"I do not know, Prince. I cannot discover where she is. I fear…"
Corum raced up the stairs.
From below the noise of the battle was changing. There seemed to be disconcerted shouts coming from the barbarians. He paused and looked back.
The barbarians were beginning to retreat in panic.
Corum could not understand what was happening, but he had no more time to watch.
He reached his apartments. "Rhalina! Rhalina!" No reply.
Here and there were the bodies of their own warriors and barbarians who had managed to sneak into the castle through poorly defended windows and balconies.
Had Rhalina been taken by a party of barbarians?
Then, from the balcony of her apartment, he heard a strange sound.
It was a singing sound, like nothing he had experienced before. He paused, then approached the balcony cautiously.
Rhalina stood there and she was singing. The wind caught her garments and spread them about her like strange, multicolored clouds. Her eyes were fixed on the far distance and her throat vibrated with the sounds she made.
She seemed to be in a trance and Corum made no sound, but watched. The words she sang were in no language he knew. Doubtless it was an ancient Mabden language. It made him shudder.
Then she stopped and turned in his direction. But she did not see him. Still in the trance, she walked straight past him and back into the room.
Corum peered around a buttress. He had seen an odd green light shining in the direction of the mainland.
He saw nothing more, but heard the yells of the barbarians as they splashed about near the causeway. There was no doubt now but they were retreating.
Corum entered the apartments. Rhalina was sitting in her chair by the table. She was stiff and could not hear him when he murmured her name. Hoping that she would succumb no further to the peculiar trance, he left the room and ran for the main battlements.
Beldan was already there, his jaw slack as he watched what was taking place.
There was a huge ship rounding the headland to the north. It was the source of the strange green light and it sailed rapidly, though there was no wind at all now. The barbarians were scrambling onto their horses, or plunging on foot through the water that was beginning to cover the causeway. They seemed mad with fear. From the darkness on the shore, Corum heard Glandyth cursing them and trying to make them go back.
The ship flickered with many small fires, it seemed. Its masts and its hull seemed encrusted with dull jewels.
And Corum saw what the barbarians had seen. He saw the crew. Flesh rotted on their faces and limbs.
The ship was crewed by corpses.
"What is it, Beldan?" he whispered. "Some artful illusion?"
Beldan's voice was hoarse. "I do not think it is an illusion, Prince Corum."
"Then what?"
"It is a summoning. That is the old Margrave's ship. It has been drawn up to the surface. Its crew has been given something like life. And see-" he pointed to the figure on the poop, a skeletal creature in armor which, like Corum's, was made from great shells, whose sunken eyes flickered with the same green fire that covered the ship like weed-"there is the Margrave himself. Returned to save his castle."
Corum forced himself to watch as the apparition drew closer.
"And what else has he returned for, I wonder?” he said.
The Twelfth Chapter
THE MARGRAVE'S BARGAIN
The ship reached the causeway and stopped. It reeked of ozone and of decay.
"If it be an illusion," Corum murmured grimly, "it is a good one."
Beldan made no reply.
In the distance they heard the barbarians blundering off through the forest. They heard the sound of the chariots turning as Glandyth pursued his allies.
Though all the corpses were armed, they did not move, but simply turned their heads, as one, toward the mam gate of the castle.
Corum was transfixed in astonished horror. The events he was witnessing were like something from the superstitious mind of a Mabden. They could have no existence in actuality. Such images were those created by ignorant fear and morbid imagination. They were something from the crudest and most barbaric of the tapestries he had looked at in the castle.
"What will they do now, Beldan?"
"I have no understanding of the occult, Prince. The Lady Rhalina is the only one of us who has made some study of such things. It was she who made this summoning. I only know that there is said to be a bargain involved…"
"A bargain?"
Beldan gasped. "The Margravine!"
Corum saw that Rhalina, still walking in a trance, had left the gates and was moving, calf-deep, along the causeway toward the ship. The head of the dead Margrave turned slightly and the green fire in his eye sockets seemed to burn more deeply.
"NO!"
Corum raced from the battlements, leapt down the stairway, and stumbled through the main hall over the corpses of the fallen.
"NO! Rhalina! NO!"
He reached the causeway and began to wade after her, the stench from the ship of the dead choking him.
"Rhalina!"
It was a dream worse than any he had had since Glandyth's destruction of Castle Erorn.
"Rhalina!"
She had almost reached the ship when Corum caught up with her and seized her by the arm with his good hand.
She seemed oblivious of him, continued to try to reach the ship.
"Rhalina! What bargain did you make to save us? Why did this ship of the dead come here?"
Her voice was cold, toneless. "I will join my husband now."
"No, Rhalina. Such a bargain cannot be honored. It is obscene. It is evil. It-it…" He tried to express his knowledge that such things as this could not exist, that they were all under some peculiar hallucination. "Come back with me, Rhalina. Let the ship return to the depths."
"I must go with it. Those were the terms of our bargain."
He clung to her, trying to drag her back, and then another voice spoke. It was a voice that seemed without substance and yet which echoed in his skull and made him pause.
"She sails with us, Prince of the Vadhagh. This must be."
Corum looked up. The dead Margrave had raised his hand in a commanding gesture. The eyes of fire burned deeply into Corum's single eye.
Corum tried to alter his perspective, to see into the other dimensions around him. At last he succeeded.
But it made no difference. The ship was in each of the five dimensions. He could not escape it.
"I will not let her sail with you," Corum replied. "Your bargain was unjust. Why should she die?"
"She does not die. She will awaken soon."
"What? Beneath the waves?"
"She has given this ship life. Without it, we shall sink again. With her on board, we live."
"Live? You do not live."
"It is better than death."
"Then death must be something more awful than I imagined."
"For us it is, Prince of the Vadhagh. We are the slaves of Shool-an-Jyvan, for we died in the waters he rules. Now, let us be rejoined, my wife and myself."
"No." Corum took a firmer grip on Rhalina's arm. "Who is this Shool-an-Jyvan?"
"He is our master. He is of Svi-an-Fanla-Brool."
"The Home of the Gorged God!" The place where Corum had meant to go before Rhalina's love had kept him at Moidel's Castle.
"Now. Let my wife come aboard."
"What can you do to make me? You are dead! You have only the power to frighten away barbarians."
"We saved your life. Now give us the means to live. She must come with us."
"The dead are selfish."
The corpse nodded and the green fire dimmed a little. "Aye, the dead are selfish."