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to be seen. The time was late afternoon on a gray chilly day of late autumn,
or winter. Clouds hung low over the glade; trees surrounding held up stark
branches, marking the sky with black. The face of the bluff no longer showed
an iron door.
The Laughing Sun and The Crying Moon on this winter evening was warm and
comfortable and almost empty of guests. Hockshank the landlord welcomed
Shimrod with a polite smile. "I am happy to see you, sir. I feared that you
had suffered a mishap."
"Your fears were by and large accurate."
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"It is no novelty. Each year folk strangely disappear from the fair."
Shimrod's garments were torn and the fabric had suffered rot; when he looked
in the mirror he saw haggard cheeks, staring eyes and skin stained the curious
brown of weathered wood.
After his supper he sat brooding by the fire. Melancthe, he reasoned, had sent
him into Irerly for one of several possible purposes: to acquire the thirteen
spangled gems, to ensure his death, or both. His death would seem her prime
purpose. Otherwise she might have allowed him to bring out the gems. At the
cost of her virtue? Shimrod smiled. She would break her promise as easily as
she had broken faith.
In the morning Shimrod paid his score, adjusted the feathers to his new boots
and departed Twitten's Corner.
In due course he arrived at Trilda. The meadow showed dreary and bleak under
the lowering clouds. An additional quality of desolation surrounded the manse.
Shimrod approached, step by step, then halted to appraise the manse. The door
hung ajar.
He went forward slowly and entered through the broken door, into the parlor,
and here he found the corpse of Grofinet, who had been suspended from the
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ceiling-beams by his lank legs and burned over a fire, presumably that he
might be forced to reveal the location of Shimrod's treasures. By the look of
affairs, Gro-finet's tail had first been roasted away, inch by inch, on a
brazier. At the last his head had been lowered into the flames. No doubt, in a
hysteria, he had screamed out his knowledge, suffering agonies as much for his
own weakness as for the fire he dreaded so much. And then, to silence his
raving, someone had split his charred face with a cleaver.
Shimrod looked under the hearth, but the gnarled object which represented his
store of magical adjuncts was gone. He had expected nothing else. He knew
rudimentary skills, a few charlatan's tricks, a clever spell or two. Never a
great magician, Shimrod was now barely a magician of any sort.
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Melancthe! She had given him no more faith than he had given her.
Still, he would have brought her no great harm, while she had sealed the
portal against him, so that he should die in Irerly.
"Melancthe, dire Melancthe! For your crimes you will suffer! I
escaped and so I won, but in that absence caused by you I lost my possessions
and Grofinet lost his life; you will suffer accordingly!" So raved Shimrod as
he stalked about the manse.
The robbers who had seized upon his absence to pillage Trilda, they also must
be captured and punished: who might they be?
The House Eye! Established for just such contingencies! But no, first he would
bury Grofinet; and this he did, in a bower behind the manse, along with his
friend's small possessions. He finished in the fading light of late afternoon.
Returning inside the manse he set every lamp aglow, and built a fire in the
fireplace. Still
Trilda seemed bleak.
Shimrod brought the House Eye down from the ridge-beam, and set it on the
carved table in the parlor, where, upon stimulus, it recreated what it had
observed during Shimrod's absence.
The first few days passed without incident. Grofinet zealously discharged his
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