Melanthrix the Mage (8 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

“IMPOSSIBLE!”

“As I was saying, Sire,” said Sergeant Poliodór to the assembled members of the Royal Council of Kórynthia, “the bolt is definitely Pommerelian in origin. If you'll look at the way the leathers are attached, here and here”—he held out the quarrel and pointed to the appropriate spot—“you can see that they're notched twice right near the end. That's unique to the weapon shops of Ysherr.”

“Bloody Walküres,” Prince Kiríll said under his breath.

“What about the crossbow?” asked Prince Arkády, continuing his own examination from the previous evening.

He abruptly tried to stifle a yawn.

“Well, that's what's interesting,” the guard said. “See, most crossbows are built so they can be quickly reloaded. The archer puts the weapon bow-down, uses his foot to engage the stirrup, and hooks the bowstring to his belt. Then he pushes down with his foot to cock the bow, which is caught by a trigger, here”—again he pointed—“and he's ready to shoot. In exchange for speed, you sacrifice some accuracy and range. But this piece is really unique. You have to have a special device to rewind it, which makes things go a whole lot slower. On the other hand, it packs much more of a wallop on the receiving end, so to speak, and it's deadly accurate to a far greater dis­tance.”

“Who made it?” Arkády asked, posing the question on everyone's mind.

The sergeant pulled the right side of his bushy mus­tachio into a curl, and shifted in his seat uncomfortably.

“Well, that's a bit of a problem, see? I once saw a bow like this in Érskeburg. Not
quite
the same, mind, but then, I've never come across anything that would match it exactly. Somewhere to the east, I'd say, but I could be wrong.”

“The east?” Arkády said. “But I thought you just said that it was made at Ysherr.”

“Well, like I said,” Poliodór said, “it looks Ysh­errian, but there are problems with the fashioning of the bow that point somewhere else. So, I guess I can't really say for sure.”

He bowed his head in exasperation.

“How was it shot?” asked Prince Nikolaí, a large, muscular man in his late twenties.

“The bow was carefully secured with leather strips to one of the center rafters,” Poliodór said. “The dust was disturbed a bit, but that's all we could see. I don't think the thing was triggered in the traditional way. It was set and cocked sometime before the banquet started, and then set off from a distance.”

“Impossible!” everyone said together.

“But how'd he get up there?” Lord Feognóst asked.

Several others tried to interrupt.

King Kipriyán motioned for silence, and then posed a question himself: “What prompted your conclusion, sergeant?”

“Well, Sire,” the guard said, “first of all, because we didn't catch anybody who shouldn't have been there. We closed down that hall within seconds of the alarum be­ing given, and I don't see how even a mouse could have es­caped from my men. We examined everyone as they left, even your physician.

“Second, well, because of how the bow was set. See, it was meant to be fired just once and once only, and it was aimed right at the place the killer knew you would be standing, Sire. All he had to do was wait until you were there. Why, any Psairothi in court could have released the trip.”

“God's teeth!” Nikolaí said. “Then it must have been someone standing with us in the hall.”

“There's something else, too, sire,” said Poliodór. “We found a trace of some resin-like substance on the bolt. We pricked a few of the servants with it, including a Psairothi. It's not poisonous, and didn't seem to have any other effect that we could see. Maybe it's nothing, but I thought you ought to know.”

“Thank you, sergeant,” said Gorázd Lord Aboéty, who was chairing the meeting.

He looked around the table.

“Any more questions, gentlemen? Then you may leave, sergeant. Prince Arkády, do you have a report?”

“Thank you, grand vizier,” said the prince, glancing down at his jottings. “As the king commanded, I ques­tioned all of the guards present at the banquet last night, and gathered the results of their examinations of the de­parting guests.

“No weapons were found, the dignitaries having re­linquished them before entering the hall. No unusual men­tal patterns were noted. No trace of the assassin was un­covered. I should also note that one person was not ex­amined, because he could not be found after the festivities.”

“Who?”
asked the king. “Who dares question my authority?”

“Doctor Melanthrix,” Arkády said.

“What!” said the king. “Arkásha, I won't have him accused of this, even by you. I've known the man for almost thirty years, and he's absolutely the last person in the world who would do me harm. In any case, he's cer­tainly had opportunities before this, had he been so in­clined.”

“Father, I'm not charging him with anything,” the prince said. “I'm just reporting the facts. Melan­thrix vanished from the hall after his appearance there. He undoubtedly saw something of the events. Shouldn't we at least get his account of what happened at the banquet?”

“The request is reasonable, Sire,” Gorázd said. “No man is above your law.”

Arkády brushed back a lock of hair, and tried again, more diplomatically this time.

“Perhaps the king could ask Doctor Melanthrix to appear before this council as a personal favor to himself.”

Kyprianos looked around the room, but found no support from his councilors for his own position. Finally he sighed.

“Very well. I'm tired, but I'll consent to having Melanthrix called as the final business of this meeting. See to it, Gorázd.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“CALL FOR DOCTOR MELANTHRIX!”

“Call for Doctor Melanthrix,” said the grand vizier, turning to his assistant.

“Call for Doctor Melanthrix!” said Lord Feognóst, as he opened the council room door.

“Call for Doctor Melanthrix,” echoed the refrain from guard to guard down the hall outside, carrying well into the distance.

The council then took a break from its deliberations, several of the older members departing to visit the garde-robes, while others just stretched, yawned, or moved about as they waited. Arkády gazed out through the glazed win­dow at the courtyard, silently lost in contemplation.

They heard the creature before he actually appeared. In the distance, down the hall, came the jingling of chains and bells, a tramping of many feet, and the sound of a low voice chanting words which no one there understood.

“
Iluuu-Ashshuuur-etiluuu-ilaniii
,” came the repeated refrain.

And suddenly he was
there!
, standing before them with his robes all aflutter, and they shrank back, every one. He towered well over six feet in height, taller than anyone in the room, but was slender as a reed, with skin preternat­urally pale. His lips narrowed into nonexistence. He wore a small diamond embedded in one earlobe, and a silver ring in the shape of a small crescent moon dangling from be­tween the nostrils of his nose. Winding around the middle finger of his right hand was a gold ring carved in the shape of an
ouroboros
, a pair of bright emeralds substituting for its eyes. His robes were aswirl with vivid colors running raucously together without pattern, but neither patched nor sewn together in any way evident to those present. Hang­ing from his neck were a dozen silver chains to which miniature bells and chimes had been attached; they made ersatz music as he swayed.

Then he stopped cold and became perfectly still; the quiet was almost worse than the racket he had made while in motion. He bowed most elegantly from the waist.

“You called, sire,” he said, “and Doctor Melanthrix has appeared.”

No one knew what to say. No one had the temerity to break the peace.

Finally, Prince Arkády bestirred himself.

“We thank you, sir, for your kind accomodation. Yesterday, the king my father was almost killed in the Great Hall of the Tighrishi. You were present. What are your impressions of the attack?”

The astrologer smiled or frowned, they were not sure which.

“Yes, my King-to-Be, Doctor Melanthrix was there, entranced by the entertainments which surrounded us.”

He swept his long narrow hand in a semi-circle in front of him.

“There was a flash of light from above, and then King Kipriyán was lying on the table. A miracle it was that he survived, a gift from the Great Creator for which we must give our thanks. The king lives, and we are grateful that he lives. That is all that matters to us.”

Timotheos Metropolitan of Örtenburg, a burly, bearded man of five-and-sixty years, sat in the patriarch's chair as his deputy.

“You speak to us of God and miracles, Doctor Melanthrix,” the churchman said, “but I didn't see you at the thanksgiving mass held this morning in the cathedral, even though I would have expected
you
, of all people, to celebrate the feast of Saint Vasíly the Hierarch. Everyone else in this room was present. You also weren't available for questioning by the guards last night. Everyone else in this room was willing to be searched. At the banquet you attacked both church and state with your scurrilous rhymes. Everyone else in this room heard them.”

“Indeed,” several of the councilors agreed.

“Just what is your question,
Sieur
Timofeí?” the as­trologer asked.

The metropolitan drew his robes close around him, and put his right hand on the icons of Saint Svyatosláv and Saint Trankvillín which hung around his neck.

“Quite simply, sir, where did you go last night after the banquet?” he asked.

“Out,” Melanthrix said, “out of that dark place past the ever-watchful guards. The atmosphere outside was more accomodating, for this warm weather will scarcely last us another day, as you well know. We should all find highly beneficial the inhalation of such air more frequently, and the exercise of one's limbs more regularly.”

Timotheos snorted.

“We're not interested in your philosophies, doctor, unless they match those of the one true faith. Why do I never see you at our services?”

The astrologer swayed slightly, jingling his bells.

“Art thou so impoverished that thou canst admit no other ideas than thine own? Does Doctor Melanthrix ask thee to bend thy will to his? No, and not yet, and never. But thou wouldst have him bow and scrape before thee, when he owes allegiance to a higher authority. Let him worry about his immortal soul. Let him ponder his loyalty to his king, which has never been in question, even from such as thee. Let him pass.”

“Pah,” Timotheos said, “and what about your so-called prophecies? Last night you dared to attack the House of Tighris and the one true church. How can this council ignore your threats?”

Melanthrix started gurgling, but it was a moment before the rest of the councilors realized he was laughing.

“You will pardon me, Sire,” he said, trying to catch his breath, “for this breach of etiquette.

“Gentle
sieurs
, if a man reaches into the air and pulls forth a raven, so”—and a black bird appeared sud­denly in his open hand—“this may be true magic or it may be a simple trick. But if he does not tell you how he did the trick, is it not still a form of magic?”

The bird flew up, circled around and 'round, and then darted through the open doorway as Feognóst quickly cracked it open.

“The future,” the astrologer said, “is like a river full of water, constantly moving and flowing and changing, even as one watches. One may catch a glimpse of an instant in time, and have some sense of whether the river is flooding or slack, of whether the water is pure or clouded, of whether great trunks are being swept rapidly downstream or whether the flow is tranquil enough to row upriver for a bit. He who peers into the future does so at great peril, for he may step too close to the bank and be swept away himself.

“Now, as to whether these small prognostications are true or not,” Melanthrix said, “let history judge, as it has always judged them before.”

The mage cupped his hands and breathed into them, molding something hidden between, spitting on it and kneading it like a loaf of bread. He then released an irides­cent bubble swirling with color that floated away above the council table.

“Look, then,
sieurs
, and see your own destinies, if you have the courage to do so.”

As the oily, roiling sphere passed each person in turn, he could see the images flowing on the surface, pieces of the events in his life that might or might not come true. When the object approached the king sitting at the far end of the table, Kipriyán suddenly turned white and shrank back from the globus with a shriek, his hands raised to ward off whatever it was he saw there.

“Enough of that,” said the Archpriest Athanasios, the council scribe, abruptly puncturing the bubble with his quill.

With an audible “pop,” the sphere disappeared.

But when the council members turned their attention back towards the door, Doctor Melanthrix was gone, leav­ing no sign that he had ever been present. Lord Feognóst questioned the two men standing guard outside in the hall, but they reported no one leaving the room. Prince Arkády proposed that a warrant of arrest for the soothsayer be is­sued at once by the High Council, but King Kipriyán imme­diately objected.

“I have to know,” he kept saying, “I have to know.”

Finally the prince adjourned the proceedings on be­half of his father.

“Arkásha,” they heard the monarch mumble as he was being led out of chambers, “Arkásha, I'm so tired, I'm so very tired, boy.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“A SPARROW ALONE
UPON THE HOUSE TOP”

That same afternoon the Archpriest Athanasios went to the Hanging Garden of Queen Landizábel to read his breviary, as was often his wont. The garden sprawled across the roof of the residential part of the Royal Palace, rising in slow, gentle tiers from its lowest point in the west to the place where the wing attached itself to the multi-sto­ried central core.

The roof had been covered with soil, irrigated, and then planted some four centuries earlier by King Tarás
i
to assuage the homesickness of his eighth wife, who had been accustomed to a climate in which the vegetation remained verdant all year 'round. Plants had been brought from her native Tuscania and many other lands, and the small patch kept warm and fertile with a localized weather spell that was renewed weekly.

Athanasios found a tranquility here that he had known in just one other place in his life. There was some­thing to be said for warm breezes, the smell of freshly-cut flowers, and the presence of growing things. He thought back upon the garden of his youth, that refuge that had given him so much pleasure, and he sighed. All of those whom he had known there were gone now, save only for two, including he who had been like a father to him.

Of all the places within the Hanging Garden, that which pleased him most was the small maze situate at its center. It was not truly a maze, if one understood the thing, for it followed the shape of the Tighris
tughra
, winding 'round and 'round itself until reaching its own conclusion at the middle of the muddle. There, surrounded by hedges, was a small grotto, called by some “Land's End,” after the queen who had designed it, complete with stone benches protected from the sunlight by the overhang­ing shrubbery, and a statue of the monarch herself reading from a book of her own poems. She was not an especially pretty woman, but the sculptor had captured in her face a sensitivity, a gentleness, that moved one even at several centuries' distance.

Here the words of God made sense, here the world was an ordered place where every man knew who and what and where he was, here one could think and reason with the dæmons of the world.

Of all the scripture, he loved the
Psalms
the best.

“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.... Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.”

And again: “I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.”

There were always things like that, little pithy say­ings, that a man of wisdom, of deliberation, could apply to his own life, or use to help others.

“I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” he read aloud.

But
who
made me?
he thought
, other than God, of course
, he added, quickly crossing himself out of respect.
And why am I so consumed by this quest? I must find some measure of peace.

He returned to his book. His reveries were inter­rupted by a trod of a foot along the pathway to the interior.

“Arik Rufímovich!” he said with affection.

“Afanásy Ivánovich.
Pax tecum
,” the older man said, embracing his friend and kissing him on both cheeks. “I thought I might find you here.”

“I was just thinking about the old days,” the arch­priest said, “of the challenges we faced together, of the joys and sorrows, of the abbey and the
Scholê
. They've been good years, for the most part.”

“And for me as well,” Arik said. “I think you've been more of a son to me than any child I might have sired during the great war.”

The archpriest looked up quickly.

“A child?” he said. “Is there any possibility that one actually exists?”

The older man smiled.

“Well, friend Afanásy, before I became a priest, be­fore I had professed any vows, I was a very ordinary per­son with ordinary desires, I'm afraid.”

The cleric sat down heavily on the bench near Athanasios.

Afanásy put down his book.

“I'm always interested in hearing about the old times from someone who was actually there,” he said. “Please, tell me again about your adventures then.”