The Maker of Universes

XIII

Wolff drank enough to loosen the wires that seemed to be wound around him. He even began to talk with the Lady Alison, wife of the baron of the Wenzelbricht March. A dark-haired and blue-eyed woman of statuesque beauty, she wore a clinging white samite gown. It was so low cut that she should have been satisfied with its exhilarating effect on the men, but she kept dropping her fan and picking it up herself. At any time other than this, Wolff would have been happy to break his woman-fast with her. It was obvious he would have no trouble doing so, for she was flattered that the great von Wolfram was interested in her. She had heard of his victory over funem Laksfalk. But he could think only of Chryseis, who must be somewhere in the castle. Nobody had mentioned her, and he dared not. Yet he was aching to do so and several times found that he had to bite the question off the tip of his tongue.

Presently, and just at the right time for him—since he could not any longer refuse the Lady Alison’s bold hints without offending her—Kickaha was at his side. Kickaha had brought Alison’s husband along to give Wolff a reasonable excuse for leaving. Later, Kickaha revealed that he had dragged von Wenzelbricht away from another woman on the pretext that his wife demanded he come to her. Both Kickaha and Wolff walked away, leaving the beer-stupored baron to explain just what he wanted of her. Since neither he nor his wife knew, they must have had an interesting, if mystifying conversation.

Wolff gestured at funem Laksfalk to join them. Together, the three pretended to stagger off to the toilet. Once out of sight of those in the dining-hall, they hurried down a hall away from their supposed destination. Unhindered, they climbed four flights of steps. They were armed only with daggers, for it would have been an insult to wear armor or swords to dinner. Wolff, however, had managed to untie a long cord from the draperies in his apartment. He wore this coiled around his waist under his shirt.

The Yidshe knight said, “I overheard Abiru talk with his lieutenant, Rhamnish. They spoke in the trade language of H’vaizhum, little knowing that I have traveled on the Guzirit River in the jungle area. Abiru asked Rhamnish if he had found out yet where von Elgers had taken Chryseis. Rhamnish said that he had spent some gold and time in talking to servants and guards. All he could find out was that she is on the east side of the castle. The gworl, by the way, are in the dungeon.”

“Why should von Elgers keep Chryseis from Abiru?” Wolff said. “Isn’t she Abiru’s property?”

“Maybe the baron has some designs on her,” Kickaha said. “If she’s as extraordinary and beautiful as you say…”

“We’ve got to find her!”

“Don’t get your neck hot. We will. Oh, oh, there’s a guard at the end of the hall. Keep walking toward him—stagger a little more.”

The guard raised his spear as they reeled in front of him. In a polite but firm voice, he told them they must go back. The baron had forbidden anybody, under pain of death, to proceed further.

“All right,” Wolff said, slurring the words. He started to turn, then suddenly leaped and grabbed the spear. Before the startled sentry could loose the yell from his open mouth, he was slammed against the door and the shaft of the spear was brought up hard against his throat. Wolff continued to press it. The sentry’s eyes goggled, his face became red, then blue. A minute later, he slumped forward, dead.

The Yidshe dragged the body down the hall and into a side-room. When he returned, he reported that he had hidden the corpse behind a large chest.

“Too bad,” Kickaha said cheerfully. “He may have been a nice kid. But if we have to fight our way out, we’ll have one less in our way.”

However, the dead man had had no key to unlock the door.

“Von Elgers is probably the only man who has one, and we’d play hell getting it off him,” Kickaha said. “Okay. We’ll go around.”

He led them back down the hall to another room. They climbed through its tall pointed window. Beyond its ledge was a series of projections, stones carved in the shape of dragon heads, fiends, boars. The adornments had not been spaced to provide for easy Climbing, but a brave or desperate man could ascend them. Fifty feet below them, the surface of the moat glittered dully in the light of torches on the drawbridge. Fortunately, thick black clouds covered the moon and would prevent those below from seeing the climbers.

Kickaha looked down at Wolff, who was clinging to a stone gargoyle, one foot on a snake-head. “Hey, did I forget to tell you that the baron keeps the moat stocked with water-dragons? They’re not very big, only about twenty feet long, and they don’t have any legs. But they’re usually underfed.”

“There are times when I find your humor in bad taste,” Wolff said fiercely. “Get going.”

Kickaha gave a low laugh and continued climbing. Wolff followed, after glancing down to make sure that the Yidshe was doing all right. Kickaha stopped and said, “There’s a window here, but it’s barred. I don’t think there’s anyone inside. It’s dark.”

Kickaha continued climbing. Wolff paused to look inside the window. It was black as the inside of a cave fish’s eye. He reached through the bars and groped around until his fingers closed on a candle. Lifting it carefully so that it would come out of its holder, he passed it through the bars. With one arm hooked around a steel rod, he hung while he fished a match from the little bag on his belt with the other hand.

From above, Kickaha said, “What are you doing?”

Wolff told him, and Kickaha said, “I spoke Chryseis’ name a couple of times. There’s no one in there. Quit wasting time.”

“I want to make sure.”

“You’re too thorough; you pay too much attention to detail. You got to take big cuts if you want to chop down a tree. Come on.”

Not bothering to reply, Wolff struck the match. It flared up and almost went out in the breeze, but he managed to stick it inside the window quickly enough. The flare of light showed a bedroom with no occupant.

“You satisfied?” Kickaha’s voice came, weaker because he was climbing upward. “We got one more chance, the bartizan. If there’s no one… Anyway, I don’t know how—ugh!”

Afterwards, Wolff was thankful that he had been so reluctant to give up his hopes that Chryseis would be in the room. He had let the match burn out until it threatened his fingers and only then let go of it. Immediately after that and Kickaha’s muffled exclamation, he was struck by a falling body. The impact felt as if it had almost torn his arm loose from its socket. He gave a grunt that echoed the one from above and hung on with one arm. Kickaha clung to him for several seconds, shivered, then breathed deeply and resumed his climb. Neither said a word about it, but both knew that if it had not been for Wolff’s stubbornness, Kickaha’s fall would also have knocked Wolff from a precarious hold on a gargoyle. Possibly funem Laksfalk would have been dislodged also, for he was directly below Wolff.

The bartizan was a large one. It was about one third of the way up the wall, projected far outward from the wall, and a light fell from its cross-shaped window. The wall a little distance above it was bare of decoration.

An uproar broke loose below and a fainter one within the castle. Wolff stopped to look down toward the drawbridge, thinking that they must have been seen. However, although there were a number of men-at-arms and guests on the drawbridge and the grounds outside, many with torches, not a single one was looking up toward the climbers. They seemed to be searching for someone in the bushes and trees.

He thought that their absence and the body of the guard had been noted. They would have to fight their way out. But let them find Chryseis first and get her loose; then would be time to think of battle.

Kickaha, ahead of him, said, “Come on, Bob!” His voice was so excited that Wolff knew he must have located Chryseis. He climbed swiftly, more swiftly than good sense permitted. It was necessary to climb to one side of the projection, for its underside angled outward. Kickaha was lying on the flat top of the bartizan and just in the act of pulling himself back from its edge. “You have to hang upside down to look in the window, Bob. She’s there, and she’s alone. But the window’s too narrow for either of you to go through.”

Wolff slid out over the edge of the projection while Kickaha grabbed his legs. He went out and over, the black moat below, and bent down until he would have fallen if his legs had not been held. The slit in the stone showed him the face of Chryseis, inverted. She was smiling but tears were rolling down her cheeks.

Afterward, he did not exactly remember what they said to each other, for he was in a fever of exaltation, succeeded by a chill of frustration and despair, then followed by another fever. He felt as if he could talk forever, and he reached his hand out to touch hers. She strained against the opening in the rock in vain to reach him. “Never mind, Chryseis,” he said. “You know we’re here. We’re not going to leave until we take you away, I swear it.”

“Ask her where the horn is!” Kickaha said.

Hearing him, Chryseis said, “I do not know, but I think that von Elgers has it.”

“Has he bothered you?” Wolff asked savagely.

“Not so far, but I do not know how long it will be before he takes me to bed,” she replied. “He’s restrained himself only because he does not want to lower the price he’ll get for me. He says he’s never seen a woman like me.”

Wolff swore, then laughed. It was like her to talk thus frankly, for in the Garden world self-admiration was an accepted attitude.

“Cut out the unnecessary chatter,” Kickaha said. “There’ll be time for that if we get her out.”

Chryseis answered Wolff’s questions as concisely and clearly as possible. She described the route to this room. She did not know how many guards were stationed outside her door or on the way up.

“I do know one thing that the baron does not,” she said. “He thinks that Abiru is taking me to von Kranzelkracht. I know better. Abiru means to ascend the Doozvillnava to Atlantis. There he will sell me to the Rhadamanthus.”

“He won’t sell you to anybody, because I’m going to kill him,” Wolff said. “I have to go now, Chryseis, but I’ll be back as soon as possible. And I won’t be coming this way. Until then, I love you.”

Chryseis cried, “I have not heard a man tell me that for a thousand years! Oh, Robert Wolff, I love you! But I am afraid! I…”

“You don’t have to be afraid of anything,” he said. “Not while I am alive, and I don’t intend to die.”

He gave the word for Kickaha to drag him back onto the rooftop of the bartizan. He rose and almost fell over from dizziness, for his head was gorged with blood.

“The Yidshe has already started down,” Kickaha said. “I sent him to find out if we can get back the way we came and also to see what’s causing the uproar.”

“Us?”

“I don’t think so. The first thing they’d do, they’d check on Chryseis. Which they haven’t done.”

The descent was even slower and more dangerous than the climb up, but they made it without mishap. Funem Laksfalk was waiting for them by the window which had given them access to the outside.

“They’ve found the guard you killed,” he said. “But they don’t think we had anything to do with it. The gworl broke loose from the dungeon and killed a number of men. They also seized their own weapons. Some got outside but not all.”

The three left the room and merged quickly with the searchers. They had no chance to go up the flight of steps at the end of which was the room where Chryseis was imprisoned. Without a doubt, von Elgers would have made sure that the guards were increased.

They wandered around the castle for several hours, acquainting themselves with its layout. They noted that, though the shock of the gworl’s escape had sobered the Teutons somewhat, they were still very drunk. Wolff suggested that they go to their room, and talk about possible plans. Perhaps they could think of something reasonably workable.

Their room was on the fifth story and by a window at an angle below the window of Chryseis’ bartizan. To get to it, they had to pass many men and women, all stinking of beer and wine, reeling, babbling away, and accomplishing very little. Their room could not have been entered and searched, for only they and the chief warder had the keys. He had been too busy elsewhere to get to their room. Besides, how could the gworl enter through a locked door?

The moment Wolff stepped into his room, he knew that they had somehow entered. The musty rottenfruit stench hit him in the nostrils. He pulled the other two inside and swiftly shut and locked the door behind them. Then he turned with his dagger in his hand. Kickaha also, his nostrils dilating and his eyes stabbing, had his blade out. Only funem Laksfalk was unaware that anything was wrong except for an unpleasant odor.

Wolff whispered to him; the Yidshe walked toward the wall to get their swords, then stopped. The racks were empty.

Silently and slowly, Wolff went into the other room. Kickaha, behind him, held a torch. The flame flickered and cast humped shadows that made Wolff start. He had been sure that they were the gworl.

The light advanced; the shadows fled or changed into harmless shapes.

“They’re here,” Wolff said softly. “Or they’ve just left. But where could they go?”

Kickaha pointed at the high drapes that were drawn over the window. Wolff strode up to them and began thrusting through the red-purple velvet cloth. His blade met only air and the stone of the wall. Kickaha pulled the drapes back to reveal what the dagger had told him. There were no gworl.

“They came in through the window,” the Yidshe said. “But why?”

Wolff lifted his eyes at the moment, and he swore. He stepped back to warn his friends, but they were already looking upward. There, hanging upside down by their knees from the heavy iron drapery rod were two gworl. Both had long, bloody knives in their hands. One, in addition, clutched the silver horn.

The two creatures stiffened their legs the second they realized they were discovered. Both managed to flip over and come down heads-up. The one to the right kicked out with his feet. Wolff rolled and then was up, but Kickaha had missed with his knife and the gworl had not. It slid from his palm through a short distance into Kickaha’s arm.

The other threw his knife at funem Laksfalk. It struck the Yidshe in the solar plexus with a force that made him bend over and stagger back. A few seconds later, he straightened up to reveal why the knife had failed to enter his flesh. Through the tear in his shirt gleamed the steel of light chain-mail.

By then, the gworl with the horn had gone through the window. The others could not rush to the window because the gworl left behind was putting up a savage battle. He knocked down Wolff again, but with his fist this time. He threw himself like a whirlwind at Kickaha, his fists flailing, and drove him back. The Yidshe, his knife in hand, jumped at him and thrust for his belly, only to have his wrist seized and turned until he cried out with the pain and the knife fell from his fist.

Kickaha, lying on the floor, raised one leg and then drove the heel of his foot against the gworl’s ankle. He fell, although he did not hit the floor because Wolff seized him. Around and around, their arms locked around each other, they circled. Each was trying to break the other’s back and also trying to trip the other. Wolff succeeded in throwing him over. They toppled against the wall with the gworl receiving the most damage when the back of his head struck the wall.

For a flicker of an eyelid, he was stunned. This gave Wolff enough time to pull the stinking, hairy, bumpy creature hard against him and pull with all his strength against the gworl’s spine. Too heavily muscled and too heavily boned, the gworl resisted the spine-snapping. By then, the other two men were upon him with their knives. They thrust several times and would have continued to try for a fatal spot in the tough cartilage-roughened hide had Wolff not told them to stop.

Stepping back, he released the gworl, who fell bleeding and glaze-eyed to the floor. Wolff ignored him for a moment to look out the window after the gworl who had escaped with the horn. A party of horsemen, holding torches, was thundering over the drawbridge and out into the country. The light showed only the smooth black waters of the moat; there was no gworl climbing down the wall. Wolff turned back to the gworl who had remained behind.

“His name is Diskibibol, and the other is Smeel,” Kickaha said.

“Smeel must have drowned,” Wolff said. “Even if he could swim, the water-dragons might have gotten him. But he can’t swim.”

Wolff thought of the horn lying in the muck at the bottom of the moat. “Apparently no one saw Smeel fall. So the horn’s safe there, for the time being.”

The gworl spoke. Although he used German, he could not master the sounds accurately. His words grated deep in the back of his throat. “You will die, humans. The Lord will win; Arwoor is the Lord; he cannot be defeated by filth such as you. But before you die, you will suffer the most… the… the most…”

He began coughing, threw up blood, and continued to do so until he was dead.

“We’d better get rid of his body,” Wolff said. “We might have a hard time explaining what he was doing here. And von Elgers might connect the missing horn with their presence here.”

A look out of the window showed him that the search party was far down the trail road leading to the town. For the moment, at least, no one was on the bridge. He lifted the heavy corpse up and shoved it out the window. After Kickaha’s wound was bandaged, Wolff and the Yidshe wiped up the evidences of the struggle.

Only after they were through did funem Laksfalk speak. His face pale and grim. “That was the horn of the Lord. I insist that you tell me how it got here and what your part is in this… this seeming blasphemy.”

“Now’s the time for the whole truth,” Kickaha said. “You tell him, Bob. For once, I don’t feel like hogging the conversation.”

Wolff was concerned for Kickaha, for his face, too, was pale, and the blood was oozing out through the thick bandages. Nevertheless, he told the Yidshe what he could as swiftly as possible.

The knight listened well, although he could not help interjecting questions frequently or swearing when Wolff told him something particularly amazing.

“By God,” he said when Wolff seemed to be finished, “this tale of another world would make me call you a liar if the rabbis had not already told me that my ancestors, and those of the Teutons, had come from just such a place. Then there is the Book of the Second Exodus, which says the same thing and also claims that the Lord came from a different world.

“Still, I had always thought these tales the stuff that holy men, who are a trifle mad, dream up. I would never have dreamed of saying so aloud, of course, for I did not want to be stoned for heresy. Also, there’s always the doubt that these could be true. And the Lord punishes those who deny him; there’s no doubt of that.

“Now, you put me in a situation no man could envy. I know you two for the most redoubtable knights it has ever been my fortune to encounter. You are such men as would not lie; I would stake my life on that. And your story rings true as the armor of the great dragon-slayer, fun Zilberbergl. Yet, I do not know.”

He shook his head. “To seek to enter the citadel of the Lord himself, to strike against the Lord! That frightens me. For the first time in my life, I,Leyb funem Laksalk, admit that I am afraid.”

Wolff said, “You gave your oath to us. We release you but ask that you do as you swore. That is, you tell no one of us or our quest.”

Angrily, the Yidshe said, “I did not say I would quit you! I will not, at least not yet. There is this that makes me think you might be telling the truth. The Lord is omnipotent, yet his holy horn has been in your hands and those of the gworl, and the Lord has done nothing. Perhaps…”

Wolff replied that he did not have time to wait for him to make up his mind. The horn must be recovered now, while there was the opportunity. And Chryseis must be freed at the first chance. He led them from the room and into another, unoccupied at the moment. There they took three swords to replace theirs, which the gworl must have cast out of the window into the moat. Within a few minutes, they were outside the castle and pretending to search through the woods for the gworl.

By then most of the Teutons outside had returned to the castle. The three waited until the stragglers decided that no gworl were around. When the last of these had gone across the drawbridge, Wolff and his friends put out their torches. Two sentries remained at the guardhouse by the end of the bridge. These, however, were a hundred yards distant and could not see into the shadows where the three crouched. Moreover, they were too busy discussing the events of the night and looking into the darkness of the woods. They were not the original sentries, for these had been killed by the gworl when they had made their dash for freedom across the bridge.

“The point just below our window should be where the horn is,” Wolff said. “Only…”

“The water-dragons,” Kickaha said. “They’ll have dragged off Smeel and Diskibibol’s bodies to their lairs, wherever those are. But there might be some others cruising around. I’d go, but this wound of mine would draw them at once.”

“I was just talking to myself,” Wolff said. He began to take off his clothes. “How deep’s the moat?”

“You’ll find out,” Kickaha said.

Wolff saw something gleam redly in the reflected light from the distant bridge torches. An animal’s eyes, he thought. The next moment, he and the others were caught within something sticky and binding. The stuff, whatever it was, covered his eyes and blinded him.

He fought savagely but silently. Though he did not know who his assailants were, he did not intend to arouse the castle people. However the struggle came out, the issue did not concern them; he knew that.

The more he thrashed, the tighter the webs clung to him and bound him. Eventually, raging, breathing hard, he was helpless. Only then did a voice speak, low and rasping. A knife cut the web to leave his face exposed. In the dim light of the distant torches, he could see two other figures wrapped in the stuff and a dozen crooked shapes. The rotten-fruit stench was powerful.

“I am Ghaghrill, the Zdrrikh’agh of Abbkmung. You are Robert Wolff and our great enemy Kickaha, and the third one I do not know.”

“The Baron funem Laksfalk!” the Yidshe said. “Release me, and you will soon find out whether I am a good man to know or not, you stinking swine!”

“Quiet! We know you have somehow slain two of my best killers, Smeel and Diskibibol, though they could not have been so fierce if they allowed themselves to be defeated by such as you. We saw Diskibibol fall from where we hid in the woods. And we saw Smeel jump with the horn.”

Ghaghril paused, then said, “You, Wolff, will go after the horn into the waters and bring it back to us. If you do, I swear by the honor of the Lord that we will release all three of you. The Lord wants Kickaha, too, but not as badly as the horn, and he said that we were not to kill him, even if we had to let him go to keep from killing him. We obey the Lord, for he is the greatest killer of all.”

“And if I refuse?” Wolff said. “It is almost certain death for me with the water-dragons in the moat.”

“It will be certain death for you if you don’t.”

Wolff considered. He was the logical choice, he had to admit. The quality and relationship of the Yidshe was unknown to the gworl, so they could not let him go after the horn; he might fail to return. Kickaha was a prize second only to the horn. Besides, he was wounded, and the blood from the wound would attract the water-monsters. Wolff, if he cared for Kickaha, would return. They could not, of course, be sure of the depth of his feelings for Kickaha. That was a chance they would have to take.

One thing was certain. No gworl was about to venture into such deep water if he had someone else to do it for him.

“Very well,” Wolff said. “Let me loose, and I will go after the horn. But at least give me a knife to defend myself against the dragons.”

“No,” Ghaghrill said.

Wolff shrugged. After he was cut loose of the web-net, he removed all of his clothes except his shirt. This covered the cord wound around his waist.

“Don’t do it, Bob,” Kickaha said. “You can’t trust a gworl any more than his master. They will take the horn from you and then do to us what they wish. And laugh at us for being their tools.”

“I don’t have any choice,” Wolff said. “If I find the horn, I’ll be back. If I don’t return, you’ll know I died trying.”

“You’ll die anyway,” Kickaha replied. There was a smack of a fist against flesh. Kickaha cursed but did so softly.

“Speak any more, Kickaha,” Ghaghrill said, “and I will cut out your tongue. The Lord did not forbid that.”