Cyrion, page 10
Cyrion had not moved.
“I know the tale. Many claim to own remnants of Zilumi’s possessions.”
“But this mirror,” said Juved softly, “this mirror will prove to you that it is a piece of wickedness.”
The watcher from the tower had by now resumed sufficient equilibrium to advance to the doorway. Reaching in and grasping Cyrion’s arm, he guided the young man from the bedroom, and back into the outer chamber.
“Did you feel the soul sucked from you, most elegant swordsman?”
Cyrion’s color was reestablished. Blithely, he said:
“What gives you to suppose I have a soul?”
A solicitous frown replaced the smile on Juved’s countenance.
“It grieves me to destroy you in this way,” he said. “But ego has triumphed. I wish to live. And though I dislike the wastage of your own vitality, what must be, must be. The wealth of sorcerous knowledge I can impart to the world, compared to your own transient beauty and skill, should recompense. God will forgive me.”
Juved had become positively energetic. His smile was gleeful, beneficent.
“I have told you one story, of Zilumi and Hraud and Hokannen. Shall I tell you the story of Juved and the mirror?”
Cyrion walked to the window. What thoughts were passing through his mind it was hard to deduce. But he gazed from the window as if something had compelled him there, some unseen gesture, some unheard voice summoning from the oasis. Even the eastern sky shone now like a topaz furled in fire. Among the sun-dyed trees, beside the water which the sunset had turned to wine, something was standing. Indistinct and small, a dwarfish thing, not quite discernible. A shadow? A white shadow? And where the monster had lain in its death-coma the ground was empty. . . .
“I gained the bronze mirror of Zilumi, no matter how,” said Juved, “intending to use it in particular sorcerous experiments. It was light to carry, uncannily so, and flawless, as you have seen. But, unhappily, it had had a terrible safeguard placed on it, probably by the witch-princess herself in her days of magery, that she alone might profit from its powers. Since that era, it had been interred in a casket from which only fierce spells could release it. Having affected the release, I was the first to look into the bronze. I felt at once a faintness, a drawing of my spirit, as if my soul, or some comparable intrinsic element, were being drawn mercilessly from my body. Once the tension eased, I frantically researched its cause. This tower, to which I had traveled for seclusion during my experiments, I had already imbued with talismanic properties. No dangerous essence could manifest within its walls. But, on spying from the window I beheld—guess what I beheld, handsome swordsman!”
“I would not dream of anticipating,” said Cyrion politely, his eyes yet riveted on the oasis below.
“Perhaps you are wise,” said Juved. “I will reveal what I saw. Some eight feet tall, a man-thing white as molten steel, skin and gristle, black clawed—it lurked beneath, ranting and slavering. The mirror, you see, took from me some piece of my psychic fiber, turning it against me, inverting, and creating the exact opposite of myself—gigantic and thin, where I am short and rounded, white for my olive complexion, primitive, barbaric and ferocious, where I am urbane and timid.
“But I am not a fool. I barred the doors of the tower as an extra precaution, and reading from my scrolls and parchments, I defined the precise nature of the thing below. Thus I learned that its paramount longing was to murder me and drink my blood, that my death accomplished, the creature itself would fade and be no more. I learned that I could not, even had I the courage, attack and kill the being, for, though I might discover some weakness whereby its invulnerability could be overcome, if it perished, then so must I, bound in spirit as we were, dual though opposed. Two methods I could utilize to save myself. The first of these I accordingly adopted. This was that I should sorcerously entice others to this spot, as many as I might throughout each month of the calendar. These innocents the monster would rush upon and butcher, draining them of blood, subsequently devouring flesh, organs and bones. Its grisly appetite temporarily appeased, it would then leave me in peace, even permitting me to journey some way from the oasis, though never itself lagging far behind me. Most recently, I visited a neighboring well and fouled it with salt, which has been useful in bringing extra victims to this water. As for the second method of protection from the fiend, I had never thought to try it, partly because it required I should bring some person other than myself into the tower, which meant an imprudent relaxing of the talismanic guards. Besides, the monster would set on whoever arrived. They never reached my door, even had I hoped to invite them inside.
“And then, dear sir, your advent. You solved the problem of the monster’s vulnerable point, and sent it to the brink of death—which death, of course, soul-bound as it and I were, would also have been mine. Hence my rush to your side, my desire to act as host, my conducting you to the room where the bronze mirror stands. For the second method of escape is this: Should another look into the mirror after me, his soul is forfeit in exchange for mine: His psychic fiber is sucked in and mine released: My inversion fades and his is formed. And what will it be in your case, heroic stranger? Squat for your tallness, gross for your slenderness, white for your tan, black for your flaxen, hideous for your beauty. Gaze from the window. Tell me, is it so?”
“You may judge for yourself,” said Cyrion.
“Rest assured, I have. But I think you are pondering retaliation, gentle sir. I had better elaborate upon my explanation. Firstly, it may occur to you that, should you be able to coerce me into looking once more into the bronze, the exchange will again be effected, your soul freed and mine enslaved once more. This would be so. However, I have discovered and prepared spells during my sojourn here against just such an unlikely event as you have brought about in slaughtering my invert. Should I confront the bronze mirror a second time, I have only to rehearse a select phrase of lore to immunize myself against its enchantment. Quite safely I may stand before the mirror, providing this phrase is intoned—or even mentally reviewed—to mutilate my tongue will not help you. And there is no way that I can be made to look into the bronze, believe me, without my knowing I do so. For, should it be enough hidden that I might mistake it, muffled, say, behind a curtain or thick veil, my reflection will not strike the surface and the magic suction cannot take effect in any event. You may think that you can circumvent my spells in another fashion, by rendering me unconscious and thus lugging me before the bronze. But this will also be valueless. Asleep or unconscious, a man’s psychic fabric is detached from his body and may not be absorbed by the mirror. Once awareness returned, I should activate the phrase of lore, and so annul the influence. This being the case, I advise you to consign yourself to your fate. And also to your death.
“You cannot, as I did, substitute another’s blood and life for yours. I am the only alternate victim to hand. And though powerless against the emanation the mirror evolved from my own body, against another emanation I am not powerless and have shielded myself by my magic. I have, moreover, lifted the talismanic guards from the tower, so that presently your invert may fathom entry and destroy you. I feel that too great quantities of hapless lives have been lost. You have given me the opportunity of freedom, and your death shall be the last. Therefore, the swifter, the kinder. You may sacrificially offer yourself to your invert monster or you may slay it. In either instance, the results will be identical. Both you and it will die. I am sorry, but I am obdurate. Console yourself that your demise enables a masterly philosopher to persist.”
“Such an honor is insupportable,” said Cyrion.
A fraction of a second after these words, light as a springing cat he was gone through the door and down the stairs.
Squeamishly, Juved did not any longer, by crystal or window, watch the tidal sand, the darkening oasis.
* * *
• • •
It waited, lurid as a beacon in the accumulating night, the alter ego of Cyrion, born from Zilumi’s mirror of bronze.
It was as Juved had prophesied.
Squat for Cyrion’s stature, gross for his slimness, grotesque for his fineness, obscene for his looks. On its fungus-white revulsion of a head, black wire, the antithesis of Cyrion’s hair. And on its weirdly taloned right paw a parody of rings, and in the left a kind of sword, wider at its tip than at its base, the shade of putrefaction.
And it tittered, simpered, invited. Its stumps of teeth grinned, and it sailed toward him through the dark like a luminescent ball of filth.
But it was, of course, clumsy for his fluidity, awkward for his brilliance.
Easily, meteoric, Cyrion dipped aside, reached and caught the black wire, and severed it. The thing sprawled and the white blood flowed phosphorescently. Twice more the steel sword dealt a blow, and all the claws lay among the night-breathing oleanders. In death, it wailed. And Cyrion felt its death. Its death, which would become his own. But you could not know he felt it, as he must. His ebbing strength was in parentheses; ignored.
He ran into the tower. The talismans having been removed, nothing barred his re-admittance. His feet connected almost noiselessly with the stone, three or four steps disposed of by each ascending foot. What sound he made was masked by the mewling of the thing below.
Juved did not expect him, or, if he did, did not expect him in the form he chose. Like wildfire, Cyrion arrowed through the room. For a moment, the magus stood gaping. In another, the heavy crystal of clairvoyance, which Cyrion had secured in passing, met the magus’ forehead with a blinding concussion.
Juved roused in nauseous discomfort and confusion. Though he retained a complete recollection of all that had gone before, the mirror, the trick, Cyrion and the crystal, these memories were negated by the atrocious agony in his skull and the appalling amount of salt which had been systematically rubbed into his lips, tongue and gums. Staggering to his knees, gagging and spitting, Juved seized the wine cup on the table, gulped and swallowed a mouthful before he could check himself. It was unfortunate he could not, for the wine also was doctored. The entire contents of the spice cellars had been poured into the jar and the cup, not merely the salt, on this occasion, but the cinnamon and pepper, the nutmeg and the ginger, too. Nausea immediately claimed its dues.
Relieved but shaken, eyes awash and throat parched as bone, Juved picked his way carefully down the stair of the tower. Cyrion’s childish revenge baffled Juved. He was irritated that a young man of such singular appearance should not have accepted death nobly, or at least resignedly. But this prank with violence and spice—Juved retched profoundly and tottered hurriedly the rest of the distance into the cool and sky-bathed serenity of the oasis.
The moon hung above the palms, clear-etched as engraved ivory, flooding the water of the pool with a miraculous sheen.
Despite Cyrion’s prank, Juved had done well and cunningly. There was nothing left to fear. A brief sickness beside a savage death—what was that?
Pleased with his philosophy, Juved knelt by the pool and lowered himself toward it. From a dim pallor among the oleanders he scrupulously averted his eyes. Soon, the horrid thing would die entirely and vanish. Cyrion’s body was luckily absent. At least the swordsman had had the decency to drag himself into the desert in order to expire.
Gratefully, Juved tested the pure liquid of the pool. Despite a sudden floating sensation, some backlash of his sickness, he drank with vast calm and an accruing store of complaisance. Until an elongated shadow blotted out the moonlight on the water.
Then, with an incredulous scream, Juved writhed about to greet the towering height and burning pits and rending claws of the inverted thing which was his, that which had first evolved from the mirror.
Just beyond the oleanders, Cyrion lay on the night-black dunes, and let his life come back to him like the blown sand.
He had done much in the tower before he had been at liberty to fall down here. As the dying monster took his life away with it, surrendering perforce, he had understood that logically he should win this game with death. But with death, there is no positive gate, no warranty, no honor. So he lay, the moon white on his eyes, and waited to end or to continue.
But life is life, and coming back it brought its own balm.
Soon he could rise, and walk to the margin of the pool, keeping away from the edge of the water, though nothing lay there, no remains either of magus or monster.
Meticulously, Cyrion scratched the warning sign on the trunks of the palms, to show the water of the oasis was fouled.
After this, from an evaluatedly adequate distance, he kicked and thrust a landslide of sand and soil into the pool. It was a wearying task, but he did not abandon it until the oasis was swamped, muddied, and its floor raised by several degrees. By then, he had buried and erased what earlier had been simply camouflaged, its reflective quality unobscured by nighttime water. And settling sand hid the bronze mirror he had thrown into the pool half an hour before Juved had leaned over there to drink.
4th Interlogue
A round of limited but enthusiastic applause greeted the ending of the story, during the course of which one of the merchants and his lady had approached to listen.
“Very quaint Very cunning,” exclaimed the merchant, clapping the merry moustached soldier on his hiccupping shoulder. The merchant, by contrast, was a big man, his head wound in a cloth of soft green muslin stitched with opals. Rings fired light from his hands. It was small wonder his dainty companion clung to him with such determination. Though she also spared a smile for both soldiers, tall or short, and a wink of one silver-lidded eye for Roilant.
The scholar had apparently enjoyed the story also, and was vowing he would remember it for the future. The blond soldier leaned boss-eyed on the blue-washed wall, beaming on everyone, particularly the awful sage in the embrasure—now slobbering his way through three sherbets. The fast, it seemed, had not merely been broken, but smashed.
Roilant had not enjoyed the story. This was plain. If any of what he was hearing was true, it only increased his need to locate the miraculous Cyrion. And where was Cyrion to be found?
“You say you saw him on Sweet Lane?”
“Yeah,” said the moustached soldier. “No. Sweesh Streesh.” He elaborated upon visiting a barber there in order to have the lustrous facial hair trimmed: “Fool in barracksh no more shkill than’n ostrish with sheersh.” While seated under the awning, he had perceived Cyrion walk by dressed like a prince.
At this juncture, the caravaneer, who had come dustily over to speak to the bejeweled merchant, said, in concern, “you mean the Cyrian, Cyrion? He of the white hair and the nomadic persuasion? If so, I regret it was not that Cyrion you saw on Sweet Street. I spoke to him only yesterday, some ten miles from Heruzala. He was on the road to Bakrad.”
“Bakrad!” Roilant displayed horror.
“You are in error, shir,” said the short soldier. “I know Scyrion as I know my brothersh. And I shaw him on Shweet Sheep shmorning.”
The caravaneer shrugged with complacent emphasis.
“As you wish. I know who I met.”
“And I know who I—pardon me—met.”
“You know Cyrion well?” Roilant asked the caravaneer.
“He once did me a service. Yes. I know him.”
“How far on the road to Bakrad?”
“Not far. By now, he will be considerably farther.”
Roilant cursed softly. He took on the childish wretchedness of the defeated adult.
“If this is urgent, you might send a pigeon from the post here. There are stations all along that road.”
“Time is—short,” said Roilant vaguely, and was rewarded by a suspicious glare from the moustached soldier, who tended always to react to one word in this way.
He, and the defeated Roilant did not, therefore, turn at the uproar that next broke out behind them. Its source, as formerly, was the sage.
The charming brunette who had passed Roilant on the way out previously, was now returning, floating down the room in a mist of gauzes, pearls gleaming, the little maid stepping delicately after, carrying flowers. The sage, at this rather mesmerizing entrance, had arisen in a splutter of sherbet.
“The Whore of the City, she walks in scarlet and gems, and the holy stones are stained by her iniquity.”
Instead of embarrassment or dismay, the lady evinced a curious amusement, and turning lazily, said in her pantheress’s voice, “be quiet, you silly old man. I am neither wearing scarlet nor staining anything, unlike yourself. I shall strongly suggest to the innkeeper that his inn be disinfected, and fumigated by strong incense as soon as you have left.”
