The defenses were yielding and soon the battle would be over. In the flare of rolling explosions the castle glittered like a solid gem, turrets and spires limned in flame, the triple arch a fading challenge flung against the sky. Shadows clustered over the meadow and in the gloom things raced and rustled and reared with vibrant clickings. Other shapes of nightmare met them, struggles culminating in dissolution, new menaces rising from the ashes of the old. The air quivered with the pulse and throb of war.
A war of fantasy which Dumarest directed from the summit of a mountain, hurling shafts and javelins of destruction against Iduna and her host, sending the figments of his imagination to stalk the terrors created by hers.
It had escalated from small beginnings; troops of armed and armored men riding, charging, falling to rise again. To be stiffened with the sinews of modern destruction which he knew all too well; the mercenary bands in which he had served providing the template for new armies more savage and vicious than those born from romantic imagery. Then they, in turn, yielded to images of delirium; horrors such as he had first experienced in the Tau, the product of buried fears and whispered fantasies; men with triple heads and spined hides, birds like lizards, dragons spouting fire, spiders which dropped from the clouds and stung like scorpions.
War which waged with unremitting fury and turned the area into a cratered and fuming waste in which the castle alone stood untouched and shining with an inner, lambent glow.
Dumarest hurtled toward it at a thought.
'Iduna! Will you yield?'
Serpents lanced toward him where he stood facing the arched doorway now blocked by the upraised drawbridge. They darted from the battlements, writhing streamers of flame which seared and hissed and fell to the foot of the hemisphere of protection he maintained about his person. From the soil darted things with many legs which scrabbled and reared to fall in puffs of ash and his guardians blasted them.
Things of the mind-when all else had been tried what more terrible than the creatures of childish terrors?
'Iduna! Yield!'
'No!' She stood on the highest battlement and her hair was a pennon of midnight glory. 'Earl, I won't let you win!'
A game-always to her everything was a game and she was right. What else could life be but a game with death as the inevitable winner? A gamble to see how long it could be extended and how much accomplished in the time so won.
But Dumarest had had enough of childish games.
To win. To beat her to her knees. To make her surrender her will and then to discover how to lead them both from the Tau. One way to escape, perhaps, the other he preferred not to think about.
'Iduna!'
She was stubbornly defiant. Soldiers sprang like weeds from the ground to be mown down and left in winnowed heaps and piles of bizarre armor and shapes and weapons. Dumarest fired a torpedo at the triple arch and saw the sky explode in searing, blue-white flame which died to leave the arch untouched, the air filled with drifting motes of burning destruction.
'Iduna?'
'This is silly, Earl.' Again she appeared to lean over the glistening stone. 'We haven't any rules and neither of us can beat the other. Of course I could-'
And he was deep underground with fires glowing at his feet and only the bubble of protection allowing him to breathe. Then he was back on the surface.
'-But it's no good. Why did you leave me, Earl?'
'I didn't like where you put me.'
'It was only for a little while. You'd upset me and I was angry but I'm not angry now. Come and have some tisane.'
Come into my parlor …
'Earl?'
'Why not? Lower the drawbridge and I'll come inside and we can talk. I've thought of something really nice we can do.'
'Something new?' The woman stood upright as the child within her clapped her hands. 'That's lovely! Hurry, Earl! Hurry!'
The skies quieted as he crossed the lowered drawbridge, the sound and fury of war muttering into a calm tranquility as he mounted the stairs to where Iduna waited on the battlements. Shamarre was attending her, the beast at her side and others thronged close; men with bandaged wounds, women with haggard faces. Warriors and their ladies who changed even as he watched into bland courtiers and simpering maidens.
'The game, Earl! Tell me about the new game!'
Iduna was dressed as a warrior queen, retaining the scaled armor which molded itself to her body, the cloak of shimmering silk adorned with abstract devices. Her head was bare and her hair flowed in rippling tresses. Watching her, Dumarest concentrated on seeing the child; catching glimpses of a long-legged girl dressed up in her mother's clothing. Flashes which dimmed against the immediate impression of firm flesh and rounded limbs- the child as she imagined herself to be. The woman she had become.
'The game?'
Dumarest said, 'We fight on neutral ground. The winner is obeyed.'
'Fight? Really fight?' A hand lifted to place a thumb within the carmined mouth. 'Like men fight with women before they make love? Will we make love again, Earl? Like we did before?'
'The game, Iduna.'
'I like it. A personal challenge. Yes, I like it. But we should balance the odds because it wouldn't be fair for me to face you. I'm too small and too light and far too weak. And the wager? What shall we decide.'
'The winner to be obeyed.'
'I know. You said that. But obeyed in what? In all things, Earl? In all things?'
'Yes.'
'And I may use a champion?' Her laughter rose as he nodded. 'Very well then, Earl. He is behind you. Begin!'
Dumarest spun-and looked at himself.
Facing him was a man who wore gray, who stooped to lift the knife from his boot, who attacked with sudden, blinding speed, the blade whining as it ripped through the air, the tip slicing a long gash in the breast of his tunic.
Dumarest sprang back, his own blade lifting, steel clashing as the weapons met, to part, to reflect a glitter of light as they joined again with the sound of chiming cymbals.
A moment in which muscle strained against muscle and face looked at face eye to eye. A hard face and hard eyes and a mouth savagely cruel in its determination to kill. His face and yet not exactly so. There were minor differences: the finer arch to brows, the lines less deeply scored, the nostrils less flared. Small touches which added to a gentler type of masculine attractiveness as judged by a certain kind of woman. One unaccustomed to the harsh realities of an unprotected existence.
Not himself then but a copy and Dumarest could guess why. A replacement to fill the gap he had made by leaving the castle. A doll modeled on her need to be always kind, always obedient, always the attentive lover and now the protective champion.
A facsimile which would kill if he gave it the chance.
The blades parted as Dumarest swung wide his own, backing as he did so and feeling the bulk of the parapet pressing against him as the stone halted his progress. A barrier along which he slid as again the other attacked, dodging to attack in turn, seeing his blade touch a cheek and create a rill of blood.
'First blood, Iduna! I've won!'
'We didn't decide that, Earl. You fight until one yields.'
And the surrogate would never yield.
He attacked again, the face cold, hard, intent on plunging the knife home in soft and yielding flesh. A glitter and the point raked up over the stomach, the edge grating on protective mesh. Dumarest flung back his head as the blade lifted toward his face, saw the glint of steel and struck back at the body before him. A cut which opened
