Lamp Medusa + Players of Hell, page 19
The three men did not speak for some time after her departure…
“Explanations?” said Zantain suddenly, with a chuckle, and taking the other two by surprise. “Explanations are tedious. But you deserve a few. Sit you down and examine the packs on your mounts. There is food and drink for all of us, and bedding. I propose we sleep through the morning, and ride this afternoon.”
The two men fell upon the food ravenously.
“The Lady Tza and Azeltarem,” Zantain continued, while they ate, “are, as you know, evils opposite to each other. There are only the two, for there are no mothers and daughters successive to the Lady—she is herself, now exactly as she was a thousand, perhaps two thousand, or three or four thousand years ago. You must pardon some vagueness; I have come from a long rest and all is not yet clear to me.
“Azeltarem is older, far older—may go back to the Old Lands themselves…These two search for power, that is clear. And there are many elder talismans, cast into the New Lands along with those few people who survived the doom of Pazatar and Armassic.”
Zantain paused, and ran a hand over his face, a troubled look shadowing his confident manner. “Pazatar and…Armassic. But I do not remember…”
Konarr blinked at Zantain’s halt and puzzlement. The man seemed so powerful, so certain of himself. He had withstood the ultimate tests of the mightiest workers of magic in all the New Lands, and spoke of unveiling old mysteries as casually as if he himself had helped draw the veils over them.
“It is not important at this time,” Zantain said, visibly pulling his attention back from wandering. “All will be made clear in time; that is the promise.
“For now, it is only clear that these two dark masters Azeltarem and Tza can partly foresee the future. Our fortune lies in that, since all they saw was some strange interrupting foreshadowing their deep endeavors. I know, for I too have this power from time to time. When I decided to awaken from my rest as a simple old innkeeper, it was only because I had noticed portents myself—because Azeltarem and Tza, foreseeing me, took blind actions that awoke my sleeping attention!”
Konarr frowned; Tassoran spoke for the first time. “Most marvelously circular, friend. No doubt it is the way of magical affairs, which is why I never cared for such. But how did I, and old captain here, come to be a part of such high mysterious matters?”
“Seeing inexplicable difficulties arising in the path of his attempt to gain the Sigil of Tron from the Ebon Tower, where the Lady Tza held it in preparation for her fateful onslaughts—now forestalled—Azeltarem wanted aid. As Shagon, an old device of his, he looked for a highly skilled professional thief, and found one, hiring him by destroying the grown devlet set on his trail by his elder brother, a devious Spellmaster of Sezain called Taher Kmatis…If Azeltarem had not found you, however,” Zantain said to Tassoran, “he would merely have searched the Thieves’ Quarter in Zetri; finding you was chance.”
The two men kept silence.
Zantain continued. “As I watched the two of you fight, I saw in you a crux of the coming conflict. Shagon was going to take one of you, clearly; and I suspected who he was. But I was far too weak yet; I needed one to act for me. Hence Konarr, acting for me even to the extent of finding his way through my own shadow tunnels!”
He smiled, then laughed. “There, that should be complex enough to satisfy your thirsts for now! The time has come for more direct proposals, firstly this: follow me, and if you live you shall know all. Decline, and I say no more.”
“I will follow you,” said Tassoran suddenly. “I do not need to hear your ‘secondly.’”
Konarr blinked with surprise, then grunted with irritation and said, grumbling, “I too.”
But Tassoran went on as if he had not heard.
“Zantain…” Tassoran mused. “It comes to me that name is familiar in an old Kazemi legend, and it is not a common name—though I have heard of mothers taking it for their sons…yes, I will follow!”
Zantain nodded. “Do you know the legends of the Vanished Ones?”
Half in the singsong fashion of the legend-hawking storytellers in every marketplace of the New Lands, Tassoran responded.
“The Vanished Ones—the High Gods! Lord Tir’u of All the Waters, and his Lady Oriada slain with a skybolt hurled by Limnar, from the high peak of Mount Yamath which is of Tormitan. And Sleepless Touraj, the heir of Vahith and Yarthob, awaits in the silence, in blind darkness; Guardian of the Horn of Althar, uncaring he awaits in blind darkness. Uncaring he awaits his doom or glory! Touraj the Guardian, in the Hidden Place! The Madnesses of TIRBADA under the Swamps, and the—”
Konarr broke in. ’Tales for children. The gods, if such there be, have not trod common dirt since the Old Lands foundered.”
“Pazatar and Armassic,” said Zantain, quietly and with great assurance, “did not founder and sink into the waves, as many think. The Old Lands to this day lie open to the warm sun and the clean fresh air. But only silence reigns. No man speaks or acts there. And as the Old Lands are still real, so the High Gods are still real, and their relics—as, the Sigil of Tron. These latter are great prizes, and—”
Konarr clenched his fists and tried to control his anger. “Would you have us storm Yarnath and the God Lands? Why do you tell us of Mysteries common men like us should never know? Or do you, perhaps, but test us for some secret purpose, as being secretly the creature of the Lady, or perhaps Azeltarem himself?”
Zantain uncorked a leathern flask and drank deeply from it. Then he offered it, first to Konarr, who shook his head in angry ‘no,’ then to Tassoran, who drank deeply and with gusto.
“Test you?” said Zantain. “Yes. For my own purposes, however, and not for those of the ominous Lady, nor for the subtle Azeltarem. So far you have proven worthy. Because of that, I shall draw my sword.”
Once more Konarr shook his head in helpless irritation and anger, as Zantain unslung his great cudgel from behind the kepht’s natural saddle. As old Durrekal’s, that cudgel was as familiar to Konarr as the inn named after it.
Puzzled, Konarr watched while Zantain, smiling slightly, brandished the club in the air a moment.
Then Konarr blinked indeed. This strange man called Zantain now held a golden-hilted longsword in his right hand, and an empty dagger case at his waist had become a long, richly-figured leathern scabbard.
“There is much I still have to remember,” said Zantain. “I am not yet fully sure what year this is that I have returned to awareness in, nor do I really know what has transpired in so long a period. I do not even well remember my life as Vesalye.
“So I cannot tell you whether this sword of mine has remained sheathed in its battered, rustic disguise for a thousand or for ten thousand years.
’This sword is Legend. ’Tis said its blade is made of a magic alloy of diamond and silver.”
And Zantain brandished the glittering blade in the sparkling dawnlight; for the sun was over the horizon and the Baragan Hills, pouring his fresh warm strength over the hills and the plains, over the cities of the righteous and wicked, and throughout the New Lands from Ank and Oan by the Sea of Cheg to the western shores of Tarmisorn…
Konarr whispered in awe, “As a child in Kolkorth I had heard tales of such a blade, held by a nameless hero of the Old Lands themselves.”
“Not nameless,” said Tassoran in a low voice shaking with awe. “They called him Zantain—the Longlived.”
Zantain sheathed his sword.
“No,” he said. “I am Zantain—the Immortal. And if you join me for the battles yet to come, another tale begins this very dawn!”
They looked at him, neither able to speak.
But Zantain turned away from them, looking over the stream and the copse of trees on the other side, looking from the Baragan Hills over the plains of Tarmisorn.
’There are two more to be found,” he said, in a low voice. “I wonder where they are, who they are. And I wonder when we shall find them.”
He looked back at the two men; there was no need to ask if they would follow now.
Zantain smiled as the breezes whipped his cloak about him.
“Then we are three—three of the Five Heroes of a new game, a new tale, a new romance!”
He laughed aloud, and jumped onto his kepht. Then Tasso-ran laughed and did the same, and finally Konarr, caught up in the spirit at last, mounted his own.
“Do men sleep at the start of a new age?” said Zantain, almost shouting. “Do we lie abed at the dawn of such a day?”
He roused the kepht, which grunted and began to move forward. “Ride with me!”
And, talking and laughing all together, the three men rode across the stream and into the trees, and were gone from sight.
The End .
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