Zaragoz Read online

  And as Orfeo looked up from the rats to the dark things whirling and capering upon the air like shadows come gleefully to life, he knew that the rats had not come alone from their secret abyss, and that whatever bargain Arcangelo had sealed with the daemons which lurked within those depths was only now to be brought to its conclusion.

  Chapter Fifteen

  From his station atop the table Orfeo looked out on a sea of confusion.

  At least two hundred and fifty people were now crowded into the room, each one lashing out in blind panic as he or she tried to run away from the black horde which seethed around their feet and leapt up to snap at their clothing. Not a single face could be seen; all the fright and horror was hidden behind grinning masks, and all the screaming merged into one colossal voice which seemed to have no lips or tongues to shape it.

  Orfeo could see men with swords hacking about themselves to the right and to the left, but their wayward blades seemed to strike their fellows more often than the beasts which harried them.

  Everyone in the room was looking wildly about for a way of escape, but the rats had herded them into a veritable trap, because all three of the smaller doors which led from the hall into the inner corridors of the Duke's palace were blocked by tables which had been moved back to make way for the dancing. There were five glazed windows in a row above the double doors through which the throng had poured but they were far too high to be reached without ladders.

  The door which was behind the table on which Orfeo stood was the one which had been used to bring the food for the banquet from the kitchens. Veronique diAvila was already reaching down 193

  Brian Craig

  into the gap behind the table, trying to turn the handle which was hidden from view. Rodrigo Cordova was clutching his chest, too weak and dazed to help her. Orfeo took out the adamantine amulet which he had taken from Falquero's body, and placed its chain about Rodrigo's neck, hoping that if had power left to save his strength. There was nothing more he could do but wait for Veronique to wrestle the door open; in the meantime he stood helplessly above the turmoil, watching the tragedy unfold.

  Orfeo reached out a hand to a man nearby, hoping to help the other climb up beside him, but the crowd had pushed all the way across the floor by now, and was all about him. The man was so crazed with fear that he nearly pulled Orfeo down to the floor again; he let go too soon, and tumbled back across another's shoulders.

  Orfeo was searching with his eyes for Marsilio diAvila—but the costume which caught and drew his eye was the vivid scarlet worn by Morella d'Arlette, whose fingers were spitting sparks as she recoiled in dread from the beasts which swarmed around her.

  She too was backed against a table, at the further end of the room, but the space around her was empty of people. Alas, it seemed that her magic could not keep back the rats, for they came at her with insane enthusiasm, undeterred by the tricks which she used to hurl them back.

  Semjaza, who had been beside her only moments before, had clambered up on to the tabletop to be out of reach of the rats, but the raven still fluttered about his head, groping with its claws at the edges of his mask—and though he summoned magical force enough to blast it into a cloud of feathers, Orfeo saw that when it was hurled away it left something on the sorcerer's h e a d -

  something like a long black worm which clung to the death's-head mask like a great leech. Orfeo remembered that he had seen it before, and knew now that it was Arcangelo's familiar, given to him by the forces with which he had made treaty as an earnest of their dark intent.

  If anyone could send this plague of monsters back into the depths from which they had been strangely roused it was Semjaza, but as Orfeo watched the magician over the heads of the panicked crowd he saw that he had spoken more truly than he knew when he told the wizard that he could not be as confident of his victory 194

  Zaragoz

  as he liked to appear. Whatever sacrifices the sorcerer had offered to the hungry evil which lurked beneath the citadel, they had been less than Arcangelo had in the end been willing to give. And how could it have been otherwise, when that agreement gave both wizards entirely to the daemons, body and soul?

  Orfeo glanced towards the great doors, and saw that the rats had not come alone—for in the terraced courtyard, where half a hundred men-at-arms were fighting off the rats with pikes, torches and swords, other figures were moving now, white as snow save for great oval eyes which caught the light of the guttering candles and glowed eerily yellow in the descending dark. And with the white apes came darker things, like shadows struggling for substance: two-legged steeds and sinister riders.

  There were at least two dozen of the ghostly apes, capering madly as they leapt from level to level, striking out with their long arms. They were not hunting now, after the fashion in which they had hunted Orfeo within the crag—they were not one whit less mad than the rats which they had chased from the depths.

  Orfeo knew immediately that they were not the herdsmen of this horrid invasion, but merely part of the herd, and that the shadowy riders which had driven the rats across magical bridges to penetrate those parts of the castle where they had never come before were their masters.

  But the shadows were not merely behind the horde—they were also above it.

  There was a living darkness in the air, hovering above the courtyard and the dancing-floor alike, drowning out the light of the stars and the feeble flames of the candles—an obliteration which erupted from the cracks and crevices of space itself, roiling and writhing as if in indecision over what shape to take, or whether to take any shape at all.

  The blackness was filling the air, with a fierce cold and a foul graveyard stink of which Semjaza's odious breath was but the merest echo.

  Orfeo's lips formed again the saying which he had repeated to Rodrigo Cordova: Though the honest strength of men dies with them, their magic may seek vengeance from the grave. He had heard that it was easier by far to destroy by magic than it was to build, and now he saw with his own eyes what destruction could 195

  Brian Craig

  be released by hatred and recklessness combined.

  He saw that Semjaza's death's-head mask had become still once the raven had been hurled away. The sorcerer stood boldly upright, almost as though he were surveying the scene without any panic or urgency at all. But the mask lied in that implication, and the lie was written across it by the writhing coils of the dreadful worm, which had begun to insinuate itself through an eye-hole to reach the disfigured face within. Though the wizard put out his arms as if to issue a command, there was no authority now in the blindly groping hands which clawed the air in desperate futility.

  Semjaza had been certain that he had turned Arcangelo's demonic conjurations against their upstart would-be master, but Orfeo saw now how true was that wisdom of lore and legend which said that the more a wizard demanded of unearthly servants, the more he made himself vulnerable to their revenge.

  Chaos was come to the castle of Zaragoz—and it came not to serve Semjaza, but to claim him.

  It was as though a flock of invisible hands swept through the courtyard and the hall, killing with icy blasts the warmth which had been in the air. The candles in every high-stacked column flickered and died. The room had seemed filled with light while the nobles danced, swirling their finery about them in cascades of brightness, but now the darkness which grew and grew in the empty reaches above the heads of the crowd brought a true Night of Masks to Zaragoz, and it was no longer possible to tell noble and commoner apart in the desperate throng where everyone was reduced to the madness of pure fear.

  No scaly or chitinous being appeared with livid eyes and savage teeth, to gloat and rejoice in the maelstrom of suffering—these daemons were as much an absence as a presence: an absence which seemed to suck up the life of the people as it sucked up the warmth and the light from the room. It sucked in Semjaza, too, plucking him hungrily from his place upon the table to bring him flying into the maw of the dark maelstrom.
/>   The arms which the wizard had raised to direct his power flew wide as the force gripped him about the middle, and his legs flailed as madly as the legs of any rat-gripped kitchen-maid. His body seemed to glow within its star-spangled silks, which rippled as though there were a plague of rats inside them.

  196

  Zaragoz

  But Semjaza did not vanish utterly into that unnatural emptiness just yet; instead he wriggled and whirled, and fire flashed from his fingers in fountainous arcs, repairing for a second or two the gloom which had been cast over the battle of the rats.

  Orfeo reached down again to help another join him on the tabletop—a woman this time, who was lifted up by someone else, so that as he bent to catch her she could put her arms around his neck. He put her down beside him, gently enough, and brushed a clinging rat from her skirt with his knuckles. The fragrance of her hair took him by surprise, but in the dimness he did not see at first what colour it was, and thought that it was Veronique diAvila. But Veronique was still behind him, and by now had contrived to open the door for herself and Rodrigo Cordova. The newcomer was Serafima Quixana.

  Orfeo, seeing the doorway yawning wide, thrust her quickly towards it, calling to her to jump and run. He did not follow her immediately, but turned back towards the crowd, thinking to help others to pass over the table—there was a connecting beam between its legs which made it very difficult for anyone to pass beneath.

  The man who had held up the lady Serafima had been swept away by the struggling crowd, who were pulling one another back as they competed for a place at the table's edge. One man and one man only was able to leap from that mass on to the table-top, and he turned quickly enough to Orfeo, reaching forward with the blade of his slender sword as though to drive the player over the edge and into the sea of frenzy. It was not the mask which the man wore but the fact that he carried his sword left-handed that told Orfeo who it was. He was facing the Duke of Zaragoz himself.

  Orfeo, knowing what an absurdity it was that the strongest men in that troubled throng should begin hacking at one another with their weapons, cried "Peace!"

  He could not tell whether his cry was unheard or not, but Marsilio diAvila cut at him again, and he had to parry the thrust, moving backwards the while.

  Then, as though compelled by that same strange reflex which had taken hold of Rodrigo Cordova, Marsilio swept his mask away with a jerking movement of his right hand—and Orfeo gasped in astonishment and alarm.

  197

  Brian Craig

  The face which had been Marsilio diAvila's when he put on his mask—the extraordinarily handsome, unnaturally youthful face—was Marsilio's no longer. It was as though a talon had reached out from another world, before whose deft caress the Duke's hard flesh had been as soft as butter, and had drawn five grooves across it from the right temple to the left part of the jaw, drawing not a single drop of blood but pressing every feature out of shape, making the right eye into a ghastly shrunken thing and the nose into a twisted wreck.

  And yet, as Marsilio stared at Orfeo, he clearly had no inkling of what had happened, for Orfeo still wore his impassive mask, and the horror in his own face was quite hidden from view.

  A cataract of light fell upon them from that place high above, beneath the roof-beams, where Semjaza still struggled desperately against whatever thing it was which held him. So few candles were burning now that the light seemed dazzling, and Marsilio diAvila blinked in a curiously quizzical fashion, as though he could not decide what was happening to his eyesight.

  Without warning, the Duke thrust again at Orfeo—a blow launched with speed and art, yet not the sort of blow which a fencer would have delivered—it was too frantic for that. Orfeo diverted the strike with his own blade, and this time he struck back, hitting the Duke above the left breast.

  It was a deep cut, but it drew no blood.

  Marsilio hesitated for just an instant, and Orfeo thought that the Duke might cry "Peace!" and devote his actions once again to the vulgar cause of survival. But the cry, if it was ever intended, was stifled by a darkness which came upon his twisted features, not as though it fell upon his face from the air above, but rather as if it came from within, lazily removing itself from an envelope of flesh which it had briefly possessed.

  The Duke of Zaragoz tried to turn then, as though in search of a different opponent, and Orfeo could have dealt him a mortal blow—but he did not, for there was no need. Marsilio's tortured features were scored yet again by that same daemonic hand, so that both his eyes were shrivelled and the two rows of his fine white teeth stood out from his melting lips and cheeks, which were dissolving into vacuous craters.

  Marsilio diAvila was shrinking, as if something inside him was 198

  Zaragoz

  pulling his body in upon itself, as a sleeping man might huddle tightly within a blanket to save himself from the cold.

  The Duke of Zaragoz toppled sideways, falling from the table to the floor where the wrathful rats awaited his delivery.

  Orfeo did not wait to see his fate, but turned and leapt into the gaping cavity of the open door. Once there, though, he paused and looked up, to see what had become of Semjaza.

  The magician was still struggling in mid-air, but he too seemed to be collapsing in upon himself, his hands and feet dwindling to threads—and the death's-head mask was falling from his head into the crowd below.

  Behind the mask there was no face at all; it had already been swallowed up into the darkness, devoured by that hungry leech which the raven had brought to feed on him.

  The last brief blaze of light from that place where the sorcerer had been devoured by emptiness lit up the silver braid on his robe as it fluttered and drifted in the turbulent air, floating hestitantly downwards to follow the mask. Orfeo could not help following the fall of the garment with his eyes, which brought his gaze again into confrontation with Morella d'Arlette.

  Her mask was gone, and though the rats still leapt at her and tore at her gown her fearful eyes were directed elsewhere. She had been searching for him, and now had found him. As their stares met and were locked together Orfeo heard a dreadful screaming inside his head: a wordless cry for help, more agonized than anything he could ever have imagined. The hold which she had on him prevented his flight, and though he put up his hands to shield his eyes he could not set aside the power of her command.

  With every fibre of his being he tried to hurl himself through the doorway and into the corridor beyond, but his flesh would not obey him while his soul was in thrall to the sorceress. He felt certain that her magic would snatch him up, as Semjaza had been plucked from his tabletop, and draw him into the yawning crack of darkness, to accompany her to whatever hell her daemons had prepared for her.

  He drew his unavailing hands away from his eyes again, and looked to see what state she was in. Despite the distance between them her features were quite clear to him, and her colourful eyes were aglow with some inner light. There was a lust and craving 199

  Brian Craig

  in her expression which was absurd in its avidity. As he watched, the air which thickened around her head like a halo seemed to take the form of a host of feces—every one as perversely beautiful as she; every one transfigured by that same miraculous lust.

  And as those faces crowded about her, to destroy her utterly with their kisses and caresses, her hold upon the player was abruptly severed—whether by accident or by design, he could not tell.

  Orfeo jumped down into the corridor beyond the door just as the rats began to spill into the new space which had thus been opened to them. He did not wait to see if any other man or woman had contrived to scramble on to the table—he grabbed at the door and slammed it shut behind him, stamping his feet upon a rat which tried to bite him. Then he turned and ran.

  He nearly ran right over someone who was hurrying along the coridor in the opposite direction. It was the boy who had brought him food in the dungeon, and had earlier been struck about the head by Morella dArlette. H
e had once carried the stricken boy through the very same door which he had shut behind him.

  "Not that way, little fool!" he said, urgently. "Which way did the others go? Which way from here to the gate?"

  The boy shook his head, dumbly.

  "The stables, then—we must find horses, if there are horses left which have not been driven to madness!"

  The boy collected himself then, and nodded vigorously. Orfeo turned him about, and he began to run along the ill-lit corridor.

  Orfeo followed him, first downwards and then to the left, then up a flight of stairs and across a landing. Wherever they ran they found rats, but only in ones and twos, and Orfeo had no difficulty driving them off with his blade. The boy stumbled once or twice, but he was a nimble runner and did not seem to mind the rats as much as those who had been panicked by them. As the lowest of the low within the castle walls, he was probably better acquainted with the beasts than anyone else.

  The way they took brought them eventually out on to the ramparts of the castle, where there should have been men-at-arms—save that on the Night of Masks they had all come down to take their share of food and drink, or to follow their luck with serving-maids and street-girls who had sneaked in from the town. Now the only 200

  Zaragoz

  guards by the battlements were great white apes ranting and raving at the sky which they had never seen before.

  Orfeo looked over the wall to see if there was any chance to make an immediate descent, but the drop was sheer for two hundred feet and more, so he followed the boy along the narrow path, heading for the gate beside which the stables were extended.

  When they went down the stairs into the stables it seemed that this quest too must be in vain, for there were rats rattling in the straw, and every box seemed to have been kicked open. The lamps which had been suspended from the roof-beams had been cast down, all save two, and one had started a fire which was extending slowly to the feed-store. A great many of the horses which had been brought to the castle by the guests had broken free and had joined the tumult on the terraces, but those which had been trained for military use had been taught to withstand both noise and fire, and though they did not like the rats they had held to their stalls.