The “supplies” that the henchmen of Portolanus had had me pack upon the extra voors were, in addition to our food and the tiny tents we slept in upon the icecap, nothing but sacks and ropes. The purpose of these wrappings soon became clear. While the voors rested and I remained outside with one villain to guard me, the sorcerer and the other two men busied themselves within the stone house. They eventually emerged with many packages, which they loaded onto the birds. Then we returned to Tuzamen by the same dangerous route we had come.
We did not fly to my village, however. We went to the coast, to the squalid human settlement of Merika at the mouth of the White River that calls itself the capital of Tuzamen. There the villains disembarked with their mysterious freight at a ramshackle place called Castle Tenebrose that overlooks the sea. I was discharged and given a small pouch of platinum coins, less than a tenth of the sum I had been promised. The balance of my fee, Portolanus said, would be paid “when his fortunes mended.” (A likely story, thought I. But I wisely held my tongue.) The lackeys of Portolanus told me the location of the remote lava tube where they had walled up my family. I would find them safe enough, they said.
The voors and I returned to the mountains, and I rescued my wife and daughters. They were hungry, cold, and dirty—but otherwise unharmed. You may imagine the happiness of our reunion. My wife was overjoyed to see the bag of platinum, and immediately made fine plans on how we were to spend it. I commanded her and the children to tell no one of their ordeal, for when one is dealing with humans—especially those who are wielders of dark magic—no precaution is too great.
Then, for nearly two years, we dwelt in peace.
News of human affairs comes slowly to the remote mountain valleys of the Dorok. We did not realize that Portolanus, claiming to be the grandnephew of the mighty sorcerer Bondanus, who had ruled forty years earlier, swiftly put down Thrinus, the nominal potentate of Tuzamen, and took over the country himself. It was said that he and his followers used weapons of sorcery that made ordinary armor useless, and were themselves invulnerable to hurt, and that they could seize the very souls of their foes and turn them into helpless puppets.
I did not encounter Portolanus again until this winter’s Rain, about twenty days ago. He came in the dead of night and burst into our cave in a thunderclap of wizardry, nearly tearing the stout door from its hinges. Our little daughters awoke screaming and my wife and I were shocked nearly out of our wits. This time the sorcerer held his aura in check somehow, and I would not have known him—except for his eyes. He was dressed like a king beneath his muddy riding-cloak. His body had regained its flesh and his voice was no longer harsh but smooth and compelling.
He said: “We must go again to the Kimilon, Oddling. Summon voors for yourself and me, and one more to carry our necessary supplies.”
I was full of indignation and great fear, for I knew—even if he did not—that we had barely managed to escape with our lives the last time we had ventured across the icecap, and that was during the Dry Time. It was lunacy to attempt such a journey now, when the snowy hurricanes were at their worst, and I told him so.
“Nevertheless, we shall go,” said he. “I have magic to command the storm. You will suffer no harm, and this time I will leave your reward with your wife so the thought of it will cheer you as we travel.”
And he pulled forth an embroidered leather pouch, opened it, and spilled a pile of cut gems onto our eating-table: rubies and emeralds and rare yellow diamonds all asparkle in the guttering light from our hearth.
I still refused. My wife was with child and one of the girls sickly, and in spite of the wizard’s assurances I feared that we two would not return alive.
To my dismay, my wife began to remonstrate with me, pointing out the good things we would be able to buy when we traded the gems. I was in a rage at her silliness and greed, and we shouted at each other, and the children wailed and sniveled until Portolanus barked: “Enough!”
His awesome magical aura suddenly enveloped him. He looked taller and supremely menacing, and we shrank away from him as he drew a dark, metal rod from a pouch at his belt. Before I knew what was happening, he touched my wife’s head with this thing and she fell to the floor. I gave a cry, but he did the same to my poor little daughters, then brandished the rod at me.
“Demon!” I screamed. “You have slain them!”
“They are not dead, only bereft of their senses,” he said. “But they will not wake until I touch them once again with this magical device. And that I will not do until you and I travel to the Kimilon and back.”
“Never!” said I, and I concentrated my mind and sent forth the Call to my Dorok tribesmen. They came racing through the stormy night to my aid with swords and hand-catapults ready, gathering in a howling crowd beneath the rocky overhang that shelters my cave door.
Portolanus laughed. He opened the door a crack and threw some small object outside. There was a bright flash of light—then all the loud voices fell silent. The magician opened the door and strode outside. My stouthearted friends lay there in the rainswept darkness, blinded and helpless. One by one, Portolanus touched them with his rod, and they were still.
The families of the fallen now began to appear at the doors of their cave-homes, calling and crying. The tall sorcerer turned to me, and his aura froze me like the glacial wind and his terrible eyes had become blazing diamonds set in black obsidian. When he spoke, his voice was very calm. “They will all die—or they will live. It is your choice to make.”
“You’ve killed them already!” I cried, beside myself. “I’ll call the voors to tear you to bits!”
Whereupon he touched me with the rod.
I felt as a candle must when it is snuffed out: swallowed into utter nothingness. An instant later I came to myself again, limp as a newborn vart, lying on my back in the mud with the rain pelting my face. The magical rod was poised a finger’s breadth from my nose and Portolanus glared down at me.
“You Oddling blockhead!” he said. “Can you not understand that you have no choice? I stunned you senseless, then restored you with my magic. The rod will restore your family and friends also—but only if you serve me!”
“The voors cannot fly long distances in the storms,” I muttered. “During this season they mostly remain in their eyries.”
“I have a way to gentle the storm,” said he. “Call the birds and let us be off.”
Having lost both courage and hope, I agreed at last. The wives and older children of the settlement came forth to bear their stunned husbands and fathers to shelter, and Portolanus directed them in the way to care for their loved ones and for my own family until I should return.
When we finally lofted into the air, he had the three voors fly closely together, with his own mount at the center. In some miraculous fashion he softened the force of the windblast, and we soared as if in calm weather. When the birds tired, we landed upon the interior icecap as before and sheltered in tents while the birds huddled around us. The same enchantment fended off the snow and wind while we rested, and then we took off once more. It took only six days to reach the Kimilon this time in spite of the incessant blizzards, and I arrived hale in body and resigned in spirit.
The magician retrieved only a single thing from the lava-rock house: a dark coffer about the length of my body, three handsbreadths wide and the same in depth. It was made of some slick material like black glass and had a silvery star with many rays embossed upon the top. All jovial now, with his aura once again in check, Portolanus opened the box to show me that it was empty.
“A simple thing, is it not, Oddling?” he asked me. “And yet it is my key to the conquest of the world”—he pulled from his fine jerkin a battered and blackened medallion on a chain, formed like the same kind of star—“just as this was the salvation of my life! There are powerful sorcerers in the southern lands who would forfeit their souls’ immortality in order to possess these two things, and kings and queens who would gladly give up their crowns for them. But t
hey are mine and I am alive to make use of them, thanks to you.”
He began to laugh madly then, and his aura enveloped me like the bone-freezing fog of the Sempiternal Ice, and I feared I would die of despair and self-disgust on the spot. But in my mind I heard the voice without words of my beloved voor Nunusio bidding me to have courage, and I remembered my family and the others.
We must go, Nunusio told me, for a vast storm approaches that will challenge this evil one’s magic to the fullest. We must be away from the Kimilon before it breaks.
Haltingly, I told Portolanus what my voor had said. He uttered a strange oath and began quickly to wrap up the precious star-box. He lashed it to the back of his own bird, rather than to that of the third voor who carried our supplies. Then we were off, just as the volcanoes vanished in impenetrable snowclouds.
Our homeward journey was so ghastly that my memories of it have all but vanished. The wizard was able to stave off enough of the wind so that we were not hurled to our deaths on the icecap, but he could not keep out the monstrous cold. On the fifth day the storm finally blew away. We camped on the ice that night under the brilliant light of the Three Moons, and Portolanus slept like a dead man, exhausted from his storm-fending.
I dared to send a Call to our village, inquiring about my family and the others stricken by the sorcerer’s spell. Old Zozi Twistback responded to me with dreadful tidings. Those who had at first seemed only to lie in enchanted sleep had by the second day clearly surrendered their spirits and gone safely beyond. The signs had been unmistakable. And so the sorrowing Folk had consigned their bodies to a single great funeral pyre.
I could not help but howl my grief aloud. The sorcerer woke, and I berated him for a liar and a foul murderer, and made to draw my hunting knife, desisting only when he threatened me with the magical rod.
“When used upon humans, it has the harmless effect I described,” he said. “And you yourself recovered easily enough, having been senseless for only a minute. There must be some unforeseen effect. You Oddling aborigines have bodies of a different sort from humans, and perhaps you are more vulnerable to the rod’s magic.”
“Perhaps!” I cried. “Is that all these murders are to you? A riddle to be pondered?”
“I did not mean to kill your people,” he said. “I am not a heartless monster.” He paused, thinking, as I continued to curse him impotently. Then he said: “I will make it up to you by tripling your reward and taking you into my service. I am the Master of Tuzamen now—and in time I will rule the world. I would deem a voorman a most valuable servant.”
A scathing refusal was on my lips, but prudence made me choke it back. Nothing could restore my wife, my children, or my friends. I would have my revenge upon this dark wizard one way or another, but he was apt to kill me out of hand if I defied him now. We were only a single day’s flight from the icecap’s edge, and my village lay an hour or so beyond.
“I will consider your offer,” I growled, turning away from him in the tent. I pretended to snore, and soon he was asleep again himself. I thought about what to do. When I had been afire with grief and fury, I would gladly have slain him. Now I could not do the deed in cold blood. There were the voors … but I could not deliberately order them to attack him, either. If I murdered him, I should be no better than Portolanus himself.
I crept from the tent, came close to Nunusio, and addressed my great friend in the speech without words, asking his advice.
He said: In days long gone, when the Mountain Folk were sore perplexed, they sought counsel of the Archimage, the White Lady, she who is the guardian and protector of all Folk.
I said I had heard tales of her as a child, but surely she dwelt in some distant corner of the world and would care nothing for the plight of a poor Dorok of Tuzamen.
We voor know where she dwells, Nunusio said, and it is a far ways. But I will take you there if my strength allows, and she will grant you justice.
I bespoke the other two voors, telling them to take the wizard safely to the edge of the ice but no farther and then return to the village. The bereaved Folk might divide among them the gems that Portolanus had left and my household possessions. I told the birds my further wish: that all voors should leave our village forever, so that no other luckless guide would bring calamity upon our people as I had, should Portolanus return and command further service. Without voors, the Folk were useless to him.
Then Nunusio and I flew away.
And at length came to you, White Lady, with this story.
2
Haramis and Magira left the little bedroom and went down the spiral staircase toward the Archimage’s library.
“Surely it could not be him!” Magira exclaimed. “He died! Blasted into nothingness by the Sceptre of Power!”
The Archimage’s face was clouded with uncertainty. “As to that, we will see. It is sufficient for now that we know that the Master of Tuzamen is a sorcerer who is quite possibly capable of upsetting the balance of the world … and the name of the place where he was marooned: Kimilon. I know I have come across that word before, but it seemed in a different context.”
The library was a huge, book-crowded chamber that was a full three stories high. Haramis herself had caused it to be built, expanding the original study of the old wizard’s Tower. It was here that she most often worked, poring over books of magecraft, history, and a hundred other topics that she hoped would assist her to carry out the difficult office she had chosen. Opposite the door was a cheerful hearth where a true fire always burned, for Haramis found inspiration in staring at the flames, even though they were less efficient in warming than the hypocaust system employed throughout the rest of the Tower. A pair of spiral ramps coiling up from opposite sides of the room gave access to the bookshelves, and there were tall, narrow windows piercing the wall along the spirals as well, which lit the place brightly during the day. After dark, the magical lanterns flanking the windows gave soft illumination. On her large worktable by the fire was a curiously wrought candelabrum, using the same ancient science, which blazed brightly or went dark if one but touched a certain spot on its pedestal.
Standing now in the library’s center, Haramis closed her eyes and rested her hand on her talisman, the white-metal wand with the circle at one end that hung on a chain about her neck. Her eyes flew open and she went dashing up one of the ramps, to pluck a certain book from the shelf.
“Here! This is the one! It was among those that I found in the ruins of Noth, where the Archimage Binah dwelt for so long.”
She returned to the worktable and plopped the dusty volume onto a table and tapped it with the Three-Winged Circle. The book flew open and certain words seemed to glow. She read them aloud:
“‘It shall be an immutable law among the Folk of Mountain, Swamp, Forest, and Sea that every artifact of the Vanished Ones found in the ruins shall be shown to the First of their place, and studied to ascertain whether or not it may have a harmful action, or one not easily controlled, or one mysterious and perhaps pertaining to powerful magic. It is forbidden to the Folk to use such artifacts or trade them. They shall be gathered in a safe place, and once a year they shall be dispatched unto the care of the Archimage, who may store them in safety at the Inaccessible Kimilon, or otherwise dispose of them fittingly …’”
“Now we store the dangerous devices here on Mount Brom,” Magira said, “in the Cavern of Black Ice.”
Haramis nodded. “And I assumed—wrongly, it seems—that this Kimilon was a place in the tower of the old Archimage. The one that vanished at her death. But if our friend Shiki has it right, then the Kimilon out on the ice must be the place where the Archimage Binah had her cache … and perhaps even other Archimages before her.”
Haramis stood frowning down at the open book, still tapping it idly with her talisman. She had neglected to light the candelabrum and the drop of fossil trilliumamber enclosed within the small wings at the circle’s top shone with an interior radiance of its own; but the magical device offered n
o further assistance.
“If the man found there is who we think he is, then he could only have come to the Inaccessible Kimilon because the Sceptre of Power sent him. Sent him after we Three besought it to judge us—and judge him.”
“But—why?” Magira cried. “Why would the Sceptre do such a thing rather than destroy him? Was its action not intended to restore the balance of the world?”
But Haramis was staring at the glowing amber and spoke as if to herself. “He would have had years to study all those wondrous ancient artifacts. And then, somehow, he was able to summon his minions to rescue him. He seized control of Tuzamen with the aid of the Vanished Ones’ devices.”
Magira’s perplexity was now frankly fearful. “But why? Why did the Sceptre allow this awful thing to happen?”
Haramis shook her head. “I do not know. If he is truly alive, it must be because he has a role yet to play in the restoring of the great balance. We thought that balance had been achieved. Recent events show that we were wrong.”
“In my opinion, he is the one who is at the root of all the recent troubles!” Magira asserted. “His agents of dark magic could be fomenting the human border unrest, and the turmoil among the Forest Folk, and even the sad antagonism between Queen Anigel and the Lady of the Eyes—”
Wearily, Haramis held up her hand. “My dear Magira, you must leave me. I must think and pray and decide what is to be done. Care for our guest, and when he is stronger, I will speak to him again. Now go.”
The Vispi woman obeyed.
Alone, Haramis stared sightlessly at the library window streaming with rain, remembering not only the appalling evil that had been wrought twelve years before, but also the lineaments of a certain face that she had tried to banish from her memory and her dreams. She had managed to forget him, believing that he was dead, and she had also forgotten the turmoil he had engendered in her soul, that confusion she had mistaken for love—
No.
Be honest, she commanded herself. You wanted to believe the lies he told you—that he had not inspired King Voltrik of Labornok to invade Ruwenda, that he had never demanded the murder of your parents, Ruwenda’s rightful King and Queen, nor conspired to slay you and your sisters. You believed him because you did love him. And when his deceits were made plain to you, when he showed you his dark plan for ruling the world and asked you to share it, you feared and despised him. You rejected his monstrous vision and rejected him.