The Key to Venudine

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Rodro's men were pushing past, were blundering with reeking weapons into the room to kill and take the princess away. Lai half stretched up from the princess's restraining arms. The room was empty of other life apart from Sir Fezius and the two knights now lifting their swords, ready to cut down Lai. A popping noise sounded like a drum bursting. A man appeared in the middle of the room. One moment he was not there; the next he stood there, holding a bulky stick in his arm, peering about with a white face. He said something that sounded like "Skeet." The next instant the room resounded with an avalanche roar and a hellfire blast of scorching flame.

Release date: December 14, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

NATURALLY, GRIFF TOWER WAS HAUNTED.

Of course it would attract weird legends of apparitions around its ancient bulk from the very nature of its appearance and its isolated situation.

To Fezius, rustling through the evening air on his griff, Honorable Lord Sunrise, the darkly shining sweep of the river below formed a bow for the upthrust shaft of the ancient tower. He had not intended to fly this close but the tower lay athwart their course to Parnasson, where they would fight in the tournaments to mark the marriage of Red Rodro the Bold.

“If the wild griffs down there get a scent of us,” Offa yelled across the wind-rushing gap between their griffs, “you’ll be sorry you didn’t wait until morning.”

“We’ll be all right if you close your big mouth, Offa, you great buffoon!” roared back Fezius joyously. “All your hot air will blow the tower into the river!”

“And you’re so tricky you’d sail it like a boat!”

Fezius and Offa—Fezius, once of Fezanois, the short-legged ex-armorer joustabout, descended of noble blood but disinherited by trickery and murder; and Oag Offa, the giant, mighty-thewed man of battle, Offa of the Ax—Fezius and Offa, comrades who earned a living battling in festive tournaments and turned their backs on no man.

Now the marriage tourney of the notorious Palans Rodro of Parnasson lay ahead. During the week of jollity they would need to fight well to earn their share of gold, for, as Fezius was uncomfortably aware, apart from the pinch-penny attractions of the Three Free Cities of Tarantanee, the year stretched fixtureless toward winter.

The wind whispered past them as their griffs’ wings beat with such apparent leisure, up and down, up and down. The moon rose in a rotundity of orange light, a burnished copper pan against the night. Night sounds reached them faintly from the sleeping earth.

Men whispered that there was witchery in the marriage of Red Rodro. Up and down the great river they were saying that no great king from the Far East with a thousand thousand vancas beating the endless grasslands to dust would marry his daughter to a mere Palans with one castle and a dubious hold on fifty miles of the river. Whatever the truth of it, Fezius who disliked the nobility and the knighthood with the joyful passion of a bloody past, could still earn his crust from the trappings of ceremony.

For sorcery in general he had the genial contempt of the fighting man. Metal and leather, a sword and an ax, a griff or vanca to bestride—these things a man could grapple with and master. But rumors of the Princess Nofret’s sister fumed from a world he could never enter; let the fool Rodro marry into a witch family as he would

Fezius had heard of the Princess Nofret’s sister in her apple-green gown and her cut-glass voice, and he was conscious of feeling the lure of the utterly exotic. But he knew that a plain armorer, a down-to-earth fighting man, could scarcely be farther from a glamorous witch-princess.

His ugly face broke into that cynical smile that turned his features suddenly into the semblance of a devil’s countenance.

He was a noble; at least, he had been nobly born, and on the death of his father he would have automatically assumed the ranks and titles of that great and distant personage if the occasion had not been one of war, pillage, destruction and death. Now, instead of being Sir Fezius, Gavilan of Fezanois, Palans of the Inner and Outer Isles and of Vectis, Lord Protector of the Guild of Fletchers, Favored of Amra and the Great Spirits, he was merely a barrel-bodied, short-legged, wandering ex-armorer and tournament competitor—for a time, at least.

Anyway, he would never have to cut the fine figure a Gavilan must always cut. They stood next to the Princes of the Blood, next to the King himself and in comparison a Palans was small beer.

Offa bawled into the rushing night wind.

“There’s someone moving down there.”

Fezius followed the direction of the giant’s pointing arm.

At first in the orange-drenched ruddy light he could make out nothing in the shadows, then a glint of steel reflected a spark and he glimpsed the shadowy mass of horses and riders clumped on the trail by the river bank.

“Just late travelers, like ourselves,” he shouted back at Offa.

Whoever they were, they would have seen and heard the two griffs long before the griff-riders had spotted their horses. For a moment more Fezius watched them, wondering idly why they chose to follow that trail to the Griff Tower so late. He leaned forward along Sunrise’s feathered neck to pat him gently, and to whisper gentle endearments into the feather-buried ear.

A blue brilliance broke sparkling into light that pulsed into his eyes. He gave a short cry and sat back, half-blinded.

When he could make out vague forms again he saw Offa’s griff, Honorable Prince Spearpoint, spiraling down toward the ground. His wings extended stiffly, rigidly, and the glide angle steepened every foot he dropped lower.

All around Offa and his griff the bright blue sparkles glowed and crackled like a dancing skin of fire.

Fezius nudged Sunrise and the griff nosed down.

A welter of impossible impressions and ideas showered on Fezius. All the old stories of the Griff Tower crowded back. What eerie force was this that could encircle a man and his griff in blue sparkles and drag him out of the sky?

The ground rushed up, a dark marshy mass, with a few sparse bushes, long ranks of sedges and rushes bending in the night wind. Offa’s griff seemed paralyzed. His wings extended as though splinted.

“Offa!” called Fezius. The fear and panic in him began to get out of hand. Offa could crash full-tilt into the ground, like an armored knight jousting at full gallop against another, although this time the unyielding ground would prove incontestably the victor. “Offa!” he screamed again. “Pull up!”

But Offa sat silent and still, a massive hump of flesh and bone and muscle, motionless on the back of his griff.

“Pull up, man! You great buffoon, Offa! Pull up!”

But the giant man and giant griff slanted down toward the ground with the blue sparkles of fire breaking out around them like a garment of violet madness.

Fezius dug his knees into the feathered sides of Sunrise and drove down—and a tongue of blue fire slashed from the darkness below and whickered past his wingtips like a scintillating sword of destruction.

He ducked instinctively. Sunrise’s wings ceased their steady beat, the rhythm grew ragged, the big prock dipped to one side, and Fezius sagged against his harness straps. Desperately he wrenched at the leathers, in uncharacteristic force pulling savagely at the griff’s fangs, hauling up the long-toothed head.

Honorable Lord Sunrise continued to spiral down, one wing rigid, the other beating ever more slowly as the sense of balance in the griff’s brain adjusted to the impossibility that had occurred. Fezius clung on and swore.

He saw Offa and Spearpoint hit the ground in a smother of wings and talons and metal. The blue sparkles vanished in the moment before impact and as he himself sank below the level of a clump of bushes growing raggedly between the tower and the river the blue sparkles vanished from Sunrise’s wing.

Then he had struck the ground, been flung over sideways, and was sitting up with his mouth full of mud and slosh.

Offa cuttingly said, “What in the name of Amra happened? How the hell did we get down here?”

Fezius spit.

“Witches and warlocks!” Offa said, again trying to shift his prock. The big male griff lay half across his legs. Probably no female griff—a marun—existed that would comfortably carry Big Oag Offa. Fezius went across and helped the giant extricate himself.

“No witches,” Fezius said savagely. “You had a touch of the blue sparkles. I don’t know what it’s all about, but those horsemen did it.” He looked angrily down the trail, black and orange in the moonlight.

“We were flying along, minding our own business, and they brought us down here?” Offa’s chest bulged beneath the leather. Like Fezius he wore leather harness, his plate armor lashed in oiled wrappings beneath his griff. “I’d like to ding their heads together!”

Some imp of cupidity, of deviltry, of that native long-headed caution so often in despite, seized Fezius then. He shook his barrel-body back into good humor. “We’ll wait for them at the Griff Tower,” he said. “I want to know what this is all about.” He nodded genially to giant Oag Offa, whose white teeth gleamed in the moonlight. “Bring your ax, Offa. Nobody shoots me down off my griff and goes without paying.”

Their two procks were quickly made comfortable in a bed of reeds by the riverbank. “Don’t chain their wings down,” Fezius told Offa. The gilded wing-chains remained braided up as they patted their mounts into a semblance of docility. “So near the Griff Tower it wouldn’t be fair—or wise. And we might need them in a hurry.”

“Too true,” grunted Offa, unpacking his ax and ignoring his shield.

“Did you bring your shield for baggage, Offa?”

“I know, I know,” grumbled Oag Offa.

It was an old argument between them, the swordsmen and the axman, the value of a shield in combat.

A screech owl shrieked, a long shuddering scream scything from the darkness.

“Go on, Offa!”

“Did you hear that?’

“You’re not frightened of a screech owl, are you?”

“That was no—”

“All right, so it was a wild griff. Now get on.”

“A wild griff …” Offa hefted his ax, his whole posture eloquent of his thoughts.

In that wild light compounded of darkness riddled by streamers of orange moonlight the two men carried their shields on their left arms, Fezius with his sword bared and Offa with his ax poised, moving cautiously down the soggy trail between massy clumps of bulrushes toward the tower. Their feet made small sly sucking noises. Every pool of water seemed to be colored orange from the moon’s glow.

The rushing sound of griff wings filled the air above them and both men half-ducked and twisted to stare upward as a skein of wild griff slanted down toward the tower. Kings of the surrounding countryside, they had finished their forays for the day. One after another, like beads tumbling from a string, the griffs left their formation and vanished into the darkness of the hides at the tower top.

“If those griffs spot us—” Offa said softly, uneasily.

“They won’t if you shut your great mouth, you atrocious buffoon!” Offa took pride in Fezius’ calumnies of him; he savored them as a child savors a pickled onion.

A wild griff could degut, debrain and tear a man asunder so fast he’d be across the Silver Mountains before he woke up.

The clink of metal on metal jangled the first warning.

A moment later the sound of horses’ hooves sucking over the mud told of their riders’ forethought: for horses, unlike vancas, ignored griffs as objects impossible in nature and had no fear of them. The long-necked and six-padded vancas, on the other hand, barely tolerated griffs. Horses always seemed out of place in Venudine, like those odd. . .