Arthur H. Landis - Camelot 03 Read online

  THE MAGICK OF CAMELOT

  camelot #3

  by

  ARTHUR H. LANDIS

  COPYRIGHT ©, 1981

  “A starship is invincible in war and indestructible to all known phenomena. A starship is also the Federation’s potential bridge to infinity… .” So stated the introductory lines, tape EC-16-LK, as reproduced in the handbook Starships of the Galactic Fleet.

  Great! Except how, by bloody Hestoor, would it ever explain the Deneb-3 to my Fregisians? It wouldn’t, actually. But no matter. For a Fregisian is first an Alphian, a humanoid from the systems of the binary stars, Fomalhaut’s I and II. And, to use an archaic metaphor, is therefore from a race “with an unfortunate propensity for advancing from barbarism to barbarism without ever achieving the mellowing influence of civilization.”

  Moreover, to a Fregisian’s thinking, they needed no explanation; indeed, they could hardly care less. For they have sorcery and witchcraft. And it works! And so to them the realities of the Deneb were but parallel manifestations of the vagaries of their own potentials. Moreover, too, they didn’t have to understand a starship. It was enough that I, their born-again “Collin-mythos,” as well as their recent hero and savior in two wars, did.

  They were even smugly pleased that it was one of their own, me, who’d apparently conjured up this marvelous package from which they now viewed the night side of Fregis against the surrounding blazing aureole of Fomalhaut I. Fomalhaut I’s twin sun, Fomalhaut II, was also visible—at about two billion miles, as was the entire starry void; this, from the parabola of platform within the inner arc of the Deneb’s translucent nose.

  Unshaken, even somewhat amused, my “ambassadors” relaxed in the platform’s swivels, sipped Terran and Velas wines and ate their fill of strange fruits and ice cream. A few—and we were a round dozen altogether—leaned against a gravity rail, nibbled confections and preened their body fur. This last was pure ostentation, done only when one of the ship’s personnel in shorts and see-through tank tops, and quite obviously devoid of body hair, passed by. On occasion, too, one or the other would wink at me and offer a jolly quip or mot All in all, they seemed to be enjoying whatever it was they thought was happening.

  They wore a mixed bag of satins, velvets, jacquards, tooled leather and the like, sufficient to dazzle a Terran peacock. Slashed sleeves and surcoats revealed the silver and gold washed steel of their mail shirts, which they’d refused to leave at Glagmaron Castle. They were armed too—greatswords and faldirks—as was I. Indeed, I looked as they did except that my blue-purple eyes (all Fregisian fauna have blue-purple eyes) were derived of contact lenses, effectively hiding their natural brown. My fur was black, short, and of a satiny, mink-like texture. It was also of a gene-cultured origin. Coming from a planet with twice Fregis’s mass, I had twice the strength of any of these downright deadly swordsmen. Moreover, as an added, protective gimmick, I’d been subjected to an imposed neural conditioning prior to original planetfall which had made me an absolute master of all Fregisian weaponry….

  Even the gleaming jewels of my swordbelt were not just jewels, but rather links to certain death-dealing laser beams as well as other things, including a communications potential with the Deneb, wherever it chanced to be.

  We’d come aboard just fifteen minutes before. I’d taken them up myself in the scoutship which had served me so well in the recent bloody months of unending battle and wild sorcery which had introduced me to some of the most courageous and lovable of friends, as well as the most evil of enemies.

  They’d called him the Kaleen, or the Dark One. Actually, he was a true alien from beyond the universe itself. And, though we’d finally won, by finishing him off as it were, the ongoing peril for Fregis, indeed the Fomalhaut systems, remained very much alive….

  The view-deck with its low swivels and servo-tables hung directly over the control banks of the main foredeck where a half-dozen crew members kept a sharp eye on whatever the ship had been programmed to do.

  Nothing seemed to be happening; a paradox, really, since in the Fomalhaut systems “nothing” was anything but the norm. As if to prove my point the viewscreens attached to an arm of each swivel, came suddenly to life. Scanner connected, they were zooming in on what I knew to be Fomalhaut II’s first planet, the destroyed Alpha, where it had all supposedly begun—the demise of the Alphians, the birth of the Fregisians—some five thousand years before.

  “Senior Adjuster Kyrie Fern!” The voice of Drelas, the starship’s commander, cut in above the muted though obviously excited voices of other officers in control-central. “Hear this,” he said with his usual flat delivery. “We have an interesting monitor check. Lieutenant Dacey’s found five more aliens enjoining with the five we’ve been watching for the last six months. We have something boiling up through the gateway, too. Have a look and tell us what you think.”

  Adjusters Ragan and Kriloy, playing P.R. to my Marackians, were seated to my left as a part of the group at my personal table. They stared appropriately, as did I. Nothing. The scanner zoomed closer. Nothing. Then, at the very edge of Alpha’s atmosphere—and it still had one despite the previous nuclear holocaust—two sets of trim-looking craft, each set in the basic pyramid attack-defense formation, became suddenly visible.

  Kriloy’s moon face showed boredom. His shrug labeled the discovery routine, just more of the same; which it obviously wasn’t. He had a right to think that, however. For the aliens to date, though refusing contact, still caused no trouble. They’d confined their explorations to Alpha and the next three of Fomalhaut II’s five planets, all equally useless, and let our monitor alone.

  Ragan, however—he was the more serious of, the two—had apparently spotted something. He frowned, pursed his lips and said, “Hey, Kyrie—” And was immediately interrupted by one of my stalwarts at the rail.

  “My Lord Collin.” It was the young lord, Lors Sernas. His tone, imperious as usual, seemed to emphasize the acquisitive gleam in his slightly bulbous eyes… . “Would it be possible, sir, to possess a bauble or two from among those I see out there? I’m bound to think they’d make a pendant for which there’d be no equal.”

  He was quite serious. Despite my briefing, he’d obviously failed to grasp what he was seeing.

  “For your lovely Buusti, no doubt,” I countered, deliberately reminding him of the recent bride whom he’d left in the dread city of Hish in Om. That country—and it had been but recently freed from the slain Dark One’s grasp—had appointed him its ambassador to the kingdom of Marack. Thus his presence in the north. He’d also fought bravely at my side; thus his presence aboard the Deneb-3.

  The delightfully wicked Sernas—he was an uncontrollable, amoral fellow—grinned, patted his privates and smacked his red lips lewdly. “Or whomever, my lord. For I’m still a Hoom-Tet man. And I’d remind you, that Hoom-Tet’s a most gracious god who seeks only the best in physical pleasures for all who worship him.”

  A flurry of Marackian hands moved instantly to trace the sign of the god, Ormon, upon their chests; this, with accompanying frowns and hisses. I sighed. “They are not baubles, sir, but suns, like unto your Fresti, now hiding behind your world there.”

  He grinned, winked, belched and said disputatiously, “Indeed, my lord. Well, if you say so… .” He then downed a full brandy-glass of what appeared to be the best of our Terran moselle.

  The frowns of the Marackians softened somewhat at that, for they could all understand a drinking man; not a drunk, but a drinking man….

  But not quite all. For the lovely Marackian sitting to my right, my betrothed, the Princess Murie Nigaard Caronne of the northern kingdom of Marack, was literally grinding her teeth in rage at the y
oung Lors Sernas, whom she dearly hated. I barely contained my laughter. In any setting she remained what I’d fancied her at our first meeting—a fairy-tale princess to stir the hearts of those ancient brothers Grimm, who’d sketched her so often in their stories. Golden-haired, golden-furred, she had a quite elvish face with dainty, slightly pointed ears and a forever demanding tilt to her chin. Petite, she was beautifully formed. At the moment she was dressed in a quasi jumpsuit of white and powder blue; boots that reached halfway up her calves, and a filmy scarf around her neck, also of blue. The epitome of femininity, she also wore a sheathed shortsword across her back and a jeweled faldirk at her waist She was a master of both. Indeed, pound for pound—and she’d proved it where it counts most, on the field of battle—she was the match of any master swordsman….

  Sensing my unheard laughter, she dug her nails into the flesh of my wrist while murmuring, “My lord! I am not at all amused, sir, that you’ve brought that disgusting creature with us. I’ve word that he accosted two butter-maids in Dame Goolis’s scullery and would have had both of them then and there had he not been driven off by the kitchen help.”

  The love-hate syndrome, as apparently inspired in the hearts of all females by Sernas, our happy paragon of total lechery, had touched my princess, hard.

  I sighed, grinned and asked owlishly, “The two of them?”

  Her brow paled in righteous rage. “Well, by the gods, he did get one.”

  I’ll speak to him, my love.”

  “You do that. Hot oil on the ballocks might cool his ardor.”

  I couldn’t help it I muttered, “You’re indeed quite lovely when you’re mad.”

  “Don’t cozen me, Collin.”

  “I know better than to try.”

  She smiled at that and made a particularly fetching moue.

  I whispered darkly, “There’s a thing by which I’m not amused.”

  “Oh?” The frown returned.

  “It’s that.”

  I pointed in disgust to the small dumpy figure asleep in her lap. It was Hooli, one of Marack’s two sacred Pug-Boos. Flat-footed, he stood about two feet tall, had a rounded basketball head with fur-tufted ears, stubby arms and legs, shoebutton eyes, and a forever runny nose. She’d dressed him for the occasion in a spanking new orange tarn (made by her own two hands, as were all his clothes), green booties and a waist-length jacket buttoned down the front The jacket was a bright vermillion.

  The Boo, or Hooli, as of that particular moment held a half-eaten, wilted, squishy-bung-jot leaf in one hand, blew bubbles as he slept and had already soiled Murie’s spotless jump-pants with the goo from his runny nose.

  Actually, there were two Hoolis, though Murie, of course, was unaware of this fact. The first, the one she held, was a low-I.Q. blob, a mindless rodentius-drusis described by Great Ap, the Vuun, one of the intelligent saurians that inhabit Fregis’s southern mountains of Ilt, as a stupid leaf-eater. “And if the trees do not leaf at their proper time,” Ap had told me, “why then the Boos simply wait and stare and stare and wait, until they fall from the trees quite dead. They are that stupid.”

  The other Hooli—he who truly deserved the formality of the name—was an entity-controller, something like myself, Kriloy and Ragan, excepting, as he put it, we were simply galactic whereas he was universal!

  I’d never seen him in his actual body. For reasons well get to, I hadn’t dared. Suffice it to say, I had a deep affection for the real Hooli; this, for various reasons, among them that without him there would never have been a victory over the Dark One; indeed, the lot of us could as easily be damn well dead!

  The blob that Murie held, that all northerners worshiped, was exactly what it was: a snot-nosed, vacuous, bag-assed nothing! It was demeaning. And yet she forever clutched it to her heart. Without a doubt, my feelings were partly jealousy. But to be forced to be jealous of that was a contradiction I found difficult to deal with.

  Next to Murie sat her companion, Lady Caroween Hoggle-Fitz, a vibrant redheaded valkyrie with a temper to match. Then came Garoween’s .betrothed, Sir Rawl Fergis, ‘ Murie’s cousin and my own sword companion across many months of bloody war. Rawl, at the moment, was diligently spooning his third bowl of ice cream; oblivious to either the “music of the spheres,” or his own personal viewscreen, in which the scanner had now boxed the alien ships… . They were at a hundred thousand miles from surface, in two sets of five each and, as stated, in the basic pyramid attack or defense formation.

  The others of our twelve were: Per-Looris, king’s sorcerer and wizard to Murie’s father. The great lord Fel-Holdt, commander of all Marack’s armies. The newly found Sir Dosh, the slain Breen Hoggle-Fitz’s son and brother to Caroween; he’d been thought lost at the battle of Dunguring. The aforementioned Lors Sernas of Hish and four of the greatest lords of the remaining northern kingdoms.

  Admittedly, they were by no means representative. Still, there had to be a first contact and they’d been the only ones available at Castle Glagmaron. The wars were over. The single remaining danger to Fregis lay in that, out there, the alien ships and the alien-created “gateway.” That they were here at all was because I’d insisted upon it and Ragan and Kriloy had agreed. What with all that had happened—indeed, was continuing to happen how—their presence aboard the Deneb was most certainly overdue.

  Ragan Orr then burst out in a voice which this time would not be silenced. “Kyrie,” he demanded, “have a look, quick! Here comes the big one!”

  I looked. The scanner had driven in still further toward atmosphere… . Beyond the double pyramids and coming up fast in an arc from surface, was a large blue sphere. Of the size of the Deneb, it seemed as a great ball of blue-white lightning, and looked somewhat like a nova looks at a distance of ten parsecs—or better yet, like one of Sernas’s “baubles.”

  We watched closely, our curiosity now tinged with alarm.

  The scanner, moving ever closer, allowed us to see our shuttlecraft monitor too, in position. Actually we were able to observe it for just about six seconds; then it vanished in a burst of intense light, obviously nuclear.

  And that was the end of our shuttlecraft monitor, plus a young Federation Lieutenant named Jal Dacey and four of his crewmen….

  In Galactic Foundation listings the planet Fregis of the Fomalhaut I system is known as Camelot-Fregis because of the aforementioned magic. The indisputable fact is that the spells, enchantments and dark wizardry practiced by Fregis’s sorcerers really work. Moreover, the place is an occultists’, alchemists’, metaphysicists’ paradise.

  Foundation Center had long been aware of this anomaly. Indeed, over a period of two galactic centuries assigned Watchers—opposite-sexed pairs with a high compatibility potential—had forever apprised them of these facts.

  To read a Camelot report had been a joy indeed, except for the one received the previous year predicting the onset of a dark and terrible sorcery to encompass the entire planet Unless we intervened, the report had said, the forces for progress, the five kingdoms of the north, would be ruined, destroyed. The results? Chaos! A new Dark Age, and worse, for all the forseeable future of the beauteous water-world of Camelot-Fregis.

  Not liking the prognostication one damned bit, the Foundation moved instantly to insert a bit of magic of its own—scientific magic! In essence, me, Kyrie -Fern, Terran, an Adjuster-manipulator of the socio-evolutionary processes, the sly introducer at dark campfires of the sharpened stick and the gut-stringed bow. … A graduate of the Foundation’s Collegium, I’d become at age thirty somewhat of a genius at the art of “adjusting.” The very man for the job, said the Prime Council, and I’d agreed, though I’d soon found that Camelot-Fregis wasn’t quite-what I’d expected. In essence, it was one giant game of misdirection.

  At the court of Marack in the greatest of the five northern kingdoms, I’d passed myself off as one of their own, Sir Harl Lenti. And, too, following certain prodigious deeds, I was also accepted as their “Collin-mythos,” reborn. He who had returne
d to save the northlands from darkest peril!

  Said peril, I quickly found, came wholly from an extra-universal, alien intruder called the Kaleen, or the Dark One; with his opponents, other than Marackians, being the host-occupiers of the cuddly court Pug-Boos, one or more attached to each of the northern kingdoms. … A solid nine months later, during which I’d led them all in two bloody wars, and won, I was still short of the answers to the original questions as posited by the Foundation. …

  I hadn’t the slightest idea, for example, as to who and what the host-occupiers of the Pug-Boos really were. Moreover, though the P.B.’s had explained Camelot-Fregis’s made, I’d so far grasped only its concepts, not its principles. And lastly, the original Alphian gateway to another universe, continued, open!

  To top that, ships had been coming through the gateway for the last six months; at least that’s where we thought they , were coming from. More aliens without a doubt. But what kind of aliens? We now knew something of the first alien, the Dark One, and for that very reason could not accept that others of his kind would use such simple craft as we were seeing. Not that they weren’t sufficiently capable. They were. Our sensors told us that their drive, matter to antimatter, held an obvious potential for warp.