A hundred paces distant rose the mossy ruins of a long tumbled castelry. The stones were blackened now by lichens, by smoke, by age; grass grew rank through the rubble — the whole a weird picture in the long light of sunset.
T’sais slowly approached. Some of the walls yet were standing, stone on weathered stone, the mortar long since dissolved. She moved wonderingly around a great effigy, mouldered, chipped, cracked, almost entirely buried; puzzled a moment at the characters carved in the base. Wide-eyed she stared at what remained of the visage — cruel eyes, sneering mouth, a nose broken off. T’sais shuddered faintly. There was nothing here for her; she turned to go.
A laugh, high-pitched, gleeful, rang across the clearing. T’sais, mindful of Pandelume’s warnings, waited in a dark recess. Movement flickered between the trees; and a man and a woman lurched into the failing sunlight; then came a young man treading light as air, singing and whistling. He held a light sword, which he used to prod the two, who were bound.
They halted before the ruins, close by T’sais, and she could see the faces. The bound man was a thin-faced wretch with a ragged red beard and eyes darting and desperate; the woman was short and plump. Their captor was Liane the Wayfarer. His brown hair waved softly, his features moved in charm and flexibility. He had golden-hazel eyes, large and beautiful, never still. He wore red leather shoes with curled tops, a suit of red and green, a green cloak, and a peaked hat with a red feather.
T’sais watched without comprehension. The three were equally vile, of sticky blood, red pulp, inner filth. Liane seemed slightly less ignoble — he was the most agile, the most elegant. And T’sais watched with little interest.
Liane deftly threw loops around the ankles of man and woman and pushed them so that they fell among the flints. The man groaned softly, the woman fell to whimpering.
Liane made a gay flourish of his hat and sprang away to the ruins. Not twenty feet from T’sais he slid aside a stone in the ancient flags, came forth with tinder and flint, and kindled a fire. From his pouch he took a bit of meat, which he toasted and ate daintily, sucking his fingers.
No word had yet passed. Liane at last stood up, stretched, and glanced at the sky. The sun was dropping below the dark wall of trees, and already blue shadows filled the glade.
“To business,” cried Liane. His voice was shrill and clear as the call of a flute. “First,” and he made a solemnly waggish gesture, “I must assure that our revelations are weighted with soberness and truth.”
He ducked into his lair under the flags and brought forth four stout staffs. He laid one of these across the thighs of the man, passed the second across this, through the crotch of his captive’s legs, so that with slight effort he could crush down at the thighs and up at the small of the back. He tested his device and crowed as the man cried out. He adjusted a similar arrangement upon the woman.
T’sais watched in perplexity. Evidently the young man was preparing to cause his captives pain. Was this a custom of Earth? But how was she to judge, she who knew nothing of good or evil?
“Liane! Liane!” cried the man. “Spare my wife! She knows nothing! Spare her, and you may have all I possess, and I serve you my lifetime!”
“Ho!” laughed Liane, and the feather of his cap quivered. “Thank you, thank you for your offer — but Liane wants no faggots of wood, no turnips. Liane likes silk and gold, the gleam of daggers, the sounds a girl makes in love. So thank you — but I seek the brother of your wife, and when your wife chokes and screams, you will tell where he hides.”
To T’sais the scene began to assume meaning. The two captives were concealing information the young man desired; hence he would hurt them until in desperation they did as he asked. A clever artifice, one which she would hardly have thought of herself.
“Now,” said Liane, “I must ensure that lies are not artfully mingled into the truth. You see,” he confided, “when one is under torment, he is too distraught to invent, to fabricate — and hence speaks naught but exactness.” He snatched a brand from the fire, wedged it between the man’s bound ankles, and instantly leapt to ply the torture lever upon the woman.
“I know nothing, Liane!” babbled the man. “I know nothing — oh, indeed!”
Liane stood away with dissatisfaction. The woman had fainted. He snatched the brand away from the man and flung it pettishly into the blaze.
“What a nuisance!” he said, but presently his good spirits reasserted themselves. “Ah well, we have much time.” He stroked his pointed chin.
“Perhaps you speak truth,” he mused. “Perhaps your good wife shall be the informant after all.” He revived her with slaps and an aromatic which he held under her nose. She stared at him numbly, her face twisted and bloated.
“Attend,” said Liane. “I enter the second phase of the question. I reason, I think, I theorize. I say, perhaps the husband does not know where he whom I seek has fled, perhaps the wife alone knows.”
The woman’s mouth opened slightly. “He is my brother — please —”
“Ah! So you know!” cried Liane in delight, and strode back and forth before the fire. “Ah, you know! We renew the trial. Now attend. With this staff I make jelly of your man’s legs, and bring his spine up through his stomach — unless you speak.”
He set about his task.
“Say nothing —” gasped the man, and lapsed into pain. The woman cursed, sobbed, pleaded. At last: “I tell, I tell you all!” she cried. “Dellare has gone to Efred!”
Liane relaxed his efforts. “Efred. So. In the Land of the Falling Wall.” He pursed his lips. “It might be true. But I disbelieve. You must tell me once more, under the influence of the truth-evoker.” And he brought a brand from the fire and adjusted it at her ankles — and set to work on the man once more. The woman spoke not.
“Speak, woman,” snarled Liane, panting. “I am in perspiration with this work.” The woman spoke not. Her eyes were wide, and stared glassily upwards.
“She is dead!” cried her husband. “Dead! My wife is dead! Ah — Liane, you demon, you foulness!” he screamed. “I curse you! by Thial, by Kraan —” His voice quavered into high-pitched hysteria.
T’sais was disturbed. The woman was dead. Was not killing wicked? So Pandelume had said. If the woman were good, as the bearded man had said, then Liane was evil. Things of blood and filth all, of course. Still, it was vile, hurting a live thing till it died.
Knowing nothing of fear, she stepped out from her hiding place and advanced into the fire-light. Liane looked up and sprang back. But the intruder was a slender girl of passionate beauty. He caroled, he danced.
“Welcome, welcome!” He glared in distaste at the bodies on the ground. “Unpleasant; we must ignore them.” He flung his cloak back, ogled her with his luminous hazel eyes, strutted toward her like a plumed cock.
“You are lovely, my dear, and I — I am the perfect man; so you shall see.”
T’sais laid her hand on her rapier, and it sprang out by itself. Liane leapt back, alarmed by the blade and likewise by the blaze which glowed deep from the warped brain.
“What means this? Come, come,” he fretted. “Put away your steel. It is sharp and hard. You must lay it away. I am a kind man, but I brook no annoyance.”
T’sais stood over the prone bodies. The man looked up at her feverishly. The woman stared at the dark sky.
Liane sprang forward, planning to clasp her while her attention was distracted. The rapier sprang up by itself, darted forward, pierced the agile body.
Liane the Wayfarer sank to his knees coughing blood. T’sais pulled away the rapier, wiped the blood on the gay green cloak, and sheathed it with difficulty. It wished to stab, to pierce, to kill.
Liane lay unconscious. T’sais turned away, sick. A thin voice reached her. “Release me —”
T’sais considered, then she cut the bonds. The man stumbled to his wife, stroked her, flung off the bonds, called to her uplifted face. There was no answer. He sprang erect in madness and howled into the night. Raising the limp form in his arms he stumbled off into the darkness, lurching, falling, cursing …
T’sais shivered. She glanced from the prone Liane to the black forest where the flickering circle of the firelight failed to reach. Slowly, with many backward glances, she left the tumbled ruins, the meadow. The bleeding figure of Liane remained by the dying fire.
The glimmer of flame waned, was lost in the darkness. T’sais groped her way between the looming trunks; and the murk was magnified by the twist in her brain. There never had been night in Embelyon, only an opalescent dimming. So T’sais continued down the sighing forest courses, stifled, weighed, yet oblivious to the things she might have met — the Deodands, the pelgrane, the prowling erbs (creatures mixed of beasts, man and demon), the gids, who leapt twenty feet across the turf and clasped themselves to their victims.
