The Starfollowers of Coramonde Read online

  PART I

  Protocols of the Sword

  Prologue

  IN a narrow ring of light in unmeasured darkness stood the Accused.

  His head was bowed, hands clasped together within long sleeves—flesh seeking its own contact for reassurance, in vain. An arraignment in Shardishku-Salamá, these proceedings were unconcerned with justice. Their function was retribution. The Accused was aware of punishments available here; that was a form of punishment.

  Yardiff Bey felt nothing change in the enormous Fane of the Masters. Yet between one moment and the next he knew the attention of the Five was upon him. No indication escaped to his face or posture, but in a shielded cinderbox in his soul, fears blew brighter.

  He damped them down. Was he not first among sorcerers, subordinate only to the Masters? Brief, awful elation fanned up his spine at the thought. In flying back to Shardishku-Salamá in his demon-ship, Cloud Ruler: to plead before the vindictive Lords of the City, Yardiff Bey had taken his greatest dare. He was in more hideous danger than most men could envision in wildest speculation.

  A waitingness hung around him, and cruel, dispassionate curiosity. He’d always exulted in the cold intellects of the Five, but now it was their displeasure directed at him. The single beam of light glinted from the strange ocular that was bound in place where his left eye had once been. He sent a stern command through every part of himself, physical and incorporeal: Be still!

  He bowed deeply, unhurriedly. When his voice came, it was impeccable in its calm control.

  “Masters, your servant has returned. Will he be heard?” He sensed mirthless amusement. Did They think he’d come on a fool’s quest for mercy? There was a vast stirring somewhere in the colossal temple.

  Yardiff Bey was slammed to his knees, by no force he could see. Without his will, his hands came up to rend the front of his robe, in mourning and contrition.

  “List us your failures,” came a disembodied command, “and number your faults.”

  He was cast headlong on the cold floor, held as a doll beneath a man’s boot would be held, by the stacked, murderous weight of the will of the Masters of Shardishku-Salamá. He sobbed for breath that wouldn’t come, and that weight retreated the merest bit. He knew a meager flicker of triumph; he hadn’t been condemned out of hand, and so had the opportunity to say on. He brought his head up a degree, neck trembling with effort.

  “Waste not the tool,” he strained, “before it mends its errors. Let me make my reparations.” He slumped again, drawing breath only with horrible exertion. He felt, by tingling of images not quite seen on his inner eye, that the Five were conferring.

  The air was suddenly icy, carrying thick, infernal stenches. There was a new, an overwhelming Presence in the Fane. The sorcerer recognized its awesome savagery. His patron, Amon, a chief among demons, had come, after ignoring all previous pleas. Before Amon, even the Masters were silent, deferential in their intangible, unmistakable way.

  When the demon spoke, words lashing like whips, the walls of the huge Fane shook in the lightlessness.

  “More vainglorious plans, unworthy one? Are my agents in Salamá to be twice fools, and trust you a second time?” Amon asked. “List me your failures. You had the whole of Coramonde in your grasp. Your puppet-son was enthroned over the most important country in the Crescent Lands. You had the rightful Heir Springbuck trapped, along with the wizard Andre deCourteney and his enchantress sister Gabrielle. How was all that dashed asunder?”

  Yardiff Bey groped for response. “I—I sent the dragon Chaffinch against them, oh Lord. He should have slaughtered them easily. But they had with them the alien Van Duyn…”

  He faltered for a way to tell it. “You know there are other universes, mighty Amon, Realities sprouting from alternatives, like leaves from a tree. Van Duyn is from another, and from it he and the deCourteneys plucked soldiers, and a metal war-machine to slay Chaffinch.”

  “Your first failure,” thundered the demon. “Masters of Shardishku-Salamá, witness it now!”

  Yardiff Bey’s senses jolted, as Amon conjured up those events again…

  Through the eyes of Ibn-al-Yed, mask-slave to Yardiff Bey, they saw the castle where Springbuck, the deCourteneys and their little band were at bay. Ibn-al-Yed had only to keep them confined until the sorcerer sent the dragon Chaffinch.

  But there was a disturbance in the air, a pushing-apart of the boundaries between worlds. A lumbering, drab-green vehicle came roaring into the meadow. From it a man emerged, confusion manifest on his face, some odd black implement cradled under his arm.

  It was, in certainty, a trick of the deCourteneys. The Druid who’d accompanied Ibn-al-Yed called up an air elemental, to undo it. But as the were-wind ripped at him, the stranger brought up his implement. There were bright, stuttering explosions. Druid and horse toppled, dead, pierced with holes by the otherworldly weapon.

  Ibn-al-Yed backed his horse away in shock and confusion. Yardiff Bey, his Masters and dread Amon looked back through time, at the indecision in the newcomer’s features. He wiped his forehead once, quickly, on an olive-colored sleeve. Over his left breast pocket were cryptic letters no one there could decipher: US ARMY. Over the right was another strip of characters, whose meaning they would come to know: MACDONALD.

  Through the eyes of the late Ibn-al-Yed, the sorcerer watched that early disruption of his careful design. The image receded, Amon summoned up another…

  There was revelry in Hell.

  The metal war vehicle had killed Chaffinch, but events had left Gabrielle deCourteney in the hands of Yardiff Bey. It was an occasion of tremendous importance, enormous success. In Amon’s mansion on the infernal plane, the demon’s votaries writhed, ecstatic, to insane music.

  Without warning the Cyclopean doors burst apart in a shower of wooden splinters and metal fragments. The armored personnel carrier revved down the center of the room, treads chewing stone, engine bellowing above the din.

  The machine’s weapons cut loose, flashing ruin in all directions. Gunfire, as Yardiff Bey was to hear it called later. The fugitive Prince Springbuck appeared, and Andre deCourteney. Gabrielle was rescued, as explosions and gunfire purged the chamber. Yardiff Bey had to flee, as Amon was humiliated by mad invasion.

  The sorcerer quivered, experiencing it again. No one had affronted great Amon that way in an eternity. Now a last image…

  Yardiff Bey sat in his own sanctum, high in the palace-fortress at Earthfast, laboring at a spell against the intruder, MacDonald, whose interference had persisted. Gil MacDonald of the bizarre innovations, unpredictable deceptions and unlooked-for influence, had thrown Bey’s equations out of kilter.

  With this invocation, sapping MacDonald’s soul from his body, Yardiff Bey would remedy that. But he began to meet odd resistance; his enchantments were warped and subverted. There was howling from his supernatural servants.

  An armed company appeared where the outlander’s naked soul should have cringed. Springbuck, Andre deCourteney, Van Duyn and MacDonald himself, whole, were among them. In seconds the palace-fortress was filled with fighting and dying, crash of alien weapons, curses of combatants and belling of sword strokes. Yardiff Bey made his escape by a barest margin aboard his flying vessel Cloud Ruler. He’d lost, in minutes, his iron grip on Coramonde.

  The taste of that catastrophe defiled his mouth once more. Then Amon let the retelling fade.

  First among sorcerers, once the Hand of Shardishku-Salamá, Bey felt his breath heaving with terror and resentment.

  “And all of that you will set right?” came the demon’s challenge, on a sepulchral wind. The sorcerer raised himself to hands and knees with quaking hope. But his response held only firm conviction.<
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  “I swear it! I have come back because I am needed. There approaches the time of greatest effort, but greatest risk also. Let me play my part in the Masters’ mighty labor, Dark Father, as I was meant to!”

  He couldn’t hear the current of thoughts that passed among them. Amon’s sawtooth voice came again. “I see what is in your thoughts, for they are open to me. Your Masters’ might waxes plentiful now, but will be diverted more and more into the enchantment they forge as time goes on. They must work undisturbed, and though the chance of hindrance is slim, yet it must be eliminated. Begin your work, search out that last source of peril. But be warned: your Masters and I, and my terrible Overlord, are engaged in other struggles, other enterprises. You must be self-reliant, or be swallowed up in that final Night we shall found.”

  Then Amon was gone, between one heartbeat and another.

  The ring of light began to move, to lead the sorcerer back out of the Fane. He lurched at first, drunk on the enormity of it, but his stride soon became surer, stronger, with his incredible good fortune. Raw power swelled him, of magic and personal force.

  Yardiff Bey’s feet were set, once more, on the thrill-path of conquest.

  Chapter One

  What are MacDonald’s antecedents, after all? Dropout, drifter, product of popular-culture eclecticism. His sole sustained adult endeavor revolved around a war that estranged him from his society. An absurd background for a young man caught up in meta-events!

  from EDWARD VAN DUYN’S personal journal, The Infinite Parallax

  TIRED, he chose not to sleep. Too often lately, he’d awakened in saturating sweat, from tremulations of the soul.

  Gil MacDonald sat, without lamp or candle, before the dying embers of the hearthfire in his room. In them, he saw racing horsemen and swords making hornet-darts of light in the night. On a night filled with just those things, his lover had died.

  He raised his right hand, the one that had held the Lady Duskwind’s as her wound had stolen her from him by inches. He drew it across his eyes, to wipe away memory; his thoughts could seldom go far from her.

  He’d been snatched into Coramonde, with his crew and their armored personnel carrier, by wizardry. After they’d been returned to their own Reality, he alone had chosen to come back. He hadn’t counted on falling in love. In love, he’d never thought he might lose Duskwind so cruelly. Bereft of her, he found his remaining desires condensed, embittered.

  He’d come back to the palace-fortress at Earthfast only that evening. For weeks he’d combed the Dark Rampart range, west of Earthfast, with an entire Legion of Coramonde. It had been rumored that Yardiff Bey kept his flying ship Cloud Ruler concealed there prior to his rise to power and subsequent overthrow.

  Gil hadn’t turned up a thing, not a whiff. Worn thin, short on the sleep he resisted these days and determined to find the sorcerer, he’d balked at the Ku-Mor-Mai’s urgent request that he go back to Earthfast. When he’d finally arrived, he’d found that Springbuck was closeted with some visiting big shot. He’d immediately gone off to be by himself.

  A soft knock came at the door. Gil’s hand dipped inside his loosened gambeson, fishing out the Browning automatic. He padded to the door, the clammy stone making his bare feet clench. The knock came again, discreet rapping a servant would use. Nevertheless, he stood to one side of the bolted door, cocking the pistol.

  “Yeah?”

  “Sir, the Ku-Mor-Mai craves your presence with all haste. He has tidings of import which you must needs hear.”

  “‘Craves my presence,’” Gil muttered. “Okay, tell him I’m coming, be right along.”

  He wondered why Springbuck would want conversation in the middle of the night. He sat on his wide, empty bed, sighing and pulling his boots on. A new thought made him pause. Maybe Springbuck had picked up on something about Bey?

  His sword, byrnie and other gear he left on the floor, in a burst of enthusiasm born of enmity.

  Springbuck, Protector-Suzerain of Coramonde—Ku-Mor-Mai, in the Old Tongue—had been up late with affairs of state, in his comfortable study. Its curtains were fastened across high windows, and a fire crackled in the hearth. Burnished lamps of brass and crystal lit it warmly, and thick furs and pelts were strewn on the floor.

  He’d no sooner finished conferring with the envoy of the Mariners when his seneschal had announced Van Duyn and the Princess Katya. He’d had them admitted at once. Dirty, spent from days of hard riding, they’d told their story, their grave words interweaving.

  Now Van Duyn, former Senior Fellow of the Grossen Institute for Advanced Studies, inter-universal traveler and self-exile from his own Reality, ran a hand through disheveled gray hair, adjusting gold-rimmed glasses with the other. His heavy M-l, that otherworldly weapon, rested against the arm of his chair. For his help in the thronal war, Springbuck had granted the scholar stewardship over an impoverished collection of city-states, the Highlands Province, in the northwestern corner of Coramonde. The Princess Katya, who’d become enamored of the alien, had gone with him, to watch him apply his peculiar theories of government and organization. Van Duyn had made impressive progress in his few months there, but now the province was abandoned, its few survivors scattered.

  “It can’t be anyone’s fault but mine,” the outlander was saying. “The local commander, Roguespur, pleaded for more men, arms, patrols and fortifications. But I needed men for improvement projects, and iron and smiths for plows and equipment, and the border’s been quiet for years. I knew the Druids were said to be there, but those were old tales.” He shook his head. “I should have listened to them. I should have remembered—”

  Katya put a pale hand on his. Her long, white-blonde hair swung around her with the gesture. Springbuck recalled the sobriquet given her in her own nation of Freegate—“the Snow Leopardess.”

  “Edward, how can you blame yourself?” she remonstrated. “No sword or spear laid waste to the Highlands Province, and none could have saved it. When magic comes, only magic can countervail it.”

  Springbuck pursued the point. “You’re certain it was the Druids?”

  The Snow Leopardess affirmed it. “Their spells haven’t been seen in living memory, at least not on this side of the mountains. Yet, from whence else would come that magic of polar winds and an ice-elemental?”

  Van Duyn concurred wearily. “When those clouds came down out of the mountains, we went from late summer to midwinter in minutes. No clothes or fire could protect us against that cold. When the ice-demon followed behind, nothing could withstand it. No one who got near it lived. I saw men shatter like icicles. All we could do was run for our lives.” He remembered the gallop, frozen grass shattering under their horses’ hooves like filaments of glass, the air filled with a cold of such awful purity that each breath was torment and the reflex of breathing contested with the pain of the lungs and throat. The ice-elemental, liberated from some absolute-zero corner of Hell, continued to prowl the province for victims. And those who fell behind never caught up.

  “Toward dawn, we passed out of the frozen zone,” Katya went on. “We tried to return the next day, but it was beyond us, unendurable. Twill demand the deCourteneys’ arts, I avow, to alter the situation back there.”

  Springbuck avoided their eyes noncommittally. “Other ears must hear this. Will you both withdraw to private chambers and take refreshment? Katya, your brother is in Earthfast. He’ll want to see you at once, I know.”

  “Reacher is here? What brings him?”

  “Several matters. He, too, has news. Many reports have come to me in recent weeks. Reacher will join you presently, as you dine.”

  When they left, Springbuck called for a council, then thrust aside the addenda for his latest Restoration Edicts and found himself staring at his sabre Bar, the sword called Never Blunted, which hung over the mantel.

  Gil MacDonald, whom he summoned, entered in obvious haste. Unannounced and unaccompanied, as they both preferred it, the other alien slid into a chair. The Ku-Mor-Mai con
templated his friend.

  The former sergeant’s face was clean-shaven, his hair trimmed short. It gave prominence to the dark smear of powderburn on his cheek, the scar on his forehead. He’d gotten both in the throne room at Earthfast, when Springbuck had won his crown by rite of combat.

  “Now what?” the American asked. He listened to these latest developments, sitting forward on his straight-backed chair, hoping to hear what he wanted so badly.

  “That’s gotta be it,” he posited. “Bey’s there, in the north, coming at us with his Druids.” He hitched himself around eagerly. “How far did they come? We’ll let Bey in far enough and whap!, the deCourteneys take a crack at him.”

  “You are less cautious than you once were,” Springbuck observed.

  “Huh? Look, I never said we shouldn’t watch out. But this is Bey, man, Bey!”

  “And you were certain he would be in the Dark Rampart range, remember? Before that, it was the far eastern provinces you wished to search, where he used to have many supporters—”

  “And he wasn’t there; I know! This deal though, this is the real item. Hell, the Druids used to work for Bey; isn’t that what you told me? So why are we spinning our wheels? When do we move out?”

  “Not yet, in truth. There are other factors.”

  Gil bristled. “Yardiff Bey arranged your folks’ deaths, didn’t he? Yeah, and Duskwind’s, and that of how many others? And he snatched our pal Dunstan, and still has him, am I right? So what’s gotten into you, saying ‘take a break’?”

  Springbuck stretched in his cumbersome robes to ease himself and measure his reply. Slightly shorter than average, with dark tones of skin and hair, he betrayed a fencer’s sinuosity even when seated. As usual, he’d foregone the crown he seldom wore outside his Court. The corners of his eyes creased from time to time; he was nearsighted, part of the reason he liked to parley in his study.

  The Ku-Mor-Mai owed the American a great deal, not the least of which was his life. There was substance to what Gil had said, too. Yardiff Bey was the creator of such suffering, pain and misery that his capture demanded high priority. And the sorcerer’s being at large posed a threat to all the Crescent Lands, Coramonde in particular.