Iron Chamber of Memory (29 page)

The urgent desire to enter the Rose Crystal Chamber vexed him, although he could not recall why it was so important. What had he left in there? He had been drinking heavily during the riotous stag party, and his memory was blurred. Something embarrassing no doubt had been left sitting in some obvious spot, some terrible thing he had to remove or hide before the happy couple entered it for their joyful nuptial consummation. He was just glad that when they dressed the bride, no one had noticed it, whatever it was.

He had been to his sister’s wedding a few years ago, and he knew that, as soon as the wedding mass was over, the photographers would press forward, issuing commands with the barking authority of prison guards, for photographers were no respecters of persons. So he waited until the mass ended for his opportunity.

But it would have been discourteous indeed to step away from the reception line and miss shaking hands with the royal family, and so there was no opportunity then. After, Hal had to give the toasts both sincere and risqué that followed, and at that point, the male guests all decided as a group, including the young Marquis of Carabas and the gray-haired, but grinning Duke of Devonshire, to hoist Manfred on their shoulders and haul him bodily to the honeymoon suite in the Rose Crystal Chamber, peers and lords mingling with servants and tenants unabashed, shouting ribald advice, while the ladies and their maids hurried a blushing Laurel into and through the throng, keeping pace with Manfred.

And then it was too late. The happy mob was streaming into the upper corridor. What else could Hal have done? Could he have stepped into the cheering, riotous throng and belabored them with his walking stick? Hal thought Manfred looked a little panicked, but he remembered no reason why Manfred should be worried, not on this, his wedding day, aside from the worries every bridegroom is right to worry.

The door to the Rose Crystal Chamber was locked, but Laurel’s mother stepped over to Hal and pushed him toward the door, and all the men cheered. Laurel said, “Allow me!” and plucked the keyring from Hal’s fingers. Again, what else was he supposed to do? Argue with the bride on her wedding day?

The throng put Manfred down, and a dozen hands picked up Laurel and shoved her into his arms. Manfred put an arm around her shoulder and another under her knees, smiling to all his well-wishers, “The Roman and his Sabine Bride need a little privacy now, you barbarians!”

Meanwhile she leaned from his arm, reached out with the key, and undid the lock. The well-wishers were all standing behind the happy couple on the stairs rank on rank. Hal, more by instinct than reason, tried to close the door against the laughing, raucous, joyful throng, but they came down the stairway, and it would have been easier to halt an avalanche.

Then they were within the Rose Chamber, brilliantly decorated, and the cheering became a little more hoarse and sinister. Henry looked up woebegone at Laureline. Their eyes met, remembering both their constant and deep love for each other, and her look of shock and guilt. Henry knew she had recalled her attempt to have Henry murder Mandrake. Mandrake, for his part, finding himself holding a woman whom he was being forced to marry, whom he did not love, and, in fact, who had tried to kill him opened his arms and dropped her, reaching for the keyring.

But the roaring mob, looking rather more shaggy than they should have, with green eyes that glowed like the eyes of wolves, called out in gruff and hoarse voices. The Duke of Devonshire, gray and lean like a famished wolf, and the Count of Carabas, grinning like a panther, heard the Countess Margaret shout out a command, and the two grabbed Mandrake roughly by his arms. Laureline’s blue-dressed maids of honor, her sisters, had grown strangely more beautiful and alluring than they had appeared even a moment before, and now moved with a sinuous, boneless grace, like undersea creatures, and one of them picked up the keyring and returned it to Laureline before Henry could move.

Henry was taken roughly by the shoulder by Laureline’s mother, Ran du Lac. The old woman seemed to have miraculously put on about one hundred pounds of blubber and fat, and turned her skin an unhealthy shade of pale green, her teeth to iron, and her scent to the rotting odor of old fish. Henry stared in bewilderment, aghast. Another young thug in a tuxedo seized his elbow, and one particularly shaggy-looking farmlad from the village bit his wrist and pried his walking stick from his hand.

In a moment, cursing and struggling, the throng moved around the spiral curve, and Laureline had worked the lock to the silver hexagonal portal. Into the wall it slid, allowing light and music to escape.

With roars, shouts, howls, and yips of excitement, the throng of people shoved themselves into the chamber, dragging Manfred with them, and then the talking animals, walking mermaids, lamia, man-eaters, ghouls and witches, their apparel glistering, and making a riotous and unruly noise. They threw down the bridegroom Mandragora, and bound him fast with chains.

The bride’s mother was now a four-hundred-pound toad-like thing with a gaping mouth full of jagged teeth like a shark. Her three sisters from Germany were singing and swaying on the surface of the waters, creatures of appalling loveliness, but with eyes devoid of humanity or pity.

The bride now threw aside the veil, and unfurled her dark and swanlike wings. “Oh, my beloved! Shall I not couch with you this day?” And her sisters stripped the bridal dress from her, and the bride in mockery lay down and wound her white arms and legs like snakes around the bound and helpless Mandragora, and she bit his neck and licked his blood.

Henry Landfall was pulled over the threshold easily, but Henwas Lanval, champion of Camelot, was not so easily taken. He threw the monsters from his arms, which now were garbed in mail, and smote a beast who tried to bite his neck, but was now protected by the aventail of his winged helm. He fell upon the talking beast who had taken his sword, grabbed its snapping jaws with both gauntlets, put his knee against its back, and reared and broke the vile creature’s spine.

The sword was in his hand, and the first wolf-faced monster who staggered back, blinking and blinded, died from a blow through heart and lungs, that also cut the gargoyle standing directly behind. Blood splashed across the white surcoat, and stained the proud ermine there, warm and glorious.

Over the screams and shrieks and roars of the beast-men and the blasphemies of the magicians, Lanval cried out the name of Arthur, and took a step, sweeping the blazing blade in a mighty sweep to the left. Paws and claws and tentacles and heads, human and inhuman, were swept away in a prodigious spray of blood, as the magic sword parted flesh and bone. He swung the other way, and men with the heads of hippogriffs and wolves, and rodents, and bears and all the vermin that prey on man or his livestock, were severed from their bodies. He drove the blade up to its hilt into the throat of the Duke of Devonshire, a corpse-mage who had used his own dark magic to raise himself back from the dead into hideous mockery of life. Lanval laughed the laugh of madness. No one else in the chamber was armed, no one else was armored. With his back to the door, he could slay as he willed, like Arthur himself that glorious, red day at Badon Hill!

With a mighty swing he decapitated the catlike and inhuman head of the Count of Carabas, but the head rolled rapidly away, eyes blazing brightly, yowling for help.

And those yowls were answered. Up from the pool in the center of the chamber stood the pale and grim prince in his black armor and blacker crown. He spread his vast wings of membrane, and spoke a word of blasphemy, so that all in the chamber were thrown to their knees or hindlegs, save only Lanval.

The Dark Prince pointed one long white finger at Mandragora. Lorelei had an athame, a witch’s knife, driven a quarter-inch into Mandragora’s neck. The Dark Prince said in a bloodless voice, “Throw down your sword and surrender, and I promise you will pass freely from this chamber.”

A small voice inside him told him not to listen, but the mother of the bride reached into Mandragora’s mouth with a pair of scissors, and cut his tongue out. The sight was so horrific that Lanval was drained of strength. He presented his sword to a gargoyle with the head of a bat.

Nine monsters grabbed Lanval, forcing him to the ground. Quickly chains were twined around his arms and wrists, legs and ankles. A baboon-creature bit through the leathern straps and yanked his helmet off, and seized his hair in its stinking paws. The baboon pounded Lanval’s face into the floor over and over again, breaking his nose and dislocating his jaw.

The bat thing proffered the great sword to the Dark Prince, who took it in hand. There was a hiss as the grip of the sword burned the unholy hand of that prince, but the gaunt man neither winced nor cried out. The light of the blade died, and the metal turned black.

Next, without a word, without a sign of remorse, the Dark Prince stepped over to where Mandragora was chained and tongueless and helpless, and drove the sword into the intestines of the wonder worker, and upward into his vitals.

Lorelei released the chained man, her fingers trembling before her mouth, her eyes wide, shocked. “No!” she cried.

Blood and offal and the fluids from other organs gushed out. The tongueless, inarticulate and lingering scream of Mandragora was horrible beyond description.

And the cry went on and on and on. Lanval forced his head backward against the grip of the baboon-thing. The flesh around his eyes had begun to swell, but he could blink through his own blood to see what was happening to his friend.

A minute passed, and then two, and still Mandragora did not die. A voluminous wash of red blood like an apron poured out of his opened stomach, over his legs, and into the lotus pool, and more blood poured out, and more, and still it did not cease to pour. Mandragora cried out again, but then closed his jaws, and hissed, and ceased from crying. Instead, jaws clenched shut, he stared at the Dark Prince unblinkingly, his face expressionless.

The Dark Prince said, “Did you say
no
to me, my pet?”

Lorelei’s eyes were round with panic. “Indeed not, Master! I was cheering for you!”

“Women are weak weapons. You always fall in love with those you lure.”

“Not so, dread and dreaded Master! My heart is cold and dead!”

“Bah! A woman’s heart. Turn him prone.”

Lorelei, with shrill little grunts of effort, receiving no help from any in that chamber, managed to roll the chained body of her husband onto his face. She pointed to the wedding band, gleaming like the sun. “My master, he wears the Ring of Youth, which restores all wounds. While he wears it, he cannot die, and I cannot be mistress here, and all of what is his be mine. Unchain the hand!”

Mandragora was roughly pulled by two large wolfish animals into a sitting position, his intestines in his lap, and his left hand, the one that bore the ring, behind him. Each monster in the chamber took its turn trying to pull the ring off his finger. It would not move.

The Dark Prince said, “Larger than they seem are all such rings, for the weight of worlds is held in little things. It must come willingly from his finger, or not at all.”

Lorelei said, “What shall we do? His blood is sacred while he wears that ring, and may counteract the poisons you have spread into the pool, my Master.”

He pointed at Lanval. “Sever the hand of the knight and bring it here!”

A creature with the head of a boar said, “He is armored by the Brisings’ lore. No weapon of ours will bite.”

But Lorelei said, “Galatine will cut him. For me, for my sake, he, willing himself woe, sought to end his life. That a miracle preserved him is not to his credit: the sin makes his armor unwhole.”

The Dark Prince took the sword, and stepped over to Lanval, while the baboon pinned Lanval’s chained hands to the floor. Lanval jerked his arms when the Dark Prince swung, and shoved the baboon’s skull into the path of the descending blade. The head of the baboon burst into flame, and fire gushed from its mouth and eye-holes, and the body danced and twitched and died. Lanval smiled.

The blade did not want to cut him. Sometimes the blade turned sideways in the grip of the Dark Prince, and sometimes it missed and struck the chain, and twice more Lanval, in his wild struggle and his fury, managed to wrestle some hapless creature of the many holding him down into the way, so that they were struck instead. But the Dark Prince neither smiled nor grew tired, and his spirit was greater than the spirit in the darkened blade, and at last the thing was done, the blade cut through wrist bones and blood and flesh and rang against the floorstones beneath. Blood spurted, bright and red, from the veins in Lanval’s stump.

The Dark Prince lightly tossed the severed hand onto the bloody mess that was the lap of Mandragora. “Place the ring on the finger of Sir Lanval, and his life will be saved, your own forfeit. Or keep your hand closed, and watch him die, and endure now and always an eternal pain like your master, the Fisher King. Slaves! Pull Lanval to the lip of the pool, and let the blood from his wound pour in and pollute it. We shall watch as Mandragora watches him die.”

The creatures pulled Lanval to the pool’s edge. He was directly across the chamber from Mandragora, and rough hands and crooked claws pulled the lolling head of Mandragora upright, so he had an unobstructed view of Lanval. Oddly, Lorelei was kneeling next to Mandragora, both her hands on his shoulder, looking at him anxiously.

Lanval said, “Don’t do it! In the name of God and Christ, do not let them prevail!”

As a cruel sport, and to silence his cry, the monsters held Lanval’s face beneath the water for short, and then longer periods, until he breathed water into his lungs. This made his heart race, and the rush of blood from his stump grew faster and stronger as his skin turned pale and more pale.

There came a roar of triumph from the chamber. The monsters and abominations all began cavorting, and the lamia and lilim began to sing. Through the haze of blood in his eyes and bloodloss in his veins, through the reddish waters and his swollen eye-bruises, Lanval squinted and saw Mandragora, quite dead, and the Ring of Youth thrust onto his own severed hand, which lay upon the floor.