The Castle of Iron - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

In the wake of the events of The Mathematics of Magic, Harold Shea and his lady love Belphebe of Faerie have married and settled happily into a mundane earthly existence. But after Belphebe disappears at a picnic, Shea is questioned by the police on suspicion of foul play. The authorities also question his work colleagues at the Garaden Institute, Walter Bayard and Vaclav Polacek, and then decide to take in the three of them for further interrogation. At that point the whole group, including police officer Pete Brodsky, are spirited away to another world, that of the Xanadu which is the subject of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. After they have all languished there for a time, Shea and Polacek are pulled away from this world as well and into that represented by Ludovico Ariosto's epic, the Orlando Furioso.

The person responsible for their plight turns out to be Reed Chalmers, aspiring magician and former head of the Garaden Institute, who had accompanied Shea to Faerie in his previous adventure. He had been attempting to retrieve Shea alone, but had erroneously pulled in Belphebe first, and then misplaced his three colleagues and the police officer before at last getting things (nearly) right. Aside, that is, from getting Polacek too and leaving Bayard and Brodsky stranded in Xanadu. Moreover, as Ariosto's epic was a source text for Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Belphebe's mind has become confused, reverting in accord with the setting to that of her Furioso prototype, Belphagor. As a result, she now believes herself a native of the world into which they have been plunged, no longer recognizing Shea as her husband!

Chalmer's goal was to seek Shea's assistance in transforming his own love, the lady Florimel, a human simulacrum magically made of snow, into a real person. It was also to that end that he himself had come to this world, where he is now the guest of the wizard Atlantès de Carena in the latter's marvelous iron castle in northern Spain. The world of the Furioso is based on Carolingian legend, and the Moorish Spain in which the extradimensional travelers find themselves is in the midst of a conflict with the Frankish empire of Charlemagne and his paladins. Somehow they must manage to negotiate their way through the delicate international politics, tiptoe around the treacherous Atlantès, achieve Chalmers' ambitions for Florimel, restore Belphebe's sanity — and survive! Beyond that there are still Bayard and Brodsky to rescue, though those are tasks for later tales...