“The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”
This review was fast lane commissioned by @krinsbez.
Lord Dunsany (more properly Baron Edward Plunkett of Dunsany) is one of THE names in fantasy. Relatively few people have heard of him, but absolutely every fantasy reader has read something influenced by him. Tolkien? Howard? Lovecraft? Moorcock? They all read Lord Dunsany. They all took inspiration from this aristocratic Anglo-Irish fantasist.
Dunsany did most of his more influential fantasy writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so he's often thought of as a mostly turn-of-the-century figure. However, he actually outlived several of his more famous imitators, even if he never became as well known to general audiences as them. He died in 1957 at the age of 79, long after the deaths of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft and just sixteen years before J.R.R. Tolkein. Dunsany never stopped writing until he died, but in his later years he tended more toward realistic fiction, plays, and academic writing; most of his fantasy stuff was written between 1905-1922.
I've read a few of Dunsany's short stories, but he wrote a lot of those, so it only amounts to a tiny fraction of his work. This particular short story, "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth," was first published in 1908, as part of a Dunsany collection called "The Sword of Welleran and Other Tales." I haven't read either this particular tale or the one that the collection is named for, but I do know that this particular collection is considered Dunsany's most influential on the work of other authors. So, this has the potential to be historically significant. I have no idea what the story is about, so this is going to be completely blind.
The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth
The opening sentence of this story is a long one, and also an incredibly evocative one. And, from the stories of his I've read in the past, anextremelyrepresentative one of Lord Dunsany's style.
“In a wood older than record, a foster brother of the hills, stood the village of Allathurion; and there was peace between the people of that village and all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood, whether they were human or of the tribes of the beasts or of the race of the fairies and the elves and the little sacred spirits of trees and streams.”
Aside from the "wood older than record" being a bit silly when you think about it (most woods are older than record, unless we're talking palaeontology ), this really does a lot of worldbuilding in a very short block of text, and it does so atmospherically and poetically. It borders on the grandiose and overblown, but it doesn't quite stray over the boundary and become pretentious. Dunsany often walks this fine line in his prose, and at least so far I don't think I've ever seen him mess it up.
Anyway, the following lines go on to describe how Allathurion is built in symbiosis with the neighbouring forest and hills, its houses' roofs covered in moss and their walls standing side-by-side with the trees of the forest's edge. The village is part of the domain of a feudal lord named Lorendiac; he doesn't come around very often, but the villagers still have a pretty cooperative relationship with him. Overall, nice fantasycore place.
One night though, the village of Allathurion is plagued by bizarrely vivid, horrible dreams. Specifically, dreams about being in hell. The dreams recur the next night, and the night after. During the night, those afflicted are heard audibly praying to the devil in their sleep. Exhaustion plagues the town as the people begin to dread falling asleep. The town's magician tries various spells and charms to protect against whatever malign influence is causing this (including some really whacky incantations using magic words derived from the trumpeting sounds of elephants and stuff like that), but nothing seems to work. The text also repeatedly describes the infernal visions as "slipping between the trees" into the village, as if they originated somewhere out in the forest.
The story has already established that there are human nomads, elves, beastmen, and various nature spirits in that forest, but the Allathurionites are supposed to be on good terms with them. So, it seems like something else has moved into the woods, and the friendlies are either unaware of it or have been prevented from informing the villagers. Troubling indeed.
The magician consults his tomes, looks through his telescope, and then calls a grave meeting of all the townsfolk. He's determined that their hell-dreams are being caused by an entity called Gaznak. This thing is one hell of a high-concept antagonist:
“And he read to the people out of the Book of Magicians, which tells the comings of the comet and foretells his coming again. And he told them how Gaznak rides upon the comet, and how he visits Earth once in every two hundred and thirty years, and makes for himself a vast, invincible fortress and sends out dreams to feed on the minds of men, and may never be vanquished but by the sword Sacnoth.”
So, he somehow gets off of the comet, builds a fortress on the planet's surface, and then jumps back onto it before it gets out of range? Or is the "comet" actually a spaceship that lands and takes off?
And, the nightmares he uses to "feed" on human minds all seem to uniformly be about hell and Satan. Curious. Indicates that Gaznak might have a pact with the devil or something.
Now, I wonder how big of an area is being affected by Gaznak's dream-feeding. Our attention is being called to just this one village, and the dreams are said to come from somewhere in the forest, so I guess it's a fairly small region. This would also explain why everyone on the planet doesn't already know about Gaznak, I suppose; if everyone felt this every two and a half centuries, it would be well documented and easy to recognize the world over. A different small region each time, though? That's different.
One of those present, a young man named Leothric, asks the magician where the Sacnoth sword is. I assume that the magician only mentioned it because he was reading aloud from the book article about Gaznak, because he's really not optimistic about getting that sword and in fact tries to deter Leothric from trying. The magician's pessimism is understandable, though, because the "sword" Sacnoth is actually the spinal cord of a unique, exotic metal-based monster that lives far to the north. This monster, a "dragon-crocodile" by the difficult name of Tharagavverug, is a habitual man-eater, and being made of alien supermetals makes it impervious to anything contemporary humanity can throw at it. Even just extracting the damned spinal cord will require shoving the entire carcass into a blast furnace and spending hours melting away everything except the unmeltable Sacnoth spine.
The magician looked up more about this killer metalosaur whose name I refuse to keep typing out, due to the mention in the Gaznak article. There's a prophecy about how metalosaur can be killed for spine-harvesting purposes, and that is by starvation. Human weapons might not be able to deal any serious damage to metalosaur, but the tip of its snout is made of common lead, and a strong blow to it can daze it and drive it off for a bit. Keep it too disoriented to eat for three days, according to said prophecy, and it will starve.
...so, this thing principally eats humans, according to the magician. And if it goes for three days without food, it dies. Meaning that it normally eats at least one person every three days. I feel like a lot of people should have been working together to try and starve this thing long before now, regardless of any uses its spine might have. If they haven't succeeded yet, then Leothric is going to have to come up with something pretty damned creative to find an angle that hasn't been tried already.
I think it might be easier to just abandon the village and migrate somewhere out of Gaznak's range, tbh.
Well, that's not what they do though. And, what's more, if Leo does come up with something creative, he's going to have to come up with it on the spot, because for now he's just grabbing a big hardwood staff to bop the metalosaur on the nose with and setting out to the north.
After traveling through forest, swamp, and wasteland for five days (huh, that's all? Robocroc is conveniently close to Allathurion), Leothric reaches the beast's territory. There are people living here, somehow. A string of villages scattered across the lightly wooded plains. They don't try to flee or fight when robocroc comes around anymore. In fact, when they hear the loud booming of his brazen heartbeat and the scraping of his steel claws against the ground the locals all just get out of their houses and assemble outside of their villages to get it over with faster. Apparently, robocroc always takes one person per feeding, and once he picks a victim he pursues them obsessively no matter what they do, so the people eventually just started cooperating to minimize the anxiety.
Hmm. Two comments on that detail.
First, if robocroc obsessively tracks his prey after choosing it, then the whole "play keep-away for three days" strategy starts to sound much more feasible. If you always know where the thing is going to go and who it'll try to eat, then a medium sized party of skilled hunters should be able to handle this by taking turns with the snout-whacking duty. I guess it's possible that robocroc might succumb to desperation and eat someone else after a day or so, though, so maybe that's not actually viable. IDK.
Second, I think Dunsany kind of missed an opportunity here. I guess his intent might have been that robocroc is so picky that you can never tell if he'll choose or pass up a victim even if there aren't any more convenient ones in sight, but otherwise this is EXACTLY the scenario I'd expect human sacrifice to crop up in. Rather than lining everyone up and letting the croc pick someone at random, I could definitely imagine communities choosing their least liked or least productive members to be staked outside the village when they hear it coming. Or, hmm. Then again, the world of this story seems like it's going for a "nobledark" vibe, with generally good people doing their best against a hostile nonhuman world, so deliberate sacrifice of undesirables might be countertheme.
Well, regardless, Leo hears robocroc's bronze churchbell heartbeat, and closes in on the beast just as it's approaching one of its feeder villages. He gets in its way and starts beating its snout with his staff, pushing it back and keeping it occupied for hour after hour after hour. Regardless of whether or not robocroc is willing to eventually settle for whatever food is within reach, it is trying to fight back against him if nothing else, and Leo is constantly one step ahead of its claws and teeth. Good thing it doesn't seem to breathe fire or anything. At one point, the villagers - either in an attempt to cheer Leo on, or just as part of a preexisting custom - start playing music, and Dunsany's reaction of how that makes robocroc feel is really something:
“Towards evening Tharagavverug ceased to snap at Leothric, but ran before him to avoid the stick, for his nose was sore and shining; and in the gloaming the villagers came out and danced to cymbal and psaltery. When Tharagavverug heard the cymbal and psaltery, hunger and anger came upon him, and he felt as some lord might feel who was held by force from the banquet in his own castle and heard the creaking spit go round and round and the good meat crackling on it.”
The hungry monster and his habitual food source are like a lord and his own dinner table. It's an incredible turn of phrase, but it's also one with some socio-political connotations that kind of surprise me. We have the son of the local feudal lord as the hero of this story, when there's absolutely nothing necessitating it not being a common village boy. And, you know, I would expect a certain set of biases to come from Lord Dunsany. So yeah, not sure how conscious and deliberate this was.
The fight goes on and on, for fully three days and three nights. Due to being a hero in a fairy tail-ish story, Leo doesn't collapse of hunger and exhaustion himself in that time. Robocroc, who lacks these narrative provisions, does. It's still a well-described struggle, though. And one that reveals that robocroc does, in fact, have the pragmatism to put neccessity before preference when the going gets rough; by the third day, Leo is having to whack its snout away from frogs and insects to stop it from grabbing any calories and outlasting him. Finally, the big lizard collapses, its bronze heartbeat slowing and quieting like the fading churchbells of a distant funeral.
You know, I'm kind of surprised the author didn't give us more description of robocroc. Just that it's metallic, vaguely crocodile-shaped, and has small beady eyes. Which I guess is enough to coax something cool out of the audience's imagination, but as a very visually-oriented reader I'd have preferred a bit more.
After the beast dies, Leo manages to shove a few nibbles of food from his sack into his mouth before collapsing unconscious beside it. The local villagers find him, and bring him back to help him recover, giving him a hero's reception when he wakes up. Once he's recovered enough, they assist him in dragging the immense crocobot carcass back to his native Allathurion, where they have a forge hot enough to smelt out the spine.
I still feel like the locals should have been able to defeat that monster themselves with a team of 10-15 decent fighters. Eh.
So, they stuff the carcass into a blast furnace and melt away everything besides the spinal cord, made as it is of supertough exotic metal. Come to think of it, is "sacnoth" the name of the material, or the name of the spine, or the prophesised name of the weapon they're going to make from it? Option b makes the least sense. I feel like option a makes the most, but c is also possible. Then, as per the wizard's prophecy, they use one of robocroc's eyes (the only things able to chip sacnoth at all!) to grind the spine down into a sharp, aerodynamic edge, and then set the other in the pommel of the hilt they attach to it. Sacnoth is now a sword,
Also, it's starting to amuse me that everything in this story gets a name whether it needs one or not - from the village to the hero's noncharacter father to the fucking monster spinal column - except for the Allathurion town wizard's. Like the story is suggesting that you aren't supposed to say a wizard's name, or that wizards in this part of the world don't have names. Part of Dunsany's charm is how much completely unneccessary and unelaborated worldbuilding he packs each story with. It makes it feel like each tale is coming from a real folkloric tradition that you wish you had more context for.
Anyway, Leo and his people make the sword out of the monster spine, and he sets off after the source of the hellish nightmares that are slowly sucking the life out of all sentient beings in the region. The fortress that Gaznak set up on Earth is to the west of Allathurion, apparently. Not sure how they figured that out, considering the implication that Gaznak plops his fortress down in a different place each visit, but I guess they did it somehow. Turns out it's just two days' travel through the forest away, though, so I guess it would have been easy enough to find out just by putting out feelers among the elves and forest nomad tribes who were mentioned at the beginning.
...actually, there's possibly an even simplet way they could have triangulated it. The hell-dreams are an issue in Allathurion, but they notably weren't bothering the people in robocroc's territory to the north. Assuming that Gaznak's effect covers a spherical area centered on himself, you could narrow down the location just by sending runners to all the nearby towns and mapping which places are in range and which ones aren't. So yeah, finding him is probably the easiest part of this quest all things considered, at least once you know what you're looking for.
Anyway, two days out through the woods, Leo finds the fortress. I was expecting something abstract and scifi-y, but it's described as a fairly mundane (aside from being impossibly large) Eurofantasy castle. Real megadungeon vibe. Also, the story comes with an illustration.
The whole thing is rising out of a vast, desolate marsh. Whether it was desolate before Gaznak landed his castle here or only became so afterward is anyone's guess.
Also, at the end of the castle's description, there's this bizarre tidbit:
“And in the wall stood doors like precipices of steel, all studded with boulders of iron, and above every window were terrible gargoyles of stone; and the name of the fortress shone on the wall, writ large in letters of brass: “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth.””
Gaznak has his fortress' one weakness literally stencilled up over the gate, does he?
I'm starting to wonder if that "prophecy" was written by Gaznak himself, and this is all some intricate plot.
Well, if Leo suspects what I suspect based on this very improbable detail, he doesn't show it. He treks across the marsh, letting the robocroc eye embedded in his sword guide him around pitfalls and sinkholes using the late monster's affinity for swampy environments. That was the purpose of setting the eye in the hilt, I guess; adding another feature to the magic item they were crafting to help with the approach. Pretty cool.
So, Leo approaches the helpfully labeled gate. When he comes close to it, the gargoyles mounted on the nearby wall all grin hideously, and then the gargoyles higher up in the turrets do as well, and it causes a chain reaction that effects all the many statued all over the castle. Alarm system, I think? Seems to be a kind of alarm system, and one with intimidation potential as an extra feature.
Also, I mentioned extraneous names and worldbuilding last time, but this paragraph is peak Dunsany:
“Then Leothric advanced towards a door, and it was mightier than the marble quarry, Sacremona, from which of old men cut enormous slabs to build the Abbey of the Holy Tears. Day after day they wrenched out the very ribs of the hill until the Abbey was builded, and it was more beautiful than anything in stone. Then the priests blessed Sacremona, and it had rest, and no more stone was ever taken from it to build the houses of men. And the hill stood looking southwards lonely in the sunlight, defaced by that mighty scar. So vast was the door of steel. And the name of the door was The Porte Resonant, the Way of Egress for War.”
Forget that the door of the villain's castle has its own name that the story thinks we need to know about; that's small potatoes compared to the marble quarry anecdote. It's the entire middle of a paragraph right in the middle of the story going on this completely irrelevant tangent about something on the other side of the damned planet, and afterward the story just continues like nothing happened. Odds are that neither the quarry of Sacremona nor the Abbey of Holy Tears will ever be mentioned again in this or any other story. How much detail Dunsany actually came up with for the world of each of his (many) stories, I really couldn't say, but the way he wrote gave the impression that he had a fifty page mental lore bible for every single one of them.
Dude was kind of insane, but not in the bad way.
Leo goes up to the steel gate, and starts hitting it with Sacnoth. The supermetal that the robocroc's spine was made of is strong enough to cut through solid steel, and he slowly but surely slices his way through like a vegetable grater making its way through a potato. As he carves through it, the many dragons inside of the castle all begin roaring and howling like a dog barking at the mailman. And then this happens:
“And when the baying of the remotest dragon had faintly joined in the tumult, a window opened far up among the clouds below the twilit gables, and a woman screamed, and far away in Hell her father heard her and knew that her doom was come.”
Does Gaznak have Satan's daughter as a houseguest? Or, just a woman whose father is a dead sinner? Or...is Gaznak already dead, and it's been his own daughter running things ever since, with him being the one in hell (thus explaining the nature of the dreams)? Or is this just another random detail that's never going to come up again? I can't even assess the probabilities here.
Leo finishes peeling a hole through the steel gate and shimmies in through it into the entrance hall. There's an elephant in the hall that runs away, startled, upon his entrance. I guess Gaznak and/or his daughter has a pet elephant? That's pretty kawaii, ngl. It leaves, and in its wake Leo hears a chorus of bells growing closer. Eventually the side-gates of the hall open, and a team of armed soldiers riding camels enter. They're described as human soldiers, interestingly, which means that either Gaznak has a whole crew of human cultists living on his comet with him, or he just recruited them locally after his most recent landing. Or they might only look human, that's also possible. Anyway, they tell him that they're here to bring him to Gaznak, and that he's free to ask them for any details he wants to know about how Gaznak plans to kill him as they escort him. Leo is unfazed.
He tells them that he's here to kill Gaznak, which just makes them laugh so hard it momentarily wakes up the vampires sleeping up in the vaulting ceiling. Oh my god this actually is a DnD megadungeon. They then (the soldiers, that is, not the vampires who presumably went back to an irritable sleep awaiting sundown) tell Leo that Gaznak can't be hurt by anything short of Sacnoth, and that he wears a suit of armor that can't even be damaged by that. Is that armor made from crocobot spine metal too? Maybe it is. He also, according to the guards, has a very powerful magic sword of his own, in addition to whatever offensive spells he feels like casting. In any case, Gaznak really needs to learn about infosec; letting anyone and everyone know about his strengths and weaknesses is a bad policy for a guy who makes this many enemies.
Then Leo tells them that he has Sacnoth right here, and holds it up. The camel riders flee immediately, knowing that mooks like themselves aren't going to meaningfully impede someone armed with Sacnoth. After kind of standing there awkwardly for a while trying to decide what to do next, Leo takes the big staircase that rises up into the ceiling in the middle of the hall. I guess the vampires are fast asleep again by now, because they don't do anything to him as he climbs passed them. He wanders around the second floor for a while, and eventually finds himself in a room full of smooth, lightweight ropes going from floor to ceiling. I'll bet it's going to be spidersilk or something. Leo can see that the hall continues for a long way, so he walks around the ropes and presses on. The strands get denser and denser, and soon he has to cut them in half in order to fit through. He cleaves through a dense forest of silky ropes, and eventually the spider gets mad and comes to deal with him.
Lol, of course it was spidersilk. Don't give me any credit for calling that.
I wonder if Howard was inspired by this story specifically when he wrote "The Tower of the Elephant." Ground floor combat encounter with human guards, then climb up and fight a web-spinning giant spider. It's a pretty striking commonality, heh.
Well, there's at least once difference here in that Lord Dunsany's spider can talk. And has a humanoid face hidden behind its pedipalps. And worships Satan.
““Who are you that spoil the labour of years all done to the honour of Satan?””
That hall of threads was apparently a monument to Lucifer Morningstar. Or, perhaps, all spiderwebs are woven in honor of Satan, and it's only the fact that most spiders can't talk that prevents them from telling us this. I think that's canon.
So, Leo politely answers the spider's question and identifies himself by name. When it starts preparing a silken noose to hang him with, he holds up Sacnoth and tells the arachnid what it is. The satanist spider leaps back and hides on the ceiling, grumbling under its breath as Leo moves on passed.
I was going to say that an insanely sharp sword isn't neccessarily an "I win" button, but then it occurred to me that part of Sacnoth's power might come from what it says about the person holding it. Specifically, it says "this guy outfought a man-eating robocroc for three days and three nights without taking a moment's rest." Just the off-chance that the guy weilding it is also the guy who harvested materials, it's probably best to avoid picking a fight with him unless you actually think you're a bad enough dude. Which neither the camel riders nor the spider thought that they were.
At the end of Arachnid LeVay's hallway, Leo carves through another steel door and emerges into a feasthall. There's a long table of noblemen and women chatting, dining, and drinking, along with a small army of footmen standing guard. The text describes "queens and princes," but I'm not sure how or why Gaznak would have a bunch of royal guests, much less how this would be done without the nearby villagers knowing anything about it. Maybe these are aristocrats of the comet-people? Like, there's a whole civilization tumbling around up there, and Gaznak is a lynchpin of their high society? Maybe? Leo tries to slip through without calling attention to himself, but one of the princes notices him, and gives the order to one of the footmen to take him out of the dinner party's sight and sound and kill him. The footman tells a few other footmen, who tell a few other footmen, who tell a few other footmen, so that the whole column is slowly alerted. They interdict Leo before he can finish crossing the feasthall, but once again they think twice when he shows off his sword. The people in the front panic and scream about Sacnoth, and the people behind them hear them scream that and start doing the same, and the whole mob of nobles and bodyguards chaotically stampedes its way out of the room, leaving Leo a clear passage.
This *has* to be a Take That at Dunsany's own social class. Anyway, it's kinda funny, but mostly it just drags. I'd call it the least entertaining part of the story so far, overall.
Leo moves on to the next room, and then hears hauntingly beautiful music from deeper into the castle. He was apparently told (by someone, sometime. I'm guessing the town wizard at the beginning, but it wasn't mentioned) that Gaznak enjoys music while he sleeps, and sure enough it's getting to be late evening by now. So, Leo heads for the source of the music, hoping to catch the final boss in his pajamas instead of his indestructible superarmor. The next encounter he stumbles into is a room full of extremely hot girls who tell him that they'd be reeeeeaaally grateful if a brave warrior with a good weapon were to stay with them here and protect them from the scary monsters that roam the rest of the castle. Leo isn't inclined to buy this even before he notices the flaming coals gleaming out from behind their pupils and concludes that, well:
He gruffly tells them that he's got Sacnoth and he's here to stab Gaznak with it. In response, they scream and hiss and their eyes go dark as they recoil back from him.
There's also one line where Leo infers that they are the animated dreams of Gaznak himself. Which implies that some or all of the other creatures he's run into so far might also be Gaznak's dream-constructs. Well, to be fair, we knew that Gaznak had dream powers before we knew literally anything else about him, so this is a logical (if absurdly powerful) extension of his moveset. How many actual independent beings are there in this castle, I wonder?
Also, and of more tactical significance: can Gaznak see and hear through these constructs? Can he consciously control them? If so, this game just got significantly harder.
The music leads him to another locked door. Leo cuts through it, and Dunsany drops acid.
“Outside he felt the night air on his face, and found that he stood upon a narrow way between two abysses. To left and right of him, as far as he could see, the walls of the fortress ended in a profound precipice, though the roof still stretched above him; and before him lay the two abysses full of stars, for they cut their way through the whole Earth and revealed the under sky; and threading its course between them went the way, and it sloped upward and its sides were sheer. And beyond the abysses, where the way led up to the farther chambers of the fortress, Leothric heard the musicians playing their magical tune. So he stepped on to the way, which was scarcely a stride in width, and moved along it holding Sacnoth naked. And to and fro beneath him in each abyss whirred the wings of vampires passing up and down, all giving praise to Satan as they flew. Presently he perceived the dragon Thok lying upon the way, pretending to sleep, and his tail hung down into one of the abysses.”
I'm pretty sure I'm NOT visualizing this correctly, but I'm also not sure how many readers ever have. Also, the vampires are awake now! And praying! To Satan!
When Leo gets close to Thok (whose name I don't think Leo himself is supposed to know, but is still being relayed to us by the narrative), the dragon stops pretending to be asleep and charges him. Too bad it went for close quarters instead of breathing fire from afar, because Leo wins initiative and bisects its head with one stroke. Thok's thrashing body falls off the lunge and tumbles away into the starfield below. The second dragon that had been about to charge, Thok's brother Lunk, sees what just happened to his bro and decides that discretion is the better part of valor.
I will say, regardless of whether or not these creatures are actual living organisms or just dream-constructs, they have a lot more common sense than most evil henchmen.
Also, are those vampires just for decoration or something? They've been hanging around in several rooms now, but they have yet to react to our hero's presence in any way, shape, or form.
Leo crosses the wtf space pit, and finds that the opposite wall opens up with a sort of Greek style colonnade. A HUGE colunnade. Like, each pillar is taller and thicker than a Sequoya, and the space beyond is nearly as large as the outer space room he just crossed. Here, he is confronted by the third and final dragon of the gauntlet; a not-very-smart, but extremely dangerous, beast by the name of Wong Bagerok. This is apparently Gaznak's favourite pet, fed with morsels of well-cooked human from the dark lord's own plate. I guess Gaznak eats humans physically as well as mentally, then. Or, perhaps, everything - dragon, meat, and all - is just Gaznak's own dreams given life.
In which case, it's a fairly pointed metaphor. If Gaznak's ability to bring his dreams to life is powered by the energy he sucks out of human dreamers, then the "dragons fed by human flesh" thing is thematically correct. Everything he creates is built with the energy of minds he consumes.
Wong Bagerok might be dull-witted, but he's also significantly larger than the previous dragons, with a more armored, almost insectoid, physique. He also, though not smart in a general sense, is fairly cunning when it comes to combat. His opening move is to feint Leo with bite, while meanwhile bringing his scorpion-like tail around behind him outside his field of vision. Fortunately, Leo can see through the eyeball planted in Sacnoth's hilt, and is also smart enough to realize that cutting off the stinger wouldn't stop the severed tip from impaling him through the skull, so he cleverly knocks it away with the flat of his blade instead. With Wong Bagerok's opening gambit foiled, a prolonged duel ensues. Not as prolonged as the three day slog against robocroc, but still prolonged. Wong's multitude of natural weapons let him keep Leo on the defensive for a while, but eventually Leo manages to sidestep a tail strike in a way that lets him cut it off without hitting himself with any shrapnel. Once the dragon is down one weapon, Leo is able to close the distance and hit a vital spot. Dragon number three is down. Leo proceeds through the big gate that it entered the oversized arena through, still following the music (which now sounds very close by).
Finally, he moves down a hallway with giant chiming bells hanging overhead and arrives in Gaznak's bedroom. You know, I think Gaznak might always be asleep, or at least for as long as he's doing his thing on Earth. It's a big courtroom with a holographic moon hovering overhead to flood the place with soft white light. Gaznak DOES sleep in his indestructible space titanium armor, it turns out, so I guess so much for that bit of optimism. Standing around him are a group of musicians lulling him with their songs as he slumbers. And, just as I predicted, there's a vortex of dream-energy flickering behind the bed, from whence images of gargoyles, cloud-high towers, batlike vampires, and other familiar art assets flicker out to add themselves to the rest of the castle.
So that's how he builds this castle for himself whenever he lands on Earth. He just dreams it into existence. I wonder...is the comet he spends the rest of his time on ALSO a dream-construct? Does Gaznak ever even wake up anymore, or has he become a somnambulist zombie monster?
The musicians standing around Gaznak playing their harps and lyres see the intruder, and all start playing the cords of a death curse to strike Leo down with. High level bard spells, go figure. Fortunately, among Sacnoth's many other properties is the power to parry spells as if they were physical objects, so Leo is able to block their song of death with a wide swing of his blade. Seeing that they're up against Sacnoth, the musicians flee. The end of their music causes Gaznak to wake up, for what might be the first time in a very, very long period. The castle notably does NOT vanish into nothingness the instant he opens his eyes, so either part of the castle is actually real, or he can make his constructs stick for at least a little while after he wakes up.
He's also not just an innocent old fool who's been heedlessly causing destruction in his sleep. As soon as he wakes up and sees Leo, he stands to his full height and pulls out his magic sword. Surprisingly, Gaznak's sword doesn't have a name; it's just referred to as "the sword of Gaznak." It's also said to be the second most powerful sword in the world after Sacnoth. Gaznak approaches his challenger with a sardonic smile, even though he's already dreamed of his impending doom (hmm, so he has at least SOME sensory input from his constructs even if it's not totally coherent). The fight begins! Gaznak's sword doesn't have quite the lightsabre bullshit cutting ability that Sacnoth does, but it IS much sharper than a normal sword, and with each blow he chips away more at Leo's armor. It's also able to at least parry Sacnoth, though it does get some nasty chips and cracks in it from doing so. Meanwhile, Sacnoth is just bouncing off of Gaznak's own armor, zero damage. So, slowly but surely, Gaznak is winning through armor attrition.
Gaznak doesn't have armor on his head, though. Or at least, if he does, its just normal steel, not supermaterials like his body armor. So, naturally, Leo tries to go for the head. However, every time he should have hit it, Gaznak uses his free hand and his apparently very good reflexes to pull his own bearded head off of his neck by its long hair, yoinking it out of the way of Leo's attacks before sticking it back in place. Smirking the entire time.
God, that's so eighties fantasy movie.
Leo's armor is shredded. He's taken glancing blows, and is losing blood. Just before Gaznak can wear him down, he figures out how to do this; the next time he has an opening, he makes a feint at Gaznak's head, but actually slashes right above and to the side of it, where he knows he's about to put his hand to grab himself by the hair. The gauntlets he's wearing aren't Sacnoth-proof, so he loses the hand that he grabs his head with. Which means that his head is dropped to the floor as well. That seems to be enough to break the mystic connection with the body, and Gaznak dies.
The castle, the vast abysses it opened over, the gargoyles and dragons, all vanish into the air as untraceably as the hell-dreams that came crawling into Allathurion from out of the woods. There's a really marvelous turn of phrase here, describing the closing of the space-pits as like the mouth of a storyteller who will never speak again. Very a propo, considering that that's pretty much how Gaznak's magic worked. Gaznak's corpse also appears much older and unhealthier than he looked a moment ago; apparently, his dream magic was also giving him a more youthful appearance.
Dawn breaks. Leo returns to Allathurion, carrying Gaznak's head in hand, to recieve an even bigger hero's welcome than he got after dealing with robocroc. He just took out the world's most powerful evil wizard, after all.
The story's closing passage gives the whole thing a different slant. An almost Inception-esque one.
“This is the tale of the vanquishing of The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth, and of its passing away, as it is told and believed by those who love the mystic days of old.
Others have said, and vainly claim to prove, that a fever came to Allathurion, and went away; and that this same fever drove Leothric into the marshes by night, and made him dream there and act violently with a sword. And others again say that there hath been no town of Allathurion, and that Leothric never lived.”
This framing makes the whole conflict seem like a wizard duel between two storytellers (or perhaps a storytelling duel between two wizards).
Gaznak and the unnamed wizard in Allathurion weaving stories to strike the weaknesses of their opposite number's. Makes you wonder how much of the landscape, the crocodile monster, the hero, etc were only conjured up by the earth wizard in response to the invader. Creating enough drama and narrative weight with the whole Sacnoth thing to impose a weakness to it onto the enemy's dream, to the point of it being stenciled over the castle gate.
...heck, maybe that's why we never learned the Allathurion wizard's name. He's the one telling the victorious narrative, and letting us learn his name would make him vulnerable to other wizard rivals.
As for the bad guy, Inception isn't the only movie I'm thinking about now. I'm also reminded of some of the thoughts I had about Interstella 5555. The predatory artist, sucking creativity out of the environment. Both robbing other, less cynical artists (the hellish dreams that "feed on the minds of men" being a method of siphoning power out of the defending wizard's constructs), and burning out his own imagination and leaving it barren and ugly except for what it can cannibalize.
Hmm. And now I'm kind of thinking about some whacky interpretations of Shakespear's Tempest that I've read; specifically, the proposals that Prospero had to arm-wrestle Sycorax or her heir over control of the island in the backstory, with the implications of it having been a contest of who could reinterpret the magic and spirits in their own favor the best.
Anyway, that's the end. Like I said at the halfway point, EXTREMELY Dunsany. To the point where it's almost less exemplary than it is self-parodying. Like, this is Dunsany squared.
The weird ending with the musing about dreams and reality helped it, I think, as even by Dunsanian standards this one was psychedelic enough to pose a real challenge to investment by the end.
Also, it just occured to me that Sacnoth sounds an awful lot like Sarnath. Lovecraft's dreamlands stories were consciously inspired by Dunsany. I wonder if that name was modified from this specific story?
I feel like there might be some more sociopolitical commentary in here that I'm missing, due to lack of familiarity with Edwardian-era Ireland. Or maybe not; it's hard to tell what's just inspired by the author's favorite myths and fairy tales versus what spoke to him about his real life surroundings. Not that those two things are ever wholly independent themselves, of course.
Anyway, fun romp. I'm almost tempted to actually build Gaznak's castle as a DnD dungeon now. Gonna have to make those vampires a bit more interactive though...
