CHAPTER 9
High among the Mountains of Wier, overlooking the green grey, northern waters of the Great Yonder Ocean, stands the Fortress of Roth. It seems to hang there, bleak and forbidding, a Portal between earth and hell. Even when the skies are clear, which is on rare days enough, the fortress looks as grim and as dark, seeming to suck in all cheer from the light of day like some misshapen black hole. For most of their sombre history, the halls of Roth have known only the loathsome shapes of the Beasts of Zedd and the rule of one man; Zedd himself. To call him a man is only partly right, though. True, he was born a child amongst men and grew to manhood. But that was countless years ago.
When he was a baby his mother had named him Lynch and that was the name that hanged by him. Other children grew to hate him for his meanness and his cruelty. The cry, ‘Look out; here comes Lynch’‘ would send them scuttling for home, for they had learned to fear him. And so Lynch grew up doubly bitter and lonely. If you have ever thought that your mothers might be glad to see the back of you, well just imagine how pleased Lynch’s mother was the day he walked away for good. He was sixteen. He headed for the high cliffs between the ocean’s edge and the Mountains of Wier. There he built a drystone dwelling, which he roofed with driftwood and reeds. He drove away all other human callers and turned his mind to the great forces that stretched from the depths of the dark ocean to the infinity of deepest night. He channelled these forces into himself so that gradually he came to master them.
And so it was that he became Zedd the Mystic; the name he took for himself when the Dark Powers finally came within his grasp: Zedd: the End of all Things.
Then, when black‑hearted men came to his door, he welcomed them. Pirates and cut‑throats flocked to him and, under his direction, they and their slaves built for him the Fortress of Roth. There, in its topmost turret, he studied dark powers and indulged in the one other thing that he loved. Gold. His henchmen brought him vast quantities of plunder, yet still he lusted after more: more gold and the chance to commit more evil.
The great wealth of the Eastern Kingdom drew Zedd like a magnet. When he confronted Sethmagnus and demanded the wealth of the Kingdom, the Mystic of Roth was not surprised that Sethmagnus scorned his threats. But he was not expecting defeat in battle.
Conquered, but not crushed, The Mystic of Roth fled back to his mountain refuge. There he plotted vengeance and his return to Seth. With all his followers dead or fled, however, other resources had to be drawn upon.
So Zedd the Mystic locked himself away for many dark years and dreamed and charmed, and charmed and cursed; and from the elements and life forces of the Cosmos he conjured up an army of the darkest fiends that the most evil of minds could imagine. And with them he destroyed the heart of the Eastern Kingdom. But all that was ages past.
*********************************************************
Far from the Island of Fa’Lacree, high in the Mountains of Wier, in the Fortress of Roth, Zedd the Mystic paced the floor of the turret room that he called his own. His footsteps traced a pattern around the floor that charged the whole room with energy.
Not a solitary living human soul, except for Zedd himself, ever trod the Halls of Roth; not since that time‑lost battle, generations ago, when Sethmagnus the Great had destroyed his legions. But Zedd was not alone in his fortress. In every dark and dismal corner, shadowy figures lurked. Some crouched, cat‑like, with flaming eyes; while others hung like bats, by vicious looking talons from rafters or from crevices in the walls. Others, still, prowled the corridors or flitted between the rafters of the vast hall that lay in the heart of the Fortress.
This was Zedd’s new army: fiends of every imaginable nightmare form, conjured up from the depths of his evil mind. With them he had carried out his awful revenge on the Eastern Kingdom and affected the destruction of Seth. Yet now his victory had a hollow ring. The Empire of Seth was grown strong again. The Lord High Craftsman had thwarted him with that infernal Bell. Seven times Zedd had launched his Beasts against Fa’Lacree, but each time the sound of the Bell had smitten them, sending them crashing from the skies into the ocean below.
And so, for generations, Zedd’s lot had been to gloat soulfully over the plundered wealth of the Eastern Kingdom.
‘Damnation!’ he would cry; ‘What use is there in being the blackest power in the Universe when I’m virtually a prisoner with my booty in this heap of rock?’
Then his dark mind was lit by the germ of an idea. From the windows of his turret room he explored the realms of the high skies and spoke words to the Great Air. Some were lost in its moans while others excited it to angry blasts. These words he wrote down on parchment in a black, spidery hand.
As he paced his room and gestured angrily at the reluctant air, for inspiration, he noticed that certain movements aggravated the air to perform ever‑more violent twists and turns. These, Zedd also added to his list of words. Day‑by-day, week-by-week, the Mystic rehearsed more words and actions and added them to his parchment. The weeks ran into months and the months into years and the spell (for it was a Spell of Bidding) grew more powerful. The words he recorded and reordered; the actions he wove among the words; arranging and rearranging them to their greatest effect. Zedd’s black eyes gleamed with excitement as the power of his spell grew.
‘I have it! I have it!’ he would scream, leaping into the air with delight as he felt the response to each new word and each new action woven aright. Finally, there on his table, lay the completed manuscript, recording every detail of the spell. Every word and every gesture was orchestrated so that the very air around him was subdued to his command. The spell was complete and Zedd, the Mystic of Roth, stood there, the master of the winds.
On his shoulder was perched one of his Beasts, a bat‑like hawk (or perhaps a hawk‑like bat), which clung tenaciously to its master with sickle‑like claws.
‘Hold on tight, Treg my little friend,’ laughed the Mystic; ‘tonight is the night for testing!’ He raised his outspread hands high and wide and threw back his head. With eyes blazing he called out the dark name of the air. At that, the room around him shimmered and the fire on the hearthstone trembled uneasily.
Then Zedd began to recite the litany, which he had spent so long in devising. Over and over he spoke the incantations and moved his whole body through the spell. On and on, deep into the afternoon, Zedd conjured up the wind to his bidding. Not any old seafaring wind, not a gale, nor even a hurricane. But a mighty cyclone: a torquewind, in the speech of the Merchant Traders of Seth, which the Mystic drew into a great column of churning and twisting air; which collected and grew and howled in a tempestuous column that wrapped itself around the Fortress of Roth from the root of its mountain to the very limits of the stratosphere.
With a yell of triumph, Zedd ordered the cyclone to move. As the furious winds inched across the fortress, the great walls shook and groaned. Air rushed wildly through the halls and corridors, while up in Zedd the Mystic’s turret room the fire was sucked bodily up the flue.
Treg, the Spell Beast, clung terrified to Zedd’s shoulder. It flapped its leathery wings in frantic resistance, its bright yellow eyes rolling miserably in their sockets. Finally, as the very roof of the turret was dragged from its joists, the hapless creature was torn from its perch and sucked, wailing, into the heart of the tornado.
Zedd, rooted to the floor by his magic, roared with an evil laughter that was caught up in the long spiral fingers of the whirlwind.
‘Enjoy your trip, my little Treg!’ he yelled; ‘Have a good flight!’
High up in the cyclone his evil laughter echoed and re-echoed amidst the howling and the groaning of the spell‑bound air. Then, under the Mystic’s word of command, the mighty whirlwind moved down the mountain. Cautiously, at first, then with growing confidence and vigour, Zedd directed his mighty column of destruction. In and out of the valleys and around the spurs of the Mountains of Wier, it heaved, leaving a trail of havoc in its path. Trees were stripped of their branches or totally uprooted; shepherds’ cottages simply vanished as the monstrous wind engulfed them and stripped them like shelled peas.
Zedd, watching from his stricken turret, was ecstatic. He leapt and cheered with glee, his hair and beard whipped up by the wind. Then, with a gesture and a word he called his creation to heel. Slowly and obediently the great wind returned to the foot of the mountain, awaiting its master’s next word of command. Zedd was now certain of his control over the wind.
‘Wait there, my beauty!’ he cried, and he flung wide the door of his turret room. Down the spiral stairway, he strode; down into the bowels of his fortress and finally along a bare and echoing corridor and into the main hall. There he summoned his beasts with a single word, which boomed around the fortress.
From the furthest corners and crannies the Beasts came slinking from their boltholes where they had cringed in fear under the onslaught of the wind. ‘Come to me, you craven cowards!’ bellowed the Mystic: ‘We have work to do!’ And come they did. Skulking and unsure, they flocked down the corridors to their master. ‘You have no more need to be afraid, my children!’ he cried; ‘We have a new ally!’
The Beasts muttered and snarled among themselves. ‘I have conjured up my finest spell yet! Finer even than your snivelling selves!’
The snarling grew more irritable.
‘Be silent, you witless curs or I’ll send you all back to oblivion, just as sure as I created you!’
The Beasts fell silent and the Mystic continued, ‘You are like helpless kittens against the Bell of the Ancients! But the Bell will be useless against my new slave! Behold the WIND! It has no mind that the Bell can paralyse; just a path to follow and a prize to win!’
The Mystic’s laughing eyes scanned his cringing beasts: ‘Do I hear you asking what the Prize is?’ he asked contemptuously; ‘No! Of course not you idiots! Well, I’ll tell you anyway! The Bell! I shall have the Bell and be done with it! You, my pets, shall have your revenge; and I,’ he added with relish, ‘shall have mine!’
The Beasts erupted with elation. Their baying and howling rose to a crescendo which was caught up by the Mystic’s tornado. Their hideous cacophony filled the mountains of Wier and echoed far across the ocean: and sailors and peasants, hearing the awful din, huddled together in stark terror, fearful of whatever dreadful thing it might mean.
High among the Mountains of Wier, overlooking the green grey, northern waters of the Great Yonder Ocean, stands the Fortress of Roth. It seems to hang there, bleak and forbidding, a Portal between earth and hell. Even when the skies are clear, which is on rare days enough, the fortress looks as grim and as dark, seeming to suck in all cheer from the light of day like some misshapen black hole. For most of their sombre history, the halls of Roth have known only the loathsome shapes of the Beasts of Zedd and the rule of one man; Zedd himself. To call him a man is only partly right, though. True, he was born a child amongst men and grew to manhood. But that was countless years ago.
When he was a baby his mother had named him Lynch and that was the name that hanged by him. Other children grew to hate him for his meanness and his cruelty. The cry, ‘Look out; here comes Lynch’‘ would send them scuttling for home, for they had learned to fear him. And so Lynch grew up doubly bitter and lonely. If you have ever thought that your mothers might be glad to see the back of you, well just imagine how pleased Lynch’s mother was the day he walked away for good. He was sixteen. He headed for the high cliffs between the ocean’s edge and the Mountains of Wier. There he built a drystone dwelling, which he roofed with driftwood and reeds. He drove away all other human callers and turned his mind to the great forces that stretched from the depths of the dark ocean to the infinity of deepest night. He channelled these forces into himself so that gradually he came to master them.
And so it was that he became Zedd the Mystic; the name he took for himself when the Dark Powers finally came within his grasp: Zedd: the End of all Things.
Then, when black‑hearted men came to his door, he welcomed them. Pirates and cut‑throats flocked to him and, under his direction, they and their slaves built for him the Fortress of Roth. There, in its topmost turret, he studied dark powers and indulged in the one other thing that he loved. Gold. His henchmen brought him vast quantities of plunder, yet still he lusted after more: more gold and the chance to commit more evil.
The great wealth of the Eastern Kingdom drew Zedd like a magnet. When he confronted Sethmagnus and demanded the wealth of the Kingdom, the Mystic of Roth was not surprised that Sethmagnus scorned his threats. But he was not expecting defeat in battle.
Conquered, but not crushed, The Mystic of Roth fled back to his mountain refuge. There he plotted vengeance and his return to Seth. With all his followers dead or fled, however, other resources had to be drawn upon.
So Zedd the Mystic locked himself away for many dark years and dreamed and charmed, and charmed and cursed; and from the elements and life forces of the Cosmos he conjured up an army of the darkest fiends that the most evil of minds could imagine. And with them he destroyed the heart of the Eastern Kingdom. But all that was ages past.
*********************************************************
Far from the Island of Fa’Lacree, high in the Mountains of Wier, in the Fortress of Roth, Zedd the Mystic paced the floor of the turret room that he called his own. His footsteps traced a pattern around the floor that charged the whole room with energy.
Not a solitary living human soul, except for Zedd himself, ever trod the Halls of Roth; not since that time‑lost battle, generations ago, when Sethmagnus the Great had destroyed his legions. But Zedd was not alone in his fortress. In every dark and dismal corner, shadowy figures lurked. Some crouched, cat‑like, with flaming eyes; while others hung like bats, by vicious looking talons from rafters or from crevices in the walls. Others, still, prowled the corridors or flitted between the rafters of the vast hall that lay in the heart of the Fortress.
This was Zedd’s new army: fiends of every imaginable nightmare form, conjured up from the depths of his evil mind. With them he had carried out his awful revenge on the Eastern Kingdom and affected the destruction of Seth. Yet now his victory had a hollow ring. The Empire of Seth was grown strong again. The Lord High Craftsman had thwarted him with that infernal Bell. Seven times Zedd had launched his Beasts against Fa’Lacree, but each time the sound of the Bell had smitten them, sending them crashing from the skies into the ocean below.
And so, for generations, Zedd’s lot had been to gloat soulfully over the plundered wealth of the Eastern Kingdom.
‘Damnation!’ he would cry; ‘What use is there in being the blackest power in the Universe when I’m virtually a prisoner with my booty in this heap of rock?’
Then his dark mind was lit by the germ of an idea. From the windows of his turret room he explored the realms of the high skies and spoke words to the Great Air. Some were lost in its moans while others excited it to angry blasts. These words he wrote down on parchment in a black, spidery hand.
As he paced his room and gestured angrily at the reluctant air, for inspiration, he noticed that certain movements aggravated the air to perform ever‑more violent twists and turns. These, Zedd also added to his list of words. Day‑by-day, week-by-week, the Mystic rehearsed more words and actions and added them to his parchment. The weeks ran into months and the months into years and the spell (for it was a Spell of Bidding) grew more powerful. The words he recorded and reordered; the actions he wove among the words; arranging and rearranging them to their greatest effect. Zedd’s black eyes gleamed with excitement as the power of his spell grew.
‘I have it! I have it!’ he would scream, leaping into the air with delight as he felt the response to each new word and each new action woven aright. Finally, there on his table, lay the completed manuscript, recording every detail of the spell. Every word and every gesture was orchestrated so that the very air around him was subdued to his command. The spell was complete and Zedd, the Mystic of Roth, stood there, the master of the winds.
On his shoulder was perched one of his Beasts, a bat‑like hawk (or perhaps a hawk‑like bat), which clung tenaciously to its master with sickle‑like claws.
‘Hold on tight, Treg my little friend,’ laughed the Mystic; ‘tonight is the night for testing!’ He raised his outspread hands high and wide and threw back his head. With eyes blazing he called out the dark name of the air. At that, the room around him shimmered and the fire on the hearthstone trembled uneasily.
Then Zedd began to recite the litany, which he had spent so long in devising. Over and over he spoke the incantations and moved his whole body through the spell. On and on, deep into the afternoon, Zedd conjured up the wind to his bidding. Not any old seafaring wind, not a gale, nor even a hurricane. But a mighty cyclone: a torquewind, in the speech of the Merchant Traders of Seth, which the Mystic drew into a great column of churning and twisting air; which collected and grew and howled in a tempestuous column that wrapped itself around the Fortress of Roth from the root of its mountain to the very limits of the stratosphere.
With a yell of triumph, Zedd ordered the cyclone to move. As the furious winds inched across the fortress, the great walls shook and groaned. Air rushed wildly through the halls and corridors, while up in Zedd the Mystic’s turret room the fire was sucked bodily up the flue.
Treg, the Spell Beast, clung terrified to Zedd’s shoulder. It flapped its leathery wings in frantic resistance, its bright yellow eyes rolling miserably in their sockets. Finally, as the very roof of the turret was dragged from its joists, the hapless creature was torn from its perch and sucked, wailing, into the heart of the tornado.
Zedd, rooted to the floor by his magic, roared with an evil laughter that was caught up in the long spiral fingers of the whirlwind.
‘Enjoy your trip, my little Treg!’ he yelled; ‘Have a good flight!’
High up in the cyclone his evil laughter echoed and re-echoed amidst the howling and the groaning of the spell‑bound air. Then, under the Mystic’s word of command, the mighty whirlwind moved down the mountain. Cautiously, at first, then with growing confidence and vigour, Zedd directed his mighty column of destruction. In and out of the valleys and around the spurs of the Mountains of Wier, it heaved, leaving a trail of havoc in its path. Trees were stripped of their branches or totally uprooted; shepherds’ cottages simply vanished as the monstrous wind engulfed them and stripped them like shelled peas.
Zedd, watching from his stricken turret, was ecstatic. He leapt and cheered with glee, his hair and beard whipped up by the wind. Then, with a gesture and a word he called his creation to heel. Slowly and obediently the great wind returned to the foot of the mountain, awaiting its master’s next word of command. Zedd was now certain of his control over the wind.
‘Wait there, my beauty!’ he cried, and he flung wide the door of his turret room. Down the spiral stairway, he strode; down into the bowels of his fortress and finally along a bare and echoing corridor and into the main hall. There he summoned his beasts with a single word, which boomed around the fortress.
From the furthest corners and crannies the Beasts came slinking from their boltholes where they had cringed in fear under the onslaught of the wind. ‘Come to me, you craven cowards!’ bellowed the Mystic: ‘We have work to do!’ And come they did. Skulking and unsure, they flocked down the corridors to their master. ‘You have no more need to be afraid, my children!’ he cried; ‘We have a new ally!’
The Beasts muttered and snarled among themselves. ‘I have conjured up my finest spell yet! Finer even than your snivelling selves!’
The snarling grew more irritable.
‘Be silent, you witless curs or I’ll send you all back to oblivion, just as sure as I created you!’
The Beasts fell silent and the Mystic continued, ‘You are like helpless kittens against the Bell of the Ancients! But the Bell will be useless against my new slave! Behold the WIND! It has no mind that the Bell can paralyse; just a path to follow and a prize to win!’
The Mystic’s laughing eyes scanned his cringing beasts: ‘Do I hear you asking what the Prize is?’ he asked contemptuously; ‘No! Of course not you idiots! Well, I’ll tell you anyway! The Bell! I shall have the Bell and be done with it! You, my pets, shall have your revenge; and I,’ he added with relish, ‘shall have mine!’
The Beasts erupted with elation. Their baying and howling rose to a crescendo which was caught up by the Mystic’s tornado. Their hideous cacophony filled the mountains of Wier and echoed far across the ocean: and sailors and peasants, hearing the awful din, huddled together in stark terror, fearful of whatever dreadful thing it might mean.
