Imperturbably Akbalik said, “I came because I was summoned by a guardsman, Gialaurys. A truckload of weird monsters was coming up the highway to the Castle, I was told, and these men here hadn’t been given any instructions to expect such a thing, and they wanted to know what to do.—By the Lady, Gialaurys, what are these beasts?”
“Pets to amuse his lordship,” Gialaurys said. “I captured them for him out Kharax way. More than that is of no immediate to concern to you or anyone else.—Septach Melayn was supposed to receive me here! This cargo of mine needs to be properly stowed, and I charged him with the task of arranging it. I ask you again, Akbalik, where is Septach Melayn?”
“Septach Melayn is here,” came the light, easy voice of the swordsman, appearing just then at the Castle’s gate. “Your message was a little slow getting to me, Gialaurys, and by error I came by way of Spurifon Parapet, which took me somewhat out of the way.” Languidly he strolled through the gate and gave Gialaurys a quick, affectionate tap on the shoulder by way of welcome. Then he stared into the wagon.
“These are what were running loose in Kharax?” he said, in a voice congested with astonishment. “These, Gialaurys?”
“These, yes. Hundreds of them. Running free all over Kharax Plain. It was a bloody terrible task, my friend, tracking those creatures down and slaughtering them. Our Coronal owes me something for it.—But do you have a place ready for these fellows, Septach Melayn? A very secure place? They are some samples of what I encountered there.”
“I have one, yes. In the royal stables, it is. Will this wagon of yours pass through the gate, though?”
“Through this one, yes. Not through the Dizimaule, which is why I arrived at this side of the Castle.” Gialaurys turned to his men. “Here, now! Get that wagon moving! Into the Castle with it, now! Into the Castle!”
It took an hour to convey the creatures to the hold that Septach Melayn had prepared for them and to settle them in, each in its own cage, safely locked away behind sturdy bars that would not be easily sundered. Septach Melayn had found a disused wing of the Castle stables: a great stone barn deep down beneath the ancient Tower of Trumpets that must have been employed for housing royal mounts a thousand or two years ago, in Lord Spurifon’s time, or Lord Scaul’s, when this part of the Castle was more frequently used than it had been of late. Craftsmen working with great speed had transformed it under Septach Melayn’s direction into a receiving chamber for Gialaurys’s pleasant specimens.
When the job was done, Gialaurys and Septach Melayn dismissed Akbalik and the others who had helped them with the work. Just the two of them remained behind. Septach Melayn said, staring in wonder and horror at the baleful things pacing and snorting within their cages, “How would we have fared in the war, I’d like to know, if Korsibar had succeeded in turning such atrocities as these loose against us?”
“You can thank the Divine that he never did. Perhaps even Korsibar had wisdom enough to know that once they were set free to attack us, they’d continue on through the world, a menace to everyone ever after.”
“Korsibar? Wisdom?”
“Well, there is that point,” Septach Melayn conceded. “But what held him back from using them, then? I suppose it was that the war came to an end before he could.” He peered into the cages and shuddered. “Foh! How they stink, these beasts of yours! What a pack of monstrosities!”
“You should have seen them when they were wandering about all over Kharax Plain. Wherever your eye came to rest there was something hideous to behold, snarling at something even more hideous. Like a scene out of your worst nightmare, it was. A lucky thing for us that the plain is closed on three sides by granite hills, so that we were able to drive them into a trap, and even get them to set upon one another, while we were picking them off at the edges.”
“You killed them all, I hope?”
“All the loose ones, one by one, until none remained,” said Gialaurys. “Except these, which I brought back as souvenirs for Prestimion. But there are hundreds more still in their pens that never broke free. The keepers have no idea what they are, you know. Having no memory of Korsibar, or of the war, how could they? All they understood was that out there in Kharax—and a gray ugly place Kharax is, too, my friend, not a tree for miles—there was this huge pen of horrors, which are supposed to be kept under guard, only something went wrong and some of them got out. Do you want to hear their names?”
“The names of the keepers?” Septach Melayn asked.
“Of the animals,” said Gialaurys. “They do have names, you know. I suppose Prestimion will want to know them.” He drew from his tunic a dirty, folded scrap of paper, which he pondered in a laborious way, reading not being one of Gialaurys’s great skills. “Yes. This one here"—he indicated a long white bony thing like a serpent made of a string of razor-sharp sickles welded together, that lay writhing and fiercely hissing in the cage on the far left—"this one’s a zytoon. And this, with the pink baggy body and all those legs and red eyes and that disgusting hairy tail with the black stingers in it, that’s the malorn. Behind it we have the vourhain"—that was a green, pustulent-looking bear-like creature with curving tusks as long as swords—"and then the zeil, the min-mollitor, the kassai—no, that’s the kassai, with the crab-legs, and that one’s the zeil—and can you make out the weyhant back there, the one with the mouth so big it could swallow three Skandars at once—” Gialaurys spat. “Oh, Korsibar! You should be killed all over again for having even dreamed of letting these things loose against us. And we should find the wizards who made them and eradicate them also.”
Turning away with a grimace from the caged monsters, Gialaurys said, “Tell me, Septach Melayn, what new and interesting things have happened at the Castle while I was off among the zeils and the vourhains?”
“Well,” said the swordsman, grinning wickedly, “the Su-Suheris is new and interesting, I suppose.”
Gialaurys gave him a perplexed look. “What Su-Suheris do you mean?”
“Maundigand-Klimd is his name. We met him, Prestimion and I, in the midnight market of Bombifale. Or, rather, he met us: saw through our disguises, walked right up to us, greeted us for who we really were.” Once more the wicked grin. “It will amuse you to learn that he’s Prestimion’s new court magus.”
“He’s what? A Su-Suheris, you say? I thought Heszmon Gorse was to be head magus here.”
“Heszmon Gorse goes back shortly to Triggoin, where he’ll rule over the wizards there as adjutant to his father, and eventually succeed him. No, Gialaurys, this Su-Suheris has been awarded the job at court. He impressed himself upon the Coronal at once, that night in Bombifale market. Was summoned to the Castle, a day or two later, at Prestimion’s express order. And now they are fast friends. It’s not just that he’s a master of his arts, although evidently he is. Prestimion is captivated by him; loves him as he loved Duke Svor, I think. It’s plain, Gialaurys, he needs someone about him that has a darker soul than yours or mine. And has found one now.”
“But a Su-Suheris—” Gialaurys threw up his hands in bewilderment. “To have those two repellent snaky heads looking down at you all the time—those cold eyes—! And the treacherous nature of the race, there’s a consideration too, Septach Melayn! How can Prestimion have forgotten Sanibak-Thastimoon so quickly?”
“I must tell you,” the swordsman said, “that this one is a different pot of ghessl from Sanibak-Thastimoon. There was the reek of evil about that other one. It came boiling up from his pallid skin like a noxious fume. This man is steady and straightforward. Dark he is within, yes, I suppose, and very sinister to behold; but that’s the nature of his kind. Still, one is tempted to put one’s trust in him. Why, he even shows Prestimion the secret of his geomantic spells.”