Castle for Rent

moment to far-off noises. Then he crooked two fingers and beckoned his companions forward again. They advanced down the hallway slowly.

A tremulous wail sounded in the distance. It was like nothing Kwip had ever heard. A chill went through him.

They stopped, Deena and Barnaby instinctively linking hands. Kwip turned to them.

“The invaders?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Barnaby said in an awed tone. “I can’t imagine what that was. Sounded like some horrible …thing.”

Kwip lifted his eyebrows, nodding emphatically. “Aye, it gave me a start. But many a strange beast walks this place.” He drew his saber and motioned with his head. “Come on, then. And keep a sharp eye out.”

They moved off. A few paces down they encountered a spiral stairwell. Kwip led them into it.

“I know a shortcut,” he said.

They hurried down the well, their footsteps making hollow, muddled echoes against the curving stone walls.

They came out into one end of a long hallway, the T of a crossing passage a few paces to the left. Barnaby edged to the right, peering into a dark alcove across the way. Kwip decided to check out the intersection and peeked around the left corner.

Kwip had never seen a demon, but he knew the creature for what it was the moment he saw it. He could barely comprehend what he saw. It was big, about seven feet tall, and its head and face were a horror that he would half remember for nightmares without end. The eyes were not human, but seemed to radiate an intelligent malevolence like heat from the glowing tip of a torturer’s pincer. The face was generally triangular, and the mouth gaped, heavy with numerous black, ragged teeth — charred stumps in a burnt forest. Its coloring was generally red, mottled with blotches of bilious green and diseased black. The torso and legs were powerfully muscled, and the three-toed feet ended in great curving talons. The area between its legs gave no hint of its gender, if it had one.

What Kwip found eye-defying was that the creature glowed with a strange interior light. The thing did not seem to be composed of ordinary matter. It was as if the figure were a three-dimensional painting, an artist’s embodied rendering of a nightmare. A diffuse greenish glow surrounded the thing, and banners of shifting auroral color played about it here and there.

The sight hit Kwip as one telling blow. His pulse stopped, his blood froze, and his mind emptied of everything but a numbing fear.

The thing apparently had heard them coming out of the stairwell and had tried to creep up along the wall. It stopped when it saw Kwip, its mouth widening into a horrible travesty of a smile. Then it spoke one word.

“Death,” it intoned. Part of the vibrations of which the voice was composed rumbled at the bottom end of the range of human hearing. The remaining, more audible component sounded like clustered notes pounded out on the lower octaves of a spinet’s keyboard, combined with shrieking overtones that rasped against the ear.

Shocked into immobility, Kwip watched the thing raise a huge bladed weapon that was a cross between an ax and a scimitar. Faint multicolored flames played about the curious, evil-looking blade. The creature’s glowing eyes nailed him with a look that pierced his heart, their hot, withering gaze searing the very nub of his being.

Hands yanked him back, and the demon’s blade struck the wall at a point directly across from where his head had been. With a cascade of violet sparks, the stone fractured, pieces of it sailing off. Smoke rose from the impact point.

The next thing Kwip knew he was running faster than he had ever run in his life, and the thing was chasing him. He was dimly aware of the young man and woman running beside him.

They ran for a short eternity, the corridor an endless treadmill. Finally they reached the branches of a cross- tunnel.

“Split up!” Kwip shouted over his shoulder.

“Barnaby, this way!” Deena yelled, grabbing her fat friend’s shirt sleeve and swinging him round. The two raced off down the left branch of the crossing.

The demon let them go and chased after Kwip.

Twenty-four Library

Osmirik was tired. He had lost track of time. It seemed that he had been locked in the vault for days on end. He had not slept yet, and his eyelids felt like lead weights. He forced himself to read on. There was no choice. Indeed, the fate of the castle might hang on what information he gleaned from the stacks of curious volumes that lay about the table.

So far, he had had no luck. Ervoldt’s journal had proved a difficult read. The difficulty lay not so much in what the ancient King wrote as in what he omitted as irrelevant or of limited interest to the reader. What was sound editorial judgment on Ervoldt’s part was vexatious obscurantism to the scholar. True, judicious paring had made for a lean and powerful narrative. Osmirik had marveled at the King’s account of how he trapped the demon Ramthonodox and transmogrified it into a great castle. But exactly what supernatural means had he used to accomplish this feat? Ervoldt had written simply: “The Enchantment hath such Convolutions as to make the Brain fairly reel. I shall not bemuse the Reader by setting it down herewith.”

Such bemusement was devoutly to be wished! But this was not the spell that Osmirik sought. There was another mentioned in the sections in which Ervoldt described his magical construct, Castle Perilous. The first of these chapters began with a typical understatement: “I found the Castle possessed of numerous Peculiarities.”

Indeed. Ervoldt went on to describe the inherent dangers of the castle’s unusual fenestration; Perilous had, in effect, 144,000 open windows, through which any manner of invader might trespass. There followed a catalogue of the aspects which the King explored, listing what was found therein and assessing its potential as a threat. The catalogue was short; apparently Ervoldt meant only to include a sample of what he had found. “It took me a Year and three-quarters, trudging through and through the Place. Much did I see.” Obviously the King had covered a good deal of ground.

Ervoldt went on to describe some particularly troublesome aspects, outlining what measures he took to ensure that they would be no danger to the castle. There was one aspect which he had found especially alarming:

I did then discover a Cosmos like no other I had seen. Vast and drear and fearful it was, a place of blackness and despair, yet Beings dwelled there, having such horrific Lineaments and foul Mien that I bethought them Demons, to be numbered among the very Hosts of Hell. I did but escape with my Life out of that Place, and laid a Spell of Entombment on the Way that led therein, and the Gods forfend its unbinding, at peril of the world — nay, of Creation itself! I say, beware this Place, in which is contained a surfeit of malign Cunning.

This was the only reference Ervoldt made to the Hosts of Hell, and to the nature of the spells used to seal off especially dangerous aspects. Osmirik had searched through volume after volume of arcane magic, chasing down spells similarly named. He had found restraining spells, binding spells, immobility spells, and confinement spells, but nothing that carried the connotation of the Haplan verb tymbut, which Osmirik had translated as meaning “to place within a tomb or burial place.” Ervoldt’s offhand mention suggested that the spell was common, one that could be found in the standard spell manuals of the day. Indeed, the King had mentioned other sorts of spells, and those Osmirik had located. But he could find no trace of a spell specifically designed for the purpose of sealing something or someone in a tomb or burial place.

It was a puzzle. Why would Ervoldt use a spell of this kind? What, indeed, could be the common use of such a curious enchantment? Why would anyone be interested in sealing the dead inside their tombs? It was a common practice to equip burial places with magical defenses to ward off ghouls and grave robbers, but these certainly were not meant to inhibit the dead from getting up and walking out.…

Osmirik rubbed his eyes and looked about the tiny, candlelit chamber. He had stacked almost two hundred books inside it, and he had just about riffled through them all. He sighed, leaned back, and stretched his arms, his