In a narrow ring of light in unmeasured darkness stood the Accused.
His head was bowed, hands clasped together within long sleeves—flesh seeking its own contact for reassurance, in vain. An arraignment in Shardishku-Salamá, these proceedings were unconcerned with justice. Their function was retribution. The Accused was aware of punishments available here; that was a form of punishment.
Yardiff Bey felt nothing change in the enormous Fane of the Masters. Yet between one moment and the next he knew the attention of the Five was upon him. No indication escaped to his face or posture, but in a shielded cinderbox in his soul, fears blew brighter.
He damped them down. Was he not first among sorcerers, subordinate only to the Masters? Brief, awful elation fanned up his spine at the thought. In flying back to Shardishku-Salamá in his demon-ship, Cloud Ruler, to plead before the vindictive Lords of the City, Yardiff Bey had taken his greatest dare. He was in more hideous danger than most men could envision in wildest speculation.
A waitingness hung around him, and cruel, dispassionate curiosity. He’d always exulted in the cold intellects of the Five, but now it was their displeasure directed at him. The single beam of light glinted from the strange ocular that was bound in place where his left eye had once been. He sent a stem command through every part of himself, physical and incorporeal: Be still!
He bowed deeply, unhurriedly. When his voice came, it was impeccable in its calm control.
“Masters, your servant has returned. Will he be heard?” He sensed mirthless amusement. Did They think he’d come on a fool’s quest for mercy? There was a vast stirring somewhere in the colossal temple.
Yardiff Bey was slammed to his knees, by no force he could see. Without his will, his hands came up to rend the front of his robe, in mourning and contrition.
“List us your failures,” came a disembodied command, “and number your faults.”
He was cast headlong on the cold floor, held as a doll beneath a man’s boot would be held, by the stacked, murderous weight of the will of the Masters of Shardishku-Salamá. He sobbed for breath that wouldn’t come, and that weight retreated the merest bit. He knew a meager flicker of triumph; he hadn’t been condemned out of hand, and so had the opportunity to say on. He brought his head up a degree, neck trembling with effort.
“Waste not the tool,” he strained, “before it mends its errors. Let me make my reparations.” He slumped again, drawing breath only with horrible exertion. He felt, by tingling of images not quite seen on his inner eye, that the Five were conferring.
The air was suddenly icy, carrying thick, infernal stenches. There was a new, an overwhelming Presence in the Fane. The sorcerer recognized its awesome savagery. His patron, Amon, a chief among demons, had come, after ignoring all previous pleas. Before Amon, even the Masters were silent, deferential in their intangible, unmistakable way.
When the demon spoke, words lashing like whips, the walls of the huge Fane shook in the lightlessness.
“More vainglorious plans, unworthy one? Are my agents in Salamá to be twice fools, and trust you a second time?” Amon asked. “List me your failures. You had the whole of Coramonde in your grasp. Your puppet-son was enthroned over the most important country in the Crescent Lands. You had the rightful Heir Springbuck trapped, along with the wizard Andre deCourteney and his enchantress sister Gabrielle. How was all that dashed asunder?”
Yardiff Bey groped for response. “I—I sent the dragon Chaffinch against them, oh Lord. He should have slaughtered them easily. But they had with them the alien Van Duyn . . . ”
He faltered for a way to tell it. “You know there are other universes, mighty Amon, Realities sprouting from alternatives, like leaves from a tree. Van Duyn is from another, and from it he and the deCourteneys plucked soldiers, and a metal war-machine to slay Chaffinch.”
“Your first failure,” thundered the demon. “Masters of Shardishku-Salamá, witness it now!”
Yardiff Bey’s senses jolted, as Amon conjured up those events again . . .
Through the eyes of Ibn-al-Yed, mask-slave to Yardiff Bey, they saw the castle where Springbuck, the deCourteneys and their little band were at bay. Ibn-al-Yed had only to keep them confined until the sorcerer sent the dragon Chaffinch.
But there was a disturbance in the air, a pushing-apart of the boundaries between worlds. A lumbering, drab-green vehicle came roaring into the meadow. From it a man emerged, confusion manifest on his face, some odd black implement cradled under his arm.
It was, in certainty, a trick of the deCourteneys. The Druid who’d accompanied Ibn-al-Yed called up an air elemental, to undo it. But as the were-wind ripped at him, the stranger brought up his implement. There were bright, stuttering explosions. Druid and horse toppled, dead, pierced with holes by the otherworldly weapon.
Ibn-al-Yed backed his horse away in shock and confusion. Yardiff Bey, his Masters and dread Amon looked back through time, at the indecision in the newcomer’s features. He wiped his forehead once, quickly, on an olive-colored sleeve. Over his left breast pocket were cryptic letters no one there could decipher: us army. Over the right was another strip of characters, whose meaning they would come to know: macdonald.
Through the eyes of the late Ibn-al-Yed, the sorcerer watched that early disruption of his careful design. The image receded, Amon summoned up another . . .
There was revelry in Hell.
The metal war vehicle had killed Chaffinch, but events had left Gabrielle deCourteney in the hands of Yardiff Bey. It was an occasion of tremendous importance, enormous success. In Amon’s mansion on the infernal plane, the demon’s votaries writhed, ecstatic, to insane music.
Without warning the cyclopean doors burst apart in a shower of wooden splinters and metal fragments. The armored personnel carrier revved down the center of the room, treads chewing stone, engine bellowing above the din.
The machine’s weapons cut loose, flashing ruin in all directions. Gunfire, as Yardiff Bey was to hear it called later. The fugitive Prince Springbuck appeared, and Andre deCourteney. Gabrielle was rescued, as explosions and gunfire purged the chamber. Yardiff Bey had to flee, as Amon was humiliated by mad invasion.
The sorcerer quivered, experiencing it again. No one had affronted great Amon that way in an eternity. Now a last image . . .
Yardiff Bey sat in his own sanctum, high in the palace-fortress at Earthfast, laboring at a spell against the intruder, MacDonald, whose interference had persisted. Gil MacDonald of the bizarre innovations, unpredictable deceptions and unlooked-for influence, had thrown Bey’s equations out of kilter.
With this invocation, sapping MacDonald’s soul from his body, Yardiff Bey would remedy that. But he began to meet odd resistance; his enchantments were warped and subverted. There was howling from his supernatural servants.
An armed company appeared where the outlander’s naked soul should have cringed. Springbuck, Andre deCourteney, Van Duyn and MacDonald himself, whole, were among them. In seconds the palace-fortress was filled with fighting and dying, crash of alien weapons, curses of combatants and belling of sword strokes. Yardiff Bey made his escape by a barest margin aboard his flying vessel Cloud Ruler. He’d lost, in minutes, his iron grip on Coramonde.
The taste of that catastrophe defiled his mouth once more. Then Amon let the retelling fade.
First among sorcerers, once the Hand of Shardishku-Salamá, Bey felt his breath heaving with terror and resentment.
“And all of that you will set right?” came the demon’s challenge, on a sepulchral wind. The sorcerer raised himself to hands and knees with quaking hope. But his response held only firm conviction.
“I swear it! I have come back because I am needed. There approaches the time of greatest effort, but greatest risk also. Let me play my part in the Masters’ mighty labor, Dark Father, as I was meant to!”
He couldn’t hear the current of thoughts that passed among them. Amon’s sawtooth voice came again. “I see what is in your thoughts, for they are open to me. Your Masters’ might waxes plentiful now, but will be diverted more and more into the enchantment they forge as time goes on. They must work undisturbed, and though the chance of hindrance is slim, yet it must be eliminated. Begin your work, search out that last source of peril. But be warned: your Masters and I, and my terrible Overlord, are engaged in other struggles, other enterprises. You must be self-reliant, or be swallowed up in that final Night we shall found.”
Then Amon was gone, between one heartbeat and another.
The ring of light began to move, to lead the sorcerer back out of the Fane. He lurched at first, drunk on the enormity of it but his stride soon became surer, stronger, with his incredible good fortune. Raw power swelled him, of magic and personal force.
Yardiff Bey’s feet were set, once more, on the thrill-path of conquest.