The King gave him an ill look, saying, “I am thy lord paramount. With subjects it sits not to use this familiar style unto their King.”
Juss answered, “Thou dost thee and thou me. And indeed it were folly in either of us twain to bend knee to t’other, when the lordship of all the earth waiteth on the victor in our great contention. Thou hast been open with me, Witchland, to let me know thou art uneager to strike a field with us. I will be open too, and I will make an offer unto thee, and this it is: that we will depart out of thy country and do no more unpeaceful deeds against thee (till thou provoke us again); and thou, of thy part, of all the land of Demonland shalt give up thy quarrel, and of Pixyland and Impland beside, and shalt yield me up Corsus and Corinius thy servants that I may punish them for the beastly deeds they did in our land whenas we were not there to guard it.”
He ceased, and for a minute they beheld each other in silence. Then the King lifted up his chin and smiled a dreadful smile.
Corinius whispered mockingly in his ear, “Lord, you may lightly give ’em Corsus. That were easy composition, and false coin too methinks.”
“Stand back i’ thy place,” said the King, “and hold thy peace.” And unto Lord Juss he said, “Of all ensuing harm the cause is in thee; for I am now resolved never to put up my sword until of thy bleeding head I may make a football. And now, let the earth be afraid, and Cynthia obscure her shine: no more words but mum. Thunder and blood and night must usurp our parts, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece.”
•••••
That night the King waked late in his chamber in the Iron Tower alone. These three years past he had seldom resorted thither, and then commonly but to bear away some or other of his books to study in his own lodging. His jars and flasks and bottles of blue and green and purple glass wherein he kept his cursed drugs and electuaries of secret composition, his athals and athanors, his crucibles, his horsebellied retorts and alembics and bains-maries, stood arow on shelves coated with dust and hung about with the dull spider’s weavings; the furnace was cold; the glass of the windows was clouded with dirt; the walls were mildewed; the air of the chamber fusty and stagnant. The King was deep in his contemplation, with a big black book open before him on the six-sided reading-stand: the damnablest of all his books, the same which had taught him aforetime what he must do when by the wicked power of enchantment he had wanted but a little to have confounded Demonland and all the lords thereof in death and ruin.
The open page under his hand was of parchment discoloured with age, and the writing on the page was in characters of ancient out-of-fashion crabbedness, heavy and black, and the great initial letters and the illuminated borders were painted and gilded in dark and fiery hues with representations of dreadful faces and forms of serpents and toad-faced men and apes and mantichores and succubi and incubi and obscene representations and figures of unlawful meaning. These were the words of the writing on the page which the King conned over and over, falling again into a deep study betweenwhiles, and then conning these words again of an age-old prophetic writing touching the preordinate destinies of the royal house of Gorice in Carcë:
Soo schel your hous stonde and bee
Unto eternytee