Count Brass Read online

  'They seemed to be in a dream, right enough,' agreed Count Brass.

  Hawkmoon adjusted his stolen mask upon his head. 'Best behave the same, if challenged,' he said. 'That, too, will be to our advantage.'

  Together they continued to make their way through the passages, moving at a measured pace, like that of patrolling soldiers.

  'At least,' said Count Brass in a low voice, 'we shall have little trouble with corpses if all those we slay disappear with such fortunate alacrity!'

  They paused at several doors and tried them, but all were secured. They passed many other masked men, from all the main orders—Pig, Vulture, Dragon, Wolf and the like—but saw no other members of the Order of the Snake. Members of this Order, they were sure, would lead them eventually to Kalan. It would also be useful to exchange mantis-masks for serpent masks at some stage. Finally they found themselves at a door larger than the others and this was guarded by two men who wore the same masks now worn by Hawkmoon and Count Brass. A guarded door was an important door, thought Hawkmoon. Behind it might lie something which would help answer the questions he had followed Kalan to solve. He thought quickly, saying in as dreamy a voice as he could manage:

  'We have orders to relieve you. You may return to your quarters now.'

  One of the guards spoke. 'Relieve us? Have we been here for a full period of duty, then? I thought it was but an hour. But then time . . .' He paused. 'It is all so strange.'

  'You are relieved,' said Count Brass, guessing Hawkmoon's plan. 'That is all we know.'

  Sluggishly the two guards saluted and marched away, leaving Hawkmoon and Count Brass to take up their positions.

  As soon as the guards were gone, Hawkmoon turned and tried the latch of the door. It was locked.

  Count Brass glanced around him, shuddering. 'This seems more of a true netherworld than the one I first found myself in,' he said.

  'I think you could be close to the truth,' Hawkmoon told him as he bent to inspect the lock. Like so many of the other artefacts here it was crude. He took out the emerald-pommelled poignard which he had got off the mantis-warrior. He inserted the point in the lock and shifted it about for several seconds before twisting it sharply. There was a click and the door swung open.

  The two companions stepped through.

  And both gasped in unison at what they saw.

  Chapter Two

  A Museum Of The

  Living And The Dead

  'King Huon!' Hawkmoon murmured. Quickly he closed the door behind him, looking up at the great globe suspended above his head. In the globe swam the wizened figure of the ancient king who had once spoken with the voice of a golden youth. 'I thought you slain by Meliadus!'

  A tiny whisper escaped the globe. It was almost a thought, so tenuous was it. 'Meliadus,' it said. 'Meliadus.'

  'The king dreams,' said the voice of Flana, Queen of Granbretan.

  And there she was, in her heron-mask, made up of fragments of a thousand jewels, in her lush brocade gown, coming slowly towards them.

  'Flana?'

  Hawkmoon moved towards her. 'How did you come to be here?'

  'I was born in Londra. Who are you? Though you be of the King-Emperor's own Order, you speak insolently to Flana, Countess of Kanbery.'

  'Queen Flana now,' said Hawkmoon.

  'Queen . . . queen . . . queen . . .' said the distant voice of King Huon from behind them.

  'King . . .' Another figure moved blindly past them. 'King Meliadus . . .'

  And Hawkmoon knew that if he tore off that wolfhelm from the figure he would see the face of Baron Meliadus, his old foe. And he knew that the eyes would be glazed, as Flana's eyes would be glazed. There were others in this room—all Dark Empire folk. Flana's old husband, Asrovak Mikosevaar; Shenegar Trott in his silver mask; Pra Flenn, Duke of Lakasdeh, in his grinning dragon-helm, who had died before his nineteenth birthday and had personally slain over a hundred men and women before his eighteenth. Yet, for all that this was an assembly of the fiercest of the Granbretanian warlords, none attacked. They hardly lived at all. Only Flana—who still lived in Hawkmoon's world—seemed to be able to frame a coherent sentence. The rest were like sleep-walkers, mumbling one or two words, but no more. And Hawkmoon's and Count Brass's entrance into this weird museum of the living and the dead had set them to babbling, like birds in an aviary.

  It was unnerving, particularly to Dorian Hawkmoon, who had slain many of these people himself. He seized upon Flana, ripping off his own mask so that she could see his face.

  'Flana! Do you not recognise me? Hawkmoon? How came you here?'

  'Remove your hand from me, warrior!' she said automatically, though it was plain she did not really care. Flana had never understood much concerning protocol. 'I do not know you. Put your mask back on!'

  'Then you, too, must have been drawn from a time before we met—or else from some other world altogether,' Hawkmoon said.

  'Meliadus . . . Meliadus . . .' said the whispering voice of King Huon in the Throne Globe above their heads.

  'Kong... king...' said wolf-masked Meliadus.

  And: 'The Runestaff . . .' murmured fat Shenegar Trott, who had died trying to possess that mystic wand ... The Runestaff .. .'

  It was all they could speak of—their fears or their ambitions. The chief fears or ambitions which had driven them through their lives and brought about their ruin.

  'You are right,' said Hawkmoon to Count Brass. 'This is the world of the dead. But who keeps these poor creatures here? For what purpose have they been resurrected? It is like an obscene treasure-house—human loot—the loot of time—all crowded together!'

  'Aye,' sniffed Count Brass. 'I wonder if, until recently, I was part of this collection. Could that not be possible, Dorian Hawkmoon?'

  These are all Dark Empire folk,' said Hawkmoon. 'No, I think you were seized from a time before all these died. Your youth speaks for that—and your own recollection of the Battle of Tarkia.'

  'I thank you for that reassurance,' said Count Brass.

  Hawkmoon put a finger to his lips. 'Do you hear something? In the passage?'

  'Aye.'

  'Into the shadows,' said Hawkmoon. 'I think someone approaches. They might notice the guard gone.'

  Not one of the people in the room, even Flana, tried to stop them as they squeezed through the company and hid in the darkest corner, sheltered by the bulk of Adaz Promp and Jherek Nankenseen, who had ever enjoyed each other's company, even in life.

  The door opened and there was Baron Kalan of Vitall, Grand Master of the Order of the Serpent, all rage and bewilderment.

  The door open and the guards gone!' he raved. He glared at the company of living-dead. 'Which of you did this? Is there one who does more than dream—who plots to rob me of my power? Who seeks that power for himself? You, Meliadus—do you wake?' He pulled the wolf-helm free, but Meliadus's face was blank.

  Kalan slapped the face, but Meliadus did not react. He grunted.

  'You, Huon? Even you are no longer as powerful as am I? Do you resent that?'

  But Huon merely whispered the name of the one who would kill him. 'Meliadus . . .' he whispered. 'Meliadus

  'Shenegar Trott? You, cunning one?' Kalan shook the unresponsive shoulder of the Count of Sussex. 'Did you unlock the door and dismiss the guards. And why?' He frowned. 'No, it could only be Flana . . .' He searched for the heron mask of Flana Mikosevaar, Countess of Kanbery, among those many masks (whose workmanship was noticeably superior to Kalan's). 'Flana is the only one who suspects . . .'

  'What do you want with me now, Baron Kalan?' said Flana, drifting forward. 'I am tired. You must not disturb me.'

  'You cannot deceive me, traitress-to-be. If I have an enemy here, it is you. Who else could it be? It is in everyone's interest, save yours, for the old Empire to be restored.'

  'As usual, I fail to understand you, Kalan.'

  'Aye, it's true that you should not understand—but I wonder . . .'

  'Your guards came in here,'
Flana went on. 'They were impolite fellows, but one was handsome enough.'

  'Handsome? They removed their masks?'

  'One did, aye.'

  Kalan's eyes darted this way and that as he considered the implications of her remark. 'How . . .?' he muttered. 'How . . .?' He looked hard at Flana. 'I still think this is your doing!'

  'I do not know of what you accuse me, Kalan, and I do not care, for this nightmare will end soon, as nightmares must.'

  Kalan's eyes glinted sardonically in his snake mask. 'Think you, Madam?' He turned away to inspect the lock. 'My plans go constantly awry. Every action I take leads to further complications. There must be a single action which will wipe out the complexities at a stroke. Oh, Hawkmoon, Hawkmoon, I wish you would die.'

  At this Hawkmoon stepped out swiftly and tapped Kalan upon the shoulder with the flat of his sword. Kalan turned and the tip of the sword slipped under the mask and rested against the throat.

  'If the request had been couched more politely, in the first place,' Hawkmoon said with grim humour, 'I might have complied. But now you have offended me, Baron Kalan. Too often have you shown yourself unfriendly to me.'

  'Hawkmoon . . .' Kalan's voice sounded like those of the living-dead around him. 'Hawkmoon . . .' He took a deep breath. 'How did you come here?'

  'Don't you know, Kalan?' Count Brass emerged, drawing off his own mask. He was grinning a big, wide grin—the first Hawkmoon had seen on his face since they had met in the Kamarg.

  'Is this a counterplot—did he bring you——? No ... He would not betray me. We have too much at stake.'

  'Who is that?'

  But Kalan had become cautious. 'Killing me at this point could easily bring disaster upon us all,' he said.

  'Aye—and not killing you, that could produce a similar effect!' Count Brass laughed. 'Have we anything to lose, Baron Kalan?'

  'You have your life to lose, Count Brass,' Kalan said savagely. 'At best you could become like these others. Is that an attractive thought?'

  'No.' Count Brass began to strip off the mantisclothing which had covered his brass armour.

  'Then do not be a fool!' Kalan hissed. 'Kill Hawkmoon now!'

  'What did you try to do, Kalan?' Hawkmoon interrupted. 'Resurrect the whole Dark Empire? Did you hope to restore it here to its former glory—in a world where Count Brass and myself and the others never existed? But you found that when you went back into the past and brought them here to rebuild Londra, that their memories were poor. It was as if they all dreamed. They had too many conflicting experiences in their minds and this confused them—made their brains dormant. They could not remember details—that is why all your murals and your artefacts are so crude, is it not? Why your guards are so ineffectual, why they do not fight. And when they are killed here, they vanish—for even you cannot control time to the extent that it tolerates the paradox of the twice-dead. You began to realise that if you altered history—even if you were successful in re-establishing the Dark Empire—all would suffer from this mental confusion. Everything would break down as swiftly as you built it. Any triumph you had would turn to ashes. You would rule over unreal creatures in an unreal world.'

  Kalan shrugged. 'But we have taken steps to adjust matters. There are solutions, Hawkmoon. Perhaps our ambitions have become a little less grandiose, but the result could be much the same.'

  'What do you intend to do?' Count Brass growled.

  Kalan gave a humourless laugh. 'Ah, that now depends on what you do to me. Surely you can see that?

  Already there are eddies of confusion in the timestreams. One dimension becomes clogged with the constituents of another. Originally my scheme was simply to get vengeance on Hawkmoon by having him killed by one of his friends. I'll admit I was foolish to think it could be so simple. And also, instead of remaining in your dreamlike state, you began to wake, to reason, to refuse to listen to what I told you. That is not what should have happened and I do not know why.'

  'By bringing my friends out of a time before any of us had met, you created an entirely new stream of possibilities,' said Hawkmoon. 'And from these sprang dozens more—half-worlds which you can't control, which become confused with the one from which we all originally came...'

  'Aye.' Kalan nodded his great mask. 'But there is still hope, if you, Count Brass, slay this Hawkmoon. Surely you realise that your friendship with him led directly to your own death—or will lead to it in your future ...'

  'So Oladahn and the others were merely returned to their own time, believing themselves to have dreamed what happened here?' said Hawkmoon.

  'Even that dream will fade,' said Kalan. 'They will never know that I tried to help them save their own lives.'

  'And why do you not kill me, Kalan? You have had the opportunity. Is it, as I suspect, that if you do, then the logic resulting from such an action leads inexorably to your own destruction?'

  Kalan was silent. But his silence confirmed the truth of what Hawkmoon had said.

  'And only if I am killed by one of my already dead friends will it be possible to remove my unwanted presence from all those possible worlds you have explored, those half-worlds your instruments have detected, where you hope to restore the Dark Empire? Is that why you are so insistent on Count Brass killing me? And do you intend, once he had done that, to restore the Dark Empire, unchallenged, to its original world— with yourselves ruling behind these puppets of yours?' Hawkmoon spread his hand to indicate the living-dead. Even Queen Flana was quiescent now as her brain shut off the information which might easily turn it insane. 'These shadows will appear to be the great warlords come back from the dead, to hold sway over Granbretan again. You will even have a new Queen Flana to renounce the throne in favour of this Shadow Huon.'

  'You are an intelligent young man, for a savage.' A languid voice came from the doorway. Hawkmoon kept the tip of his sword against Kalan's throat as he looked towards the source of the voice.

  A bizarre figure stood there, between two mantismasked guards who bore flame-lances and looked anything but indecisive. There were, it now seemed, others in this world who were more than shadows. Hawkmoon recognised the figure, clad in a gigantic mask which was also a working clock and was, even as its wearer spoke, chiming the first eight bars of Sheneven's Temporal Antipathies, all of gilded and enamelled brass, with numerals of inlaid mother-of-pearl and hands of filigree silver, balanced by a golden pendulum in a box worn upon his chest.

  'I thought you might be here, too, My Lord Taragorm,' said Hawkmoon. He lowered his sword as the flame-lances nudged his midriff.

  Taragorm of the Palace of Time voiced his golden laughter.

  'Greetings, Duke Dorian. You will note, I hope, that these two guards are not of the company of the Dreaming Ones. These escaped with me at the Siege of Londra, when it became obvious to Kalan and myself that the battle was lost to us. Even then we could probe a little way into the future. My sad accident was arranged— an explosion produced to cause my apparent death. And Kalan's suicide, as you already know, was in reality the occasion of his first jump through the dimensions. We have worked so well together, since then. But there have been a few complications, as you've guessed.'

  Kalan moved forward and took the swords of Count Brass and Hawkmoon. Count Brass was scowling but seemed too astonished to resist at that moment. He had never seen Taragorm, Master of the Palace of Time, before.

  Taragorm continued, his voice of full of amusement. 'Now that you have been gracious enough to visit us, I hope those complications can be dispensed with, at long last. I had not hoped for such a stroke of luck! You were ever headstrong, Hawkmoon.'

  'And how will you achieve it—freeing yourselves of the complications you have created?' Hawkmoon folded his arms on his chest.

  The clock face inclined itself slightly to one side, the pendulum beneath continued to swing, balanced as it was by complicated machinery, allowing for every movement of Taragorm's body.

  'You will know when we return to Londra shortly. I spe
ak, of course, of the true Londra, where we are soon expected, not this poor imitation. Kalan's idea, not mine.'

  'You supported me!' said Kalan in an aggrieved tone. 'And it is I who take all the risks, travelling back and forth through a thousand dimensions . . .'

  'Let us not have our guests think us petty, Baron Kalan,' Taragorm chided. There had always been something of a rivalry between the two of them. He bowed slightly to Count Brass and Hawkmoon. 'Please come with us while we make the final preparations for our journey back to our old home.'

  Hawkmoon stood his ground. 'If we refuse?'

  'You will be stranded here forever. You know we cannot, ourselves, kill you. You bank on that, do you? Well, alive in this place or dead in another, it's all much of a muchness, friend Hawkmoon. And now, please cover up your naked face. I know it might seem rude, but I am dreadfully old-fashioned about such things.'

  'I regret that, in this too, I must give offence,' said Hawkmoon with a small bow. He let the guards lead him through the door. He saluted the dull-eyed Flana and the others, who had even stopped breathing, it seemed. 'Farewell, sad shades. I hope I shall, at length, be the cause of your release.'

  'I hope so, also,' said Taragorm. And the hands on the face of his mask moved a fraction and this bell began to strike the hour.

  Chapter Three

  Count Brass Chooses To Live

  They were back in Baron Kalan's laboratory.

  Hawkmoon considered the two guards who now had their swords. He could tell that Count Brass was also wondering whether it would be possible to rush the flame-lances.

  Kalan was already in the white pyramid, making adjustments to the smaller pyramids which were suspended before him. Because he was still wearing his serpentmask, he had greater difficulty in manipulating the objects and arranging them to his satisfaction. It seemed to Hawkmoon, as he watched, that somehow this scene symbolised a salient aspect of the Dark Empire culture.