The Witch War Cycle

Chapter two

Chapter two

The Ganchark of TherminsaxWe searched. Oh, yes, we searched.

Marion’s villa yielded weapons enough to give us some confidence we might meet and face up to a gigantic beast. We shone lanternlight into the shrubberies and arcades, we thrashed the bushes. We shouted and banged kettles and pans.

We found not a sign of that feral horror.

The Watch of this precinct carried on the search farther into the streets and alleys. Seg and I felt firmly convinced the beast must be lurking low, sated by now on a victim he seized and killed without being disturbed.

“I don’t want the whole city sent into a panic,” I said to the prefect, who attended me at Marion’s villa.

“Quite so, majister. We will prosecute the search with the utmost diligence; but I think we shall find nothing until the beast strikes again.”

The prefect was a Pachak, Joldo Nat-Su, who had only two arms. He had been long employed by Naghan Vanki, the emperor’s chief spymaster, and had lost his lower left in some fracas or other. Giving the post of city prefect in charge of the Watch to a man of Naghan Vanki’s had seemed at the time sensible. He ran a tidy force and carried the honorary rank of Chuktar.

“I think you are right, Joldo, bad cess to it. Sink me!” I burst out. “We cannot have wild animals roaming the streets of Vondium! It is not to be borne!”

“If we are ready when it is seen,” said Delia in her soothing and practical voice, “then we can catch it and cage it up again.”

“Ah,” said Prefect Joldo. “You say again, majestrix. So far my men have found no one who owns to having lost a caged animal.”

“Too scared what’ll happen to ’em,” said Seg.

He held Milsi close and I fancied that no man or woman would willingly let their spouse out of their sight until this wild beast was safely caged — or killed.

Marion’s party had incontinently wound up. Most of the guests had departed. There were just a few of us left, gathered in a small withdrawing room to talk over the events of the night.

Strom Nango kept to himself and made no effort to push forward or impose his views, and this pleased us. Everyone, including himself, realized he was on approval.

The Lord Farris leaned forward in his chair and said: “I’ll put every soldier we have at your disposal, Joldo. I agree with the emperor. We cannot allow this kind of happening in the city.”

Farris, the Kov of Vomansoir, was the emperor’s justicar-crebent, or crebent-justicar; I could never worry over which way around the title went. He ran Vallia when Drak and I were away. He was a man with an intense loyalty to Delia, a man I trusted, the kind of man Vallia sorely needed.

The conversation became general then as we talked the thing inside out.

And, then, Thantar the Harper struck a chord and we all fell silent.

He sat sideways on his chair so that a samphron oil lamp’s glow brought out the hollows of his blind eyes. His harp was quite small, resting between his knees, cunningly fashioned and probably two or three hundred years old. He used it to emphasize what he said, underlining the starker passages with grim chords, using ripples of sound to highlight a passage of action or love.

“You will delight us, Thantar?” said Delia. “We are in your debt that you accepted Stromni Marion’s invitation. She is, I think, to be congratulated as well.”

Marion looked pleased at this little piece of Delia’s tomfoolery; but Delia was deadly serious about Thantar. Great artists are not bidden to perform in the politer courts of Kregen, whatever they get up to in the barbarian lands.

Thantar just said: “It is your presence, majestrix, that does us all the honor.”

Well, so it was fulsome; he was dead right, too, by Vox!

In the rich and golden voice that appeared so incongruous issuing from so gaunt and desiccated a frame, Thantar began the story of The Ganchark of Therminsax.

Therminsax was the capital city of the Imperial province of Thermin, to the west of Hawkwa Country. From there a fine canal system extended southward. I recalled the iceboats that flew down from the Mountains of the North. Rough country around there, in places, and rich lands, too. With all the other romantic connections associated with Therminsax, I confess my own most important thought about the city was that it witnessed the creation of the Phalanx, the core of the army which had done so much to reunite and pacify Vallia.

Of course, by Zair, there was still a great deal to do. But then, that is the way of life...

No one spoke as the blind harpist delivered his lines.

The story was of the olden time; but not too long ago, when savage beasts still roamed wild and free in many of the provinces of Vallia. The chark was one such wild animal, untamed, ferocious, cunning, pitiless in a special way that set it apart from your usual run of creatures of the wild. The charks normally hunted in packs and men said they possessed a primitive language of their own. Sometimes a single chark, either female or male, would go rogue, go lonely, wander off as a solitary. These became a menace to the surrounding territory. They were not to be classed, I understood as Thantar spoke on, with the man-eating tigers of India on our own Earth which are too old and slow to catch much other game than humans.

These solitary charks were among the most powerful of the packs.

As he described the beast in glowing words, the Kregish rolling and fierce, subtle and cunningly hinting, I saw in my mind’s eye a picture of the beast I had seen on the towpath. That had been a chark. I felt sure of it.

Charks, said Thantar, were considered to be extinct. None had been reliably reported in Vallia for many years, although some men boasted they had seen the gray shaggy forms slinking through the back hills of Hawkwa country.

Then a rash of bloodthirsty killings set all Therminsax on edge. No one was safe. A mother taking her child to school wearing her best dress was set on and slain. Blood splashed the pretty dress, and the hunters followed the trail until they came upon the grisly remains. Men out in the woods burning charcoal were ripped to shreds. The city itself was not safe, for the great beast seemed able to steal in as and when he pleased, to take a life in blood-welling horror.

Traps were set. All were unsuccessful.

Listening intently, I admired the masterful way in which Thantar included blood and death and horror in describing each incident, and yet did not overburden his narrative with so much blood and death and horror as to offend the susceptibilities of the ordinary person. Only the ghoulish and perverted would complain at the lack. Only the sadist would demand more agony.

A change overtook the story. Now Thantar spoke with hindsight, telling us things that were afterwards discovered and deduced, facts unknown at the time of the events.

Even with all the hindsight, the wise men had been unable to tell how the young man, Rodo Thangkar, had first become a werewolf.

He had been a happy, carefree young fellow, training to be a stylor, reasonably well-connected. He had hoped to marry his childhood sweetheart, Losha of the Curled Braids. She was one of the earliest victims of the terror, her face slashed to ribbons, her throat torn out by the fangs of the werewolf.

As the City Elders discussed what to do, and set their traps, young Rodo Thangkar stood by, learning his trade as a stylor and under his master’s tuition taking down notes of all that was said and decided.

No wonder the werewolf evaded all the traps with such contemptuous ease!

The reign of terror continued and the ganchark continued to exact a hideous toll of the folk of Therminsax and the surrounding countryside.

Many brave fighting men, champions, came to the city to strike blows with their swords and spears against the ganchark. None survived. Their mangled bodies were reverently buried, and the folk sighed, and stayed close to home.

The City Elders pleaded with anyone to come and help them in their time of trial. Sorcerers and wizards did, indeed, journey to Therminsax. One of them, a Sorcerer of the Cult of Almuensis, boasted that no ganchark could stand against the awful powers locked in his great book chained to his waist.

He was a glittering figure in his robes and jewels, girded with gold, the hyrlif itself a book exuding the aura of thaumaturgy. They found him with his head detached from his body, lying in the roadside ditch. His forefinger was still in place in the half-opened book. It was clear to all that the werewolf had leaped long before the sorcerer had had time to read out the curse to free the land of this terror.

From his island came Goordor the Murvish, of the Brotherhood of the Sorcerers of Murcroinim. He stank. He wore wild animal pelts, belts of skulls, and carried a morntarch, the heavy staff crowned with rast skulls and dangling with objectionable portions of decayed organic matter. Yet he wore swords.

He said he would relieve the city of Therminsax of its werewolf for one thousand gold talens.

The City Fathers collected the money in a single hour.

So young Rodo Thangkar listened to this transaction, and he smiled, and perhaps he raised a hand to his mouth to polish up a tooth.

He, himself, said the story, could not explain why he did what he did, why he transformed himself into a werewolf.

The following night when all the good folk of the city lay fast, the confrontation took place. No man or woman witnessed that sight. Nothing was heard.

In the morning they were found, the sorcerer and the young man, lying near to each other. The ganchark had resumed his form as a man in the moment of death, the sorcerer’s dudinter sword through him. And the sorcerer lay crumpled with no face, no throat, no breast. Blood spattered everywhere.

Thantar the Harper finished with a thrumming chord, and said: “So Therminsax was rid of the evil, and the thousand gold talens were never given to the sorcerer Goordor the Murvish but were used to provide a great feast in thanksgiving.”

When the last vibrating note dwindled to silence no one spoke, no one stirred. There was no applause. We all sat like dummies, the words spinning in our heads.

Then, bursting out like a thunderclap, the Lord Farris snapped: “No! Impossible. I do not believe it!”

Strom Nango began: “The story, or the—?”

“The story is a story, well calculated to frighten children, and exciting too, I daresay. But as for the conclusion you all seem to wish to draw — no!”

“Tsleetha-tsleethi,” said Seg. “Softly-softly. These tales are known. Werewolves are known also.”

Delia remained silent.

Milsi looked troubled, and I noticed the way she gripped Seg’s hand, her nails biting into his palm.

Marion said: “I’m not sure. Oh, I used to love all these ghostie and ghoulie stories when I was young. They have a treasury of them in the north — but, this — it is so horrible — can one believe? Is it possible? A werewolf at large, here in Vondium?”

Various of the other people in this small select gathering expressed similar views. How could a legend of the past spring into vivid life in this day and age?

Thantar the Harper, having sowed this seed, remained silent. One could not help wondering what was going on in his mind. He had told this story with meaning, with a purpose. A blind man, could he see more than we sighted ones?

Strom Nango bent and whispered in Marion’s ear.

She turned her head up, smiling at him, and I saw there was love there.

“You are right, my dear.” She turned to face us, and prefacing her remarks with flattering references to the emperor and empress in our midst, she said: “This is too gloomy and horrendous a subject. My party for dear Nango I will not have completely ruined. He has suggested we move on to more salubrious subjects—”

“Oh, indeed, yes!” exclaimed Milsi.

“Very well.” Here Marion glowed with inner pleasure. “Thantar and I have devised a new story, one that is supremely worth the telling. I hope, soon, that Thantar will set it to suitable music. But, at the moment...”

“At the moment,” rang the golden voice of the harpist, “the story is worthy in its own right, a story of high courage and selfless devotion.”

We all called out, demanding that Thantar delight us with this new and wonderful story.