was young, strong, of middling height. An uncommonly
good fighter, so I've heard."

Rolf's face showed nothing. "And when did you see him
last?" He might have had his questions on a written list.

"I can tell you that exactly enough." Chup turned his face
to the north, remembering. "It was on the last night of my
journey southward from my own satrapy, coming here to the
Broken Lands to take my charming bride.

"I came traveling with considerable style and power, rid-
ing a river barge down the dolles, and escorted by two
hundred armed men. Tarlenot, with five or six, going north-
ward, met us on the last day before we reached the castle.
He and his troop, being so few in unfriendly country, were
glad to spend the night in our encampment."

"Who or what was he escorting then?" Rolf, listening
eagerly, leaned just slightly forward. But he was not near
enough, as yet, for Chup to lunge at him.

He was escorting no one. Perhaps he carried messages.
Anyway, he had with him one captive girl who might have
been your sister. As nearly as I can recall, she must have
been about twelve years old. Dark-haired, I think. Ugly.
Whether she had any closer resemblance to yourself I can't
remember."

"True, she was not pretty," Rolf said eagerly. He shook his
head. "Nor was she my blood relative. What happened
then?"

"I had other things to think about. I remember Tarlenot,

if I am not mistaken, saying something about selling her, in
the north. There was a tavernkeeper up there at a caravan-
serai—" Chup stopped, caught by a sudden thought. "Why,
it conies back, now. On that night I dreamt, and it was
most odd. I thought I wakened, while all the men in the
encampment, even the sentries, lay sleeping all around me.
The watchfires burned down low. I dreamed I was awake,
but could not move. Tarlenot, he moved, and rose up from
his blankets, but I could see his eyes were closed and he
was still asleep."

"What happened then?" Rolf was utterly intent, but none
the less alert. And still no closer.

Chup thought he might better have kept quiet about the
dream. It must sound like some devious lie or stalling tactic.
But now he had begun it.

"I dreamt there came one from outside the firelight, taller
than a man and dressed in full dark armor that hid his face
and all his body. A great lord, certainly, but whether of
East or West I could not say. The earth seemed to sink
down beneath his feet, as stretched cloth would yield to
the weight of a walking man. He stood before the sleeping,
standing Tarlenot, and stretched out his hand toward—yes,
toward where the girl must have been lying.

"And the dark lord said: 'What you have there is mine,
and you will dispose of it as I wish.' Those were his words,
or very like them. And Tarlenot bowed, like one accepting
orders, though his eyes remained closed in sleep.

"Then all became confused, as in dreams it often does,
you know? When I awoke it was morning. The sentries were
alert, as they must have been all through the night. The girl
was still asleep, and smiling. That recalled to me my dream,
but then I forgot it again in the press of the day's business."
The dream had been very vivid, and the way he had for-
gotten and then remembered it was odd. Quite likely it had
some magical importance for Chup. But what?

He asked: The girl was not your blood relative, you say?
Who was she?"

"I call her my sister; I thought of her that way." Seeing
how intently Chup leaned forward, gripping the saddle,
Rolf went on. "She was about six years old when she came
to us, the year I was eleven. The armies of the East had not
yet come to us, but they were in the country to the south,
and people fleeing north sometimes passed along our road.

We thought Lisa must have come from some such group
passing through. My parents and I woke up one spring
morning to find her standing naked in our farmyard, crying.
She could remember nothing, not her name or how she'd
gotten there. She could hardly talk. But she had been well
fed and cared for up till then; my mother marveled that
she had not a bruise or scratch."

"You took her in?" Chup would find out all he could from
the young fool. Before he should come close enough . . .

"Of course. I told you, that was before the East had
come upon us; we had food in plenty. We named her Lisa,
for my true sister, that had died as a baby." Rolf scowled,
running thin on patience. "Why are you questioning me? Tell
me what happened to her."

Chup shook his head. "I told you, what happened to her
finally I do not know. Except for this: when we separated
in the morning, Tarlenot spoke no more of going north and
selling his captive, but of going east to the Black Mountains.
I, of course, came south, with other things to think about."
Weary of talking, Chup reached for the water bag and got
a drink.

After probing Chup with his gaze for a time, Rolf nodded.
"I think, if you were making up a lie, you would make one
that was more satisfying and believable." And yet Rolf hesi-
tated. "Come, if this tale just now was a lie, tell me. The
water and the knife will still be yours. And freedom, what-
ever it may be worth to you out here."

"No lie. I've done my part of the bargain, told you all I
know." Chup gripped his left leg with his hands and pulled
it free of the stirrup, and then the right. He made them
dangle lifelessly. "Come, get me down. Another moment or
two, and this animal will fall beneath my weight."

"Swing yourself off with your arms," said Rolf. "I'll hold
its head."

Chup, had he been honestly trying, might not have been
able to manage getting off without using his legs. Which-
ever side he lurched toward, one of his limp legs hooked
over the saddle, while the other dangled awkwardly in
such a position that it was likely to be broken under him if
he just let go and fell. Even a man seeking to be left alone
in the desert to die would not like to start his ordeal with
a broken ankle. Chup grunted, shifted from one side to the
other, made his legs dead and appeared to be trying to get

down. The beast muttered and grew restive, while Rolf con-
tinued to hold its head.

At last Rolf muttered impatiently: "I'll lift you down." Still
holding the bridle with one hand, he stepped to the side
of the animal opposite from where Chup was dinging at
the moment. He freed Chup's leg so it would slide easily
over the animal's back. Then, bridle still in hand, he moved
back around the loadbeast's head.

He found Chup standing free.

Rolf's moment of surprise was time enough for Chup to
half-lunge, half-fall, upon his victim. Chup learned in that
first moment of real test that his legs were still far from
their full strength. They could do little more than hold him
up.

But they had served him well enough for a moment, and
that moment was enough. Rolf's hand had moved quickly,
but still he had hesitated fractionally between drawing
sword and dagger, and by the time his choice had settled on
the shorter blade it was too late. Chup's hand was there to
grip Rolf's wrist and argue for the weapon. Grappling as he
fell, Chup dragged the other down upon the sand.

The youth had wiry strength, and two good legs. He
writhed and kicked and struggled. But already Lord Chup
had the grip he wanted, on Rolf's dagger arm. Rolf's tough
arm muscles strained and quivered, fighting for his life;
the Lord Chup with brutal power, methodical and patient,
wore them down.

The captured arm began to bend. It was near the breaking
point before its hand would open and give the dagger up.
Chup caught the weapon up, reversed; he did not want
to kill Rolf until he had made absolutely sure the charm
was still with him. If it was not, Rolf would have to tell
him where it was. He clubbed Rolf along the skull with
the butt of the knife, and Rolf went limp.

Inside Rolf's jacket, in an inner pocket buttoned shut and
holding nothing else, Chup found the charm. No sooner
had his fingers touched it than he snatched them back. When
he took it, would it work on him as it seemed to have on this
young clod? Turn him misty-eyed and doting over the treach-
erous woman whom he had wed for nothing but political
reasons?

Only briefly did he kneel there in hesitation. There was
no use worrying about it. If he would be a lord once more,

he had no choice but to take the charm into his possession
and carry it to the East.

The loadbeast, decrepit and lethargic as it was, had run
off a few strides and was still stirring restlessly. Chup called
to it in a soothing voice. Then he muttered the three brief
defensive spells that sometimes seemed to work for him—he
was a poor magician—and drew the coil of hair out of Rolf's
pocket. He turned it over in his hands.

It was an intricately woven circlet of startling gold, about
the size to fit around a man's upper arm. Chup had no
immediate feeling of power in it, but obviously it was no
mere trinket; it was not dull or crumpled, though an oaf had
kept it in his pocket perhaps for half a year, and had
probably given it much secret fondling.

Holding it, Chup did not doubt for a moment that it was
Charmian's hair. It brought her beauty sharply to his mind,
and he stood up, swaying on his reborn legs, gazing at the
charm. Aye, his unclaimed bride was beautiful, whatever
else men might say of her, they never argued that. Char-
mian's was the beauty, made real, that lonely men imagined in
their daydreams. He recalled now the ceremonies of their
wedding. There had followed half a year of death, for him.
But now he was a man again . . .

Eventually he took note of Rolf's stirrings at his feet, and
tucked the charm into a pocket in his own rags, and bent to
put an end to his victim. On Chup's still-unsteady legs it
was a slow bending. Before he could complete it, one of his
victim's feet was hooked behind his right ankle, and the
other came pushing neatly at the front of Chup's right knee.
The warrior-lord had no more chance of remaining upright
than a chopped-through tree.

When he landed on his back he lay still briefly, raging at
his own foolishness while he pretended to be stunned. Pre-
tending did no good, for the peasant was not fool enough
to jump on him. Instead, Rolf was crawling and scrambling
away, dazed-looking, but also plainly full of life. Chup strug-
gled erect, and tried to hurry in pursuit. But instead of
lunging and pouncing he could only stumble on his traitor-
ous legs and fall again.

Quickly he was up once more, drawing his captured dag-
ger. But Rolf too was now on his feet, facing Chup, sword
drawn and pointed more or less steadily at Chup's midsec-
tion.

Something he had almost forgotten began to grow in
Chup: his old happiness of combat. "At least," he observed,
"you have learned how to hold a blade since last we fought."

Rolf was not minded to talk or even listen. His face
showed how he, too, raged at himself for carelessness. He
lunged forward, thrusting straight at Chup in a wicked blur.
To Chup, his own response seemed horribly slow and rusty;
but still his hand had not forgotten what to do. It came
up of itself, bringing the knife in an economical curve to
meet the sword. They clashed and the long steel sang, shoot-
ing two centimeters wide of Chup's ribs. Then quickly the
sword slid back, to make a looping swing and cut. Chup
saw it was coming downward toward his legs. They had
no nimbleness to save themselves. He let himself drop for-
ward, reaching down with his short blade to parry the
stroke as best he could. He caught the sword blade in the
angle between hilt and blade of his dagger, caught it and
tried to pin it to the ground. But Rolf wrenched the sword
away again. Rolf feinted twice before he struck again, but
there was not much skill in his pretense, so Chup had time
to get back on his feet, parrying the real cut even as he rose.

Chup saw as they circled that the loadbeast was moving
steadily away. No help for that. His eyes were locked on
Rolf's, and both of them were breathing harshly. So it went
on for a little time, with nothing said. Rolf would advance
and strike, or sometimes only feint. Chup parried, and faked
attacking in his turn. With his short blade he could not very
well attack a sword, held by a determined foe. If Chup
had had his strong legs he could have tried and might have
won—skipping back when the sword cut at him, driving
forward then at the precisely proper instant for striking.
Without perfectly dependable legs it would be suicide.

A first-rate swordsman in Rolfs place would have driven
in on Chup, trying to stay just at the distance where the
sword could strike but the dagger could not, pounding one
stroke upon another until at last the shorter blade must miss
a parry. Though Rolf was dangerous with a sword, he was
far from masterly. Chup watched and judged him critical-
ly. Rolf was evidently determined he was not going to be
tricked again into rushing to too close quarters with the
Lord Chup. So he stood just a fraction of a meter too far
away before he struck; and he failed to press his attacks.

Against his efforts the knife in Chup's hand could, with a
minimum of luck, stand like a wall of armor.

Rolf at last drew back a further step, and dropped his
sword point slightly. Perhaps he hoped to provoke Chup
into something rash.

But Chup only dropped his own arms to his sides and
stood there resting, panting honestly. His legs, he thought,
were stronger than when the fight had started, as if ex-
ercise were an aid to the demon's magic. But in the joy of
fighting, with health and strength and freedom come again,
he had no great wish to kill.

He said: "Youngster, come with me to the East. Follow
and serve me, and I will make you a warrior. Yes, and a
leader of warriors. You have the guts for it, though you
yourself may never be a great one with the sword. You have
the guts, and if you live long enough you may absorb a little
knowledge."

The murderous determination frozen in the young face
did not thaw for an instant. Instead, Rolf closed again, and
struck, once, twice, three times, with greater violence than
usual. The blades rang, rang, rang. Ah, Chup thought, it
was too bad, a good man wasted as an enemy. Chup would
have to kill him.

If he could. The desert this near the castle must be
patrolled. Should a squad of Western cavalry appear, that
would be all for the Lord Chup and his ambition and his
golden bride. And, too, the sun was lowering. Suppose they
kept on duelling here until nightfall? To fight with blades
in darkness was more like pitching coins than matching skills.

Rolf circled round him now, struck less frequently, and ap-
peared to be thinking more. It seemed that he was searching
for the proper way, trying strategies in his mind. He might
hit on the right one. He would have the guts to try it if
he decided it was best. Chup therefore had better get the
initiative, and soon. How? He would dare Rolf, anger him,
play on young impatience.

"Come here to me, child, and I will impart a little knowl-
edge. Just a little spanking is all that I intend. Come, no
reason for you to be so much afraid."

It seemed Rolf was not even listening. He was looking
eastward now, past Chup's shoulder, and there was a change
toward desperation in Rolf's face.

Chup carefully backed up a step, to insure against surprises,

and took a quick glance behind him. A thin cloud of dust
rose from the desert, a kilometer or more away, and be-
neath the dust he glimpsed movement as of riders; and he
thought that the riders were garbed in black.

Rolf, too, thought that he saw black uniforms, and plain-
ly they were coming from the east

Chup had lowered his blade again, at the same time
stretching himself up to his full height His beggar's rags
were suddenly completely incongruous. In a lofty and dis-
tant tone, he said: "Burrow into the sand, young one."

Rolf's thought, like a cornered animal, jumped wildly this
way and that It would be hopeless, in this barren country,
to try to run from mounted men. The approaching riders
now seemed to be coming straight on, as if they had already
spotted Chup, at least. He stood quite tall and willing to
be seen.

"Don't be an idiot. Hide, I say."

Bending low, Rolf scrambled around the nearest hum-
mock, threw himself down there, and dug himself as rapid-
ly and thoroughly as possible into the sand between two
straggly bushes. Not much more than his head, emerging
amid roots and wiry stems, was left unburied when he ceased
his work and froze, hearing hoofbeats near at hand.

Looking out through his inadequate-seeming cover, over
the top of the hummock, he could see the head and shoulders
of Chup, who stood facing away from Rolf with chin held
high. And in that moment Rolf felt a chill brush over him,
a shadow unseen by eyes yet deeper far than any simple
lack of light. Something enormous and invisible brushed by
him, something that he thought was searching for him. It
missed him, and was gone.

The many hoofbeats, their makers still unseen by Rolf,
had halted, very near at hand. Dust came drifting above
Chup. And now an unknown, deep, and weary voice called
out: "And are you Chup? The former satrap?"

"I am the Lord Chup, man."

"Where is it? Were you able to—?"

Chup in his best commanding voice broke in: "And your
name, officer?"

For a moment the only sound was the shifting of hooves.
Then the deep tired voice said: "Captain Jarmer, if it makes
any difference to you. Now quickly, tell me whether you—"

"Jarmer, you will provide me with a mount. That beast
you see wandering away there will not support me longer."

Some of the mounts shifted their positions, and now Rolf
could see the one he took to be the captain, black-bearded,
scowling down at Chup. Mounted beside the captain was
one in wizard's robes of iridescent black, with the hump
of some small beast-familiar showing under the loose robes
at the shoulder. The wizard juggled something like a crystal
in his cupped hands. A facet of it winked at Rolf, with a
sharp spear of the lowering sun; again he felt the sense of
something searching passing by.

Chup in the meantime was continuing his debate with
Jarmer: "Yes, I have it, and it is not your job to ask for
proofs of anything, but to escort me. Now the sooner you
provide me with a mount, the sooner we will be where all
of us want to go."

There was a murmuring of voices. Chup vanished from
Rolfs view, to reappear more fully a few moments later,
mounted. "Well, captain, are there any more problems I
must solve before we can be off? A Western army lies within
that fortress, and if they've eyes they've seen your dust by
now."

But still the captain tarried, exchanging glances with his
wizard. Then he spoke to Chup once more, in the tones of
one who knew not whether to be angry or obsequious. "Had
you no companion on your way out here from that castle? My
wise man here says his crystal indicates—"

"No companion that I mean to tarry for. That ancient
loadbeast, mirages, and a skulking predator or two." Un-
hurriedly, but ending all delay, Chup turned his new mount
to the east and dug his heels in.

The captain shrugged, then motioned with his arm. The
wizard put away his jiggling piece of light. The sound of
hooves rose loudly for a moment, then rapidly declined,
with the settling of the light dust they had raised.

Rolf, almost unbelieving, watched and listened to them
go, letting out his held-in breath in little whiffs. When the
last sound of hooves had faded utterly, he pulled himself
out of the sand and looked. The riders' plume of dust was
already distant in the east from which the night was soon
to come. Turning back to face the castle, he saw that some
sentinel had—too late—given the alarm. A heavy stream of

beasts and men, a mounted reconnaissance-in-force, flowed
from the castle's main gate toward the desert.

Rolf stood there numbly waiting for them. He had been
given back hope for his sister's life, but robbed of something
whose importance he had not understood until it was taken
from him—though in truth his feelings were more relief than
loss, as if an aching tooth had been pulled. His hand re-
turned again and again to the empty pocket. His head
ached from the robber's blow.

Ask help of the tall broken man. Why had Gray's powers
told him that?

CHAPTER    3

On the first night of the long flight into the east there
had been only brief pauses to take rest. During the following
day, their toiling across the enormous waste of land seemed
to bring the Black Mountains no closer. Jarmer during day-
light slowed down the pace somewhat, pausing for long
rests with posted sentinels. Chup at each stop slept deeply,
lying with his golden treasure beneath his body, where none
could reach it without waking him. When he awoke he ate
and drank voraciously, till those of the black-clad soldiers
who had been ordered to share provisions with him grum-
bled—not too loudly—when they looked him in the eye. His
legs grew stronger steadily. They were not yet what legs
should be, to serve the Lord Chup properly, but he could
stand and move on them without expecting to fall down.

The second morning of the journey, the sun was very
high before it came in sight; the Black Mountains of the
East were tall before them now, casting their mighty shad-
ows many kilometers out upon the desert. Clouds draped
their distant summits. Seen from this near, they were no
longer black, nor particularly forbidding. What had given
them the hue of midnight from a distance, Chup saw now
to be the myriad evergreen trees that clothed the middle
slopes like blue-green twisted moss.

The troop with Chup and Jarmer riding at its head trav-
eled now upon a long, slow rise of land by which the
desert approached the cliffs. Already they were at a con-

siderable elevation above the middle of the desert. The
chain of peaks so near ahead now ran far on either flank to
north and south, and curved ambiguously from sight in
both directions, so Chup was now hard put to guess how
far the range might stretch.

Straight ahead was one of the higher-looking peaks, sheer
cliffs rising to its waist. Now from somewhere on the table-
land above the cliffs it disgorged a dozen or so flying
reptiles. Down to inspect the mounted troop they flew, on
laboring slow wings; the air here must be high and thin
for them, and the season of their hibernation was approach-
ing.

Looking more closely at the cliffs as he rode ahead, Chup
saw that they were not after all a perfect barrier. To them
and into them a road went climbing, switchback after switch-
back. Toward that road and half-hidden pass Jarmer was
leading his men. And indeed the frayed-out start—or end-
ing—of that climbing road seemed to be appearing now,
beneath the riding-beasts' hurrying hooves.

Chup was observing all these matters with alert eyes
and mind, but with only half his thought. A good part of
his attention was focused inward, upon a vision that had
grown in his mind's eye through the two long nights and
single day upon the desert.

Charmian. The weight of the knot of his wife's hair, swing-
ing in his pocket as the wind and motion of the ride swung
his light and ragged garments, seemed to strike like molten
gold against his ribs. He remembered everything about her,
and there was not a thing that made her less desirable. He
was the Lord Chup again, and she was his.

The gradually steepening slope slowed down the tired rid-
ing-beasts. The road they traveled, empty of all other traffic,
veered abruptly away from the cliffs, then toward them
again, on the first winding of the steep part of its ascent.
The cliff tops must be a kilometer above their heads.

Chup drank again from the borrowed waterskin he had
slung before his saddle. His thirst was marvelous; the water
must be going, he thought, to fill out his recovering legs.
Their muscles still seemed to be thickening by the hour,
though the speed of recovery was not what it had been at
first. He stood up in his stirrups now, and squeezed the
barrel of the beast beneath him with his knees. The skin on

his legs ached and itched, stretching to hold the new live
flesh.

Some of the reptiles were quite close now, swelling down-
ward from the sky. On leather wings spread wider than
Chup's arms and thick with gray-green scales they circled,
gliding, drifting, round the troop. Through their snouts and
needle-teeth they cawed and clamored an exchange with
Jarmer. He told them he was bringing back a former satrap,
who had just escaped the West; the bridegroom of the
Lady Charmian, Jarmer said. Their black eyes bored at
Chup. Jarman said nothing to them of any golden charm.
They cawed again, and rose laboriously to carry word
ahead.

On the next switchback of the road the troop climbed past
a slender, ancient watchtower, unmanned on this road where
scouting reptiles perched and the defenders above held such
advantage of position that it almost seemed an empty fort
might turn an army back. But in Chup's mind the slender
tower was chiefly an evoking symbol of the slenderness of his
bride. Again, with another turning of the road, the riders
passed shabby, dull-eyed serfs at labor in a terraced hill-
side field. Among them were a few girls and women young
enough to look young though they labored for the East;
but Chup's eyes passed quickly over them, only searching
for one who was not there, who could not be.

But she was real, somewhere ahead, probably atop this
mountain. She had sent him health and power. And she
was, she must be, waiting for him (never mind now why).

Oh, he knew what she was like. He remembered every-
thing, not just the incredible beauty. But what she was like
no longer seemed to matter.

It was a long and arduous climb, up through the narrow
pass. Chup held as an article of faith that no fortress existed
that could not be taken, by siege, surprise, or treachery if
not by direct attack. But this one he would far rather hold
than try to take, if there was no easier way than this up
through the cliffs.

As soon as they had reached the top, men dismounted
wearily, Chup among them, and animals slumped to their
knees to rest. They faced a nearly horizontal tableland,
rugged and cracked by many crevices. Across this wound
the road that they had followed up the pass, and at its
other side, two or three hundred meters distant, sprawled

the low-walled citadel of Som the Dead. Chup could not
see much from here but several gates, open, in the outer
rampart of gray stone. It did not look particularly formidable
as a defense. There was no need for it to be; a few earth-
works, now unmanned, stood right at the head of the pass
where Chup and his escort had stopped. It needed no
shrewd military eye, looking back and down from here, to
see that a few men here could stop an army.

Beyond the citadel, the mountain went on up, to lose its
head at last within a clinging scarf of cloud. This mountain,
unlike most of those surrounding, was but little forested. Very
little vegetation grew above the citadel, but there the rock
itself grew black. The more Chup looked up at that slope,
the better he perceived how odd it was. On that dark,
dead surface—was it perhaps metal, instead of rock?—
there were a few tiny, even blacker spots, that might be
windows or the entrances of caves. No paths or steps led
to them. They might be reptile nests, but why so high above
the citadel, already at an altitude where the leather-wings
had hard work to fly?

Jarmer was standing beside him now, looking forward as
if half-expecting some signal from the citadel. The only
movement there was of banners, each black with stripes of
other colors, snapping briskly over the ramparts. Chup
turned to him and asked: "I suppose that Som the Dead
dwells there above the fort, where all the signs of life are
gone?"

Jarmer looked at him oddly for a moment, then laughed.
"By the demons! No. Not Som, nor demons either. Quite
the opposite. That's where the Beast-Lord Draffut dwells—
you may meet him one day, if you're lucky." Then worry
replaced amusement. "I hope you're what you claim to be,
and what you bring is genuine. You seem quite ignorant . . ."

"Just bring me to my lady. Where is she?"

Shortly they were mounting up again, and riding. Jarmer
turned away from the largest gate, set in the center of the
gray stone wall and flanked with modest towers, and chose
a path that followed close beneath the wall, round to the
south flank of the citadel. There a small gate was open,
just wide enough for the troop to enter in a single, weary
file. Still surrounded by frowning defensive walls, they
reached a stableyard where they dismounted, giving their
animals into the care of quick-moving, dull-eyed serfs.

Scarcely had Chup got his feet upon the ground when
there came hurrying to him a man with the indefinable air
of the wizard about him, more powerfully by far than the
one who had accompanied the patrol, though this new-
comer had no iridescent robes and no familiar on his shoul-
der. He was slight of build, with a totally bald head that
kept tilting from side to side on his lean, corded neck, as if
he wished to view from two angles everything he saw.

This man caught Chup's ragged sleeve, and in a rapid
low voice demanded: "You have it with you?"

"That depends on what you mean. Where is the Lady
Charmian?"

The man did something like a dance step in his im-
patience. "The charm, the charm!" he urged, with voice
held low. "It's safe to speak. Trust me! I am working for
her."

"Then you can take me to her. Lead on."

The man seemed torn between his annoyance and satis-
faction at Chup's caution. "Follow me," he said at last, and
turned and led the way.

A series of gates were opened for them, first by black-
garbed soldiers, then by serfs. With each barrier they passed,
the aspect of their surroundings grew milder. Still the upper
half of the mountain, black and enigmatic, steadily looked
down on them from almost straight above; but now Chup
followed the wizard along pleasant paths of flagstones and
of gravel, across terraces and gardens bright with autumn
flowers and fragrant with their scent. They passed a garden-
er, a bent-leg cripple with a face like death, pulling himself
with wracking, hurried effort along the path upon a little
cart, his implements before him.

The last barrier they came to was no wall, but a tall
thorny hedge. Chup followed the bald wizard through a
gateless opening. They came upon a garden patio, built
out from a low stone building, or from one wing of it;
Chup could not see how far the house extended. Here was
the grass thicker and better cared for than before, and the
flowers, between a pair of elegant marble fountains, brighter
and more numerous.

By now the day was well advanced, the sun come round
the mountain's bulk. It made a flare and shock of gold of
Charmian's hair, as she rose from a divan against the wall
to greet her husband. Her gown was gold, with small fine

trimmings of dead black. Her grace of movement was in
itself enough for him to know her by.

Her beauty filled his eyes and nearly blinded him. "My
lady!" His voice was hoarse and dry. Then he remembered,
and regretted, that he stood before her in the rags and filth
of half a year of beggary.

"My husband!" she called out, in tones an echo of his
own. Mingled with the tinkling of the fountains, it was her
voice as he had dreamed of it, through all the lonely nights
. . . but no, he had not dreamed of her. Why not? He
frowned.

Never mind. He shook his head to clear his eyes, and now
he saw her beauty plain, and for a moment could not speak.
"My husband. Chup." The very sunlight was not brighter
nor more joyful than her voice, and in her eyes he read what
all men want to see. Her arms reached out, ignoring all his
filth.

He had taken three steps toward her and would have run,
if he could, the remaining distance, when his feet were
pulled out from under him and the world in the form of a
rough gravel path came smiting up to strike him in the face.
He heard a shriek of laughter and from the corner of his
eye saw a dwarfish figure spring up and flee away from a
concealing bush beside the path, trailing howls of glee.

The unthinking speed in his arms had slapped out his
hands in time to break his fall and save his chin and nose.
Gaping up now at his bride he saw her beauty gone—not
taken away, or faded, but shattered in her face like some
smashed image in a mirror. It was her hateful rage contorted
her face so. How well he knew that look. And how could
he have forgotten it?

She glared her rage at him as he regained his feet. She
screamed out her shrewish filth and hate—how often he had
heard it, in the brief days he had known her before their
marriage ceremony. He had not been the target, then, of
course; she would not then have dared.

Now why was she screaming all this abuse at him? It
neither hurt nor angered him. He had no intention of striking
her or shouting back. She was his bride, infinitely beautiful
and desirable, and he would have her and she must not be
hurt. Yes, yes, all that was settled. It was simply annoying
that he had for some reason completely forgotten this side
of her character.

She was screeching at him. "Filth! Carrion! Did you
ever doubt I would repay you triply for it?"

"For what?" he asked, deliberately.

A vein of anger stood out in her lineless forehead. For a
moment she could not speak. Then, in a choking voice, not
unlike a reptile's caw: "For striking me!" A tiny drop of
spittle came far enough to strike his cheek. The touch of it
was to him a warm and lovely blessing.

"I struck you?" Why, that was mad, ridiculous. How
could she think—but wait. Wait. Ah, yes. He remembered.

He nodded. "You were hysterical when I did that," he
said, absently trying to brush the dust from his rags. "I did
it for your good, actually. I only slapped you with my open
hand, not very hard. You were hysterical, much as you are
now."

At that she cried out with new volume and alarm. She
backed away toward a doorway that led into the building.
From a gap between hedges there came running three men
in servants' drab clothes. One of them was quite large. To-
gether they ran to make a wide barrier between him and
his lady.

"Take him away," she ordered in a soft and venomous
voice, regaining most of her composure. "We will amuse
ourselves with him—later." She turned quickly to the bald
wizard, who was still hovering near. "Hann. You have made
sure he has it with him, have you not?"

He tilted his head. "I have not yet had that opportunity,
my lady."

"I have it," Chup interrupted them. "Your lady, wizard?
No, she's mine, and I have come to claim her." He stepped
forward, and saw with some surprise that the three fools in
his way stood fast. They saw only his dirt and rags, and
perhaps they had seen him fall when he was tripped.

He scorned to draw his knife for such as these. He heeled
an ugly nose up with his left hand, and swung his right fist
into the stretched-up throat below it; one man down. He
grabbed a reaching hand by its extended thumb, and broke
bone with one wrenching snap. He had only one opponent
left. This third and largest fellow had got behind Chup in
the meantime, and got him in a clumsy grip. But now, with
his fellows yelping and thrashing about in helplessness, the
lout realized he was alone, and froze.

"I am the Lord Chup, knave; let go." He said it quietly,

standing still, and he had the feeling that the man would
have done so if he had not feared Charmian more than
Chup. Instead the big slave cried out hoarsely, and tried
to lift Chup and throw him. They swayed and staggered
together for a moment before Chup could shift his hips
aside and snap a fist behind him, low enough for best effect

Now he was free to turn once more to claim his lady. She
once more howled for help. The wizard Hann hauled out
a short sword from under his cloak—most magic was un-
reliable when violence was right at hand—and threw him-
self between Chup and his bride. But Hann was not the
equal of the last swordsman Chup had faced, and Chup
was stronger now than then. Hann dropped his good long
blade and fell down screaming, when he felt the knife
caress his arm before he saw it move.

This time, however, Charmian did not resume her noise-
making, nor did she try to flee. Instead she stood with
bright eyes smiling past Chup's shoulder. He heard a foot
crunch gravel there behind him on the path.

It was Tarlenot who stood there. He had already drawn
his sword, at sight of the lawn littered with writhing,
groaning men. His eyes were fixed on Chup in puzzlement,
but they lighted unpleasantly in recognition as Chup turned
round to face him. Tarlenot was not a tall man, but power-
ful and long of arm. His short pink tunic showed bare legs
as muscular as Chup's had been in his days of full strength.
Around his thick neck was clasped a thin collar of some
dark, plain metal, a strangely poor-looking thing for one to
wear who was otherwise garbed luxuriously. Tarlenot's face
was haughty now, more so than Chup remembered, the
countenance of a pouty child grown big and muscular; his
hair fell with a slight curl round his ears. He nodded his
head lightly in recognition to Chup, and gave him a little
smile. But he made no move to sheathe his sword.

"Tarlenot," said Charmian's ethereal and tender whisper.
"Make this one a gardener for us."

Chup bent and picked up the sword dropped by the
wizard Hann, who still sat moaning, bleeding lightly, on
the flagstones. The sword seemed stout enough, though its
twisted fancy hilt was not much to the liking of Chup's
eye. It did feel better than it looked.

"That is no gardener's tool," Tarlenot observed. "And
here we do not need another lord."

Charmian giggled quietly at them. "Tarlenot, his legs
have grown too straight. Bend his knees for him. We will
get him a little cart, and he will tend our flowers."

Chup sighed faintly and moved a step farther from his
lady. It was hard, when the woman you were devoted to
might stick a knife between your ribs. She was his bride,
and the only woman he wanted, but there would be no
trusting her.

"Tarlenot," he called out, watching and waiting while the
other made up his mind. "One questioned me about you.
Only a few days ago."

"Oh? In what connection?" The mind had been made up.
"First, though, would you rather I only cut your tendons, or
took your legs clean off? They say that useless limbs are
worse than none at all. You should know, is it so?"

"He was one who meant to do things to you that you
would not like." Chup stepped slowly and easily forward.
"Now he will never have his chance." His legs were working
very well, but he could have wished to give them their
first real test in practice. He raised his blade as he ad-
vanced, and Tarlenot's sword came up in a motion quite
gentle and controlled, and with a careful metal touch the
duel was joined.

With the first preliminary touches and feints Chup knew
that he had met a formidable enemy, and one cautious
enough not to be deceived by Chup's scarecrow appearance
into taking the scarecrow lightly. And when Chup had to
make a really quick hard parry for the first time, he realized
there was no great endurance left in his own body, long
underfed, but newly healed, and just finished with a long
ride.

Tarlenot on the other hand was fresh and vigorous. Had
it not been for the residual effect of the healing elixir-
fading now, though the good work it had done remained—
Chup might have been quickly beaten. His muscles were
left aching and quivering by two or three exchanges at full
power and speed. Now he also knew beyond doubt that
Tarlenot was very good, that the first small slip against him
would very likely be the last.

They circled slowly on the gravel path and flagstones,
and felt for cautious footing amid the flowers between the
tinkling fountains. Chup as he turned saw Charmian pass
within his range of vision; he saw her with a gesture stay

her other attendants, now running up, from any interference.
He saw how bright her eyes were, and the expectant parting
of her perfect lips. She would take the winner, but only to
use him and discard him when it was to her advantage or
merely suited to her whim. Chup knew that, if Tarlenot
perhaps did not. But she was Chup's ...

And then in front of her face came Tarlenot's visage,
powerful, composed and proud. "Let me see," said Tarlenot,
"if I can hit the old wound on your spine, within a fin-
ger's breadth. How was it done? Like this?" And he at-
tacked.

Chup parried desperately, and riposted; his weary arm
thrust wide. "Not like that, no," he said. "But with some
skill." Demons and blood, but he was tired.

And Tarlenot knew it, must have counted on it to some
degree from the start, was now carefully making sure that
Chup's tremulous near-exhaustion was no sham. Now that
Tarlenot had measured Chup's reach and something of his
style, he began to push the fight harder. Harder, till he
himself began to puff.

Now Chup gave ground steadily as they circled. Sheer
desperation kept him going, now. He might back into a cor-
ner ... he saw before him the gardener on his cart, with
lifeless eyes . . .

No, he was the Lord Chup, and he would win or die. And
just then Tarlenot's sword came flicking in a little faster
than before. Chup saw the danger but his weary, tardy
arm could not make the parry quite in time, and he felt the
hot bite of the wound along his side.

With that hurt there came before Chup all the blackness
of the past half year, all of it seemingly alive before him in
the person of his foe. The hurt was rage, the rage was fuel,
the only hope and power he had left. He let his fury drive
him forward, striking fast and hard, stroke after stroke—and
then he staggered, halting. He feigned a final exhaustion
before his ultimate reserve of energy was quite gone. Tarle-
not, with triumph too early on his face, came thrusting in
as Chup had thought he would. Chup parried that thrust
and spent his final strength in one last blow, straight over-
hand, cleaving downward at the angle of his enemy's shoul-
der and neck.

The sword touched glancingly the blackish metal collar,
and then bit down through garments, flesh, and bone. He

saw Tarlenot's eyes bulge out, and the red fountain leaping
from the wound. Clear down to the breastbone Chup's sword
smote, and Tarlenot was driven to his knees, and then fell
backward dead, his arms flung wide.

Chup found the strength to set his foot upon the ruined
tunic that had once been silken pink, and wrench to get his
sword blade from the riven chest. He staggered back, then,
and by instinct got his back against a wall. He leaned there
choking while the world grew gray and dim before him with
the throbbing of his heart, as if it were his own blood pud-
dling up the walk.

But no. He was not bleeding much. His searching fingers
told him that the cut along his side had parted little more
than skin.

Charmian . . . but she was gone. That was all right. Let
her play any game she wanted, but he was going to have
her now. As soon as he had rested for a bit. A sound made
him turn, but there was nothing to see but a small mob of
dumb-looking lackeys, goggling timidly at him from a dis-
tance. The odd sound did not emanate from them. From
where, then?

Straight up. A flying reptile had emerged from one of
the windowlike openings that marked the mountain's dead
black upper slope. It was winging down toward where Chup
stood—but not on reptile's wings, he realized. Its rounded,
headless body, considerably bulkier than a man, hung be-
neath a speed-blur such as the wings of hummingbirds drew
in the air. But this blur was a thin, horizontal disc, a spin-
ning, not a vibration up and down. The noise it made,
growing now into a whining roar, was like no sound of life
that Chup had ever heard. The thing came rushing, almost
falling, down toward the garden where Chup stood, plum-
meting faster than could a reptile or a bird. The body be-
neath the blur looked dead and rigid.

Chup pushed himself away from the wall. He had seen
before something of the magic that the Old World had
called technology (though never a machine that flew) and
he knew well the hopelessness of fighting with a sword
against machines. He moved toward the doorway beside
Charmian's empty divan; the flying thing looked too big to
get in there. But before Chup reached the door, the wizard
Hann was coming out to meet him, not as a foe but wel-
coming, with a flushed maidservant skipping beside him

awkwardly, trying to finish tying a bandage on Hann's arm.

"The Lady Charmian sends you greetings . . ." Then Hann
noticed the flying machine's approach, and Chup's atten-
tion to it. "No, no, Lord Chup, do not concern yourself; it
is not a fighting device. Put up your sword. Come in! The
Lady Charmian greets you, as I said, and expresses her
apologies for all of this unfortunate . . . she will soon receive
you. You have the golden charm with you, I trust? She
begs you, let her maidens tend you now. When you are
rested and refreshed ..."

Chup was not really listening as he went on with Hann
inside the door, which was too narrow for that flying blur to
pass. Anyway the machine was not coming to Chup. Instead
it descended close beside the corpse of Tarlenot, where he
lay half on gravel, half on grass. Just above the ground,
the flyer hovered, while the shining whirl of speed on top
roared down a blast of air, a wind that pressed down
bushes, kicked up dust, and rippled grass. Along the head-
less metal body there stood symbols, meaningless to Chup:

VALKYRIE MARK V
718th FIELD HOSPITAL BATTALION

In another moment the rounded metal body opened six
secret holes, three on a side, and from them came extending
hidden legs, sliding jointed things like insects' feelers grown
monstrously large. These reached for Tarlenot and probed
him, one delicate leg-tip clinging to the dull metal collar
beside the great leaking leer of his wound. Then suddenly
and effortlessly with its slender legs the flying thing gath-
ered up Tarlenot's dead weight, drew it up and swallowed
it into a coffin-sized cavity that gaped suddenly in the
metal belly and as suddenly closed again. The six legs
retracted also, and in that same moment the Old World
thing shot upward once again, roaring a louder noise and
blasting the garden with a greater rush of air. It raced up
toward the place whence it had come. It turned insect-sized
again, and vanished into one of the windows where, accord-
ing to Jarmer, the Beast-Lord Draffut dwelt.

Chup had stepped outside again, and remained gaping
upward until prompted by Hann's diplomatic voice. "When
you have rested and refreshed yourself, Lord Chup, and
dressed in finer garments, your lady waits to see you."

Lowering his eyes, Chup found a quartet of serving girls
approaching. All were young but ugly; his lady preferred
her servants so, he knew, to heighten by contrast her own
beauty. The four girls, carrying towels and garments and
what might be jars of ointment, advanced very slowly,
looking almost too frightened to put one foot before another.
Chup nodded. He would have to relax his guard some-
time. "I would put down this sword that I have won, but
I seem to have no scabbard for it."

Hann hastened to amend the lack, unburdening his own
waist, wincing when he moved his wounded arm. "Here,
take all. Indeed I think I am well rid of it. Let the shoemaker
stick to his last."

When he had wiped and sheathed his sword, Chup let
the servants of Charmian lead him along a short path into
another garden, and from that into another wing of the same
low, sprawling building that Charmian had entered. He
could not yet see its full extent; perhaps all of Som's court
lived in its separate apartments. In a luxurious room the
servants stripped away Chup's filthy rags, and tended the
light cut along his side with what seemed ordinary oint-
ments, not the demon's cure. The girls' fear of him abated
rapidly, and by the time they had immersed him in hot
water in a sunken marble tub, they were talking almost
freely back and forth among themselves. To serve anyone
but Charmian would be a relaxation and a pleasure, he
thought, after serving her.

He set the love-charm of springy golden hair upon the
twisty hilt of his captured sword, and set both close beside
him as he soaked and washed and soaked again. He was
too weary to give the least thought to his attendants, or
anyone else, as females. Amid their nervous chatter, though,
he caught their names: Portia, with the blackest skin and
hair that he had ever seen, and a bad scar on her face; Kath,
blond and buxom, with eyes that looked in different ways;
Lisa, shortest and youngest, nothing quite right about her
looks; Lucia, shaped well enough except for her huge mouth
and teeth; Samantha and Karen, looking like sisters or even
twins, with sallow skins, pimples, and hair that looked stringy
though it was bound up in peasant style like that of the
four other girls.

When Portia and Kath had finished scrubbing his back,

Lisa and Lucia poured on rinse water, and Samantha and
Karen held for him a robelike towel.

When he had been clothed in rich garments, Karen and
Lucia fed him soup and meat and wine. Between mouthfuls
he touched the golden charm, safe now in an inner pocket
of his tunic of soft black. He only tasted the wine, for al-
ready sleep hung like weighty armor on his eyelids. "Where
is my lady?" he demanded. "Is she coming here, or must I
go to her?"

There was a moment's hesitation before Kath, with no-
ticeable reluctance, answered: "If my lord permits, I will
go and see if she is ready to receive you." At this the other
girls relaxed perceptibly.

His weariness was great, and he reclined on a soft couch.
Though he had much to think about, his eyes kept closing
of themselves. "Keep talking," he ordered the five girls.
"You there, do you sing?" And Lisa sang, and Karen fetched
out an instrument with strings. The music that they made
was soft.

"You sing quite well and easily," Chup said, "for one who
serves the Lady Charmian. How long have you been her
servant?"

The girl paused in her song. "For half a year, my lord,
since I was brought to the Black Mountains."

"And what were you before?"

She hesitated. "I do not know. Forgive me, lord, my head
was hurt, my memory is gone."

"Sing on."

And then he was waking, with a start, the golden charm
clenched in his hand inside his pocket. It seemed that no
long time had passed, for the sun still shone outside, and
the young girls still made their soft music.

His tiredness was like the hands of enemies gripping all
his limbs, but he could not rest until he had made sure of
her, at the very least seen her once again. He arose and
walked out of the building, into the garden under the upper
mountain's looming bulk. On legs that pained but could not
rest, he paced the paths and lawns, emptied now of men
and cleaned of signs of violence. He entered the building
where she had gone in. In a narrow passage he caught a
whiff of perfume that woke old memories clamoring, and
at a little distance heard Charmian's well-remembered laugh.
He put aside a drapery.

Some distance inside a vast and elegantly female room,
Charmian sat on an elaborate couch. She was facing Chup
expectantly, though his coming had been soundless. The
man who sat there with her, facing her, had fair hair that
fell with a slight curl around his ears. His long, strong arms
emerged from the short sleeve of a lounging suit of black
and pink. As this man arose, turning toward Chup the
wary, pouting eyes of Tarlenot, Chup could do nothing
but stand frozen in the doorway, marking well the scar,
wide and long but neatly healed, that ran down from the
joining of neck and shoulder to vanish on the hairy chest-
ran down from just below the metal collar that bore a little
shiny spot left by a sword.

CHAPTER   4

The army of the West lay camped for the night, a day's
march to the northeast of the castle of the Broken Lands.
Around them the plain was no longer a true desert, but a
gentle sea of sparse grass, now drying and dying before
the approaching winter. Once men had grazed the flocks
of peacetime here, but that was long ago.

Thomas now had with him more than four thousand men,
all holding in common a hard hatred of the East. The ranks
of his own fighters of the Broken Lands had been greatly
swollen by volunteers from Mewick's country and others in
the south, from the offshore islands, and from the north,
beasts.

In the early evening the camp murmured with the feed-
ing of the army and the digging of temporary defenses for
the night, with the hundred matters of organization and re-
pair that must be tended to before the second day's march.
Inside Thomas's big tent were crowded the score of men he
had called into a meeting.

The first matter that Thomas raised with them was the
golden charm, and its sudden departure to the East.

That the charm was magic of great power was obvious
to all, and none blamed Rolf for having fallen so deeply
under its influence that he had not spoken of it during the
long months since he had found it, while it forced him to

cherish secret thoughts of a woman he would otherwise have
hated. Though he was not blamed, still he was downcast
and somewhat ashamed as he sat at one side of the circle
in the tent. Thomas, Gray, and a few others were at one
end of the long tent, their chairs around three sides of a
plain table, the fourth side being open to the wide circle
of men who made themselves comfortable upon the matting
of the floor. Thomas, with his strong arms folded before him,
sat at the center of the table, leaning forward a trifle, look-
ing up at Gray who was on his feet and holding forth.

"Some of you know, but some do not," Gray was saying,
"that I and other wizards of the West have for some years
spent most of our time in desperate search for the We of
Zapranoth, the Demon-Lord in the Black Mountains."

There was a faint murmur round the tent. Rolf felt a little
better, seeing how many of the others' faces mirrored his
own ignorance of what the higher wizards did.

"It now seems possible," continued Gray, "that I stood
next to the life of Zapranoth where I had scarcely thought
to look for it: inside the walls of that strong castle we left
yesterday. It is possible—I think not likely—that the Demon-
Lord's life was hidden in that twist of hair."

Eyes turned to Rolf, enough of them so that he felt he
had to speak. "I had no thought or feeling of any demon
near me, before or after the charm was taken from me."

Gray had paused to survey his audience. Now he said:
"A number of you are still looking at me blankly, or frown-
ing suspiciously at that young man. I am convinced that a
short lecture on the ways of demons is in order." Having re-
ceived a nod of agreement from Thomas, he went on. "The
ordinary layman, soldier or not, has little hard knowledge of
magic, though it almost daily influences his life. And to him
the ways of demons are as unaccountable as those of earth-
quakes.

"I must make sure you understand me when I speak of
our search for the life of Zapranoth. Now that we are on the
march and spies have hopefully all been left behind us, I
can speak somewhat more freely. If you understand it may
be that you can help, and if you help we may still succeed,
and if we succeed in slaying the Demon-Lord of the Black
Mountains it will count for more than would grinding the
walls of Som's citadel to powder. Depend on that.

"Now. When I speak of finding a demon's life, I do not

mean his active presence but his essence, secret and vulner-
able-what the men of the Old World seem to have called
the soul. A demon's soul is separable in space from his per-
sonality. It is invisible, impalpable, and of vital importance,
for only through it can he be destroyed. To keep his soul
safe, he may hide it in any innocent thing: a flower, a tree,
a human's hair, a rock, the foam of the sea, a spiderweb.
He may keep it far away from him, where his enemies will
not think to look for it, or near at hand where he will more
easily know when it is threatened, and take steps in its
defense. What is it?"

One of the fur-garbed northmen got to his feet. "Is not
Som the Dead the viceroy of the East, in the Black Moun-
tains? And the Demon-Lord only his subordinate? Well,
then. It would seem to me Zapranoth's life must be in Som's
control."

Gray shook his head. "We think not. Those who rule the
Empire of the East would not care to give any underling as
much power as Som would have if Zapranoth were ab-
solutely at his mercy. Therefore they have given Som only
a lesser power of punishment over the Demon-Lord; so the
two of them are constrained to eye each other jealously. It
is a common pattern in the organization of the East."

Thomas and other senior leaders nodded. The man from
the north sat down, and one from the south, from Mewick's
country, asked: "If you wizards are baffled, trying to get
at Zapranoth, how are we supposed to help?"

"How? First, understand the great importance of our
search. Then, if our campaigning takes you among strangers,
friendly or neutral-seeming, say nothing of this matter, but
listen carefully for any hint that there is information to be
had. We will pay for it. We make no broadcast offers of
reward, or half the fools and swindlers in the world would
come to clog our path and waste our time, with spies and
agents of the East among them. The chance that you will
hear any clue is doubtless very small; but we must take
every chance that we can get. I have said our search is
desperate."

Gray took his seat, and Thomas rose. "Any more ques-
tions on our magic? Then let's go on to something else." He
looked round the wide circle, as if gauging the temper of
his men before continuing. "It will be plain to all of you
that our numbers, though we are a real army now, are insuf-

ficient to storm any citadel as strong as Som's in the Black
Mountains. You must know also that I have sent emissaries
farther afield, to every other source of Western strength we
are aware of, looking for help. You have been asking your-
selves, and me, who may be sending troops to help us and
where we are to meet them. The answer is: no troops are
coming, or very few. We go on this campaign with no
more men than we have now. Yet we are attacking the Black
Mountains."

Thomas paused there, with every eye fixed on him in-
tently. There was no murmur in the tent, but rather a deep
hush; somewhere in the camp outside a blacksmith was
shouting coarse imprecations at an animal.

He went on. "After, we make a feint to the north and
perhaps fight a few skirmishes there with Som's outlying
garrisons. In the Black Mountains is his power rooted, and
only there can it be destroyed."

Someone urged: "Wait for the spring, then, for the birds'
help! We cannot scale Som's cliffs or knock them down. The
birds could lift rope ladders for us, scout, bear messages,
drop rocks upon the enemy, and use their talons, too!"

Thomas shook his head inflexibly and the murmur of
approval that had started up died down. "We thought once
that the Silent People might have stayed; we would have
tried to warm them through the winter; but it is written in
their bone-marrow, it seems, that they must fly south each
autumn. There was nothing we or they could do about it.
However, if the birds of the West will be absent from this
campaign, the reptiles of the East will at least be sluggish
and thick-blooded. And it is all very well to say, wait for
spring. Then the Silent People will fly north to us again,
and help us. But so might Som be stronger then. And what
of this human army we have gathered here and now? Shall
we sit on our tails for another half year, hoping for improve-
ment in our luck?"

That got something of the response he must have hoped
for. Folding his arms before him once again, Thomas went
on in a milder voice. "As for getting at Som in his citadel,
we think that we have found a way. Gray?"

Once more the wizard arose, and spoke. His audience
heard him out, in steadily deepening silence. As the plan
he was proposing became clear, at least to some degree,
men cast looks at one another across the circle, with slowly

lengthening faces. When the wizard paused, there were no
questions. Probably, Rolf thought, because the only ones
that came to mind were bluntly insulting about Gray's sin-
cerity or sanity.

Thomas, stony-faced, glared at his men and through them
while Gray concluded. "As I said before, we are now on the
march, somewhat away from prying eyes. Now the time
has come to test what I propose, and if the test succeeds, to
practice it. It will not be a usable technique without con-
siderable practice."

The stunned silence continued. Thomas dismissed the
meeting, and while the others were filing out, called Rolf
to one side where he stood with Gray. "Rolf. You have more
experience with technology than anyone else we know of in
our army. Gray will need an assistant in the project he just
spoke of. I think you could do a good job of helping him."

Rolf grunted. "I don't know much, really."

"You have a knack." Thomas clapped both their shoulders,
and said to Gray: "Take him, if you will, as your helper
for the first experiment." Then Thomas turned quickly away,
answering voices that were already calling him to see about
some other business.

Gray and Rolf were left confronting each other in what
was apparently a mutual lack of confidence. "Tell me, young
one," the tall wizard said at last, "what do you know about
the djinn?"

"Much like demons, are they not?"

Gray's gaze grew harder. "Young one, may you never be
called upon to suffer in proportion to your ignorance of the
world! Djinn are not demons, and no more like them than
men are like the talking reptiles."

Gray led Rolf from the tent, continuing to talk mean-
while. "Demons are, without exception, of the East—rather
it is only the men of the East, turned against mankind, who
can call on them for service. But the djinn are rather like
elementals, neither good.nor evil in themselves, and a man
may call on them without being corrupted or consumed there-
by."

"I see." Rolf nodded, not seeing much. "But what has this
to do with technology, and the scheme you were proposing?"
They were walking now through the uneven rows of tents,
Gray heading apparently for the outskirts of the camp.

"Just this. The djinn I plan to call upon for help is unique,

so far as I know, among his kind. He is a technologist, a
builder and designer, I think superior in those fields to
any human who has lived since the Old World. Now help
me with some preparations, if you will."

It seemed to Rolf that he had little choice. Besides, the
djinn as Gray described him was certainly intriguing.

They had gotten past the tents now, to a place within the
trench lines of the camp but near its edge, not far from the
latrines. It was a clear, open area perhaps fifty meters across,
badly illuminated by a couple of torches on poles stuck in
the ground. Rolf had earlier heard casual speculation that
the place was being kept reserved for some magical purpose.
Near its center was tethered a sullen-looking loadbeast wear-
ing panniers that were bulky but did not seem heavy. From
these Rolf and the wizard gathered bags and parcels which
Gray opened on the sand. From them in turn he took small
objects which, Rolf again helping as directed, he set out on
the ground in a regular and careful pattern. The things
looked to Rolf for the most part like toys for some carpenter's
child: there were miniature hammers, wooden wheels, a tiny
saw, small brace and bit, and other tools.

"Rolf, I am told that once you rode upon an Old World
vehicle that moved across the land without a beast to pull
it; that you learned its secrets of control, and rode it into
battle."

"That is so." Rolf had finished laying out his portion of
the pattern.

"Had you ever any indication that it might fly?"

"No, Gray." His answer was emphatic. "It was of metal,
and heavier than a big house, and it had no sign of wings."

Gray shrugged. "Well, certainly they had many machines
that did not fly; but they had some that did. And some of
them still do, I think, though that does not concern us at
this moment. What I proposed in meeting just now was not
as mad as the men evidently thought it. Machines can fly,
and I intend that we shall use them to assault the cliffs of
the Black Mountains." Gray spoke in a low voice now, per-
haps to himself as much as to Rolf. Squinting at the arrange-
ment of toy tools on the ground, he grunted with satisfaction,
and began to draw with his staff (it occurred to Rolf that
he had not noticed any staff in Gray's hand until just now)
a diagram of straight lines surrounding the symbolic tools.
"The djinn that I will summon up will build for us a vehicle

which we will then operate ourselves. I think its operation
will not be too difficult, for intelligent men who have a little
nerve and imagination."

Gray stood his staff beside him on the ground; there it
remained, though leaning slightly from the vertical, as if it
had taken root. He rummaged in the beast's panniers again,
and produced a paper that he unrolled and showed to Rolf.

"From drawings left by the ancients of some of their
simpler flying machines, I have made this sketch of my
own. Other types they made as well, that were heavier than
air, and winged like birds, but the technology of those re-
mains somewhat beyond my grasp; and what I cannot under-
stand, I cannot order the djinn to build. However the type
that I have shown here should suit our needs very well."

Rolf studied the sketch. It showed, apparently in midair,
a rimmed platform or shallow basket, supported at each of
its four corners by a cluster of lines, the lines in turn reach-
ing tautly upward to four great globes above. A mast rose
from the center of the platform; small sails bellied, and
pennants fluttered, showing the direction of the breeze. In-
side the basket, four men sat or squatted, riding in apparent
comfort.

"These globes from which the flying craft depended were
made of some elastic fabric," Gray explained. "Sometimes
filling them with hot air was enough to make them rise."

Rolf considered silently. Was Gray mad? But wait—hot
air did rush up the chimney.

"But with the djinn to labor for us, we shall do far better.
Our globes will be made of thin metal, much stronger and
safer, and in them there will be nothing."

"Nothing?" Rolf tried to make the question sound intel-
ligent.

Gray studied him, and sighed. Perhaps he wondered if
he should request a more intelligent aide. "Consider: Why
does a ship, or any chunk of wood, float on the water?"

"Because—because it is lighter than water. Too light to
sink."

"Ah. Very true." Gray smiled, and tapped the paper with
his finger. "Now when all the air has been exhausted from
these metal spheres—experiments have already shown me
that air indeed has weight—when the weight of this whole
apparatus is thus made less than the weight of an equal
volume of air, what will this flying craft do?"

"It will weigh less than air?" Yes, it all sounded mad; but
Rolf despite himself felt some enthusiasm growing for this
mad scheme. Wild as Gray's ideas were, they somehow felt
right in his mind.

Gray spoke more rapidly, perhaps pleased that someone
could at least halfway understand him. "Air is very light,
true. But nothingness is lighter still. I tell you, the ancients
made the idea work. Are you ready to try it with me, young
technologist? I will need quick hands to help me and a
quick mind, too, perhaps; Thomas tells me you have both,
and I believe him. Of course you will help, you are ordered
to. But are you really with me in this enterprise?"

Rolf took the time to give the question honest thought.
"I am."

Gray nodded. With a flourish, then, he beckoned to his
balancing staff—that sprang lightly through the air into his
hand. "Be silent for a moment now, while I evoke the djinn.
He is an odd creature, even of his kind, irascible and not
well-meaning. But he must labor for us, though he cares
nothing for East or West, or for any man or demon."

The calling-up was accomplished with quick confidence.
After making a few controlled gestures over the array of toy
tools and drawn lines, Gray uttered in a low rapid voice
words that Rolf could not quite hear. There appeared fire
in the air before the wizard, with a belching of soot and
acrid smoke, and accompanied by a sound of rapid pound-
ing, as by unseen, crude and heavy implements. The voice
of the djinn rolled forth, sounding one moment like splinter-
ing wood, the next like clashing metal. "I come as bidden,
master. What is your command?"

After a further incantation, evidently meant to seal his
control over the creature, Gray unrolled his sketch and held
it forth toward the flaming image of the djinn, meanwhile
intoning: "I first let be created four such great hollow
spheres such as you see represented here—"

The djinn's voice hammered, interrupting. "You let be?
That means you do not hinder?"

Asperity was in Gray's voice. "It means that I command! I
order you to do it, and be quick! The specifications for the
globes are as follows ..."

The djinn did not dispute him further, but maintained its
sooty glow in silence, evidently listening. A moment after
Gray had finished detailing his order, there appeared seem-

ingly from nowhere four crude blocks of metal, each half
as big as a man. In another moment the blocks were glowing
hot. At once there arose a mighty screeching, and a banging
as of invisible hammers.

The few soldiers who had been standing in the middle
distance, watching, were being joined momentarily by ever-
growing numbers of their fellows, drawn by the prospect of
seeing something spectacularly unusual in the way of magic.
The camp had doubtless heard by now several versions of
what had happened at the meeting in Thomas's tent. Rolf,
for his part, backed up a few paces, and considered putting
his fingers in his ears to dull the noise. The blocks of metal
glowed incandescent and expanded under the powerful
working of the djinn. They stretched out and up into enor-
mous sheets of fiery metal, which then began to curve them-
selves, perfectly and surely, into the form of spheres.

When the spheres, each the size of a small house, were
almost completely closed, the djinn left them to continue
cooling on the sand. Meanwhile he received from Gray the
specifications for the platform of the flying device, and for
the ropes and sails and their attachments.

"So I let it be done!" Gray concluded.

The djinn began to work again, extruding from its smoke
long coils of twine. And as it worked, it grumbled. "Just so
you understand that it is I am gathering all the stuffs and
doing all the work that you are letting. It does not come
from nothingness, you know."

"Nothingness," said Gray sharply, "is what I want inside
the spheres—when the craft is finished, we are aboard, and
all's in readiness for flight. Then will I give you the order
to empty them and seal them."

The djinn emitted a burst of noise somewhat like the
working of a broken sawmill. It took Rolf a little time to
understand that this was laughter. "Nothingness! You do not
know what you are ordering—beg pardon, what you are
letting, master."

"Contrary dolt!" A vein now stood upon Gray's forehead.
Rolf made a prudent mental note that the wizard was not
notably long on patience. Gray went on: "By nothingness I
mean a lack of air, a vacuum, nullity; such as you yourself
will soon become if you irritate me too sorely!"

The djinn evidently did not regard the threat as idle, for
the work did pick up speed, and for the time being at least

there were no further threats or grumblings. What seemed
to be a multitude of invisible hands spun twine into stout
ropes, and fastened ropes to the basket as it was fabricated.
It was of a size to hold three or four people without crowd-
ing, with a waist-high rim all round, woven of tough, flexible
withes, and seemingly very light. Each corner of the square
basket was secured with several ropes to one of the great
metal spheres. Their overshadowing bulks creaked as they
cooled, and all but hid the basket from observation. At
Gray's direction, a central mast was now stepped in, and
sails and pennants made and stowed folded in the bottom
of the basket. Water and provisions, from more common-
place sources, went in also.

Full night had come, but was not yet very far advanced,
when Gray was satisfied that all was in readiness for flight
He himself was the first to step into the basket, with a
somewhat cautious scissoring of his long legs. "Now master
Rolf, if you will." And Rolf, feeling almost evenly balanced
between eagerness and reluctance, hopped nimbly aboard.

Thomas and several others had drawn near, to wish the
voyagers well and to observe at close range whatever might
happen next. When the last word of encouragement had
been called in between the surrounding metal globes, Gray
gestured for silence. Facing the smoky glow of the djinn's
image, he swept his pointing hand to one after another of
the four spheres as he cried out: "Now, let there be ex-
hausted from them all the air and other vapors, and let
them then be sealed shut!"

A quartet of hissing noises suddenly surrounded the bas-
ket, issuing from the four orifices left in the spheres. Rolf
felt his hair stirred by one of the jets of air. Tensely he
gripped the basket's railing, waiting for the first surge of
flight.

And almost at once the four enormous globes did stir
themselves. But not to rise. Instead, as their hissings began
they rolled from side to side on the sand, they lurched and
crumpled and deformed themselves. The sphere in front of
Rolf seemed to be struck by some giant and invisible mace;
it sounded a deafening clang as it drew into itself a vast
dent that bent its surface to its center. Then all four spheres,
in a great blacksmith's uproar of tortured metal, were shriv-
elling and flattening like so many fruit-husks thrown into
a fire. As their obscuring bulks shrank down, Rolf saw

Thomas and others tumbling away with as little thought of
dignity or face as they would have shown before an enemy
ambush that caught them unarmed. Rolf had one leg over
the basket rim again, and would have fled, but one direction
looked as perilous as another. Meanwhile the basket stayed
firmly seated on the sand, only swaying with Gray's vocifer-
ous anger. The wizard spouted words at a tremendous rate,
while Rolf dodged this way and that to avoid his gesturing
arms.

Silence returned as suddenly as it had fled. The metal
spheres, being reduced to shrunken, twisted wads of scrap,
were still. Gray's speech faltered and ran down, and for
the moment silence was complete. There quickly ensued a
murmur of laughter from part of the watching army, a mur-
mur that dissolved before it could grow too large, when
Gray swept his glare around him like a weapon. The dim
masses of men beyond the torchlight began to scatter and
drift off in clots and fragments; a number of the men, once
they had gotten some distance away, seemed compelled to
utter muted whooping noises.

Thomas and others, drawing near once more after their
retreat, spitting dust and brushing it from their clothes, did
not seem much amused. But none of them dared yet say
anything to Gray.

He drew in a big breath, and shouted one more outburst
at the djinn. Its flaming, fuming scroll flared on apparently
unperturbed.

"Oh great master," it answered in its clattering voice,
"such a curse as you have just delivered would pain me
like the grip of Zapranoth—if I were in fact such a dis-
obedient traitor as you say I am. But, as things are, I feel
no ill effects. I have followed your instructions to the letter."

"Ahhg! Technology!" Gray flung down his arms, which he
had dramatically been stretching wide. He climbed out of
the basket, in his excitement of disgust catching his foot
on the rim and nearly falling. Lowering his voice, he said to
those nearby: "It speaks the truth. Technology! How can any
man who means to keep his sanity go far in such an art?"

Rolf, having gotten out of the basket too, was thinking.
Hesitantly he asked: "Can I put questions to this djinn?"

"Why not?" Gray snapped, as if answering only with the
easiest thing to say.

Rolf turned to address the fiery image. "You, there. What
made the balls all crumple up like that?"

There was a brief silence, as if the djinn were assessing
its new questioner. Then with a clatter the answer came:
"Little master, they crumpled because the air was taken
out of them."

"why?"

"Why not? The outside air pushed in with all its weight,
and there was only thin metal to resist it."

Gray had spoken of his experiments, showing that air
had weight. The wizard looked exceedingly uncomfortable
now, but with a sharp motion of his head he signed Rolf
to go on with his questioning.

Rolf considered. It seemed to him that Gray's theory was
basically correct: a machine made lighter than air should rise
in air, as wood rose in water; and air most certainly had
weight. But obviously there were traps and dangers awaiting
the technologist.

Rolf asked Gray: "Must it speak the truth to us?"

"Yes." Gray sighed. "But not the whole truth; that's the
catch. Go on, go on, ask it more. Perhaps you have a better
head for this than I."

Rolf took thought, tried to put from his mind the fact
that everyone present was watching and listening to him,
and faced the djinn again. "Suppose you make the walls of
the globes thicker and stronger. That should keep them
from being crushed when you take out the air."

"You are right," said the djinn immediately. "Shall I re-
build them so?"

"And would they still be light enough, when emptied,
to lift us and the basket with them?"

There was a short delay. "No." This time Rolf thought
he detected disappointment.

He folded his arms, and took a few short paces to and
fro. "Tell me, djinn, what did the men of the Old World do
when they wished to fly?"

"They made a flying machine, and rode in it. I myself was
born with the New World, of course, and never saw them.
But so I have been told, and so I truly believe."

"How did they make these flying machines?"

There was another pause. "Describe a way, and I will
tell you if it is right or wrong."

Rolf looked at Gray, who shook his head and told him:

"I cannot compel it to greater helpfulness than that. The
djinn must give us what it knows of the truth, in answer to
our questions, but if it wishes to be grudging it can yield
only a small fragment at a time."

Rolf nodded, accepting the rules of the game, which he
was beginning to find fascinating. "Djinn. Were these flying
devices lighter than the air?"

"Some of them."

"Had they lifting spheres, as big as these were?"

"Sometimes."

"Yet their spheres were not crushed."

"That is true."

The audience was silent. The time of half a dozen breaths
had passed before Rolf chose his next question. "Were
their lifting spheres empty?"

"No." The monosyllable had a forced,  reluctant sound.

"They were filled, then, with something lighter than the
air?"

"They were."

The stars had rotated to midnight before Rolf had ex-
tracted from the djinn what seemed to be the last necessary
bit of information, and Gray could issue new orders: "—that
the new spheres be made of fabric such as you have de-
scribed, airtight and capable of stretching; and that they
be filled, by this lighter-than-air gas that will not burn, to
the point where they will lift the basket with us in it."

Shortly before dawn, having managed a few hours' sleep
in the meantime, Gray and Rolf were once more in the
basket, attended by an audience much smaller and less
hopeful-looking than that of the previous evening. Once
more Gray gave orders to the djinn. The new balloons, that
had replaced the crumpled metal spheres, rose from the
sands as they inflated, then tugged boldly at their strong
tethers, then pulled them taut. The basket creaked and
moved, and Rolf beheld the desert floor go dropping silent-
ly from beneath his feet.

Thomas and the few who had come with him to the
launching cheered and waved. The camp was already astir
with preparations for the day's march, and now a wider
cheer went up to greet the swift-ascending flyer. Rolf, look-
ing down upon an earth much darker than the lightening
sky, saw his comrades' breakfast fires shrink steadily. The
airborne flying machine was drifting slowly but steadily to

the north. Gray was issuing sharp orders, planned before-
hand, to the djinn, whose smoky image drifted without
weight or apparent effort beside the basket. There came a
hissing as flying-gas was vented from the bags. Their giant
shapes were spheres no longer but pressed together above
the mast by their own bulging.

The hissing continued, as Gray had ordered, until their,
ascent had been stopped, or so the djinn informed them.
Rolf could not say from one moment to the next that they
were really on the same level, and he would have been hard
put to judge exactly how high they were. The fires of
the camp were now a scattering of sparks at some distance
to the south, and the last men Rolf had seen there had
been shrunken to the stature of small insects. Not that he
was worried about their height. The tight grip he had taken
on the rim of the basket when it lifted, was now loosening.
Enjoyment was winning out steadily over fright.

Gray, too, seemed pleased, rubbing his hands together
and exclaiming in satisfaction. After exchanging with Rolf
opinions that all was going well, he resumed giving orders
to the djinn, for the attachment of rigging to the mast, and
the readying of sails.

The wizard called out jovially: "Rolf, have you ever
steered a sailing ship?"

"No. Though I have lived my whole life near enough to
the sea."

"It matters not, I have experience. Once we get up a sail,
I'll show you how to tack against the wind. We'd best not
fly by daylight, there may be reptiles scouting."

Things did not immediately go right with the rigging.
Rolf was called upon to hold lines, tie knots, and pull. A
sail soon rose upon the mast, but hung in utter limpness
after doing so. Gray, scowling again, hauled this way and
that on lines and cloth, but the sail would not so much as
flutter. He hoisted a pennant, but it too drooped like chain
mail. Clenching his fists, Gray muttered: "Is this some
countering magic? I sense none. Yet there was a breeze
before we lifted from the ground."

"There is one yet," said Rolf, nodding to the ever-shrinking
pattern of the camp's cookfires, dimming now with the ap-
proach of dawn. "Or what is carrying us northward?" But
then he realized he could not feel a breath of moving air
upon his face.

Gray took one look back at the camp, and called the djinn
to question. "Why does the wind not belly out my sail?"

"Name a reason, and I will say if it be true." The clatter
of the djinn's voice became something like a cackle.

Gray sputtered.

Rolf asked, "Djinn. Are we becalmed because our whole
craft is already moving with the wind, like part of it? In-
stead of the wind pushing past us?"

"It is so."

Angrily Gray flared up. "There were sails drawn in the
Old World pictures—" Then a thought struck him silent;
after a moment he grumbled: "Of course, those drawings
may have been sheer fancy; they did that sometimes. But
they did have real airships. How then did they steer them?
Rolf, question it some more. And I will think, meanwhile."

Rolf tried not to think of how fast they might be drifting,
and how high. "Djinn, tell me. Did the ancients ever use
sails?"

Clatter, cackle. "Not to fly."

"Did they use paddles to propel their airships?"

"Never."

"Rudders to steer them?"

There was a reluctant-seeming pause. "Yes."

"Yes?" Rolf pounced without a second thought. "Then
fetch us such a rudder, here, at once!"

The air around them seemed to sigh, as with a giant's
effort, or perhaps the satisfaction of a djinn. Then arrived
the rudder, here and at once indeed; it was a wall of metal,
curving, monstrous, overgrown, wedged between balloon and
basket so that it bent the mast and stretched the ropes and
all but crushed the occupants. Shaped roughly like a door
for some great archway, the rudder was a good twelve
meters long. Its longest, straightest edge, turned downward
now, was nearly a meter thick; coming out of the flatness
of this edge were festoons of cabling and the ends of metal
pipes.

The balloon sank horrendously under the huge load. Gray,
bent double under the slab whose main weight was for-
tunately carried by the basket's rim, cried out an order. In
an instant the great mass was gone. The airship leaped up
again, Gray stood, and Rolf recovered himself from the
position into which he had been forced, almost entirely
out of the basket.

There was silence for a little while, except for gasps and
wheezings. When Gray spoke at last, his voice was icily de-
tached. "In magic, hasty words are ill-advised. So I learned
long ago."

"I will not utter any more of them. Believe me."

"Well. I have blundered, too, this night. Let us learn
from our mistakes and then forget them, if we can."

"Gray, may I ask the djinn a cautious question?"

"Ask him what you will. Our troubles seem to stem from
giving him orders."

Turning to the unperturbed scroll of smoke, Rolf asked:
"Did the Old Worlders ever use such a rudder as you
brought to us to steer a flying craft like this one, lighter
than the air and with no means of making headway through
the air?" He was imagining himself in a boat, drifting with
a current; and he saw clearly in his mind that the rudder
in the boat was useless, for there was no streaming of water
around it.

"No." The monosyllabic answer seemed all innocence.

Gray asked: "Did they ever steer craft like this at all?"

"No."

The two humans exchanged a weary look. Gray said: "I
had better give orders for the gradual deflation of the bags,
so that we drift no farther. It will take our men a while to
reach us as it is."

"I see no danger in that order," Rolf said cautiously. As
gas began to hiss from the bags again, he turned to the east,
where now the sun lanced at him from above the distant
range of the Black Mountains. There was one peak that
seemed to tower above the rest, its head lost in a wreath
of cloud that looked much higher still than the balloon.

Gray seemed to know where he was looking. "There lies
the citadel of Som the Dead," the wizard said. "On those
cliffs—can you see them?—that rise up halfway on the high-
est mount. There's where we must somehow land part of
our army."

And somewhere there, thought Rolf, my sister may be
still alive. "We will find a way," he said. With his hand he
struck the basket rim. "We will make this work."

"Here comes the ground," said Gray.

The landing was a tumble, but it broke no bones.

CHAPTER   5

Chup stood frozen in the doorway, watching as the man
whom he had killed stood up, fresh and healthy as when
their duel had started. Tarlenot, startled by Chup's entrance,
turned and got up quickly. But when he saw Chup's paraly-
sis of astonishment, he relaxed enough to offer him a slight
bow and a mocking smile.

Charmian, who had looked up as if expecting Chup, said
in a calm voice: "Leave us now, good Tarlenot."

Tarlenot, with the air of one who had completed his visit
anyway, bowed once more, this time to her. "I shall. As
you know, I must soon give up this happy collar for a
while, and take to the road again. Of course I mean to see
you again before I set out—"

She waved him off. "If not, you shall when you return.
Go now."

He frowned briefly at her, decided not to argue, and
gave Chup one more look of amusement. Then Tarlenot
withdrew, going out through a doorway at the long cham-
ber's other end.

Charmian now turned herself completely toward Chup,
and at the sight of him began to giggle. In a moment she
was rolling over on her couch, quite gracefully, in her mirth.
And she laughed with a loud clear peal, like some innocent
teasing girl.

Chup moved unsteadily toward her from his doorway.
Still looking after Tarlenot, he said: "My blade went this
far down in him. This far. I saw him die, out there."

She went on laughing merrily. "My hero, Chup! But you
are so astonished. It is worth all the vexation, just to see
you so."

For his part, Chup was very far from laughter. "What
powers of sorcery do you have here? What do battles mean,
and warriors' lives, when dead men jump up grinning?"

Her mirth quieted. She began to eye Chup as if with
sympathy. "It was not sorcery, dear Chup, but his Guards-
man's collar that saved him."

"No collar stopped my blade, I cut down to his heart. I
know death when I see it."

"Dear fool! I did not mean that at all. Of course you cut
him down. He died. You beat and killed him, as I knew you
would. But then he was restored by the Lord Draffut."

"There is no way of restoring . . ." But then Chup's voice
trailed off.

She, following his thought, nodded with amusement. "Yes,
my lord. As it was done for you, restoration by the fluid of
the Lake of Life. Since you do not wear the collar of Som's
Guard, I had to risk the Beast-Lord's great displeasure by
having the fluid stolen for you—by one of the demons he
so hates. But I would face greater risks than that, to have you
with me." Her face and voice were innocent and proud.
"Come, sit beside me here. Have you the little trinket with
you, that was woven of my hair?"

He walked to the soft couch, and sat down beside his
unclaimed bride. From his pocket he brought out the golden
charm, clenched in his hand.

"No, keep it for me, my good lord, until I tell you how
it must be used. Keep it and guard it well. With no one else
will it be so safe." Charmian took his hand, but only to press
his fingers tighter around the knot of yellow hair.

He put the thing back in his pocket. Still foremost in his
thought was the resurrection he had witnessed. "So. Tarle-
not will be magically healed, whenever and however he is
slain?"

"If he falls here, in sight of Som's citadel and with his
collar on. Did you not hear him say just now that he will
leave his Guardsman's collar here when he goes out as a
courier again? The valkyries will not fly more than a kilome-
ter or two from the citadel."

"The what?"

"The valkyries, the flying machines of the Old World, that
take the fallen Guardsmen up to Draffut to be healed. They
get but little practice now."

"What is this Guard of Som's? You speak of it as some-
tiling special."

"An elite corps, of men he thinks reliable." She had re-
leased his hand and was talking in a businesslike way.
"They number about five hundred; there are no more collars
than that."

He observed: "You have not yet managed to get one of
these protective collars for yourself."

She seemed slightly hurt. "I will depend upon my strong

Lord Chup for protection; we will see that you have a collar,
of course, as soon as possible. Besides, the valkyries will
take no woman."

"You have been depending on the strong Lord Tarlenot
till now, I gather. Well, I will wait and catch him with his
collar off."

Charmian laughed again, this time even more delightedly,
and curled up amid her silks. "That messenger? Why, you
are joking, lord. You must know I am only using him, and
to make him really useful I must lead him on. My only
true thoughts are for you."

Grimly and thoughtfully, he said: "I remember that you
do not have true thoughts."

Now she was hurt. Her eyes looked this way and that,
then sought him piteously and fluttered. One who did not
know her as he did might easily have been convinced. He
knew her, and was not fooled; but she was still his bride,
and all-important to him. He frowned, wondering why he
did not wonder. There must be a reason, and he ought to
have remembered it, but somehow it eluded him.

"My every thought has been for you," his all-important
bride was pouting. "True, when you arrived today I pre-
tended to be angry—surely you could not have been de-
ceived by that? I wanted Tarlenot to fight you, so you would
put him in his place. You must have understood that! Could
he ever have beaten you, even on the sickest day you've
ever had?"

"Why, yes, he could, and handily."

She avoided his reaching hand and jumped to her feet
"How can you dare to think that I have ever meant you
harm? If you will be rude enough to ask for proof of my
intentions, I can only point out that here you are, restored
to life and health and power. And who is responsible for
your restoration, if not I?"

"Very well, you saved me. But for your own reasons. You
wanted this." Again he pulled the charm out of his pocket
Looking down at the soft and shiny thing resting so lightly
in his open hand, he could remember vaguely that he had
felt misgivings about picking it up for the first time, but he
could not remember why. He asked: "What do you want
it for?"

"Put it away, please." When he had done that, Charmian
sat down again and took his hand between hers. "I want

to use it. To make you a viceroy in the Black Mountains,
in Som's place."

He grunted in surprise, beyond mere disbelief.

"Be at ease, my lord," she reassured him. The wizard
Hann, who is with us in this enterprise, has made this
apartment proof against Som's spies."

"I came in quite unnoticed."

"Not by me. I wanted you to enter, my good lord." Her
small hands pressed his fingers tenderly. "Ah, but it is good
to have you sitting with me once again. You will be Lord
of High Lords here, with Zapranoth and Draffut as your
vassals; and I will be your consort, proud beside you."

He made another boorish noise.

Unruffled, she pressed his arm. "Chup, do you doubt that
I would like to be the lady of a viceroy?"

"I don't doubt that."

Her nails spurred his forearm. "And do you think that I
would want some lesser man than you beside me, one who
could not hold such a prize when we had won it, or try for
something higher still. By all the demons, you underrate me
if you do!"

Viceroy, Lord of High Lords . . . armies numbering tens
of thousands under his command . . . beside him, Charmian,
looking as she did now. He could no longer wholly doubt
what she was saying. "Has Viceroy Som no need of you, to
hold his place and help him try for something higher still?"

Her eyes flashed anger, mixed with determination. "I
want a living man, not dead . . . but you are right, my
lord, Som is the key. We must dispose of him." She said it
easily. "He gave me shelter when my father fell, thinking
I would be useful to him one day; I convinced him you
would be useful too. He does not know that you have
brought the means of his downfall."

Chup's manner was still scornful. "And what are we to
do with Som the Dead? How shall we topple him?"

Her eyes, that had gone to feast upon some distant vision,
came back to his unwaveringly. "The circlet woven of my
hair must go into his private treasure hoard, unknown to
him. Only thus can he be made vulnerable to—certain
magic that we shall use against him."

"He must be guarded against such charms."

"Of course. But Hann says that the one you carry is of
unequalled power."

Chup said: "You speak much of this wizard Hann, and
what he says. What does he gain, by helping you?"

Charmian pouted. "I see I must soothe down your point-
less jealousy again. Hann wants only vengeance, for some
punishment that Som inflicted on him long ago. I know
that Hann gives no impression of great skill at magic, yet
he is stronger in his way than Elslood was, or Zarf—"

"Then why can he not make a stronger charm than Elslood
wrought?" He thought he could feel it in his pocket, like a
circle of heavy fire.

She shook her head impatiently. "I do not understand
it perfectly, but it seems that Elslood, wanting me to care
for him, stole some of my hair and wove the charm. But
he tapped some power greater than he understood, the
effect was reversed, the charm only made him dote all the
more on me. Never mind. We need not struggle with these
technicalities of magic. All that you need worry about, my
lord, is getting the charmed circlet woven of my hair into
Som's private treasure hoard."

"How?"

"I have already gone far in learning ways and making
plans for that. But the execution of the plan requires some-
one like yourself, my lord; and who is there but you?"

"How?" His voice was still heavy with his skepticism.

She seemed about to tell him, but first she recounted once
more the joys of being viceroy. He still could not credit
what she said, but her soft voice wore him down, so that
he passed the midpoint between doubting and belief; all
things were possible, when his bride whispered that they
were.

Now she was telling him what he must do: "Now hear
me, my lord, this is vital to us both and you must learn it,
the sooner the better. Three things must fall together ere
we strike. First, the human guards who watch the outer
entrance to the treasure vault must be those we have sub-
orned. Second—are you listening?—the new breed of centi-
pedes in the second room must not yet have hatched.
Thirdly, the word for quieting the demons in the inner
vault must be the one we know . . ."

Demons again. He ceased to listen. He was wearying
quickly of all these endless words, even if they came from
her, when she herself was here. Shaking his head to break
the spell of words, he reached for her.

"My lord, wait. Hear me. This is vital-"

But he would not wait, nor hear her any longer, and
with a small sigh of vexation she let him have his way.

On the next day, when he had truly rested, there came
to him officers of Som's Guard. As was to be expected,
they wished to question Chup about the military situation
in the West, about Thomas's plans and the strength of his
forces. Chup related the rumors common in the Broken
Lands, for what they might be worth. He told the officers
what he had observed of troop movements, from his beg-
gar's post, and of other matters bearing on the military,
the conditions of roads and livestock in the Broken Lands,
the feelings and prosperity of the populace, the state of the
harvest. He could give the Guardsmen little comfort, except
as regarding the relative smallness of Thomas's force. Thomas
would need great reinforcement before he could attempt
an attack upon this citadel.

Chup was soon sitting at ease with the officers, military
men like himself. He was now dressed like them in a uni-
form of black, except that he had as yet no rank, and of
course no Guardsman's collar. In the course of exchanging
some soldiers' talk he asked them about the collars. He
could not imagine how it would feel to enter a fight with
the knowledge that you could be glued together again if
you were hacked apart; would it be a spur or a hindrance to
the most effective action? Would a man who wearied let
himself be killed to gain a rest?

One of the officers shook his head, and raised one finger.
It ended in a tiny abnormal loop of flesh, instead of a fin-
gernail. "The healing's not that safe or certain. Things some-
times go wrong, up in Lord Draffut's house. A man who's
badly mangled going in may well come out too crooked to
walk straight. And those who've been too long lifeless when
the valkyries pick 'em up may never again be smarter than
little animals."

The other officer nodded his scarred head. "Still," he
said, "I think none of us are likely to turn in our collars."

"See much fighting here?" Chup asked.

"Not since we came here, and Draffut handed out his
collars; he was here first, you know, before the East or
West . . . We do grow somewhat stale, those of us who
stay inside these mountains. Nothing but a peasant uprising

from time to time. But we practice. We'll handle this Thomas
if he comes. You think he'll gather men enough to try?"

Chup guessed he might. They chatted some more. Chup
was invited to visit the officers' club on a lower level of the
citadel, where wine and gambling and fresh peasant girls
were available. He got up and strolled with the two men
to sample the wine; as for the dice and the women, he had
no money at the moment, and could not imagine himself
wanting any woman but one.

Walking the main, buried corridors of the citadel, he took
note of the fighting men he saw. He supposed the garrison
might number a thousand if all the able men were mobilized;
but the five hundred elite Guardsmen should be easily able
to hold the natural defenses of the place against Thomas's
four thousand or so. A few of the Guardsmen were grotes-
quely misshapen with old scars, of wounds no man could
ordinarily survive, though they were active still; this con-
firmed what the officer had said about the uncertainty of
being healed. So Tarlenot had needed at least some guts
to face him in a fight—that was a useful if not encouraging
bit of information on a rival.

Chup had other things to watch for on his walk to the
officers' club and back again, through rooms and passages
carved from the mountain's rock. In one large chamber,
decorated with some ancient artisan's frieze of unknown
men and creatures, he spotted without paying it any ob-
vious attention the entrance to the passage that Charmian
had told him to watch for. It was an unmarked tunnel lead-
ing downward and yet farther into the mountain. It was
this way that, by many turns and branches she had de-
scribed, would lead him to Som's own treasure hoard.

Again and again during the next two days she repeated
her instructions to him; by then he had ceased to doubt her
word on anything at all. And then she awoke him in the
night, to tell him that the time had come, the three re-
quirements had fallen together. He must try tomorrow to
reach the treasure vault of Som.

He strode into the high, frieze-corniced room with the
air of a man upon some important errand, as indeed he was.
The room was an intersection of two corridors, and held
people passing continually to and fro. No one paid attention
as Chup turned aside into the downward way that led

toward the treasure; it led to other things as well, and was
not guarded here.

Chup walked unarmed with any blade or club; he must
not kill today, must leave no traces of his passage. For
weapons, he carried Charmian's knowledge of Som's secrets,
gathered he knew not how, but trust her to manage that, in
a world of men; and his own boldness, and speed of mind
and body; and three words of magic; and a pocketful of
dried fruit, innocent to the eye and taste. Hann had demon-
strated that a human might eat of it without effect.

A few people passed Chup, coming toward him through
the tunnel he descended. Then the way branched, once
and again, and now there were no other walkers. The
branch that Chup had been taught to follow was a narrow
way, and it went on without another intersection for some
distance. Now and then it broke out of its walls into a
large cave, where it formed a suspended walkway across
chasms whose depths were lost in darkness. Sunlight filtered
down into the big caves through hidden openings some-
where high above. Along the buried parts of the way, a few
cheap lampstands cast some illumination. There were no
signs, nor any evidence that any goal of much importance
lay in this direction.

So far, all was as Charmian had foretold. And now, here,
just as she had said, the path bridged a wider crevasse than
usual, and then once more branched. The right way, she
had told him, led up into the viceroy's private quarters. The
left side, narrower, was the one that Chup must take.

Now at last there were posted warning signs. Chup had
no doubt of what they meant, though he did not stop to try
to puzzle out the letters. He also ignored another, blunter,
warning: a bundle of mummied hands that were no doubt
supposed to be those of would-be trespassers hung like a
cluster of dried vegetables above the way. He moved his
head slightly as he walked beneath, not liking that the
dead fingers should brush his hair. His pulse went quicker.
If he were stopped and questioned now, it would be hard
to say convincingly that he had seen no warning.

A final abrupt turn, and Chup's path came to an end
against a massive, unmarked door. This too he found as
Charmian had described it: so strongly built that a crew of
men swinging a ram would be needed to break it down, and
the tunnel so curved before it that such a gang would have

no place to stand. Having no sword hilt to rap out a signal
with, Chup put his knuckles to the job. The door re-
sounded no more than would a massive tree stump, but
someone must have been listening for the little noise, for it
was answered quickly. There was a grating noise, and a
dim face peeking out at Chup through a small and heavy
grill. There came next a sliding of bars and rattle of chains,
and the great door moved inward just enough for him to
enter.

He stepped into a barren, rock-walled chamber about
ten meters square, and almost as high. The two men in
Guardsmen's collars standing watch had been given no chairs
or other furniture to lure them into relaxation. Directly across
from the door where Chup had entered, a ladder five or six
meters long stood leaning against the wall; beside the ladder
was the room's only visible aperture besides the door, a nar-
row hole that led down into darkness. Thick candles in
wall sconces lit the guardroom adequately.

One of the men who greeted Chup was hardly more than
half a man in size, his legs being grotesquely short. The
other guard was of ordinary size, and sound of limb, but
his face was the strangest Chup had ever seen on living
man, a wall of scars from which one live eye gleamed like
something trapped. According to Charmian, these men had
been enlisted in her cause by promises of better healing when
she came to power. The two of them closed up and chained
and barred the great door tight as soon as Chup was through
it; and then they looked at Chup expectantly, but saying
nothing.

He had wasted no time either, but had crossed the cham-
ber to look down into the hole. He could see nothing in
the darkness there. "Where's the beast?" he asked. "I mean,
in which part of its room?"

The scarred man made a nervous sound. "Hard to say.
You've got some means of putting it to sleep?"

"Of course. But I'd like to know just where to toss the
bait."

They came and stood beside him at the hole, peering
down and listening, muttering to each other, trying to locate
the beast. They were nervous for his welfare. If his attempt
miscarried down below, their complicity in it would be
discovered when Chup—alive or dead—was found. It seemed
to Chup a long time passed before the dwarfed man raised

a hand for his attention, and pointed to the quarter of the
room below where he evidently thought the beast to be.
Bending over the pit, straining his ears, Chup thought he
could barely hear a dry patter that must be made by its
multitude of feet.

"There, there, yes," the scarred man whispered. "It'll be
behind you as you go down the ladder."

They got ready for him the long ladder—Chup saw
now that it was really an extremely slim and elegant stair,
complete with handrail, fit for Som to use when he went
down to count his gold—and now they slid the ladder
down.

Chup went down facing the ladder, about one third of
its length, before he tossed his first piece of dried fruit. He
heard the hundred feet shiver before he saw the rail-thin,
cat-quick body; he could not tell for sure whether the bait
had been taken. Hann had said the two pieces swallowed
should afford Chup time enough to walk a kilometer, plenty
of time to complete his mission. He let his eyes become
somewhat more accustomed to the gloom before he tossed
a second piece of fruit, and he saw this one snapped up by
the first pair of delicate legs, flicked up into the tiny, harm-
less mouth. A moment only passed before the beast shivered,
twitched extravagantly, and began to curl its body. Its hun-
dred legs in disarray, it slid down springily to the floor,
showing Chup as it bent the hundred branching slivers of
its whip-like tail.

Chup cautiously went down the rest of the ladder. The
centipede had fallen and remained completely quiet He
left the ladder and paced toward the door that led to the
next lower level; and now the dryness of fear was growing
in his throat. Behind him he heard the ladder being drawn
up; so it had been planned, in case some officer should
come while he was down below.

There was a bloated bulk of darkness that he only just
avoided stepping on, when it made a feeble movement in his
path. He had been told of this also. It had been a man, and
was still alive, nourishing the larvae of the centipede inside it-
self. Perhaps its hands would someday join the thieves' bun-
dle over the tunneled walk; perhaps it had in fact once been
a would-be thief.

In the faint light from below he could make out the way
to the next lower level: an ordinary doorway led to a simple

solid stair of stone, narrow and curving but quite open.
What was below had no desire nor occasion to come up,
and the centipede would be too frightened to go down.

Chup went down, armed with the three words of magic
Hann had taught him. They weighed now like swallowed
arrows in his throat, syllables not fit for ordinary men to
bear. Chup went down the curving stair, and before him
the increasing light carried the hint of the color of gold.

As he had been instructed, Chup counted the turnings of
the stair, and stopped on what should be the last, before
the source of light ahead could come into his view. There
he drew in his breath, and said, clearly and loudly, paus-
ing after each word, the three words of the incantation.

With the first word, there fell a silence in the air, where
before he had only thought the air was silent; there had
been a certain quiet murmuring that he was not aware of
until it ceased.

With the second word, the light in the room below was
dimmed, and the air became fresh and ordinary, where be-
fore he had only thought that it was so; and time began
to make itself felt, so that Chup perceived the age in all
the slimy stones that built the vault surrounding him.

The third word of the incantation seemed to hang for-
ever on his tongue, but when he had said it, time flowed on
once more as it should. The golden light before him grew
as bright as ever; a certain rippling watery reflection in it
had been stopped so it was steady, where before he had
only thought that it was so.

With that Chup went on down, walking into Som's treasure
room through its sole entrance. The vaulted chamber was
round and high, perhaps twenty meters across. The golden
light came from the center of it, seemingly from the treasure
itself. It lay in careless-looking heaps, for the most part bril-
liant yellow metal, coins and jewelry, bars and foldings of
gold leaf; here and there the piles were studded with the
sharper glint of silver or the brighter flash of gems.

The treasure was still sealed from Chup by a last en-
circling fence, of what seemed fragile metal wands. He had
no need to cross that barrier or worry about it. Instead
he looked up at once to the upper vaulting of the high
chamber. By the light of the ensorceled treasure, he saw
that up there the seven guardian demons hung, where
Hann's three words had sent them, like malformed bats in

fine gray gossamer robes. They were head down, with
arms or forelegs-it was hard to specify-that hung below
their heads. Several of the dangling limbs hung nearly to
the level of Chup's head, so elongated were the demons'
shapes. One had a gray blur of a talon run like a fishhook
through the hide of a small furry beast, a living toy apparently,
that struggled and squeaked incessantly to be free, and
very slowly dripped red blood. As Chup watched the de-
mons, they began to drone, like humans newly fallen asleep
who start to snore.

With a shudder he pulled his gaze down and stepped
forward, making himself forget what hung above his head.
He stood staring for just a moment in awe at the accumu-
lated wealth before him. He thought he had seen riches
before, and owned some too. But he had known only
handfuls compared to his.

The moment of distraction passed; what drove him had
far more power over him than greed. Taking now from his
pocket the golden circlet of Charmian's hair—infinitely bright-
er in his eyes than any hoard of metal—he held it up
before him in both hands. He was reluctant ever to let
it go. But after all it was the woman he wanted, not her
token. It was for the sake of their future life together that
he must give away the charm; for no other reason could
he have parted with it now.

He tossed it from him, over the innocent-looking fence of
fragile rods, toward the piled-up wealth. As it passed from
his fingers it seemed to draw from him a greater spark
than ever man might get by rubbing cloth and amber; and
with this spark, invisible for all its power, Charmian's image
in his mind was smashed and shattered as in a broken mirror.

Under the blow, Chup lurched forward two steps, hands
outstretched and groping. Like one aroused from sleep-
walking he blinked and cried out incoherently. His case was
all the worse for his remembering all the nightmare that
had brought him here; nightmare magic, that had made
him trust his bride . . .

Tightly he squeezed shut his eyes, forgetting for the
moment even the dreaming, droning, blinded demons over
his head as he tried to call back Charmian's face, tried
to see it once again as he had seen it setting out upon his
mission. He visualized her now as beautiful as ever. But

now, freed of the potent charm, he recognized her beauty
as nothing but a mask worn by an enemy.

He stood gazing dazedly through the fragile-seeming
fence of wands. The gold circlet had vanished, lost in the
dazzle of the yellow metal stacked and strewn there . . . and
now that he was freed of it, he did not want it back. Nor
her. She would be with Tarlenot now, or Hann, or someone
else. And Chup realized that he no longer minded that.

The thought broke in upon him that she must have known
he would be freed by tossing away the charm. Or did she
think he was still bound to her and blinded by the simple
magic of her attraction, like the other men she used? No, he
never had been enthralled by her before he picked up the
charm. She must have known that he would, at this point,
be set free.

To do what? Where did his best interests lie? Was he now
committed irrevocably to helping her against Som?

Remembering now her face and voice over the last few
days, he concluded that she still hated him for not being
manageable without magic, especially for once slapping her
to put an end to a mindless hysteria of noise. Was she done
with using him now, and was her revenge already set?

At best his time of safety here was passing quickly. Cau-
tiously he turned to leave the treasure chamber. Above his
head the little furry animal still writhed and squeaked,
impaled upon the demon's dangling talon. Chup put up a
hand in passing to rob the demon of its toy; he tossed
the small beast ahead of him up the curving stair. There
it might find a crevice in which to die in peace. The curses
of three thousand wizards on all demons! He could not slay
them, but he would take the chance to rob one of a toy.
When he had climbed round the first turn of the ascending
stair he paused, and uttered in reverse order Hann's three
words. The light changed subtly, down below, and no longer
was there perfect silence.

When he had climbed to the darkened level of the centi-
pede, he was glad that he had wasted no more time below,
for already the beast was stirring. It was not moving yet,
but trying to rise, its feet a-scratching on the pavement in
the darkness. He waited briefly, to give his eyes a better
chance to see.

Now that he had thought a little, it seemed to him that
he would have no more usefulness to Charmian. No longer

bewitched, he could do nothing for her that someone more
manageable—Tarlenot—could not do almost as well. She
hated Chup, he felt quite sure of that, and she was not the
girl to leave her hate unsatisfied.

He could see the dim shape of the centipede now, lying
on its side, curling and uncurling like a slow snake swim-
ming in the dark. Its feet scraped but were not yet ready
to support it. Chup moved in the utmost silence, stepping
toward the place where they must let down the ladder for
him . . . here? Would this be where Charmian meant for
him to die?

The more he thought, the likelier it appeared. For one
thing, this whole scheme could have been accomplished in
a different way. Hann could have given the two deformed
guards dried fruit, and magic words. They could have taken
the circlet in and thrown it on the pile as easily as Chup.
Except in that case Chup would have been left above ground,
live and active, and with his own will back again.

Holding his breath, he listened for any sound above. They
must be standing silent and listening too. Suppose he called
up for the ladder and they lowered it. When he, unarmed,
climbed to the top, the two Guardsmen would be there,
one on each side, with weapons drawn ... or suppose they
did not lower the ladder, but laughed at him. They could
have some means to grapple his body and hoist it up, after
the centipede had struck him. Either way, once he was
dead, put him down a crevice somewhere. He would vanish,
or seem to be the victim of an accident or some chance quar-
rel or casual assassination—only there would be nothing
to connect him with the treasure vault.

Behind Chup now, the sounds of the centipede grew
louder. Looking back, it saw it was now managing to drag
itself along the floor. It moved in his direction.

And close above him now he heard the faint sound of a
sandal-scrape, and the intake of a nervous breath. "Where
is he?" came a Guard's low whisper. "If the demons took
him after all, they're certain to report him and we're through!"

Chup's eyes had now adapted well enough for him to see
the beast in some detail. Thin as an arm its body was,
though longer than a man, about as long as the many-
weaponed tail that flicked and twitched behind it. A man
with good arms might easily break the beast's thin neck, it
seemed. Except that as soon as he tried to get a grip that

tail would come snapping like a whip in the gloom, impos-
sible to block or dodge . . . the clustered poison-spines
grew longer than fingers on that tail. How could a man
fight such a thing barehanded?

Why, thus, and so. And he would have a fighting chance,
if it was dazed and slow. The cold calculation of tactics led
Chup on into the outline of a larger plan. He trusted what
his instinct told him, in a fight; the reasons came clearer
later, if he took the time to think them out.

The animal was trying now to stand, was on the verge
of success. Chup drew a deep breath and moved into action.
He scraped his sandals on the paving, making hurried foot-
steps, and in a low clear voice he called out: "Let down the
ladder."

From up above, the laughter came.

The centipede was still sliding toward Chup, with whis-
pery scraping of its feet and body on the stones. Moving
more quietly than the dazed beast, Chup circled to its rear
and closed in. He grabbed in the near darkness with his
unprotected hand for the tail, and caught it, just under the
cluster of poison-spines at the tip. He set his foot against
what might be called the creature's rump and shoved it
down and pinned it when it would have tried to rise. Hold-
ing the tail straight was easy enough, but the multitude of
slender legs had strength in numbers, resilient power sur-
prising for their size. He was in for a struggle as soon as the
drug had worn off completely, the more so as he must not
kill this beast. The fighter's intuition on which he relied
had grasped that point at once, though he had not thought
it through with conscious logic: he must keep for himself
the option of making Charmian's plan succeed or fail, and
to leave this animal dead would mean alerting Som and the
plot's eventual discovery.

Up above, the Guardsmen's low voices were cheering on
the beast.

"Put down the ladder, quick, by all the demons!" Chup
cried out. He was now sitting on the body of the beast to
hold it down. Their position could not be seen from up
above. His right hand was still vising the tail, his left hand
feeling for the neck.

"Fight it out, oh great Lord Chup!" called down a voice.
"What's wrong, did you forget your sword?"

He answered with a wordless cry of rage, as he shifted

his grip upon the creature just slightly and stood up, lifting
it across his shoulders. The weight was quite surprising for
the size, it must be half as heavy as a man.
"That sounded like it did it for him."
"It must have. Wait a moment, though."
The hundred legs remained in agitation, pounding softly,
coldly, at Chup's head. He moved with his hideous burden,
carefully keeping  out of  direct  sight of  the men  above,
stepping soundlessly.

One of the hidden voices said: "Toss down a bait. We've
waited long enough. It got him, or he'd still be running."

Said the other, doubtfully: "He might have gone back
down to the vault."

"Dimwit! The words won't work twice in one night, re-
member? Hann told us that. No man'll run to a wakeful
demon, not even if a hundred-logger's chasing him. Throw
a bait, we don't know when an inspector's going to come."

"All right, all right. Where's the beast? I'll toss one before
his nose."

Chup twisted his burden off his shoulder and lowered it
carefully in straining arms, just enough to let the little feet
make scratching sounds upon the floor.

"There, there, hear it?" Chup heard the tiny spat of
Hann's dried fruit, landing a meter or so before him. He
waited, counting slowly to ten, his captive's body prisoned
now under his left arm, its deadly tail still clamped safely
by his tireless sword hand. Then he pressed the hundred
legs down on the pavement once again, and this time let the
writhing sides make contact too, to make the sounds of
staggering and collapse.

"It took the bait. Go down."

TOM go down, if you're in such a hurry. Wait till it
falls, I say."

Chup lifted the animal again, and moved in silence to
a new position.

"It's quiet now. Go down and haul out the mighty Lord
Chup."

"We had it settled, you were going down!"

"You're the stronger, as you always brag. So now be
quick about it."

A snarl of fear and anger.

"Quick! What if an inspector comes?"

It  was  the   dwarf   who   eventually   prevailed;   the   tall

scarred man came down the ladder, slowly and hesitantly,
frowning into the shadows where he thought Chup and
the beast must both be lying. He had his sword drawn,
and he spun round quickly when he heard Chup's soft step
behind him; then he screamed and jumped away and fell
when he saw what weapon Chup was brandishing.

Without hesitation Chup turned and charged up the lad-
der, the writhing beast held above him and in front of him.
He saw the dwarfs face, peering down incredulously, then
tumbling backward out of sight in terror.

The dwarf was far too late in trying to draw his stubby
sword. Chup by that time had reached the ladder's top,
pitched the animal back down the hole, and was reaching
for the little man. The dwarf's thick sword arm, caught,
was twisted till the weapon clattered to the floor, then he
himself was flung away across the room.

"Hold back!" Chup barked out, with his back against
the door. "I mean no killing here, no valkyries buzzing
down the tunnel to haul you out and bring investigators.
Now hold back!"

The disarmed dwarf was sitting, scowling, where he had
been tossed, and gave no impression of any eagerness to
attack. Nor did the tall, scarred man, who, having beaten
the maltreated centipede to the ladder on one lap or an-
other of what must have been a lively race, now halted at
the ladder's top. The tall one was armed, but so now was
Chup, who had scooped up the dwarf's sword; and what
Chup had just accomplished without a blade must have
augmented his reputation considerably in the present com-
pany.

The men held back. Chup nodded, and reached behind
him with one hand to slide back the massive bolts that
sealed the door. "The scheme you were enlisted for goes
forward, and if you play your parts I will see to it that you
are rewarded." As you deserve, he thought. He went on
speaking, with his field commander's voice: "The plan goes
on, but now I am in charge, and not those who first bribed
you and instructed you. Remember that. Raise that ladder."

The tall man hesitated briefly, then jumped to obey,
sheathing first his sword. The dwarf was snuffling now like
some schoolboy caught in an escapade.

Chup demanded: "What were you to do next? What
signal were you to give her, that I am dead?"

The tall one said: "Your . . . your body, lord. To be left
where it would be found; as if some feral centipede had
. . . there are some in these caverns. To make your death
look accidental."

"I see." Chup could now take time to think. "Maintain
your guard here as if nothing had happened. If an inspector
comes, say nothing. I left no traces down below. I will be
back, or will send word, to tell you what to do." Now he
could see the logic and the details of his plan, and he was
grinning as he went out and shut the door.

CHAPTER   6

The corpse's face had been shattered into unrecognizabil-
ity, as if by a long fall onto rock, and the appearance of the
rest of the body suggested that it had been nibbled by
some kind of scavenger; reptiles, perhaps. The men who
had brought the body to Charmian—soldiers, led by two
officers who were not of her small group of plotters—stood
by watching stolidly, as she attempted to make the re-
quested identification.

She looked long at what had been the face, and at the
heavy limbs that had once been powerful. They did not
seem to have anything to do with Chup, but in their present
state they might be his as well as not. Charmian was not
squeamish about death—in others—and put out a hand and
turned the ruined head, trying without success to find an
identifiable feature. The build and hair color of the dead
man were Chup's, and the now-tattered black uniform might
have been the one that he had worn. She could see no marks
of weapons on the body.

Half a day after Chup had set out upon his mission for
her, she had as planned sent word to Som's chamberlain in-
quiring whether her husband had been detained on any
business. Word came back that nothing was known of his
whereabouts. Half a day after that, the search was begun
in earnest. Now, another day later, this. Events were pro-
ceeding just about on the schedule she had planned.

"Where was this man found?" she asked.

"Wedged in a deep crevice,  lady, in one of the  deep

caves. It appeared he might have fallen from a bridge." The
officer's voice was neutral. "Can you make an identifica-
tion?"

"Not with certainty." She lifted her eyes calmly; no one
high in the councils of the East would be expected to show
much grief for the loss of any other. "But yes, I think this is
the body of my husband. Tell the Viceroy Som that I am
grateful for his help in searching. And if it was no accident
that killed the Lord Chup, then those who did it are as
much Som's enemies as mine."
The officers bowed.

And half a day after they and their men had gone, wheel-
ing their gruesome charge upon a cart, other messengers
came from Som, more cheerfully garbed and with far
merrier words to speak—it was a summons for her, to appear
before the viceroy, but it came couched in the welcome
form of gracious invitation.

Soon after those emissaries also had departed, leaving her
time for preparation, the wizard Hann sat watching Char-
mian. They were in a central room of her elaborate suite.
Hann sat a-straddle of a delicate chair turned back to front,
his sharp chin resting broodingly upon his wry, somehow
unwizardly forearms, crossed upon the chair's high back.

The clothes that Charmian was to wear, close-fitting gar-
ments of raven black, hung thin and shimmering beside a
screen. She herself, swathed in a white robe and soft towels
and newly emerged from her bath, sat primping before an
array of mirrors, surrounded by white and brilliant lamps.
She would make an imperious motion of her finger or her
head, or merely with her eyes, and Karen or Kath would
jump to adjust the angle of a mirror or lamp, or Lisa or
Portia would fetch a different comb or brush, jar or phial,
most of which their lady considered and rejected. Saman-
tha was upon some errand for Charmian, and Lucia had
earlier been judged guilty of some gross error and was
not here; there was blood drying on the small silvery whip
that lay at one end of the long dressing table. Charmian's
face, utterly intent on appraising itself in all its multiple
reflections, was for the time devoid of youth and softness,
was ageless as ice and equally as hard.

Hann,  observing her thus  disarmed and charmless, was
able to appraise her with something of the feeling he had

when watching another magician pull off a perilous feat:
professional respect.

He need never have worried about her nerves, he told
himself. This girl-woman had matured considerably in the
half year since she had come here as a frightened refugee.
From the start she had been enormously ambitious, and now
she could be cold and capable, and self-controlled. She
probably could command .an army, given a tactical ad-
viser and mouthpiece to pass on orders—a man like Tarlenot.
And she would have the nerve and ruthlessness to manage
the other powers that were the viceroy's, even the power
called Zapranoth—given the aid of a wizard of great skill,
Hann.

The rulers of the Empire of the East would not care if
Som were overthrown by one of his subordinates; that would
mean only that a more capable servant had replaced a less.
And now it did seem that Som's hand was faltering. (Only
in the back of Hann's mind the question waited: why had
the body been so mutilated, impossible to certainly identify?
Well, why not? The Dwarf and Scarface swore that they
had put the Lord Chup down a crevice as planned. And
there were little scavenger beasts, that strayed out from the
dungeons where they bred .. .)

Charmian was dismissing her attendants. As soon as the
last of them had left the room she turned to Hann a ques-
tioning look. Hann, understanding, quickly made use of the
best developed of his powers to quickly scan the suite and
its environs. In this branch of magic he thought that he
was unexcelled. The voices of invisible powers, inhuman
and abject and faithful, muttered their reports to him,
speaking close and softly in his ear so none but he could
hear.

"Speak safely," he said to Charmian. "No one is listening
but me."

Fingering a tiny perfume bottle, she asked: "How did
our viceroy and master acquire his name?"

Hann was perplexed. "Som?"

"Who else, my learned fool? Why is he called The
Dead'?"

He sprang up from his chair, aghast. "You don't know
that?"

A light danced in Charmian's eyes. She remained seated
at her dressing table, looking at Hann in her mirrors. She

was quite relaxed, save for her fingers on the little phial.
"You know that I have met Som only twice, and both times
only briefly. I realize of course that the purpose of his
name must be to frighten those who hear it. But in what
sense is it true?"

"In a very real sense!" Alarmed at her ignorance, Hann
tilted his head from side to side in agitation.

"In a real sense, then. But tell me more." Charmian's
voice was soothing and deliberate, her eyes tranquil.

Hann absorbed some of her calm, turned his chair around,
and sat down properly. "Well, Som does not age at all. He
is immune alike to poison and disease, if what I hear is
true." The wizard frowned. "He has reached some balance,
struck some bargain with death. I admit I do not know how."
Charmian appeared to disbelieve. "You speak as if death
were some man, or demon."

Hann, who had been to the center of the Empire of the
East, said nothing for a moment. He had tied his fortune to
this girl, and now her inexperience and rashness were begin-
ning to frighten him. There was not time to teach her
much. "I know what I know," he said at last.

She inquired, calmly enough: "And what else do you
know of Som?"

"Well. I have never seen him enter battle. But it is said
on good authority that any man who raises a weapon against
Som finds himself smitten in that very moment with the
same wound that he is trying to inflict."

On hearing this, Charmian's many mirror faces marred their
foreheads with thoughtful frowns. She said:  "Then when I
have put my ring of magic through Som's nose, and led him
from his throne, how are we to do away with him? If no
weapon can kill him ..."
"There may be one."
"Ah."

"Though what the weapon is, I do not know. Nor does
Som himself know, I believe." Through the powers that served
him Hann had recently heard of recent threats to Som, by
some mysterious power of the West, threats implying that
the one effective weapon was known and would be used
when the time came. "I do not know, but I could quickly
learn, if I was given all the tools and wealth I needed for
my work."

"When I am consort of a new viceroy, you shall have all

you need and more. Now what else must I know of Som
before I go to him?"

Hann went on worriedly: "I know by my own nose that
there is sometimes the smell of death upon him; though
when he is inclined to deal mildly with those around him,
he covers up his stink with perfumes.

"And—I warn you. When you see him at close range
and from the corner of your eye, you are liable to see not
a man's face but a noseless skull. Can you smile and coo
at that and not show your disgust?"

Once more she appeared to be concentrating completely
on her reflection, adding a final something to her lips. "I?
You do not know me, Hann."

"No! I admit that I do not." He jumped to his feet
again and began to pace, two or three strides and turn
sharply about, two or three more and turn again. "Oh, I
know that you are able. But also that you are very young,
and from the hinterlands. Inexperienced and untraveled in
the world."

Her mirrors all laughed at him in light and easy con-
fidence.

Annoyed, and worried all the more, he pressed on: "I
know, back in your father's little satrapy, men were ruining
themselves to win your favor. Some here, also . . . but re-
member that not everyone here will be so easily manipu-
lated."

She gave no sign that she had heard.

He raised his voice a trifle. "Do you suppose you have
enthralled and bedazzled me? I am your full partner in this
enterprise, my lady. It is magic that is drawing Som to
you; see that you do not forget it."

"You do not know me," Charmian repeated softly. And
with that she pushed away her clutter of towels and jars
and phials and turned to him from her mirrors. The room
seemed brighter, suddenly. Even clothed as she was, in the
loose concealing robe ...

"Never have I seen . . ." said Hann, in a new, distracted
voice; and after the four words fell silent, marveling.

She laughed, and stood up, with a single swaying of her
hips.

Hann said in a blurred voice: "Wait, do not go just
yet."

Her lips swelled in a pretended pout. "Ah, do not tempt

me so, sly wizard. For you know how weak I am, how
subject to your every trifling spell and whim. Only the
knowledge that I must go, for the sake of your own wel-
fare, enables me to tear myself away." And with that she
laughed again, and vanished behind the screens where her
attendants were, and Hann was left with no more than
the memory of a vision.

By the time she had finished dressing and set out, the
time of her appointment was near at hand, but she did not
hurry; the audience chamber was not far off. On her walk
deep into the citadel she was bowed on and escorted by a
series of the viceroy's attendants, some of whom were hu-
man. Others were more beastlike or more magical than men,
and had shapes not commonly encountered away from the
Black Mountains. Charmian no longer marveled at them, like
a backwoods girl; twice before she had walked this way.
At her first audience with Som, nearly half a year ago
just after her father's  downfall,  the  viceroy had  told her
simply and briefly that it suited his purposes to grant her
asylum. At her second audience she had stood silent and
apparently unnoticed amid a number of other courtiers as
Som announced to them the opening of a new campaign to
recover her father's and the other lost satrapies, and par-
ticularly  to  crush  the   arch-rebel   Thomas   of  the   Broken
Lands; little or nothing had been heard of the campaign
since then. On neither occasion had Som shown her any
more interest than he might have bestowed upon an article
of furniture. She had soon learned from the gossip of the
other  courtiers   that  he   was   dead  indeed  regarding   the
pleasures of the body.

    Or so they all had thought; what would they say today?
Looking into Som's great audience hall from just outside
the door, she was vaguely disappointed to see that it was
almost empty. Then as she was bidden enter by the cham-
berlain she saw that the viceroy had just finished talking
with a pair of military men, who were now walking back-
ward from his presence, bowing, noisily rolling up their
scrolls of maps. Som was frowning after them. Charmian
could not discern any change since her last audience in
the man who sat upon the ebony throne. Som was a man
to all appearances of middle size and middle age, rather
plainly dressed except for a richly jeweled golden chain
around his neck. He was rather sparely built, and his aspect

at first glance was not unpleasant,  save perhaps  for his
rather sunken eyes.

The soldiers backed past Charmian and she heard them
stumbling and colliding with each other at the doorway as
they left; but the viceroy's aspect softened as bis eyes re-
focused on her.

The chamberlain effaced himself, and Charmian was alone
with her High Lord in the great room where a thousand
might have gathered—alone save for a few Guardsmen,
heavily armed and standing motionless as statues, and for
a pair of squat inhuman guardians—she could not tell at
once if they were beasts or demons—that flanked his throne
at a little distance on each side.

Som beckoned to her, with a gesture whose slightness
she found enviable: that of one who knows he has complete
attention. With humility in every move, her eyes downcast,
steps quick but modest, she walked toward him. When still
at a humble distance, she stopped, and made obeisance
deeply, with all the grace at her command.

All was silent in the vast hall. When she thought it time
to raise her eyes to the ebony throne, Som was gazing down
at her, solemnly, with the stillness of a statue or a snake.
Then like a snake he moved, with a sudden flowing gesture.
In his dry, strong voice he said: "Charmian, my daughter—
I have come to think of you as in some sense a relative of
mine—you have lately begun to assume importance in my
plans."

She dipped her eyes briefly and raised them again; so
might a girl perform the gesture who had but lately begun
to practice it before her mirror. A perfect imitation of in-
nocence would never be convincing, here. She said: "I hope
these thoughts of me are in some measure pleasing to my
High Lord Viceroy."

"Come closer. Yes, stand there." And when he had gazed
upon her from closer range for a little while, Som asked:
"Is it then your wish to please me as a woman? It is long
since any have done that."

"I would please my High Lord Som in any way he might
desire." There was perfume in the hall, of high quality cer-
tainly but stronger than the delicate scent she had put on
herself.

"Come closer still."

She did so, and sank on one knee before him so close that

he might have reached out a hand and touched her face.
But he did not. For just a moment her nostrils caught a
whiff of something else beneath the perfume; as if perhaps
a small animal had crawled beneath the viceroy's throne
and died.
"My daughter?"

"If you will have me so, my High Lord Som."
"Or should I now say 'sister' to you, Charmian?"
"As you will have it, lord." Waiting for the next move of
the game with her eyes cast down submissively, she saw
(not looking directly at him) that Som had no nose, and that
his sunken eyes were black and empty holes.

"My woman, then; we'll settle it at that Give me your
hand, golden one. In all my treasure hoard I have not such
gold as you have in your hair. Do you know that?"

The statement gave her a bad moment of suspicion. But
when she looked straight at her lord again, she saw an or-
dinary man's face, smiling thinly and nodding. However,
she could not hear him breathe. And his hand, when she
touched it, felt like meat that had been kept somewhat too
long in the kitchen of a palace. Her hand did not for a
moment tense, or her face change. She would take the
fastest, surest way to power, though it meant embracing
dead meat, and waking in the morning beside a noseless
skull on a fine pillow.

In his dry voice, lowered now, he asked her: "What do
you mark about me?"

Truthfully and without hesitation she replied: "That you
do not wear the collar of the Guard, High Lord." It was a
sign that Hann had mentioned, meaning that Som enjoyed
some better protection than the valkyries.

The viceroy smiled. "And do you know why I wear it
not?"

Impulsively she answered: "Because you are mightier
than death."

He gave a silent, shaking grimace that she realized in a
moment was his laughter. He said: "You are thinking that
it is because I am already dead. But yet I rule, and crush
my enemies, and have my joys. Dead? I have become
death, rather. No weapon, no disease, not even time, has ter-
rors for me now."

She only vaguely understood him, and she could not
think what to reply. Instead of speaking, she bowed her

head and once more pressed to her lips the sticky tissue of
his hand.

The viceroy said: "And all that is mine, my golden one, I
have decided to share with you."

With unconcealed joy Charmian rose in response to the
viceroy's tug on her hand. Som's dead hands pulled her to
him, and she kissed him on the lips, or where lips should
have been and seemed to be. "As your willing slave forever,
gracious lord!"

Holding her at arms' length now, and smiling in great
pleasure, he said: "Therefore you will become death too."
These last words of his seemed to stay circling like birds
in Charmian's awareness, uncertain whether or not they
meant to land. When at last they came fully home to her,
her new triumph was shattered like a glass goblet. Not
yet did her distress show in her face or voice; her surface
was her strength, where terror would reach only when it
had already conquered all within.

She only asked, like a girl expressing sweet wonderment
at a reward too great: "I shall become as you are, lord?"
"Even so," he reassured her happily, patting her hand
between his, with faint sticking sounds. "Ah, I could almost
regret such goldenness must perish at its peak, like the
beauty of a blossom plucked; but so it must be, for the
woman who shares my endless life and power."

With a shock of terror as sharp as the pain of blade or
fire, she caught herself barely in time from trying to pull
her hands away from his. In the back of her mind she was
aware that other presences, human she thought, were coming
into the audience chamber. But she could pay them no
attention now.

She must express her joyful acceptance of Som's offer,
without the least appearance of hesitation. But moment by
moment her understanding of his meaning grew more cer-
tain and her fear grew more intense. Never for an instant
had she expected this. She would rather die, rather die a
thousand times, a million times, than become as he was.
She could smile without a tremor at his dead face, she
could embrace it warmly if she must. But to see the like of
it in her mirror was unimaginable, was fear more pure than
she had ever known.

No longer knowing whether she could conceal her horror,
faint with the dizziness of it, she whispered: "When?"

"Why, now. Is anything the matter?"
"My High Lord—" Charmian could scarcely see. Would
not some crevice open in the earth to swallow her? "It is
only that I would preserve my beauty for you. That you
may continue to enjoy it."

He made a gesture of impatience. "As I said, it is annoy-
ing that your appearance must be so much changed. But
never mind. It is only mortal men who find those super-
ficialities of great importance. What draws me to you is
primarily your inner essence, so like my own. Now, there is
something wrong. What is it? Is the process causing you
discomfort?"

"The process, my High . . . now? It happens to me now?"
She was only half-aware of losing control, of pulling away
from him and moving back a step.

He peered at her in evident astonishment. "Why, yes. I
am impatient. Once having decided that you are the one
to rule beside me, I had the magicians begin the process
of your transformation as soon as you entered the chamber.
Already the change is far advanced—"

There was a rush of the world, and screaming. Vaguely
Charmian realized it was herself who screamed, and that
the sound of pounding steps on wood and stone came from
her own running feet. She had no longer any plan, no
thought except to flee the death that moved and spoke and
would engulf her with its own decay. A tall shape loomed
before her, very near; she had run into it and rebounded
before she saw it was a man, and knew his face.
The living face of Chup.

Still mad with panic, she tried to run around Chup, but
he caught her by the arm. She had never seen his face so
hard, not even on that day so long ago when he had
slapped her. Now his voice came as if ground out between
two stones: "Does it surprise you, Queen of Death, to see
that I am still alive?"

Then Charmian understood what Chup's presence here
must mean, that all her plotting had been discovered, all
her hopes destroyed. Her fear was so extreme she could
not move or speak; she sank down in a faint before attend-
ants came to carry her from the chamber.

Som, relaxed now upon his throne, spent a little time in
the enjoyment of his almost silent, grimacing laughter. Chup
waited, standing motionlessly at attention, until the viceroy

had composed himself and beckoned him to come nearer.

"My good Chup, all your warnings to me have been borne
out by investigation. The wizard Hann has been arrested.
The circlet of the lady's hair has been found where you left
it, in my treasure vault, with no trace visible of how you
put it there. Needless to say, my security measures will
be extensively revised. Fortunately, I am less susceptible to
love-charms than these unhappy plotters thought; so it was
shrewd of you to cast your lot with me."

Chup bowed slightly.

Som went on. "Unhappily, the man Tarlenot has" de-
parted on a courier's mission, on Empire business; it may
be difficult to get him in our grasp again. But he left be-
hind him his Guardsman's collar, which shall be yours,
along with some substantial military rank."

For the first time since entering, Chup allowed himself
to smile. "That's how I'd choose to serve, my High Lord
Som. I am a fighter, with little taste for these intrigues."

"And you shall have your command." The viceroy paused.
"Of course there is one matter first—your pledging to the
East."

Ah, said Chup to himself, without surprise. I might have
known.

Settling himself still more informally upon his throne, Som
continued: "You were for some time a satrap in our service,
were you not? But unlike others of your rank, you never
came here to make a formal pledge. That has always
seemed to us rather odd."

There was no satisfying the powers of the East. Always
the certainty of great success was one more step away. Chup
said, rather wearily: "I have been six months a crippled
beggar."

"You were a satrap, free to come, for a much longer
time than that." Som's voice was no longer so relaxed. "Be-
fore you lost your satrapy."

There was no good answer Chup could give. As a satrap,
he had certainly been busy fighting, and he had told himself
that he served his masters better in that way than by par-
taking in mysterious rituals. But they had never seen it
quite that way.

Now Som was looking at him from his sunken eyes, and
Chup thought that he could smell the death. The viceroy
said: "This pledging is more important than you seem to

realize. There are many who ask to bind themselves com-
pletely to the East, to share in its inner powers, and are not
allowed to do so."

As a soldier long accustomed to orders and the ways of
giving them, Chup understood that there was but one
thing for him to say. "I ask to be allowed to make my
pledge, High Lord. As soon as possible."

"Excellent!" Som took from around his own neck a richly
jeweled chain which he tossed carelessly to Chup. "As a
mark of my good favor, and the beginning of your fortune."
"Thanks, many thanks, High Lord."
"Your face says there is something else you want."
"If I may retain for the time being the lodgings of that
treacherous woman. And her servants, those who had no
part in her plotting."

To this the viceroy assented with a nod. The chamber-
lain was evidently signalling him that other business pressed,
for with a few quick words he gave Chup his dismissal.
After backing deferentially from the chamber, Chup hung
the chain of Som's favor around his neck, and made his way
to what had been Charmian's apartment. With the chain
around his neck, he was now saluted by soldiers of the
common ranks. People of more standing, some of whom had
not deigned to notice him before, now nodded or eyed him
with respect and calculation.

When he reached the apartment he found it swarming
with men in black, each of whom bore a skull insignia upon
his sleeve. In the past Chup had noticed only a few of these
men in the citadel and had not thought of their significance.
They were searching Charmian's rooms, thoroughly, leaving
casual wreckage in the process, with the air of men well
trained for what they were about. Chup did not attempt to
interfere until he found their leader, whose sleeve bore a
much larger skull. This man, though he maintained an
air of arrogance, was like everyone else impressed with
the chain that hung about Chup's neck. In answer to Chup's
question, he led him to a service passage in the rear of the
apartment. There, chained together, sitting huddled against
the wall, there waited Karen, Lisa, Lucia, Portia, Samantha,
and Kath.

Chup said: "You may release them, on my word. I am to
occupy these rooms, and I will require a good staff, familiar

with the place, to restore order from this mess that you have
made."

"They have not been questioned yet," the leader of the
skullmen said, finality in his voice.

"I am somewhat aware of how the plotting went, and
who was involved, as our Lord Som can tell you. These
are innocent. But they will be here when you want them
for your questions."

It took a little more argument, but Chup did not lack
stubbornness and pride, and there was Som's favor hanging
down upon his chest. When the skull-marked men in black
at length departed, their fruitless searching finished, the six
girls, unchained, were left behind. When they were alone
with him the six of them came slowly to surround Chup;
scarred Portia, strabismic Kath, and the other ugly four,
Lucia, Samantha, Karen, and Lisa, hanging back a little.
They said nothing, did nothing but gaze at him.

He bore this silent, disturbing scrutiny only briefly be-
fore issuing curt orders for them to get to work. The shortest
turned away at once and started in; he had to bark com-
mands, and kick a couple of the others, to get them moving
properly. Then he walked out into the garden, turning ideas
over in his mind.

On the next day Som's chamberlain came to Chup, and

with few words led him down into the mountain. Through

devious and guarded tunnels they passed, along routes new

to Chup, until the tunnel they were in broke out into the

side of a huge and roughly vertical shaft. This chimney had

the look of a natural formation;  it was  about ten meters

wide here, at a level well below the citadel. It seemed to

widen  gradually   as   it   curved   upward   through   the  rock.

What must be sunlight came reflecting down through it, from

what must be an opening at the unseen top, beyond a curve.

A precarious ledge made a narrow pathway going up and

down, winding round the inside of the shaft. At the level

where  Chup  and  the   chamberlain  now   stood,   this  ledge

widened,   and  from  it  several   little   rooms   like   cells  had

been dug back into the rock, and fitted with heavy doors.

Only one of these doors was now closed. Gesturing at it,

the chamberlain, in the manner of one imparting necessary

information,   said:   "In  there   lies   she  who  was   the   Lady

Charmian."

When Chup had nodded his understanding of this fact,

if not of its importance, the chamberlain said quite solemn-
ly: "Come." And started down the rough helix of a path
that wound both up and down the chimney.

Chup followed. The two of them were quite alone on all
the path, as far as Chup would see, peering down a long
drop. From below, round a lower curve in the gradually
narrowing chimney, there came up a roseate glow as the
sunlight came down from above. "Where are we going?"
Chup asked the silent figure ahead of him. "What lies
down there?"

The chamberlain glanced back, with evident surprise,
and in a low voice answered: "Below us dwells the High
Lord Zapranoth, master of all demons in the domain of Som
the Dead!"

Chup's feet, that had been slowing down, now stopped
completely. "What business have we visiting the Demon-
Lord?"

"Why, I thought you understood, good Chup. It is the
business of your pledging. Today I will explain how your
initiation is to be accomplished. I must take you nearly to
the bottom, to make sure you are familiar with the ground."

Chup drew a deep breath. He might have known they'd
put demons into this, the one peril that could make him
sweat from only thinking of it. "Tell me now, what is the
test to be?"

He listened, frowning, while the chamberlain told him.
On the surface of it, it sounded easier than Chup had ex-
pected. He'd have to face Zapranoth, but not for long and
not in any kind of contest. On the surface, nothing very
difficult

But there was something—wrong—about it.

Still scowling, Chup asked: "Is there not some mistake in
this? I am to serve Som as a fighting man."

"I assure you there is no mistake. You will not suffer at
the hands of the High Lord Zapranoth if you do properly
what you are sent to do."

"I don't mean that."

The chamberlain looked at him blankly.  "What, then?"

Chup struggled to find words. But he could not make it
clear in his own mind what was bothering him. "The
whole business is not to my liking. I think there must be
some mistake,"

"Indeed? Not to your liking?" The chamberlain's haughty
glare could have withered many a man.

"No,  it is  not.   Indeed.   Something  is  wrong  with  this
scheme. Why am I to do this?"

"Because it is required of you, if you wish to participate
fully in the powers of the East."

"If you cannot give me any more definite reason, let us
go back to Som, and I will question him."

It cost Chup some further argument, and the nearly in-
credulous displeasure of the chamberlain, but at last he
was led upward again, and admitted to see Som once more.
This time he found the viceroy apparently quite alone, in
a small chamber below the audience hall. In spite of half a
dozen torches on the walls, the place seemed dim and cold.
It was a clammy room, nearly empty of furniture except for
the plain chair Som was sitting in, and the small plain table
before him. On that table there stood upright mirrors, and
at the focus of the mirrors a candle guttered, topped with
a wavering tongue of darkness instead of flame, casting all
around it an aura of night instead of luminance. Som's face
turned toward the candle was all but invisible, and what little
Chup could see of it looked less human than before.

In answer to the silent interrogation of that face turned
toward him, Chup came to attention. In a clear voice he
said: "High Lord Som, I have taken and given orders
enough to understand that orders must be followed. But
when I think an order is mistaken, then it is my duty to
question it, if there is time. I question the usefulness of this
initiation, in the form I am told it is to follow."

Som the Dead was silent for a little time, as if such an
objection were something unheard-of, and he had no idea
how to deal with it. But when he answered, his dry voice
was hard to read. "What is it you dislike about the pledg-
ing?"

"Excuse me, High Lord Som. That I dislike it is beside
the point. I can carry out orders that I find unpleasant. But
this ... I see no benefit in this, for you, for me, for anyone."
That sounded weak. "Excuse me if I speak clumsily, I am
no courtier . . . yes. That's just it, High Lord. I am a fighter,
What can a thing like this prove of my ability?"

Som's voice did not change; his face remained unreadable.
"Exactly what did my chamberlain tell you was required
of you?"

Chup stood a little more at ease. "I am to take the wom-
an Charmian from her cell. Tell her that I'm helping her
escape. Then I am to lead her down into the pit, where
dwells our High Lord Zapranoth. There I am to give her
to the demon, to be devoured—possessed—whatever Zapra-
noth may do with human folk."

The answer was quick and cold. "The chamberlain spoke
our will correctly, then. That is what we require of you,
Lord Chup."

A good soldier, supposing he had ever gotten himself in
this deep, would know that this was the moment to salute,
turn and leave. Chup knew it; yet he lingered. The hollows
of darkness that were Som's eyes remained aimed at him
steadily. Then Som said: "The strong magic of a love-charm
once bound you to that woman, but my magicians tell me
you are free of that. What are your feelings for her now?"

In a flash of relief Chup understood, or thought he did.
"Demons! I'm sorry, Lord. Do you mean, have I affection
for her? Hah! That's what you're testing." He almost laughed.
"If you want me to feed her to the demons, well and good.
Ill drag her to the pit and toss her in, and sing about my
work!"

"In that case, what is your objection?" Som's voice was
still cold and hard, but reasonable.

"I ... High Lord, what good will it do to test my skill
in lying and intrigue? To see if she believes me when I
promise to help her? You'll have other men in your service
far more cunning in such matters than I am. But you'll have
few or none who'll fight like me."

"The test seems useless to you, then."

"Yes, sir."

"Does a good soldier argue all orders that seem to him
useless? Or, as you said before, only those that seem mis-
taken?"

Silence stretched out following the question. Chup's stub-
born dissatisfaction remained, but his will was wavering. The
more he tried to pin down what was bothering him and put
it into words, the more foolish his objections seemed. What
harm could he suffer, in obediently carrying out this test,
that could compare with all he stood to gain from it? Yet,
encouraged by Som's seeming patience, he made an effort
and tried once more to speak his inner feelings.

"This thing that you would have me  do is  small,  and

mean .. ." Then try as he might he could not form his shape-
less revulsion any further; he made a weak and futile gesture
and fell silent. Despite the clamminess of the chamber,
sweat was trickling down his ribs. Now his coming here to
argue seemed nothing but a hideous blunder. Why shouldn't
he do anything to the woman they wanted done? Had she
bewitched him yet again? But no, it wasn't that he cared
what happened to her ... the face of Som was growing
hard to look at And there were no perfumes here . . . but
Chup was long used to the air of battlefields.

The viceroy shifted in his seat, and lo, was very manlike
once again. The dark flame that had risen burned down
to only a spark of night. Som said: "My loyal Chup. As you
say, your talents are not those of a courtier; but they are
considerable. Therefore will I not punish you for this in-
solent questioning; therefore will I condescend this once to
explanation.

"The test you do not like is given you because you do
not like it, because you have shown reluctance to do things
that you think of as 'small and mean.' To pledge yourself
formally to the East is no meaningless ritual. In your case it
will mean changing yourself, importantly, and I realize full
well it can be very difficult. It is to do violence to your old
self, in the name of that which you are going to become."

Time was stretching on in the odd little room, until it
seemed to Chup almost as if the raw presence of a demon
had come to perch between him and Som. Like a man
dreaming or entranced, Chup asked: "What am I going
to become?"

"A great lord with the full powers of the East to call
upon. The master of all that you have ever craved."

"But. How shall I change myself? To what?"

"To become as I am. No, no, not dead and leathery; I
was playing with the woman when I told her she would be
so. That is given only to me, here in the Black Mountains. I
mean you shall become as I am in your mind and inward
self. Now will you take the test?"

"My lord, I will."

"You are obedient." Som leaned closer, looking intently
from his sunken eyes. "But in your case I wish for more than
that. Loyal Chup, if you still had some affection for the
woman, then merely to throw her to the demons might well
suffice for your initiation. But as things are, it is not the

woman, it is something else, within yourself, you must de-
stroy ere you are ours completely."

Som rose from his chair. He was not tall, but he seemed
to tower above Chup as he leaned yet closer, with his smell
of old death. "You must be for once not brave, but cowardly.
Small and mean, as you describe it. It will be this difficult
only once. You must learn to cause pain, for the sake of
nothing but causing pain. Only thus will you be bound to us
entirely. Only thus will there be opened for you the inner
secrets of power and the inner doors of wealth. And how
can I give command of my Guard to one who is not bound
to me and to the East?"
"The Guard . . ."

"Yes. The present Guard commander's aged and scarred
well past his peak of usefulness. And you know Thomas of
the Broken Lands, who is planning to assail us here, you
know him and how he thinks and fights."

Not only an officer, but once again the commander of an
army in the field . . . "My High Lord, I will do it! I hesitate
no morel"

When Chup had gone, the viceroy returned to brooding
on his other problems. What power was it, almost equal to
his own, that dwelt in the circlet of gold hair and almost
woke in him the old desires of life?
His wizards would find out, in time.

In all their divinations lately, a threatening sign, the name
of Ardneh, loomed up from the West. A name, with nothing
real as yet attached to it. But it was in that sign, they said,
that the Broken Lands and other satrapies along the sea-
coast had been lost...

CHAPTER    7

It was the hour before the dawn. The army of the West
was gathered in the moonless night, close below the cliffs
that supported and protected the citadel of Som the Dead.
It had been a long night for the Westerners already, of
traveling by scattered bands and companies in long, thin
files, each man keeping just in sight of the one ahead, so
that an army was invisibly reassembled here in the shadow

of the cliffs. A long night already, and a longer day about
to start.

Thomas had been right about the reptiles, Rolf was think-
ing now, as he trudged up a small hillock to where his com-
mander stood looking upward at the black, night-shrouded
cliffs. Rolf's breath steamed in the air before his face. The
onset of winter's chill, more noticeable at this altitude than
it had been near the seashore, had kept the reptiles close to
their roosts, had prevented their scouting out the army of
the West during the days as it lay hiding in a hundred
fragments. Night by night they had crept closer to Som's
citadel.

Rolf reached the spot where Thomas stood, alone for
once, his head tipped back. There seemed little to be seen,
gazing upward, except the stars above the cliffs, whose tops
seemed but little below the twinkling sparks.

"I think it's going to work," Rolf reported. He then went
into some detail, while Thomas listened. Rolf had recently
been given his first command, a work party of men to set
in order and inspect the balloon-craft that the djinn pro-
duced. All through this night the technology-djinn had la-
bored at Gray's direction, making airships. Loford and the
Other wizards had concentrated on preventing the army's
discovery by demon or diviner dwelling on the cliffs above.

It seemed that Gray had now learned to manage the
djinn successfully, Rolf reported. At the foot of the cliffs
were twenty balloons tugging gently at their mooring ropes,
each of the twenty capable of carrying five armed men. The
balloons were to ascend connected in pairs by stout lines,
and longer cords would fasten each pair to the ones be-
hind it and ahead, so the hundred men would find them-
selves together at the top, not scattered into ineffectiveness.

"Once we begin it, it had better work," said Thomas, nod-
ding, when Rolf had finished detailing his report. Thomas
himself was one of the hundred men ascending by balloon
to seize a foothold on the cliffs, to which the rest of the
army hopefully could climb. Rolf was going up, to order
the maneuvering and landing of balloons, and Gray, as
wizard and technologist both. The other ninety-seven had
been hand-picked from the fiercest warriors. At first Thomas
had contemplated lifting his whole army in an aerial assault
But testing and maneuvering, by night and day, on various
smaller cliffs between here and the Broken Lands, had dis-

suaded him. The number of things that could go wrong had
proven almost limitless, and the time available for practicing
was not. In maneuvers, the stunt had been worked success-
fully with as many as fifteen balloons. He had decided to
risk twenty, and his hundred finest men, to seize the upper
ending of the pass and hold it open for his army to march
up.

Thomas now had nothing more to say. Rolf, who had
known him from his earliest days of leadership—not so long
ago—wanted to offer more encouragement, but hesitated
to interrupt what might be a necessary pause for thought.
The pause was not long before Thomas turned suddenly
and strode off down the hill. Rolf hurried after.

Most of Thomas's other officers were waiting for him, in
a body, and he strode in among them briskly. "All here
who are supposed to be? Once more: our flares will burn
with a green fire, to signal you to start to climb the pass.
We'll sound horns at the same time, as we've rehearsed.
Once you get the word, by sound or light or both, that
we've seized the top of the pass, come up as if a hundred
demons were behind you."

"Instead of waiting for us at the top, aye!" There were
sounds of nervous laughter.

Gray's tall figure loomed up. In one hand he raised what
appeared to be a quite ordinary satchel. "The demons at
Som's command number far fewer than a hundred. And I
have the lives of two of the strongest of them in here."

"Zapranoth? Zapranoth's life?" The murmured question
came from several of the men at once.

Gray, perhaps irritated, raised his voice slightly. "These
are the lives of Yiggul, and of Kion. I have had them in my
possession for some time, though for the sake of secrecy I
have said nothing about them until now. And I have let
them live, so I can destroy them when Som has called them
up, thrown them into battle, and is depending on them. I am
sure many of you know their names; they are both formidable
powers."

There was silence.

Gray lowered his satchel. "You will see me blow them
away like clouds of mist, before they have had time to do us
the least harm."

"Not Zapranoth's life," one low-voiced listener said.

"No!" Gray snapped. "His life eludes us still. But these

two are the strongest of the other demons. With these two
gone, we can beat off the smaller fry like insects, my
brother and I, with other good men here to help us. We will
not need the lesser demons' lives to drive them off."

There was no comment.

Gray went on, a little louder still: "Then, with all the
others gone, we will be free to deal with him. Myself,
Loford, the other stout wizards here. Zapranoth is mighty,
well, so are we. We will hold off him or any other power,
until your swords have won the day."

"And that we will do," Thomas put in with great firmness.
"Any questions? Remember what you've been told about
the valkyries. Let's move, the light is coming." He gripped
hands all round with his officers, and led the way toward
the moored balloons. Thomas planned to go up with the
ninth pair of airships, or perhaps the last, thinking this
would give him the best opportunity of judging if the attack
should be abandoned or pressed home.

Rolf trotted to take his place in the basket of the leading
balloon. He felt weak in the knees, as usual before a fight,
but he knew that it would pass. It crossed his mind as he
and Gray were boarding their separate balloons that he
had never seen the wizard sleep. If Gray felt any fatigue
from his night-long supervision of the djinn, he did not show
it. Gray was compelling the djinn to accompany his balloon,
and had even forced it somehow to dim the intensity of its
fiery image; Rolf could see it like a floating patch of camp-
fire embers in the shadow of the great hulking gasbag of
Gray's balloon, some thirty meters distant. Tests had shown
that the lifting gas provided by the djinn would not burn,
but the problem of arrow-proofing the bags had not been
entirely solved. They were protected to some extent by
draped sheets of chain-mail whose rings were lighter than
metal, made, as were the bags themselves, of something that
the djinn called plastic.

Rolf had argued at some length for using to the full the
tremendous powers of the djinn, delaying the campaign as
long as necessary to exercise its abilities and try out the
results; it seemed to him that in a few months enough Old
World arms, armor, and techniques might be acquired and
understood to give the army an overwhelming advantage
against the East.

But Gray  had vetoed  such  a plan.  "For two reasons.

First, not all Old World devices will work now as neatly
and reliably as they did in the Old World. This is true in
particular of certain advanced weapons. I do not fully un-
derstand, myself, why this should be; but I have my means
of knowledge, and it is so."

"We could experiment—"

"With devices far more perilous than balloons? No, I do
not think that we are ready. The second reason, and perhaps
the stronger"—here Gray paused for a moment, looking round
as if to make sure that he was not overheard—"is the chance
that our djinn will perish in this battle. We are facing Zapra-
noth, and such a blow is far from impossible. It would leave
us without help in operating and maintaining our Old World
weapons. No. Better that we fight with means we under-
stand, depending on no one but ourselves once battle is
joined."

Waiting now in the basket for the signal to ascend, Rolf
grinned nervously at the impassive Mewick at his side.
"Mewick, will you one day teach me to use weapons?" he
asked in a low voice. It was something of an old joke be-
tween them, for Rolf at least. Mewick could joke, but not
about his craft of killing. He had already taught Rolf most
of what Rolf knew along that line. Now he only shook his
head at Rolf in faint reproach and let his expression deepen
into gloom.

The first balloons had their full complements of men
aboard; the crews who were to do the launching were mov-
ing about briskly and capably in the gloom. It was an army
practiced in night actions, and many of its men had followed
Thomas before on seemingly mad assaults. They were going
forward now like workmen to their trade.

Rolf did not see when Thomas gave the final signal for
the attack, but those who were required to see did so. Two
men standing by the mooring ropes each tugged and re-
leased a knot, and Rolf beheld the dim cliffside, ten meters
from his face, begin abruptly to slide down in silence. Gray's
balloon kept pace, its basket rocking gently, the dim fire
of the image of the djinn suspended near it. The line con-
necting Rolf's balloon to Gray's drew gently taut, then slack-
ened again. The longer lines, that the next craft were to
follow up, were paid out from their reels outside the baskets.

The edge of sky that Rolf could see past the bottom of
his balloon was now brightening with a hint of dawn. Higher

the two baskets swung, moving in the perfect silence of a
dream, emerging now from the deeper shadows at the base
of the cliffs, so that the rocky walls before them grew rapid-
ly more distinct. Turning for a moment to the west, Rolf
could see the plains and desert, night-bound still, stretching
far into vague, retreating darkness. His homeland, and the
ocean, would be visible from here by day. But there was no
time now to think of that.

Up and up ...

He gave a start that was a literal jump, and his drawn
sword snapped up in his hand to guard position, as the utter
quiet was shattered by the strident cawing of a reptile. The
creature had been dozing on the cliff face, a pebble's toss
from the balloons, and it had wakened to see the strange
shapes soaring past. Sluggish with chill, wings laboring, it
came out in a dark and slow explosion from the rocks, and
fled them upward strainingly. Mewick and others who had
their arrows nocked were quick to draw and loose at it, and
it was hit but only hurt, it seemed. Clamoring all the louder,
it flew on up above the great gasbags and out of sight.

From somewhere farther up there came a slow-voiced, caw-
ing answer, and then another, higher yet. Then there was
silence once more, until it almost seemed that the citadel
might have returned to sleep.

Up and up. The men hanging in the baskets, straining
to see and hear, had little to say to one another. Rolf
found himself gripping the basket's wicker rim, inside the
quilted armor-padding, trying to lift the craft into a faster
climb. He could see Gray murmuring to the djinn.

Rolf was expecting that at any moment they would top
the cliff, but they had not done so before there came sure
proof that the enemy had awakened. It was a small squadron
of reptiles on reconnaissance. Their cawing and snarling was
heard above, and then the soft thumps of their bodies
striking atop the gasbags. The craft continued to rise steadi-
ly. It seemed that the mail of plastic links had proven too
tough for reptilian teeth and claws, and their bodies were
not weighty enough to hold down the balloons. Perhaps
Gray had ordered the djinn to pump more; lifting gas into
the bags.

When the reptiles flew down below the bags to find the
baskets, arrows and slung stones bit at them accurately.
They screamed and raged and fled; some fell, transfixed

by shafts, turned into weights with fluttering fringes drop-
ping through the brightening sky.

And now came the first sign that Som's fighting men
were reacting to the attack. Rolf saw men in black-trimmed
uniforms running on ledges of the cliffs. A slung stone
thunked on the padding-armor right in front of him, and
he crouched lower. A fur-clad Northman in Rolfs basket
loosed an arrow in reply, and on the cliff face a man
dropped, toppled and slid on the steep slope, trying to cling
to it with the shaft in him, plowing up a little avalanche.
The balloon carried Rolf above the scene before he saw its
outcome.

He knew they could not have much farther to ascend, but
still the top came as a surprise. The cliff face ended, fell
back abruptly into a tableland, rough and split by many
crevices, but essentially flat. At the rear of this horizontal
reach, Som's low-walled citadel sprawled, backed by the
next leap upward of the mountain. Across the little distance
that separated his balloon from Gray's, Rolf heard the
wizard barking orders to the djinn. The two balloons, each
trailing a long spider-filament of line behind it, slowed and
stopped their ascent just above the rim of the cliff. Just
here, almost beneath Rolf now, the narrow pass delivered
the road it had caught up on the plain below; this, the head
of the pass, was what the aerial assault must take and hold.

Modest earthworks on one side of the debouching road
defended the pass against a climbing army, and in fact
formed the only real defense short of the citadel's own
walls. These works manned by half a hundred men might
easily hold the road, it seemed, against Thomas's four thou-
sand, so great was their advantage of position. Ten or twelve
men were in the trenches now, pulling on black helmets and
gaping confusedly at the balloons. Their fortification offered
no protection against men dropping from the sky.

Gray was smoothly ordering the operations of the djinn.
Gas hissed from the bag above Rolf's head; the basket he
was riding skimmed the rock, just in from the cliff's edge.
He pitched out a metal grapple on a line, and leaped
right after it The balloon bobbed up with the removal of
his weight; for a moment he stood there alone, the sole
invader of Som's stronghold. But in the moment it took him
to catch the grapple and fix it in one of the many crevices
in the rock, Mewick was standing beside him, short sword

and battle-hatchet at the ready. Then with thudding sandals
others were landing, at their right and at their left. Gray
swung from his bobbing basket, agile-seeming as a youth.
Across ten meters of empty ground the ten invaders faced
the unfortified rear of the strong point that looked so in-
domitably down the pass; ten black-helmeted Guardsmen,
more or less, stared back as if uncertain they were real.

Excepting Rolf and Gray, the aerial troops had been hand-
picked for guts and viciousness, and those proved first in
fighting skill had been selected for the first balloons. The
struggle for the earthwork began without an order, in the
space of one short breath, and it was over in the time one
might draw a long breath and release a sigh; only one of
the West had been cut down. Rolf sprang forward with
the rest, but all the enemy were slaughtered before he had
a chance to strike a blow. Still gripping his unmarred
sword he turned to Gray; the towering wizard with a mo-
tion of his arm was already sending out the signal of green
fire, bright as a small sun in the morning sky, leaping and
shining in the air above the pass.

Rolf turned and cried out: "Sound the horn!" A North-
man, blood from a scalp wound running in his eyes, had
the twisting beast-horn already at his lips; he gave a nod,
and winded it with all his might.

Sheathing his weapon, Rolf ran back to his balloons, made
them secure with double grapples, and deciding where the
second pair should land. He was none too soon, for they
were close below and rising rapidly. When they arrived,
he helped to land them, pulling on the thin ropes that the
first balloons had trailed, while their fierce passengers leaped
out and set themselves to hold the pass and landing place.
Rolf stayed at the landing place, seeing that the new balloons
were tied down, and looking for the next. When he glanced
toward the citadel, he heard alarms and signals there, and
saw men running on the walls, and reptiles in a sluggish
swarm" above them. The main gates had been open, and
still were; at any moment a force must sally out to push
the Westerners from the cliff. Rolf looked the other way,
down the road that became a twisty ribbon marking the
bottom of the pass, but the army of the West was still in-
visible. It would be hours before their legs could bring them
to this height.

In the earthworks, men had already methodically sepa-

rated the slaughtered Guardsmen's heads from their bodies,
gathered the freed collars and thrown them down the cliff;
the valkyries, coming down from the high mountain, hov-
ered and sniffed but could find no one to save. Rolf and the
others, taught by Gray to expect the flying things, still stared
at them, Rolf with particular fascination. Again he could
not shake the feeling that Thomas should have waited to
attack, delayed his campaign until they could have forced
the djinn to give them some far more certain means of
winning than balloons.

"Demons!" someone called out. It was not an expletive,
but a warning.

Faces turned to Gray. He had already seen the disturb-
ances in the air a little way from the citadel, hanging low,
more like the roiling of heat above fires than like rainclouds.
Opening his satchel, he pulled out of it a flowery but weed-
like little vine, wrapped as if for sustenance around a piece
of what looked like damp and maggoty wood. From some-
where there came into Gray's other hand a silvery-gleam-
ing knife.

As the two presences drifted nearer in the lower air,
sweeping reptiles in a timid swarm before them, Gray brought
the blade near the tender, innocent green tendrils of the
vine. He muttered a few words in a low voice—and cut.
Silver flashed in the sky above the citadel, like a reflec-
tion or mirage of an enormous axe. The blow that struck one
of the demons came in utter silence, but was irresistible
nonetheless; its image in the air split in two spinning halves.
Gray scarcely looked up; his hands, like those of some aging,
maddened gardener, kept at their work, severing and pluck-
ing leaf from stem, slicing, splitting, and demolishing the
vine. Gray breathed upon the rotten wood, and green flame
sprouted from it. In unburned hands he held it up, watch-
ing the clean flame devour the clinging fragments of the
petals, leaves, and stems. "Yiggul," he said with feeling, "trou-
ble our fair world no more." And he chanted verses in a
language Rolf did not know.

Fire burned now in the sky as well, consuming the scat-
tered pieces of the demon. Its companion paused in his
advance, but then came drifting on again.

"Now, Kion," Gray addressed the demon remaining, "let
us say farewell to you." He reached into his satchel once
more.

The roiling disturbance in the air, the size of a small
house, shook for a moment as if with fear or rage, then came
toward Gray like a hurled missile. Some of the men around
the wizard threw up their arms or ducked their heads; others,
just as uselessly, raised shield and blade. Gray shot forth his
arm, and the object he had pulled from his satchel—it looked
like some trinket of cheap metal—was held above the chunk
of burning wood. The hurtling demon was transformed into
a ball of glowing heat. Rolf heard, more in his mind than
in his ears, a scream of pain beyond anything he had yet
heard upon the field of war. Kion's course was bent from
what he had intended. He struck the earth far from the
Western men, spattering flames and rock about his point
of impact, where he left a molten scar; he bounded up
again, twisting and spinning like an unguided firework, and
all the while the scream went on unbreathingly, and Gray's
unburning hand held the bauble in the fire. The metal of
it, tin or lead mayhap, melted in beautiful silvery drops that
fell into the flame and there unnaturally disappeared. And
as the bauble melted, so diminished the fireball that had
been the mighty demon Kion, flashing madly from one part
of the sky to another until it vanished in a final streak of
brilliance.

Gray pressed his hand down on the fiercely burning
wood, and it went out like a candle. "What are these others
here?" Gray asked in a low voice. "Do they propose to try
our strength, after what we have just done?" Rolf saw that
there were indeed a scattering of other disturbances in the
air, man-sized waverings visible to him only now when the
larger two were gone. He heard, or felt, the thrummings of
their power. Alone, he might have fallen down or fled be-
fore the least of them. Standing here with Gray and Loford
now, he found he minded these minor demons no more than
so many sweat-bees or mosquitoes. And now as if they had
heard Gray's challenge, and chose not to accept it, the
swarm of them began to disappear. Rolf could not have said
just how; one moment the air above the citadel was thick
with them, then they were fewer, and soon they were no
more.

"So, then, masters of the Black Mountains," mused Gray,
still in the same low tone of conversation, that you would not
think was audible ten meters off. He stood straight, dusting
his hands absently against one another. "So. Do you mean

then to let our differences be settled by the sword? In the
name of my bold companions here I challenge you: march
out and try with blades to pry us from this rock!"

Rolf heard no answer from the citadel, only a shouting
from behind him, where more balloons were ready to dis-
charge their fighting men. He ran back to take charge of
the docking. Thomas, in a gleaming barbut-helm, had come
impatiently ahead of schedule to see what was going on
atop the cliff and take charge of the fighting.

When Rolf turned back toward the citadel he could see
through the open gates that men were marshalling inside as
if to sally out in strength. The evidences of confusion had
been replaced by the appearance of purpose.

"Som is on the battlement," said someone. "See, there. I
think he wears a crown of gold."

Rolf shivered. The day was chill. Winter was near at hand,
and this place was high.

"If he takes the field," warned Loford, "do not strike at
him, but only ward his blows. The wound you would inflict
on Som the Dead is likely to become your own to bear."

Gray, too, was shivering, calling for a cloak. Of course it
should be cold.

But why should the sun seem dimmer, when there were
no clouds? And Rolf had a feeling in his guts like that of
being lost, alone, at night amid a host of enemies . . . and
now, why should he think there might be something wrong
with the mountain, that it might crumble and collapse be-
neath his feet? Loford, Thomas, all of them, were beginning
to look at one another with eyes of dread.
Gray, in his low voice, said: "Zapranoth is coming."

CHAPTER    8

Chup nodded once to the expectant-looking jailor—not a
Guardsman—who stood near the door of Charmian's cell,
on the wide part of the ledge that wound both up and
down the demons' chimney. There was no one else in sight.
The man responded with a facial contortion that might
represent a smile, and took two steps backward to a spot
well shaded from the feeble glimmerings of dawn now prob-

ing down the chimney. There he let himself down carefully
and lay still, only his feet remaining clearly visible, to look
like those of a man laid low by stealthy violence.

Half a dozen strides brought Chup to the cell door, where
he paused a moment to try the seating of his new sword in
its sheath, and give a loosening shake to the nerve-tight
muscles of his shoulders. He thought in wonder that if he
were plotting a real escape for Charmian, instead of this
safe pledging trickery, he would not be quite as tense as
this.

He stood his lighted torch against the wall. The heavy
bar grated as he raised it from the door of Charmian's cell,
and he reminded himself to strive more realistically for si-
lence. Cautiously he put the key he had been given into the
lock and turned it. With only a faint squeaking of hinges,
the massive door swung outward at his pull. Chup's shadow,
jumping in the torchlight, fell before him into the uncleanness
of the cell. There in his shadow Charmian huddled on the
floor, wearing the same black clothing of her audience with
Som. The shimmering garments, slit revealingly, seemed wild-
ly out of place.

When she recognized Chup, the sharp terror in Char-
mian's face turned dull; she had evidently expected visitors
even more menacing than he.

He stepped back from the doorway and said in a low
voice: "Come out, and quickly." When she did not move
at once he added: "I'm going to try to set you free."

The words sounded so utterly false in his own ears that
it seemed to him impossible for clever Charmian to believe
them for a moment. But she stood up and came toward
him, though hesitantly at first. Her blond hair hung dis-
heveled, half-concealing her face. Without a word she came
out of the cell, and stood against the wall, her face averted
from him, while he played the game of dragging the sham-
ming guard into the cell and barring up the door again.
Then at a motion of Chup's head she followed close behind
him as he set foot upon the path that spiraled downward
through the chimney. Chup had picked up his torch again,
and it was useful now, though the trickle of morning light
was slowly brightening.

How could she have believed him? But whether she did or
not, she was following. They had gone down perhaps two

hundred paces, when Charmian in a small voice broke the
silence: "Where are we going?"

He answered, without turning. "We must go down, in
order to get out."

Her footsteps behind him stopped. "But down there is
where the demons nest. There is no way out, down there."

Startled, he too stopped, and turned. "How do you
know? Have you come this way before?"

She in turn seemed to be startled, by the question. "No.
No, how could I have?" Uncharacteristically, she was not
looking directly at him.

"Then follow me," he growled, and turned away and
started down again. After a moment her soft footfalls fol-
lowed. She must believe his masquerade, or she would be
screaming at him or pleading. But the evidence of success
brought him no satisfaction.

Pretending to be cautious and alert, looking this way and
that, pausing now and then as if to listen, he led her down
toward the pit. He felt weary and awkward; he was not cut
out for this game. It will mean changing yourself, Som had
said, you must do violence to your old self. Yet what he
was supposed to do was basically quite simple, and on
the surface there was nothing in it difficult for a bold man.
He was to bring her down (by fair words and promises, not
by force—that had been emphasized) to the Demon-Lord's
chamber at the bottom of this hole. There where she ex-
pected a door to freedom he was to give her to the demon.
And then he was to run away. If he did not run away, and
briskly, the chamberlain had warned him, Zapranoth in his
demonic humor might nip him too.

His pledging was a task for one who giggled and ran
away, and Chup now liked it less than ever. He did not
see how he could succeed, how Charmian could fail from
one moment to the next to guess the truth. Well, let her.
But no, she followed him obediently. He realized suddenly
how desperate she must have been, how ready to grasp at
any hope.

His pretended alertness suddenly became real. From be-
low, where all had been ominous silence, there arose now a
murmuring strange sound which he did not at once identify
but which he did not like.

The first whisper of it froze Charmian in her tracks be-

hind him. "Demons!" she whimpered, in a voice of certainty
and resignation.

Chup had been assured there would be no interference,
no distractions, while they were going down. He took a step
back, fighting his own fear of demons, trying to think. Think-
ing was not easy; the sound grew rapidly louder, and at
the same time more plainly wrong. It put Chup in mind of
the gasping of some unimaginable animal; it made him think
of a terrible wind come blowing through the solid earth.

Now there was a light below, a pinkish glow, as well as
sound. Chup could make no plan. As if by instinct, seeking
each other's humanity, he and Charmian put their arms
around each other and crouched down on the narrow path.
The sound was almost deafening now, a climbing clamor
flying upward from the pit. With it came the aura of sick-
ness that accompanied demonic power, an aura stronger than
Chup had ever felt before. The brightening roseate light
seemed to quench the torch that he had dropped, and to
drive back the feebly growing glimmerings of the sun. He
clenched his eyes shut, held his breath—and the rush, as
of a multitude of beings, passed by them and was gone.

"Demons," Charmian once more whimpered. "Yes . . . oh,
it seems that I remember them, rushing by me in this place.
But how?"

"What do you remember? Have you been down this pit?"
he rasped at her. He wondered if she was planning some
deception. But she only shook her head, continuing to avert
her face.

He pulled her to her feet and led her down the curving
path once more. What else could he do? His torch was
gone, but there was daylight enough now trickling down
to show the path. They came to a doorway, but when he
peered in there was nothing but an alcove, no way out. No
way out . . . but he must go on to pass his pledging, to
reach the power of the inner circles of the East

What else could he do? Down and down they went,
though very slowly now.

Soon it began again, the noise far down below the
climbing fast.

"It is Zapranoth," said Charmian.

This time a bass quaver, that told of madness rampant in
the foundation of the world; this time the whole world shud-

dered and sickened with the coming up, and the light it
cast before was blue and horrible.

Charmian began to scream: "Lord Z—"
Chup grabbed her, stifling her mouth beneath his palm,
and cast himself and her once more down upon the narrow
curving ledge, this time at full length, with both their faces
turned toward the wall of rock. With a twisting and a
stretching of the universe, with impacts of great footfalls smit-
ing air and rock, the blaring, glaring Lord of Demons tram-
pled past them. If they were seen, they were ignored, as
two ants might have been.

Chup did not see the demon. His eyes had shut them-
selves, and at the moment of the demon's closest presence
all his bones seemed turned to jelly. This must be Zapranoth.
Against this, no use to think of showing bravery; compared to
this, the demons rising earlier had been small. And the
demon who, days ago, had entered his beggar's hovel to heal
and threaten him—that one had been a nasty child, making
faces, nothing more.

When the world was still and sane and tolerable once
more, he raised his head, gripped Charmian by the hair,
and turned her face toward him. "How did you know that
it was him? From far away, when first he started up?"

She looked convincingly bewildered. "I don't know . . . my
Lord Chup, I do not know. By his sound? But how could I
have heard him, met him, ever, and forgotten it? You are
right, I knew at once that it was he. But I don't know how
I knew."

Chup got slowly to his feet. There was one small comfort:
the game he was to play could not proceed until the Demon-
Lord came back, from whatever unforeseen errand had called
him out. Chup would have to find some means of stalling
until then. But at the moment he could think of no plausible
excuse for staying where they were. Slowly he led Char-
mian downward once again.

They had gone but two more turns around the gradually
narrowing chimney when there came a different and more
human sound, from far above. It was faint, but to Chup's
ears unmistakable—the cry and clash of men at war. Chup
listened, knowing now what had called the demons forth. No
one in the citadel had thought it possible for Thomas to
make a direct assault; well, it was not the first time he had
been underestimated.

So the wait for Zapranoth might prove to be a long one,
though it seemed a safe prediction that he ultimately would
return triumphant It was hard to imagine that Thomas
could raise a power equal to the Demon-Lord, even if he
could get his army up the pass. Chup grinned the way he
did when he felt pain. He led Charmian on down until
they came to another doorway into another blind alcove.
There he took her by the arm and pulled her in.

"What is it?" she whispered, terrified anew.

"Nothing. Just that we must wait a bit."

He expected her to ask him why, and wondered how he
could answer. But she only stood there with her eyes down-
cast, face half-hidden by her hair. Surely this behavior was
a pose, part of some plan she was evolving. He had seen her
terrified before, but never meek and silent.

Considering what to do next, he sat down with his back
against the wall, watching the entrance to their alcove. Al-
most timidly, she slid down beside him. In her new, small
voice she said: "Lord Chup, when I was in the cell, I
hoped it would be you who came for me."

He grunted. Then asked: "Why?"

"Oh, not that you would come to help me, I didn't dare
hope that. Even now . . . but I knew that if you came to
take revenge, you would be quick and clean about it. Not
like Som, not like any of the others."

He grunted again. Suddenly anxious to know what it
would feel like now, freed of all enchantments, he pulled
her near, so that their mouths and bodies were crushed
together. She gasped and tensed, as if surprised—and then
responded, with all her skill and much more willingness than
ever before.

And he discovered that to him, the touch of her meant
nothing. It was no more than hugging some huge breathing
doll. He let her go.

To his surprise, she clung to him. It seemed that she was
weeping. He had never seen her do this act before; puz-
zled, he waited to learn its point.

Now between her sobs she choked out: "You—you find
me then—not too much changed?"

"Changed?" Then he remember certain things, that made
a pattern with the pieces of her puzzling behavior, and sud-
denly that behavior was understandable. "No. No, you are
not changed at all. Our mighty viceroy was lying about

the destruction of your beauty. You look as good as ever,
except for a little dirt." For the first time in a long while
Chup could hear his own voice as an easy, natural thing.

Charmian stared at him for a moment and dared to believe
him. Her sobs changed abruptly into cries of joy and relief.
"Oh, Chup, you are my lord—my high and only lord." She
choked on fragments of strange laughter.

Feelings Chup had not known were his came fastening
on him now like mad familiars. He could not sort them out
or put them down. He groaned aloud, jumped up, and
pulled Charmian to her feet. He seized her shoulders, grip-
ping them until it seemed that bones might crunch, while
she gasped uncomprehendingly. Then, still holding her with
his left hand, he drew back his right and swung it, open-
palmed but with all his rage. "That, for betraying me, for
using me, for trying to have me killed!"

The blow stretched her out flat, and silenced all her
cries. A little time passed before she stirred and groaned
and sat up, for once ungracefully. Her hair no longer hid
her face. Blood dripped from her mouth and there was a
lump already swelling on her cheek. She finally could ask
him, in the most dazed and tiniest of voices: "Why now?
Why hit me now?"

"Why, better late than never. I take my revenge my own
way, as you said. Not like Som, nor any of the others here."
Gripping his sword hilt, he looked out of the alcove, up
and down the spiral path. Let them come against him now,
he was Chup, his own man, and so he meant to die.

When he saw no understanding in her dazed face, he went
on: "Shake your head and get it clear. I was not to lead
you out of this foul place. I was to play the court jester
for Som and Zapranoth; thus should I prove my fitness to
join the elite of the East. No, a free man's service they
will not have. They must have pledgings, and grovelings,
and for all I know, kissings of their hinder parts as well.
Then will they open to their tested slave the secrets of pow-
er and the doors of wealth. So they say. Liars. Gigglers at
cripples, and pullers of wings from flies. I know not if Som
stinks of death—or only loadbeast-droppings!"

He felt better for that lengthy speech, and better still
for the action that had just preceded it. Now there ensued
a silence, while his breathing slowed and Charmian's grew
steadier, and she ceased to moan.

And now once more he heard, from far above, the clash
and cry of many men at arms.

Charmian, her voice now nearly normal, asked: "Is that
Thomas's assault we hear? The one our generals thought
could not be made?"

Chup grunted.

"They of the West bear me great hatred," Charmian said.
"But if I've any choice I'll go to them instead of Som."

"You'd be wise, if you could do so. They in the West are
living men, and many would fall down swooning at a flutter
of your eyelids. What is it now?"

Some thought or memory had brought a look of new
surprise into her face. "Chup. I have never been down into
this cave before—and yet I think I have. Things as they hap-
pen seem familiar. The winding path, these alcoves. The
sounds the demons make in passing, and the feelings that
they bring—the wretched feelings most of all." She shivered.
"But how can I have known them, and not remember plain-
ly?"

His thought was practical. "If you have been in this
cavern, or seen it in some vision, then remember a way out
of it, that we can use."

She gave him a long, probing look, with something in it
of her old haughtiness. Her bruised face did somewhat spoil
the effect "Have you finished now with taking your revenge
on me?"

"I have more important things to think of. Getting out of
here, now that I've spoiled my pledging. Yes, I'll help you
out if you'll help me. But turn treacherous again, and I'll
kick you down the pit at once."

She nodded to him soberly. "Then I'll help you all I can,
for I know what to expect from Som. What must we do?"

"You ask me? I thought you might recall an exit from this
hole. And quickly. While the battle's fierce, we're probably
forgotten."

Doubtfully and anxiously she stared at him, and through
him. "I think—whether it is memory or a vision that I have
—I think that there is no way out for us below." Her voice
grew dreamy. "At the bottom of this chimney there are
only huge blind chambers in the blackened rock. And strange
lights, and the demons roaring past. I would have run back,
screaming, but my father gripped my—" She broke off with
a little cry, her blue eyes widening.

"Your father led you down here? Ekuman?" Chup did
not bother trying to understand that; if it was part of some
new and elaborate deception, he could not see the point
of it. He prompted: "How did you get out? If there's no
way below, we must go up again. Where does the top of this
shaft break out of the mountain?"

She had to make an effort to recall herself, to answer
him. "I don't know. I don't think that I was ever at the
top of this chimney. It seems to me we entered and left it
at the level of the cells . . . Chup, why would my father
bring me here?"

Not answering, Chup led her out of the alcove, and started
on the long ascent, at a good pace. Little was said between
them until they drew near the level of the cells again. Here
Chup proceeded cautiously, but there was still no one else
in sight The cell that had been Charmian's was once more
unbarred and open. Every available man must have been
mobilized to fight; but how long that situation might last
was impossible to guess.

He gripped Charmian by the arm. "You say you entered
and left the shaft here. Remember a way out of the citadel
that we can use."

"I . . ." She rubbed her head wearily. "I can remember
no such way. We should go on to the top. There must be
some exit there, to sunlight if not freedom."

The demons, at least, went out that way. Chup went up
quickly. The occasional sounds of combat were noticeably
louder here.

Still they met no one. The chimney widened around them
as they climbed, passed more and more below them, and
straightened to show them the gray-blue sky, over a mouth
ringed by ragged outcroppings of rock. The path seemed to
go right up to the mouth and out to unbarred freedom.

Chup and Charmian had only one more circuit of the
chimney to climb, to its outlet barely ten meters above
them, when there appeared there against the sky the head
of a man in Guardsman's helm and collar, looking down.
Before Chup could react in any way the man had seen them.
He called out something as if to others behind him, and
withdrew from sight.

"Perhaps I should go first," suggested Charmian, in a
whisper.

"I think so." He would rather not try to fight his way up

this narrow path, against unknown odds. "Ill walk a step
behind you, as your aide." It was unspoken between the
two of them that the men above could not be certain of
Chup's and Charmian's current power and status, not even
if they knew she was a prisoner last night. So things went
in the intrigue-ridden courts of the East.

Charmian ran combing fingers through her hair, put on
a smile, and took the lead. With Chup following impas-
sively they marched another half-turn up the chimney,
which brought them into plain view of the pathway's narrow
exit at the top, and of the men who guarded it. These were
looking down with, to say the least, considerable suspicion.
There were eight or ten of the Guard in view, and Chup
noted with inward discouragement that they included pike-
men and archers.

Anger in her voice, Charmian called up to them: "You,
there, officer! Why do you stare in insolence? Bring cool
water to me! We have slipped and fallen and nearly killed
ourselves upon your miserable path!" For there must be an
explanation of her soiled garments, and of Chup's anger
marked upon her cheek and lips.

The faces of the soldiers turned from hard suspicion to
noncommittal blankness. On Chup's breast the chain that
Som had given him still swung, massive and golden, and
he made sure it could be seen, at the same time he favored
the officer with his best haughty and impatient stare.

The Guards officer—a lieutenant—softened considerably
from his first hard pose. He could not keep his new per-
plexity from showing. "My Lady Charmian. I had heard
that you—" He shifted his stance. "That is, you or no one
else is to be allowed to pass this way, according to the orders
I have been given."

"The lady wanted a good look at the fighting," Chup
said, guiding her forward with a touch. From the way some
of the soldiers kept glancing over their shoulders he guessed
that the action was in plain sight from where they stood.

The lieutenant protested. "Lord, why did you not watch
from the battlement instead?" But he made no attempt to
block their way. Instead he turned to one of his men, order-
ing: "Here, find some water for the lady."

Charmian and Chup had now come right up to the top
of the path, and stood among the soldiers. They had
emerged in the midst of the broken plain, roughly halfway

between the citadel and the sudden drop-off of the cliffs.
Looking out over a breastwork of piled rocks, they had a
good view of the fighting, perhaps three hundred meters
distant. The fight was not at the moment being carried on
with blades, but it was none the less a deadly struggle. Hold-
ing the roadhead at the pass were some fourscore men of
the West, Chup saw, along with the balloons that he guessed
had somehow allowed them to surprise the defenders. The
Guard, or most of it, was drawn up on the plain in battle
ranks, but only waiting now.

Above the ground between the battle lines, drifting like
some foul cloud of smoke, was Zapranoth. The power of the
Demon-Lord was being turned away from Chup, but still
he thought he felt its backlash here, and looked away to-
ward the citadel. Small figures were on the parapet; he
thought he could see Som. Above the fort, a single valkyrie
droned toward its lofty home.

Charmian finished her thirsty drinking from a canteen
handed to her by an awkward soldier. "Oh, captain," she
now smiled, dabbing prettily at her sore lips. "I had heard
you were a man of gallantry, and I believed it true, and I
have climbed that horrible path to reach you. I wish to
see the ending of the battle close at hand, not stand with
all the timid females behind a wall. Surely if I go out a little
way, a little closer, I will still be safe, with you and all these
stalwart men of yours at hand?"

"I . . ." The lieutenant floundered, trying to be firm. It
was so easy for her. Chup marveled in silence, shaking his
head slightly while he took his turn at the canteen. Distant
Guardsmen chanted a war cry, and somewhere a reptile
cawed.

Charmian was going on. "We do not mean that you
should leave your post. The Lord Chup will go with me, but
a little way out upon the plain here ... I will tell you the
truth, there is a wager involved, and I feel I must reward
you if you can help me win it."

The lieutenant had no more chance than if Chup had
come upon him here unarmed and alone. In the space of half
a dozen more breaths Charmian was being helped over the
barricade of stones, her escorting lord beside her. As they
walked out upon the empty, crevice-riven field that stretched
away toward the fighting, he heard the reptile again, cawing
somewhere behind them; and this time he thought he could

make out a word or two within its noise. Chup took his bride
by the arm, as if to steady her on the hazardous ground, and
she heeded the silent increase of his fingers' pressure. They
walked faster. With a stride and a stride and another stride,
the barricade, the soldiers, and the power of the East fell
meter by meter behind them. Not that the way in front was
clear.

". . . escaaaaped!" came the raw reptile cry, much louder
now. "Rewaaards for their bodies, double reward for them
alive! Trrraitor, Chup of the Northern Provinces! Prisoners
escaped, Charrrmian of the Broken Lands!"

Chup ran, dodging with every second or third stride to
spoil the archers' aim. Charmian, close behind him, screamed
as if they had caught her already. Now ahead of him there
loomed across his way a chasm, one of the splits that ran
in deeply from the mountain's edge. It was too wide at this
point for even a desperate man to try to jump. The farther
Chup ran the more treacherously uneven grew the footing,
and he dropped to all fours to scramble over it, even as an
arrow sang past his ear. From the officer's bawled orders
not far behind, he knew that close pursuit was right at hand.
The reptile now shrieked in triumph right above him. Char-
mian cried out her panic with each breath, but her cries
stayed right at Chup's heels.

He reached the edge of the deep crevice. To follow along
it on this footing of broken, tilting rocks would be a slow
and tortuous process, and the pursuit could not fail to catch
up to easy arrow range at once. To jump across the chasm
was impossible. To attempt to scramble down its nearly
vertical side would have seemed at any other time like
madness, but now Chup unhesitatingly began to slide and
grab. Better a quick fall than the demon-pits below the cita-
del. But all was not lost yet: on a slope this steep there
must be overhangs, to offer some protection against missiles
from above; and Chup could see now that at the distant
bottom the crevice ran out in a dry watercourse and got
away from Som.

Chup swung from handholds, danced and bounded, leap-
ing down the slope. Another arrow twirred past him, going
almost straight down, and after it the hurtling blur of an
almost-silent rock. He started falling, slid and grabbed in
desperation, and got his feet upon a ledge that was not
much wider than his soles. A moment later he was clutched

by Charmian sliding down beside him and almost pulled
into the abyss. To his left the ledge all but vanished, then
widened into what looked like opportunity, a sizable flat
spot under a large overhang. With Charmian still clutching
at his garments, he lunged that way. Somehow the two of
them scrambled to that spot of comparative safety, on foot-
holds that would have been suicidal if attempted with cold
calculation.

They were sheltered from missiles on a flat space big
enough to sprawl on carelessly, while they gasped for breath.
Somewhere, ten or twenty meters above them but out of
sight, the lieutenant was bawling out a confusion of new
orders.

The reptile found them almost instantly. It hovered over
the chasm on deft and leathery wings, screaming its loathing
and alarm, carefully staying out farther than a sword might
sweep. Charmian with a wide swing of her arm threw out a
fist-sized rock; through luck or skill it caught a wing. The
beast screamed and fell away, struggling in pain to stay in
the air.

But it had already screamed out their location to the
men above.

Chup stood up and drew his sword and waited for the
men to come. From the renewed sounds of battle farther
off, he soon picked out a closer sound, the scraping and
sliding of sandalled feet on rock, too desperately concerned
with footholds to be completely furtive.

"Both sides!" Charmian cried out. A man was sliding
down toward them on each side of their almost cavelike
shelter. But each attacker had to think first of his own foot-
ing. Chup put the first one over easily before the man could
do more than wave his arms for balance, then turned quick-
ly enough to catch the other still at a disadvantage. This
one, going over, dropped his sword and managed to catch
himself with his hands. Only his fingers showed, clinging
stubbornly to the ledge, until Charmian, screaming, pounded
and shattered them with a rock.

Chup sat down once more to rest and wait. To Charmian,
kneeling beside him, he said: "They'll have a hard time get-
ting at us here. So they may just wait us out." He leaned
out for a quick glance at the slope below them; it was worse
than that above. "I don't suppose you got out by this route
the last time you were here."

I— don't know." Somewhat to Chup's surprise, she lost
herself again for a time in silent thought. "I was only a
child then. Twelve years old, perhaps. My father led us—"
Her face turned up, wide-eyed with another shock of mem-
ory. "My sister and I. My sister. Carlotta. I have not thought
of her from that day till this. Carlotta. I had forgotten that
she ever lived!"

"So. But how did you get out? Down this cliff some-
how?"

"Wait. Let me think. How very strange, so many memories
wiped out . . . she was six years younger than I. Now it
comes back. My father took us both down the long spiral
path. Into the demon chambers at the bottom. There ... he
pushed us both forward, so we fell, and he turned and ran
away himself. Lying on the warm rocks, I twisted round
to look, and saw his flying robes, while Carlotta lay beside
me, crying. Ah, yes. That would have been my father's
initiation, his pledging to the East. Ah, yes, I understand
it now."

"What happened?"

Charmian, almost calmly now, stared into the depth of
time. "We lay there, frightened. And before we could get
up, he came for us."

"He?"

"Lord Zapranoth. Our father, for his initiation, had to
give us to the Demon-Lord." Charmian's eyes now turned
on Chup, but still her mind was in the past. "Lord Zapranoth
reached for us, and I jumped to my feet and took Carlotta
and pushed her in front of me, and I cried out: Take her! I
am yours already, already I serve the East!' " Charmian gig-
gled, a pearly ripple of pure music, yet it made Chup draw
back slightly. "I cried: 'Now take Carlotta as my pledging!'
And Zapranoth stayed his hand, that had been reaching for
us." Charmian's merriment faded suddenly. "And then he ...
laughed. That was a thing most horrible to hear. Then he
put out his hand again, and stroked my h—"

Breaking off with a little shriek, Charmian clutched at
her golden hair, that hung disheveled before her eyes, as if
it were some alien creature settled on her head. Then she .
recovered herself somewhat, brushed back her hair and let
it go. "Yes, Zapranoth stroked my hair. And later, when
Elslood tried to make a love-charm from it—" She stopped.

"All Elslood's magic was confounded and reversed," Chup

finished. "And he and every man who carried the charm was
drawn to you by it. But never mind that now." He put out
his hand slowly, not quite far enough to touch the gold that
he had handled with rough carelessness not long ago. He
said: "Do you suppose, that on that day—the Demon-Lord
—might have left this life in this?"

The thought was no surprise to Charmian. "No, Chup.
No. Hann examined my hair closely, when we were planning
how best to use the charm, trying to find the source of its
unusual power. Hann would have found a demon's life if it
were there. We could have made the Demon-Lord our
servant." She smiled. "No, Zapranoth would not have been
fool enough to give his life into my keeping. He understood
me far too well. When he had touched my hair, he said
to me: 'Go freely from this cave, and serve the East. It has
great need of such as you.' Yes. Now all the memories come
back. My father was much amazed when I caught up with
him. Much amazed to see me, and not entirely pleased. Oh,
he looked back hopefully enough to see if my sister had
also been released. She was the one he favored, truly cared
for. But her the demon kept.

"And I think my father also was made to forget what
happened here; at least he never spoke of it, or of Carlotta—
Chup, what is it?"

He had gotten to his feet as if to face the enemy again,
but he did not raise his weapon, only stared down fixedly
at Charmian. Without taking his eyes from her he sheathed
his sword and gripped her hands and pulled her to her
feet. She twisted as if expecting another blow. But he only
held her fast, demanding: "Tell me this: what was his
aspect, when you saw him then?"
"Whose?"

"Zapranoth's." Chup's voice had dropped until it was not
much louder than a whisper. "What did he look like then,
what form did he take?" His eyes still bored relentlessly at
her.

"Why, the form of a tall man, a giant, in dark armor. It
matters little what form a demon takes. I knew him today,
even at a distance, because the feeling he brought with him,
the sickness, was the same—"

"Yes, yes!" He let her go. Caught by a powerful thought,
he turned away, then turned right back. "You said that

she was six years old, your sister, when the demon took
her?"

"I don't know. About that, yes."

"And was she fair of face?"

"Some thought so. Yes."

"That could be changed—a small thing for the Demon-
Lord," he murmured, staring past her into space. "What was
the season of the year?"

"Chup, I—what does it matter now?"

"I tell you it does matter now!" He glared at Charmian
again.

She closed her eyes and lined her perfect forehead with
a frown, then opened them and looked at him warily. "It
must have been six years ago. I think—no, it was in spring.
Six and a half years ago, to this very season. I do not think I
can calculate it any more closely—"

"Enough!" Chup slapped his hands together, rough triumph
in his face and voice. "It must be so. It must be. The young
fool said she came to them in springtime."

"What are you babbling of?" Charmian's temper edged
her voice. "How can this help us now?"

"I don't know yet. What happened to your sister—?"

Before Chup could finish the question there came a faint
sound behind him and he had turned, sword drawn and
ready. But the shape that dropped now to the narrow ledge
was not a soldier and did not seem menacing. It was only
a small brown furry creature, half the length of a sword
from head to tail.

"Chupchupchupchup." Stretched as if in supplication on
the ground, just outside of thrusting range, it opened a
harmless-looking, flat-toothed mouth to make a noise be-
tween repeated gasps and hiccups. It took Chup a moment
to understand this was a repetition of his name.

"Chupchupchup, the High Lord Draffut bids you come."
The creature's speech was almost one long word, like some-
thing memorized and all but meaningless to the speaker. A
beast as small as this one could not have much intelligence.

"I should come to the Lord Draffut?" Chup demanded.
"Where? How?"

"Chup come, Chup come. Tell man Chup, now he is
hunted, the High Lord Draffut bids him come to sanc-tu-
ar-y. Haste and tell man Chupchupchup."

"How am I to come to him? Where? Show me the way."

As if to show Chup how, the little four-footed animal
spun around and bounded off, going up the side of the
cliff again with ease, darting between rocks where a man
could not easily have thrust an arm. Chup took one step,
and then could only stare after it, hoping it might realize
he could not follow.

He turned to Charmian. "How do you reckon that? If it's
a trap, the bait's being kept safely out of my reach, so distant
I can't grab for it"

She shook her head, and seemed both envious and mysti-
fied. "It seems that you are genuinely offered sanctuary. I've
heard that the small animals run the Beast-Lord's errands
now and then. Does Draffut know you as an enemy of
demons? That might account for it"

Before he could reply there came again the whispery
slide of men trying to get at them from the right and from
the left. Perhaps they had seen the little messenger run
past, and feared their prey was plotting an escape. As be-
fore, Chup smote the foe upon his right before the man
could get his weapons up. This time the man on the left
side was impeded by Charmian's falling at his feet. She
had ducked for safety and lost her footing, and now she
was clutching at her enemy's ankles while he was forced
to concentrate on Chup. Much good his concentration did
him with his feet immobilized; Chup's swordpoint tore him
open and he toppled. Charmian let go his ankles quickly as
his weight cleared the edge.

Chup spun back purposefully to the man he had struck
down upon his right. It was the lieutenant of the Guards
whom they had duped into letting them pass; he now had
dropped his weapons and clung with blood-slippery fin-
gers to the rock. Chup cautiously pulled him in from the
brink and cut his throat. Charmian watched, at first without
understanding, as Chup continued cutting through the neck,
gorily separating head from body.

When the seamless-looking collar of Old World metal was
free, he wiped it clean on the lieutenant's uniform and held
it up. With two motions of his foot he sent the headless body
into the abyss.

By now she understood, or thought she did. Anger was
in her voice, perhaps from envy or from fear of being left
alone. "You are a fool. The valkyrie will take no unhurt

man to the Lord Draffut. And none who does not wear
the collar properly around his neck."

"You are not entirely right in that, my lady. I have talked
with the soldiers. The valkyries will take a man whose collar
is off. Provided he is so wounded that his head is severed
from his trunk."

And now her face showed that she fully understood his
plan; her anger grew. "Not every dead man is brought to
Lord Draffut's domain in time to be restored, nor heals prop-
erly."

"Nor has a personal invitation from the High Lord Draffut.
Listen, lady, I think you will not be worse off if I go. If
more soldiers scramble down here, you may do as well with
your eyelashes and sweet voice as I would with a sword.
As things stand now, you can't get out of here."

That was true; now she was listening.

He pressed on. "Your situation may be greatly helped if
I can go. What I was saying when the animal came is more
important now than ever. What happened to your sister?"

"The Lord of Demons took her, as I said. Devoured her,
I suppose."

"You saw the tall black man do that?"

"I . . no. He laid his hand upon her, and her screams
were quieted. I did not linger to see more."

With a quick movement Chup reversed his sword, and
held the pommel of it out to Charmian. "Take this."

She stood in hesitation.

Chup said: "If the Beast-Lord hates demons, as you say,
I had better go to him, and quickly."

"Why?"

"To tell him where to find the life of Zapranoth. Now take
this, and cut off my head."

Holding out the sword and waiting, Chup felt content.
True, she might murder him for good, or his plan might fail
for other reasons. But since he had turned his back on Som
and on the East, he felt like his own man again, and that
feeling was enough; perhaps it was all that a man like him
should try to get from life.

He fought on now to win, to live, because that was his
nature. But he was tired, and saw no future beyond this
battle. Death in itself had never been a terror for him. If it
came now—well, he was tired. Half a year of paralytic near-
death he had endured, out of sheer pride, unwillingness to

give in. Then, when as if by miracle, his strength and free-
dom had been returned to him, he had come near throwing
them away again, to serve the East—and why? What power
or treasure could they offer that was worth the price they
asked?

"Strike off my head," he said to Charmian. "A valkyrie
must be coming for this collar by now; there'd be one al-
ready here if they weren't having a busy day."

She was still hesitating, fearing, hoping, thinking, des-
perately deciding what course was best for her own welfare.
She reached out and took the sword, then asked him:
"Where is the demon's We concealed?"

"Lady, I would not trust you with my beheading, save
that you must see how it is in your own interest for me to
reach Draffut with what I know. If we can kill or threaten
Zapranoth, and tip the battle to the West, then you may
sit here safely until Som is no longer dangerous. Unless, of
course, you would rather bear the message; in which case
I must cut off your—no. I thought not."

He turned and knelt down slowly, face toward the cliff.
Charmian was at his right, holding the long blade point
down on the ground. He said: "Now, about this little
surgery I need ... I suppose a single stroke would be too
much to ask for. But more than two or three should not be
needed, the blade is heavy and quite sharp." Without turn-
ing to see her face, he added: "You are most beautiful, and
most desirable by far, of all the women I have ever known."
From the corner of his eye he saw Charmian losing her
hesitation, gathering resolve, straightening her thin wrists in
a tight two-handed grip to lift the weapon's weight Chup
studied the details of the rock wall straight before him.

He had knelt down facing this way so that his head
would not roll over-
Enough of that. He was Chup. He would not even close
his eyes.

On its way, the sword sang thinly. His muscles cried for
the signal to roll away, his nerves screamed that there was
still time to dodge. His ruling mind held his neck stretched
and motionless.

CHAPTER   9

Out near the middle of the tableland that divided the
forces of the East and West, in a part of the rough plateau
that was shattered and split into a dozen peninsulas divided
by abyssal crevices, the High Lord Zapranoth came bursting
up into the morning air like some foul pall of smoke, from
a huge chimney-opening in the ground. Rolf, turning from
his work of grappling down great gasbags, looked up at
Zapranoth and saw that which made him squint his eyes
half shut and turn away—though he could not have said
what it was about the smoke that was so terrible. Looking
around him, he saw that all the other soldiers of the West
had been compelled to drop their eyes before that image,
and so it was with all their minor wizards also. Only Gray,
and Loford who now stood beside his brother, faced the
demon with their heads raised and eyes wide open. They
were standing in the rear of the invaders' little line, near Rolf
and the balloons. Looking up at the great flying devices in
his charge, Rolf saw the smoky image of the technology-
djinn fluttering and darting to and fro above the gasbags,
like some frantic bird between the bars of an invisible cage.

Now Gray raised both his arms, and something changed;
looking back, Rolf saw that before the face of Zapranoth
there had appeared a haze or reflection of light gray, a
screen as insubstantial as a rainbow, but as persistent. It
stood steadily before the demon as he drifted gently nearer.
Now it was possible for the soldiers of the West to look to-
ward him—and toward the citadel, where now the Guard
and its armed auxiliaries were pouring out, quick-march,
through the open gate. Arrows began at once a-moving
both ways across the field. When the Guard, quick and
practiced, had finished its deployment in four ranks, Rolf
guessed there might be near a thousand of them. He was
too busy to give much time to pondering the odds, for the
last balloons were landing now and he and his assistants had
all they could do with work and dodging arrows. Each
wore on his left arm a light shield woven of green limber
branches; such shields were thought capable of squeezing

and stopping piercing shafts that could bite through a coat
of mail.

"Sound the trumpet once more!" Thomas now ordered
with a shout, turning back his big head in the gleaming
barbut-helm. The Northman with the horn, his head now
bandaged, turned back in turn to face the pass—its thread
of road still empty—and once more blasted out the signal.
This time there came an answering horn from down the
pass, though it sounded dishearteningly far away.

"There is our army coming, friends!" Thomas shouted in
a great voice to his hundred men. "Let's see if we can do
the job before they get here!"

As if the distant horn had been a signal for them too,
the Guard swayed now in formation to the shouting of its
officers, and as one man stepped forward to attack. At a
range of a hundred fifty meters there came from their rear
ranks a volley of arrows.

Rolf and those around him, finished at last with tying
down balloons, took up their weapons and moved into their
places for the fight. Some, holding large shields, raised them
to protect Gray and Loford. The two wizards still were
standing motionless, and gazing steadfastly upon the ominous
but also nearly motionless bulk of Zapranoth, high in the
air above the middle of the field. Loford was swaying slight-
ly on his feet; there was no other overt sign as yet of the
struggle of invisible powers that had been joined.

The horn from down below, within the pass, now sounded
once more, noticeably closer; and again as if its signal had
been meant for them, the Guard of Som the Dead began
to run and came on in a yelling charge.

The broken ground delayed them, and unequally, so that
their lines were bent Rolf, with bow in hand and arrows
laid out before him on the ground, knelt in the middle of a
line of archers. Taking his shafts up one by one, he did his
best to make them count. He took little time to aim, but
loosed into the oncoming swarm of men in black, nocked
and drew and loosed again. The air was thick with dust
and missiles, and his targets moved confusingly, so it was
difficult to tell what damage his own shots were doing.
Certainly many of the West were shooting to good effect, for
the ranks of black were thinning as they came. A steady
droning sprang up in the air above, as the valkyries whirred
and blurred industriously to their work; in madly methodical

calm they dipped into the fury of the fight below to lift
the fallen warriors of Som and take them to the high place
of the High Lord Draffut. Some machines flew through
the image of the Demon-Lord, with no awareness shown
on either side. It was as if each were unreal to the other, and
only men must know and deal with both.

Rolf and the other bowmen fired rapidly until their arrows
were all gone; if this attack was not stopped there would
be no need to worry about the next. The man next to Rolf
went down, killed instantly by a flung stone. Others were
falling in the Western ranks, but those thin lines did not
pull back. Behind them was the cliff edge, or defeat and
death retreating down the pass. They braced themselves
instead, and readied pike and battle-axe and sword.

By now some of the enemy were come so close to Rolf
that he could hear them gasping with their running and
excitement, and see the hair on hands that lifted swords
to strike. A mass of them was charging in at Rolf's part of
the line, to get at the balloons, he thought. Rolf threw his
bow behind him and rose up in a crouch, shield on arm
and sword in hand.

And now the mass of black, its decimated ranks dis-
solved into a howling mob, was just before him. An East-
ern officer, marked by the plume upon his helmet, came run-
ning past in front of Rolf, with great arm-wavings urging his
men on. Rolf leaped forward to get in striking range, but was
checked by another Guardsman charging at him. This foe
was running blindly, berserk with battle already, his eyes
seeming to look unseeing through Rolf even as he swung a
many-pointed mace at him. Rolf dodged back, then stepped
in—not as neatly as the nimblest warriors could, but well
enough to avoid this weapon, only half-controllable. Before
the mace could be swung back Rolf cut his sword into the
Guardsman's running legs, felt shin bones splinter, saw the
man go plowing forward on his face.

Now on Rolfs left one of the Northmen started his own
countercharge, striding into the foe, making a desert round
him with a great two-handed blade. Those of the enemy
who did not fall back before this giant tried to spread
around him and get at him from the sides. Rolf hung back
a step until he had outflanked the liveliest of these flankers,
then lunged in for the kill. The man was more than half
armored, but Rolf's sword point found a soft place in be-

tween the hipbone and the ribs. As that man fell, another
came, but this one straight at Rolf. This new opponent was
the better swordsman, but Rolf would not yield an inch.
He warded one stroke after another, somehow, until the
Northman's long sword on its backswing wounded his enemy
from behind. The odds were more than evened, and the foe
went staggering back until the ranks of black had hidden
him.

Then all at once there were no more of the enemy menac-
ing, but only the retreating horde of their black backs.

"What? What is it?" Rolf demanded. Mewick had come
from somewhere and had taken him by the arm.

"—bind it up," Mewick was saying.

"What?" All the world, for Rolf, was still quivering with
the shock of battle. He could not feel nor hear nor think of
anything else.

"You are hurt. See, here. Not bad, but we must bind it
up."

"Ah." Looking down, Rolf saw that it was so; a small gash
on the upper part of his left arm was running blood, though
he could not feel the slightest pain. His shield woven of
green limber withes, that had been on his left arm, was all
but gone now, hacked to bits. He could not recall now which
of his enemies had dealt these blows, nor how he had
avoided being killed by them.

The soldiers on both sides were reforming lines, just out
of easy arrow range, and binding wounds. And while the
Valkyries went droning on, without rest or hesitation, some
men of the West hurried, at Thomas's orders, to behead the
enemy who had fallen among them, gather their metal col-
lars and throw them over the cliff. This was the only way
they had discovered to prevent their foemen's restoration.
No blow from any weapon that a man could wield could
stay a valkyrie from gathering up a fallen man; the Western-
ers learned this quickly, and then saved their breath and
effort and the edges of their blades. They only grumbled
and dodged the vicious, blurring rotors that smashed the
pikemen's weapons down and broke their fingers when they
tried to interfere.

One of Mewick's countrymen was calling: "Look—our boys
in sight now, at the bottom of the pass. Look!"

Men turned and gathered, looking down the pass. Rolf
joined them, his arm now bandaged and his mind a little

clearer. He felt no great emotion at the sight of reinforce-
ments coming.

'They're running now that they're in sight," said someone.
"But it seems they've been all day about it."

"Only a few in sight yet, with light weapons. The mass
of 'em are still far down."

There was short time to celebrate, even had there been
greater inclination. The Guard was fast reforming. Their
ranks, while thinner than before, were still impressively su-
perior in size to those of the invaders, whose small force
seemed to Rolf's eyes to have been drastically diminished. He
started to count those still on their feet, and then decided
he would rather not.

Men were looking up. Now once again the Demon-Lord
was drifting slowly closer, his image rolling like a troubled
cloud. The screen of protective magic that Gray had thrown
up before Zapranoth yielded to the demon's pressure but
stayed squarely in his path.

Neither Loford nor Gray had ducked or dodged or moved
a hand to save themselves as yet, but they had survived
the storm of missiles through the fight Around them tall
protective shields had been held up, by the minor wizards
who had abandoned any thought of dueling Zapranoth
themselves, and by others. More than one had fallen, by
stone or arrow, of the men protecting Gray and Loford with
their shields. Neither one of the two strong wizards had
been struck by any material weapon, but anyone looking
at their faces now might think that both were wounded.

A darkness like the dying of the sun fell round the two
tall magicians now. It was the shadow cast by Zapranoth
as he loomed nearer. And now, for the first time on this
field, his voice came booming forth: "Are these the wizards
of the West who seek to murder me? Ho, Gray, where is my
life? Will you pull it out now from your little satchel?" Still
the thin gray screen before him held, but now it flared and
flickered raggedly, and still he slowly pressed it back.

"Come now," boomed Zapranoth, "favor me with an an-
swer, mighty magicians. Admit me to your august company.
Let me speak to you. Let me touch you, if only timidly."

At that the wizard Loford gave a weak cry and toppled,
senseless, and would have struck the ground headlong if
men who were standing near him had not caught him first.

Now Gray alone was standing against the pressure of the

dark shape above. He cried out too, and swayed, but did not
fall. Instead he straightened himself up with some reserve
of inner strength, and with his arms flung wide set his
fingers moving in a pattern as intricate as that a musician
makes upon a keyboard. There sprang up gusts of wind as
sudden and violent as the firing of catapults, so men who
stood near Gray were thrown to the ground, and dust and
pebbles were blasted into the air, in savage streams that
crisscrossed through the heart of Zapranoth before they
lost velocity and fell in a rain of dirt into the citadel three
hundred meters distant.

The image of the demon did not waver in the least. But
these howling shafts of wind were only the forerunners, the
scouts and skirmishers, of the tremendous power that Gray
in his extremity had set in motion; Rolf saw this, glancing
behind him over the cliff edge to the west. There where the
sky some moments earlier had been azure and calm, there
now advanced a line of clouds, roiling and galloping at a
pace far faster than a bird could fly. These clouds, confined
to a thin flat plane a little above the level of the citadel, con-
verged like charging cavalry upon the waiting, looming bulk
of Zapranoth.

An air-elemental, thought Rolf, with awe and fear and
hope commingled; he would have shouted it aloud, but no
one could have heard him through the screaming wind.

The violence of that wind was concentrated at the level
of the Demon-Lord, well above the field where humans
walked and fought. Men found that they could stand and
swing their weapons, though they staggered with the heavier
gusts. And now the Guard came charging on again. Rolf
put on his arm a shield taken from a fallen Easterner, gripped
his sword hard, and waited in the line. While over their
heads a torrent of air and cloud-forms thundered from the
west to beat like surf upon the image of the demon, men
lowered their eyes and worked to injure one another with
their blades, like ants at war on some tumultuous wave-
pounded beach.

The earlier fight had seemed to Rolf quite short. This
one seemed endless, and he several times despaired of coming
through alive. Mewick, howling like the wind, fought this
time on Rolf's right hand, and saved him more than once
when he would otherwise have been caught hopelessly be-
tween two of the enemy. Somehow he was not caught, or

killed, or even wounded in this attack, which failed as the
first one had to throw the Western men back down the pass.

While the warriors fought, the violence of the wind
gradually abated; and even as the host of black-clad men
fell back once more in disarray, the weightless bulk of
Zapranoth once more came pressing forward.

"Gray!" Thomas, stumbling on a wounded leg, came forc-
ing his way through to the wizard's side. "Hang on, OUT
men are coming up!" Even now the first gasping and ex-
hausted troops of the climbing Western army were nearing
the top of the pass; the bulk of that army, on its thousands
of laboring legs, was now in sight though far below.

Gray slowly, with the movement of an old, old man,
turned his head to Thomas. In Gray's face, that seemed to
be aging by the moment, there was at first no hint of
understanding.

Thomas raised his voice. "You, and you, support him on
his feet. Gray, do not fail us now. What can we do?"

The answer came feebly, as from the lips of a dying man:
"You had better win with the sword, and quickly. I will
hold the demon off till my last breath . . . that is not far
away."

Thomas looked round to see that the first men of his
main army were just arriving at the top of the pass, brave
men too exhausted for the moment by their running climb
to do anything but sit and gasp for air, and squint up
doubtfully at the looming shape of Zapranoth. The winds
had driven the demon some distance from the field; whether
they had inflicted pain or injury upon him no one could
tell save Gray, perhaps. Of the screen of white magic Gray
had earlier thrown before the demon, there were only traces
left, flickering and flaring like the last flames of a dying
fire.

Rolf found it was no longer bearable to look straight at
the Demon-Lord.

"One man run down," Thomas was ordering, pointing
with a long arm down the pass to the approaching reinforce-
ments. "Tell any with the least skill in magic to push on
before the others, and hurry!" He turned his helmet's T-
shaped opening toward Rolf. "Ready the balloons for the
attack upon the citadel itself! We must not sit here waiting
for the demon to set the course of battle."

Rolf sheathed his sword and  turned and ran,  shouting

to rally his working crew to the balloons. He who had
fought without distinction in the ranks now took the role
of officer again. At his direction men put down weapons,
eased off armor, took up tools and ropes. The technology-
djinn, still constrained by the spells that Gray had put upon
it, obeyed Rolf's orders when he called them out.

When he could look up from his work again, Rolf saw
that the Guard of Som had been reformed once more on
the plain. The ranks of black were not greatly smaller than
they had been at the start of the day's carnage: Guard re-
placements were trotting out from the citadel wearing torn
and bloodstained garments in which they had already been
slain once today. But the Guard had missed its chance to
push the stubborn West from its small foothold on the
height; the trickle of reinforcement up the pass had thick-
ened steadily. Soon it would become a flow of hundreds
and of thousands.

There were wizards of diverse but minor skills ascending
with the army; each of these as he arrived was hurried to
the side of Gray, who still was conscious, though standing
only with the help of strong men on each side. But one by
one these lesser magicians fell away, nearly as fast as they
arrived and sought to relieve Gray of some part of the invis-
ible power of Zapranoth. Some crumpled soundlessly. Some
leaped and fell, groaning as if struck by arrows. One man
tore with his nails at his flesh, screamed wildly, and before
he could be stopped, leaped from the precipice.

Rolf took it all in with a glance. "We are ready!" he
shouted to Thomas.

In answer, the commander waved his arm toward the
citadel. "Then fill your baskets with good men, and fly! We
will be with you there."

Most of the survivors of the original assault force, being
the type of men they were, had already boarded for the
next attack. The wind seemed right. But Zapranoth was
coming, rushing now toward them like a toppling wall. Rolf,
in the act of boarding his balloon, looked up and cried out
at the sight. With the majesty and darkness of a thunder-
cloud great Zapranoth now passed above them; it was as if
the skirts of his robe spilled madness and dragged lightning.
Two of the balloons burst thunderously, even as the djinn
in its invisible cage became a blur of terror. Above the djinn
there lowered a drifting fringe of cloud, that in the winking

of an eye became a closing pair of massive jaws. With the
devouring of the djinn, Gray cried out in despair and pain,
and his head rolled loosely on his neck.

Men were running, falling, waving weapons in the air. In
the confusion Rolf lost sight of Thomas, who had not yet
given the last order to cast off. But there was no doubt that
it must be done; the balloons were ready, a little wind still
held. Even without the djinn they could rise up and drop
again upon the citadel.

"Cast off!" Rolf shouted left and right; ropes were let go,
and his flotilla rose and flew. The demon that had just
passed by now turned, but did not strike at the balloons;
perhaps Gray was not yet wholly overcome. As the craft
passed over the formation of the Guard, stones and arrows
made a thick buzzing swarm around them. Shafts pierced
every gasbag, though the padded baskets shielded the men
inside. But their flight was not intended to be far.

Lowering again, they reached the citadel's low wall, and
for the most part cleared it. Along the top of the wall, be-
hind its parapet, one lean man in black came running toward
the invaders as if to fight them all, while others ran away
—by his behavior Rolf knew Som the Dead. But in another
moment Som was left behind.

Inside the walls, the silent flyers skimmed above a dif-
ferent world, one that was still ordered, peaceful, pleasant
to the eye. Trees, hedges, and the rooftops of low sprawling
buildings skimmed the basket bottoms. There fled before
them women in rich silks and furs, and a few men and
women servants in drab dress.

Only one person besides Som remained at first to watch
them boldly. One young servant girl had mounted a low roof,
and gazed at the balloons, and past them at the battle. Rolf
passed near enough to get a good look at her face.

It was his sister Lisa.

CHAPTER    10

There was a steady swell of sound, a moaning endless
tone so long prolonged in his strange loneliness that Chup
could not imagine or remember when he had begun to hear

it; and this odd swelling was a light as well, of which he
could not remember his first sight, so bright he did not need
his eyes to see it, but not too bright for eyes in spite of that.
And it was a touch, a pressure, of an intensity to make it
unendurable if it had been felt in one place or even many,
but it bore in all directions on every fiber, inward and out-
ward, so all the infinity of opposing pressures balanced and
there was no pain. Chup lived encompassed in this swelling
thing like a fish within the sea, immersed and saturated
and supported by inexhaustible sound, pressure, light, odor,
taste, heat of fire and cold of ice, all balanced to a point of
nothingness and adding up to everything.

So he lived, without remembering how he had come to be
so living, remembering only the soft and singing promise of
the sword. He did not waken, for he had not slept. Then: I
am Chup, he thought. This is what the beheaded see.

What had jogged him into thinking was the feel of some-
one prosaically pulling on his hair. He did not open his
eyes now, for they were already open. He could see light
and soft pleasant colors, flowing downward. Up he rose,
pulled by his hair, until he broke with a slow splash of glory
back into the world of air, in which his senses once more
functioned separately.

He was in a cave. He could not at once be certain of its
size, but he thought it was enormous. The overhead curve
of its roof was too smoothly rounded to be natural. The
upper part of the cave was filled with light, though its
rounded sides and top were dark; the lower part, up to
what was perhaps the middle, was filled with the glowing
fluid from which Chup had just been lifted, an enclosed
lake of restless energy. Chup knew now that he had reached
his goal, what he had heard the soldiers call the Lake of
Life.

Like some gigantic bear reared on two legs, immersed
to his middle in the lake, there stood the shaggy figure of
a beast. His fur was radiant, of many colors or of none, as
if of the same substance as the lake. Chup could not see his
face as yet, because he could not turn or lift his head.
Chup's head swung like a pendulum, neckless and bodiless,
from what must be this great beast's grip on his long hair.
He could, however, move his eyes, and did so. Where his
body should have been below his chin there was nothing
to be seen except receding strings of droplets, not gore, but

drops of multicolored glory from the lake. Falling dripping
from his neck stump, out of sight beneath his chin, the
droplets splashed and merged into the glowing lake whence
they had come. Chup understood now that he, his head, had
been immersed and saturated in the lake, and that had been
enough to restore life, with no least sense of shock or pain.

The grip upon his hair turned his pendulum-head around,
and now he saw the High Lord Draffut's face. It was a
countenance of enormous ugliness and power, more beast
than human certainly, but gentle in repose. And now Chup
saw that in his other hand the Beast-Lord held like a doll
the nude and headless body of a man. Like a child washing
a doll he held the body down, continually dipping and
sloshing it in the Lake of Life. With the splashing and
the motion the brilliance of the liquid intensified into soft
explosions of color, modulating in waves of light the steady
gentle lumination of the air inside the cave.

And now in his enormous shaggy hand, very like a human
hand in shape but far more powerful and beautiful, the
High Lord Draffut raised the headless thing and like a
craftsman turned it for his own inspection. Like that of one
newborn, or newly slain, the muscular body writhed and
floundered uncontrolled. On its skin Chup could count his
old scars, like a history of his life. He marked the hagged-
ness of the neck stump, where Charmian had hacked and
sliced unskillfully. From the great severed veins there the
elixir of the lake came pumping out like blood, and tinged
with blood.

The hand that held Chup's head up by its hair now
shifted its grip slightly. Turning his eyes down once again,
he beheld his own headless, living body being brought up
close beneath his head. Its hands grasping clumsily, like a
baby's, at Draffut's fur when they could feel it. Closer the
raw neck stump came, till Chup could hear the burbling of
its severed arteries. And closer yet, until there came a pres-
sure underneath his chin—

His head had not been breathing, nor felt any need to
breathe; now there came a choking feeling, but it entailed
no pain. It ended as the first rush of lung-drawn air caught
coldly in his mouth and throat. Then with a sharp tingle
came the feelings of his body, awareness of his fingers
clutched in fur, of his feet kicking freely in the air, of the
gentle pressure of the great hand closed around his ribs.

That hand now bore him down, to immerse him complete-
ly in the lake once more. Once he was below the surface,
his breathing stopped again, not by any choking or impedi-
ment but simply because it was not needed there. A man
plunged into clearest, purest water would not call for
a cup of muddy scum to drink; so it was his lungs made
no demand for air. Then in two hands Chup was lifted out,
to be held high before an ugly, gentle face that watched
him steadily.

"I came—" Chup began to speak with a shout, before
he realized there was no need for loudness. The lake gave
the impression of filling all the cave with waterfall-voices,
as sweet as demons' noise was foul, but yet in fact a whisper
might be heard.

"I came as quickly as I could, Lord Draffut," he said
more normally. "I thank you for my life."

"You are welcome to what help I have to give. It is long
since any thanked me for it." The voice of Draffut, deep
and deliberate, was fit for a giant. His hands turned Chup
like a naked babe undergoing a midwife's last inspection.
Then Draffut set him, still dripping with the lake, upon a
ledge that—Chup now saw—seemed to run all the way
around the cavern. This ledge, and the huge cave's walls
and curving roof, were of some substance dark and solid as
the goblet in which the demon had brought him his healing
draught long days ago. The ledge was at a level but little
higher than the surface of the lake. Seeing at a distance
was difficult in the cavern's glowing air, but at its farthest
point from Chup the ledge seemed wider, like a beach, and
there were other figures moving on it, perhaps of other
beasts who tended other men.

The Beast-Lord said: "I cannot command the valkyries, or
I would have sent them for you. If I could choose what men
I help, I would help first those who fight against the
demons."

Chup opened his mouth to answer. But now that he was
no longer bathed in the fluid of life, a great weakness came
over him, and he could only lean back against the wall and
feebly nod.

"Rest," said Draffut. "You will grow stronger quickly,
here. Then we will talk. I would give all men sanctuary,
and heal them, but I cannot ... I sent for you because you
are the first man in the Black Mountains in many years who

has cared for a fellow creature's suffering. A small beast
brought me the news that you had saved it from a demon.
In some cave."

For a moment Chup could not remember, but then it came
to him: in the cavern of Som's treasure hoard. Still he was
too feeble to do more than nod.

He tried again to study the figures moving in the cavern's
farthest reaches, but could not see them clearly, so vibrant
was the air with light and life. The ledge Chup rested on
was of a dull and utter black, but covered tightly with a
film as thin and bright as sunlight, a glowing, transparent
skin formed of the fluid of the lake. The film was never
still. At one spot there would begin a thickening in the film,
a thickening that swelled and pulsed, rose up and broke
away, becoming a living separation that went winging like
a butterfly. And from some other place there would spring
a similar fragment, perhaps bigger than the first, big enough
to be a bird, flying up and sagging as its wings melted, but
not dying or collapsing, only putting out new wings of some
different and more complex shape and flying on to collide
in the singing, luminous air with the butterfly, the two of
them clinging together and trembling, seeming on the verge
of growing into something still bigger and more wonderful;
but then diving deliberately together and melting back into
the gracefully swirling body of the lake, with their plunge
splashing up droplets that fell again into the patterned film
that glided shining and without ceasing over the black sub-
stance of the ledge.

Feeling some strength returning, Chup raised one hand
to touch his neck. Running his fingers all the way around,
he followed the scar, thin, jagged, and painless, of his death
wound. Once more he tried to talk.

"Lord Draffut, is the battle over?"

Draffut turned his head toward the far end of the lake.
"My machines are still working without pause, gathering up
men and healing them. The battle goes on. From what I
have heard from beasts and men, the foul demon is likely
to prevail, though if the issue were left to swords alone,
the West would win."

"Then there is little time for us to act." Chup tried to rise,
but felt no stronger than the splashing butterflies of light,
and had to sit again.

"Your healing is  not finished.  Wait,  you  soon will be

strong enough to stand. What do you mean, we must act?"
"We must act against the one you call 'foul demon'—if
you are as much the demons' enemy as you claim, and I
have heard."

Draffut lifted his great forearms high, then let them
down, like falling trees, with a huge splash. "Demons! They
are the only living things that I would kill, if I could.
They devour men's lives, and waste their bodies. For no
need of their own, but out of sheer malignity, they steal
the healing fluid from my lake, and taunt me when I rage
and cannot come to grips with them."

Chup was now able to sit straighter on the ledge, and his
voice had grown stronger. "You would kill Zapranoth?"

"Him soonest of them all! Of all the demons that I know,
he has done men the greatest harm. Why do you talk to
me of killing Zapranoth? How can that be?"
"I know where he has hidden his life."
All was silent, except for the sweet seashell roaring of the
lake. Draffut, standing absolutely still, looked down steadily
at Chup for so long that Chup began to wonder if a trance
had come upon him.

Then Draffut spoke at last. "Here in the citadel? Where
we can reach it?"

"Here in the citadel he hid it, where he could keep his
eye upon it every day. Where we can reach it if we are
strong and fierce enough."

The Beast-Lord's hands, knotted into barrel-sized fists,
rose dripping from the lake. "Fierce? I can be fierce enough
for anything, against obstacles that do not live, or against
demons, or even beasts if there is need. I cannot injure
men. Not even—when it must be done."

"I can, and will again." With a great effort Chup rose
up, swaying, to his feet. "Som and his demon-loving crew . . .
as soon as I can hold a sword again. Lord Draffut, the
human Lords of the East are more like demons than like
men." Lifting a weak arm, Chup pointed to the distant
beachlike place, where men were being cared for by tall
figures that were not men. "Who are they?"

"Those? My machines. At least they were machines, when

I was young. We all have changed since then, working in

this cave, in constant contact with the Lake of Life. Now

they are alive."

Chup had no time for marveling at that "I mean the

men there who are being healed. If you would fight the
demons, fight the men who help them. Turn against the
East. Order your machines, beasts, whatever they are, to
stop healing Som's troops now."

At that, Lord Draffut's eyes blazed down upon him. "I
have never seen Som, nor acknowledged him as lord, and I
care nothing for him. Men come and go around my lake,
and use it. I remain. Long before there was an East or
West, I lived, and healed men. From the days of the Old
World I have healed their wounds. Weapons were different
then, but wounds were much the same, and men change
not at all—though to me they then were gods."

Were what? Chup wondered, fleetingly; he had not heard
that word before.

Draffut spoke on, as if relieving himself of thoughts and
words too long pent up. "I was not in the Old World as you
see me now. Then I could not think. I was much smaller,
and ran behind men on four legs. But I could love men, and
I did, and I must love them still. Turn against the East,
you say? I am no part of that abomination! I was here
before Som came—long before—and I mean to be here
when he has gone. I walked here when the healing lake
was made, by men who thought their war would be the
last. When they went mad and ran away, I was locked in,
with the machines. I—grew. And when men came again,
new tribes of them, I was ready to lend them the collars,
and the valkyries' help, that they might be healed when
they fought. And—after them—came others—"

The High Lord Draffut slowed his angry speech. "Enough
of that. Where is the life of Zapranoth?"

Chup told him, things that he had heard and seen, and
how the pieces seemed to fall together. The telling was
quickly finished, but Chup was standing straight before
he'd finished; he felt his strength increasing by the moment.
"The girl's name is the same, you see. Lisa. Though I
would wager that her face and memory have been changed.
And she has been here just half a year."

Draffut pondered but a moment more. "Then come, Lord
Chup, and I will give you arms. If there are men I cannot
frighten from our path, then you will fight them. If what
you say is true, no other obstacle can keep me from the
life of Zapranoth. Come! Swim!" And Draffut turned and

swam away, cleaving the lake with stretching overhand
strokes. Chup dove in and followed, faster than he had ever
splashed through water.

CHAPTER    11

The balloon that Rolf was riding in skimmed lower,
dragged in tall shrubbery, scraped free, but then continued
sinking. In the quiet he could hear the gas escaping from
a dozen arrow punctures in the bag. Mewick pointed silent-
ly at the next hedge ahead of them; this one they would
not clear.

Rolf swung up to the basket's rim, and leaped in the
instant before they struck the hedge. He hit the ground
with sword already drawn—this time there was no need to
think of anchoring—but there were no opponents yet in
sight It seemed that the enemy were as unprepared to meet
this balloon attack as they had been for the first.

In all directions, other balloons were coming down, seed-
ing armed desperate fighters throughout the inner courts
and buildings of Som's citadel But some balloons had missed
the walls, or were still going up. Lacking the djinn's help, or
guiding ropes to follow, there was no pattern in the landing.
Mewick was to assume leadership of the five man squad in
Rolfs balloon, once they had landed. But Mewick, like the
rest, now stood perplexed for a moment beside the hedge;
it was hard to see which was the best way to move to join
up most effectively with other elements of the assaulting
force. And from this garden there was no vulnerable target
to be seen, where they might hurt Som with a quick attack.

Only Rolf had glimpsed a goal, and he turned toward it
when it seemed as likely a direction to take as any other. He
ran toward the place where he had seen his sister, Mewick
and the others pounding after him, across empty lawns and
over deserted terraces.

The girl was still on the roof. Her face was turned away,
toward the battlefield, where the Demon-Lord hung in the
air like the smoke of burning villages. Rolf could faintly
hear men screaming, over there.

"Lisa!"

She looked round when he shouted out her name, and
he knew he had not been mistaken. But there was no recogni-
tion in her eyes when they met his, only confusion and alarm.

Rolf stared toward her, but then stopped as a squad
of men in black appeared, coming in single file round the
corner of the building where she was.

He called out once more: "Lisa, try to come this way!"
But there was no way for her to manage that right now. The
Eastern squad was coming on to block the way. They were
only auxiliaries, without the collars of the Guard, and
armed with a varied selection of old weapons, but they were
eight to face Rolf and his four companions. The eight soon
proved to lack the willingness for battle of the five; they
started backing up as soon as Mewick bounded forward,
screeching, his battle-hatchet twirling in one hand, long dag-
ger ready in the other. Rolf and three others came pacing
forward right at Mewick's heels. Their enemies delayed for
one brief clash, then fled. One of their number they left
behind, bleeding his life out in a flowerbed, and others,
fleeing, clutched at wounds and yelled and left red trails.

Rolf tried to get another look at Lisa on her roof. But
there was no time. Beyond a tall hedge and a wall of
masonry, some thirty meters distant, a huge collapsing gas-
bag showed where another Western squad had landed.
These now seemed heavily beset, to judge by the shouts
and noises there. Another force in black, ten or twelve men
maybe, could be glimpsed through hedges as they hurried
in that direction.

Drops of gore flew from Mewick's hatchet as he motioned
for a charge. "That way!" And they were off.

The shortest route to this new fight, and the way that
Mewick chose, lay over a decorative stone wall, head high.
Rolf sheathed his sword to hurl himself up at full speed
and with two hands free to grab. He drew again even as he
lunged onward from his crouch atop the wall, and as he
leaped struck downward with full force, to kill a Guardsman
from behind. They were in a walled-in garden, with more
than a score of men contending in a wild melee. Rolf landed
awkwardly, off balance, but bounced up into a crouch at
once, just in time to parry a hard blow that nearly knocked
his sword away.

Above the garden the huge gasbag, draped with its plastic
mail, was steadily collapsing, threatening to make a tem-

porary peace by smothering the fight. But yet there was

room to wield weapons, and men took the chance to do so.

The five beleaguered crewmen of this balloon welcomed with

shouts the arrival of Mewick and his squad, and doubled

their own strokes. But this time the enemy were Guardsmen,

and more numerous by far than the squad of auxiliaries had

been. The fight was savage and protracted. Men avoided

the settling gasbag, and tried to drive their opponents under

it.

The West could gain no advantage until the crew of a
third balloon had managed to reach the scene, and fell
upon the Guardsmen's flank. When at last the Guard re-
treated, they left bodies in black strewn thickly on the
ground; but in the garden there were but nine men of the
West still on their feet, and several of these were weak with
wounds. Rolf, bearing only the one light wound suffered
earlier, helped others with their bandages. He then began
to hack off fallen Guardsmen's heads, but Mewick stopped
him.

"We must move on, and find some heart or brain within
this citadel where we can strike; let dead men be."

One of the Northmen had gotten up into a tree to look
around. "More of our fellows over there! Let's link with
them!"

Over the wall again they went, and back more or less in
the direction whence Mewick's crew had come. There an-
other dozen or fifteen Westerners had joined together, and
were setting fires in apartments, and in some unimportant-
looking storerooms. Mewick was quick to argue with the
leader of these men that what they were doing had little
purpose, that some target more vital must be found. To
make his point he gestured toward the battlefield outside
the citadel. There the High Lord Zapranoth remained im-
mobile above the Western force; and what the demon might
be doing to the men who swarmed like ants beneath his feet
was not something that Rolf cared to think about.

The leader of the vandalizing crew, in turn, gestured to
the clouds of smoke his men were causing to go up; these,
he shouted, were bound to have an effect when they were
seen.

And he was right. A hundred black-clad men or more,
diverted from the fight outside, came pouring back into the
citadel. Som dared not let his fortress and its contents fall.

This Eastern counterattack came with a volley of arrows,
then a charge. Rolf once more caught sight of Som himself
entering the fight in person in defense of what might be
his own sprawling manor. The Lord of the Black Mountains,
gaunt and hollow-eyed, wearing no shield or armor, shouting
orders, came striding at the head of his own troops, swinging
a two-handed sword. A Western crossbowman atop a wall
let fly a bolt at Som. Rolf saw the missile blur halfway to
its black-clad target, spin neatly in midair, then fly back with
the same speed it had been fired. It tore a hole clear through
the bowman's throat.

After that, there were few weapons raised at Som, though
he ran straight at the Western line. Hack and thrust as he
might, hoping to provoke a counter, those of the West who
came within his reach restricted themselves to parrying and
dodging his blows. Fortunately he was no great swordsman,
and could do little damage to such a line as faced him now,
shields at the ready. Once his sword was knocked out of his
hands. He grabbed it up again, his face a mask of rage, and
leaped once more to the attack. This time the Western
line divided just in front of him; Mewick had quickly hatched
a scheme to cut off Som and capture him, by a ring of
shields pressed round him till he could be immobilized and
disarmed. But the opening appeared too neatly before Som,
or perhaps some magic warned him; he fell back into the
shelter of his own men's ranks, and thenceforward was con-
tent to let them do his fighting. They came on sturdily
enough.

Once more, for a time, the fighting was without letup.
Then there came another small body of Western troops,
fighting their way into the mass, bettering the odds just
when it seemed they were about to worsen too severely. The
forces separated briefly, the West dragging back their
wounded where they had the chance. Rolf, looking again
for Lisa, saw that she had remained at her vantage point on
the roof. Perhaps she felt safer up there. Looking beyond
her, he saw the sign of defeat still in the sky—the brooding
shape of Zapranoth.

One of the party who had just joined them had thrown
himself down, exhausted, and was answering questions about
the progress of the battle outside. Rolf realized that this
man and his group had just come from there, had somehow

managed to fight their way over the citadel's wall or through
its gate.

"—but it does not go well. The old man withstands the
demon still, how I do not know. Surely he cannot live much
longer. Then Zapranoth will have us all. Already half our
army has gone mad. They throw away their weapons, chew
on rocks . . . still we have numbers on our side, and we
might win, if it were not for Zapranoth. None can withstand
the demon, none ..."

His voice fell silent. The men around were looking at him
no longer, but up toward the mountain.

Rolf craned his neck. There, on the high, barren, un-
climbable slope, amid the doors where valkyries shuttled in
and out, a new door had been opened. Rolf, at the distance,
could not be sure, but it looked as if an outer layer of rock
had been cracked away by the door. It was of heavy dull
black stuff, and had been swung out. Framed now within
the opening, there stood what seemed to be the figure of a
man, but having a beast's head, and garbed in fur as
radiant as fire. From behind this figure, from inside the
mountain, there streamed out a coruscating light that made
Rolf think of molten metal.

And now he saw that the figure could not be a man, for
there was a real man beside him; no bigger than an infant
by comparison, but armed with a bright needle of a sword,
and clothed in black like some lord of the East.

"Lord Draffut!" cried out someone in the Eastern force.
"Who will heal us if he should fall?" another called.
Other shouts of astonishment came from the Guard. They,
like their enemies facing them, were lowering their weapons
momentarily and looking up to marvel. The Easterners were,
if anything, more surprised than their opponents.

Lord Draffut bent, picked up the man beside him in one
hand, and held him cradled in one arm. Then striding down
the slope Lord Draffut came, walking boldly on two legs
where it seemed no man could have climbed. It was as if
he walked in snow or gravel, instead of solid stone; for at
his touch, rock melted, not with heat but as if quickening
briefly into crawling life, to quiet again when he had passed.
Though the Lord Draffut carried no weapon but one
armed man, his attitude and pace were those of one who
came on eagerly to enter battle. Yet from the ranks of the
East there came no cheers. All men still watched in blank

surprise, half of them with weapons dragging in the dirt.
Som himself was peering up as if he could not credit what
was happening before his eyes.

Draffut's great strides quickly brought him close to the
citadel. Then he had entered it, sliding down the last near-
vertical face of rock that served as its rear wall. Behind
him stretched a line of tracks left in the dead solidity of
the mountain.

The men of the West who were inside the citadel con-
tracted their defensive line now, and gripped their weapons
tightly; there was no place for them to run. Then gradually
they understood that Draffut and his rider were not coming
straight toward them—not quite. The tiny-looking man in
black raised his bare sword and pointed, and the striding
lord he rode accommodatingly made a slight correction in
his course. The rider's black garments, it could now be
seen, were trimmed with such a motley of other colors
as should belong to no proper Eastern uniform.

Rolf was perhaps the first to recognize this man in black-
and-motley garb as Chup, and no doubt the first to under-
stand that Chup was pointing straight at Lisa on her roof-
top. Now the girl had turned round to face Chup; and in
the lower sky beyond her, the weightless bulk of Zapranoth
was turning too, like a tower of smoke caught in a shifting
wind.

The Guardsmen, as Draffut approached their ranks, be-
gan shifting to and fro uncertainly, not knowing what the
Beast-Lord meant to do, still unable to imagine what had
called him forth. Draffut majestically ignored them; they
scampered from his path, and like a moving siege-tower he
passed through where their ranks had been.

Lisa on her rooftop sprang to her feet, but made no
move toward Draffut or away. Her building was not oc-
cupied at the moment by either East or West, but the
Eastern forces were the closer to it. Draffut after he had
passed them paused briefly to set down Chup, who stood
with his sword in hand and glaring at the Guard. Draffut
himself strode on toward the girl. Taller than the roof he
reached toward, he stretched out one mighty arm toward
her—

And recoiled. Beneath Rolf's feet the ground leaped like
a drumhead, beaten by the shock that had made the Lord
of Beasts go staggering back.

Between the girl upon her building, and the High Lord
Draffut, there now stood one who was the tallest of the
three. Seemingly sprung from nowhere, this figure was cov-
ered in dark armor, even to segmented gauntlets and closed
visor. In the reflections of this metal armor, silent lightnings
seemed to come and go. The world around this Dark Lord
seemed askew to Rolf, and Rolf had the impression that
under the Dark Lord's feet the rocks had stretched, like
taut canvas bearing weights.

And in the instant of his appearance, the cloud-image of
Zapranoth, that had for so long loomed above the battle-
field in domination, had vanished from the sky.

Now, scattered all across the plateau, inside the citadel
and out of it, bodies of fighting men let weapons rest, and
held their breaths, waiting for they knew not what. Only
the valkyries above still droned on imperturbably, taking up
the slain and mangled and returning to find more.

Had there been listeners a kilometer away, the High Lord
Draffut's voice would no doubt have reached them plainly
when he spoke. "Lord of Demons, drinker of men's lives! I
hear no taunting from you now. You must maintain a solid
form if you will try to stop what I intend to do today—a
solid form that I can grasp."

The voice of Zapranoth, even louder than Draffut's voice,
began before the other had ceased. "Foul upstart beast-
cub, calling yourself lord! Lord of vermin! Lord of cripples!
Though it may be that I cannot end your Me, you will soon
wish that it had ended yesterday."
The two blurred toward each other.

Rolf did not truly see them come together, for there
flashed out from their contact a moment of blind blackness
to engulf him. The men around Rolf were all blinded too,
if he could judge by the multitudinous outcry that sprang
up. Even as the men were blinded, came the shock; Rolf
once more felt it in the mountain underneath his feet, and
this time in the air around him, too, more like a blow than
like a noise.

He fell and blindly clutched the earth. When vision came
back, it was to show a world gone mad. Where the great
beings had grappled one another, there had grown some-
thing almost like the sun, too brilliant for the eye to bear
for long. Shapes within this brilliance moved, slowly, as if
with tremendous effort. Rolf had to turn away from it, to

save his eyes. Around him other men were crawling from
the light that threw their shadows long before them; not
one man there seemed to be left upon his feet. Men of East
and West were intermingled, for the moment, without
fighting, as predator and prey seek safety from a flood upon
a floating log, and keep a truce.

Rolf tried to rise, to get away, but before he could regain
his feet there sounded an awesome bellow of rage, unmis-
takably in the voice of Zapranoth. With this cry the moun-
tain lurched beneath Rolf, seeming to rise a meter or more
and fall back. As it lurched, the mountain's surface split like
a torn garment. A fine crevice, nowhere wider than a man's
body, ran faster than the eye might follow it across the
walls and gardens and terraces of the citadel; in one direc-
tion it shattered the outer, battlemented wall, revealing the
field before the citadel, where the army of the West had
been stopped and where most of its soldiers still lay stunned;
in the other direction the flying split raced up through the
upper mountain, defining hidden faults by making them its
path. The splitting ceased before it reached the domain of
the Lord Draffut. Up there the coruscating light still flooded
from an open giant's doorway, and through their smaller
passages the valkyries still flew in and out.

The zone of radiance around the mighty figures bad
dimmed, and now when he looked back at them Rolf saw
their two figures plain. The Lord of Beasts was biting down
upon the armored shoulder of the Lord in Black. Draffut's
drawn-back lips revealed enormous fangs, and these were
sunken in. Rolf saw that wherever Draffut touched the black
armor, it moved and flowed and yielded to the resistless life
that poured from him. Around the demon's waist his huge
beast-forearms, bright with glowing fur, were locked like
mortised logs to hold and crush.

And yet the being in black seemed mightier. For all the
Dark Lord showed of pain, he might have felt nothing from
the bite that seemed to pierce his armor. With his own great
arms Zapranoth strove to loosen the hold about his waist.
He tested out one counter-grip and then another, working
without haste or hesitation. At last he got both his dark-
metaled hands clamped to his satisfaction upon one arm of
glowing fur. If the metal of his gauntlets ran and dripped
with life, he did not heed. Now Zapranoth's enormous shoul-

ders tilted, and he strained. Slowly—very slowly—he be-
gan to win.

Rolf cried out, and bit his lip, and tried to move. Some
power would not let him take a step toward the fight. He
threw his sword at Zapranoth; the spinning blade vanished
in midair.

Slowly—ever so slowly—Zapranoth was breaking the grip
about his waist. When that was done, maintaining his own
grip on Draffut's arm, he bent it farther. Draffut's jaws did
not relax their bite, but through them came the muffled
outcry of a titan's pain.

Rolf yelled again, and hurled a rock, and picked up an-
other, larger one. Somehow his frenzied rage enabled him
to run forward. Caring nothing now for his own fate, he
tried to strike the demon with a rock. Turning in their
struggle, the giants brushed him aside unnoticed. He felt
an impact, and his body soaring. The ground flying up to
meet him was the last part of the battle that he knew.

Chup, like all other mortal men, had been knocked down
by the repeated rolling of the earth. He had continued to
keep in sight the ugly young girl who clung to the swaying
rooftop, her bright eyes fixed now on the giants' struggle.
Then the opening crevice had split the mountain between
Chup and the object of his attention. Even while the earth
was still heaving like a ship's deck under him, Chup
gathered his resolve and crossed the narrow chasm with a
lunge, nearly falling into it though it was scarcely wider
than his body.

Behind him he heard Draffut's muffled cry of agony, as his
arm was mangled in the demon's grip. Chup did not look
round. He ran on toward the building where Lisa was. Now
it was so close that the roof and the girl on it were out of
his field of vision.

"Will you still nurse at my shoulder, beast?" It was the
roaring voice of Zapranoth. "I have no milk to yield! Bah!
If I tore your arms off, no doubt you would nuzzle at me
still." A brief pause. "But I can see a way to cause you
greater pain than that, vile animal. All you care for is your
Lake of Life. Now look! See what I do!"

Chup did not look, but jumped to grab the roof. His fin-
gers slid on marble and he fell; while falling, he did look
back. Despite the untroubled speeches of the demon, his

right arm in its armor was now hanging almost motionless,
below the unrelenting pressure of Draffut's fangs. But Za-
pranoth's left arm was free, and with a barrel-sized armored
fist he now smote down into the split that climbed the
mountain. Twice he struck, a third time and a fourth. With
each blow the mountain shook and rumbled; with each,
rumbling the crack widened by a little and lengthened
generously. Draffut, his limbs broken-looking, his fur now
dulled and matting, seemed helpless to do anything but
cling to the demon with his jaws.

With the last blow of the demon's fist, the lengthening
crevice broke into the doorway from which Draffut had
come down; and with that the rumbling of the tortured
mountain ended, in a sound as of a great clear bell. For a
moment all was still. Then through the broken, distant door-
way the Lake of Life came spurting, a flood of fiery radiance,
leaping, pouring down, dazzling even in full sun.

At the draining of the lake, there came from Draffut's
tight-clamped jaws a howl more terrible than anything that
Chup had ever heard. Beneath the loose fur of the Beast-
Lord's neck, his muscles bulged, as if he tried to tear the
demon's shoulder off. Now Zapranoth, too, let out a word-
less cry. Struggling as savagely as ever, the two of them
rolled away, while men of both armies fled in panic from
their path. Meanwhile the lake came down the mountain
in a thin but violent stream, sliding into crevices and up
from them again, leaving in its pathway rock that knew
the taste of life and moved, before it sank as if reluctantly
into being not-alive again.

At this latest shuddering of the earth, the building before
Chup, like many others in the citadel, collapsed. The walls
bulged out and crumpled almost gently, the roof caved in-
ward with a noise that was not loud amid the greater thun-
ders of the mountain. Chup stayed on all fours, crawling
forward into the fresh ruin. He quickly found the girl, cov-
ered with dust from the masonry that had collapsed be-
neath her, but showing no sign of any great hurt. Sprawled
on her belly on a mound of stones, she drew in gasps of air
as if readying a scream. A place on her forehead bled a
trickle, and she stared dazedly at Chup and past him.

A burning brazier inside the structure had been crushed,
and Chup poked together its spilled coals, lighted no doubt
when this day had been a peacefully chilly autumn morn-

ing. He fed in splinters from a broken beam until he had a
hardy little fire. When the girl looked at him with some
understanding, and began to sob, he asked: "Remember me,
young Lisa?"

She only sobbed on, in her fear and minor hurt. She
moved a little, but she was still dazed.

"Don't be afraid. This will not hurt you much." He tried
to hide the dagger from her with his arm as he moved it
toward her head. There seemed to be no doubt where the
exact place of hiding was. The dark brown mass of Lisa's
hair was bound up carefully, like the hair of ten thousand
other peasant girls across the countryside.

This was the girl who had appeared, seemingly from no-
where, at the house of Rolf's parents, at the same time that
Charmian's sister had been left with the Lord of Demons.
Rolfs people were obscure farmers, then seemingly remote
and safe from wars and magic. No one searching for a hidden
thing of power would have had reason to search them.

But six years passed, and war came there. Tarlenot by
accident carried off the girl as he had taken others. What-
ever rough disposal he might have made of her, her hair
would not have been so tidily cared for. In a dream or
vision the Dark Lord came, and worked hypnotically; and
Tarlenot forgot his own designs, and took the girl right to
the citadel. There were no more safe farms; Zapranoth
would hide his life where he could see it, and be quick in its
defense. So Lisa had been taken to serve a sister who did
not know her because both of their minds had been altered
by the demon, and because the appearance of the younger
girl had probably been changed as well...

She closed her eyes and moaned when Chup set his dag-
ger's edge to the tough cord by which her hair was bound.
When the cord parted, a feeling like the shock of combat ran
up the dagger to his hand. It was the first hard evidence that
he was right. Lord Draffut, he implored in silence, clamp
down your bite and hold the demon occupied. Hold him but
a little longer.

The dagger Draffut had given Chup was virginally sharp;
he held it like a razor, and severed the first long strands.
The girl came out of her daze, then, to scream and try to
fight, and in an instant he reversed his grip on the dagger
and clubbed her quiet with the hilt.

He dragged her limp form closer to his little fire, and laid

the first of the cut hair carefully beside the flame. With
proper shaving gear, or at least water, the business would
have gone more smoothly. But Chup had little inclination
and no time to be squeamish; beads of blood came upwell-
ing from the scalp as he shaved rapidly and thoroughly.
The girl moaned, but did not move.

Chup noticed first a strange, deep silence all around him.
But he did not look round. Then, somewhere nearby, there
spoke the voice of Zapranoth, in all its power and majesty:
"Little man. What do you think that you are doing there?"

Chup's hands began to shake, but without looking up or
pausing he forced them to shave another swath. He could
sense the power of Zapranoth above him, descending onto
him—the full power of Zapranoth, whose mere passing in
the cave had turned his bones to jelly. Chup sensed also
that as long as he kept his full attention to his task, he
could balance on a perilous point above annihilation.

"What you are doing is a nuisance to me. Cease it at
once, and I will see to it that your death is quick and clean."

One pause, in this stage of his work, and he would never
work again, nor fight nor play nor love. Chup knew it by
some inner warning: do not stop, look, turn. Hands that had
mangled the Lord of Beasts would close upon his merely
human flesh. Though Chup's own hands threatened to dis-
obey him, he made them shave more hair and set it by the
fire.

"Put down your knife and walk away." Zapranoth's voice
now was not loud so much as it was overwhelming. It seemed
impossible that anyone could say—or even think or hope—
a word in contradiction. Chup felt his concentration slip-
ping. In a moment he would answer, he would turn, he
would face Zapranoth and die.

"Powers of the West!" he cried aloud. "Come to my help!"
His hands meanwhile kept at their work.

"I am the only power who can reach you now, and what
you are doing arouses my displeasure. Put down your knife
and walk away. I repeat, you shall have a clean death if
you do—clean, and far in the future, after a long and
pleasant Me."

Lisa-Carlotta's face was changing, as the last of her hair
was taken off. The ugly proportions of her nose and jaw
and forehead flowed and melted into shapes of beauty, as
some pressure that had steadily deformed them was re-

moved. She whimpered, in a new and lighter voice. In spite
of her dirt and her raw, oozing scalp, Chup thought he
could see Charmian's sister in the unconscious face.

"Put down your knife," said Zapranoth, "or I devour you.
You will join your whining Beast-Lord in my gut, where
both of you can cry forever."

Chup turned, but just enough to feed a little more wood
into the fire, still not looking up toward the demon. Then
between thumb and finger Chup lifted a lock of Zapranoth's
life from the dark brown pile beside the flame. He tried to
think how Western wizards worded their spells, but he could
not remember ever hearing one of them. True, it might not
be necessary to say anything at all, with Zapranoth's life
right in his hands. But he suspected that against such an
adversary, all the help that he could get would not be too
much.

In his insistent, overwhelming voice the demon said: "Far
from here is a mountain that I know of, having hidden in
it gold in amounts undreamed of even by Som the Dead. I
see now, Chup of the North, that I have greatly under-
estimated you. I am prepared to bargain, to avoid the trouble
you can cause me."

And Chup fed the first of Zapranoth's life into the fire,
saying: "You will fall by the flame. The knife of fire is in
your head."

The words were rather good, Chup thought, pleased at
his own unexpected power of invention. From outside there
came what might have been an indrawn breath, but was a
sound too deep for human ears to fully register. Then Zapra-
noth said: "I am convinced, Lord Chup. From now on we
must deal as equals."

Very good, thought Chup. What to say next?
"Your ears are cut off"

"I submit to you, Lord Chup! You are my master, and I
will serve no other, so long as you permit me to survive! As
good beginning to my service, let me take you to the golden
mountain that I spoke of. Deeper inside it even than the
vault of gold, lies buried an emerald so great—"

Chup  opened  his   mouth   and  found  words  coming  to

him: "Opening him with this knife of fire. Separating flesh—"

The scream began in the mighty voice of Zapranoth, but

ended in the shrilling of a woman. She cried out then: "Ah,

mercy, master! Burn me no more. To you I must show my-

self in my true form." And Chup without stopping to think
looked out of his ruined building, and saw a young woman
stretched out on the ground, clothed scantily in her own
long hair of fiery red, and in her one body she was all the
women he had ever yearned to have, yes, Charmian among
them. To Chup she stretched out her imploring arms. "Ah,
spare me, lord!"

He craved no more the gold and emeralds of the East,
but this temptation could have moved him. Still, he knew
better than to heed another lie. He burned more hair.

"Separating flesh, piercing hide. I give him to the flames."

The woman screamed again, and in mid-scream her voice
belonged to something else, surely nothing human, and sure-
ly not the powerful Lord of Demons; but yet it was Zapra-
noth's. With shaking hands Chup fed more hair into the
crackling flame. He was somehow making up the words he
needed, or they were being sent to him.

"In the name of Ardneh—"

Where had that name come from? Where had he heard
it, before now?

"In the name of He-Who-Wields-The-Lightning, Breaker
of Citadels,

I fetter Zapranoth.

I fetter him with metal.

I make his members

So that he cannot struggle.

I force him to vomit what is in his stomach."

Chup looked outside. The image of the woman was gone,
and its place lay something huge, that made Chup think of
greasy ashes, and a mound of corpses on a field of war. The
thing was fettered in mighty hoops of shining metal, and
the labored breathing of it sounded like the wind. The
greasy ashes stirred and struggled, made heads and tails
and many-jointed limbs, but could not get from out the
binding bands. And now a mouth larger than any of the
others appeared, yawning as if forced open from inside, and
from it there tumbled forth all manner of wretched people
and beasts. The people wore the clothes of many lands, or
none at all, and rolled about and lay stunned and crying
like newborn babes, though most of them were grown. Among
them were some soldiers of the West, their weapons still in
hand. And there was one huge figure, that Chup recog-
nized . ..

The High Lord Draffut, tumbling back to life from what
had seemed the bitterest of nightmares, gave no immediate
thought to his own condition, or to the outcome of the
battle, or to anything except the ruin of his lake. Disregard-
ing the ruin and confusion that surrounded him, he raised
his eyes at once to what had been his high domain. The
radiant cascade of the lake had slowed to a mere trickle.
It was draining with the new finality of death.

He rushed at once to climb the slope behind the citadel.
Power remained in him to melt the rock of life, and make
it form holds for his hands and feet; the power absorbed
through ages of his dwelling in and near the lake, that
would not let him die, that healed his bones almost as fast
as they were broken. Only this life-power let him bear the
shock when he had mounted to his lake and found it a
drained shell, cracked at the bottom like a broken egg. The
dull, black fabric of its inner lining, the only material the
Old World had devised that could resist the quickening
force of pure life-principle—this shell remained, now for
the first time in his memory marked by no shifting patterns
or gay butterflies. The healing machines, their lives already
fading, hopped and struggled feebly, like dying frogs in a
drained pond.

Draffut did not stand long within the broken doorway,
gazing at the utter ruin of his life and purpose. The cries
from down the slope came to his ears. Human cries, from
the battlefield, of men in deadly need and fear. He moved
to answer them, without stopping to consider what he might
be able to do.

Down the slope again he went, walking at first, then
quickening his strides into a run. Before him like a trodden
anthill lay the demolished citadel and its swarming men.
Here and there they were still fighting one another. But
there were no more valkyries in the air.

Close before Draffut one of them lay motionless, smashed
by a fall, rotors bent and body broken with the violence of
its crash. A look through the sprung-open belly doors showed
Draffut that the man inside was cold and dead. Draffut,
raging, picked up the machine, shook it and shouted at it.
Where his hands touched the metal it stirred with faint
life; but that was all. Only now did the magnitude of what
had happened come home to the Lord Draffut with full
force. Even if he could somehow repair or vivify this ma-

chine, there was nowhere for it to go, no healing possible
for the dead man inside. Nor for any of the others who now
lay upon the field, or might fall tomorrow.

Far down the mountainside, near where the great crack
in the mountain had shattered the citadel's outer wall, a
bright gleam caught Lord Draffut's eye. It was the many-
colored radiance of the lake, trapped in a small pool in the
rocks. At once he tore the battered flyer apart, pulled out
the corpse inside. Cradling the body tenderly in one arm,
he hurried on.

Reaching the small pool, not much bigger than a bathtub,
he found that some of the wounded of both armies had
sought it out already, were sprawled beside it drinking, or
splashing the fluid on their wounds. Picking his way care-
fully among these injured men, Lord Draffut reached a
spot beside the radiant pool. He dropped into it the dead
man he carried, then set himself to disperse healing to as
many as he could.

With every passing moment, more men, mostly Easterners,
were crawling and staggering to the place. A groaning, de-
manding throng grew rapidly around the Lord of Beasts.
The level of the fluid in the pool sank rapidly as well—rock
could not hold it for long—and Draffut crouched low be-
side it, scooping up healing handfuls which he poured into
mouths or onto wounds. The dead man he had carried here
was sitting up and groaning now.

Draffut splashed a remnant of the lake onto a mangled
arm-stump, whose owner shouted with the ending of his
pain; perhaps a new and proper arm would grow. Another
man, his belly opened, came sliding in blood to reach the
pool, and Draffut poured for him an end of agony.

Amid the general cries of pain, and with his dazed concen-
tration on his task, Lord Draffut did not notice when a dif-
ferent, heartier voice, raging and commanding, was raised in
the rear of the rapidly growing throng about him.

"—back to your ranks, malingerers! The enemy still holds
the field. You who can walk, rejoin your units, cowards, or
I'll give you wounds . . . Guardsmen! Take up your arms
and fight for me!"

Nor did Lord Draffut, in his dazed state, fully notice
what was happening when this shouter came raving, scatter-
ing wounded Guardsmen from the pool with blows of the
flat of his sword. Draffut was aware only of one more victim

reeling toward him, with sunken eyes and the stink of ter-
rible gangrene. Draffut scooped up for this one a generous
handful, and threw it accurately. From his hand the fluid of
the lake leaped out, a clear and innocent serpent in the air.
Only in that instant did the sunken eyes of the raving, raging
man meet those of Draffut, in a look that the Beast-Lord
would long remember; and only in that instant did Draffut
know who this man was.

The splash of liquid struck. A maddened shout ceased in
mid-syllable, a sword dropped clanging on the ground.
Then nothing more was heard or seen of Som the Dead. He
and his portion of the Lake of Life had vanished from the
world of men.

"—with the knife of fire I cut off feet and hands,

Shut his mouth and his lips—"

The bellowing of Zapranoth grew louder and more desper-
ate, and at the same time became more muffled.

"Blunted his teeth,

Cut his tongue from his throat.

Thus I took away his speech,

Blinded his eyes,

Stopped his ears,

Cut his heart from its place."

The fire swam before Chup's eyes, and the exhaustion of
the magician, a feeling new to him, seemed to weaken his
every bone. Once more he begged the power of the West
to send him words, for it was growing very hard to think.
Then summoning his strength, he shouted:

"I made him as if he had never been!"

Silence had fallen all across the riven plateau of the bat-
tlefield; in silence the army of the East had begun to turn
to desperate flight or to surrender. Looking where Zapranoth
had been, Chup could see no more metal hoops, no more
heap of greasy ashes, nothing.

But in his mind still spoke the Demon-Lord: "Master. Yet
a very little of my life remains. Save that, and from it all
the rest can be remade. My powers can be restored, to raise
for you an army to lead, to build for you your kingdom—"
Chup with great care gathered the last hairs, while be-
side   him   Lisa-Carlotta  moved  her  mistreated  head   and
once more opened her eyes,
"His name is not any more.

His children are not.

He existeth no more.

Nor his kindred.

He existeth not, nor his record;

He existeth not, nor his heir.

His egg cannot grow.

Nor is his seed raised.

It is dead.

And his spirit, and his shadow, and his magic."

Thus was the Lord of Demons, Zapranoth, destroyed,
and thus did Chup of the North earn a place in the army of
the West. His bride was searched for, especially where some
said they had seen her pass, descending along a new path
created by the splitting of the mountain. But she was not
found.

The great beast Draffut fled, when the last drops of his
lake were gone, to somewhere where there were no cries of
wounded men.

"Lisa?" Rolf of the Broken Lands had come to speak to
the unrecognizable girl who, they said, had been his sister
once.

"Rolf." She knew him, but her voice was dull She was
inconsolable—not for her own pain, not for the East's defeat,
nor for any of the fallen—save one.

"My Dark Lord," she said. "My strong protector. He was
all I had."