Tales of the Dying Earth (11 page)

He strode past the broken obelisk, into a wide court —the Place of Whispers. Directly opposite was a long wide hall, marked by a leaning column with a big black medallion, the sign of a phoenix and a two-headed lizard.

Liane merged himself with the shadow of a wall, and stood watching like a wolf, alert for any flicker of motion.

All was quiet. The sunlight invested the ruins with dreary splendor. To all sides, as far as the eye could reach, was broken stone, a wasteland leached by a thousand rains, until now the sense of man had departed and the stone was one with the natural earth.

The sun moved across the dark-blue sky. Liane presently stole from his vantage-point and circled the hall. No sight nor sign did he see.

He approached the building from the rear and pressed his ear to the stone. It was dead, without vibration. Around the side—watching up, down, to all sides; a breach in the wall. Liane peered inside. At the back hung half a golden tapestry. Otherwise the hall was empty.

Liane looked up, down, this side, that. There was nothing in sight. He continued around the hall.

He came to another broken place. He looked within. To the rear hung the golden tapestry. Nothing else, to right or left, no sight or sound.

Liane continued to the front of the hall and sought into the eaves; dead as dust.

He had a clear view of the room. Bare, barren, except for the bit of golden tapestry.

Liane entered, striding with long soft steps. He halted in the middle of the floor. Light came to him from all sides except the rear wall. There were a dozen openings from which to flee and no sound except the dull thudding of his heart

He took two steps forward. The tapestry was almost at his fingertips.

He stepped forward and swiftly jerked the tapestry down from the wall.

And behind was Chun the Unavoidable.

Liane screamed. He turned on paralyzed legs and they were leaden, like legs in a dream which refused to run.

Chun dropped out of the wall and advanced. Over his shiny black back he wore a robe of eyeballs threaded on silk.

Liane was running, fleetly now. He sprang, he soared. The tips of his toes scarcely touched the ground. Out the hall, across the square, into the wilderness of broken statues and fallen columns. And behind came Chun, running like a dog.

Liane sped along the crest of a wall and sprang a great gap to a shattered fountain. Behind came Chun.

Liane darted up a narrow alley, climbed over a pile of refuse, over a roof, down into a court. Behind came Chun.

Liane sped down a wide avenue lined with a few stunted old cypress trees, and he heard Chun close at his heels. He turned into an archway, pulled his bronze ring over his head, down to his feet. He stepped through, brought the ring up inside the darkness. Sanctuary. He was alone in a dark magic space, vanished from earthly gaze and knowledge.

Brooding silence, dead space ...

He felt a stir behind him, a breath of air. At his elbow a voice said, "I am Chun the Unavoidable."

Lith sat on her couch near the candles, weaving a cap from frogskins.

The door to her hut was barred, the windows shuttered. Outside, Thamber Meadow dwelled in darkness.

At scrape at her door, a creak as the lock was tested. Lith became rigid and stared at the door.

A voice said, "Tonight, O Lith, tonight it is two long bright threads for you. Two because the eyes were so great, so large, so golden ...

Lith sat quiet. She waited an hour; then, creeping to the door, she listened. The sense of presence was absent. A frog croaked nearby.

She eased the door ajar, found the threads and closed the door. She ran to her golden tapestry and fitted the threads into the ravelled warp.

And she stared at the golden valley, sick with longing for Ariventa, and tears blurred out the peaceful river, the quiet golden forest. "The cloth slowly grows wider . . . One day it will be done, and I will come home...."

PRINCE KANDIVE the Golden spoke earnestly to his nephew Ulan Dhor. "It must be understood that the expansion of craft and the new lore will be shared between us."

Ulan Dhor, a slender young man, pale of skin, with the blackest of hair, eyes, and eyebrows, smiled ruefully. "But it is I who journey the forgotten water, I who must beat down the sea-demons with my oar."

Kandive leaned back into his cushions and tapped his nose with a ferrule of carved jade.

"And it is I who make the venture possible. Further, I am already an accomplished wizard; .the increment of lore will merely enhance my craft.

You, not even a novice, will gain such knowledge as to rank you among the magicians of Ascolais. This is a far cry from your present ineffectual status. Seen in this light, my gain is small, yours is great."

Ulan Dhor grimaced. "True enough, though I dispute the word

'ineffectual'. I know Phandaal's Critique of the Chill, I am reckoned a master of the sword, ranked among the Eight Delaphasians as a ..."

"Pah!" sneered Kandive. "The vapid mannerisms of pale people, using up their lives. Mincing murder, extravagant debauchery, while Earth passes its last hours, and none of you have ventured a mile from Kaiin."

Ulan Dhor held his tongue, reflecting that Prince Kandive the Golden was not known to scorn the pleasures of wine, couch, or table; and that his farthest known sally from the domed palace had taken him to his carven barge on the River Scaum.

Kandive, appeased by Ulan Dhor's silence, brought forward an ivory box. "Thus and so. If we are agreed, I will invest you with knowledge."

Ulan Dhor nodded. "We are agreed."

Kandive said, "The mission will take you to the lost city Ampridatvir."

He watched Ulan Dhor's face from sidelong eyes; Ulan Dhor maintained an even expression.

"I have never seen it," continued Kandive. "Porrina the Ninth lists it as the last of the Olek'hnit cities, situated on an island in the North Melantine." He opened the box. "This tale I found in an ancient bundle of scrolls—the testament of a poet who fled Ampridatvir after the death of Rogol Domedonfors, their last great leader, a magician of great force, mentioned forty-three times in the Cyclopedia ..."

Kandive brought forth a crackling scroll, and, whipping it open, read:

Ampridatvir now is lost. My people have forsaken the doctrine of strength and discipline and concern themselves only with superstition and theology. Unending is the bicker: Is Pansiu the excellent principle and Cazdal depraved, or is Cazdal the virtuous god, and Pansiu the essential evil?

These questions are debated with fire and steel, and the memory sickens me; now I leave Ampridatvir to the decline which must surely come, and remove to the kind valley of Mel-Palusas, where I will end this firefly life of mine.

I have known the Ampridatvir of old; I have seen the towers glowing with marvellous light, thrusting beams through the night to challenge the sun itself. Then Ampridatvir was beautiful—ah my heart pains when I think of the olden city. Semir vines cascaded from a thousand hanging gardens, water ran blue as vaul-stone in the three canals. Metal cars rolled the streets, metal hulls swarmed the air as thick as bees around a hive—for marvel of marvels, we had devised wefts of spitting fire to spurn the weighty power of Earth . . . But even in my life I saw the leaching of spirit. A surfeit of honey cloys the tongue; a surfeit of wine addles the brain; so a surfeit of ease guts a man of strength. Light, warmth, food, water, were free to all men, and gained by a minimum of effort. So the people of Ampridatvir, released from toil, gave increasing attention to faddishness, perversity, and the occult.

To the furthest reach of my memory, Rogol Domedonfors ruled the city. He knew lore of all ages, secrets of fire and light, gravity and counter-gravity, the knowledge of superphysic numeration, metathasm, corolopsis. In spite of his profundity, he was impractical in his rule, and blind to the softening of Ampridatvirian spirit. Such weakness and lethargy as he saw he ascribed to a lack of education, and in his last years he evolved a tremendous machine to release men from all labor, and thus permit full leisure for meditation and ascetic discipline.

While Rogol Domedonfors completed his great work, the city dissolved into turbulence—the result of a freak religious hysteria.

The rival sects of Pansiu and Cazdal had long existed, but few other than the priests heeded the dispute. Suddenly the cults became fashionable; the population flocked to worship one or the other of the deities. The priests, long-jealous rivals, were delighted with their new power, and exhorted the converts to a crusading zeal. Friction arose, emotion waxed, there was rioting and violence. And on one evil day a stone struck Rogol Domedonfors, toppled him from a balcony.

Crippled and wasting but refusing to die, Rogol Domedonfors completed his underground mechanism, installed vestibules throughout the city, and then took to his death-bed. He issued one directive to his new machine, and when Ampridatvir awoke the next morning, the people found their city without power or light, the food factories quiet, the canals diverted.

In terror they rushed to Rogol Domedonfors, who said: "I have long been blind to your decadence and eccentricities; now I despise you; you have been the death of me."

"But the city dies! The race perishes!" they cried.

"You must save yourselves," Rogol Domedonfors told them. "You have ignored the ancient wisdom, you have been too indolent to learn, you have sought easy complacence from religion, rather than facing manfully to the world. I have resolved to impose a bitter experience upon you, which I hope will be salutary."

He called the rival priests of Pansiu and Cazdal, and handed to each a tablet of transparent metal.

" These tablets singly are useless; laid together a message may be read. He who reads the message will have the key to the ancient knowledge, and will wield the power I had planned for my own use. Now go, and I will die."

The priests, glaring at each other, departed, called their followers, and so began a great war.

The body of Rogol Domedonfors was never found, and some say his skeleton still lies in the passages below the city. The tablets are housed in the rival temples. By night there is murder, by day there is starvation in the streets. Many have fled to the mainland, and now I follow, leaving Ampridatvir, the last home of the race. I will build a wooden hut on the slope of Mount Liu and live out my days in the valley of Mel-Palusas.'"

Kandive twisted the scroll and replaced it in the box. "Your task," he told Ulan Dhor, "is to journey to Ampridatvir and recover the magic of Rogol Domedonfors."

Ulan Dhor said thoughtfully, "It was a long time ago ... Thousands of years ..."

"Correct," said Kandive. "However, none of the histories of indices make further mention of Rogol Domedonfors, and herefore I believe that the wisdom of Rogol Domedonfors still remains to be found in ancient Ampridatvir."

Three weeks Ulan Dhor sailed the nerveless ocean. The sun rose bright as blood from the horizon and belled across the sky, and the water was calm, save for the ruffle of the breeze and the twin widening marks of Ulan Dhor's wake.

Then came the setting, the last sad glance across the world; then purple twilight and the night. The old stars spanned the sky and the wake behind Ulan Dhor shone ghastly white. Then did he watch for heavings of the surface, for he felt greatly alone on the dark face of the ocean.

Three weeks Ulan Dhor sailed the Melantine Gulf, to the north and west, and one morning he saw to the right the dark shadow of coastland and to the left the loom of an island, almost lost in the haze.

Close off his bow goated an ungainly barge, moving sluggishly under a square sail of plaited reeds.

Ulan Dhor laid a course so as to draw alongside, and saw on the barge two men in coarse green smocks trolling for fish. They had oat-yellow hair and blue eyes, and they wore expressions of stupefaction.

Ulan Dhor dropped his sail and laid hold of the barge. The fishermen neither moved nor spoke.

Ulan Dhor said, "You seem unfamiliar with the sight of man."

The older man broke into a nervous chant which Ulan Dhor understood to be an invocation against demons and frits.

Ulan Dhor laughed. "Why do you inveigh against me? I am a man like yourself."

The younger man said in a broad dialect: "We reason you to be a demon. First, there are none of our race with night-black hair and eyes.

Second, the Word of Pansiu denies the existence of all other men.

Therefore you can be no man, and must be a demon."

The older man said under his hand, "Hold your tongue; speak no word. He will curse the tones of your voice . . ."

"You are wrong, I assure you," replied Ulan Dhor politely. "Have either of you ever seen a demon?"

"None but the Gauns."

"Do I resemble the Gauns?"

"Not at all," admitted the older man. His companion indicated Ulan Dhor's dull scarlet coat and green trousers. "He is evidently a Raider; note the color of his garb."

Ulan Dhor said, "No, I am neither Raider nor demon. I am merely a man ..."

"No men exist except the Greens—so says Pansiu."

Ulan Dhor threw back his head and laughed. "Earth is but wilderness and ruins, true enough, but many men yet walk abroad . . . Tell me, is the city Ampridatvir to be found on that island ahead?"

The younger man nodded.

"And you live there?"

Again the young man assented.

Ulan Dhor said uncomfortably, "I understood that Ampridatvir was a deserted ruin—forlorn, desolate."

The young man asked with a shrewd expression, "And what do you seek at Ampridatvir?"

Ulan Dhor thought, I will mention the tablets and observe their reaction. It is well to learn if these tablets are known, and if so, how they are regarded. He said, "I have sailed three weeks to find Ampridatvir and investigate some legendary tablets."

"Ah," said the older man. “The tablets! He is a Raider, then. I see it clearly. Note his green trousers. A Raider for the Greens ..."

Ulan Dhor, expecting hostility as a result of this identification, was surprised to find a more pleasant expression on the faces of the men, as if now they had resolved a troublesome parodox. Very well, he thought, if that is how they will Have it, let it be.