"Well, get on with it," said the Chief Justice.
Karadur brought a little brass bell out of his satchel. "When I sound this, smite!" He poured more powders into his dish, which flamed and bubbled.
"Kneel, my royal son," said Karadur. "Fear nought."
The crowd surged forward expectantly. Fathers hoisted small children to their shoulders.
Jorian cast a thoughtful look at the old Mulvani. Then he knelt before the block and bowed his head until his throat rested across the narrow, flat place on top. His chin lay comfortably in the hollow that had been cut in the west side of the block. His eyes, swiveling sideways, kept Uthar the butcher in the periphery of his vision. Uthar, bending over him, brushed Jorian's long, black hair forward to bare his nape.
Karadur uttered another incantation, gesturing with his skinny brown arms. This continued until Jorian's knees began to hurt from kneeling on the hard boards. Stepping back from the block, Uthar took a firm grip on the helve of the ax.
At last the Mulvani tinkled his bell. Jorian, straining to keep the headsman in sight without seeming to do so, felt rather than saw the ax swing up to the vertical. Then the bell tinkled again, meaning that the ax had started down.
Jorian's next action required exquisite timing, and he was not at all sure of success—even though Karadur and he had rehearsed for hours in his private gymnasium, with the old wizard wielding a broom instead of an ax. For one thing, Jorian was a little tired because four of his wives had insisted, the night before, on proof of his love for them.
As the ax descended, Jorian cast off the thongs that bound him, which throughout the ceremony he had been discreetly sawing through with the little knife. Simultaneously, he hurled his body to the left, falling on his side. Since the heavy ax had already begun its downward course, the burly headsman was neither quick enough of apprehension nor strong enough of arm to stop it in mid-career. It thudded into the block, sinking deeply into the red-painted wood.
In one swift movement, Jorian rolled to his feet and put the little knife between his teeth. Karadur cast something more into the dish, which flamed and smoked like a little volcano, sending up a swelling column of green smoke shot with red and purple. The wizard uttered a loud cry, flinging out his arms. Thereupon the coiled rope before him sprang erect, like some monstrous serpent. Its end shot up twenty feet or more, and the upper end disappeared into a kind of haze, as if it had pierced a hole in the sky. A tremendous cloud of smoke arose from the dish, obscuring the vision of those on the platform and hiding them from the spectators below. Some, supposing the king's head to have fallen already, set up a cry of "Red and white! Red and white!"
One long stride brought Jorian to the executioner. With the ax in his hands, Uthar the butcher would have been a formidable foe. But, despite his desperate tugs, the head of the ax remained firmly fixed in the block.
Jorian brought his left fist up in a long, swinging, ox-felling blow against the headsman's jaw. Uthar reeled back against the net and fell off the platform.
A cry from Karadur warned Jorian to turn. One of the mailed halberdiers was lunging towards him, thrusting with his weapon. With the leopard-quick timing that had once already saved his gore, Jorian caught the halberd below the head, just before the spearhead reached his skin. As he jerked the head of the weapon violently to the left, the soldier's lunge drove it past his body.
Seizing the haft with both hands and turning his back on the trooper, Jorian put the shaft on his shoulder and then bent his back, pulling the head of the halberd down. The halberdier, clinging to the shaft, found himself hoisted over Jorian's broad back and hurled head over heels off the platform, to fall with a clash of mail to the ground below.
Clutching the halberd, Jorian spun to face the remaining soldier, who stood coughing smoke. The Chief Justice and the high priest of Zevatas scrambled down the stair in such haste that the latter lost his footing and plunged to earth head-first, gravely injuring himself.
Whether for fear or for love of his former lord, the soldier hesitated, holding his halberd at port and neither swinging the ax head nor thrusting with the spear point. Having nothing personal against the man, Jorian reversed his weapon and jabbed the butt against the soldier's armored ribs. A ferocious push sent the trooper tumbling off the scaffold after his comrade.
Thus, twelve seconds after the headsman's blow, Jorian and Karadur found themselves the only persons on the platform. A vast murmur ran through the throng. The events on the scaffold had taken place so quickly and had been so obscured by smoke that nobody on the ground yet really grasped what had happened. It was plain, however, that the execution had not gone as planned. People jostled and shouted questions; the murmur rose to a roar. A sharp command rang out, and a squad of pikemen rushed towards the foot of the stair.
Jorian dropped his halberd and sprang to the rope. Not for nothing had he spent months practising climbing a rope hand over hand, until the muscles of his arms and hands were like steel. As he went up, the rope swayed gently but remained straight and taut. The platform sank beneath him. Somewhere a crossbow snapped, and Jorian heard the swishing hum of the quarrel as it sped past.
Below, the crowd was in a frenzied uproar. Soldiers scrambled up the stair. As they reached the top, Karadur, who had been performing another incantation, dropped spryly off the edge of the platform. Jorian had only a brief glimpse of the wizard; he saw, however, that as Karadur reached the ground his appearance changed. Instead of a deep-brown, white-haired Mulvanian holy man, he was now, to all appearances, a member of the lower Xylarian priesthood, clad in a neat black robe of good stuff. The crowd swallowed him up.
Again came the twang of a bowstring. The missile grazed Jorian's shoulder, raising a welt. The soldiers had reached the platform and were looking doubtfully at the lower end of the rope. The thought flashed across Jorian's racing mind that they would try either to pull it down or to climb up after him.
Sweat poured down his face and his massive, hairy torso as he mounted the last few feet of the rope. He reached the place where the rope turned hazy and disappeared. As his head came level with this terminus, he found that the rope remained as solid and clear as ever, while below him the scene became dim and hazy, as if seen through a gathering fog.
A final, heart-wrenching heave, and the scene below vanished. Around him, instead of empty air, stretched an utterly strange landscape. He lowered his feet and felt earth and grass beneath them.
For the moment, he had not time to examine his new surroundings. Karadur had repeatedly warned him of the importance of recovering the magical rope, the upper end of which still stuck up stiffly from the grass to nearly Jorian's own height. He seized the rope with both hands and pulled. Up it came, as if out of an invisible hole in the ground. As he pulled, the visible part of the rope lost its stiffness, drooped, and hung limply, like any other rope.
Then Jorian felt a check, as if someone below were holding the rope. One of the soldiers must have nerved himself to seize it as he saw it rising into the air. Since the man was heavy, it was all that Jorian, still panting from his climb, could do to haul him up.
Then a better idea struck him. Rather than pull an armed foe up into this new world about him, he let the rope run loosely through his hands, dropping the man at the other end back on the scaffold. Very faintly, he heard a crash and a yell. Then he pulled quickly, hand over hand. This time the rope came up without resistance until it all lay in a heap on the grass before him.