Iron Chamber of Memory (26 page)

One of the mirrors had been opened like a door. Behind was a cabinet made of dark wood, and piled high with parchment bound with ribbons, scrolls, librums, folios and quartos, grimoires, manuals, and books with iron padlocks.

Lanval said, “Is anything missing?”

“Of a certainty,” said Mandragora. “But what?”

“Wait! Now I recall. I saw her spread wings and fly upward.”

“Wings? Then she is something worse than a mermaid.”

Mandragora and Lanval stepped to the brink of the lotus pool, and stared upward against the light overhead, which poured in through a crystal dome. The four pillars upholding the dome had hollow capitals in the shape of iron cages. The bars of the cages were wrought in the twisting shapes of runes and sigils, and the four letters of the Tetragrammaton were written on the four sides of each cage.

Within the cages were djinn, creatures of pure fire. It was from them the light came, along with black clouds and fumes that filled the dome above.

Mandragora raised the green book in his unwounded hand and spoke words that rang and echoed like golden bells tolling.
Qui facis angelos tuos spiritus et ministros tuos ignem urentem
! Immediately a wind stirred in the silver white chamber, and the black clouds cloaking the dome grew transparent to their sight. Now they saw Lorelei in her true shape, short-haired but winged like a black swan, laying elegantly atop a cornice that ran around the lip of the dome. She was a foot or two from the bars of one of the pillars. The folded wings which now draped her naked body past her hips, in the outer world, had looked to their spell-caught eyes like hair.

Lanval hefted his sword and saw how high above them she was, forty feet or more. “I have no bow and arrow. How can she fly? I thought she was a mermaid, a river daughter, or a nix. I thought she hid her fish-tail in shoes enchanted to give her legs a human seeming.”

Mandragora said, “No, she merely likes shoes, since she had none to wear in the unpitying fair world from which she comes. She dances the elf dance on lakes in the moonlight, craving praise and sorrow of men, their love and their grief. The legs are hers. But what is she doing?”

And then he cried out in anger and woe, for Lorelei, smiling archly, took one of the papers from the sheaf she held and thrust it in through the bars of the cage. The paper touched the chained foot of the iron-winged djinn, and the cage bars vanished like vapor, and the dome sagged where the pillar’s support was absent. A crack appeared in the crystal. The djinn arose in a clatter of iron wings, fires before him and behind, shouting triumphant blasphemies and defiance against heaven. The being of fire whirled near the top of the dome, a tornado of dark smoke, with branches of further darkness reaching upward from its blazing skull like the tines of a crown.

Lorelei looked down with mirth and malice in her emerald eyes. “Ah! Is my little poppet come to play? My lover who I, with such labor, enchanted to adore me—what can you do now, now that you have played your part, and opened up this door to me? Here are the writings, oaths and contracts signed in blood, by which the older things trampled by Arthur were made sanctified. And look! I have set one free! It is your doing, lover! If only you have kept your word, kept your purity intact, kept trousers on and let the luscious and forbidden apple linger sweetly without a taste—but that was too much to ask, was it?” She pointed at Mandragora. “Go, son of fire, regent of Iblis! Nasir al Khuddam! Slay the wonder-worker!”

But the voice from the fire said, “First free my brother Shasir, and my sisters, the
jiniri
Hassa and Massa!”

“Burn! Burn and consume, for Mandragora is the scholar by whose grammary you are bound! His tales that penance will return your long-lost unsmoking forms to you, clean and bright, were but lies to deceive you.”

The tornado of fiery darkness flew down, and the roar was a storm.

Mandragora held up his book, and around the book when it opened, there came a rainbow which burned like an emerald. And the fires of the rainbow, Lanval saw, were words written in the three languages of Man, the Latin of Europe, and the Aramaic of Asia, and the Hieroglyphs taught to the Pharaohs from long-drowned Atlantis. Thunder and lightning fell from the black cloud all around Mandragora.

Lanval stepped between the two. His shining sword parried the first bolt of darkness, and then a second, but the force of the Djinn was too great for him. Electric shock threw him from his feet, and a screaming wind flung him against a far wall, and the silver was dented.

Mandragora flung aside his cloak, and, behold, beneath his robe was full of stars. He stepped over to Lanval’s fallen body, his book of emerald brightness still held high, and stood with one foot to either side of Lanval, crying out, “
Statuet turbinem in tranquillitatem et silebunt fluctus eius!”

The black wind tore at the chamber to the left and right, throwing tiny fragments of silver and diamond here and there, and great wet sopping lotus leaves, but the roaring force did not touch Mandragora nor Lanval.

“Henwas, can you move?”

Lanval groaned, saying, “I don’t know if I can—I cannot feel my hands and feet. I am pretty badly burnt.”

“Can you reach into the pocket in my sleeve and pull out a little silver mirror?”

Lanval coughed, and stared at the blood which spilled out over his chin and breast. His white mail coat was blacked and stained, and from his blacked skin of his arms, raw redness oozed. But he managed to force his numb and trembling fingers into the pocket of Mandragora’s strange robe, in which stars and comets burned and turned.

He withdrew a small eight-sided looking glass smaller than his palm. “I have the glass. Now what?”

With his wounded arm, Mandragora reached into his billowing sleeve and pulled something out, something alive. Lanval marveled when he saw it. It was a dove.

“Hold up the glass in front of my familiar’s eyes.”

The effort pained Lanval greatly, and his charred fingers left red stains on the little mirror, but he held the glass, trembling, before the bright eyes of the little white bird.

Lanval expected to see some change in the bird, but the little creature merely stared blankly at the mirror, cooing.

Mandragora said to the bird, “Comforter, great spirit that flies between my tower in Elfland and my place of exile here, fly to my chambers in the Otherworld and return with my wand. You will forget who you are when you go, and will think yourself nothing more than a lost bird, but by my art I will place in your mind the suggestion that you want to carry a bit of bright straw that you find back here, back to the hand that feeds you grain. Now go!”

Around them, the djinn roared and lashed at them with black wind, but it could not reach through the green emerald rainbow. Mandragora tilted the book in his hand, and the top of the rainbow opened outward, forming a road or chimney up which the little bird quickly passed. The bird flew past the djinn, past the tops of the pillars, and found a small crack in the dome, and pass out beyond.

Lorelei from above the two men dropped a mocking laugh, her wings flapping lazily, as she fed a second document into the bars of a second pillar. Loudly over the wind of the first djinn still battering the emerald barrier below her, she cried to the trapped spirit, “Once I release thee, great Shasir, older than Adam, pass quickly over the walls into the Sleepwalking World. You will forget who you are, and think yourself but a thunderstorm, or some other natural disturbance of the air. Slay the Talking Animals protecting this house. Find the Dragon-Prince of the Soul-Eaters, the Impaler, and bear him here on wings of storm. Go!”

With a deafening noise, the crystal dome was broken from the two remaining pillar tops and flung away into the high blue sky, toppling into a thousand bright shards that fell no man knows where.

Lanval saw the dove, a white speck against the red light of dawn, flying away from the house.

Lorelei called down sweetly, her voice loud and shrill over the wind: “My master, the Prince of the Soul-Eaters, is nigh, living in a gutter, drinking whiskey that will never soothe the craving for blood that torments him. His host is gathered here, each one called by a silent voice inside him, called by their true selves, burning!”

The black whirlwind now broke the circle of green light protecting Mandragora, caught him up in the air and flung him headlong to the far side of the silver chamber.

Mandragora, on hands and knees, bruised in his face, nose running blood, shouted back, “You shall not prevail, Lorelei.”

“Watch and see!” she called.

The black-crowned whirlwind left Lanval and hurled itself upon Mandragora. Again, he opened his book, and three columns of light, green as spring grass, softly arose from the floorstones around him. The windstorm drove him to his knees, but the tongues of forked lighting flew wild, striking the silver walls, leaving him unharmed.

Lorelei flew toward the next tall column, reaching out with a document toward the iron bars that held one of the two remaining djinn bound in place. But she mistook the wildness of the winds the djinn had let free, and a sudden turn of the wind flung her downward.

Lanval, despite his pains and wounds, made a prodigious leap then, while she struggled with her wings against the gale, and grabbed her slender ankle. He was twice her weight and more: down the two fell into the lotus pool. She sputtered, and he sighed at the ease of his burns, which vanished away in those magical waters like a dream.

Lanval, his strength restored, and Lorelei found their feet. He twisted her arm behind her, and placed the tip of his bright sword between her perfect breasts.

“Call off the djinn afflicting Mandragora! Send it out swiftly to protect the Wolfhound brothers!”

Lorelei held a handful of dripping papers and parchments. With a furious gesture she cast them into the air, where the whirlwind caught them and spun them to each quarter of the chamber. “I release my power of command over ifrit, djann and djinn! Nasir is now his own master! Whom do you think he will slay?”

The djinn roared with laughter.

Mandragora called out to Lanval, “I can hold off the creature until my wand is brought. With that, I can force the spirit back into a brass bottle.”

Lorelei called out gaily, “And if My Master arrives here first, you both will be consumed by inches, screaming!”

Lanval shifted his grip on her, pinning both her elbows behind her folded wings. The dark-haired beauty arched her back and smiled alluringly, teasingly, at Lanval, ground her shapely hips against him.

He held her to him, threatening her with his sword. He shouted to Mandrake to bath this wounds in the pool.

Mandrake said, “The same contract binding the djinn permits that the pool they are forced to guard may cure what wounds they inflict here. Its waters will sooth no other ills.”

Lorelei cooed in a mocking, dry tone to Lanval, “Sweet lover, what do you recall of the World of Exile? Were you born there, among the death and suffering and pointless misery afflicted by an uncaring and distant heaven? Or was it all taken from you? All your poor, pathetic memories? Have you never wondered how we came to be here, living like this, disguised as Sons and Daughters of Eve?”

“I am the son of The Grail Knight. My father showed me the cup when I was a boy, still with heaven’s innocence in me, so that the shining rays were visible to me: and in the Blood of the Grail he anointed me.”

“And after…?”

“We moved to New York, and he opened a used bookstore.”

“Fitting mission for one of the boldest knights of the Table Round!”

“Silence, lilim, daughter of Lilith!”

“Should I be silent? Or should you know why we dwell here in utter unmemory and amnesia? Here is the tale of the Exiles! The triumph of the Father of Dragons was nigh. He is that same worm that tempted Eve with knowledge; eating also of the Tree of Life, the subtlest of creatures could never die, and grew with every passing year, till the land could not hold him, and even the sea was in torment to hold his bulk. He took his tail into his mouth, and his stinger tail piercing his own tongue, wrapped the whole world in his scaly belly. His hunger is such that he must eat, and he gnaws faster than he grows. The world was about to be split like an egg, when the Exile was proclaimed. All of us, friend and foe alike, knight and wise man, elf or scaly drake, was flung into this place of forgetting! It is not the spell of witches that robbed you of your glories, Son of the Grail Knight—it was heaven’s last desperate act! The final burning of all bridges back through the perilous woods and wilds of myth and lore to the gardenlands of paradise! The way is closed, and all of us lost ourselves, as a stop gap to stave off utmost defeat—a defeat for you which is now at hand!”

The sword grew dimmer in his hand, and Lanval saw with horror that its virtue came from his own heart. As soon as his spirit failed, the sword would again go dark, and then he would be defenseless against both djinn and lamia alike.

Mandragora called out over the noise of the winds, “Each passing year, their forces dwindle in number. The Sons of Light, even forgetting all their triumphs, do not forget their virtues; but the Children of Darkness, forgetting their black crimes, sometimes turn away from their vices, charmed by the simple humans we here live among.”

But the emerald columns of light around him had bent and broken, and the dark wind was driving him back, step by step, toward the hexagonal portal, trying to hurl him back into the world where he was a scholar, not a magician.

She laughed. “It is not our numbers that dwindle each day, but yours! The Silver-White Lotus Chamber was built to spread the narcotic power of the Lotus Pool across all the worlds on the wings of captive genii, so that the dream is not interrupted. Now that we possess the pool, it will only be a short time until we discover how to break it, and wake the world, and show them the serpent that circles the globe! Men can only have the heart to stand against us when their eyes are held, and our true power and true beauty and dark majesty is hidden from them—how do you think they will prevail against the naked forces of the night world in all our terror and glory?”