Free Mazirian the Magician by Jack Vance Page B

harshly. “You shrink from the visage of the pelgrane. The countenance I wear would put the pelgrane themselves to flight.”
    The next morning he took her into the woods, and she found the trees mindful of Embelyon. They returned to the cottage in the early afternoon, and Etarr retired to his books.
    â€œI am no sorcerer,” he told her regretfully. “I am acquainted with but a few simple spells. Yet I make occasional use of magic, which may ward me from danger tonight.”
    â€œTonight?” T’sais inquired vaguely, for she had forgotten.
    â€œTonight is the Black Sabbath, and I must go to find Javanne.”
    â€œI would go with you,” said T’sais. “I would see the Black Sabbath, and Javanne also.”
    Etarr assured her that the sights and sounds would horrify her and torment her brain. T’sais persisted, and Etarr finally allowed her to follow him, when two hours after sunset he set off in the direction of the crags.
    Over the heath, up scaly outcroppings, Etarr picked a way through the dark, with T’sais a slender shadow behind. A great scarp lay across their path. Into a black fissure, up a flight of stone steps, cut in the immemorial past, and out on top of the cliff, with Modavna Moor a black sea below.
    Now Etarr gestured T’sais to great caution. They stole through a gap between two towering rocks; concealed in the shadow, they surveyed the congress below.
    They were overlooking an amphitheater lit by two blazing fires. In the center rose a dais of stone, as high as a man. About the fire, about the dais, two-score figures, robed in gray monks-cloth, reeled sweatingly, their faces unseen.
    T’sais felt a premonitory chill. She looked at Etarr doubtfully.
    â€œEven here is beauty,” he whispered. “Weird and grotesque, but a sight to enchant the mind.” T’sais looked again in dim comprehension. More of the robed and cowled figures now were weaving before the fires; whence they came T’sais had not observed. It was evident that the festival had just begun, that the celebrants were only marshalling their passions.
    They pranced, shuffled, wove in and out, and presently began a muffled chant.
    The weaving and gesticulation became feverish, and the caped figures crowded more closely around the dais. And now one leapt up on the dais and doffed her robe — a middle-aged witch of squat naked body with a great broad face. She had ecstatic glittering eyes, large features pumping in ceaseless idiotic motion. Mouth open, tongue protruding, stiff black hair like a furze bush, falling from side to side over her face as she shook her head, she danced a libidinous sidelong dance in the light of the fires, looking slyly over the gathering. The chant of the cavorting figures below swelled to a vile chorus, and overhead dark shapes appeared, settling with an evil sureness.
    The crowd began to slip from their robes, to reveal all manner of men and women, old and young — orange-haired witches of the Cobalt Mountain; forest sorcerers of Ascolais; white-bearded wizards of the Forlorn Land, with babbling small succubi. And one clad in splendid silk was the Prince Datul Omaet of Cansaspara, the city of fallen pylons across the Melantine Gulf. And another creature of scales and staring eyes came of the lizardmen in the barren hills of South Almery. And these two girls, never apart, were Saponids, the near-extinct race from the northern tundras. The slender dark-eyed ones were necrophages from the Land of the Falling Wall. And the dreamy-eyed witch of the blue hair — she dwelt on the Cape of Sad Remembrance and waited at night on the beach for that which came in from the sea.
    And as the squat witch with the black ruff and swinging breasts danced, the communicants became exalted, raised their arms, contorted their bodies, pantomimed all the evil and perversion they could set mind to.
    Except one — a quiet figure still wrapped in her robe,