From the Heart of Darkness
Author: David Drake
Date: 1983-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Short Stories; Fantasy
Description: FROM THE HEART OF DARKNESS come no gentle wraiths, no pastel fantasies of bittersweet, seductive evil. This horror slams like a muzzle blast into its victim's awareness, carves its image with razor claws of violence as vivid as graphic as uncensored imagination. This horror comes from the center of the man soul, FROM THE HEART OF DARKNESS.
Publisher: Tor Books

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

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Acknowledgments: The stories contained herein were first published and are copyrighted as follows:

INTRODUCTION, by Karl Edward Wagner, MD

MEN LIKE US
from OMNI; May, 1980

SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE
from F&SF; February, 1975

THE AUTOMATIC RIFLEMAN
from DESTINIES; Fall, 1980

THAN CURSE THE DARKNESS
from NEW TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS; ed Ramsey Campbell; Arkham House, 1980

FIREFIGHT
from FRIGHTS; ed Kirby McCauley; St Martins; 1976

THE RED LEER
from WHISPERS II; ed Stuart Schiff; Doubleday; 1979

THE SHORTEST WAY
from WHISPERS; March, 1974

BEST OF LUCK
from THE YEAR’S BEST HORROR STORIES, SERIES VI; ed Gerald Page; DAW, 1978

DRAGONS’ TEETH

This version differs from both earlier-published versions.

OUT OF AFRICA

Original to this collection

THE DANCER IN THE FLAMES
from WHISPERS; August, 1982

SMOKIE JOE
from MORE DEVIL’S KISSES; ed Linda Lovecraft; Corgi; 1977

CHILDREN OF THE FOREST
from F&SF; November, 1976

BLOOD DEBT
from THE FOURTH MAYFLOWER BOOK OF BLACK MAGIC STORIES; ed Michel Parry; Mayflower, 1976

THE BARROW TROLL
from WHISPERS; December, 1975

THE HUNTING GROUND
from SUPERHORROR; ed Ramsey Campbell; W H Allen, 1976

DEDICATION

To the friends to whom I read the manuscripts:

Karl and Barbara

Bobette and Richard

Glenn and Helen

Sharon and Bob

Bernadette
and especially Jo

INTRODUCTION
BY KARL EDWARD WAGNER

Anyone who has read more than two books is well aware of the exaggerations indulged in by those who write cover blurbs and, yes, even introductions. “A shuddery feast of thrills to chill you to the marrow!” “Be warned! You are about to embark upon a nerve-shredding excursion into the ghoul-haunted nightmares of the psychotic mind!” “These tales will terrify you through a thousand heart-stopping nights of horror!” Exclamation points always go nicely here. So do comparisons. “Not since Edgar Allan Poe!” “In the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft!” “Out-horrifies even Stephen King!”

Forget the typical barrage of strident hype and crescendos of superlatives. Forget the stock characters and tried-and-true plots that have proliferated like junk food franchises throughout the horror genre. Here there be no enchanted castles, endearing dragons, nor darling little elves. Here you are not about to encounter suave vampiric counts, brooding gothic heroines, nor moaning phantoms abroad midst a dark and stormy night. Here you will not find perpetually haunted New England towns, nor menacing children possessed by supernatural forces, nor trendy California couples in soap opera throes of Some Dark Secret.

You are holding a collection of thoroughly vicious, uncompromising horror stories.

For any author, the publication of a volume of his collected short stories is a welcome event—all the more to be cherished owing to the unlikelihood of its occurrence. Flatly stated, publishers do not like short story collections; short story collections, even very good ones, simply do not sell as well as novels, even very bad novels. It is an exceptional short story collection that entices an editor to publish it against very sound misgivings, and it happens that this is a collection of exceptional short stories.

The short story, as is too often lamented, is a vanishing literary form. Again the harsh realities of economics are a major factor. The markets for short fiction have all but disappeared. Where fifty years ago there were literally hundreds of fiction magazines published each month, today the magazine whose contents are primarily fiction is all but extinct. Those few that remain are paying substantially the same rates for fiction as did their forebears. A glance at the most recent market reports for the surviving science fiction and fantasy magazines (two of which were doing business fifty years ago) shows payment rates of three to seven cents a word. Fifty years ago similar magazines paid one to three cents a word. Taking into account inflation, a 7500-word story sold during the Depression paid for a lot more groceries than a same-length story could buy if sold to today’s magazine and anthology markets. On the other hand, a paperback novel, say a science fiction or horror novel, that might have earned a $500 advance thirty years ago, can pull down today an advance from a comfortable five figures to past the million dollar mark.

Any author who can sell novels is wasting his time by writing short fiction. No one wants to publish short fiction; if they do, they pay only peanuts, and when they do, no one wants to read it. A successful author who writes short fiction can only do so for the personal enjoyment it brings him—a sense of satisfaction at having mastered a difficult craft. David Drake is a successful novelist, and these stories are those written by a painstaking craftsman with a lifetime love for the horror story.

David A. Drake was born in Dubuque, Iowa on September 24, 1945. Growing up in that midwestern state, he graduated from the University of Iowa in 1967 with a double major in history and in Latin. Marrying his childhood sweetheart, Joanne Kammiller, the couple honeymooned in Providence, Rhode Island—indulging Drake’s avid interest in horror fiction with a visit to the H. P. Lovecraft collection at Brown University. In autumn of 1967, Drake moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he entered Duke University School of Law. Drafted out of law school, Drake wound up in the Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment, working in military intelligence. After a year stateside at Fort Bliss, Texas, Drake was shipped to Viet Nam, just in time to be sent in with the spearhead of the Cambodian invasion. While Drake insists that the closest he ever came to being under fire was when a spent cal .50 core plopped down beside his tent during a mad minute, he does admit to having been a good listener to the conversations of combat veterans. Returning to North Carolina in January, 1971, Drake graduated from Duke Law School in 1972 and moved to nearby Chapel Hill, where he found employment as deputy town attorney.

As a teenager Drake read and was tremendously impressed by a paperback collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s best horror stories, entitled Cry Horror! Published during a period when Lovecraft’s work was not generally available, this book was a major influence upon the impressionable young minds of more than a few of today’s horror writers. Inspired by this discovery, Drake began writing stories of his own in the Lovecraftian mode. This might have passed as a harmless juvenile phase, except that in 1964 Arkham House published a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake, written by Liverpool’s J. Ramsey Campbell, another 16-year-old kid infatuated with the works of Lovecraft. Reading this book of Lovecraftian pastiches convinced Drake that he could do the same, and he began to make a serious attempt to break into print. Following Campbell’s lead, Drake started submitting stories to August Derleth, editor-publisher of Arkham House, persisting despite Derleth’s caustic rejections. Eventually this persistence paid off. On its third submission, Derleth bought Drake’s short story, “Denkirch”—paying $35 and commenting that the story still wasn’t right and that Drake should compare the published version, as revised by Derleth, with Drake’s own final draft to see how the story should have been written. In 1967 “Denkirch” appeared in the Arkham House anthology, Travellers by Night, and Drake was at last a published author.

The Derleth connection is another point Drake has in common with several of today’s horror writers, most notably Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley. Himself a noteworthy author—and not just in the fantasy genre—Derleth founded Arkham House to showcase and preserve the works of many of this field’s greatest writers. Not content merely to canonize certain authors of the past, Derleth worked to develop new writers—patiently reading their first stumbling efforts, offering criticism and encouragement, and, perhaps, publishing their awkward initial attempts at fiction, and thereby giving the greatest encouragement of all to the neophyte writer.

Drake’s first few sales were all to Derleth, whose rejections always came tempered with sound advice. Gradually Drake broke away from the stultifying influence of Lovecraft, having managed (again in common with many writers at this stage) only in emulating all that was bad in Lovecraft’s prose. Drake’s interests in history and classical languages directed his writing to horrors that lurked in the historical past, whether ancient Egypt or the past century. His consuming interest in ancient Rome resulted in an excellent series of stories about a pair of fourth century adventurers, Vettius and Dama. Drake saw no reason to invent a mythical unhistoried past for such exploits, believing that the dimly known history of past ages holds an abundance of horrors and wonders.

In July of 1971 Derleth bought “Black Iron,” a Vettius and Dama story, from Drake. It was to be the last story Derleth would ever buy, as death cut short his career the following day. Had Derleth lived, it seems very probable that Arkham House in time would have published a collection of Drake’s stories—not Lovecraftian pastiches, for Drake had moved beyond this now, but stories set in the historical past, crafted with loving attention to accuracy of detail. Such obsessive attention to detail was in part Drake’s major failing during this period; he expended all of his energy on historical accuracy, and characterization and plot became inconsequential. For Drake, accuracy and realism were everything, and the addition of a monster or two was all that was needed to transform a didactic exercise into a story. Other editors were not as patient as Derleth, and for a few years it appeared that Drake’s writing career was stillborn.

Determination—and a few good breaks—have carried many a struggling writer through difficult times. Drake got an agent, a newcomer from Minneapolis named Kirby McCauley, who joined several of Drake’s fellow writers in urging him to make use of his Viet Nam experience in his fiction, to write of modern day horrors rather than those from a period with little market clout—to try science fiction, perhaps. Drake reluctantly followed advice, and his career abruptly shifted from that of a promising amateur to full-fledged professional.

A series of fantasy and science fiction stories set in Viet Nam quickly sold to F&SF, Analog, and Galaxy—markets that had previously rejected all of his submissions. Extrapolating the Viet Nam experience into the future and onto other planets, Drake found a ready market for the Hammer’s Slammers cycle of science fiction stories—space opera with realistic gore. Slowly emerging as a name author from the “and others” ranks, Drake now discovered a market for his contemporary horror stories as well as his beloved historical fantasies. In addition to the magazines, Drake’s stories came into increasing demand for anthologies of original fiction, both here and in England. Stuart David Schiff, editor-publisher of the premier fantasy/horror magazine, Whispers, was not merely content with buying some of Drake’s best fiction, and he tapped Drake as his assistant editor. Drake found further involvement with the small press field as a partner in Carcosa, a fantasy/horror limited edition publisher located in Chapel Hill. With the publication in 1979 of his first two books, Hammer’s Slammers and The Dragon Lord, the inevitable conflict of careers came to a head.

Any writer who is serious about his work and who has another career eventually has to make a commitment: either he will write full time as a career, or he will relegate his writing to the status of a sometime hobby. It probably drove the final coffin nails in Drake’s law career that his friends included one writer who had been writing full time for half a century and another writer who had turned his back on a medical career. In summer of 1980 Drake left his position as deputy town attorney and took a job as part-time bus driver—this to pay the bills while he wrote. It was a gamble, but a successful one. In autumn of 1981 Drake drove his last bus and turned to writing on a full-time basis.

An extremely versatile writer, Drake seems as much at ease with his material whether it’s fifth century Britain or today’s cold war espionage or some future colonial war on a distant planet. His writing reflects his many hobbies and interests—firearms, motorcycles, high tech hardware, ancient and modern warfare, dinosaurs, classical history. Drake owns an extensive library of specialized reference works as well as thousands of science fiction and fantasy books. The fact that he is equally enthusiastic over his set of Arkham House books and his complete run of Planet Stories and his collected novels of Sven Hassell is a fair indication of his orientations as a writer. Nor is all his research second hand. Drake is a crack pistol marksman, and his motorcycles include the 108-horsepower Suzuki GS1100E.

His style is straightforward and economical, somewhat unusual in a genre overladen with purple prose, and Drake professes a debt to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. One unfailing trademark of Drake’s writing is that it always is well researched—in point of fact, obsessively accurate in those areas of particular interest and expertise. While Drake has mastered the intricacies of plot and characterization over the course of some fifty published stories and half a dozen books, his overriding concern remains get it right.

Drake’s fiction usually has a very strong impact upon the reader. Some readers find his work extremely unpleasant—enough so to write angry letters to the editor or inveigh against him in reviews. His story, “Smokie Joe,” originally published in the British anthology, More Devil’s Kisses, is partially credited with Scotland Yard’s seizure of the book and jailing of its publisher. On the other hand, two of his stories (“The Red Leer” and “Best of Luck”) have been optioned for television production, and Hammer’s Slammers has attracted enough of a cult following to be adapted by Mayfair into a board game. Readers enamored of lovely unicorns and romantic quests, or who insist upon the inevitable triumph of Good over Evil had best leave Drake’s fiction strictly alone. Drake’s insistence upon accuracy of detail extends to gruesome surety that swordcuts bleed and that bullets make rather nasty holes in things. Depending upon one’s personal philosophy, one might argue that Drake’s determinedly pessimistic attitude toward humanity, separately or as a race, is a further extension of his obsession with realism. Drake is not an author readers are likely to feel neutral toward; either they enjoy his writing, or they react with heartfelt aversion.

From the Heart of Darkness is an excellent introduction to Drake’s work, offering examples of his Vettius and Dama stories, historical pieces, Viet Nam horrors, contemporary nightmares, and bleak visions of the future. It is also an excellent collection of horror stories from an author who has paid his dues. These stories may frighten you and they may turn your stomach, but you are not going to forget them—and that is the hallmark of successful horror fiction.

MEN LIKE US

There was a toad crucified against them at the head of the pass. Decades of cooking in the blue haze from the east had left it withered but incorruptible. It remained, even now that the haze was only a memory. The three travellers squatted down before the talisman and stared back at it.

“The village can’t be far from here,” Smith said at last. “I’ll go down tomorrow.”

Ssu-ma shrugged and argued, “Why waste time? We can all go down together.”

“Time we’ve got,” said Kozinski, playing absently with his ribs as he eyed the toad. “A lot of the stories we’ve been told come from ignorance, from fear. There may be no more truth to this one than to many of the others. We have a duty, but we have a duty as well not to disrupt needlessly. We’ll wait for you and watch.”

Smith chuckled wryly. “What sort of men would there be in the world,” he said, “if it weren’t for men like us?”

All three of them laughed, but no one bothered to finish their old joke.

*   *   *

The trail was steep and narrow. The stream was now bubbling twenty feet below, but in springtime it would fill its sharp gorge with a torrent as cold as the snows that spawned it. Coming down the valley, Smith had a good view of Moseby when he had eased around the last facet of rock above the town. It sprawled in the angle of the creek and the river into which the creek plunged. In a niche across the creek from the houses was a broad stone building, lighted by slit windows at second-story level. Its only entrance was an armored door. The building could have been a prison or a fortress were it not for the power lines running from it, mostly to the smelter at the riverside. A plume of vapor overhung its slate roof.

One of the pair of guards at the door of the powerplant was morosely surveying the opposite side of the gorge for want of anything better to do. He was the first to notice Smith. His jaw dropped. The traveller waved to him. The guard blurted something to his companion and threw a switch beside the door.

What happened then frightened Smith as he thought nothing in the world could frighten him again: an air-raid siren on the roof of the powerplant sounded, rising into a wail that shook echoes from the gorge. Men and women darted into the streets, some of them armed; but Smith did not see the people, these people, and he did not fear anything they could do to him.

Then the traveller’s mind was back in the present, a smile on his face and nothing in his hands but an oak staff worn by the miles of earth and rock it had butted against. He continued down into the village, past the fences and latrines of the nearest of the houses. Men with crossbows met him there, but they did not touch him, only motioned the traveller onward. The rest of the townsfolk gathered in an open area in the center of the town. It separated the detached houses on the east side from the row of flimsier structures built along the river. The latter obviously served as barracks, taverns, and brothels for bargees and smelter workers. The row buildings had no windows facing east, and even their latrines must have been dug on the river side. A few people joined the crowd from them and from the smelter itself, but only a few.

“That’s close enough,” said the foremost of those awaiting the traveller. The local was a big man with a pink scalp. It shone through the long wisps of white hair which he brushed carefully back over it. His jacket and trousers were of wool dyed blue so that it nearly matched the shirt of ancient polyester he wore over it. “Where have you come from?”

“Just about everywhere, one time or another,” Smith answered with an engaging grin. “Dubuque, originally, but that was a long time ago.”

“Don’t play games with the Chief,” hissed a somewhat younger man with a cruel face and a similar uniform. “You came over the mountains; and nobody comes from the Hot Lands.”

Chief of Police, Smith marveled as he connected the title and the shirts now worn as regalia. Aloud he said, “When’s the last time anybody from here walked over the mountains? Ever?”

Bearded faces went hard. The traveller continued, “A hundred years ago, two hundred, it was too hot for you to go anywhere that side of the hills … but not now. Now—maybe I’ll never sire children of my own, but I never needed that, I needed to see the world. And I have done that, friends.”

“Strip him,” the Chief said flatly.

Smith did not wait for the grim-looking men to force him. He shrugged off his pack and handed it to the nearest of the guards armed with crossbows and hand-forged swords. He said, “Gently with it, friend. There’s some of it that’s fragile, and I need it to trade for room and board the next while.” He began to unhook his leather vest.

Six of the men besides the Chief wore the remnants of police uniforms over their jackets. They were all older, not lean warriors like the crossbowmen—but they carried firearms. Five of them had M16 rifles. The anodized finish of the receivers had been polished down to the aluminum by ages of diligent ignorance. The sixth man had a disposable rocket launcher, certain proof that the villagers here had at some time looted an army base—or a guard room.

“Just a boy from the Midwest,” Smith continued pleasantly, pulling out the tails of his woolen shirt. “I wanted to see New York City, can you believe that? But we’ll none of us live forever, will we?”

He laid the shirt, folded from habit, on his vest and began unlacing his boots of caribou leather. “There’s a crater there now, and the waves still glow blue if there’s even an overcast to dim the sun. Your skin prickles.”

The traveller grinned. “You won’t go there, and I won’t go there again; but I’ve seen it, where the observation deck of the World Trade Towers was the closest mortal man got to heaven with his feet on man’s earth.…”

“We’ve heard the stories,” the Chief grunted. He carried a stainless-steel revolver in a holster of more recent vintage.

“Trousers?” Smith asked, cocking an eyebrow at the women in dull-colored dresses.

The Chief nodded curtly. “When a man comes from the Hot Lands, he has no secrets from us,” he said. “Any of us.”

“Well, I might do the same in your case,” the traveller agreed, tugging loose the laces closing the woolen trousers, “but I can tell you there’s little enough truth to the rumors of what walks the wastelands.” He pulled the garment down and stepped out of it.

Smith’s body was wiry, the muscles tight and thickly covered by hair. If he was unusual at all, it was in that he had been circumcized, no longer a common operation in a world that had better uses for a surgeon’s time. Then a woman noticed Smith’s left palm, never hidden but somehow never clearly seen until that moment. She screamed and pointed. Others leveled their weapons, buzzing as a hive does when a bear nears it.

Very carefully, his face as blank as the leather of his pack, Smith held his left hand toward the crowd and spread his fingers. Ridges of gnarled flesh stood out as if they had been paraffin refrozen a moment after being liquified. “Yes, I burned it,” the traveller said evenly, “getting too close to something the—something the Blast was too close to. And it’ll never heal, no … but it hasn’t gotten worse, either, and that was years ago. It’s not the sort of world where I could complain to have lost so little, hey?”

“Put it down,” the Chief said abruptly. Then, to the guard who was searching the pack, “Weapons?”

“Only this,” the guard said, holding up a sling and a dozen dense pebbles fitted to its leather pocket.

“There’s a little folding knife in my pants pocket,” Smith volunteered. “I use it to skin the rabbits I take.”

“Then put your clothes on,” the Chief ordered, and the crowd’s breath eased. “You can stay at the inn, since you’ve truck enough to pay for it—” he nodded toward the careful pile the guard had made of Smith’s trading goods—“and perhaps you can find girls on Front Street to service you as well. There’s none of that east of the Assembly here, I warn you. Before you do anything else, though, you talk to me and the boys in private at the Station.”

The traveller nodded and began dressing without embarrassment.

The Police and their guards escorted Smith silently, acting as if they were still uncertain of his status. Their destination was a two-story building of native stone. It had probably been the Town Hall before the Blast. It was now the Chief’s residence as well as the headquarters of the government. Despite that, the building was far less comfortable than many of the newer structures which had been designed to be heated by stoves and lighted by lamps and windows. In an office whose plywood panelling had been carefully preserved—despite its shoddy gloominess—the governing oligarchs of the town questioned Smith.

They were probing and businesslike. Smith answered honestly and as fully as he could. Weapons caches? Looted by survivors or rotted in the intervening centuries. Food depots? A myth, seeded by memories of supermarkets and brought to flower in the decades of famine and cold which slew ten times as many folk as the Blast had slain directly. Scrap metal for the furnaces? By the millions of tons, but there would be no way to transport if across the mountains … and besides, metals were often hot even at this remove from the Blast.

“All right,” said the Chief at last, shutting the handbook of waxed boards on which he had been making notes. The room had become chilly about the time they had had to light the sooty naphtha lamp. “If we think of more during the night, we can ask in the morning.” His eyes narrowed. “How long are you expecting to stay?”

Smith shrugged. “A few days. I just like to … wander. I really don’t have any desire to do anything else.” He raised his pack by the straps and added, “Can one of you direct me to your inn?”

Carter, the youngest of the six Policemen, stood. He was a blocky man with black hair and a pepper and salt beard. He had conducted much of the questioning himself. “I’ll take him,” he said. Unlike his colleagues, he carried a heavy fighting knife in addition to his automatic rifle. He held the door for Smith.

The night sky was patchy. When the sliver moon was clear, there was more light outside than the bud of naphtha gave within. The pall of steam above the powerplant bulged and waned like the mantle of an octopus. Tiny azure sparks traced the power lines across the bridge and down into the smelter.

Smith thumbed at the plant. “They made light from electricity, you know? Before the Blast. You ever try that?”

His guide looked at his sharply. “Not like they did. Things glow, but they burn up when we can’t keep all the air away from’em. But you’d be smarter not to ask questions, boy. And maybe you’d be smarter to leave here a little sooner than you planned. Not to be unfriendly, but if you talk to us, you’ll talk to others. And we don’t much care for talk about Moseby. It has a way of spreading where it shouldn’t.”

The Policeman turned through an open gate and up a gravelled pathway. Rosy light leaked around the shutters of a large building on the edge of the Assembly. Sound and warm air bloomed into the night when he opened the door. In the mild weather, the anteroom door was open within.

“Carter!” shouted a big man at the bar of the taproom. “Just in time to buy us a round!” Then he saw Smith and blinked, and the dozen or so men of the company grew quieter than the hiss of the fire.

“Friends, I don’t bite,” said Smith with a smile, “but I do drink and I will sleep. If I can come to an agreement with our host here, that is…,” he added, beaming toward the barman.

“Modell’s the name,” said the tall, knob-jointed local. Neither he nor the traveller offered to shake hands, but he returned the other’s smile with a briefer, professional one of his own. “Let’s see what you have to trade.”

The men at the bar made room as Smith ranged his small stock on the mahogany. First the traveller set out an LP record, still sealed in plastic. Modell’s lips moved silently as his finger hovered a millimeter above the title. “What’s a ‘Cher’,” he finally asked.

“The lady’s name,” said Smith. “She pronounced it ‘share’.” Knowing grunts from the men around him chorused the explanation. “You’ve electricity here, I see. Perhaps there’s a phonograph?”

“Naw, and the power’s not trained enough yet anyhow,” said Modell regretfully. His eyes were full of the jacket photograph. “It heats the smelters, is all, and—”

“Modell, you’re supposed to be trading, not running your mouth,” interrupted the Policeman. “Get on with it.”

“Well, if not the record, then—” Smith said.

“I might make you an offer on the picture,” one of the locals broke in.

“I won’t separate them, I’m afraid,” Smith rejoined, “and I won’t have the record where it can’t be used properly. These may be more useful, though I can’t guarantee them after the time they’ve been sitting…,” and he laid a red and green box of .30-30 cartridges on the wood.

“The Chief keeps all the guns in Moseby besides these,” spoke Carter, patting the plastic stock of his M16. “It’ll stay that way. And there’s a righteous plenty of ammunition for them already.”

“Fine, fine,” said Smith, unperturbed, reaching again into his pack. He removed a plastic box which whirred until a tiny green hand reached out of the mechanism to shut itself off. It frightened the onlookers as much as Smith’s own radiation scars had. The traveller thoughtfully hid the toy again in his pack before taking out his final item, a GI compass.

“It always shows North, unless you’re too close to iron,” Smith said as he demonstrated. “You can turn the base to any number of degrees and take a sighting through the slot there … but I’ll want more than a night’s lodging for it.”

“Our tokens’re good up and down the river,” one of the locals suggested, ringing a small brass disk on the bar. It had been struck with a complex pattern of lightning bolts on one side and the number ‘50’ on the other. “You can redeem’em for iron ingots at dockside,” he explained, thumbing toward the river. “’Course, they discount’em the farther away you get.”

“I don’t follow rivers a great deal,” the traveller lied with a smile. “Let’s say that I get room and board—and all I care to drink—for a week…”

The chaffering was good-natured and brief, concluding with three days’ room and board, or—and here Smith nodded toward the stern-faced Carter—so much shorter a time as he actually stayed in the village. In addition, Smith would have all the provisions he requested for his journey and a round for the house now. When Modell took the traveller’s hand, extended to seal the bargain, the whole room cheered. The demands for mugs of the sharp, potent beer drew the innkeeper when he would far rather have pored over his pre-Blast acquisition—marvelous, though of little enough use to him.

Dealing over, Smith carried his mug to one of the stools before the fire. Sausages, dried vegetables, and a pair of lanterns hung from the roof joists. Deer and elk antlers were pegged to the pine panelling all around the room, and above the mantle-piece glowered the skull of a rat larger than a German Shepherd.

“I wonder that a man has the courage to walk alone out there,” suggested a heavy-set local who tamped his pipe with the ball of his thumb, “what with the muties and all.”

Smith chuckled, swigged his beer, and gestured with the mug at the rat skull. “Like that, you mean? But that’s old. The giant rats were nasty enough, I have no doubt; but they weren’t any stronger than the wolves, and they were a good deal stupider. Maybe you’d find a colony now and again in ruins downwind of a Strike … but they’ll not venture far into the light, and the ones that’re left—not many—are nothing that a slingstone or arrow can’t cure if needs be.” He paused and smiled. “Besides, their meat’s sweet enough. I’m told.”

Despite the ruddy fire, the other faces in the circle went pale. Smith’s eyes registered the reaction while his mouth continued to smile. “Now, travellers tell stories, you know,” he said, “and there’s an art to listening to them. There’s little enough to joke about on the trail, so I have to do it here.”

His face went serious for a moment and he added, “But I’ll tell you this and swear to the truth of it: when I was near what may have been Cleveland, I thought I’d caught a mouse rummaging in my pack. And when I fetched it out, it was no bigger than a mouse, and its legs were folded under it so it could hop and scurry the way a mouse can. But its head … there was a horn just there—” the traveller touched the tip of his nose— “and another littler one just behind it. I figure some zoo keeper before the Blast would have called me a liar if I’d told him what his rhinos would breed to, don’t you think?”

He drank deep. The company buzzed at the wonder and the easy fellowship of the man who had seen it.

“Scottie meant the half-men, didn’t you, Scottie?” said a bulky man whose moustache and the beard fringing his mouth were dark with beer. He mimed an extra head with his clenched fist. “Monsters like that in the Hot Lands.”

Smith’s head bobbed sagely against the chorus of grim assent from the other men. “Sure, I know what you mean,” he said. “Two-headed men? Girls with an extra pair of legs coming out of their bellies?”

Sounds of horror and agreement.

“You see,” the traveller went on, “the Blast changed things … but you know as I do that it didn’t change them to be easier for men. There’ve always been children born as … monsters, if you will. Maybe more born nowadays than there were before the Blast; but they were born, and I’ve seen books that were old at the Blast that talk of them. And they don’t live now, my friends. Life everywhere is too hard, and those poor innocents remind folk of the Blast; and who would remember that?”

He looked around the room. The eyes that met his dropped swiftly. “There’s been some born here in Moseby, haven’t there?” Smith asked, his words thrusting like knifeblades and no doubt to them. “Where are they now?”

The man they had called Scottie bit through the reed stem of his pipe. He spluttered and the front legs of his stool clacked on the puncheon floor.

“Say, now, I’m not here to pry,” Smith continued swiftly. “What you do is your own business. For my own part, I’d appreciate another mug of this excellent beer.”

Chairs scraped in agreement as all the men stood, stretched, and moved to the bar. Modell drew beer smoothly, chalking drinks on the board on the back wall—everyone but Smith was a local. The innkeeper even broached a new cask without noticeable delay. Several of the company went out the rear door and returned, lacing their trousers. There was a brief pause as everyone settled back around the fire. Then Scottie swallowed, scowled, and said belligerently, “All right, what about the Changlings?”

“Pardon?” The traveller’s eyes were friendly above the rim of his mug, but there was no comprehension in them.

“Oh, come on!” the local said, flushing in embarrassment. “You know about the Changlings, everybody does. The Blast made them. They were men before, but now they glow blue and change their shapes and walk around like skeletons, all bones!” Scottie lowered his eyes and slurped his beer in the silence. At last he repeated, “Everybody knows.”

Gently, as if the suggestion did not appear as absurd to him as it suddenly did to everyone else in the room, Smith said, “I’ve seen some of the Strike Zones.… I guess I’ve said that. There’s nothing there, friend. The destruction is total, everything. It isn’t likely that anything was created by the Blast.”

“The Blast changed things, we can all agree there,” said Carter unexpectedly. Eyes turned toward the Policeman seated at one corner of the hearth. “Random change,” Carter continued to muse aloud. “That generally’ll mean destruction, yes. But there was a lot of power in the bombs, and a lot of bombs. So much power that … who knows what they could have done?”

Smith looked at the Policeman, raising his eyebrows. He nodded again. “Power, yes. But the chance that the changes, cell by cell, atom by atom, would be … not destructive.… That’s a billion to one against, Mr. Carter.”

“Well, the books say there were billions of men in the world before the Blast,” the Policeman said, spreading the fingers of his left hand, palm upward.

The traveller’s scarred left hand mirrored the Policeman’s. “It’s a wide world,” he said, “as you must know and I surely do.” He drank, smiled again, and said, “You’re familiar with bombs it would seem, friend. I’ve heard talk in my travels that there was a stockpile of bombs in the mountains around here. Do you know that story?”

Carter looked at Smith with an expression that was terrible in its stillness. “Modell,” he said in the silence, “it’s time to throw another log on the fire.” He paused; the innkeeper scurried to do as directed. “And it’s time,” the Policeman continued, “to talk of other things than the Blast. What sort of game do you find in the Hot Lands, for instance?”

“Well, I snare more than I knock on the head with my sling,” Smith began easily, and the room relaxed a little.

They talked and drank late into the night. Smith told of gnarly woods and following miles of trails worn no higher than a hog’s shoulder. The locals replied with tales of their farms in the river bottoms, managed for them by hirelings, and the wealth they drew from shares in the smelter’s profits. Few of them actually did any of the heavy, dangerous work of steel production themselves. Moseby was a feudal state, but its basis was the powerplant rather than land.

When Carter finally left, only Scottie and another local remaining in company with Smith and Modell, the talk grew looser. Finally Scottie wheezed, “They drift in here to Moseby, up the river and down—you’re the first across the mountains, boy, I’ll tell the world. We put’em to work in the fields or the smelter, or they crew the barges for us. But they’re not Moseby, they’re not of the Assembly. It’s us who’ve got the power, under the Chief and the Police, that is. We keep the Light and the—”

Modell touched the line of Scottie’s jaw, silencing him. Scottie’s surprise bloomed into awakened fright. “You’ve had enough tonight, old man,” the innkeeper said. “Pook, you too. Time for you both to get home, and for me to get to bed.”

“And me,” Smith agreed—Modell had already brought out blankets and opened a side bench into a cot. “Though first I’ll take a leak and, say, a walk to settle my head. If you leave the door on the latch?”

Modell nodded dourly. “You’ve been listening to that fool Howes and his talk of the girls across the Assembly. Him with a wife and six children, too! Well, don’t try to bring one back here with you. They should know better, but if one didn’t, it’d be the worse for both of you.” The innkeeper blew out one of the lamps and moved toward the other.

*   *   *

Smith urinated in the open ditch behind the building, letting his eyes readjust to the moonglow. Then he began to walk along the sewer with a deceptive purposelessness. In the shadow of the house nearest the creek he paused, eying the nodding guards across the gorge. The traveller took off his boots. He ducked into the ditch and used its cover to crawl down onto the creek bank.

The rock was steep, but it was limestone and weathered into irregularity enough for Smith’s practiced digits to grip. Smoothly but without haste, the traveller slipped along below the line of sight of the guards at the powerplant. When he reached the bridge trestles he paused again, breathing carefully. His hands examined the nearest of the handsawn oak timbers, tracing it from where it butted into the rock to where it crossed another beam half-way to the stringers. Smith swung onto the trestle and began to negotiate the gorge like an ant in a clump of heavy grass.

Any sounds the traveller might have made were hidden by the creek. Its clatterings beneath echoed in a backdrop one could not easily talk over. That itself was a danger for Smith when he reached the far end of the bridge and would have listened to the guards’ conversation before going on. Carefully, because a crook in the gorge threw most of the spray onto the rocks on this side, Smith edged left toward the west corner of the building. The wall there was built almost to the rim of the gorge. Smith’s clothing matched the color of the wet stone so that his outline was at least blurred for a potential watcher from the village; but lack of alertness on the guards’ part was his real defense.

Smith raised his head. Both guards were nodding in their chairs, crossbows leaning against the doorposts beside them. The traveller swung lithely up. A step later he was hugging the greater concealment of the powerplant’s west wall. The stone hummed.

The building was as massive a construction as anything Smith had seen created after the Blast. The walls were drystone, using the natural layering of limestone and their two-foot thickness to attain an adequate seal without mortar. Their weathered seams made it easy for one of Smith’s strength and condition to mount the fifteen feet of blank wall to the lighted slits just below the roof. The interior was much as the traveller had expected it to be, much as he had seen it before here and there across the face of the world.

Six huge electric motors were ranked below him. They were being used as generators, driven by a complex pattern of shafts and broad leather belts. Only one of them was turning at the moment. When the smelters were working at full capacity and called in turn for the maximum output of the plant, the room would be a bedlam of machines and their attendants. Now a man and a woman, scarcely less somnolent than the guards outside, were sufficient. The light of the naphtha lanterns illuminating the chamber may have exaggerated the attendants’ pallor, but they certainly saw less of the sun than the villagers across the stream did. It was hard to believe that control of this apparatus was left to slaves; yet it was even more unlikely that free men who knew what they were doing would be willing to enter the chamber below.

In the center of the north wall, built against the living rock of the mountainside, was the reactor.

Its genesis was evident, for the black hulls of ten fusion bombs were ranged along the partition wall to the east. Smith, his head framed in the narrow window, licked his lips when he saw the bombs. They would no longer be weapons; the plutonium of their fission cores would have decayed beyond the capacity to form critical mass when compacted. But those cores, taken from their cocoons of lithium hydride and the inner baths of deuterium, could still fuel a reactor.

The latter was an ugly mass of stone blocks, overshadowed by a mantis-like derrick. Steam from the reactor drove the pistons of a crude engine. Unlike the pre-Blast electric motors, the steam engine had been manufactured for its present purpose. Inefficient, it leaked vapor through seams and rope gaskets—but the power to create steam from water was practically inexhaustible on the scale required here.

Manufacturing skill and not theoretical knowledge had frequently been the brake on human progress: da Vinci could design a workable aircraft, but no one for four hundred years could build an engine to drive it. Nuclear power technology was so simple, given the refined fuel and expendable humans to work it, that an age which could not manufacture smokeless powder could nonetheless build a fission plant. All it would have taken was a weapons stockpile and a technician or two from Oak Ridge, vacationing in the mountains at the time of the Blast.

It was what Smith had come to learn.

There was a new sound in the night. A score or more of men were thudding across the bridge to the powerplant. Smith ducked his head beneath the sill of the window. As he did so, the siren on the roof hooted ferally. Knowing that there was no escape downward if he had been seen, the traveller slipped sideways and began to clamber up between a pair of the windows. As his fingers touched the edge of the slates, a voice from below shouted, “There he is!”

Smith gathered himself to swing onto the gently-sloped roof; something tapped his knuckles. He looked up. The muzzle of Carter’s M16 stared back at him. The Policeman smiled over the sights. “I saw something block one of the plant windows,” the local man said. “Thought it might be worth waking the guards for. Now, ‘friend’, you just climb down easy to where the people are waiting, or me and the boys here won’t wait for the ceremony.”

The pair of guards flanking Carter had faces as tense as their cocked crossbows. Smith shook his head ruefully and descended into the waiting manacles.

*   *   *

The siren gave three long cries as the guards marched Smith back across the bridge. Citizens, warned by the initial signal, began walking out of their houses; the men armed, the women bleak as gray steel. They drifted toward the shrouded platform across the long axis of the Assembly from the bridge. None of the citizens seemed to want to be the first to reach the common destination. They dawdled in pairs and trios, turning aside as Smith and his captors passed through them.

The Chief and the remaining Policemen had hurried up the steps to what was clearly a covered altar by the time Smith reached it. Cords fluttered as the canvas roof was gathered within the screen of hoardings built on a base of stone blocks. Something mechanical purred and paused. Sparks hissed about the powerline strung to the platform along a line of low posts on the western edge of the Assembly.

“On up,” Carter said, smiling. He tweaked Smith’s manacles toward the steps. The guards were taking position at the base of the altar, facing out toward the Assembly. Despite the siren calls, there was no sign of life or movement from the smelter and its associated buildings. Their blank walls were no more than a physical reminder of the grip the freeholders of Moseby held on the minds and lives of those who would work in their village. The business tonight was no business of a bargee or a factory hand.

Smith mounted the steps. Two Policemen received him, holding their rifles by the pistolgrips as if they were still functional weapons. Well, perhaps they were.

There were other improbable things in this place.…

The moonlight was shadowed by the flimsy walls. It gave only hints of the enclosed area: the Policemen in their ragged uniforms; two large, vertical cylinders, the one mounted somewhat higher than the other; and, at the front of the platform, a wooden block the height of a man’s knee.

“There,” muttered one of the Policemen, guiding the traveller’s neck onto the block. No force was necessary; Smith was as docile as a babe at its mother’s breast. Carter took a quick lashing from Smith’s right wrist to a staple set for the purpose in the flooring. “If it wasn’t that you know too much,” the Policeman said conversationally, “we’d let you spend the rest of your life inside the plant. But somebody’s who’s travelled as you have, seen what you have … we don’t want to be like Samson, chaining you in the temple so you can bring it down on us, hey?”

“Tie him and we’ll get this over with,” the Chief growled.

Carter unlocked the manacles and bound Smith’s left wrist to another staple. “It was a good idea when they chopped muties here every week,” he said. “It’s a good idea now. The ceremony reminds us all that it’s us against the world and all of us together. I’ll take the axe if you like.”

Smith, facing the wooden panels, could not see the exchange. The air licked his neck and cheek as something passed from hand to hand between the two men. “Drop the walls,” the Chief ordered. “And turn on the Light.”

The pins locking together the corners of the hoardings slipped out. The panels arced down simultaneously in a rush of air and a collective sigh from the Assembly. The purring of an electric motor awoke under the platform, rising and becoming sibilant in the absence of competing sound. A taut drive-belt moaned; then the moan was buried in a sudden crackle and white light played like terror across the upturned faces.

Smith twisted his head. The Policemen stood in a line across the width of the platform. Carter, in the middle, gripped the haft of a fire axe. Its head was still darkened by flecks of red paint. He grinned at the traveller. Behind the rulers of the village glared another burst of lightning between the static generator’s heads: the polished casings of a pair of fusion bombs. No objects could have been more fittingly symbolic of Moseby’s power. The van de Graff generator provided a crude but effective way of converting electricity to light. Its DC motor pulled a belt from which electrons were combed into one bomb casing. The static discharges to the grounded casing were all the more spectacular for being intermittent.

“You still have a chance to save yourselves if you let me go,” said Smith, shouting over the ripping arcs. “There is no punishment too terrible for men who would use atomic power again, but you still have time to flee!”

Carter’s smile broadened, his teeth flickering in light reflected onto his face. He roared, “We dedicate this victim to the power that preserves us all!” and he raised his axe.

“You fool,” the traveller said quietly. He did not try to slide back from the block, even as he watched a multiple discharge strobe the edge of the descending axe. The hungry steel caught him squarely, shearing like a shard of ice through his flesh. His vertebrae popped louder in his ears than the hollow report of the blade against the wood. The axe head quivered, separating all but a finger’s breadth of the traveller’s neck. He blinked at Carter.

The Policeman rocked his blade free. Static discharges sizzled behind him at three-second intervals. Smith felt a line of warmth as his Blast-changed flesh knit together again as the steel withdrew.

Still kneeling, the Changling turned toward the crowd. “People!” he shouted. “Whatever it costs men today, men tomorrow must know that nuclear power is death! Nuclear power made this world what it is. Nuclear power is the one evil that cannot be tolerated, never again! For Man’s sake, for the world’s—”

Screaming, Carter slammed the axe down on the traveller’s temple. The blade bit to the helve. Smith reached up with his right hand, tearing the staple from the flooring. He gripped the wood and it splintered as he drew the axe from where it was lodged in his bone. The Changling stood, his head flowing together like wax in a mold. His left wrist reformed as the rawhide lashing cut through it.

Sparks like shards of sunlight clawed through the high windows of the powerplant. That gush of light died. The siren began to wind, higher and higher. The motor of the van de Graff generator was speeding also, the current that drove it no longer controlled. The arcs were a constant white sheet between the bomb casings. Someone—two figures—crossed the bridge from the powerplant. The blue glow from the building backlighted them.

“Flee!” Smith cried, lifting to the crowd the scarred hand he had thrown up two centuries before to the flare of a hundred megaton bomb. “Flee this abomination before it devours you—as it surely will, as it did the world before this world!”

Carter screamed again and struck with his riflebutt, hurling the Changling off the platform. Smith picked himself up. The guards backed away from him, their eyes wide, their cocked bows advanced as talismans and not threats.

The two figures on the bridge threw back their cloaks. The lapping arcs played across the half of Kozinski’s face and torso that was naked bone. The bare organs pulsed within, and his one eye darted like a black jewel. The Blast had sometimes preserved and had sometimes destroyed; this once it had done both in near equality.

Ssu-ma would have stood out without the artificial lightning. She had the same trim, beautiful figure as the girl she had been the night she stared into the sky above Lop Nor and saw dawn blaze three hours early. Now that figure shone blue, brighter even than the spreading fire that ate through the wall of the powerplant behind her.

The crowd was scattering toward homes and toward the river. No one approached the platform except the two Changlings walking toward their fellow.

The Chief threw up his revolver and snapped it three times, four, and at the fifth attempt an orange flash and the thump of a shot in the open air. Five of the Policemen were triggering their automatic weapons and tugging at the cocking pieces to spill misfired rounds on the platform. But the old guns could still fire. Shots slapped and tore at the night in short bursts that pattered over the flesh of the Changlings like raindrops on thick dust. And still they came, walking toward Smith and the platform.

Incredibly, the anti-tank rocket ignited when the sixth Policeman tugged its lanyard. In ignorance he was holding the tube against his shoulder like a conventional weapon. The back-blast burned away the man’s arm and chest in a ghastly simulacrum of Kozinski’s mutilation. The rocket corkscrewed but chance slammed it into Ssu-ma’s chest. The red blast momentarily covered the Changling’s own fell glow. Her body splattered like the pulp of a grapefruit struck by a maul. Simultaneously, the front wall of the powerplant tore apart, snuffing the arcs dancing madly between the bomb casings.

Then, evident in the sudden darkness, the bits of Ssu-ma’s glowing protoplasm began to draw together like droplets of mercury sliding in the bowl of a spoon. Her head had not been damaged. The waiting eyes smiled up at the platform.

Only Carter still stood before the casings. He had thrust the muzzle of his M16 into his mouth and was trying to fire the weapon with his outstretched finger. The round under the hammer misfired.

The powerplant exploded again, a gout of lava that loosened the hillside beneath it and sprayed the village. Wood and cloth began to burn in a pale imitation of what was happening across the creek. In slagging down, the reactor was fusing the rock and the hulls of the remaining bombs. Plutonium flowed white-hot with its own internal reactions, but it was spread too thin to self-trigger another Blast. The creek roared and boiled away as the rain of rock and metal spewed into it. The vapor that had been a plume over the powerplant was now a shroud to wrap the burning village.

“I hadn’t called you yet,” Smith said, shouting over the tumult as he clasped Kozinski’s hand with his own left hand. He extended his right to the smiling Ssu-ma.

“We heard the siren,” the Ruthenian said, his voice strange for coming from a mouth that was half bone … the half that had been turned away from the Strike which vaporized his infantry company, he had once explained.

“We could all tell they weren’t burning coal, couldn’t we?” Ssu-ma added.

The three travellers began groping through the night, through the smoke and the screaming. “I don’t think we’ve ever checked whether the Oconee plant was still operable,” Smith said. “It’d be a good time to see.”

Kozinski shrugged. “We ought to get back to England some time. It’s been too long since we were there.”

“No, there’s time for that,” Smith argued. “Nobody there is going to build a fission plant as long as there’s one man left to tell what we did when we found the one at Harewell.”

A pair of burning buildings lighted their path, sweeping the air clear with an angry updraft. Kozinski squinted, then reached out his hand to halt Ssu-ma. “Your birthmark,” he said, pointing to the star-shaped blotch beneath the girl’s left breast. “It used to be on the right side.”

She shrugged. “The rocket just now, I suppose.”

Kozinski frowned. “Don’t you see? If we can change at all, we can die some day.”

“Sure,” Smith agreed with a nod. “I’ve got some white hairs on my temples. My hair was solid brown the … when I went to New York.”

“We’ll live as long as the world needs us,” Ssu-ma said quietly, touching each of the men and guiding them onward toward the trail back through the mountains. The steam and the night wrapped them, muffled them. Through it her words came: “After all, what sort of men would there be in the world if it weren’t for men like us?”

And all three of them spoke the final line of the joke, their voices bright with remembered humor: “Men like us!”

SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE

“He was out in the hall just a minute ago, sir,” the pinched-faced WAC said, looking up from her typewriter in irritation. “You can’t mistake his face.”

Capt. Richmond shrugged and walked out of the busy office. Blinking in the dim marble were a dozen confused civilians, bussed in for their pre-induction physicals. No one else was in the hallway. The thick-waisted officer frowned, then thought to open the door of the men’s room. “Sergeant Morzek?” he called.

Glass clinked within one of the closed stalls and a deep voice with a catch in it grumbled, “Yeah, be right with you.” Richmond thought he smelled gin.

“You the other ghoul?” the voice questioned as the stall swung open. Any retort Richmond might have made withered when his eyes took in the cadaverous figure in ill-tailored greens. Platoon sergeant’s chevrons on the sleeves, and below them a longer row of service stripes than the captain remembered having seen before. God, this walking corpse might have served in World War II! Most of the ribbons ranked above the sergeant’s breast pockets were unfamiliar, but Richmond caught the little V for valor winking in the center of a silver star. Even in these medal-happy days in Southeast Asia they didn’t toss many of those around.

The sergeant’s cheeks were hollow, his fingers grotesquely thin where they rested on top of the door or clutched the handles of his zippered AWOL bag. Where no moles squatted, his skin was as white as a convict’s; but the moles were almost everywhere, hands and face, dozens and scores of them, crowding together in welted obscenity.

The sergeant laughed starkly. “Pretty, aren’t I? The docs tell me I got too much sun over there and it gave me runaway warts. Hell, four years is enough time for it to.”

“Umm,” Richmond grunted in embarrassment, edging back into the hall to have something to do. “Well, the car’s in back … if you’re ready, we can see the Lunkowskis.”

“Yeah, Christ,” the sergeant said, “that’s what I came for, to see the Lunkowskis.” He shifted his bag as he followed the captain and it clinked again. Always before, the other man on the notification team had been a stateside officer like Richmond himself. He had heard that a few low-casualty outfits made a habit of letting whoever knew the dead man best accompany the body home, but this was his first actual experience with the practice. He hoped it would be his last.

Threading the green Ford through the heavy traffic of the city center, Richmond said, “I take it Pfc Lunkowski was one of your men?”

“Yeah, Stevie-boy was in my platoon for about three weeks,” Morzek agreed with a chuckle. “Lost six men in that time and he was the last. Six out of twenty-nine, not very damn good, was it?”

“You were under heavy attack?”

“Hell, no, mostly the dinks were letting us alone for a change. We were out in the middle of War Zone C, you know, most Christ-bitten stretch of country you ever saw. No dinks, no trees—they’d all been defoliated. Not a damn thing but dust and each others company.”

“Well, what did happen?” Richmond prompted impatiently. Traffic had thinned somewhat among the blocks of old buildings and he began to look for house numbers.

“Oh, mostly they just died,” Morzek said. He yawned alcoholically. “Stevie, now, he got blown to hell by a grenade.”

Richmond had learned when he was first assigned to notification duty not to dwell on the ways his … missions had died. The possibilities varied from unpleasant to ghastly. He studiously avoided saying anything more to the sergeant beside him until he found the number he wanted. “One-sixteen. This must be the Lunkowskis’.”

Morzek got out on the curb side, looking more skeletal than before in the dappled sunlight. He still held his AWOL bag.

“You can leave that in the car,” Richmond suggested. “I’ll lock up.”

“Naw, I’ll take it in,” the sergeant said as he waited for Richmond to walk around the car. “You know, this is every damn thing I brought from Nam? They didn’t bother to open it at Travis, just asked me what I had in it. ‘A quart of gin,’ I told’em, ‘but I won’t have it long,’ and they waved me through to make my connections. One advantage to this kind of trip.”

A bell chimed far within the house when Richmond pressed the button. It was cooler than he had expected on the pine-shaded porch. Miserable as these high, dark old houses were to heat, the design made a world of sense in the summer.

A light came on inside. The stained glass window left of the door darkened and a latch snicked open. “Please to come in,” invited a soft-voiced figure hidden by the dark oak panel. Morzek grinned inappropriately and led the way into the hall, brightly lighted by an electric chandelier.

“Mr. Lunkowski?” Richmond began to the wispy little man who had admitted them. “We are—”

“But yes, you are here to tell us when Stefan shall come back, are you not?” Lunkowski broke in. “Come into the sitting room, please, Anna and my daughter Rose are there.”

“Ah, Mr. Lunkowski,” Richmond tried to explain as he followed, all too conscious of the sardonic grin on Morzek’s face, “you have been informed by telegram that Pfc Lunkowski was—”

“Was killed, yes,” said the younger of the two red-haired women as she got up from the sofa. “But his body will come back to us soon, will he not? The man on the telephone said…?”

She was gorgeous, Richmond thought, cool and assured, half smiling as her hair cascaded over her left shoulder like a thick copper conduit. Disconcerted as he was by the whole situation, it was a moment before he realized that Sgt. Morzek was saying, “Oh, the coffin’s probably at the airport now, but there’s nothing in it but a hundred and fifty pounds of gravel. Did the telegram tell you what happened to Stevie?”

“Sergeant!” Richmond shouted. “You drunken—”

“Oh, calm down, Captain,” Morzek interrupted bleakly. “The Lunkowskis, they understand. They want to hear the whole story, don’t they?”

“Yes.” There was a touch too much sibilance in the word as it crawled from the older woman, Stefan Lunkowski’s mother. Her hair was too grizzled now to have more than a touch of red in it, enough to rust the tight ringlets clinging to her skull like a helmet of mail. Without quite appreciating its importance, Richmond noticed that Mr. Lunkowski was standing in front of the room’s only door.

With perfect nonchalance, Sgt. Morzek sat down on an overstuffed chair, laying his bag across his knees. “Well,” he said, “there was quite a report on that one. We told them how Stevie was trying to boobytrap a white phosphorous grenade—fix it to go off as soon as some dink pulled the pin instead of four seconds later. And he goofed.”

Mrs. Lunkowski’s breath whistled out very softly. She said nothing. Morzek waited for further reaction before he smiled horribly and added, “He burned. A couple pounds of willie pete going blooie, well … it keeps burning all the way through you. Like I said, the coffin’s full of gravel.”

“My god, Morzek,” the captain whispered. It was not the sergeant’s savage grin that froze him but the icy-eyed silence of the three Lunkowskis.

“The grenade, that was real,” Morzek concluded. “The rest of the report was a lie.”

Rose Lunkowski reseated herself gracefully on a chair in front of the heavily draped windows. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, sergeant?” she said with a thin smile that did not show her teeth. “There is much we would like to know before you are gone.”

“Sure,” Morzek agreed, tracing a mottled forefinger across the pigmented callosities on his face. “Not much to tell. The night after Stevie got assigned to my platoon, the dinks hit us. No big thing. Had one fellow dusted off with brass in his ankle from his machine gun blowing up, that was all. But a burst of AK fire knocked Stevie off his tank right at the start.”

“What’s all this about?” Richmond complained. “If he was killed by rifle fire, why say a grenade—”

“Silence!” The command crackled like heel plates on concrete.

Sgt. Morzek nodded. “Why, thank you, Mr. Lunkowski. You see, the captain there doesn’t know the bullets didn’t hurt Stevie. He told us his flak jacket had stopped them. It couldn’t have and it didn’t. I saw it that night, before he burned it—five holes to stick your fingers through, right over the breast pocket. But Stevie was fine, not a mark on him. Well, Christ, maybe he’d had a bandolier of ammo under the jacket. I had other things to think about.”

Morzek paused to glance around his audience. “All this talk, I could sure use a drink. I killed my bottle back at the Federal Building.”

“You won’t be long,” the girl hissed in reply.

Morzek grinned. “They broke up the squadron, then,” he rasped on, “gave each platoon a sector of War Zone C to cover to stir up the dinks. There’s more life on the moon than there was on the stretch we patrolled. Third night out, one of the gunners died. They flew him back to Saigon for an autopsy but damned if I know what they found. Galloping malaria, we figured.

“Three nights later another guy died. Dawson on three-six … Christ, the names don’t matter. Some time after midnight his track commander woke up, heard him moaning. We got him back to Quan Loi to a hospital, but he never came out of it. The lieutenant thought he got wasp stung on the neck—here, you know?” Morzek touched two fingers to his jugular. “Like he was allergic. Well, it happens.”

“But what about Stefan?” Mrs. Lunkowski asked. “The others do not matter.”

“Yes, finish it quickly, sergeant,” the younger woman said, and this time Richmond did catch the flash of her teeth.

“We had a third death,” Morzek said agreeably, stroking the zipper of his AWOL bag back and forth. “We were all jumpy by then. I doubled the guard, two men awake on every track. Three nights later and nobody in the platoon remembered anything from twenty-four hundred hours till Riggs’ partner blinked at ten of one and found him dead.

“In the morning, one of the boys came to me. He’d seen Stevie slip over to Riggs, he said; but he was zonked out on grass and didn’t think it really had happened until he woke up in the morning and saw Riggs under a poncho. By then, he was scared enough to tell the whole story. Well, we were all jumpy.”

“You killed Stefan.” It was not a question but a flat statement.

“Oh, hell, Lunkowski,” Morzek said absently, “what does it matter who rolled the grenade into his bunk? The story got around and … something had to be done.”

“Knowing what you know, you came here?” Mrs. Lunkowski murmurred liquidly. “You must be mad.”

“Naw, I’m not crazy, I’m just sick.” The sergeant brushed his left hand over his forehead. “Malignant melanoma, the docs told me. Twenty-six years in the goddam army and in another week or two I’d be warted to death.

“Captain,” he added, turning his cancerous face toward Richmond, “you better leave through the window.”

“Neither of you will leave!” snarled Rose Lunkowski as she stepped toward the men.

Morzek lifted a fat gray cylinder from his bag. “Know what this is, honey?” he asked conversationally.

Richmond screamed and leaped for the window. Rose ignored him, slashing her hand out for the phosphorous grenade. Drapery wrapping the captain’s body shielded him from glass and splintered window frame as he pitched out into the yard.

He was still screaming there when the blast of white fire bulged the walls of the house.

THE AUTOMATIC RIFLEMAN*

Coster was waiting for them in the darkened room, hidden by the greater shadow of the couch. His face was as lean and hard-edged as the automatic rifle he held pointed at the door.

“Where’s the goddam light?” Penske muttered. He found the switch, threw it, and froze with his hand halfway down to the knife in his boot.

Davidson bumped into Penske from behind and cursed, her lips twisting into the sneer she kept ready when she was around the short man. “Move your—” she began before she saw why Penske had stopped. Then, without hesitation, she cried, “George, look out!”

“Too late,” said Coster with a bailiff’s smirk and the least motion of the rifle muzzle to bring it to the attention of George Kerr. The black man in suit and tie loomed behind his two companions. His eyes were open and apparently guileless, shuttering a mind that had already realized that the flimsy apartment walls would be no obstacle to rifle bullets. “But we’re all friends here,” Coster went on, his grin broadening.

“Then I suggest we all come in and discuss matters,” said Kerr in a cultured voice, showing his bad front tooth as he spoke. His fingers touched Davidson’s right elbow and halted the stealthy motion of her hand toward her open purse.

“Sure,” said Coster, nodding, “but stay bunched in that corner, if you will.” His head and not the rifle twitched a direction. “Until you’re convinced of my good intentions, you’ll be tempted to—put yourselves in danger. We don’t want that.”

“Who the hell are you?” Penske demanded, shuffling sideways as directed. An angry flush turned his face almost as dark as that of Kerr beside him.

“My name’s Coster,” the rifleman said. “Agfield told me where I’d find you.”

Davidson whirled angrily toward Kerr. “I told you not to trust that bastard!” she said. “Somebody ought to take one of his basketballs and stuff it—”

“Dee, that’s enough,” the big man said, his eyes still on the rifleman. He had closed the hall door softly behind him. Nothing in his manner called attention to the pistol holstered in the small of his back.

“He said you could use a rifleman for what you had in mind,” Coster amplified. “We’re what you need.”

“We?” asked Penske tautly. The muscles beneath his leather jacket were as rigid as the bones to which they were anchored, for he recognized even better than the others the menace of the weapon which covered them.

“Me,” said Coster, “and him.” His left forefinger tapped the gunbarrel where it projected from its wooden shroud. His right hand stayed firm on the rifle’s angled handgrip, finger ready on the trigger.

Calmly, Kerr said, “Agfield doesn’t know what we have in mind.” His right hand was now loose at his side, no longer restraining Davidson.

“Sure he does,” said the rifleman, flashing his tight-lipped grin again. “Kawanishi, the Japanese Prime Minister. And I’m here to make sure you get him.”

For a moment, no one even breathed. Coster leaned forward, his right elbow still gripping the gunstock to his ribs. He said earnestly, “Look, if I were the police, would I be talking to you? The whole World Proletarian Caucus is right here, right in front of … us. And if it was trials, convictions, they were after—the evidence is on you, or at least outside in your car. You blew away a teller in La Prensa, and you’ve still got the gun, don’t you? And the one that killed that little girl in Mason City?”

Davidson mumbled a curse and looked hot-eyed at Penske.

“But we’re friends,” Coster repeated. Very deliberately, he rotated the automatic rifle so that its muzzle brake pointed at the ceiling. The rubber butt rested on his thigh.

“Friends,” said Kerr. “Then we should get comfortable.” He took off his suit coat and turned, as deliberate as Coster, to drape it over the back of a chair. The grip of the big Colt was a square black silhouette against his light shirt.

Everyone eased a little. Coster laid the rifle across his knees, one hand still caressing the receiver of the weapon. Davidson and Penske both lit cigarettes, the latter by flicking the head of a kitchen match with his thumbnail. He tossed the wooden sliver toward a wastebasket. It missed, but he ignored it as it continued to smoulder on the cheap carpet.

Kerr took one of the straight chairs from the kitchen-dinette and sat backwards on it, facing in toward the living room and Coster. The pistol did not gouge at him that way. “Penske, why don’t you bring things in from the van,” he said.

The short man glowered, but his expression suddenly cleared and he walked to the door. “I’ll knock when I want you to open,” he said as he left the room.

Davidson moved over beside Kerr, her fingertips brushing the point of his shoulder. “You sound very confident about your ability to use that gun,” the big man said with a gesture toward the oddly-shaped rifle. “But I don’t know that I’d care to make plans based on something … suppositious.”

Coster’s tongue clicked in amusement. “Do you want references? Somebody who saw us put away Kennedy? Or King?”

Davidson snorted a puff of smoke. “You don’t look like a fool,” Kerr said.

“I’m not—not any longer,” the rifleman replied. He shook his head as if to clear something from his hair. He went on, “What we’ve done doesn’t matter. You won’t believe me, and it doesn’t matter. But if you have some place for a demonstration, we’ll—demonstrate.”

Kerr nodded. “That would be best,” he said neutrally.

Coster suddenly turned and lowered the rifle again toward the door. “Speaking of fools,” he said, “your Mr Penske—”

There was no knock. The door slammed back. “All right you—” Penske shouted before he realized that the fat muzzle of the automatic rifle was centered on his breastbone. The swarthy man held a carbine waist high, his left hand locked on the curving 30-round magazine.

Obviously furious but with no more sound than his chair made clattering on the floor, Kerr strode toward the disconcerted Penske. With his left hand the black gripped the carbine and tugged the smaller man back within the room. Then his right hand slapped Penske’s head against the wall. He stepped away, holding the carbine muzzle-down. “And if you’d used it, you damned fool?” the big man demanded. “If you’d brought the police down on us here, what chance would our plans have had then? What chance?”

“You didn’t have to hit me,” Penske said, not quite meeting Kerr’s eyes.

Contemptuously, the black unloaded the carbine, tossing the magazine onto a stuffed chair and ejecting the round in the chamber. It winked against the carpet. “Get the things out of the van,” he said.

*   *   *

Kerr had rented the furnished apartment a month before, but that was as far as preparations had gone. The can-opener beside the sink was broken and Penske, grumbling, had to hack their dinners open with his heavy-bladed dagger.

“If you were a real Green Beret, you could bite the lids off,” Davidson gibed.

“Shut the hell up!” the short man snarled. He caught Coster eying him as the rifleman spread baked beans one-handed on a slice of bread. “I’d a’ made it, no goddam doubt,” Penske said defensively. “Only they had us doing sprints up and down the company street with sand in our packs. Some wise-ass clerk thinks it’s funny to laugh at me. I knocked his teeth out, and the bastard’s goddam lucky they hadn’t issued us ammo. But the goddam government don’t want anybody that’ll really fight, so they busted me out.”

“Makes a good story,” Davidson said. “I think they caught him with his—”

“Dee!” Kerr said.

Penske’s eyes unglazed and he slowly lowered his knife back onto the can of spaghetti. He hammered the hilt down with his palm, splashing the red sauce onto the table.

Despite their hostility, Davidson and Penske settled down to a desultory game of cribbage after dinner. Kerr sat in the living room across from the rifleman. “I don’t play games that you have to score,” the big black said. “When I win, the whole world will know it. When I win, there won’t be any polite Orientals pumping mercury into the sea because poisoning children is cheaper than not. There won’t be any blue-shirted gestapo beating in their brothers’ heads because the bankers say to. There won’t be any more nuclear powerplants pouring out their deadliness for a quarter million years.”

The rifleman smiled. He held a jelly glass he had filled with whiskey and had not diluted. “There won’t be any three-year-olds orphaned in La Prensa because their daddy was too slow emptying his money drawer.”

“What are you here for?” Kerr demanded.

Coster’s free hand played with his rifle. “Now? To kill a Japanese politician in America discussing import quotas.” He swigged his drink.

Kerr leaned forward. “To show the rich that there is justice for the people?” he pressed.

“Human society’s a funny thing,” said the rifleman, staring at the reflection of the overhead light in his whiskey. “Very complex. But if it gets enough little thrusts, all in the same direction … lots of people hate lots of other people anyway. Someday enough people are going to hate enough other people that one of them is going to push the button. Then it all stops.”

Kerr’s lips tightened. “Bad as things are, I don’t believe they’ve come to that pass yet. Nobody would gain by that.”

“Right. Nobody would gain.”

Penske and Davidson were arguing about the count. The dinette was blurry with cigarette smoke. Kerr stared for a moment at the ex-soldier, then said to Coster, “There’ll be bodyguards, you know. Secret Service men.”

“Bodyguards,” Coster snorted. “Like Huey Long had? It was one of his guards who killed him, you know, a bullet ricochetting in the marble hallway. And when King Alexander was killed in Marseilles, the gunman ran right through a line of mounted gendarmes.”

“I suppose you shot him, too?” Kerr said acidly. “Like Kennedy?”

Coster looked at the heavier man with an odd expression. “I wasn’t there,” he said. “That was in 1934. The man who did it used a pistol, yes, but there was an automatic rifle backing him up. If it had been needed.” He finished his drink with a long swallow and said, “A push here, a push there.…”

Kerr stood abruptly. “It’s been a long day for us,” he said. “Now that I’ve stopped seeing pavement, I’ll go to bed. You can carry your things into the smaller bedroom, Coster. Penske fits the couch better, I think.”

Coster nodded. “I don’t have much,” he said, toeing a canvas AWOL bag.

In the dinette, Davidson threw in her hand without a word. She followed Kerr into the larger bedroom, slamming the door behind them.

The rifleman walked over to the table, his weapon muzzle-down in his left hand. He poured a drink and raised it in an ironic salute. “Cheers,” he said to the brooding Penske. He drank and walked into the remaining bedroom without bothering to take his bag.

*   *   *

Penske drove with Davidson on the front seat beside him. Her short hair was dark except at the roots where it was growing in blond. Kerr and Coster looked at each other from side benches in the windowless back of the van.

Over his shoulder Penske said, “Ah, George … the guy who owns the farm, Jesse, I met him when I was at Bragg, see? Could be he won’t be around and he’s not gonna care what we’re shooting, choppers, grenades, whatever. Only maybe you better stay in the back, you know? It’d be better if Jesse didn’t, you know.…”

“Jesse doesn’t like his black brothers, is that it?” Kerr said easily. His face worked and he added, “Don’t have much use fer a nigger ’cept to kick his black butt, that is.”

“Well, George…,” the short man mumbled. “We just needed a place to range in the guns.…”

“That’s all right, it’s no fault of yours,” Kerr said. “Or your friend’s.” He looked over at the rifleman. “You see what they do, splitting natural allies so that they’d rather tear each others’ throats out than both tear at their oppressors. Turning humans into beasts.”

“Humans are beasts, of course,” Coster said without emphasis. “Whether or not Darwin was right, he was convincing on that score. I think that’s why the concept of werebeasts is so much less terrifying today than it was in the Fifteenth Century. We’re all basically convinced that man-beasts are normal reality. Hieronymous Bosch and his constructs of part flesh, part metal … that I don’t think we’ve outgrown. Yet.”

“Is that all injustice means to you?” Davidson asked sharply. “That we’re all beasts, so what? Did you just get out of your flying saucer or something?”

Coster looked at her, his fingers toying with the selector switch below his rifle’s gunsight. “Viewpoint, I suppose,” he said. “But no, I’m human. Funny, I used to wonder what aliens … creatures from space, that is … would look like. I thought they might look just like you and me.” He began to laugh brittlely.

No one in the van spoke again during the remainder of the drive.

After nearly an hour on the road, Penske pulled off on a farm track. A gate stopped the van immediately. The swarthy man jumped down, unhooked the chain, and tugged the sagging frame out of the way. As he got back in and slipped the van into gear, he explained, “Jesse said he’d loop it for me, not run it through the bars.”

Penske pulled up just beyond the arc of the gate. He said to Davidson, “Go hook it shut. We don’t want any a’ the cows to get loose.”

Davidson’s eyes narrowed. “You opened it, you can shut it. Who the hell—”

“Look, bitch!” Penske said, his right hand curled by reflex into a fist, “You’ll shake a leg or you’ll—”

“Penske!” Kerr shouted, thrusting his torso over the seat and forcing the driver back without contact. “What do you think we are, exploiters ourselves who treat women like furniture? Want to try that with me too, is that what you think?”

“George, I…,” Penske began. He shook his head fiercely to hide the tears of frustration. Then he unlatched the door, almost falling out backwards in the process. He closed the gate. It was almost a minute before the short man got back into the van and drove on. There were three more gates in the long track between the highway and the pasture swale in which they finally halted. Penske opened and closed each gate himself without saying anything more.

In wet weather the swale drained into a creek more than three hundred yards from the van. The bank beyond the watercourse was steep but generally grassy. There was a bare patch in line with the axis of the swale. Bits of cardboard and metal there brightened the bullet-gouged bank. Other target material lay in riddled clumps at various distances along the way. There was some scattered cartridge brass, mostly .22 caliber—centerfire empties had been picked up for reloading.

“The boys around here use it a lot,” Penske said in satisfaction as he took cases out of the back of the van.

“The boys,” Davidson snorted. “The Klan’s more like it.”

Penske looked at her without speaking or moving. He had just begun to load a magazine into a carbine. He looked back downrange after a moment.

Davidson swallowed, then bit at a knuckle. “I’ll set some targets up,” she said.

“That’ll take rigging,” Penske said without turning around. “You get the rest a’ the guns loaded. Coster’n me’ll rig the targets.”

“Sure,” she said, and she slid a box of miscellaneous empty containers over to the automatic rifleman.

Coster gripped the box with his left hand and his jutting hip bone. His other hand held the rifle at its balance. “All right,” he said, “where do you want them?”

“I doubt you’ll have to fight off the field mice,” Kerr observed from the van. “You can leave the gun here and save the trouble of carrying it.”

“No trouble,” Coster said. He began walking down the swale.

Penske, carrying an armload of clothesline and plastic milk jugs, trotted along beside the rifleman. “You put a few a’ those at one hundred and two hundred,” he said “Save a lot for the bank across the creek, though, ’cause that’s where it’s really gonna be at. We’ll see if you can handle that thing’r not.”

The smaller man stopped some fifty yards from the van. He dropped his load and pointed. A fence post and a metal engineer stake stood on opposite rims of the swale. “I’m gonna rig a moving target,” he said. “You set up the bottles.”

Both men worked quickly. By the time Coster had returned to the line of the posts, the shorter man joined him unreeling clothesline behind him. “Aw right,” Penske said, wringing his hands with enthusiasm as they strode back to the firing line. “Aw right, now we just see how goddam good you are.”

Coster said nothing.

On a blanket beside the van, Davidson had laid out half a dozen varied long arms. Kerr was still in the vehicle, either in deference to Penske’s request or from a disinclination to be anywhere else. Penske had forgotten his shirt downrange. Sweat streaks trembled along valleys separating ridges of chest muscle. He picked up what looked like an ordinary autoloading rifle and checked its magazine before cradling the weapon in his left arm.

“We let the lady shoot, hey?” Penske said to Coster with a high-lipped grin. “Then you’n me try it.”

The automatic rifleman shrugged.

Davidson passed Penske’s reference with only a scowl. She picked up an M1 carbine and pointed it in the general direction of the nearest bottles. Her grip on the trim little weapon was fierce enough to whiten the skin across the tendons of her hands. She held the gunstock a good quarter inch from her shoulder. The first shot was loud and metallic, startling even to those who were prepared for it.

“You don’t wanna let it scare you,” Penske said, reaching for the carbine.

“Go shove your head up your ass!” Davidson flared, snatching the weapon away with a clear willingness to empty it into the swarthy man. She whirled back to the targets and fired a long, savage volley as fast as she could jerk her trigger finger. When she paused, the muzzle had recoiled up to a 30° angle. None of the men spoke when she glared around fiercely. Squinting along the barrel, Davidson resumed fire more deliberately until the banana magazine was empty. Her brass spun off in flat arcs to the right. Once a puff of dirt halfway to the targets marked a shot. Davidson flung the carbine back onto the blanket and stalked into the van.

Penske started to say something but thought better of it. He grinned at Coster and raised his own rifle. Instead of a shot, there was a ripping five-round burst, the rifle emptying its own magazine as Penske held the trigger back. Dirt spouted around the bottles, though the last three shots had been slung skyward by the recoiling muzzle.

“Thought you had the only automatic rifle here, huh?” the short man crowed. “Converted this myself, same as the one a’ the M1s and the .22 there. Not so special now, are you?”

“You only hit one bottle,” Coster said. His left hand curled around the grip on the rifle’s forearm.

“Only one?” Penske cried in a fury. “A man’s a lot bigger target’n a goddam bottle!”

Metal clicked as Coster’s forefinger slid forward the safety catch in his rifle’s trigger guard. Speech crumbled into the shattering muzzle blasts of the automatic rifle.

Coster ignored the nearest targets. The bottles at 200, then 300, yards disintegrated in pluming earth. The weapon fired in short bursts of two and three rounds, the muzzle recovering momentarily between blasts to snuffle another target. When the bolt locked back on an empty magazine, there was nothing but dust and glass shards at either aiming point.

Coster’s fingers relaxed on the handgrips. He extracted the magazine and began thumbing cartridges into it from a box on the ground. He looked sidelong at Penske.

“We’ll try the moving one, wise guy,” the shorter man said.

Behind them, Kerr had gotten out of the van. “What kind of gun is that?” he asked.

“M14E2,” Penske replied. “The squad automatic version of the standard M14. Has pistolgrips and a straight-line stock. Made goddam few of’em, too, before they switched from the fourteen to the sixteen.” He looked at Coster. “Hey, ain’t that so?”

Coster shrugged and locked home his magazine. Heat waves danced from the tip of the barrel where metal was exposed to the air.

“Well, don’t you even goddam know?” Penske demanded. “How’d you get that rifle, anyway?”

The rifleman looked at him. “You’d better hope you never learn,” he said. “Now, are we going to shoot guns or talk about them?”

“We’ll shoot,” the smaller man said fiercely. “We’ll goddam shoot.” He pointed to the gallon milk jug suspended beside the engineer stake. “One line’s through the handle, the other’s tied to it,” he said. “When I pull this one—” he gestured with the loop of wire-core clothesline in his left hand—“the jug runs to the other post. Don’t sweat, I poured it full a’ dirt so it’ll show if you hit it. If you hit it.”

“Then pull,” Coster said and braced himself. His knuckles were as white as Davidson’s had been. His head, hunched low, looked more like that of a man trying to hide than one aiming.

Penske chuckled. “Won’t hit nothing but air if you’re that scared a’ your weapon,” he said. He tugged two-handed at the line bent around the fencepost. The jug spurted sideways and the first three bullets ripped it. Sandy loam sprayed from the torn plastic in all directions. The impacts spun the jug around its support line and the second burst caught it at the tip of its arc. Dirt flew again and both lines parted. The gun muzzle tracked the flying container, spiked it in the air, and then followed it down the swale, the bullets themselves kicking their target into a semblance of life.

Flying brass had driven Kerr back from where he stood to Coster’s right. Now he massaged his left fist with his right palm, watching the rifleman reload methodically.

“That enough?” Coster asked. Kerr nodded.

Penske had silently begun to gather up the paraphernalia they had brought. Suddenly he stopped, staring at the empty cartridge box he held in his hand. “You reloaded from this,” he said, waving the box in Coster’s face. “Last time.”

“So?” said the rifleman. “You want me to pay you for them?”

“You stupid bastard!” the shorted man blazed. “This was .30-’06 for my Remington there. It won’t fit a goddam M14. You need .308!”

“Then I didn’t use your ammunition after all,” Coster said, backing a step. “I brought my own in my kit, you know.” His foot tapped the AWOL bag gently.

“Let’s see that goddam rifle,” said Penske, lunging forward, and the safety clicked off with the muzzle only six inches from the bridge of his nose.

“Don’t,” said Coster very quietly.

Sullenly, the ex-soldier backed away. “Somebody gimme a hand with this crap,” he said, thrusting weapons back into their cases.

“We aren’t rivals, you know,” Coster said without lowering the M14. “I wasn’t Oswald’s rival either. If you want a man dead and he dies, what else matters?”

“Just shut the hell up, will you?” Davidson burst out unexpectedly.

The three men looked around in surprise. Davidson’s fists were clenched at waist height, her elbows splayed. After a moment Coster said, “All right.” He dropped the muzzle of his rifle and began handing guns back into the van.

*   *   *

A mercury vapor streetlight threw a line of saw teeth through the venetian blinds to the wall above the couch. Penske lay there, fully clothed, watching the whorls which his cigarette smoke etched across the pattern. The apartment was still.

Penske took a last drag on his cigarette. Its yellow-orange glow was momentarily brighter than the blue of the streetlight. He ground the butt out in the dish with the others and the crumpled pack from which they had come. Then Penske swung his feet over the side of the couch and stood, his right hand silently drawing his knife from its sheath in the same motion. He glided across the worn carpet to the door of Coster’s room.

For a moment the swarthy man waited with his ear pressed against the panel. There was no sound within. The door did not have a working latch; its hinges were nearly silent. Penske pulled the door open just enough to slip through into the pitch-dark bedroom. His whole body followed the knife as if he were a serpent and the blade was his questing tongue.

There was a metallic click from the bed, tiny and lethal as a cobra.

“The light switch is on the right,” Coster said quietly. “Better flip it on. Carefully.”

Penske’s hand found the switch. The room was narrow. The bed lay along its axis, the foot of it pointing to the door. The M14 pointed down that same axis. Coster’s index finger was within the trigger guard. The safety catch had clicked as it slid forward. The shorter man stared at the muzzle brake of the automatic rifle. He remembered the way bullets had shredded the earth-filled jug that morning. Now his blood and tissue and splinters of his bones would spray the inside of the door panel.

“Put your knife away,” Coster said.

The shorter man only blinked.

“We’re not here to kill you, Penske,” said the automatic rifleman. His voice was calm, almost wheedling. “Put your knife away and close my door behind you. It’ll all look different tomorrow. Kawanishi will be dead, and you’ll have as much of the credit for it as you want.”

Penske swallowed and began to back through the doorway. The gun muzzle waggled disapproval. “First the knife,” Coster said.

The shorter man hunched over, his eyes on the rifle except for quick dips down to the strait boot sheath. He jabbed the point into the flesh above his ankle the first time he tried. At last he succeeded.

“Fine,” said the rifleman. “You can go now.”

Penske’s face contorted with rage. “You bastard, you gotta sleep sometime!” he said.

Coster smiled like a skull. “Do we?”

The swarthy man slammed the door, turned, and jumped back before he realized that the figure hulking on the arm of the couch was Kerr. “What’re you doing up?” Penske demanded in a husky whisper.

Kerr shrugged. “Let’s go out on the landing,” he said. “Dee’s asleep.” But it was toward the rectangle of light around Coster’s door that he nodded.

The second-floor apartment was served by an outside staircase. Its landing formed a small railed balcony, open to crisp air and the stars of early morning. Kerr waved Penske outside, then followed and swung the door closed behind them. The big man was barefoot, but he wore slacks and a shirt. The latter was unbloused to conceal his pistol.

Penske clenched his joined hands. “He can’t shoot,” he said in a low voice. “Not worth a damn.”

“You could have fooled me, then,” said Kerr. “What I saw this morning was pretty convincing.”

“I tell you he’s afraid of it!” Penske burst out. “The recoil, the noise even—he flinched every time Dee shot, and when he was shooting himself—I swear to god he kept his eyes shut!”

Kerr’s fingers played at flaking paint from the bars of the railing. His complection was richened to a true black in the wash of the street light. “It looked like that to me, too,” he admitted, “but he hit everything he shot at. He couldn’t have done that if—if you were right.”

“Unless that goddam rifle was alive,” said Penske under his breath. He gripped the railing with both hands. His eyes were focused on the cars parked in the lot beneath them.

“Don’t be a fool,” Kerr snapped.

“George, I’ve seen people who can shoot,” Penske said urgently. “That bastard’s not one of’em. Besides, nobody’s that goddam good to shoot like he did off-hand. Nobody human. He got it somewhere, and he trained it up to look like’n M14 and shoot for him. Christ, he don’t even know the difference from one kinda ammo and another. But it don’t matter ’cause he’s trained this—thing—and it’s just like a guard dog.” The little man paused, breathing deeply. “Or a witch cat,” he added.

Kerr’s index finger began to massage the gum above his bad tooth. “That’s nonsense,” he muttered around his hand. He did not look at Penske.

The smaller man touched Kerr’s wrist. “It fits, George,” he said. “It’s the only goddam thing that does. The whole truth an’ nothing but.”

Kerr pursed his lips and said, “If we suppose that … what you say … could be true, does that change anything?”

“It changes—” Penske blurted, but he stopped when Kerr raised his hand. The question had been rhetorical.

“We accepted him as a man with a sophisticated weapon,” the big man continued as if he had not been interrupted. “That’s no less true now than it was. And our need for his weapon is no less real.”

Penske blinked. “Maybe you know what you’re doing. But I don’t like it.”

Kerr patted him on the shoulder. “After tomorrow it won’t matter,” he said. “After this morning, that is. Let’s both get some sleep.”

Coster’s door was dark when the two men re-entered the silent apartment. Everything was peaceful. Penske wondered briefly at what would have happened if instead they had returned determined to kill the automatic rifleman. He took his mind off that thought as he would have taken his hand off a scorpion.

*   *   *

The three men in the back of the van were each expressionless in a different way. Davidson swung to the curb in front of the office building. The street was marked “No Parking” but there was little traffic this early on a Saturday morning. Kerr nodded minusculy. Penske, carrying a Dewar’s carton, scrambled out the back door. Coster followed with a long, flat box stencilled “Ajax Shelving—Light—Adjustable—Efficient”. His right hand reached through a hole in the side of the box, but a casual onlooker would not have noticed that.

The entranceway door was locked. After a moment’s fumbling with the key Kerr had procured, Penske pulled it open. Behind them, the assassins heard the van pull away. It would wait in the lot of a nearby office building until time to pick them up.

The hallways were empty and bright under their banks of fluorescents. Coster stepped toward the elevators but Penske motioned him aside. “We take the fire stairs,” he said. “Get in a elevator’n you got no control. We can’t afford that.”

The stairs were narrow and sterile, gray concrete steps in a dingy yellow well. Penske slipped once as he took two hurrying steps at a time, barking his shins and falling with a clatter on the box he carried. He got up cursing and continued to leap steps, but now he held the liquor carton in his right hand and gripped the square iron rail with his left. At the third floor landing, the little man pulled open the door and peered suspiciously down the hall.

“Clear,” he said, stepping through. He let the door swing closed as Coster grabbed for it. Penske was opening an office with another key when the rifleman joined him. Then they were inside, the hall door closed and the fluorescents in the ceiling flickering into life.

Coster threw down the shelving box and caressed the M14 with both hands. Penske squatted on the carpet as he reassembled the stock and action of his carbine. He sneered, “You shoulda took that down ’steada hauling a goddam box that size around. Or don’t you know how?”

“I don’t take him down,” said Coster. “You handle your end, I’ll handle mine.”

Penske strutted into the inner office. From the letterheads on the desks, the suite was connected in some fashion or other to the university. The swarthy man pushed a swivel chair aside and raised the venetian blinds. “There,” he said, waving. “There’s where the bastards’ll be.”

Coster’s slight smile did not change as he ducked a little to follow Penske’s gesture. The rifleman had not visited the ambush site before. The window looked out on a parking lot, almost empty now, and the back street which formed a one-way pair with the street in front of the building. Beyond the lot and the street was a chainlink fence surrounding the building that sprawled across the whole block. The gates were open, but there was a guardhouse with a sign which read, “Carr Industries—Knitwear Division”.

The name had amused Kerr.

In the paved yard between the gates and the two-story mill were already gathered a score of newsmen and perhaps an equal number of plain-clothes security personnel. Many of the latter carried attache cases and binoculars. They looked bored and uncomfortably warm in their suits.

The phone beside Penske rang. He jumped, waggling his carbine. Coster grinned and lifted the instrument out of its cradle. He offered it to the shorter man. Penske glowered. “Yeah, everything’s goddam fine,” he said. “Just don’t screw up yourself.” He laid the receiver down on the desk instead of hanging up. At the other end of the open line was Kerr in a sidewalk phone booth. The sound of the shots through the telephone was the signal to start the van toward the pick-up point.

Coster swung the lowest window into the room. He pushed the desk further aside and knelt with the rifle muzzle a yard back from the frame. The relative gloom of the office shielded them from the security men who were dutifully sweeping windows and rooftops with their binoculars. Coster grinned in satisfaction. He lowered the automatic rifle and began scanning the crowd left-handed through the glasses Penske had brought.

“Gonna spray the whole load a’ the bastards?” Penske asked. “Supposed to be some big mother from the State Department, too.”

“Nobody dies but Kawanishi,” said Coster. He did not take his eyes from the binoculars. “We’d lose the effect, otherwise.”

Penske grunted. Coster grimaced at him and explained, “If Martin Luther King had been gunned down with thirty whites, there would have been doubt as to just … what we had in mind. It would have been an accident, not an attack—and maybe no cities had burned. American officials can die at, say, a Memorial Day parade. Here, only the Japanese. Only a slant-eyed Nip.” He turned back to the crowd.

The swarthy man stared at the side of Coster’s head. His right hand began a stealthy, not wholly conscious, movement to his boot. As his fingers touched the knife, there was a sharp snap. Penske jumped as he had when the phone rang. The rifle lay across Coster’s lap, its muzzle pointing at Penske. The safety had just clicked off.

The rifleman set the binoculars down between them. “Don’t even think of that,” he said.

Penske’s lips were dry, but he nodded.

There was a bustle around the mill entrance. Uniformed officers had joined the plain-clothes team and were forming a double cordon against the gathering sightseers. Down the cordon and in through the gate drove a city police car with its bar lights flashing, followed by a trio of limousines. The first of the black cars disgorged its load of civilians, both Westerners and Japanese. “Small fry,” mumbled Coster beneath the binoculars.

A security man from the third, open-topped, limousine ran to the rear door of the second big car and opened it. A tall, gray-haired man in a dark suit got out. He nodded and reached a hand back to help his companion.

“Yes…,” Coster breathed. He dropped the glasses and fitted his left hand to the forward grip of the automatic rifle. A stocky man, shorter than the first, straightened and waved to the cameras. Then he hurtled forward, face-first onto a patch of concrete already darkened by the spray of his blood.

The BAM BAM of the two-round burst struck the office like hammerblows. A Daumier print on the wall jarred loose and fell. Coster scrambled back to the outer office. Penske waited a moment, his eardrums still jagged from the punishing muzzle blasts. Three security men were thrusting the Undersecretary of State back into the armored limousine like a sacked quarterback. Cut-down Uzis had come out of the attache cases, but they were useless without targets. A cluster of security men was shouting into walkie-talkies while trying to shield Kawanishi’s body. They were useless too. Kawanishi was beyond human help, his spine shattered by two bullets.

Penske broke for the door, leaving his carbine and the binoculars where they lay. He could replace them in the van. They were too dangerous to be seen carrying now. The stairwell door was still bouncing when the shorter man reached it. Coster was taking the steps two and three at a time, his right hand hugging the rifle to him through the hole in the carton. Penske, unburdened, was only a step behind when the rifleman turned at the second-floor landing, lost his footing on the painted concrete, and slid headlong down the next flight of steps. The crack of his right knee on the first step was louder than contact alone could explain.

Penske paused, staring down at the rifleman. Coster’s face was a sallow green. “Give me a hand,” he wheezed, trying unsuccessfully to rise.

“You’ll never make it with a broken kneecap,” the swarthy man said, more to himself than to the fallen man.

“God damn you!” Coster shouted. He had flung the shielding carton away from the automatic rifle. He aimed the weapon at Penske’s midriff. “Help me!”

The safety clicked on. Both men heard the sound. Coster went a shade still paler and tried to force the slotted bar forward with his index finger. It would not move.

“Sure, I’ll help you,” Penske said softly. He slipped his dagger from its sheath and stepped forward.

*   *   *

The van was waiting at the curb with its rear door ajar. Penske leaped in, thrusting the carton before him. He shouted, “Drive!”

“Wait!” Kerr snapped to Davidson. “Where’s Coster?”

Penske had the automatic rifle out on his lap now. He was feeling a little dizzy. “He fell and I had to leave him,” he said. “Don’t worry—he won’t talk.”

Without further orders, Davidson swung the van out into traffic. Occasional pedestrians were looking around for the source of the sirens they heard, but no one gave the escape vehicle a second glance.

Kerr’s eyes narrowed as he watched the smaller man’s fingers play with the action of the automatic rifle. After a moment he said, “Well, maybe it’s for the best.”

Penske did not reply. His mind was filling with images of men staggering and falling, each scene a separate shard differing in costume and background. Together the images turned smoothly like gear teeth engaging, each a part of a construct as yet incomplete.

“You know, I don’t think I ever got a chance to look at that,” Kerr remarked conversationally. He reached out to take the weapon.

“No!” said Penske, and the automatic rifle swung to cover the black’s chest.

For an instant Kerr thought of drawing his pistol, but the thought passed and the pressure on the trigger of the automatic rifle passed also. “Okay,” the big man said, “so long as you shoot what you’re told to shoot with it.”

Penske was no longer listening. The pattern was now complete. It stretched from a cold world whose remaining energies were all harnessed in a great design, to an Earth without native life forms. Winds whipped sand and nerve gas around badlands carven in past millenia, and the poisoned seas surged against blue-glowing shorelines. But over those landscapes coursed metal creatures who glittered and shifted their forms and raised triumphant cities to the skies.

And in Penske’s mind something clicked. A voice said in no human language, “Yes, this replacement will be quite satisfactory.…”

THAN CURSE THE DARKNESS

“What of unknown Africa?”

—H. P. Lovecraft

The trees of the rain forest lowered huge and black above the village, dwarfing it and the group of men in its center. The man being tied to the whipping post there was gray-skinned and underfed, panting with his struggles but no match for the pair of burly Forest Guards who held him. Ten more Guards, Baenga cannibals from far to the west near the mouth of the Congo, stood by with spears or Albini rifles. They joked and chattered and watched the huts hoping the villagers would burst out to try to free their fellow. Then killing would be all right.…

There was little chance of that. All the men healthy enough to work were in the forest, searching for more trees to slash in a parody of rubber gathering. The Law said that each adult male would bring four kilograms of latex a week to the agents of King Leopold; the Law did not say that the agents would teach the natives how to drain the sap without killing the trees it came from. When the trees died, the villagers would miss their quotas and die themselves, because that too was the Law—though an unwritten one.

There were still many untouched villages further up the river.

“If you cannot learn to be out in the forest working,” said a Baenga who finished knotting the victim to the post with a jerk that itself cut flesh, “we can teach you not to lie down for many weeks.”

The Forest Guards wore no uniforms, but in the Congo Basin their good health and sneering pride marked them more surely than clothing could have. The pair who had tied the victim stepped back, nodding to their companion with the chicotte. That one grinned, twitching the wooden handle to unfurl the ten-foot lash of square-cut hippopotamus hide. He had already measured the distance.

A naked seven-year-old slipped from the nearest hut. The askaris were turned to catch the expression on the victim’s face at the first bite of the chicotte, so they did not see the boy. His father jerked upright at the whipping post and screamed, “Samba!” just as the feathery hiss-crack! of the whip opened an eight-inch cut beneath his shoulder blades.

Samba screamed also. He was small even for a forest child, spindly and monkey-faced. He was monkey quick, too, darting among the Guards as they spun. Before anyone could grab him he had wrapped himself around the waist of the man with the whip.

“Wau!” shouted the Guard in surprise and chopped down with the teak whip handle. The angle was awkward. One of his companions helped with a roundhouse swing of his Albini. The steel butt-plate thudded like a mallet on a tent stake, ripping off the boy’s left ear and deforming the whole side of his skull. It did not tear him loose from the man he held. Two Forest Guards edged closer, holding their spears near the heads so as not to hit their fellow when they thrust.

The whipped man grunted. One of the chuckling riflemen turned in time to see him break away from the post. The rough cord had cut his wrists before it parted. Blood spattered as he took two steps and clubbed his hands against the whip-wielder’s neck. The rifleman shot him through the body.

The Albini bullet was big and slow and had the punch of a medicine ball. The father spun backward and knocked one of the Baengas down with him. Despite the wound he stood again and staggered forward toward Samba. A pink coil of intestine was wagging behind him from the bullet’s exit hole. Both the remaining rifles went off. This time, when the shots had sledged him down, five of the spearmen ran to the body and began stabbing.

The Baenga with the whip got up, leaving Samba on the ground. The boy’s eyes were open and utterly empty. Lt. Trouville stepped over him to shout, “Cease, you idiots!” at the bellowing knot of spearmen. They parted immediately. Trouville wore a waxed moustache and a white linen suit that looked crisp save for the sweat stains under his arms, but the revolver at his belt was not for show. He had once pistoled a Guard who, drunk with arrogance and palm wine, had started to burn a village which was still producing rubber.

Now the slim Belgian stared at the corpse and grimaced. “Idiots,” he repeated to the shame-faced Baengas. “Three bullets to account for, when there was no need at all to fire. Does the Quartermaster charge us for spear-thrusts as well as bullets?”

The askaris looked at the ground, pretending to be solely concerned with the silent huts or with scratching their insect bites. The man with the chicotte coiled it and knelt with his dagger to cut off the dead man’s right ear. A thong around his neck carried a dozen others already, brown and crinkled. They would be turned in at Boma to justify the tally of expended cartridges.

“Take the boy’s too,” Trouville snapped. “He started it, after all. And we’ll still be one short.”

The patrol marched off, subdued in the face of their lieutenant’s wrath. Trouville was muttering, “Like children. No sense at all.” After they were gone, a woman stole from the nearest hut and cradled her son. Both of them moaned softly.

*   *   *

Time passed, and in the forest a drum began to beat.

In London, Dame Alice Kilrea bent over a desk in her library and opened the book a messenger had just brought her from Vienna. Her hair was gathered in a mousy bun from which middle age had stripped all but a hint of auburn. She tugged abstractedly at an escaped lock of it as she turned pages, squinting down her prominent nose.

In the middle of the volume she paused. The German heading gave instructions, stating that the formula there given was a means of separating death from the semblance of life. The remainder of the page and the three that followed it were in phonetic transliteration from a language few scholars would have recognized. Dame Alice did not mouth any of those phrases. A premonition of great trees and a thing greater than the trees shadowed her consciousness as she read silently down the page.

It would be eighteen years before she spoke any part of the formula aloud.

*   *   *

Sergeant Osterman drank palm wine in the shade of a baobab as usual while Baloko oversaw the weighing of the village’s rubber. This time the Baenga had ordered M’fini, the chief, to wait for all the other males to be taken first. There was an ominous silence among the villagers as the wiry old man came forward to the table at which Baloko sat, flanked by his fellow Forest Guards.

“Ho, M’fini,” Baloko said jovially, “what do you bring us?”

Without speaking, the chief handed over his gray-white sheets of latex. They were layered with plantain leaves. Baloko set the rubber on one pan of his scales, watched it easily overbalance the four-kilogram weight in the other pan. Instead of setting the rubber on the pile gathered by the other villagers and paying M’fini in brass wire, Baloko smiled. “Do you remember, M’fini,” the Baenga asked, “what I told you last week when you said to me that your third wife T’sini would never sleep with another man while you lived?”

The chief was trembling. Baloko stood and with his forefinger flicked M’fini’s latex out of the weighing pan to the ground. “Bad rubber,” he said and grinned. “Stones, trash hidden in it to bring it to the weight. An old man like you, M’fini, must spend too much time trying to satisfy your wives when you should be finding rubber for the King.”

“I swear, I swear by the god Iwa who is death,” cried M’fini, on his knees and clutching the flapping bulk of rubber as though it were his firstborn, “it is good rubber, all smooth and clean as milk itself!”

Two of the askaris seized M’fini by the elbows and drew him upright. Baloko stepped around the weighing table, drawing his iron-bladed knife as he did so. “I will help you, M’fini, so that you will have more time to find good rubber for King Leopold.”

Sergeant Osterman ignored the first of the screams, but when they went on and on he swigged down the last of his calabash and sauntered over to the group around the scales. He was a big man, swarthy and scarred across the forehead by a Tuareg lance while serving with the French in Algeria.

Baloko anticipated the question by grinning and pointing to M’fini. The chief writhed on the ground, his eyes screwed shut and both hands clutched to his groin. Blood welling from between his fingers streaked black the dust he thrashed over. “Him big man, bring no-good rubber,” Baloko said. Osterman knew little Bantu, so communication between him and the Guards was generally in pidgin. “Me make him no-good man, bring big rubber now.”

The burly Fleming laughed. Baloko moved closer, nudged him in the ribs. “Him wife T’sini, him no need more,” the Baenga said. “You, me, all along Guards—we make T’sini happy wife, yes?”

Osterman scanned the encircling villagers whom curiosity had forced to watch and fear now kept from dispersing. In the line, a girl staggered and her neighbors edged away quickly as if her touch might be lethal. Her hair was wound high with brass wire in the fashion of a dignitary’s wife, and her body had the slim delight of a willow shoot. Even in the lush heat of the Equator, twelve-year-olds look to be girls rather than women.

Osterman, still chuckling, moved toward T’sini. Baloko was at his side.

*   *   *

Time passed. From deep in the forest came rumblings that were neither of man or of Earth.

In a London study, the bay window was curtained against frost and the gray slush quivering over the streets. The coal fire hissed as Dame Alice Kilrea, fingers tented, dictated to her male amanuensis. Her dress was of good linen but two buttons were missing, unnoticed, from the placket, and the lace front showed signs of lunch bolted in the library.… “and, thanks to your intervention, the curator of the Special Reading Room allowed me to handle Alhazred myself instead of having a steward turn the pages at my request. I opened the volume three times at random and read the passage on which my index finger fell.

“Before, I had been concerned; now I am certain and terrified. All the lots were congruent, referring to aspects of the Messenger.” She looked down at the amanuensis and said, “Capital on ‘Messenger’, John.” He nodded.

“Your support has been of untold help; now my need for it is doubled. Somewhere in the jungles of that dark continent the crawling chaos grows and gathers strength. I am armed against it with the formulas that Spiedel found in the library of Kloster-Neuburg just before his death; but that will do us no good unless they can be applied in time. You know, as I do, that only the most exalted influence will pass me into the zone of disruption at the crucial time. That time may yet be years to come, but they are years of the utmost significance to Mankind. Thus I beg your unstinting support not in my name or that of our kinship, but on behalf of life itself.

“Paragraph, John. As for the rest, I am ready to act as others have acted in the past. Personal risk has ever been the coin paid for knowledge of the truth.”

The amanuensis wrote with quick, firm strokes. He was angry both with himself and with Dame Alice. Her letter had driven out of his mind thoughts of the boy whom he intended to seduce that evening in Kettners. He had known for some time that he would have to find another situation. The problem was not that Dame Alice was mad. All women were mad, after all. But her madness had such an insidious plausibility that he was starting to believe it himself.

As presumably her present correspondent did. And the letter to him would be addressed to, “His Royal Highness.…”

*   *   *

In most places the trees grew down to the water edge, denser for being able to take sunlight from the side as well as from above. The margins of the shallow backwaters spread after each rain into sheets thick with vegetable richness and as black as the skins of those who lived along them. In drier hours there were sand banks and easy expanses on which to trade with the forest folk.

Gomes’ dugout had already slid back into the slough, leaving in the sand the straight gouge of its keel centered in the blur of bare footprints. A score of natives still clustered around Kaminski’s similar craft, fondling his bolts of bright-patterned cloth or chatting with his paddlers. Then the steam ship swung into sight around the wooded headland.

The trees had acted as a perfect muffler for the chuffing engine. With a haste little short of panic, the forest dwellers melted back into concealment. The swarthy Portugese gave an angry order and his crew shipped their paddles. Emptied of its cargo, the dugout drew only a few inches of water and could, had there been enough warning, have slid up among the tree roots where the two-decked steamer could never have followed.

Throttled down to the point its stern wheel made only an occasional slapping, the government craft edged closer to Gomes. On the Upper Kasai it was a battleship, although its beamy twenty-four meters would have aroused little interest in a more civilized part of the world. Awnings protected the hundreds of askaris overburdening the side rails. The captain was European, a blond, soft-looking man in a Belgian army uniform. The only other white man visible was the non-com behind the Hotchkiss swivel-mounted at the bow.

“Messieurs Gomes and Kaminski, perhaps?” called the officer as the steamship swung to, a dozen yards from the canoe. He was smiling, using his fingertips to balance his weight on the starboard bridge rail.

“You know who we are, de Vriny—damn you,” Gomes shot back. “We have our patent to trade and we pay our portion to your Société Cosmpolite. Now leave us!”

“Pay your portion, yes,” de Vriny purred. “Gold dust and gold nuggets. Where do you get such gold, my fine mongrel friends?”

“Carlos, it’s all right,” called Kaminski, standing in his grounded boat. “Don’t become angry—the gentleman is doing his duty to protect trade, that is all.” Beneath the sombrero which he had learned to wear in the American Southwest, sweat was boiling off Kaminski. He knew his friend’s volcanic temper, knew also the reputation of the blond man who was goading them. Not now! Not on the brink of the success that would gain them entree to any society in the world!

“Trade?” Gomes was shouting, “What do they know about trade?” He shook his fist at de Vriny and made the canoe rock nervously, so that the plump Angolan woman he had married a dozen years before put a calming hand on his leg. “You hold a rifle to the head of some poor black, pay him a ha’penny for rubber you sell in Paris for a shilling fourpence. Trade? There would be no gold coming out of this forest if the tribes didn’t trust us and get a fair value for the dust they bring!”

“Well, we’ll have to explore that,” grinned the Belgian. “You see, your patent to trade was issued in error—it seems it was meant for some Gomez who spelled his name with a ‘z’—and I have orders to escort you both back to Boma until the matter can be resolved.”

Gomes’ broad face went saffron. He began to slump like a snow figure on a sunny day. “They couldn’t take away our patent because of a spelling mistake their own clerks made?” he whined, but his words were more of a sick apostrophe than a real question.

The Belgian answered it anyway. “You think not? Don’t you know who appoints the judges of our Congo oh-so-Free State? Not Jews or nigger-wenching Portugees, I assure you.”

Gomes was probably bracing his sagging bulk against the thwart, though he could indeed have been reaching for the Mauser lying across the pack in front of him. Presumably that was what the Baenga thought when he fired the first shot and blew Gomes into the water. Every Forest Guard with a rifle followed in a ragged volley that turned the canoe into a chip dancing on an ornamental fountain. Jets of wood and water and blood spouted upward.

“Christ’s blood, you fools!” de Vriny cried. Then, “Well, get the rest of them too!”

Kaminski screamed and tried to follow his paddlers in a race for the tree line, but he was a corpulant man whose boots punched ankle-deep into the soft sand. The natives had no chance either. The Hotchkiss stuttered, knocking down a pair of them as the gunner checked his range. Then, spewing empty cases that hissed as they bounced into the water, the machine gun hosed bullets across the other running men. Kaminski half turned as the black in front of him pitched forward hemorhaging bright blood from mouth and nose. That desire to see his death coming preserved the trader from it: the bullet that would otherwise have exited through his forehead instead drilled through both upper maxillary bones. Kaminski’s eyes popped out as neatly as oysters into a gourmet’s silver spoon. His body slapped hard enough to ripple the sand in which it came to rest face up.

The firing stopped. Capsized and sinking, Gomes’ shattered dugout was drifting past the bow of the steamer. “I want their packs raised,” de Vriny ordered. “Even if you have to dive for them all day. The same with the packs on shore—then burn the canoes.”

“And the bodies, master?” asked his Baenga headman.

“Faugh,” spat the Belgian. “Why else did the good Lord put crocodiles in this river?”

They did not take Kaminski’s ear because it was white and that would attract comment. Even in Boma.

*   *   *

Time passed. Deep in the forest the ground spurted upward like a grapefruit hit by a rifle bullet. Something thicker than a tree bole surged, caught at a nearby human and flung the body, no longer distinguishable as to sex or race, a quarter mile through the canopy of trees. The earth subsided then, but in places the surface continued to bubble as if made of heated tar.

Five thousand miles away, Dame Alice Kilrea stepped briskly out of her solicitors’ office, having executed her will, and ordered her driver on to the Nord Deutscher-Lloyd Dock. Travelling with her in the carriage was a valise containing one ancient book and a bundle of documents thick with wax, ribbons, and gold foil—those trappings and the royal signatures beneath. On the seat across from her was the American servant she had engaged only the week before as she closed her London house and discharged the remainder of her establishment. The servant, Sparrow, was a weasely man with tanned skin and eyes the frosty color of lead cast in too hot a mold. He said little but glanced around frequently; and his fingers writhed as if with separate life.

*   *   *

Occasionally chance would merge the rhythm of mauls and axes splitting wood in a dozen parts of the forest. Then the thunk-thunk-THUNK would boom out like a beast approaching from the darkness. Around their fire the officers would pause. The Baengas would chuckle at the joke of it and let the pounding die away. Little by little it would reappear at each separate group of woodsmen, finally to repeat its crescendo.

“Like children,” Colonel Trouville said to Dame Alice. The engineer and two sergeants were still aboard the Archiduchesse Stephanie, dining apart from the other whites. Color was not the only measure of class, even in the Congo Basin. “They’ll be cutting wood—and drinking their malafou, wretched stuff, to call it palm wine is to insult the word ‘wine’—they’ll be at it almost till dawn. After a time you’ll get used to it. There’s nothing, really, to be done, since we can only carry a day’s supply of fuel on the steamer. While they of course could find and cut enough dry wood by a reasonable hour each night, when one is dealing with the native ‘mind’.…”

De Vriny and Osterman joined in their Colonel’s deprecating laughter. Dame Alice managed only a pre-occupied smile. During the day, steaming upriver from the Stanley Pool, she had stared at the terrain in which her battle would be joined: heavy forest, here mostly a narrow belt fringing the watercourse but later to become a sprawling, barely-penetrable expanse. The trees climbed to the edge of the water and mushroomed over the banks. Dame Alice could imagine that where the stream was less than the Congo’s present mile breadth the branches would meet above in laced blackness.

Now at night, blackness was complete even on the lower river. It chilled her soul. The equatorial sunset was not a curtain of ever-thickening gauze but a knifeblade that separated the hemispheres. On this side was death, and neither the laughter of the Baenga askaris nor the goblets of Portugese wine being drunk around Trouville’s campfire could change that.

Captain de Vriny swigged and eyed the circle. He was a man of middle height with the roundedness of a bear, a seeming softness which tended to mask the cruelty beneath. Across from him, Sparrow dragged on the cigarette he had rolled and lit his face orange. The captain smiled. Only because his mistress, the mad noblewoman, had demanded it did Sparrow sit with the officers. He wore a cheap blue-cotton shirt, buttoned at the cuffs, and denim trousers held up by suspenders. Short and narrow-chested, Sparrow would have looked foolish even without the waist belt and the pair of huge double-action revolvers hanging from it.

Dame Alice was unarmed by contrast. Like the men she wore trousers, hers tucked into low-heeled boots. De Vriny looked at her and, shaping his mocking smile into an expression of friendly interest, said, “It surprises me, Dame Alice, that a woman as well born and, I am sure, delicate as yourself would want to accompany an expedition against some of the most vicious sub-men on the globe.”

Dame Alice lifted the faintly bulbous tip of her nose and said, “It’s no matter of wanting, Captain.” She eyed de Vriny with mild distaste. “I don’t suppose you want to come yourself—unless you like to shoot niggers for lack of better sport? One does unpleasant things because someone must. One has a duty.”

“What the Captain is suggesting,” put in Trouville, “is that there are no lines of battle fixed in this jungle. A spearman may step from around the next tree and snick, end all your plans—learned though we are sure they must be.”

“Quite,” agreed Dame Alice, “and so I brought Sparrow here—” she nodded to her servant—“instead of trusting to chance.”

All heads turned again toward the little American. In French, though the conversation had previously been in English to include Sparrow, de Vriny said, “I hope he never falls overboard. The load of iron-mongery he carries will sink him twenty meters through the bottom muck before anyone knows he’s gone.”

Again the Belgians laughed. In a voice as flat and hard as the bottom of a skillet, Sparrow said, “Captain, I’d surely appreciate a look at your nice pistol there.”

De Vriny blinked, uncertain whether the question was chance or if the American had understood the joke of which he had been made the butt. Deliberately, his composure never more than dented, the Belgian unhooked the flap of his patent-leather holster and handed over the Browning pistol. It was small and oblong, its blued finish gleaming like wet sealskin in the firelight.

Sparrow rotated the weapon, giving its exterior a brief scrutiny. He thumbed the catch in the grip and stripped out the magazine, holding it so that the light fell on the uppermost of its stack of small brass cartridges.

“You are familiar with automatic pistols, then?” asked Trouville in some surprise at the American’s quick understanding of a weapon rarely encountered on his native continent.

“Naw,” Sparrow said, slipping the magazine back home. His fingers moved like those of a pianist doing scales. “It’s a gun, though. I can generally figure how a gun works.”

“You should get one like it,” de Vriny said, smiling as he took the weapon back from Sparrow. “You would find it far more comfortable to carry than those—yours.”

“Carry a toy like that?” the gunman asked. His voice parodied amazement. “Not me, Captain. When I shoot a man, I want him dead. I want a gun what’ll do the job if I do mine, and these .45s do me jist fine, every time I use’um.” Sparrow grinned then, for the first time. De Vriny felt his own hands fumble as they tried to reholster the Browning. Suddenly he knew why the askaris gave Sparrow so wide a berth.

Dame Alice coughed. The sound shattered the ice that had been settling over the men. Without moving, Sparrow faded into the background to become an insignificant man with narrow shoulders and pistols too heavy for his frame.

“Tell me what you know about the rebellion,” the Irishwoman asked quietly in a liquid, attractive voice. Her features led one to expect a nasal whinny. Across the fire came snores from Osterman, a lieutenant by courtesy but in no other respect an officer. He had ignored the wine for the natives’ own malafou. The third calabash had slipped from his numb fingers, dribbling only a stain onto the ground as the bearded Fleming lolled back in his camp chair.

Trouville exchanged glances with de Vriny, then shrugged and said, “What is there ever to know about a native rebellion? Every once in a while a few of them shoot at our steamers, perhaps chop a concessionaire or two when he comes to collect the rubber and ivory. Then we get the call”—the Colonel’s gesture embraced the invisible Archiduchesse Stephanie and the dozen Baenga canoes drawn up on the bank beside her. “We surround the village, shoot the niggers we catch, and burn the huts. End of rebellion.”

“And what about their gods?” Dame Alice pressed, bobbing her head like a long-necked diving bird.

The Colonel laughed. De Vriny patted his holster and said, “We are God in the Maranga Concession.”

They laughed again and Dame Alice shivered. Osterman snorted awake, blew his nose loudly on the blue sleeve of his uniform coat. “There’s a new god back in the bush, yes,” the Fleming muttered.

The others stared at him as if he were a frog declaiming Shakespeare. “How would you know?” de Vriny demanded in irritation. “The only Bantu words you know are ‘drink’ and ‘woman’.”

“I can talk to B’loko, can’t I?” the lieutenant retorted in a voice that managed to be offended despite its slurring. “Good ol’ Baloko, we been together long time, long time. Better fella than some white bastards I could name.…”

Dame Alice leaned forward, the firelight bright in her eyes. “Tell me about the new god,” she demanded. “Tell me its name.”

“Don’ remember the name,” Osterman muttered, shaking his head. He was waking up now, surprised and a little concerned to find himself center of the attention not only of his surperiors but also of the foreigner who had come to them in Boma as they readied their troops. Trouville had tried to shrug Dame Alice aside, but the Irishwoman had displayed a patent signed by King Leopold himself.… “Baloko said it but I forget,” he continued, “and he was drunk too, or I don’ think he would have said. He’s afraid of that one.”

“What’s that?” Trouville interrupted. He was a practical man, willing to accept and use the apparent fact that Osterman’s piggish habits had made him a confidant of the askaris. “One of our Baenga headmen is afraid of a Bakongo god?”

Osterman shook his graying head again. Increasingly embarrassed but determined to explain, he said, “Not their god, not like that. The Bakongos, they live along the river, they got their fetishes just like any niggers. But back in the bush, there’s another village. Not a tribe; a few men from here, a few women from there. Been getting together one at a time, a couple a year, for Christ … maybe twenty years. They got the new god, they’re the ones who started the trouble. They say you don’ have to pay your rubber to the white men, you don’ have to pray to any fetish. Their god gonna come along and eat up everything. Any day now.”

Osterman rubbed his eyes blearily, then shouted, “Boy! Malafou!”

A Krooman in breeches and swallow-tailed coat scurried over with another calabash. Osterman slurped down the sweet, brain-stunning fluid in three great gulps. He began humming something meaningless to himself. The empty container fell, and after a time the Fleming began to snore again.

The other men looked at one another. “Do you suppose he’s right?” the Captain asked Trouville.

“He could be,” the slim colonel admitted with a shrug. “They might well have told him all that. He’s not much better than a nigger himself despite the color of his skin.”

“He’s right,” said Dame Alice, looking at the fire and not at her companions. Ash crumbled in its heart and a knot of sparks clawed toward the forest canopy. “Except for one thing. Their god isn’t new, it isn’t new at all. Back when the world was fresh and steaming and the reptiles flew above the swamps, it wasn’t new either. The Bakongo name for it is Ahtu. Alhazred called it Nyarlathotep when he wrote twelve hundred years ago.” She paused, staring down at her hands tented above the thin yellow wine left in her goblet.

“Oh, then you are a missionary,” de Vriny exclaimed, glad to find a category for the puzzling woman. Her disgusted glance was her reply. “Or a student of religions?” de Vriny tried again.

“I study religions only as a doctor studies diseases,” Dame Alice said. She looked at her companions. Their eyes were uncomprehending. “I…,” she began, but how did she explain her life to men who had no conception of devotion to an ideal? Her childhood had been turned inward to dreams and the books lining the cold library of the Grange. Inward, because her outward body was that of an ugly duckling whom everyone knew had no chance of becoming a swan. And from her dreams and a few of the very oldest books had come hints of what it is that nibbles at the minds of all men in the darkness. Her father could not answer or even understand her question, nor could the Vicar. She had grown from a persistent child into an iron-willed woman who lavished on her fancy energies which her relatives felt would have been better spent on the Church … or, perhaps, on breeding spaniels.

And as she had grown, she had met others who felt and knew what she did.

She looked around again. “Captain,” she said simply, “I have been studying certain—myths—for most of my life. I’ve come to believe that some of them contain truths or hints of truths. There are powers in the universe. When you know the truth of those powers, you have the choice of joining them and working to bring about their coming—for they are unstoppable—or you can fight, knowing there is no ultimate hope for your cause and going ahead anyway. Mine was the second choice.” Drawing herself even more rigidly straight, she added, “Someone has always been willing to stand between mankind and Chaos. As long as there have been men.”

De Vriny snickered audibly. Trouville gave him a dreadful scowl and said to Dame Alice, “And you are searching for the god these rebels pray to?”

“Yes. The one they call Ahtu.”

From the score of firelit glades around them came the thunk-thunk-THUNK of axe and wedge, then the booming native laughter.

“Osterman and de Vriny should have their men in position by now,” said the Colonel, pattering his fingertips on the bridge rail as he scanned the wooded shore line. “It’s about time for me to land, too.”

“Us to land,” Dame Alice said. She squinted, straining forward to see the village the Belgian force was preparing to assault. “Where are the huts?” she finally asked.

“Oh, they’re set back from the shore some hundreds of meters,” Trouville explained off-handedly. “The trees hide them, but the fish weirs—” he pointed out the lines of upright sticks rippling foam tracks down the current—“are a good enough guide. We’ve stayed anchored here in the stream so that the villagers would be watching us while the forces from the canoes downriver surrounded them.”

Muffled but unmistakable, a shot thudded in the forest. A volley followed, drawing with it faint screams.

“Bring us in,” ordered the Colonel, tugging at the left half of his moustache in his only sign of nervousness.

The Archiduchesse grated as her bow nuzzled into the trees, but there was no time now for delicacy. Forest Guards streamed past the Hotchkiss and down the gangplank into the jungle. The gunner was crouched behind the metal shield that protected him only from the front. Tree boles and their shadows now encircled him on three sides.

“I suppose it will be safe enough on the shore,” said Trouville, adjusting his harness as if for parade instead of battle. “You can accompany me if you wish—and if you stay close by.”

“All right,” said Dame Alice as if she would not have come without his permission. Her hand clutched not a pistol but an old black-bound book. “If we’re where you think, though, you’ll need me very badly before you’re through here. Especially if it takes till sunset.” She swung down the companionway behind Trouville. Last of all from the bridge came Sparrow, grimy and small and deadly as a shark.

The track that wound among the trunks was a narrow line hammered into the loam by horny feet. It differed from a game trail only in that shoulders had cleared the foliage to greater height. The Baengas strode it with some discomfort—they were a Lower Congo tribe, never quite at home in the upriver jungles. Trouville’s step was deliberately nonchalant, while Dame Alice tramped gracelessly and gave an accurate impression of disinterest in her physical surroundings. Sparrow’s eyes twitched around him as they always did. He carried his hands waist-high and over his belted revolvers.

The clearing was an anticlimax. The score of huts in the center had been protected by a palisade of sorts, but the first rush of the encircling Baengas had smashed great gaps in it. Three bodies, all of them women, lay spilled in the millet fields outside. Within the palisade were more bodies, one of them an askari with a long iron spearhead crosswise through his rib cage. About a hundred villagers, quavering but alive, had been forced together in the compound in front of the chief’s beehive hut by the time the force from the steamer arrived. Several huts were already burning, sending up shuddering columns of black smoke.

Trouville stared at the mass of prisoners, solidified by fear into the terrible, stinking apathy of sheep in the slaughtering chute. “Yes…,” he murmured appreciatively. His eyes had already taken in the fact that the fetishes which normally stood to the right or left of a well-to-do family’s doorway were absent in this village. “Now,” he asked, “who will tell me about the new god you worship?”

As black against a darkness, so the new fear rippling across faces already terrified. Near the Belgian stood an old man, face knobbed by a pattern of ritual scarring. He was certainly a priest, though without a priest’s usual trappings of feathers and cowrie shells. Haltingly he said, “Lord, l-lord, we have no new gods.”

“You lie!” cried Trouville. His gloved fingertip sprang out like a fang. “You worship Ahtu, you lower-than-the-apes, and he is a poor weak god whom our medicine will break like a stick!”

The crowd moaned and surged backwards from the Colonel. The old priest made no sound at all, only began to tremble violently. Trouville looked at the sky. “Lieutenant Osterman,” he called to his burly subordinate, “we have an hour or so till sunset. I trust you can get this carrion—” he pointed to the priest—“to talk by then. He seems to know something. As for the rest … de Vriny, take charge of getting the irons on them. We’ll decide what to do with them later.”

The grinning Fleming slapped Baloko on the back. Each seized one of the priest’s arms and began to drag him toward the shade of a baobab tree. Osterman started to detail the items he needed from the steamer and Baloko, enthusiastic as a child helping his father to fix a machine, rattled the list off in translation to a nearby askari.

*   *   *

The evening breeze brought a hint of relief from the heat and the odors, the oily scent of fear and the others more easily identified. Osterman had set an overturned bucket over the plate of burning sulphur to smother it out when it was no longer needed. Reminded by Trouville, he had also covered the brush of twigs he had been using to spread the gluey flames over the priest’s genitals. Then, his work done, he and Baloko had strolled away to add a bowl of malafou to the chill, “Thank you, Lieutenant,” which was all the praise Trouville had offered for their success.

The subject of their ministrations—eyes closed, wrists and ankles staked to the ground—was talking. “They come, we let them,” he said, so softly and quickly that Trouville had to strain to mutter out a crude translation for Dame Alice. “They live in forest, they not bother our fish. Forest here evil, we think. We feel god there, we not understand, not know him. All right that anybody want, wants to live in forest.”

The native paused, turning his head to hawk phlegm into the vomit already pooled beside him. Dame Alice squatted on the ground and riffled the pages of her book unconsciously. She had refused to use the down-turned bucket for a stool. Sparrow paid only scant attention to the prisoner. His eyes kept picking across the clearing, thick and raucous now with Baengas and their leg-shackled prisoners; the men and the trees beyond them. Sparrow’s face shone with the frustrated intensity of a man certain of an ambush but unable to forestall it. Shadows were beginning to turn the dust the color of the noses of his bullets.

The priest continued. The rhythms of his own language were rich and firm, reminding Dame Alice that behind Trouville’s choppy French were the words of a man of dignity and power—before they had brought him down. “All of them are cut men. First come boy, no have ears. His head look me, like melon that is dropped. Him, he hear god Ahtu calling do what god tell him.

“One man, he not have, uh, manhood. God orders, boy tells him … he, uh, he quickens the ground where Ahtu sleeps.

“One man, he only half face, no eyes … him sees, he sees Ahtu, he tells what becoming, uh, is coming. He—”

The priest’s voice rose into a shrill tirade that drowned out the translation. Trouville dispassionately slapped him to silence, then used a rag of bark cloth in his gloved hand to wipe blood and spittle from the fellow’s mouth. “There are only three rebels in the forest?” he asked. If he realized that the priest had claimed the third man was white, he was ignoring it completely.

“No, no … many men, a ten of tens, maybe more. Before we not see, not see cut men only now and now, uh, again, in the forest. Now god is ripe and, uh, his messengers.…”

Only a knife edge of sun could have lain across the horizon, for the whole clearing was darkening to burnt umber where it had color at all. The ground shuddered. The native pegged to it began to scream.

“Earthquake?” Trouville blurted in surprise and concern. Rain forest trees have no deep tap roots to keep them upright, so a strong wind or an earth tremor will scatter giants like straw in the threshing yard.

Dame Alice’s face showed concern not far from panic, but she wholly ignored the baobab tottering above them. Her book was open and she was rolling out syllables from it. She paused, turned so that the pages opened to the fading sun; but her voice stumbled again, and the earth pitched. It was sucking in under the priest whose fear so gripped him that, having screamed out his breath, he was unable to draw another one.

“Light!” Dame Alice cried. “For Jesus’ sake, light!”

If Trouville heard the demand against the litany of fear rising from the blacks, guards and prisoners alike, he did not understand. Sparrow, his face a bone mask, dipped into his shirt pocket and came out with a match which he struck alight with the thumb of the hand that held it. The blue flame pulsed above the page, steady as the ground’s motion would let the gunman keep it. Its light painted Dame Alice’s tight bun as she began again to cry words of no meaning to any of her human audience.

The ground gathered itself into a tentacle that spewed up from beneath the prisoner and hurled him skyward in its embrace. One hand and wrist, still tied to a deep stake, remained behind.

Two hundred feet above the heads of the others, the tentacle stopped and exploded as if it had struck a plate of lightning. Dame Alice had fallen backward when the ground surged, but though the book dropped from her hands she had been able to shout out the last words of what was necessary. The blast that struck the limb of earth shattered also the baobab. Sparrow, the only man able to stand on the bucking earth, was knocked off his feet by the shock wave. He hit and rolled, still gripping the two handguns he had leveled at the afterimage of the light-shot tentacle.

Afterwards they decided that the burned-meat odor must have been the priest, because no one else was injured or missing. Nothing but a track of sandy loam remained of the tentacle, spilled about the rope of green glass formed of it by the false lightning’s heat.

Colonel Trouville rose, coughing at the stench of ozone as sharp as that of the sulphur it had displaced. “De Vriny!” he called. “Get us one of these devil-bred swine who can guide us to the rebel settlement!”

“And who’ll you be finding to guide you, having seen this?” demanded the Irishwoman, kneeling now and brushing dirt from the fallen volume as if more than life depended on her care.

“Seen?” repeated Trouville. “And what have they seen?” The fury in his voice briefly stilled the nightbirds. “They will not guide us because one of them was crushed, pulled apart, burned? And have I not done as much myself a hundred times? If we need to feed twenty of them their own livers, faugh! the twenty-first will lead us—or the one after him will. This rebellion must end!”

“So it must,” whispered Dame Alice, rising like a champion who has won a skirmish but knows the real test is close at hand. She no longer appeared frail. “So it must, if there’s to be men on this earth in a month’s time.”

The ground shuddered a little.

*   *   *

Nothing moved in the forest but the shadows flung by the dancers around the fire. The flames spread them capering across the leaves and tree trunks, distorted and misshapen by the flickering.

They were no more misshapen than the dancers themselves as the light displayed them.

From a high, quivering scaffold of njogi cane, three men overlooked the dance. They were naked so that their varied mutilations were utterly apparent. De Vriny started at the sight of the one whose pale body gleamed red and orange in the firelight; but he was a faceless thing, unrecognizable. Besides, he was much thinner than the plump trader the Belgian had once known.

The clearing was a quarter-mile depression in the jungle. Huts, mere shanties of withe-framed leaves rather than the beehives of a normal village, huddled against one edge of it. If all had gone well, Trouville’s askaris were deployed beyond the hut with Osterman’s group closing the third segment of the ring. All should be ready to charge at the signal. There would not even be a fence to delay the spearmen.

Nor were there crops of any kind. The floor of the clearing was smooth and hard, trampled into that consistency by thousands of ritual patterns like the one now being woven around the fire. In, out, and around—crop-limbed men and women who hobbled if they had but one foot; who staggered, hunched and twisted from the whippings that had left bones glaring out of knots of scar tissue; who followed by touch the motions of the dancers ahead of them if their own eye-sockets were blank holes.

There was no music, but the voices of those who had tongues drummed in a ceaseless chant: “Ahtu! Ahtu!”

“The scum of the earth,” whispered de Vriny. “Low foreheads, thick jaws; skin the color of a monkey’s under its hair. Your Mr Darwin was right about Man’s descent from the apes, Dame Alice—if these brutes are, in fact, kin to Man.”

“Not my Mr Darwin,” the Irishwoman replied.

The Krooman steward, in loincloth now instead of tailcoat, was behind the three whites with a hissing bull’s-eye lantern. Dame Alice feared to raise its shutter yet, though, and instead ran her fingers nervously along the margins of her open book. Three other blacks, armed only with knives, stood by de Vriny as couriers in case the whistle signals were not enough. The rest of the Captain’s force was invisible, spread to either side of him along the margin of the trees.

“Don’t like this,” Sparrow said, shifting his revolvers a millimeter in their holsters to make sure they were free in the leather. “Too many niggers around. Some of’em are apt to be part of the mob down there, coming back late from a hunt or something. Any nigger comes running up in the dark and I’m gonna let’im hold one.”

“You’ll shoot no one without my order,” de Vriny snapped. “The Colonel may be sending orders, Osterman may need help—this business is going to be dangerous enough without some fool killing our own messengers. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you talking.” A stray glimmer of firelight caught the throbbing vein in Sparrow’s temple.

Rather than retort, the Belgian turned back to the clearing. After a moment he said, “I don’t see this god you’re looking for.”

Dame Alice’s mouth quirked. “You mean you don’t see a fetish,” she said. “You won’t. Ahtu isn’t a fetish.”

“Well, what kind of damned god is he then?” de Vriny asked in irritation.

The Irishwoman considered the question seriously, then said, “Maybe they aren’t gods at all, him and the others … it and the others Alhazred wrote of. Call them cancers, spewed down on Earth ages ago. Not life, surely, not even things—but able to shape, to misshape things into a semblance of life and to grow and to grow and to grow.”

“But grow into what, madame?” de Vriny pressed.

“Into what?” Dame Alice echoed sharply. Her eyes flashed with the sudden arrogance of her bandit ancestors, sure of themselves if of nothing else in the world. “Into this earth, this very planet, if unchecked. And we here will know tonight whether they can be checked yet again.”

“Then you seriously believe,” de Vriny began, sucking at his florid moustache to find a less offensive phrasing. “You believe that the Bakongos are worshipping a creature which would, will, begin to rule the world if you don’t stop it?”

Dame Alice looked at him. “Not ‘rule’, the world,” she corrected. “Rather become the world. This thing, this seed awakened in the jungle by the actions of men more depraved and foolish than I can easily believe … this existance, unchecked, would permeate our world like mold through a loaf of bread, until the very planet became a ball of viscid slime hurtling around the sun and stretching tentacles toward Mars. Yes, I believe that, Captain. Didn’t you see what was happening last night in the village?”

The Belgian only scowled in perplexity.

A silver note sang from across the broad clearing. De Vriny grunted, then put his long bosun’s pipe to his lips and sounded his reply even as Osterman’s signal joined it.

The dance broke apart as the once-solid earth began to dimple beneath men’s weight.

The Forest Guards burst out of the tree line with cries punctuated by the boom of Albini rifles. “Light!” ordered Dame Alice in a crackling alto, and the lantern threw its bright fan across the book she held. The scaffolding moved, seemed to sink straight into ground turned fluid as water. At the last instant the three figures on it linked hands and shouted, “Ahtu!” in triumph. Then they were gone.

In waves as complex as the sutures of a skull, motion began to extend through the soil of the clearing. A shrieking Baenga, spear raised to thrust into the nearest dancer, ran across one of the quivering lines. It rose across his body like the breaking surf and he shrieked again in a different tone. For a moment his black-headed spear bobbled on the surface. Then it, too, was engulfed with a faint plop that left behind only a slick of blood.

Dame Alice started chanting in a sing-song, molding a tongue meant for liquid Irish to a language not meant for tongues at all. A tremor in the earth drove toward her and those about her. It had the hideous certainty of a torpedo track. Sparrow’s hands flexed. De Vriny stood stupefied, the whistle still at his lips and his pistol drawn but forgotten.

The three couriers looked at the oncoming movement, looked at each other … disappeared among the trees. Eyeballs white, the Krooman dropped his lantern and followed them. Quicker even than Sparrow, Dame Alice knelt and righted the lantern with her foot. She acted without missing a syllable of the formula stamped into her memory by long repetition.

Three meters away, a saw-blade of white fire ripped across the death advancing through the soil. The weaving trail blasted back toward the center of the clearing like an ant run blown by carbon disulphide.

De Vriny turned in amazement to the woman crouched so that the lantern glow would fall across the black-lettered pages of her book. “You did it!” he cried. “You stopped the thing!”

The middle of the clearing raised itself toward the night sky, raining down fragments of the bonfire that crowned it. Humans screamed—some at the touch of the fire, others as tendrils extruding from the towering center wrapped about them.

Dame Alice continued to chant.

The undergrowth whispered. “Behind you, Captain,” Sparrow said. His face had a thin smile. De Vriny turned, calling a challenge. The brush parted and a few feet in front of him were seven armed natives. The nearest walked on one foot and a stump. His left hand gripped the stock of a Winchester carbine; its barrel was supported by his right wrist since there was a knob of ancient scar tissue where the hand should have been attached.

De Vriny raised his Browning and slapped three shots into the native’s chest. Bloodspots sprang out against the dark skin like additional nipples. The black coughed and jerked the trigger of his own weapon. The carbine was so close to the Belgian’s chest that its muzzle flash ignited the linen of his shirt as it blew him backwards.

Sparrow giggled and shot the native through the bridge of his nose, snapping his head around as if a horse had kicked him in the face. The other blacks moved. Sparrow killed them all in a ripple of fire that would have done justice to a Gatling gun. The big revolvers slammed alternately, Sparrow using each orange muzzle flash to light a target for his other hand. He stopped shooting only when there was nothing left before his guns; nothing save a writhing tangle of bodies too freshly dead to be still. The air was thick with white smoke and the fecal stench of death. Behind the laughing gunman, Dame Alice Kilrea continued to chant.

Pulsing, rising, higher already than the giants of the forest ringing it, the fifty-foot thick column of what had been earth dominated the night. A spear of false lightning jabbed and glanced off, freezing the chaos below for the eyes of any watchers. From the base of the main neck had sprouted a ring of tendrils, ruddy and golden and glittering over all with inclusions of quartz. They snaked among the combatants as flexible as silk; when they closed, they ground together like millstones and spattered blood a dozen yards up the sides of the central column. The tendrils made no distinction between Forest Guards and the others who had danced for Ahtu.

Dame Alice stopped. The column surged and bent against the sky, its peak questing like the muzzle of a hunting dinosaur. Sparrow hissed, “For the love of God, bitch!” and raised a revolver he knew would be useless.

Dame Alice spoke five more words and flung her book down. The ground exploded in gouts of cauterizing flame.

It was not a hasty thing. Sparks roared and blazed as if the clearing were a cauldron into which gods poured furnaces of molten steel. The black column that was Ahtu twisted hugely, a cobra pinned to a bonfire. There was no heat, but the light itself seared the eyes and made bare flesh crawl.

With the suddenness of a torn puffball, Ahtu sucked inward. The earth sagged as though in losing its ability to move it had also lost all rigidity. At first the clearing had been slightly depressed. Now the center of it gaped like a drained boil, a twisted cylinder fed by the collapsing veins it had earlier shot through the earth.

When the blast came it was the more stunning for having followed a relative silence. There was a rending crash as something deep in the ground gave way; then a thousand tons of rock and soil blew skyward with volcanic power behind them. Where the earth had trembled with counterfeit life, filaments jerked along after the main mass. In some places they ripped the surface as much as a mile into the forest. After a time, dust and gravel began to sprinkle down on the trees, the lighter particles marking the canopy with a long flume down wind while larger rocks pattered through layer after layer of the hindering leaves. But it was only dirt, no different than the soil for hundreds of miles around into which trees thrust their roots and drew life from what was lifeless.

“God damn if you didn’t kill it,” Sparrow whispered, gazing in wonderment at the new crater. There was no longer any light but that of the hooked moon to silver the carnage and the surprising number of Forest Guards straggling back from the jungle to which they had fled. Some were beginning to joke as they picked among the bodies of their comrades and the dancers.

“I didn’t kill anything,” Dame Alice said. Her voice was hoarse, muffled besides by the fact that she was cradling her head on her knees. “Surgeons don’t kill cancers. They cut out what they can find, knowing that there’s always a little left to grow and spread again.…”

She raised her head. From across the clearing, Colonel Trouville was stepping toward them. He was as dapper and cool as always, skirting the gouge in the center, skirting also the group of Baengas with a two-year-old they must have found in one of the huts. One was holding the child by the ankles to drain all the blood through its slit throat while his companions gathered firewood.

“But without the ones who worshipped it,” Dame Alice went on, “without the ones who drew the kernel up to a growth that would have been … the end of Man, the end of Life here in any sense you or I—or those out there—would have recognized it.… It’ll be more than our lifetimes before Ahtu returns. I wonder why those ones gave themselves so wholly to an evil that would have destroyed them first?”

Sparrow giggled again. Dame Alice turned from the approaching Belgian to see if the source of the humor showed on the gunman’s face.

“It’s like this,” Sparrow said. “If they was evil, I guess that makes us good. I’d never thought of that before, is all.”

He continued to giggle. The laughter of the Baengas echoed him from the clearing as they thrust the child down on a rough spit. Their teeth had been filed to points which the moonlight turned to jewels.

FIREFIGHT

“Christ,” Ginelli said, staring at the dusty wilderness, “if this is a sample, the next move’ll be to Hell. And a firebase there’d be cooler.”

Herrold lit a cigarette and poked the pack toward his subordinate. “Have one,” he suggested.

“Not unless it’s grass,” the heavy newbie muttered. He flapped the sleeveless flak jacket away from his flesh, feeling streaks of momentary chill as sweat started from beneath the quilted nylon. “Christ, How d’you stand it?”

Herrold, rangy and big-jointed, leaned back in the dome seat and cocked one leg over the flamethrower’s muzzle. Ginelli envied the track commander’s build every time he looked at the taller man. His own basic training only four months before had been a ghastly round of extra physical training to sweat off pounds of his mother’s pasta.

“Better get used to it,” Herrold warned lazily. “This zippo always winds up at the back of the column, so we always wait to set up in the new laagers. Think about them—pretend you’re a tree.”

Ginelli followed his TC’s finger toward the eight giant trees in the stone enclosure. It didn’t help. Their tops reached a hundred feet into the air above the desolate plain, standing aloof from the activity that raised a pall of dust beside them. The shadows pooling beneath could not cool Ginelli as he squatted sun-dazzled on the deck of the flame track.

At least Colonel Boyle was just as hot where he stood directing placements from the sandbagged deck of his vehicle. Hieu stood beside him as usual. You could always recognize the interpreter at a distance because of the tiger fatigues he wore, darkly streaked with black and green. Below the two, radiomen were stringing the last of the tarpaulin passageways that joined the three command vehicles into a Tactical Operations Center. Now you could move between the blacked-out tracks in the dark; but the cool of the night seemed far away.

On the roof, Boyle pointed and said something to Hieu. The dark-skinned interpreter’s nod was emphatic; the colonel spoke into his neck-slung microphone and the two vehicles ahead of the flame track grunted into motion. Herrold straightened suddenly as his radio helmet burped at him. “Seven-zero, roger,” he replied.

“We movin’?” Ginelli asked, leaning closer to the TC to hear him better. Herrold flipped the switch by his left ear forward to intercom and said, “OK, Murray, they want us on the west side against that stone wall. There’ll be a ground guide, so take it easy.”

Murray edged the zippo forward, driving it clockwise around the circuit other tracks had clawed in the barren earth. Except for the grove within the roomy laterite enclosure, there was nothing growing closer than the rubber plantation whose rigid files marched green and silver a mile to the east. Low dikes, mostly fallen into the crumbling soil, ordered the wasteland. Dust plumed in the far distance as a motorbike pulled out of the rubber and turned toward the firebase. Coke girls already, Ginelli thought. Even in this desert.

Whatever the region’s problem was it couldn’t have been with the soil itself; not if trees like the monsters behind the low wall could grow in it. Every one of the eight the massive stonework girdled was forty feet around at the base. The wrinkled bole of the central titan could have been half that again.

The zippo halted while a bridge tank roared, churning the yielding dirt as it maneuvered its frontal slope up to the coarse laterite. The ground guide, a bare-chested tanker with a beaded sweat band, dropped his arms to signal the bridge to shut down, then motioned the flame track in beside the greater bulk. Murray cut his engine and hoisted himself out of the driver’s hatch.

Common sense and the colonel’s orders required that everyone on a track be wearing helmet and flak jacket. Men like Murray, however, who extended their tours to four years, tended to ignore death and their officers when comfort was at stake. The driver was naked to the waist; bleached golden hairs stood out wire-like against his deep tan. “Dig out some beers, turtle,” he said to Ginelli with easy arrogance. “We got time to down’em before they start puttin’ a detail together.” Road dust had coated the stocky, powerful driver down to the throat, the height he projected from his hatch with the seat raised and the cover swivelled back. Years of Vietnamese sunlight had washed all color from his once-blue eyes.

An ACAV pulled up to the flame track’s right, its TC nonchalant in his cupola behind the cal fifty. To Ginelli’s amazement, the motorbike he had seen leaving the rubber plantation was the next vehicle in line. It was a tiny green Sachs rather than one of the omnipresent Honda 50s, and its driver was Caucasian. Murray grinned and jumped to his feet. “Crozier! Jacques!” he shouted delightedly. “What the hell are you doin’ here?”

The white-shirted civilian turned his bike neatly and tucked it in on the shady side of the zippo. If any of the brass had noticed him, they made no sign. Dismounted, Crozier tilted his face up and swept his baseball cap away from a head of thinning hair. “Yes, I thought I might find you, Joe,” he said. His English was slightly burred. “But anyway, I would have come just to talk again to Whites. It is grand to see you.”

Herrold unlashed the shelter tarp from the load and let it thump over the side. “Let’s get some shade up,” he ordered.

“Jack was running a plantation for Michelin up north when we were in the A-Shau Valley,” Murray explained. “He’s a good dude. But why you down here, man?”

“Oh, well,” the Frenchman said with a deprecating shrug. “Your defoliation, you know? A few months after your squadron pulls out, the planes come over. Poof! Plantation Seven is dead and I must be transferred. They grow peanuts there now.”

Herrold laughed. “That’s the nice thing about a job in this country,” he said. “Always somethin’ new tomorrow.”

“Yeah, not so many VC here as up there,” Murray agreed.

Crozier grimaced. “The VC I am able to live with. Like them? No. But I understand them, understand their, their aims. But these people around here, these Mengs—they will not work, they will not talk, only glare at you and plant enough rice for themselves. Michelin must bring in Viets to work the rubber, and even those, they do not stay because they do not like Mengs so near.”

“But they’re all Vietnamese, aren’t they?” Ginelli asked in puzzlement. “I mean, what else could they be?”

The Frenchman chuckled, hooking his thumbs in his trouser tops. “They live in Viet Nam so they are Vietnamese, no? But you Americans have your Indians. Here are the Montagnards—we call them; the Mountaineers, you know? But the Vietnamese name for them means ‘the dirty animals.’ Not the same folk, no no. They were here long before the Viets came down from the North. And the Meng who live here and a few other places, they are not the same either; not as the Viets or even the Montagnards. And maybe they are older yet, so they say.”

The group waited a moment in silence. Herrold opened the Mermite can that served as a cooler and began handing out beer. “Got a churchkey?” he asked no one in particular. Murray, the only man on the track with a knife, drew his huge Bowie and chopped ragged triangles in the tops. Tepid beer gurgled as the four men drank. Ginelli set his can down.

“Umm,” he said to his TC, “how about the co-ax?”

Herrold sighed. “Yeah, we don’t want the sonafa-bitch to jam.” Joints popped as he stood and stretched his long frame.

Crozier gulped the swig of beer still in his mouth. “Indeed not,” he agreed. “Not here, especially. The area has a very bad reputation.”

“That a fact?” Herrold asked in mild surprise. “At the troop meetin’ last night the ole man said around here it’d be pretty quiet. Not much activity on the intelligence maps.”

“Activity?” the Frenchman repeated with raised eyebrows. “Who can say? The VC come through the laborers’ hootches now and again, not so much here as near A-Shau, that is true. But when I first was transferred here three years ago, there were five, maybe six hundred in the village—the Mengs, you know, not the plantation lines.”

“That little place back where we left the hardball?” Ginelli wondered aloud. “Jeez, there’s not a dozen hootches there.”

“Quite so,” Crozier agreed with a grave nod of his head. “Because a battalion of Communists surrounded it one night and killed every Meng they found. Maybe twenty survived.”

“Christ,” Ginelli breathed in horror, but Herrold’s greater experience caused his eyes to narrow in curiosity. “Why the hell?” the tall track commander asked. “I mean, I know they’ve got hit squads out to gun down village cops and headmen and all. But why the whole place? Were they that strong for the government?”

“The government?” the civilian echoed; he laughed. “They spat at the District Governor when he came through. But a week before the Communists came, there was firing near this very place. Communist, there is no doubt. I saw the tracers myself and they were green.

“The rest—and this is rumor only, what my foremen told me at the time before they stopped talking about it—a company, thirty men, were ambushed. Wiped out, every one of them and mutilated, ah … badly. How they decided that the Mengs were responsible, I do not know; but that could have been the reason they wiped out the village later.”

“Umm,” Herrold grunted. He crumpled his beer can and looked for a litter barrel. “Lemme get on the horn and we’ll see just how the co-ax is screwing up.” The can clattered into the barrel as the TC swung up on the back deck of the zippo again. The others could hear his voice as he spoke into the microphone, “Battle five-six, track seven-zero. Request clearance to test fire our Mike seven-four.”

An unintelligible crackle replied from the headset a moment later. “No sir,” Herrold denied, “not if we want it working tonight.” He nodded at the answer. “Roger, roger.” He waved. “OK,” he said to his crew as he set down the radio helmet, “let’s see what it’s doin’.”

Ginelli climbed up beside Herrold, slithering his pudgy body over the edge of the track with difficulty. Murray continued to lounge against the side of the track. “Hell,” he said, “I never much liked guns anyway; you guys do your thing.” Crozier stood beside his friend, interested but holding back a little from the delicacy of an uninvited guest. The machinegun had once been co-axial to the flamethrower. Now it was on a swivel welded to the top of the TC’s dome. Herrold rotated it, aiming at the huge tree in the center of the grove. A ten foot scar streaked the light trunk vertically to the ground, so he set the buckhorn sight just above it. Other troopers, warned by radio what to expect, were watching curiously.

The gun stuttered off a short burst and jammed. Empty brass tinkled off the right side of the track. Herrold swore and clicked open the receiver cover. His screwdriver pried at the stuck case until it sprang free. Slamming the cover shut, he jacked another round into the chamber.

BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM

“God damn it,” Herrold said. “Looks like we gotta take the whole thing down.”

“Or throw rocks,” Ginelli suggested.

Herrold cocked a rusty eyebrow. Unlike the thick-set newbie, he had been in country long enough to have a feel for real danger. After a moment he grinned back. “Oh, we don’t have to throw rocks,” he said. He unslung his old submachinegun from the side of the dome. Twenty years of service had worn most of the finish off its crudely stamped metal but it still looked squat and deadly. Herrold set the wire stock to his shoulder; the burst, when he squeezed off, was ear-shattering. A line of fiercely red tracers stabbed from the muzzle and ripped an ascending curve of splintered wood up the side of the center tree.

“Naw, we’re OK while the ole greasegun works,” Herrold said. He laughed. “But,” he added, “We better tear down the co-ax anyhow.”

“Perhaps I should leave now,” Crozier suggested. “It grows late and I must return to my duties.”

“Hell,” Murray protested, “stick around for chow at least. Your dinks’ll do without babysittin’ for that long.”

The Frenchman pursed his lips. “He’ll have to clear with the colonel,” Herrold warned.

“No sweat,” the driver insisted. “We’ll snow him about all the local intelligence Jacques can give us. Come on, man; we’ll brace him now.” Crozier followed in Murray’s forceful wake, an apprehensive frown still on his face.

“Say, where’d you get these?” Ginelli inquired, picking up a fat, red-nosed cartridge like those Herrold had just thumbed into his greasegun.

“The tracers?” the TC replied absently. “Oh, I found a case back in Di-An. Pretty at night and what the hell, they hit just as hard. But let’s get crackin’ on the co-ax.”

Ginelli jumped to the ground. Herrold handed him a footlocker to serve as a table—the back deck of the zippo was too cluttered to strip the gun there—and the co-ax itself. In a few minutes they had reduced the weapon to components and begun cleaning them.

A shadow eased across the footlocker. Ginelli looked up, still holding the receiver he was brushing with a solvent-laden toothbrush. The interpreter, Hieu, had walked over from the TOC and was facing the grove. He seemed oblivious to the troopers beside him.

“Hey Hieu,” the TC called. “Why the hell’d the colonel stick us here, d’ya know? We get in a firefight and these damn trees’ll hide a division a VC.”

Hieu looked around slowly. His features had neither the fragility of the pure Vietnamese nor the moon-like fullness of those with Chinese blood. His was a blocky face, set as ever in hard lines, mahogany in color. Hieu stepped up to the wall before answering, letting his hands run over the rough stone like two dried oak leaves.

“No time to make berm,” he said at last, pointing to the bellowing Caterpillar climbing out of a trench near the TOC. The D-7A was digging in sleeping trailers for the brass rather than starting to throw up an earthen wall around the perimeter. “The wall here make us need ti-ti berm, I show colonel.”

Herrold nodded. The stone enclosure was square, about a hundred yards to a side. Though only four feet high, the ancient wall was nearly as thick and would stop anything short of an eight inch shell. But even with the work the wall would save the engineers on the west side, those trees sure played hell with the zones of fire. Seven of them looked to Herrold to be Phillipine mahoganies; God knew what the monster in the middle was; a banyan, maybe, from the creviced trunk, but the bark didn’t look like the banyans he’d seen before.

“Never saw trees that big before,” the TC said aloud.

Hieu looked at him again, this time with a hint of expression on his face. “Yes,” he stated. “Ti-ti left when French come, now only one.” His fingers toyed with the faded duck of the ammo pouch clipped to his belt. Both soldiers thought the dark man was through speaking, but Hieu’s tongue flicked between his thin lips again and he continued, “Maybe three, maybe two years only, there was other. Now only this.” The interpreter’s voice became a hiss. “But beaucoup years before, everywhere was tree, everywhere was Meng!”

Boots scuffled in powdery dirt; Murray and the Frenchman were coming back from the TOC. Hieu lost interest in Herrold and vaulted the laterite wall gracefully. The driver and Crozier watched him stepping purposefully toward the center of the widely spaced grove as they halted beside the others.

“But who is that?” Crozier questioned sharply.

“Uh? That’s Hieu, he’s our interpreter,” Murray grunted in surprise. How come?”

The Frenchman frowned … “But he is Meng, surely? I did not know that any served in the army, even that the government tried to induct them any more.”

“Hell, I always heard he was from Saigon,” Herrold answered. “He’d’a said if he was from here, wouldn’t he?”

“What the hell’s Hieu up to, anyhow?” Ginelli asked. He pointed toward the grove where the interpreter stood, facing the scarred trunk of the central tree. He couldn’t see Hieu’s hands from that angle, but the interpreter twitched in ritual motion beneath the fluid stripes of his fatigues.

Nobody spoke. Ginelli set one foot on the tread and lifted himself onto the flame track. Red and yellow smoke grenades hung by their safety rings inside the dome. Still lower swung a dusty pair of binoculars. Ginelli blew on the lenses before setting the glasses to his eyes and rotating the separate focus knobs. Hieu had knelt on the ground, but the trooper still could not tell what he was doing. Something else caught his eye.

“God damn,” the plump newbie blurted. He leaned over the side of the track and thrust the glasses toward Herrold, busy putting the machinegun back together. “Hey Red, take a look at the tree trunk.”

Murray, Crozier, and Ginelli himself waited expectantly while the TC refocused the binoculars. Magnified, the tree increased geometrically in hideousness. Its bark was pinkish and paper thin, smoother than that of a birch over most of the bole’s surface. The gouged, wrinkled appearance of the trunk was due to the underlying wood, not any irregularity in the bark that covered it.

The tall catface in front of Hieu was the trunk’s only true blemish. Where the tear had puckered together in a creased, blackened seam, ragged edges of bark fluttered in the breeze. The flaps were an unhealthy color, like skin peeling away from a bad burn. Hieu’s squat body hid only a third of the scar; the upper portion towered gloomily above him.

“Well, It’s not much to look at,” Herrold said at last. “What’s the deal?”

“Where’s the bullet holes?” Ginelli demanded in triumph. “You put twenty, thirty shots in it, right? Where’d they go to?”

“Son of a bitch,” the TC agreed, taking another look. The co-ax should have left a tight pattern of shattered wood above the ancient scar. Except for some brownish dimples in the bark, the tree was unmarked.

“I saw splinters fly,” Murray remarked.

“Goddam wood must’a swelled right over’em,” Herrold suggested. “That’s where I hit, all right.”

“That is a very strange tree,” Crozier said, speaking for the first time since his return. “There was another like it near Plantation Seven. It had almond trees around it too, though there was no wall. They call them god trees—the Viets do. The Mengs have their own word, but I do not know its meaning.”

A Chinook swept over the firebase from the south, momentarily stifling conversation with the syncopated whopping of its twin rotors. It hovered just beyond the perimeter, then slowly settled in a circular dust cloud while its turbines whined enormously. Men ran to unload it.

“Chow pretty quick,” Murray commented. It was nearing four o’clock. Ginelli looked away from the bird. “Don’t seem right,” he said. The other men looked blank. He tried to explain, “I mean, the Shithook there, jet engines and all, and that tree there being so old.”

The driver snorted. “Hell, that’s not old. Now back in California where they make those things”—his broad thumb indicated the banana-shaped helicopter—“they got redwoods that’re really old. You don’t think anything funny about that, do you?”

Ginelli gestured helplessly with his hands. Surprisingly it was Crozier, half-seated on the laterite wall, who came to his aid. “What makes you think this god tree is less old than a redwood, Joe?” he asked mildly.

Murray blinked. “Hell, redwoods’re the oldest things there are. Alive, I mean.”

The Frenchman laughed and repeated his deprecating shrug. “But trees are my business, you know? Now there is a pine tree in Arizona older than your California sequoias; but nobody knew it for a long time because there are not many of them and … nobody noticed. And here is a tree, an old one—but who knows? Maybe there are only two in the whole world left—and the other one, the one in the north, that perhaps is dead with my plantation.”

“You never counted the rings or anything?” Herrold asked curiously. He had locked the barrel into the co-ax while the others were talking.

“No…,” Crozier admitted. His tongue touched his lips as he glanced up at the god tree, wondering how much he should say. “No,” he repeated, “but I only saw the tree once while I was at Plantation Seven. It stood in the jungle, more than a mile from the rubber, and the laborers did not care that anyone should go near it. There were Mengs there, too, I was told; but only a few and they hid in the woods. Bad blood between them and my laborers, no doubt.”

“Well, hell, Jacques,” Murray prompted. “When did you see it?” Crozier still hesitated. Suddenly realizing what the problem might be, the driver said, “Hell, don’t worry about our stomachs, fer god’s sake. Unless you’re squeamish, turtle?” Ginelli blushed and shook his head. Laughing, Murray went on, “Anyhow, you grow up pretty quick after you get in the field—those that live to. Tell the story, Jacques.”

Crozier sighed. The glade behind him was empty. Hieu had disappeared somewhere without being noticed. “Well,” he began, “it has no importance, I am sure—all this happened a hundred miles away, as you know. But.…

“It was not long after Michelin sent me to Indochina, in 1953 that would be. I was told of the god tree as soon as I arrived at Plantation Seven, but that was all. One of my foremen had warned me not to wander that way and I assumed, because of the Viet Minh.

“Near midnight—this was before Dien Bien Phu, you will remember—there was heavy firing not far from the plantation. I called the district garrison since for a marvel the radio was working. But of course, no one came until it was light.”

Herrold and Murray nodded together in agreement. Charging into a night ambush was no way to help your buddies, not in this country. Crozier cleared his throat and went on, “It was two companies of colonial paras that came, and the colonel from the fort himself. Nothing would help but that I should guide them to where the shooting had been. A platoon had set up an ambush, so they said, but it did not call in—even for fire support. When I radioed they assumed.…” He shrugged expressively.

“And that is what we found. All the men, all of them dead—unforgetably. They were in the grove of that god tree, on both sides of the trail to it. Perhaps the lieutenant had thought the Viets were rallying there. The paras were well armed and did much shooting from the shells we found. But of enemies, there was no sign; and the paras had not been shot. They were torn, you know? Mutilated beyond what I could believe. But none had been shot, and their weapons lay with the bodies.”

“That’s crazy,” Ginelli said, voicing everyone’s thought. “Dinks would’a taken the guns.”

Crozier shrugged. “The colonel said at last his men had been killed by some wild tribe, so savage they did not understand guns or would not use them. The Mengs, he meant. They were … wilder, perhaps, than the ones here but still.… I would not have thought there were enough of them to wipe out the platoon, waiting as it must have been.”

“How were the men killed?” Herrold asked at last.

“Knives I think,” the Frenchman replied, “short ones. Teeth I might have said; but there were really no signs that anything had fed on the bodies. Not the killers, that is. One man—”

He paused to swallow, continued, “One man I thought wore a long shirt of black. When I came closer, the flies left him. The skin was gone from his arms and chest. God alone knows what had killed him; but his face was the worst to see, and that was unmarked.”

No one spoke for some time after that. Finally Murray said, “They oughta have chow on. Coming?”

Crozier spread his hands. “You are sure it is all right? I have no utensils.”

“No sweat, there’s paper plates. Rest’a you guys?”

“I’ll be along,” Herrold said. “Lemme remount the co-ax first.”

“I’ll do that,” Ginelli offered. His face was saffron, bloodless beneath his tan. “Don’t feel hungry tonight anyhow.”

The track commander smiled. “You can give me a hand.”

When the gun was bolted solidly back on its mount, Herrold laid a belt of ammunition on the loading tray and clicked the cover shut on it. “Ah,” Ginelli mumbled, “ah, Red, don’t you think it’d be a good idea to keep pressure up in the napalm tanks? I mean, there’s a lotta Mengs around here and what Murray’s buddy says.…”

“We’ll make do with the co-ax,” the TC replied, grinning. “You know how the couplings leak napalm with the pumps on.”

“But if there’s an attack?” Ginelli pleaded.

“Look, turtle,” Herrold explained more sharply than before, “we’re sitting on two hundred gallons a napalm. One spark in this track with the pressure up and we won’t need no attack. OK?” Ginelli shrugged. “Well, come on to chow then,” the TC suggested.

“Guess I’ll stay.”

“S’OK.” Herrold slipped off the track and began walking toward the mess tent. He was singing softly, “We gotta get outta this place.…”

*   *   *

Crozier left just before the storm broke. The rain that had held off most of the day sheeted down at dusk. Lightning when it flared jumped from cloud-top to invisible cloud top. It back-lighted the sky.

The crewmen huddled under the inadequate tarpaulin, listening to the ragged static that was all Murray’s transistor radio could pick up. Eventually he shut it off. Ginelli swore miserably. Slanting rain had started a worm of water at the head of his cot. It had finally squirmed all the way to the other end where he sat hunched against the chill wind. “Shouldn’t somebody be on the track?” he asked. Regular guard shifts started at ten o’clock, but usually everybody was more or less alert until then.

“Go ahead, turtle, it’s your bright idea,” Murray said. Herrold frowned more seriously. “Yeah, if you’re worried you might as well … Look, you get up in the dome now and Murray’ll trade his first shift for your second. Right?”

“Sure,” the driver agreed. “Maybe this damn rain’ll stop by then.”

Wearing his poncho over his flak jacket, Ginelli clambered up the bow slope of the zippo. The metal sides were too slimy with rain to mount that way. Except during lightning strokes, the darkness was opaque. When it flashed, the trees stabbed into the suddenbright skies and made Ginelli think about the napalm beneath from a different aspect. Christ, those trees were the tallest things for miles, and God knew the track wasn’t very far away if lightning did hit one. God, they were tall.

And they were old. Ginelli recognized the feeling he’d had ever since the flame track had nosed up to the wall to face the grove: an aura of age. The same thing he’d sensed when he was a kid and saw the Grand Canyon. There was something so old it didn’t give a damn about man or anything else.

Christ! No tree was as old as that; it must be their size that made him so jumpy. Dark as it was, the dinks could be crawling closer between lightning flashes too. At least the rain was slowing down.

The hatch cover was folded back into a clamshell seat for the man on the dome. There was a fiber pillow to put over the steel, but it was soaked and Ginelli had set it on the back deck. For the first time he could remember, the thickness of his flak jacket felt good because the air was so cold. Water that slicked off the poncho or dripped from the useless flat muzzle of the flamethrower joined the drops spattering directly onto the zippo’s deck. It pooled and flowed sluggishly toward the lowest point, the open driver’s hatch.

The sky was starting to clear. An occasional spray fell, but the storm was over and a quarter moon shone when the broken clouds allowed it. Herrold stuck his head out from under the tarp. “How’s going, man?”

Ginelli stretched some of the stiffness out of his back and began stripping off the poncho. “OK, I guess. I could use some coffee.”

“Yeah. Well, hang in there till midnight and get Murray up. We’re gonna rack out now.”

Shadows from the treetops pooled massively about the boles. Although there was enough breeze to make the branches tremble, the trunks themselves were solid as cliffs, as solid as Time. The scar at the base of the god tree was perversely moonlit. The whole grove looked sinister in the darkness, but the scar itself was something more.

Only the half-hour routine of perimeter check kept Ginelli awake. Voices crackled around Headquarters Troop’s sector until Ginelli could repeat, “Seven zero, report negative,” for the last time and thankfully take off the commo helmet. His boots squelched as he dropped beside the cot where Murray snored softly, wrapped in the mottled green-brown nylon of his poncho liner. Ginelli shook him.

“Uh!” the driver grunted as he snapped awake. “Oh, right; lemme get my boots on.”

One of the few clouds remaining drifted over the moon. As Murray stood upright, Ginelli thought movement flickered on the dark stone of the wall. “Hey!” the driver whispered. “What’s Hieu doing out there?”

Ginelli peered into the grove without being able to see anything but the trees. “That was him goin’ over the wall,” Murray insisted. He held his M16 with the bolt back, ready to chamber a round if the receiver was jarred. “Look, I’m gonna check where he’s going.”

“Jeez, somebody’ll see you and cut loose,” Ginelli protested. “You can’t go out there!”

Murray shook his head decisively. “Naw, it’ll be OK,” he said as he slipped over the wall. “Crazy,” Ginelli muttered. And it suddenly struck him that a man who volunteered for three extra years of combat probably wasn’t quite normal in the back-home sense. Licking his lips, he waited tensely in the darkness. The air had grown warmer since the rain stopped, but the plump newbie found himself shivering.

A bird fluttered among the branches of the nearest mahogany. You didn’t seem to see many birds in country, not like you did back in the World. Ginelli craned his neck to get a better view, but the irregular moonlight passed only the impression of wings an drab color.

Nothing else moved within the grove. Ginelli swore miserably and shook Herrold awake. The track commander slept with his flak jacket for a pillow and, despite his attitude of nonchalance, the clumsy greasegun lay beside him on the cot. His fingers curled around its pistolgrip as he awakened.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” he muttered when Ginelli blurted out the story. Herrold had kept his boots on, only the tops unlaced, and he quickly whipped the ties tight around his shins. “Christ, ten minutes ago?”

“Well, should I call in?” Ginelli suggested uncertainly.

“Hell,” Herrold muttered, “no, I better go tell the ole man. You get back in the dome and wait for me.” He hefted his submachinegun by the receiver.

Ginelli started to climb onto the track. Turning, he said, “Hey, man.” Herrold paused. “Don’t be too long, huh?”

“Yeah.” The track commander trudged off toward the unlighted HQ tent. A bird, maybe a large bat from its erratic flight, passed over Ginelli’s head at treetop level. He raised the loading cover of the co-ax to recheck the position of the linked belt of ammunition.

There was a light in the grove.

It was neither man-made nor the moon’s reflection, and at first it was almost too faint to have a source at all. Ginelli gaped frozen at the huge god tree. The glow resolved into a viridescent line down the center of the scar, a strip of brightness that widened perceptably as the edges of the cicatrix drew back. The interior of the tree seemed hollow, lined with self-shining greeness to which forms clung. As Ginelli watched, a handful of the creatures lurched from the inner wall and fluttered out through the dilated scar.

Someone screamed within the laager. Ginelli whirled around. The tactical operations center was green and two-dimensional where the chill glare licked it. A man tore through the canvas passage linking the vehicles, howling and clutching at the back of his neck until he fell. A dark shape flapped away from him. The remaining blotches clinging to the green of the tree flickered outward and the scar began to close.

The cal fifty in the assault vehicle to the right suddenly began blasting tracers point blank into the shrinking green blaze. Heavy bullets that could smash through half an inch of steel ripped across the tree. It was like stabbing a sponge with ice picks. Something dropped into the ACAV’s cupola from above. The shots stopped and the gunner began to bellow hoarsely.

Ginelli swivelled his co-ax onto the tree and clamped down on its underslung trigger. Nothing happened; in his panic he had forgotten to charge the gun. Sparkling muzzle flashes were erupting all across the laager. Near the TOC a man fired his M16 at a crazy angle, trying to drop one of the flying shapes. Another spiraled down behind him of its own deadly accord. His rifle continued to fire as he collapsed on top of it. It sent a last random bullet to spall a flake of aluminum from the flame track’s side, a foot beneath Ginelli’s exposed head.

A soldier in silhouette against the green light lunged toward the god tree’s slitted portal and emptied his rifle point blank. The knife in his hand glowed green as he chopped it up and down into the edge of the scar, trying to widen the gap. “Murray!” Ginelli called. He jerked back his machinegun’s operating rod but did not shoot. He could hear Murray screaming obscenities made stacatto by choppy bursts of automatic fire from behind him.

Ginelli turned his head without conscious warning. He had only enough time to drop down into the compartment as the thing swooped. Its vans, stretched batlike between arm and leg, had already slammed it upright in braking for the kill. The green glare threw its features in perfect relief against the chaos of the firebase: a body twenty inches long, deep-torsoed like a mummified pigmy; weasel teeth, slender cones perfectly formed for slaughter; a face that could have been human save for its size and the streaks of black blood that disfigured it. Tree light flashed a shadow across the hatch as the chittering creature flapped toward other prey for the moment.

Ginelli straightened slowly, peered out of the dome. There was a coldness in his spine; his whole lower body felt as though it belonged to someone else. He knew it wasn’t any use, even for himself, to slam the dome hatch over his head and hope to wait the nightmare out. The driver’s compartment was open; there was plenty of room between the seat and the engine firewall beside it for the killers to crawl through.

Taking a deep breath, Ginelli leaped out of the hatch. He ignored the co-ax. A shuffling step forward in a low crouch and he slid feet first through the driver’s hatch. Throttle forward, both clutch levers at neutral. The starter motor whined for an instant; then the six-cylinder diesel caught, staggered, and boomed into life. An imbalance somewhere in the engine made the whole vehicle tremble.

Murray was still gouging at the base of the scar, face twisted in maniacal savagery. Chips flew every time the blade struck, letting more of the interior glare spill out. Ginelli throttled back, nerving himself to move. “Murray!” he shouted again over the lessened throb of the diesel. “Get away—dammit, get away!”

A figure oozed out of the shadows and gripped Murray by the shoulder. Perhaps the driver screamed before he recognized Hieu; if so, Ginelli’s own cry masked the sound. The Meng spoke, his face distorted with triumph. As the incredulous driver stared, Hieu shouted a few syllables at the god tree in a throaty language far different from the nasal trills of Vietnamese.

The tree opened again. The edges of the scar crumpled sideways, exposing fully the green-lit interior and what stood in it now. Murray whipped around, his blade raised to slash. An arm gripped his, held the knife motionless. The thing was as tall as the opening it stood in, bipedal but utterly inhuman.

Its face was a mirror image of Hieu’s own.

Murray flung himself back, but another pallid, boneless arm encircled him and drew him into the tree. His scream was momentary, cut off when the green opening squeezed almost shut behind him and what Hieu had summoned.

The hooked moon was out again. Hieu turned and began striding toward the shattered laager. His single ammo pouch flopped open; the crude necklace around his neck was of human fingertips, dried and strung on a twist of cambium. Behind him a score of other human-appearing figures slunk out of the grove, every face identical.

Ginelli gathered his feet under him on the seat, then sprang back on top of the track. One of the winged shapes had been waiting for him, called by the mutter of the engine. It darted in from the front, banking easily around Ginelli’s out-thrust arm. Ginelli tripped on the flamethrower’s broad tube, fell forward bruisingly. Clawed fingers drew four bloody tracks across his forehead as the flyer missed its aim. It swept back purposefully.

Ginelli jumped into the dome hatch and snatched at the clamshell cover to close it. As the steel lid swung to, the winged man’s full weight bounced it back on its hinges ringingly. Jagged teeth raked the soldier’s bare right arm, making him scream in frenzy. He yanked at the hatch cover with mad strength. There was no clang as the hatch shut, but something crackled between the edges of armor plate. The brief cry of agony was higher pitched than a man’s. Outside, the scar began to dilate again.

Ginelli gripped the valve and hissed with pain. Shock had numbed his right arm only momentarily. Left-handed he opened the feeds. His fingers found a switch, flicked it up, and the pump began throbbing behind him. His whole body shuddered as he swung the dome through a short arc so that the tree’s blazing scar was centered in the periscope. The universal joint of the fat napalm hose creaked in protest at being moved and a drop of thickened gasoline spattered stickily on Ginelli’s flak jacket.

With a cry of horrified understanding, Hieu leaped onto the stone wall between Ginelli and the tree. “You must—” was all the Meng could say before the jet of napalm caught him squarely in the chest and flung him back into the enclosure. There was no flame. The igniter had not fired.

Mumbling half-remembered fragments of a Latin prayer, Ginelli triggered the weapon again. Napalm spurted against the tree in an unobstructed black arch. The igniter banged in mid shot and the darkness boomed into a hellish red glare. The tree keened as the flame rod’s giant fist smashed against it. Its outer bark shriveled and the deep, bloody surge of napalm smothered every other color. Ginelli’s fiery scythe roared as he slashed it up and down the trunk. Wood began to crackle like gunfire, exploding and hurling back geysers of sparks. A puff of dry heat roiled toward the laager in the turbulent air. It was heavy with the stench of burning flesh.

A series of swift thuds warned Ginelli of flyers landing on the zippo’s deck; teeth clicked on armor. Something rustled from the driver’s compartment. The trooper used his stiffening right hand to switch on the interior lights. The yellow bulbs glinted from close-set eyes peering over the driver’s seat. Ginelli kicked. Instead of crunching under his boot, the face gave with a terrible resiliency and the winged man continued to squirm into the TC’s compartment. A sparkling chain of eyes flashed behind the first pair. The whole swarm of killers was crowding into the track.

Ginelli’s only weapon was the flame itself. Instinctively he swung the nozzle to the left and depressed it, trying to hose fire into the forward hatch of his own vehicle. Instead, the frozen coupling parted. Napalm gouted from the line. The flame died with a serpentine lurch, leaving the god tree alone as a lance of fire. The track was flooding with the gummy fluid; it clung to Ginelli’s chest and flak jacket before rolling off in sluggish gobbets.

Bloody faces washed black with smears of napalm, the winged men struggled toward Ginelli implacably. His mind barely functional, the soldier threw open the hatch and staggered onto the zippo’s deck. Unseen, one flyer still hung in the air. It struck him in the middle of the back and catapulted him off the vehicle. Ginelli somersaulted across the dusty, flame-lit cauldron. The napalm’s gluey tenacity fixed the creature firmly against Ginelli’s flak jacket; its hooked claws locked into the fabric while its teeth tore his scalp.

The huge torch of the god tree crashed inward toward the laager. A flaming branch snapped with the impact and bounded high in the air before plunging down on the napalm-filled flame track. Ginelli staggered to his feet, tried to run. The zippo exploded with a hollow boom and a mushroom of flame, knocking him down again without dislodging the vengeful horror on his back.

With the last of his strength, Ginelli ripped off the unfastened flak jacket and hurled it into the air. For one glistening instant he thought the napalm-soaked nylon would land short of the pool of fire surrounding the flame track. His uncoordinated throw was high and the winged killer had time to pull one van loose as it pinwheeled. It struck the ground that way, mired by the incendiary that bloomed to consume it.

Ginelli lay on his back, no longer able to move. A shadow humped over the top of the wall: Hieu, moving very stiffly. His right hand held a cane spear. The Meng was withered like a violet whose roots had been chopped away, but he was not dead.

“You kill all, you … animals,” he said. His voice was thick and half-choked by the napalm that had hosed him. He balanced on the wall, black against the burning wreckage of the god tree. “All…,” he repeated, raising the spear. “Cut … poison … burn. But you—”

Herrold’s greasegun slammed beside Ginelli, its muzzle blast deafening even against the background roar of the flames. A solid bar of tracers stitched redly across the Meng’s chest and slapped him off the wall as a screaming ball of fire.

It was still four hours to dawn, Ginelli thought as he drifted into unconsciousness; but until then the flames would give enough light.

THE RED LEER

As he swung the tractor for a final pass across Sac Ridge Field, Deehalter saw that dirt had been turned on the side of the Indian mound. The big man threw in the hand clutch of the Allis-Chalmers and throttled the diesel back to idle as he glared at the new trench through the barbed wire. “That goddam Kernes,” he whispered. “If I’ve got to work with him much longer.…”

He revved the engine and slammed the tractor back in gear. The farmer’s scowl was as black as the hair curling up his arms from the backs of his hands to the shirtsleeves rolled at his biceps.

At the south end of the field, Deehalter raised the cultivator and drove the Allis down the long, looping trail back to the farm buildings. There was a way of sorts straight west from the top of the ridge, but it was too steep for the tractor. The more gradual slope took Deehalter through half a dozen gates and eventually back to the buildings from the southwest. To the left loomed the barn and the three concrete silos peering over its roof at him. The milking parlor was a one-story addition to the barn’s east side, facing the equipment shed and the gas pump. And at the pump was Tom Kernes with his ten-year-old son, Deehalter’s nephew, putting gas in the jeep.

Deehalter pulled up beside them and let the diesel clatter for a moment before he shut it off. Kernes, a short, ginger-headed man, looked up. His arms were not tan but a deep red, with brighter slashes where the straps of his undershirt had interrupted part of the sunlight. Kernes was thirty-five, five years younger than his brother-in-law, but his crinkly, sunburned face would have passed for any age. “Finish Sac Ridge already, Dee?” he asked in his pleasant, throaty voice. The tension in his muscles showed that he had correctly read Deehalter’s anger.

“Kernes, what’ve you been doing with the Indian mound?” the bigger man demanded from the tractor seat. “You know to leave that the hell alone!” A pick and shovel lay in the back of the jeep. Deehalter noticed them and a black flush moved across his face.

Kernes’ skin was too red to show the blood, but his voice rose to the challenge. “When Old John owned the farm, he could say what he pleased; but he’s dead now. I’m damned if I’m not going to get an Indian skull like yours.” Gesturing eastward at the ridge, the little man added, “I own half this goddam place and I’m going to get a skull.”

The curio cabinet in Deehalter’s parlor had been assembled by his grandfather before the first world war. Among its agates and arrowheads, sword-cane and ostrich plumes, was a brown human skull. The family had always assumed the skull came from a mound somewhere, but not even Old John had been sure. It fascinated Kernes, perhaps only because Deehalter had refused to give it to him. The main house and its furnishings, including the cabinet, had gone to Deehalter under his father’s will—just as the new house in which his sister Alice lived with Kernes and their children had gone to her. The rest of the six hundred acre farm was willed to Deehalter and Alice jointly, with the provision that if either of them tried to partition the property, the whole of it went to the other. Deehalter had talked to a lawyer and he was sure Kernes had done the same. The worst news either of the men had heard in a long time was that the will would probably stand up in court.

“There’s a law against digging up mounds,” Deehalter muttered.

“There’s a law against keeping an Indian skull on display,” the shorter man blazed back. “You going to bring the law in here, Dee?”

“Well,” Deehalter said lamely, “you don’t get everything in the mound. You’ve no right to that.”

Kernes stood, arms akimbo, sweat from the June sun glittering on his face. “If I do all the goddam digging, I do,” he said. “And anyhow, I get the skull out first.”

Deehalter wiped his face with his huge, calloused palm. He didn’t like to fool with the mound. Old John had whaled him within an inch of his life thirty years ago, when he had caught his son poking into the smooth slope with a posthole digger. But Deehalter remembered also the nightmare that had awakened him for months after that afternoon, and that dream was of nothing so common as a beating by his father. Still, to let Kernes take everything.… “All right,” Deehalter said, “I’ll help you dig. But I get my pick of anything besides a skull. Wouldn’t be surprised if there was gold in with a chief.” Actually, Deehalter knew enough about mounds to doubt there would be anything that would interest a non-archeologist—often the mounds hadn’t even been built over a body. But that wasn’t anything the big farmer was going to say to his brother-in-law.

“Dad,” said the Kernes boy unexpectedly. “If Uncle Dee helps you, you don’t need me, do you?”

Kernes looked at the child as though he wanted to hit him. “Go on, then,” he snapped. “But I want that goddam toolshed painted when I get back. All of it!”

The boy took off running for the house. Wiener, the farm’s part-collie, chased after him barking. “Kid’s been listening to his mother,” Kernes grumbled. “From the way Alice’s been carrying on, you’d think Old John was going to come out of his grave if I dug up that mound. He must’ve knocked that into her head with a maul.”

“He was strong on it,” Deehalter agreed absently. “I know when he was a boy, there was still a couple Sac Indians on the farm. Maybe they talked to him. But he was strong about a lot of things.”

“Well, you ready to go?” Kernes demanded. He had hung up the pump nozzle and now remembered to cap the jeep’s tank.

Deehalter grimaced. “I’ll put the cultivator in the shed,” he said. “Then we’ll go.”

*   *   *

Kernes drove, taking the direct trail through the east pasture. There was a rivulet to ford and a pair of gullies that had to be skirted, but the hard going didn’t start until they reached the foot of the ridge. They had bought the jeep ten years before from Army surplus, and the sharp grades of the ridge slope made the motor wheeze even in the granny gear. Cedars studded the slope, interspersed with bull thistles whose purple brachs were ready to burst open. There was a final switch-back just before the trail reached the summit. As Kernes hauled the wheel hard to the left, the motor spluttered and died. Deehalter swung out of the jeep and walked the last thirty yards while the smaller man cursed and trod on the starter.

The mound was built on the north end of the ridge. That part had never been opened as a field because the soil was too thinly spread above the bedrock. The mound was oval, about fifteen feet long on the east-west axis and three or four feet high. Though small, it was clearly artificial, a welt of earth on the smooth table of the ridge. Kernes’ trench was in the center of the south side, halfway in and down to the level of the surrounding soil. Deehalter was examining the digging when the jeep heaved itself up behind him and was cut off again.

“We just kept hitting rocks,” the smaller man explained. “We didn’t get near as far as I’d figured before we started.”

Deehalter squatted on his haunches and poked into the excavation with a finger like a corncob. “You didn’t hit rocks,” he said, “you hit a rock. One goddam slab. There’s no way we’re going to clear that dirt off it without a week of work or renting a bulldozer. And even if we cleared down to the rock, that slab’s a foot thick and must weigh tons. We’re just wasting our time here—or we would be if we didn’t go on back right now.”

Kernes swore. “We could hook a chain to the Allis—” he began.

Deehalter cut him off. “We’d have to get the dirt off the top first, and that’d take all goddam summer. This was a bad idea to start, and it got worse quick. Come on, let’s go back.” He straightened.

“What about dynamite?” blurted Kernes.

Deehalter stared at his brother-in-law. The smaller man would not meet his gaze but continued, “There’s still a stick under the seat from when you blew up the beaver dam. We could use it.”

“Kernes,” Deehalter said, “you’re so afraid of that dynamite that you’d rather leave it in the jeep than touch it to get it out. Besides, it’ll blow the shit out of anything under that slab—if there is anything and the slab’s not flat on bedrock all the way across. What’re you trying to prove?”

Kernes’ red face grew even brighter with embarrassment or anger. “Look,” he said, “I’m gonna get into this goddam thing if I got to hire a contractor. I said I would and I will. You don’t want to help, that’s your goddam business.”

Deehalter eyed him a moment longer. “Oh, I’ll do my part,” he said. He gestured to the pick and added, “You see if you can cut a slot an inch deep and maybe eight inches long in the seam between the top slab and the bedrock. I’ll get the dynamite ready.” He grinned. “Unless you want to do that instead?”

Kernes’ only response was to heft the tool with a choked grip and begin chopping at the stone.

Deehalter flipped the jeep’s seat forward and lifted out the corrugated cardboard box beneath it. There was, as Kernes had said, still one stick of dynamite left along with a roll of wire and a smaller box of blasting caps. The explosive terrified Kernes in the way snakes or spiders do other men. Deehalter had deliberately refused to take the stick out of the jeep despite his brother-in-law’s frequent requests. Finally Kernes had ceased to mention it—until now. Kernes was so stubbornly determined to have an Indian skull that he had overridden his fear of the explosive. It occurred to Deehalter that he was doing the same thing himself with his fear of the mound.

The big farmer leaned against the jeep as he dug a fuze pocket in the dynamite with a pencil stub. Kernes was chipping the soft rock effectively, even in the confined space. “Not too wide,” Deehalter warned as he twisted the leads from the blasting cap onto the extension wire.

He didn’t like what they were doing. Shapes from long-ago nightmares were hovering over his mind, unclear but no less unpleasant for that. He’d never heard of Indians using stone in their mounds, and that bothered him too. Still, why not? The Mississippi Basin was rich in soft yellow limestone, already layered by its floodings and strandings in the shallow seas of its deposition. So it wasn’t the stone or anything else rational which was eating at Deehalter; it was just that something felt cold and very wrong inside him.

“That enough, Dee?” Kernes asked, panting. His sleeveless undershirt was gray with sweat.

Deehalter leaned forward. “It’ll do,” he acknowledged. Kernes was shrinking back from the explosive in Deehalter’s hand. “Run the jeep over the crest of the ridge and get the hood open. There’s enough wire to reach to there.”

While his brother-in-law scrambled to obey, Deehalter knelt in the trench and made his own preparations. First he set the blasting cap in the hole in the end of the dynamite. Then he carefully kneaded the explosive into the slot Kernes had cut in the rock. The heavy waxed paper and its fillings of sawdust, ammonium nitrate, and nitroglycerin were hot and deformed easily. A lot of people didn’t know how to use dynamite; they wasted the force of the blast. Deehalter didn’t want to blow the mound open, but he’d be damned if he wouldn’t do it right if he did it at all.

When the dynamite had been molded into the rock, the big man shoveled dirt down on top of it and used his boots to firmly tamp the pile. The thin wire looped out of the earth like the shadow of a grass blade. Deehalter hung the coil on the pick handle, using it as a loose spindle from which to unwind the wire as he walked to the jeep.

“This far enough away?” Kernes asked, eying the mound apprehensively.

“Unless a really big chunk comes straight down,” Deehalter said, silently pleased at the other man’s nervousness. “Christ, it’s just one stick, even if it is sixty-percent equivalent.”

Kernes bent down behind the jeep. Deehalter squatted at the front, protected from the blast by the brow of the hill. He held the bare end of one wire to the negative post of the battery, then touched the other lead to the positive side. Nothing happened. “God dammit,” he said, prodding the wire to cut through the white corrosion on the post.

The dynamite exploded with a loud thunp.

“Jesus!” Kernes shouted as he bounced to his feet. Deehalter, more experienced, hunched under his baseball cap while dirt and tiny rock fragments rained over him and the jeep. Then at last he stood and followed his brother-in-law. The smaller man was now cursing and trying to brush dirt from his head and shoulders with his left hand; in his right he carried a battery spotlight.

Acrid black smoke curled in the pit like a knot of snakes. The sod walls of the trench looked as they had before the explosion, but the earth compacted over the charge was gone and the exposed edge of the rock slab had shattered. Because the limestone could neither move nor compress, the shock had broken it as thoroughly as a twenty foot fall could have.

Kernes bent down over the opening and grasped a chunk of stone to toss out of the way. The dynamite fumes looped a tendril over his face. Kernes coughed and quivered, and for an instant Deehalter thought the other man lost focus. Then Kernes was on his feet again, fanning the shovel blade to clear the smoke faster and crying, “By God, Dee, there’s really something in there! By God!”

Deehalter waited, frowning, as Kernes shoveled at the rubble. A little prying with the blade was enough to crumble the edge of the slab into fist-sized pieces like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. More dirt fell in, but that was easily scooped away. The actual opening stayed small because the only cavity in the bedrock was a shallow, water-cut basin. It sloped so gradually that even after a two-foot scallop had been nibbled from the overlying slab there was barely enough room to reach an arm into the hollow.

The fumes had dissipated. Kernes scattered a last shovelful of dirt and gravel, then tossed the tool aside as well. Kneeling down with his face as close to the opening as he could get it and still leave room for the spotlight, he began to search the cavity. “God damn,” Kernes said suddenly. “God damn!” He tried to reach in left-handed, found there was too little room, and shoved the light back out of the way since he had already located the object in his head. The spotlight beam touched grass blades shaded from the sun, a color rather than an illumination.

“Look at this, Deehalter!” cried Kernes as he scrabbled backward. “By God!”

“I’ve seen skulls before,” the black-haired man said sourly, eyeing the discolored bone which his brother-in-law held hooked through the eyesockets. The lower jaw was missing, but the explosion seemed to have done little damage. Unless the front teeth.…

“There’s other stuff in there too,” Kernes bubbled.

“Then it’s mine,” said Deehalter sharply.

“Did I goddam say it wasn’t?” Kernes demanded. “And you can get it out for yourself, too,” he added, looking down at his shirt, muddied by dirt and perspiration.

Deehalter said nothing further. He lay down carefully in the fresh earth and directed the spotlight past his head. He could see other bones in the shallow cavity. The explosion had shaken them, but their order was too precise for any large animals to have stripped away the flesh. Indeed, the bundles of skin and tendon still clinging to the thighs indicated that not even mice had entered the tomb. The stone-to-stone seal must have been surprisingly close.

Metal glittered beyond the bones. Deehalter marked its place and reached in, edging himself forward so that his shoulder pressed hard against the ragged lip of the slab. He expected to feel revulsion or the sudden fear of his childhood, but the cavity was dry and empty even of death. His wrist brushed over rib bones and he thought the object beyond them was too far; then his fingertips touched it, touched them, and he lifted them carefully out.

Kernes stopped studying the skull in the sunlight from different angles. “What the hell you got there, Dee?” he asked warily.

Deehalter wasn’t sure himself, so he said nothing. He held the two halves of a hollow metal teardrop, six inches long. On the outside it was black and bubbled-looking; within, the spherical cavity was no larger than a hickory nut. The mating surfaces and the cavity itself were a rich silver color, untarnished and as smooth as the lenses of a camera.

“One of them’s mine,” said Kernes abruptly. “The skull and half the rest.” He reached for one of the pieces.

“Like hell,” said Deehalter, mildly because he was concentrating on the chunks of metal. His big shoulder blocked Kernes away without effort. “Besides, it’s all one thing,” he added, holding the sections so that the polished surfaces mated. Then, when he tried to part them, the halves did not reseparate.

“Aw,” Kernes said in disbelief and again put a hand out for the object. This time Deehalter let him take it. Despite all the ginger-haired man’s tugging and pushing, the teardrop held together. It was only after Kernes, sweating and angry, had handed back the object that Deehalter found the trick of it. You had to rotate the halves along the plane of the separation—which, since there was no visible line, was purely a matter of luck the first time it worked.

“Let’s get on home,” Deehalter said. He nodded westward toward the sun. Sunset was still an hour away, but it would take them a while to drive back. The ridge was already casting its broad shadow across the high ground to the east. “Besides,” Deehalter added, almost under his breath, “I don’t like the feeling I get up here sometimes.”

But it was almost two weeks before Deehalter had any reason for his uneasiness.…

*   *   *

Despite the full moon low in the west and the light of the big mercury vapor lamp above the cowyard to the north of the barn, the plump blonde stumbled twice on the graveled path to the car. The second time she caught Deehalter’s arm and clung there giggling. More to be shut of her than for chivalry, the farmer opened the passenger door of the Chrysler and handed her in. Naturally, she flopped across his lap when he got in on the driver’s side. He pushed her upright in disgust.

It was 3 AM and there were no lights yet in Alice and her husband’s house. Deehalter knew they had seen him bring Wendy home in the evening, knew also that Wiener would awaken them as he chased the car. Kernes had once complained to Deehalter, red-faced, about the example he set for his nephew and nieces by bringing whores home to their grandfather’s house. Deehalter had told him that under the will it was his house, and that when Kernes and Alice quit fucking in their house, he’d consider quitting it in his. The smaller man hadn’t quite taken a swing as Deehalter had hoped he might.

When the car began to scrunch down the drive past the new house, Wiener came loping toward them from the barn. He barked once every other time his forefeet touched the ground. The noise was more irritating than even a quick staccato would have been. The car windows were closed against the night’s damp chill. Deehalter’s finger was poised on the switch to roll the glass down and shout at the mongrel, when Wendy’s scream snapped his head around.

The bank to the left sloped up from the drive, so the thing standing there was only in the edge of the lights. It was wire thin and tall—twice the height of a man at a fleeting glance, though a part of Deehalter knew that was the effect of the bank and the angle. A flat lizard-snout of teeth glittered sharply. Then the beast turned and the big car leaped forward down the drive as Deehalter floored the accelerator. Wendy was still screaming, her face buried in her hands, when the car banged over the slotted cattle-guard and fishtailed onto the gravel county road.

Deehalter kept his speedometer dangerously above 60 for the first three miles, until they reached the tavern and gas station at Five Points. There he braked to a stop and turned on the dome light. The girl whimpered. Deehalter’s big hands gripped her shoulders and hauled her upright. “Shut up,” he said tightly.

“W-what was it?” she slubbered.

“Shut up, for Christ’s sake!” Deehalter shouted. “It wasn’t a god damned thing!” He brought his face close to Wendy’s. The girl’s eyes were as fearful as they had been minutes before at the sight of the creature. “You saw a cat in the headlights, that’s all. You’re not going to get everybody and his brother tramping over my farm shooting my milking herd. You’re going to keep your goddam mouth shut, do you hear?”

The blonde was nodding to the rhythm of Deehalter’s words. Tears streamed from her eyes, and when she tried to wipe them she smeared the remains of her eye shadow across her cheeks.

Deehalter released her suddenly and put the car in gear. Neither of them spoke during the rest of the ride to town. When the big farmer stopped in front of the girl’s apartment, she stumbled out and ran up the steps without bothering to close the car door. Deehalter locked it after he slammed it shut.

He drove back to the farm at a moderate pace that slowed appreciably as he came nearer. The night had only its usual motions and noises now. Deehalter was waiting in his locked car an hour later, alone with nothing but a memory to disturb him, when Kernes came out of his house to start milking.

*   *   *

After lunch—a full meal of fried steak and potatoes; Deehalter had cooked for himself and his father as well before Old John died—the big man walked down the drive and began searching the grassy bank to the left of it. Once when he looked up, he saw his sister watching him intently from the Kernes’ kitchen window. He waved but she ducked away. Toward three o’clock, Kernes himself came back in the jeep from inspecting the fences around the northwest pasture. Deehalter hailed him. After a moment’s hesitation, the ginger-haired man swung the vehicle up the bank and stopped.

“Come look at this,” Deehalter said. The turf was marked fuzzily where he pointed. “Doesn’t it look like three claw prints?” he asked.

Kernes looked at him strangely. “Claw prints? What do you mean, Dee?”

“It—oh, Christ, I don’t know,” said the big man, straightening and lifting his cap to run his hand through his hair. He looked glumly back past the barn to the long bulk of Sac Ridge.

“Haven’t seen Wiener today, have you?” Kernes asked unexpectedly.

“Not since I took Wendy home this morning,” replied Deehalter, his own expression odd. “Barked at the car as usual. You must’ve heard him.”

“Learned to sleep through it, I guess,” said Kernes, and the words did not quite ring true … though that might have been the blurred print on the ground and Deehalter’s blurred memory of what had made the print. Kernes got into the jeep. “Usually he chases a rabbit, he gets back for breakfast. Kids’ve about worried me to death about that damn dog.”

“I’ll ride to the barn with you,” Deehalter said. They did not speak about the dog—or the print—for the rest of the afternoon.

*   *   *

In the evening, after Deehalter had finished his turn at milking, Alice came out to the barn to help wash down the equipment. Alice Kernes was ten years younger than her brother. Though they had never been close, there was a thread of mutual affection despite Deehalter’s reciprocated hatred for his brother-in-law. Alice hummed as she polished the glass tubing and stainless steel; a short woman with her black hair tied back by a kerchief and a man’s shirt flapping over the waistband of her gray skirt.

“Wiener been back yet?” Deehalter asked with feigned disinterest.

“No, have you seen him?” Alice said, pausing to catch the shake of Deehalter’s head.

“Susie’s been crying all day. Tom went out to quiet the dog down this morning and I think he scared him off. But he’ll be back tonight, I figure.”

Deehalter flipped the switch that would drain the water now being cycled through the transfer piping. “Kernes got up to chase him?”

“Uh-huh. Did you get the big tank?”

“Yeah, we can call it a night,” Deehalter said. Bloodstains are hard to identify in heavy grass, harder even than footprints in the sod beneath, so he made no mention of the splotches he had found thirty yards from the drive that afternoon. There had been no body, not even a swatch of dog fur forn off in a struggle.

But despite that, Deehalter guessed that the mongrel would not be coming home that night.

*   *   *

A cow awakened Deehalter with a blat like a cut-off klaxon horn. His Remington .30-06 leaned against the window frame, bathed in moonlight. Deehalter stripped a shell into the autoloader’s chamber from the full magazine before he pulled on his dungarees and boots. Shirtless, his baggy trousers weighted down by the rest of the box of ammunition, Deehalter unlocked the front door and began running across the yard.

There were one hundred and sixty cattle in the barn, and from the noise they had all gone wild. Over their bellows came clatters and splintering as the frantic tons of beef smashed the fittings of the barn. Normally in the summer, the cows were free to wander in and out of the yard and to the pasture beyond, but tonight Deehalter had penned them for safety. He was a hundred feet from the electric fence of the yard, cursing his mistake in having concentrated the herd and then left it unprotected, when one of the black-and-white Holsteins smashed from the barn into the cowyard through both halves of the Dutch door.

There was something behind it.

The thing’s tongue and the blood on its jaws were black in the mercury floodlight. Erect against the side of the barn it was almost eight feet tall, though only the shadows gave mass to its spindly limbs. It saw Deehalter and skidded on the slippery concrete, its claws rasping through the slime. Deehalter threw his rifle to his shoulder. It was as if he were aiming at a skeleton made of coat hangers, the thing was so thin. Deehalter’s hands shook. The creature bent forward, cocking its hips back for balance. It opened its jaws so wide that every needle tooth seemed pointed at the farmer. Then it screamed like a plunging shell as Deehalter fired. His bullet punched neatly through the side of the barn ten feet above the ground.

With a single stride, the creature disappeared back within the building. Deehalter slammed another shot through the empty doorway.

Panting, the big man knelt and fumbled out the box of ammunition without letting go of the rifle. His shoulder ached. The empty cases shone silver pale on the grass to his right. When Deehalter had reloaded, he shuffled forward again. He held his rifle out as if he were thrusting it through fluid. The yard was filled with milling cows. Deehalter moved past them to the low milking parlor and tried in vain to peer through the dusty windows. Then, holding the rifle awkwardly like a huge pistol, he unlatched the door and flipped on the light. There was nothing in the parlor, and its metal gates to the barn were still closed.

Deehalter turned on the lights in the main building. There were only a score of frightened cows still within. The half loft eight feet above the bare floor had only a little straw in it. The loft door in the south wall hung askew. There were deep scratches around its broken latch. From the left, Deehalter grimly surveyed the barn. The interior walls were spattered with blood. A heifer was dead in her stall; long gouges reddened the hides of several others of the herd.

It was almost dawn. The black-haired farmer stood at the loft door, cursing and staring out into the red sunrise which pulled the shadow of the ridge like a long curtain over the pasture.

The door to the milking parlor banged. Deehalter swung around and raised the muzzle of his rifle. It was Kernes barefooted and in torn pajamas with Alice, wide-eyed, behind him. Seeing the blood and the dead heifer, she shouted at her husband, “My God, Tom, have you and George been shooting cows?”

Kernes gaped. Deehalter couldn’t understand why the question was directed at his brother-in-law. “No, it was a, a—” Deehalter began and stuttered to a halt, uncertain both of the truth and what he should say about it. To change the subject he said, “We got to phone Doc Jepson. Some of the cows’ve been—cut.”

“Phone the vet?” blazed Alice—Kernes still had not spoken. She reached back into the parlor for the extension which hung on the wall higher than a cow carries its head. “We’ll call the Sheriff, we’ll call—”

“Put down that goddam phone!” Deehalter said, not loudly but too loudly to be ignored by anyone who knew him well.

Alice was in a rage herself, but she stepped back from the phone and watched her brother descend carefully from the loft. “What did it, George?” she asked.

“I didn’t get a good look.”

“God dammit, George,” Alice said, letting go of her anger now that Deehalter had cooled enough not to shoot her dead in a fury, “why won’t you let me get help?”

“Because we’re in the milk business,” the big man said, sagging against the ladder in mental exhaustion. Kernes wasn’t really listening; Alice’s face was blank. “Because if we go tell people there’s an eight-foot lizard on our farm—”

Kernes swore. Deehalter shouted, “All right, I saw it, what the hell’s the difference? Something killed the cow, didn’t it?” He glared at the others, then went on, “First they’ll think we’re crazy. And then when they learn it’s true, they’ll say, ‘Strontium 90,’ or ‘What’re they spraying their fields with to do that?’ or, ‘There’s something in their water.’ And we’ll never sell another pint of milk from here as long as we live. You know what the dairy business is like!”

Alice nodded sharply. “Then we’ll just raise hogs,” she said, “or corn—or we’ll sell the farm and all get jobs with Purina, for God’s sake. Spring Hill Dairies isn’t the whole—”

“Alice!”

Kernes’ eyes were flicking from one sibling to the other, a spectator rather than a referee. Alice glared at him, then said to her brother, “All right, George. But I’m taking the kids into town to stay with Iris until you come to your senses.” Then, to her husband, she added, “Tom, are you coming too?”

“If you leave here, Kernes,” said Deehalter quietly, “you’ll never come back. I don’t give a shit what the law says.”

The men stared at each other. “I’ll stay,” Kernes said. Alice banged through the gate and into the milking parlor without a look behind her. “I’d have stayed anyway, Alice!” the smaller man shouted.

“Call Doc Jepson,” Deehalter repeated wearily. “We can tell him it was dogs or something—” the tooth marks were too high and broad for that to be other than a transparent lie—“and hope we can scotch this thing before worse happens.”

Numbly, Kernes made the call. As the little man hung up, they heard the rasping starter of the old station wagon. A moment later, gravel spattered as Alice rocketed down the drive. Almost as fast as he himself had driven the night before, Deehalter thought.

“It’s because of what we took out of that mound,” Kernes said in a small voice.

Deehalter shook his head in irritation. “This thing didn’t come from a skull or a little bit of iron,” he snapped. “It’s big, big enough to kill a Holstein.”

“It was there just the same,” Kernes replied. “We’ve got to close that grave up with everything in it again. Then maybe we’ll be okay.”

“You’re nuts,” Deehalter said. But he remembered the thing’s eyes and the gape of its jaws; and he knew that some time that day he would help Kernes bury the objects again.

*   *   *

Deehalter walked to the mound and the parked jeep without speaking. In the field behind him, the crows settled noisily on the carrion again.

Kernes had lifted out a pair of shovels and the gunny sack holding the objects. “Well?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Deehalter with a shrug, “it was Wiener.”

Kernes began to undo the knot which closed the sack’s throat. Without looking up, he said, “I think it’s the moon. That’s why it didn’t come out when we opened the mound. It needed the full moon to bring it out.”

“Bullshit,” said Deehalter. “I saw the thing and it’s not moonlight, it’s as solid as you or me. Damn sight solider than old Wiener there,” he added with a grim twist of his head. “Moonlight’s just light, anyway.”

“Fluorescent light’s just light too,” Kernes retorted, “but it makes plants grow like they don’t with a regular lightbulb. Christ, Dee, don’t you feel the moon on you at night?”

Deehalter did, but he wasn’t about to admit that weakness even in the noon sun. Kernes had paused after opening the bag, unwilling either to dump the contents back into the hole without ceremony or to touch them again bare-handed. The big man hesitated also. Then he glanced at the guns in easy reach, between the front seats of the jeep, and lifted out the skull.

The bone felt warm. Because Deehalter had not really taken a look at it before, he did so now at this last opportunity. The teeth were damaged in a way that at first he could not explain. Then the farmer cursed, set the skull down on the ground, and stretched out in the open trench. The angle was too flat for Deehalter to have been able to see anything even if he had brought a flashlight this trip, but his fingertips found the shallow grooves he expected in the under-surface of the slab.

“Christ,” he muttered, standing up again. “That poor sucker was alive when they covered him up in there. He didn’t have a damned thing to dig with, so he tried to scrape through the stone with his teeth.”

Kernes stared at the skull and looked a little sicker than he had before. His finger traced but did not touch the front teeth. All four of the incisors were worn across the flats as if by a file. They had been ground down well into the nerve canals. One of the front pair had cracked about half-way from the root. “Yeah, I’d seen that but I didn’t think…,” he said. “Jesus, what a way to go. He surely must’ve known he couldn’t chew his way through a foot of rock.”

“Maybe he didn’t know there was a foot of it,” Deehalter said. “Besides, he didn’t have a lot of choice.”

Carefully, the big man set the skull as far back into the mound as his arm would reach. The litter of bone and rock chips within scrunched under his shirtsleeve.

The rippled, iron teardrop was still closed. Deehalter looked at it for a moment, then twisted it to split the halves because they had been separate when he found them. The metal divided with a soft gasp like a cold jar being opened. Deehalter set the halves under the slab as carefully as he had the discolored skull.

Almost before he rolled out of the way, his brother-in-law was tossing a shovelful of earth into the hole. Kernes worked feverishly at the soil pile he and his son had thrown up in digging the pit. By the time Deehalter had brushed himself off and picked up a shovel, the blast-crumbled edge of the slab had been buried again.

They finished their work before noon, leaving on the mound’s side a black scar that sealed off the greater blackness within.

*   *   *

The barn windows were green fiberglass which the western moonlight outlined sharply against the walls. The diffused illumination was weak and without distinct shadows, It made the loft floor an overlay of grays on grays which wobbled softly as Deehalter paced along it. The cattle penned below murmured, occasionally blatting loudly at their unfamiliar restraint. At each outburst, Deehalter would pause and lean over the loft rail with his rifle forward; but the bellowing was never for any reason that had to do with why two armed men were watching the barn tonight.

At the north end of the loft, Deehalter stopped and looked out the open loading door. The cowyard below was scraped and hosed off daily, but animal waste had stained the concrete an indelible brown which became purple in the mercury light.

To the left, within the fence of the cowyard and in the corner it formed with the barn, hunched Kernes with a shotgun loaded with deer slugs. From Deehalter’s angle, the smaller man was foreshortened into a stump growing from the concrete. Nothing moved in the night, though the automatic feeder in the hog pens flapped several times. As Deehalter watched silently, Kernes looked up at the moon. Despite the coolness of the night and the breeze from the west, Kernes pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

Deehalter turned and began pacing back to the south end of the barn. He had finished his thermos of coffee hours ago, and it was only by staying in motion that he was able to keep awake. He couldn’t understand how Kernes could huddle in the same corner since ten o’clock and still be alert; but then, Kernes wasn’t a person Deehalter wanted to understand.

Deehalter peered out the south door. Nothing, nothing, of course nothing. A fox barked in the invisible distance and the big man’s grip tightened on his rifle stock. He caught himself before he threw a bullet out into the night in frustration; then he began to pace back.

But each time the creature had come, it was in the near dawn. As if it were striding to the farm from far away, or because it got a late start. The notch he and Kernes had blasted in the Indian mound faced southwest. Moonlight would not have entered it until nearly morning. But there was no living thing in that narrow rock basin, only a litter of bones and what was probably a meteorite.

Why had that Indian been sealed up alive?

Nothing but bones and iron in the mound. Briefly, Deehalter’s mind turned over a memory of awakening to seize his rifle in the pattern of moonlight etched across his room by the venetian blinds. Now he held the weapon close and bent forward to look at his brother-in-law.

Kernes had moved slightly, out along the electric fence. The yard light colored his shirt blue but could not throw a shadow forward into the glare of the full moon. Kernes was staring west at that mottled orb. His shotgun barrel traced nervous arcs, rising and slipping back to a high port. It was almost as if the smaller man were wishing he could fire at the moon, but catching himself a moment before he did anything that … crazy.

Kernes’ body slithered.

“Kernes!” Deehalter screamed.

The man below turned and was a man again. The shotgun had fallen to the concrete. Kernes’ clothing was awry from having something monstrously thin start to clamber out of it. Part of Deehalter’s mind wondered what Kernes had thought in the mornings when he found himself naked in the pasture, his tangled pajamas outside his house.

Now the small farmer was looking up at Deehalter, his face as dead and horrified as that of the statue of Laöcoon. Then he changed again, and the long jaws spread to hiss at the man above. Deehalter laid his open sights in the middle of the thing’s breastbone and squeezed off the shot.

The bullet flew high because of the angle, but the big man was hunter enough to have allowed for that. The soft-nose spiked through the lower mandible and into the throat, exiting at last through the creature’s back. The jacketed lead, partly expanded but with only a fraction of its energy gone, slapped the concrete beyond and splashed away in a shower of sparks and a riven howl.

The thing that had been Kernes hurtled backwards and slid until it struck the fence. Its stick-thin limbs thrashed, shredding remnants of its clothing with claws and the strength of a grizzly. Its jaws snapped. The hole in its throat was small, but Deehalter knew that the supersonic bullet would have left a wound cavity like a pie tin in the back.

The entrance wound had closed. The beast was scrabbling to its feet.

Deehalter screamed and shot it through the chest, an off-center impact that spun the creature again to the concrete. This time Deehalter could see the plastic flesh closing on the scale-dusted torso. He remembered Wiener and the gullied throat of the Holstein. With only that instant’s hesitation, the big man braced his rifle in front of him and leaped through the window to his right. The fiberglas panel sprang out in a piece as the frame tore. Deehalter stumbled headlong onto the low roof of the milking parlor, rolled, and jumped to the ground. The jeep was only twenty feet away and he ran for it.

There was no ignition lock. Deehalter flipped the power on and stabbed at the starter button under the clutch pedal. The engine ground but did not catch. There was a tearing noise behind him, and despite himself the big man turned to look. The creature was in the cowyard fence. The top strand was electrified. Blue sparks crackled about the thing’s foreclaws. Its shape was in a state of flux so swift as to be almost subliminal. It was as if superimposed holograms of Kernes and the creature he had become were being projected onto the fence. Then the hot wire snapped and the thing’s legs cut the remaining strands like sickles through fog.

Deehalter fired one-handed and missed. He steadied the rifle, locking his left elbow on the tubular seat-frame, and knocked the creature back into the cowyard with no top to its skull. Then the engine chugged and the big farmer threw the jeep into second gear at higher revs than the worn clutch was used to. Spewing gravel but without the power to sideslip, the vehicle churned forward.

For choice, Deehalter would have run west for the county road as he had two nights before in his Chrysler. That would have meant turning and trying to race past the cowyard, where the creature was already on its feet again and striding toward him. Deehalter had small need of his imagination to picture that scene: the long-clawed arms hooking over the steering wheel and plucking him out like the meat from a walnut half, leaving the empty jeep to careen into a ditch. He was headed instead toward Sac Ridge and the mound from which the horror must have come.

Deehalter had the headlights on, but they were mounted too low to show up potholes in time even at moderate speed—and his present speed was anything but moderate. The jeep jounced so badly that only the big man’s grip on the steering wheel kept him in the vehicle. The shovels in the back did spin out into the night. It occurred to Deehalter that the rifle which he had wedged butt-downward beneath the back seat might fire and end him permanently as it had been unable to do to the thing pursuing. He did not care. He only knew that he had looked down the creature’s gaping jaws and would rather anything than die between them.

Despite his panic, Deehalter shifted into compound low to cross the stream, knowing that any attempt to mount the slippery bank in a higher gear would have meant sliding back into certain death. On the rutted pasture beyond, he revved and slam-shifted. He was proud of his skill only for the instant before the low moon flicked a leaping shadow across the corner of his eye. Fear washed away pride and everything else.

Despite the ruts the jeep made good time in the pasture, but as the old vehicle began to climb the side of the ridge Deehalter knew the creature must be gaining. There was no choice, nowhere else to run. If he turned either north or south, the thing’s long shanks would cut it across the slant of his right angle.

Where had the creature come from originally? Perhaps the Indians had known; but even if the teardrop was the source, it could as easily have fallen a million years before and a thousand miles away, carried south on a glacier. Deehalter could picture a nervous band of Sacs dragging one of their number to the rock basin, bound or unconscious. Or would it have been a tribe from the pre-Columbian past? There was nothing in the mound to date it. Something had come from the cocoon of iron and been trapped again between layers of rock. Trapped until he and Kernes had freed it in a vapor which merged with the black tendrils of the dynamite.

As Deehalter neared the top of the ridge, he glanced sideways. The creature was a foot behind him and a foot to the left, its right leg poised to stride and its yard-long right arm poised to rip the farmer’s throat open. Deehalter slammed on the brakes, acting by reflex. It was the proper reflex, even though the jeep stalled. The beast’s claws swept where Deehalter’s head should have been, and its body belled and rebounded from the unyielding fender. For a moment, the thing sprawled backwards on the hillside; then it twisted upright, lizard-quick, and lunged.

Deehalter touched the muzzle of his Remington to the scaly ribs and blew the creature a dozen yards down the hill. The cartridge case sailed away in a high arc, the mouth of it eroded by the excessive pressures from the blocked muzzle.

And though Deehalter still had the part box in his pocket, that had been the last round in the weapon.

In stalling, Deehalter had flooded the jeep’s engine. He leaped out, winded already with fear, and topped the ridge with two long strides. The headlights were waning yellow behind him, where he could already hear the creature moving. The sky to the east was the color of blood. Deehalter ran for the mound as if its gentle contours could protect him. He tried to jump to its top, but his foot sank in the soft earth of the diggings. The big man windmilled forward onto his face in the grass beyond. His grip on the empty rifle had flayed his right knuckles against the ground. His twisted ankle gave a twinge; it might or might not bear his weight again.

Deehalter turned, trying to fumble another cartridge into the breech of the rifle. It was too late. Hissing like a cat in a lethal rage, the creature leaped delicately to the top of the mound.

It was even thinner than it had looked when flickering shadows had bulked its limbs. It had to be thin, of course, with only Kernes’ hundred and thirty pounds to clothe its frame. The curve of the mound made the creature’s height monstrous, even though its legs were poised to lunge and it carried its flat skull forward like that of a near-sighted mantis. The narrow lips drew apart in a momentary grin, gray-white and then crimson as the first rays of the sun touched the creature over the rim of the next hill.

For a moment the leer hung there. Deehalter, on his back, stared at it like a rabbit spitted by the gaze of a hunting serpent. Then the thing was gone and the fear was gone, and Deehalter’s practiced fingers slid a live round into the chamber of the ought-six.

“Wh-what’s the matter, Dee?” Kernes whimpered. He was pitiful in his nakedness, more pitiful in his stunned surprise at where he found himself. Kernes really hadn’t known what was happening, Deehalter realized. Perhaps Alice had begun to guess where her husband had been going in the night. That may have been why she had been so quick to run, before suspicion could become certainty.

“Dee, why’re you looking at me like that?” Kernes begged.

Deehalter stood. His ankle only throbbed. If his first bullet had killed the creature as it should have, he would have buried the body and claimed that something had dragged Kernes away. Perhaps he would have buried it here in the mound from which the creature had escaped to begin with. Alice and Dr Jepson could testify to the cattle’s previous injuries, whatever they might surmise had caused them.

The same story would be sufficient now.

“Goodby, you son of a bitch,” Deehalter said, and he raised his rifle. He fired point blank into the smaller man’s chest.

Kernes whuffed backwards as if a giant had kicked him. There was a look of amazement on his face and nothing more; but momentarily, something hung in the air between the dead man and the living, something as impalpable as the muzzle blast that rocked the hillside—and as real.

Deehalter’s flesh gave and for a startled second he/it knew why the Indians had buried their possessed brother alive, to trap the contagion with him in the rock instead of merely passing it on to raven and slay again.…

Then the sun was bright on Deehalter’s back, casting his shadow across the body of the man he had murdered. He recalled nothing of the moment just past.

Except that when he remembered the creature’s last red leer, he seemed to be seeing the image in a mirror.

THE SHORTEST WAY

The dingy relay station squatted beside the road. It had a cast-off, abandoned look about it though light seeped through chinks in the stone where mortar had crumbled. Broken roofslates showed dark in the moonlight like missing teeth. To the rear bulked the stables where relays for the post riders stamped and nickered in their filthy stalls, and the odor of horse droppings thickened the muggy night.

The three riders slowed as they approached.

“Hold up,” Vettius ordered. “We’ll get a meal here and ask directions.”

Harpago cantered a little further before halting. He was aristocrat enough to argue with a superior officer and young enough to think it worthwhile. “If we don’t keep moving, sir, we’ll never get to Aurelia before daybreak.”

“We’ll never get there at all if we keep wandering in these damned Dalmatian hills,” Vettius retorted as he dismounted. His side hurt. Perhaps he had gotten too old for this business. At sunup he had strapped his round shield tightly to his back to keep it from slamming during the long ride. All day it had rubbed against his cuirass, and by now it had left a sore the size of his hand.

The shield itself galled him less than what it represented. A sunburst whose rays divided ten hearts spaced around the rim had been nielloed onto the thin bronze facing: the arms of the Household Cavalry. Leading a troop of the emperor’s bodyguard should have climaxed Vettius’ career, but he had quickly discovered his job was really that of special staff with little opportunity for fighting. He was sent to gather information for the emperor where the stakes were high and the secret police untrustworthy. There was danger in probing the ulcers of a dying empire, but Vettius found no excitement in it; only disgust.

Dama chuckled with relief to be out of his saddle again. He used his tunic to fan the sweat from his legs, looking inconsequential beside the two powerful soldiers. Though he was a civilian, a sword slapped against his thigh. In the backcountry, weapons were the mark of caution rather than belligerence. He nodded toward the still silent building, his blond hair gleaming as bright in the moonlight as the bronze helmets of his two companions. “If it weren’t for the light, I’d say the place was empty.”

The door of the station creaked open, making answer needless. The man who stood on the threshold was as old and gnarled as the pines that straggled up the slopes of the valley. He faced them with wordless hostility. The last regular courier had passed, and he had been dozing off when this new party arrived. Like many petty officeholders, the stationmaster reveled in his authority—but did not care to be reminded of the duties that went with his position.

Vettius strode forward holding out a scroll of parchment. “Food for us,” he directed, “and you can give our horses some grain while we eat.”

“All right for you and the other,” the stationmaster rasped. “The civilian finds his own meal.”

“Government service,” Harpago muttered. He spat.

Vettius began kneading one wrist with his other hand. The little merchant touched his friend’s elbow, but Vettius shook him away. “I’ll take care of it my own way,” he said. His temper had worn thin on the grueling ride, and the stationmaster’s sneering slovenliness gouged at his nerves.

“Old man,” he continued in a restrained voice, “my authority is for food and accommodations for me and my staff. The civilian is with me as part of my staff. Do you dispute the emperor’s authority?”

The stationmaster reared back his head to look the soldier in the eyes. “Even the emperor can’t afford to feed every starving thief who comes along,” he began.

Vettius slapped him to the ground. “Will you call my friend a thief again?” he grated.

The old man’s eyes narrowed in hatred as he sullenly dabbed at his bleeding lip, but he shook his head, cowering before the soldier. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Then take care of those horses—and be thankful I don’t have you rub them down with your tongue.” Vettius stamped angrily into the station, Harpago and Dama behind him.

“Food!” Vettius snapped. A dumpy peasant woman scurried to open a cupboard.

“I could have paid something, Lucius,” the merchant suggested as they seated themselves at the trestle table. “After all, I came because I thought I could set up some business of my own here.”

“And I brought you because I need your contacts,” his friend replied. “The traders here won’t tell me if they think the governor really is trying to raise money for a rebellion.”

He paused, massaging the inside of his thighs where they ached from holding him into his stirrupless saddle since early dawn. “Besides,” he added quietly, “it’s been a long day—too long to be put upon by of some lazy bureaucrat.”

Dama sighed as the serving woman set down barley bread and cheese. “Not much of a meal anyway, is it?” he said. “I thought the empire fed its post couriers better than this, even in the back country.”

“And I thought we were going to get directions here,” Harpago complained. “If we don’t get to Aurelia before the fair ends we’ll find all the merchants scattered—and then how are we going to learn anything?”

“We’ll find a way,” Vettius assured him sourly. He took a gulp of the wine the woman had poured him, then slammed the wooden cup back on the table. “Gods! that’s bad.”

“Local vintage,” Dama agreed. “Maybe I should try to sell some decent wine here instead of silk.”

The older soldier swigged some more wine and grimaced wryly. “Old man!” he shouted. After a moment the stationmaster came to the door. He limped slightly and his swollen lip was a blotch of color against his tight face.

The soldier ignored the anger in the old man’s eyes. “How far is it to Aurelia?” he demanded.

“By which road?” the other growled.

Vettius touched the pommel of his spatha so that the long straight blade rattled against the bench. “By the shortest way,” he said testily.

“You have to…” the stationmaster began, then paused. He seemed to consider the matter carefully before he started again. “The shortest way, you say. Well, there’s a road just past the station. If you turn north on it, it’s only about twenty miles. But you’ll have to look well, because nobody’s been over that road for fifty years and the beginning is all grown over with trees.”

The serving woman suddenly chattered something in her own language. The man snarled back at her and she fell silent.

“Could you catch any of that?” Vettius asked Dama under his breath.

The little Cappadocian shrugged. “She said something about bandits. He told her to be quiet. But I don’t really know the language, you know.”

“Bandits we can take care of,” Harpago muttered, one finger tracing a dent in the helmet he had rested on the table.

“How else can we get to Aurelia?” Vettius questioned, half squinting as if to measure the stationmaster for a cross.

“You can keep on into Pasini, then turn back west on the Salvium road,” the other replied without meeting the officer’s eyes. “It’s several times as long.”

“Then we go by the straight route?” Vettius said, looking at his companions questioningly.

Harpago rose and reslung his shield.

“Why not?” Dama agreed.

The stationmaster watched them mount and ride off. His gnarled face writhed in terrible glee.

*   *   *

“What did they do, tear the whole road up?” Harpago asked. Even with the stationmaster’s warning they had almost ridden past the junction. The surfacing flags and concrete certainly had been taken up. Seeds had lodged in the road metal beneath. They had grown to sizable trees by now, so that the only sign of the narrow road was a relative absence of undergrowth.

“The locals must have torn up this branch because it wasn’t used much and they were tired of the labor taxes to repair it,” Vettius surmised. “They probably used the stone to fill holes on one of the main roads.”

“But if this leads to the district market town, it should have gotten quite a lot of use,” Dama argued.

“At least it’ll guide us to where we’re going,” Harpago put in, plunging into the trees.

The pines grew close together and their branches frequently interlocked; riding through them was difficult. Vettius began to wonder if they should stop and turn back, but after a hundred yards or so the torn up section gave way to regular road.

Dama paused, looking back in puzzlement as his fingers combed pine straw out of his hair. “You know,” he said, “I think they planted those trees on the road-bed when they tore up the surface.”

“Why should they do that?” Vettius snorted.

“Well, look around,” his friend pointed out. “The road is cracked here, too, but there aren’t any trees growing in it. Besides, the trees don’t grow as thickly anywhere else around here as they do on that patch of road. Somebody planted them to block it off completely.”

The soldier snorted again, but he turned in his saddle. Dama had a point, he realized. In fact, the pines might even be growing in crude rows. “Odd,” he admitted at last.

“Sir!” called Harpago, who had ridden far ahead. “Are you coming?”

Vettius raised an eyebrow. Dama laughed and slapped his horse’s flank. “He’s young; he’ll learn.”

“Sorry if I seem to push,” the adjutant apologized as they trotted onward, “but I don’t like wasting time on this stretch of road. It’s too dark for me.”

“Dark?” Vettius echoed in amazement. For the first time he took more than cursory notice of their surroundings. The swampy gully to the left of the road had once been a drainage ditch. Long abandonment had left it choked with reeds, while occasional willows sprouted languidly from its edge. On the right, ragged forest climbed the slope of the valley. Scrub pine struggled through densely interwoven underbrush to form a stark, desolate landscape.

But dark? The moonlight washed the broken pavement into a metal serpent twisting through the forest. The trees were too stunted to overshadow the road, and the paving stones gleamed against the contrast of frequent cracks and potholes. Even the scabbed boles of the pines showed silver scales where the moon touched them.

“I wouldn’t call it dark,” Vettius concluded aloud, “though you could hide a regiment in those thickets.”

“No, he’s right,” Dama disagreed unexpectedly. “It does seem dark, and I can’t figure out why.”

“Don’t tell me both of you are getting nervous of shadows,” jeered Vettius.

“I just wonder why they blocked off this road,” the merchant replied vaguely. “From the look of the job it must have taken most of the district. Wonder what that stationmaster sent us into.…”

*   *   *

Miles clattered gloomily by under their horses’ hooves. It was fell, waste land, a wretched paradigm for much of the empire in these latter days. This twisting valley could never have been much different, though. The humid bottoms had never been tilled; perhaps a few hunters had taken deer among its drooping pines. For the others who had come this way—lone travellers, donkey caravans, troops in glittering armor—the valley was only an incident of passage.

Now even the road was crumbling. Although only a short distance had been systematically destroyed, nature and time had taken a hand with the remainder. The flags had humped and split as water seepage froze in the winter, and one great section had fallen into the gully whose spring torrents had undercut it. They led their horses over the rubble while the pines drank their curses.

The usual nightbirds were hushed or absent.

Even Vettius began to feel uneasy. The moonlight weighed on his shoulders like a palpable force, crushing him down in his saddle. The moon was straight overhead now. Occasional streaks of light pierced the groping branches to paint the dark trunks with sword-blades.

It was dark now. No white face would gleam from the forest edge to warn of the bandit arrow to follow in an instant. Was it fear of bandits that made him so tense? In twenty years service he had ridden point in tighter places!

Letting his horse pick its own way over the broken road, Vettius scanned the forest. He took off his helmet and the tight leather cap that cushioned it. The air felt good, a prickly coolness that persisted even after he put the helmet back on, but there was no relief from the ominous tension. Grunting, he tried to hike his shield a little higher on his back.

Dama chuckled in vindication. “Nervous, Lucius?” he asked.

Vettius shrugged. “The woman at the station said there were bandits.”

“On an abandoned piece of road like this?” Dama laughed bitterly. “I wish she were here now. I’d find out for sure what she did say. Do you suppose she knew any Greek besides ‘food’ and ‘wine’?”

“No, she was too ugly for other refreshment,” Vettius said. His forced laughter bellowed through the trees.

After a short silence, Harpago said, “Well, at least we should be almost to Aurelia by now.”

“Look where the moon is, boy,” Vettius scoffed. “We’ve only been riding for two hours or so.”

“Oh, surely it’s been longer than that,” the younger man insisted, looking at the sky in amazement.

“Well, it hasn’t,” his commander stated flatly.

“Shall we rest the horses for a moment?” Dama suggested. “That pool seems to be spring fed, and I’m a little thirsty.”

“Good idea,” Vettius agreed. “I’d like to wash that foul wine out of my mouth too.”

“Look,” Harpago put in, “Aurelia must be just around the next bend. Why don’t we ride on a little further and see—”

“Ride yourself if you want to be a damned fool,” snapped Vettius. He didn’t like to be pushed, especially when he was right.

Harpago flushed. He saluted formally. When Vettius ignored him, he wheeled and rode off.

Vettius unstrapped his shield and looked around while the Cappadocian slurped water from his cupped hand. The adjutant was out of sight now, but the swift clinking of his horse’s hooves reached them clearly.

“If that young jackass doesn’t learn manners, somebody’s going to break his neck before he gets much older,” Vettius grumbled. “Might even be me.”

Dama dried his face on his sleeve and began filling the water bottles. “It’s something in the air here,” he explained. “We’re all tight.”

The soldier began scuffing at a stump fixed beside the roadway. Decayed wood flaked away under his hobnails and the wasted remnants of a bronze nail clinked on the pavement. “They crucified somebody here,” he said.

“Um?”

“These posts along the road,” Vettius explained. “There were several others back a ways. They’re what’s left of crosses when the top rots away.”

Around the bend the hoofbeats faltered and a horse neighed in terror. Vettius swore and slipped his left arm through the straps of his shield. Metal crashed on stone.

Someone screamed horribly.

The big soldier vaulted into his saddle. With one swift jerk Dama loosed the cloak tied to his pommel, snapped it swiftly through the air to wrap protection around his left arm. He scrambled astride his horse.

“Wait!” Vettius said. “You aren’t dressed for trouble. Ride back and get help.”

“I don’t think I will,” the merchant remarked, drawing the short infantry sword that was belted over his tunic. “Ready?”

“Yes,” Vettius said. His spatha shimmered in his hand.

They rounded the bend at a gallop. Wind caught at their garments. The Cappadocian’s tunic bulked out into a squat troll shape while Vettius’ short red officers’ cape flew straight back from his shoulders. When a man looked up at their approach, the soldier let out the terrible banshee howl he had learned from his first command, a squadron of Irish mercenaries, as they slaughtered pirates on the Saxon Shore.

One of the men in the road howled back.

Harpago’s horse pitched wildly as two filthy, skin-clad men sawed at its reins. Startled by Vettius’s howl, a dozen similar shapes in the middle of the road parted to disclose the adjutant himself. He lay on his back with his eyes wide open to the moon. One of the slayers was still lapping at the blood draining from Harpago’s torn throat.

The bandits surged to meet them. A youngster with matted hair and a wool tunic too dirty to show its original color swung a club at Vettius. It boomed dully on his shield, and the bandit snarled in fury. Vettius struck back with practiced grace, felling the club wielder with an overarm chop, then stabbing another opponent over his own back as he recovered his blade. Dropping the reins, he smashed his shield down into the face of a third who was hacking at his thigh below his studded leather apron. Her rough cloak fell away from her torso as she pitched backwards.

Dama had ridden down one of the bandits. He was trading furious strokes with a second, a purple-garbed patriarch with a sword, when a third man crawled under his horse’s belly and stabbed upward with a fire-hardened spear. The beast screamed in agony and threw the Cappadocian into the gully. He struggled upright barely in time to block the blow of a human thighbone used as a bludgeon, then thrust his assailant through the neck.

“Get Harpago’s horse!” Vettius shouted as he cut through the melee to relieve his friend.

Dama caught at the beast’s reins. A bandit, his mouth smeared with gore, clubbed him across the shoulders and he dropped them again. Stunned, he staggered into the horse. Before his opponent could raise his weapon for another blow, Vettius had slashed through his spine. Drops of blood sailed off the tip of the soldier’s sword as each blow arced home.

Dama threw himself onto the saddle. As he struggled to swing a leg astride, the purple-clad swordsman who had engaged him earlier slipped behind Vettius’ horse and cut at the blond merchant’s face. Vettius wheeled expertly and lopped off the bandit’s right arm.

The handful of surviving bandits fell back in mewling horror. Then a baby bawled from the darkness as his mother tore him from her breast and dropped him to the ground. The woodline crackled with frantic movement. Savage forms rushed from the black pines—children scarcely able to walk and feral women. In the hush their bare feet scratched on the stone. Their men, braced by their numbers, moved forward purposefully.

All looked bestially alike.

Vettius took the reeling bandit chief by the hair and thrust his blade against his bony throat. The ghoulish horde moaned in baffled rage, but hesitated.

Then one of the women snarled deep in her throat and rushed at the riders alone. Dama, reeling in his saddle, slashed at her. She ducked under his sword and raked the merchant’s leg with teeth and horny nails. Dama hacked awkwardly at her back. The woman cried shrilly each time the heavy blade struck her, but only at the fourth blow did she sag to the pavement.

“Let’s get out of here!” Dama cried, gesturing at the clot of savage forms. He could face their crude weapons, but the bloodlust in their eyes was terrifying.

Vettius was chopping at the bandit’s neck with short strokes. At last the spine parted and the soldier howled again, flaunting his trophy as he kicked his horse into a gallop.

As they rounded the next bend, Dama glanced over his shoulder. Harpago’s body was again covered by writhing men. Or things shaped like men.

*   *   *

A mile down the road they halted for a moment, looking to their wounds and gulping air. The merchant hung his head low to clear it. His face was still pale when he straightened.

Vettius had dropped his trophy into a saddlebag, so that he could grip the reins again with his left hand. He continued to rest the spatha on his saddlebow instead of sheathing it.

“We’d better be going,” he said curtly.

*   *   *

The eastern sky was perceptibly brighter when their foam-spattered horses staggered into another stretch of dismantled roadway. The riders’ skin crawled as they forced their way between the files of trees, but the passage was without incident. Beyond lay Aurelia, a huddle of mean houses surrounded by the tents of the merchants come for the fair.

Light bobbed as a watchman raised his lantern toward them. “You!” he called, “Where did you come from?”

“South of here,” Vettius replied bleakly.

“Gods,” the watchman began, “nobody’s come that way in—” The riders had come within the circle of lantern light and his startled eyes took in their torn clothes and bloody weapons. “Gods!” he blurted again, “Then the story is true.”

“What story?” Dama croaked, his gaze fixed on the watchman. Absently, he wiped his sword on his ruined tunic.

“There was a family of bandits—cannibals, really—living on that stretch—”

“You knew of that and did nothing?” Vettius roared, his face reddening with fury. “By the blood of the Bull, I’ll have another head for this!”

“No!” the watchman squealed, cringing from the upraised sword. “I tell you it’s been fifty years! For a long time they killed everybody they attacked, so it went on for years and years without anyone knowing what was happening. But when somebody got away, the governor brought in a squadron of cavalry. He crucified them all up and down the road and left them hanging there to rot.”

Vettius shook his head in frustration. “But they’re still there!” he insisted.

The watchman gulped. “That’s what my grandfather said. That’s why they had to close that road fifty years ago. Because they were still there—even though all of them were dead.”

“Lucius,” the merchant said softly. He had opened his friend’s saddlebag. A moment later the severed head thumped to the ground.

Rosy light reflected from eyes that were suddenly vacant sockets. Skin blackened, sloughed, and disappeared. The skull remained, grinning at some secret jest the dead might understand.

BEST OF LUCK

A Russian-designed .51 caliber machinegun fires bullets the size of a woman’s thumb. When a man catches a pair of those in his chest and throat the way Capt Warden’s radioman did, his luck has run out. A gout of blood sprayed back over Curtis, next man in the column. He glimpsed open air through the RTO’s middle: the hole plowed through the flailing body would have held his fist.

But there was no time to worry about the dead, no time to do anything but dive out of the line of fire. Capt Warden’s feral leap had carried him in the opposite direction, out of Curtis’ sight into the gloom of the rubber. Muzzle flashes flickered over the silver tree-trunks as the bunkered machineguns tore up Dog Company.

Curtis’ lucky piece bit him through the shirt fabric as he slammed into the smooth earth. The only cover in the ordered plantation came from the trees themselves, and their precise arrangement left three aisles open to any hiding place. The heavy guns ripped through the darkness in short bursts from several locations; there was no way to be safe, nor even to tell from where death would strike.

Curtis had jerked back the cocking piece of his M16, but he had no target. Blind firing would only call down the attentions of the Communist gunners. He felt as naked as the lead in a Juarez floor show, terribly aware of what the big bullets would do if they hit him. He had picked up the lucky Maria Theresa dollar in Taiwan, half as a joke, half in unstated rememberance of men who had been saved when a coin or a Bible turned an enemy slug. But no coin was going to deflect a .51 cal from the straight line it would blast through him.

Red-orange light bloomed a hundred yards to Curtis’ left as a gun opened up, stuttering a sheaf of lead through the trees. Curtis marked the spot. Stomach tight with fear, he swung his clumsy rifle toward the target and squeezed off a burst.

The return fire was instantaneous and from a gun to the right, unnoticed until that moment. The tree Curtis crouched beside exploded into splinters across the base, stunning impacts that the soldier felt rather than heard. He dug his fingers into the dirt, trying to drag himself still lower and screaming mentally at the pressure of the coin which kept him that much closer to the crashing bullets. The rubber tree was sagging, its twelve-inch bole sawn through by the fire, but nothing mattered to Curtis except the raving death a bullet’s width above his head.

The firing stopped. Curtis clenched his fists, raised his head a fraction from the ground. A single, spiteful round banged from the first bunker. The bullet ticked the rim of Curtis’ helmet, missing his flesh but snapping his head back with the force of a thrown anvil. He was out cold when the tree toppled slowly across his boots.

*   *   *

There were whispers in the darkness, but all he could see were blue and amber streaks on the inside of his mind. He tried to move, then gasped in agony as the pinioning mass shifted against his twisted ankles.

There were whispers in the darkness, and Curtis could guess what they were. Dog Company had pulled back. Now the VC were slipping through the trees, stripping the dead of their weapons and cutting the throats of the wounded. Wherever Curtis’ rifle had been flung, it was beyond reach of his desperate fingers.

Something slurped richly near Curtis on his right. He turned his face toward the sound, but its origin lurked in the palpable blackness. There was a slushy, ripping noise from the same direction, settling immediately into a rhythmic gulping. Curtis squinted uselessly. The moon was full, but the clouds were as solid as steel curtains.

Two Vietnamese were approaching from his left side. The scuff of their tire-soled sandals paused momentarily in a liquid trill of speech, then resumed. A flashlight played over the ground, its narrow beam passing just short of Curtis’ left hand. The gulping noise stopped.

“Ong vo?” whispered one of the VC, and the light flashed again. There was a snarl and a scream and the instant red burst of an AK-47 blazing like a flare. The radioman’s body had been torn open. Gobbets of lung and entrails, dropped by the feasting thing, were scattered about the corpse. But Curtis’ real terror was at what the muzzle flash caught in mid-leap—teeth glinting white against bloody crimson, the mask of a yellow-eyed beast more savage than a nightmare and utterly undeterred by the bullets punching across it. And the torso beneath the face was dressed in American jungle fatigues.

*   *   *

“Glad to have you back, Curtis,” Capt Warden said. “We’re way understrength, and replacements haven’t been coming in fast enough. Better get your gear together now, because at 1900 hours the company’s heading out on a night patrol and I want every man along.”

Curtis shifted uneasily, transfixed by the saffron sclera of the captain’s eyes. The driver who had picked him up at the chopper pad had filled Curtis in on what had gone on during his eight weeks in the hospital. Seventeen men had died in the first ambush. The condition of the radioman’s body was blamed on the VC, of course; but that itself had contributed to rotted morale, men screaming in their sleep or squirting nervous shots off into the shadows. A month later, Warden had led another sweep. The lithe, athletic captain should have been a popular officer for his obvious willingness to share the dangers of his command; but when his second major operation ended in another disaster of bunkers and spider holes, the only emotion Dog Company could find for him was hatred. Everybody knew this area of operations was thick with VC and that it was Dog Company’s business to find them. But however successful the operations were from the division commander’s standpoint—the follow-ups had netted tons of equipment and abandoned munitions—Warden’s men knew that they had taken it on the chin twice in a row.

It hadn’t helped that the body of Lt Schaden, killed at the captain’s side in the first exchange of fire, had been recovered the next day in eerily mutilated condition. It looked, the driver whispered, as though it had been gnawed on by something.

*   *   *

They moved out in the brief dusk, nervous squads shrunk to the size of fire teams under the poundings they had taken. The remainder of the battalion watched Dog’s departure in murmuring cliques. Curtis knew they were making bets on how many of the patrol wouldn’t walk back this time. Well, a lot of people in Dog itself were wondering the same.

The company squirmed away from the base, avoiding known trails. Capt Warden had a destination, though; Curtis, again marching just behind the command group, could see the captain using a penlight to check compass and map at each of their frequent halts. The light was scarcely necessary. The mid-afternoon downpour had washed clean the sky for the full moon to blaze in. It made for easier movement through the tangles of trees and vines, but it would light up the GI’s like ducks in a shooting gallery if they blundered into another VC bunker complex.

The trade dollar in Curtis’ pocket flopped painfully against him. The bruise it had given him during the ambush still throbbed. It was starting to hurt more than his ankles did, but nothing would have convinced him to leave it in his locker now. He’d gotten back the last time, hadn’t he? Despite the murderous crossfire, the tree, and the … other. Curtis gripped his sweaty M16 tighter. Maybe it hadn’t been Maria Theresa’s chop-scarred face that got him through, but he wasn’t missing any bets.

Because every step he took into the jungle deepened his gut-wrenching certainty that Dog Company was about to catch it again.

The captain grunted a brief order into the phone flexed to his RTO. The jungle whispered “halt” from each of the platoon leaders. Warden’s face was in a patch of moonlight. His left hand cradled the compass, but he paid it no attention. Instead his lean, dominant nose lifted and visibly snuffled the still air. With a nod and a secret smile that Curtis shivered to see, the captain spoke again into the radio to move the company out.

Three minutes later, the first blast of shots raked through them.

The bullet hit the breech of Curtis’ rifle instead of simply disemboweling him. The dented barrel cracked down across both of his thighs with sledge hammer force. His left thumb was dislocated, though his right hand, out of the path in which the .51 cal had snatched the rifle, only tingled. Curtis lay on his back amazed, listening to the thump-crack of gunfire and bullets passing overhead. He was not even screaming: the pain was yet to come.

An American machinegun ripped a long red streak to within six inches of Curtis’ head, no less potentially deadly for not being aimed at him. The wounded soldier fumbled open his breast pocket and clutched at the lucky piece. It was the only action to which he could force his punished body. The moon glared grimly down.

Something moved near Curtis. Capt Warden, bare headed, was snaking across the jungle floor toward him. Warden grinned. His face slumped suddenly like lead in a mold, shaping itself into a ghastly new form that Curtis had seen once before. The Warden-thing’s fangs shone as it poised, then leaped—straight into a stream of Communist fire.

A two-ounce bullet meat-axed through the thing’s chest back to front, slapping it against a tree. Curtis giggled in relief before he realized that the creature was rising to its knees. Fluid shock had blasted a great crater in the flesh over its breastbone, and the lower half of its face was coated with blood gulped out of its own lungs. The eyes were bright yellow and horribly alive, and as Curtis stared in fascination, the gaping wound began to close. The thing took a step toward the helpless soldier, a triumphant grimace sweeping over its distorted features.

Without conscious direction, Curtis’ thumb spun the silver dollar toward the advancing creature. The half-healed wound-lips in the thing’s chest seemed to suck the coin in. The scream that followed was that of an animal spindled on white-hot wire, but it ended quickly in a gurgle as dissolution set in.

*   *   *

The stretcher team brought Curtis out in the morning. His right hand had been dipped into the pool of foulness soaking the ground near him, and the doctors could not unclench the fist from the object it was frozen on until after the morphine had taken hold.

DRAGONS’ TEETH

The sound of squealing axles drifted closer on the freezing wind. The watching Roman raised his eyes an inch above the rim of his brush-screened trench. A dozen Sarmatian wagons were hulking toward him into the twilight. Their wheels of uncured oak, gapped and irregular at the fellies, rumbled complainingly as they smashed stiff grass and bushes into the unyielding soil.

A smile of grim satisfaction brushed Vettius’ lips as the Sarmatians approached. He did not touch the bow that lay beside him; it was still too soon.

The enormous weight of the wagons turned every finger’s breadth of rise into a steep escarpment up which the oxen had to plod. They grunted out great plumes of breath as they threw their weight into the traces. Sexless, almost lifeless in their poses of stolid acceptance, the drivers hunched on the high wagon seats. Like the oxen, they had been at their killing work since dawn. The wind slashed and eddied about the canopies of aurochs hide which covered the boxes. Tendrils of smoke from heating fires within squirmed through the peaks. They hung for a moment in the sunset before scudding off invisibly.

The last of the wagons was almost within the defile, Vettius noted. It would be very soon now.

Among the Sarmatians the whole family travelled together, even to war. The children and nursing mothers huddled inside the wagons. So did the warriors; their work, like that of the horses tethered behind each wain, was yet to come. Soon the wagons would halt and laager up in the darkness. Using night as a shroud, the reivers would mount and thunder across the frozen Danube. Laughingly they would return before dawn with booty and fresh Roman ears.

The only picket Vettius could see from where he lay was a single rider slightly ahead and to the left of the wagons. Earlier in the day he might have been guide or outrider. Hours had passed. Wagons had bunched or straggled according to the strength of their teams and the temper of their drivers. Now, while the sun bled like an open wound in the western sky, the rider was almost a part of the jumbled line and no protection for it. Vettius smiled again, and his hand was on the bow.

The wind that moaned around the wagons scuffed up crystals from the snow crusts lying in undulant rills among the brush. The shaggy pony’s rump and belly sparkled. The beast’s torso, like its rider’s, was hidden under armor of broad horn scales, each one painstakingly sewn onto a leather backing by the women of the family. Across his pommel rested a slender lance more than eighteen feet long. The Sarmatian fondled its grip as he nodded over his mount’s neck, neglecting to watch the bushes that clawed spiked shadows from the sun.

A sound that trickled through the wind made him straighten; unexpected movement caught his eye. Then the Roman archer rose up from behind a bush far too small to conceal a man the way it had. The Sarmatian, spurring his horse in incredulous panic, heard the slap of the bowstring, heard the loud pop as one scale of his cuirass shattered. After the bodkin-pointed arrow ripped through his chest he heard nothing at all.

“Let’s get’em!” Vettius shouted, nocking another arrow as his first target pitched out of the saddle. The trumpeter crouching behind him set the silver-mounted warhorn to his lips and blasted out the attack. Already the shallow hillsides were spilling soldiers down on the unprepared Sarmatians.

The driver of the lead wagon stood up, screaming a warning. The nearest Roman thrust her through the body with his spear. With two slashes of his short-sword, the legionary cut open the canopy behind her and plunged inside with a howl of triumph.

Sarmatians leaped out the back of the second wagon, trying to reach their horses. Three legionaries met them instead. Vettius had set fifty men in ambush, all picked veterans in full armor. None of the others had bows—the legate had feared a crossfire in the dusk—but sword and spear did the butcher’s work on the startled nomads. The Sarmatians were dressed for war in armor of boiled leather or aurochs horn, but they had no shields and their light swords were no match for the heavy Roman cut-and-thrust blades. One at a time the nomads jumped down to be stretched on the ground by a stab, a quick chop, or even the heavy smash of a shield rim. Death trebled, the legionaries stood waiting for each victim. The fading sunlight gleamed from their polished helmets and greaves and touched with fire the wheels of bronze and vermillioned leather that marked their shields.

The legate’s practiced eye scanned the fighting. The wrack showed the Sarmatians had battled with futile desperation. A baby lay beside the fourth wagon. Its skull had been dashed in on the wagon box, but its nails were stained with Roman blood. The oxen bellowed, hamstrung in the yoke. One was spurting black jets through a heart-deep channel. This day was Rome’s vengeance; retribution for a thousand sudden raids, a thousand comrades crumpled from a chance arrow or a dagger thrust in the night.

Only toward the rear where three wagons had bunched together was there real fighting. Vettius ran down the line of wagons though his quiver was almost emptied when he saw one of his men hurtle through the air in a lifeless somersault. The legionary crashed to the ground like a load of scrap metal. His whole chest and body armor had been caved in by an enormous blow. Measurably later the man’s sword completed its own parabola and clanked thirty feet away.

“Get back!” Vettius shouted when he saw the wind-row of ruined bodies strewn in front of him. “Stand clear!” Before he could say more, the killer was lumbering toward him around the back of the wagon.

The horsehair crest wobbling in the waning sunlight increased the figure’s titanic height, but even bareheaded the giant would have been half again as tall as the six-foot soldier. Worse, he was much heavier built than a man, a squat dwarf taller than the wagon. He carried no shield but his whole body shone with a covering of smooth bronze plates. Both gauntleted hands gripped the haft of an iron-headed mace. The six-foot helve was as thick as a man’s calf and the head could have served as an anvil.

The giant strode toward Vettius with terrifying agility.

Vettius arced his bow. The shaft of his arrow splintered on the monster’s breastplate. It left only a bright scar on the metal. Vettius stepped back, nocking another missile and shifting his aim to the oddly-sloped helmet. The face was completely covered except for a T-shaped slot over the eyes and nose. The light was very dim but the narrow gap stood out dead black against the helmet’s luster. As the giant started to swing his mace parallel to the ground, Vettius shot again.

The arrow glanced off the bronze and howled away into the darkness.

Vettius leaped upward and fell across the wagon seat as the giant’s mace hurtled toward him. The spiked head smashed into a wheel with awesome force, scattering fragments of wood and making the whole wagon shudder. As it rocked, the driver’s hacked corpse tumbled to the ground leaving the Roman alone on the seat as he sighted along his last arrow.

The giant had reversed his grip on the mace. Now he swung his weapon upward with no more apparent effort than a man with a flywhisk. As the head came level with the giant’s hips, the mace slipped from his fingers to fly forward and burst through the side of the wagon. The titan reeled backwards. A small tuft of feathers was barely visible where the helmet slot crossed the bridge of his nose.

The earth trembled when he fell.

Shaking with reaction himself, Vettius dropped his now-useless bow and craned his neck to peer over the wagon’s canopy at the remaining fighting. Some of the wains were already burning. Confusion or the victors had spilled the heating fires from their earthenware pots and scattered coals into the cloth and straw of the bedding.

“Save me a prisoner!” Vettius bellowed against the wind. “For Mithra’s sake, save me a prisoner!”

He jumped to the ground and cautiously approached the fallen giant. The helmet came off easily when he grasped it by the crest and yanked. Beneath the bronze the face was almost human. The jaw was square and massive; death’s rictus had drawn thin lips back from leonine tushes, yellowed and stark. The nose squatted centrally like a smashed toad, and from it the face rose past high flat eyesockets to enormous ridges of bone. There was virtually no forehead so that the brows sloped shallowly to a point on the back of the skull. Only their short tight coils distinguished the eyebrows from the black strands that covered the rest of the head.

No wonder the helmet looked odd, Vettius thought bleakly. He would believe in the face, in a man so large, because they were there for him to touch; but he would have called another man a liar for claiming the existence of something so impossible. Perhaps believing in the impossible was the secret of the success of the Christians whose god, dead three hundred years, was now beginning to rule the Empire.

The trumpeter approached from behind with his horn slung and a bloody sword in his right hand. The torque he now wore was of gold so pure and soft that he had spread it by hand to get it off a dead nomad and rebent it around his own neck.

“Sir!” he called, “are you all right?”

“Give me a hand here,” Vettius grunted unresponsively as he tugged at the mace. Together the men pulled the weapon from the fabric of the wagon. Vettius gave a curt order and hefted it alone as his subordinate stepped back. “Ha!” he snorted in disbelief. The mace weighed at least two talents, the weight of a small man or a fair-sized woman.

He let it thud to the ground and walked away from it. “May the Bull bugger me if I don’t learn more about this,” he swore.

*   *   *

The doorkeeper had difficulty slamming the door against the gust of wind that followed Vettius into the anteroom. Moist air from the baths within condensed to bead the decorated tiles and rime the soldier’s cape of black bearskin. He wore the bear’s head as a cowl. The beast’s glass eyes usually glared out above Vettius’ own; now they too were frosted and the doorkeeper, turning, shuddered at the look of blank agony they gave him.

Vettius shrugged off the cape and stamped his muddy boots on the floor. The doorkeeper sighed inwardly and picked up his twig broom. The damned man had been stomping through the muck like a common soldier instead of riding decently in a litter as befit his rank. The slave said nothing aloud as he swept, though; the legate had a reputation for violence and he already wore a dark glower this afternoon.

Walking through the door of the changing room, Vettius tossed his cape to one of the obsequious attendants and began to unlace his boots. While he sat on a bench and stripped off his thick woolen leggings, the other attendant looked delicately at the miry leather and asked with faint disdain, “Will you have these cleaned while you bathe, sir?”

“Dis, why should I?” the soldier snarled. “I’ve got to wear them out of here, don’t I?”

The attendant started at his tone. Vettius chuckled at the man’s fear and threw the filthy leggings in his face. Laying both his tunics on the bench, he surveyed the now apprehensive slaves and asked, “Either of you know where Dama is?”

“The Legate Vettius?” called a voice from the inner hallway. A third attendant poked his head into the changing room. “Sir? If you will follow me.…”

The attendant’s sandles slapped nervously down the hallway past steam rooms on the right and the wall of the great pool on the left. Tiles of glaucous gray covered the floors and most of the walls, set off by horizontal bands of mosaic. A craftsman of Naisso who had never been to the coast had inset octopuses and dolphins cavorting on a bright green sea. The civilization I protect, Vettius thought disgustedly. The reason I bow to fat fools.

At the corner of the hall the attendant stopped and opened one of the right-hand doors. Steam puffed out. Vettius peered in with his hand on the jamb to keep from slipping on the slick tile. Through the hot fog he could make out the figure of the small man who lay on one of the benches.

“Dama?” the soldier called uncertainly.

“Come on in, Lucius,” invited the other. He rose to his elbow and the light on his head of tight blond curls identified him. “How did it go?”

“The interrogation was fine,” Vettius answered; but his tone was savage, that of a man used to taking out his frustrations in slaughter and very close to the point of doing so again. “We didn’t need much persuasion to get the prisoner to tell us everything he knew about the giant. It came from a tent village called Torgu, and he says the shaman running the place has ten more just like it.”

“If one, why not eleven?” Dama mused. “But I didn’t think the Sarmatians ever made a shaman chief.”

“I didn’t either,” Vettius agreed darkly, “and that wasn’t the last strange thing he told us about this wizard, this Hydaspes. He was at Torgu when the family we ambushed got there late in the fall, nervous as the Emperor’s taster and fussing around the village to look over each new arrival. He wasn’t claiming much authority, either. Then about two months ago a horseman rode in from the east. Our prisoner didn’t talk with the fellow but he saw him give a package the size of his fist to Hydaspes. That was what the wizard had been waiting for. He laughed and capered all the way to his tent and didn’t come out again for a week. When he did, he started giving orders like a king. Since now he had a nine-foot giant behind him, everyone obeyed. In back of Hydaspes’ tent there was a long trench in the frozen ground and a lot of dirt was missing. Nobody the prisoner knew hung about behind there to see if the wizard really was digging up giants there night after night—they were all scared to death by then.”

“So a one-time hedge wizard gets a giant bodyguard,” the merchant said softly, “and he unites a tribe under him. If he can do that, he may just as easily become king of the whole nation. What would happen, Lucius, if the Sarmatians got a real king, a real leader who stopped their squabbling and sent them across the Danube together?”

The white fear that had been shimmering around the edges of Vettius’ mind broke through again and tensed all his muscles. “A century ago the Persians unified Mesopotamia against us,” he said. “Constant fighting. Some victories, more losses. But we could accept that on one frontier—it’s a big empire. On two at the same time.… I can’t say what would happen.”

“We’d better deal with Hydaspes soon,” Dama summarized flatly, “or Hydaspes will deal with us. Have you told Celsus?”

“Oh, I told the Count,” Vettius snapped, “but he didn’t believe me—and besides, he was too busy reaming me out for leading the ambush myself. It was undignified for a legate he said.”

Dama crowed, trying to imagine Vettius too dignified for a fight.

“That’s the sort he is,” the soldier agreed with a rueful smile. “He expects me to keep my cut-throats in line without dirtying my boots. A popular attitude this side of the river, it seems.”

Knuckles slammed on the steam-room door. Both men looked up sharply.

“Sirs, quickly!” the attendant hissed from outside.

Dama threw the door open for the frightened attendant. “Sirs,” the slave explained, “the Count has come for the legate Vettius. I misdirected him, thinking you might want to prepare, but he’ll be here any moment.”

“I’ll put on a tunic and meet him in the changing room,” the soldier decided. “I’ve no desire to be arrested in the nude.”

The frightened changing room attendants had disappeared into the far reaches of the building, leaving the friends to pull on their linen tunics undisturbed. Celsus burst in on them without ceremony, followed by two of his runners. He’s not here to charge me after all, Vettius thought, not without at least a squad of troops. Though Mithra knew, his wishes would have supported a treason indictment.

“Where have you been?” the official stormed. His round face was almost the color of his toga’s broad maroon hem.

“Right here in the bath, your excellency,” Vettius replied without deference.

“Word just came by heliograph,” the count sputtered. “There were ten attacks last night, ten! Impregnable monsters leading them—Punicum, Novae, Frasuli, Anarti—posts wiped out!”

“I told you there were other attacks planned,” the soldier replied calmly. “None of them were in my sector. I told you why that was too.”

“But you lied when you said you killed a monster, didn’t you?” accused Celsus, stamping his foot. “At Novae they hit one with a catapult and the bolt only bounced off!”

“Then they didn’t hit him squarely,” Vettius retorted. “The armor isn’t that heavy. And I told you, I shot mine through the viewslit in his helmet.”

The count motioned his runners away. Noticing Dama for the first time he screamed, “Get out! Get out!”

The merchant bowed and exited behind the runners. He stood near the door.

“Listen,” Celsus whispered, plucking at the soldier’s sleeve to bring his ear lower, “you’ve got to do something about the giants. It’ll look bad if these raids continue.”

“Fine,” Vettius said in surprise. “Give me my regiment and the Fifth Macedonian, and some cavalry—say the Old Germans. I’ll level Torgu and everyone in it.”

“Oh no,” his pudgy superior gasped, “not so much. The Emperor will hear about it and the gods know what he’ll think. Oh, no—fifty men, that was enough before.”

“Are you—” Vettius began, then rephrased his thought. “This isn’t an ambush for one family, your excellency. This is disposing of a powerful chief and maybe a thousand of his followers, a hundred miles into Sarmatia. I might as well go alone as with fifty men.”

“Fifty men,” Celsus repeated. Then, beaming as if he were making a promise, he added, “You’ll manage, I’m sure.”

*   *   *

The two riders were within a few miles of Torgu before they were noticed.

“I shouldn’t have let you come,” Vettius grumbled to his companion. “Either I should have gone myself or else marched my regiment in and told Celsus to bugger himself.”

Dama smiled. “You don’t have any curiosity, Lucius. You only see the job to be done. Myself, I want to know where a nine-foot giant comes from.”

They eyed the sprawling herd of black cattle which were finding some unimaginable pasturage beneath the snow crust. Perhaps they were stripping bark from the brush that scarred the landscape with its black rigidity. A cow scented the unfamiliar horses approaching it. The animal blatted and scrambled to its feet, splashing dung behind it. When it had bustled twenty feet away, the cow regained enough composure to turn and stare at the riders, focusing the ripple of disturbance that moved sluggishly through other bovine minds. Face after drooling, vacant face rotated toward them; after long moments, even the distant herdsman looked up from where he huddled over his fire in the lee of a hill.

Dama’s chest grew tight. There was still another moment’s silence while the Sarmatian made up his mind that there really were Romans riding toward Torgu through his herd. When at last he grasped that fact, he leaped to his feet yipping his amazement. For an instant he crouched bowlegged, waiting for a hostile move. When the intruders ignored him, the Sarmatian scampered to his horse and lashed it into a startled gallop for home.

The merchant chewed at his cheeks, trying to work saliva into a mouth that had gone dry when he realized they would be noticed. He’d known they were going to meet Sarmatians: that was the whole purpose of what they were doing. But now it was too late to back out. “About time we got an escort,” he said with false bravado. “I’m surprised the Sarmatians don’t patrol more carefully.”

“Why should they?” Vettius snorted. “They know they’re safe over here so long as a brainless scut like Celsus is in charge of the border.”

They jogged beyond the last of the cattle. Without the Sarmatian’s presence the beasts were slowly drifting away from the trampled area where they had been herded. If they wandered far they would be loose at night when the wolves hunted.

“Cows,” Vettius muttered. “It’s getting hard to find men, my friend.”

Half a mile away on the top of the next rolling hill an armored horseman reined up in a spatter of snow. He turned his head and gave a series of short yelps that carried over the plain like bugle calls. Moments later a full score of lancers topped the brow of the hill and pounded down toward the interlopers.

“I think we’ll wait here,” the soldier remarked.

“Sure, give them a sitting target,” Dama agreed with a tense smile.

Seconds short of slaughter, the leading Sarmatian raised his lance. The rest of the troop followed his signal. The whole group swept around Vettius and Dama to halt in neighing, skidding chaos. One horse lost its footing and spilled its rider on the snow with a clatter of weapons. Cursing, the disgruntled Sarmatian lurched toward the Romans with his short, crooked sword out. From behind Dama, the leader barked a denial and laid his lance in front of the man. The merchant breathed deeply but did not relax his grip on the queerly shaped crossbow resting on his saddle until the glowering Sarmatian had remounted.

The leader rode alongside Vettius and looked up at the soldier on his taller horse. “You come with us to Torgu,” he ordered in passable Greek.

“That’s right,” Vettius agreed in Sarmatian. “We’re going to Torgu to see Hydaspes.”

There was a murmur from the Sarmatians. One of them leaned forward to shake an amulet bag in the soldier’s face, gabbling something too swiftly to be understood.

The leader had frowned when Vettius spoke. He snapped another order and kicked his horse forward. Romans and Sarmatians together jogged up the hill, toward the offal and frozen muck of Torgu.

On the bank of a nameless, icebound stream stood the village’s central hall and only real building. Dama glanced at it as they rode past. Its roughly squared logs were gray and streaked with odd splits along the twisted grain. Any caulking there might have been in the seams had fallen out over the years. The sides rose to a flaring roof of scummed thatch, open under the eaves to emit smoke and the stink of packed bodies. The hall would have seemed crude in the most stagnant backwaters of the Empire; the merchant could scarcely believe that a people to whom it was the height of civilization could be a threat.

Around the timber structure sprawled the nomad wagons in filthy confusion. Their sloping canopies were shingled with cow droppings set out to dry in the wan sunlight before being burned for fuel. The light soot that had settled out of thousands of cooking fires permeated the camp with an unclean, sweetish odor. Nothing in the village but the untethered horses watching the patrol return looked cared for.

Long lances had been butted into the ground beside each wagon. As he stared back at the flat gazes directed at him by idle Sarmatians, Dama realized what was wrong with the scene. Normally, only a handful of each family group would have been armored lancers. The rest would be horse archers, able to afford only a bow and padded linen protection. Most of their escort hung cased bows from their saddles, but all bore the lance and most wore scale mail.

“Lucius,” the merchant whispered in Latin, “are all of these nobles?”

“You noticed that,” Vettius replied approvingly. “No, you can see from their looks that almost all of them were just herdsmen recently. Somebody made them his retainers, paid for their equipment and their keep.”

“Hydaspes?” the merchant queried.

“I guess. He must have more personal retainers than the king, then.”

“You will be silent!” ordered the Sarmatian leader.

They had ridden almost completely through the camp and were approaching a tent of gaily pennoned furs on the edge of the plains. At each corner squatted an octagonal stump of basalt a few feet high. The stones were unmarked and of uncertain significance, altars or boundary markers or both. No wains had been parked within fifty paces of the tent. A pair of guards stood before its entrance. Dama glanced at the streamers and said, “You know, there really is a market for silk in this forsaken country. A shame that—”

“Silence!” the Sarmatian repeated as he drew up in front of the tent. He threw a rapid greeting to the guards, one of whom bowed and ducked inside. He returned quickly, followed by a tall man in a robe of fine black Spanish wool. The newcomer’s face was thin for a Sarmatian and bore a smile that mixed triumph and something else. On his shoulder, covered by the dark hood, clung a tiny monkey with great brown eyes. From time to time it put its mouth to its master’s ear and murmured secretly.

“Hydaspes,” Vettius whispered. “He always wears black.”

“Have they been disarmed?” the wizard questioned. The escort’s leader flushed in embarrassment at his oversight and angrily demanded the Romans’ weapons. Vettius said nothing as he handed over his bow and the long cavalry sword he carried even now that he commanded an infantry unit. The merchant added his crossbow and a handful of bolts to the collection.

“What is that?” Hydaspes asked, motioning his man to hand him the crossbow.

“It comes from the east where I get my silk,” Dama explained, speaking directly to the wizard. “You just drop a bolt into the tall slot on top. That holds it while you pull back on the handle, cocking and firing it all in one motion.”

“From the east? I get weapons from the east,” the Sarmatian said with a nasty quirk of his lip. “But this, this is only a toy surely? The arrow is so light and scarcely a handspan long. What could a man do with such a thing?”

Dama shrugged. “I’m not a warrior. For my own part, I wouldn’t care to be shot with this or anything else.”

The wizard gestured an end to the conversation, setting the weapon inside his tent for later perusal. “Dismount, gentlemen, dismount,” he continued in excellent Greek. “Perhaps you have heard of me?”

“Hydaspes the wizard. Yes,” Vettius lied, “even within the Empire we think of you when we think of a powerful sorceror. That’s why we’ve come for help.”

“In whose name?” the Sarmatian demanded shrewdly. “Constantius the emperor?”

“Celsus, Count of Dacia,” Vettius snapped back. “The Empire has suffered the bloody absurdities of Constantius and his brothers long enough. Eunuchs run the army, priests rule the state, and the people pray to the tax gatherers. We’ll have support when we get started, but first we need some standard to rally to, something to convince everyone that we have more than mere hopes behind us. We want your giants, and we’ll pay you a part of the Empire to get them.”

“And you, little man?” Hydaspes asked the merchant unexpectedly.

Dama had been imagining the count’s face if he learned his name was being linked with raw treason, but he recovered swiftly and fumbled at his sash while replying, “We merchants have little cause to love Constantius. The roads are ruinous, the coinage base; and the rapacity of local officials leaves little profit for even the most daring adventurer.”

“So you came to add your promise of future gain?”

“Future? Who knows the future?” Dama grunted. Gold gleamed in his hand. A shower of coins arced unerringly from his right palm to his left and back again. “If you can supply what we need, you’ll not lament your present payment.”

“Ho! Such confidence,” the wizard said, laughing cheerfully. The monkey chittered, stroking its master’s hair with bulbous fingertips. “You really believe that I can raise giants from the past?

“I can!”

Hydaspes’ face became a mask of unreason. Dama shifted nervously from one foot to the other, realizing that the wizard was far from the clever illusionist they had assumed back at Naisso he must be. This man wasn’t sane enough to successfully impose on so many people, even ignorant barbarians. Or was the madness a recent thing?

“Subradas, gather the village behind my tent,” Hydaspes ordered abruptly, “but leave space in the middle as wide and long as the tent itself.”

The leader of the escort dipped his lance in acknowledgement. “The women, Lord?”

“All—women, slaves, everyone. I’m going to show you how I raise the giants.”

“Ho!” gasped the listening Sarmatians. The leader saluted again and rode off shouting. Hydaspes turned to re-enter his tent, then paused. “Take the Romans, too,” he directed the guards. “Put them by the flap and watch them well.”

“Yes,” he continued, glancing back at Vettius, “it is a very easy thing to raise giants, if you have the equipment and the knowledge. Like drawing a bow for a man like you.”

The Hell-lit afterimage of the wizard’s eyes continued to blaze in the soldier’s mind when the furs had closed behind the black figure.

As the rest of the Sarmatians dismounted and began to jostle them around the long tent, Dama whispered, “This isn’t working. If it gets too tight, break for the tent. You know about my bow?”

Vettius nodded, but his mind was chilled by a foretaste of death.

*   *   *

As the prisoner had said, eleven long trenches bristled outward from the wall of Hydaspes’ tent. Each was shallow but too extensive for the wizard to have dug it in the frozen ground in one night. Dama disliked the way the surface slumped over the ditches, as if enormous corpses had clawed their way out of their graves …

Which was what the wizard seemed to claim had happened.

The guards positioned the two Romans at the center of the back wall of the tent where laces indicated another entrance. Later comers crowded about anxiously, held back in a rough circle by officers with drawn swords. Twenty feet to either side of the Romans stretched the straight walls of the tent paralleled by a single row of warriors. From the basalt posts at either corner curved the rest of the tribe in milling excitement, warriors in front and women and children squirming as close as they could get before being elbowed back.

The Sarmatians were still pushing for position when Hydaspes entered the cleared space, grinning ironically at Vettius and Dama as he stepped between them. A guard laced the tent back up. In the wizard’s left hand was a stoppered copper flask; his right gripped a small packet of supple cowhide.

“The life!” Hydaspes shouted to the goggle-eyed throng, waving the flask above his head from the center of the circle. He set the vessel down on the dirt and carefully unrolled the leather wrappings from the other objects.

“And the seed!” the wizard cried at last. In his palm lay a pair of teeth. They were a dull, stony gray without any of the sheen of ivory. One was a molar, human but inhumanly large. The other tooth, even less credible, seemed to be a canine fully four inches long. With one tooth in either hand, Hydaspes goat-footed about the flask in an impromptu dance of triumph.

His monkey rider clacked its teeth in glee.

The wizard stopped abruptly and faced the Romans. “Oh, yes. The seed. I got them, all thirteen teeth, from the Chinese—the people who sell you your silk, merchant. Dragons’ teeth they call them—hee hee! And I plant them just like Cadmus did when he built Thebes. But I’m the greater prince, oh yes, for I’ll build an empire where he built a city.”

Dama licked his lips. “We’ll help you build your empire,” he began, but the wizard ignored him and spoke only to Vettius.

“You want my giants, Roman, my darlings? Watch!”

Hydaspes plucked a small dagger from his sash and poked a hole in the ground. Like a farmer planting a nut, the wizard popped the molar into the hole and patted the earth back down. When he straightened he shouted a few words at the sky. The villagers gasped, but Dama doubted whether they understood any more of the invocation than he did. Perhaps less—the merchant thought he recognized the language, at least, one he had heard chanted on the shores of the Persian Gulf on a dead, starless night. He shuddered.

Now the wizard was unstoppering his flask and crooning under his breath. His cowl had fallen back to display the monkey clinging fiercely to his long oily hair. When the wizard turned, Dama could see the beast’s lips miming its master obscenely.

Droplets spattered from the flask, bloody red and glowing. The merchant guessed wine or blood, changed his mind when the fluid popped and sizzled on the ground. The frozen dirt trembled like a stricken gong.

The monkey leaped from Hydaspes’ shoulder, strangely unaffected by the cold. It faced the wizard across the patch of fluid-scarred ground. It was chanting terrible squeaky words that thundered back from Hydaspes.

The ground split.

The monkey collapsed. Hydaspes leaped over the earth’s sudden gape and scooped up the little creature, wrapping it in his cloak.

Through the crack in the soil thrust an enormous hand. Earth heaved upward again. The giant’s whole torso appeared, dribbling dirt back into the trench. Vettius recognized the same thrusting jaw, the same high flat eyesockets, as those of the giant he had killed.

The eyes were Hydaspes’ own.

“Oh yes, Roman,” the wizard cackled. “The life and the seed—but the mind too, hey? There must be a mind.”

The giant rose carefully in a cascade of earth. Even standing in the trench left by his body, he raised his pointed skull eight feet into the air.

“My mind!” Hydaspes shrieked, oblivious to everyone but the soldier. “Part of me in each of my darlings, you see? Flowing from me through my pet here to them.”

One of the wizard’s hands caressed the monkey until it murmured lasciviously. The beast’s huge eyes were seas of steaming brown mud, barely flecked by pinpoint pupils.

“You said you knew me,” continued the wizard. “Well, I know you too, Lucius Vettius. I saw you bend your bow, I saw you kill my darling—

“I saw you kill me, Roman!”

Vettius unclasped his cape, let it slip to the ground. Hydaspes wiped a streak of spittle from his lips and stepped back to lay a hand on the giant’s forearm. “Kill me again, Roman,” the wizard said softly. “Go ahead; no one will interfere. But this time you don’t have a bow.

“Watch the little one!” he snapped to the guard on Dama’s right. The Sarmatian gripped the merchant’s shoulder.

Then the giant charged.

Vettius dived forward at an angle, rolling beyond the torn-up section of the clearing. The giant spun, stumbled in a ditch that had cradled one of his brothers. The soldier had gained the room he wanted in the center of the open space and waited in a loose-armed crouch. The giant sidled toward him splay footed.

“Hey!” the Roman shouted and lunged for his opponent’s dangling genitalia. The giant struck with shocking speed, swatting Vettius in midair like a man playing handball. Before the Roman’s thrusting fingers could make contact, the giant’s open-handed blow had crashed into his ribs and hurled him a dozen feet away. Only the giant’s clumsy rush saved Vettius from being pulped before he could jump to his feet again. The soldier was panting heavily but his eyes were fixed on the giant’s. A thread of blood dribbled off the point of his jaw. Only a lip split on the hard ground—thus far. The giant charged.

Two faces in the crowd were not fixed on the one-sided battle. Dama fingered the hem of his cloak unobtrusively, following the fight only from the corners of his eyes. It would be pointless to watch his friend die. Instead the merchant eyed Hydaspes, who had dug another hole across the clearing and inserted the last and largest tooth into it. The wizard seemed to ignore the fighting. If he watched at all, it was through the giant’s eyes as he claimed; and surely, mad as he was, Hydaspes would not otherwise have turned his back on his revenge. For the first time Dama thought he recognized an unease about the monkey which rode again on the wizard’s shoulder. It might have been only fatigue. Certainly Hydaspes seemed to notice nothing unusual as he tamped down the soil and began his thirteenth invocation.

Dama’s guard was wholly caught up in the fight. He began to pound the merchant on the back in excitement, yelling bloodthirsty curses at Vettius. Dama freed the slender stiletto from his cloak and palmed it. He did not turn his head lest the movement catch the guard’s attention. Instead he raised his hand to the Sarmatian’s neck, delicately fingered his spine. Before the moth-light touch could register on the enthusiastic Sarmatian, Dama slammed the thin blade into the base of his brain and gave it a twist. The guard died instantly. The merchant supported the slumping body, guiding it back against the tent. Hydaspes continued chanting a litany with the monkey, though the noise of the crowd drowned out his words. The wizard formed the inaudible syllables without noticing either Dama or the stumbling way his beast answered him. There was a look of puzzlement, almost fear, in the monkey’s eyes. The crowd continued to cheer as the merchant opened the flap with a quick slash and backed inside Hydaspes’ tent.

Inside a pair of chalcedony oil lamps burned with tawny light. The floor was covered with lush furs, some of which draped wooden benches. On a table at one end rested a pair of human skulls, unusually small but adult in proportions. More surprising were the cedar book chests holding parchments and papyri and even the strange pleated leaf-books of India. Dama’s crossbow stood beside the front entrance. He ran to it and loosed the bundle of stubby, unfletched darts beside it. From his wallet came a vial of pungent tarry matter into which he jabbed the head of each dart. The uncovered portions of the bronze points began to turn green. Careful not to touch the smears of venom, the merchant slipped all ten missiles into the crossbow’s awkward vertical magazine.

Only then did he peer through the tent flap.

*   *   *

Vettius leaped sideways, kicking at the giant’s knee. The ragged hobnails scored his opponent’s calf, but the giant’s deceptively swift hand closed on the Roman’s outer tunic. For a heartsick instant the heavy fabric held; then it ripped and Vettius tumbled free. The giant lunged after him. Vettius backpedaled and, as his enemy straightened, launched himself across the intervening space. The heel of his outstretched boot slammed into the pit of the giant’s stomach. Again the iron nails made a bloody ruin of the skin. The titan’s breath whooshed out, but its half-ton bulk did not falter at the blow. Vettius, thrown back by the futile impact, twisted away from the giant’s unchecked rush. The creature’s heels grazed past, thudded with mastodontic force. The soldier took a shuddering breath and lurched to his feet. A long arm clawed for his face. The Roman staggered back, barely clear of the spade-like talons. The monster pressed after him relentlessly, and Vettius was forced at last to recognize what should have been hopelessly obvious from the first: he could not possibly kill the giant with his bare hands.

A final strategem took shape. With desperate purpose Vettius began to circle and retreat before his adversary. He should have planned it, measured it, but now he could only trust to luck and the giant’s incredible weight. Backed almost against a corner post, he crouched and waited. Arms wide, the giant hesitated—then rushed in for the kill. Vettius met him low, diving straight at his opponent instead of making a vain effort to get clear again. The Roman’s arms locked about the great ankles and the giant wavered, then began to topple forward. As he fell his taloned fingers clamped crushingly on Vettius’ ribs.

The unyielding basalt altar met the giant’s skull with shattering force. Bone slammed dense rock with the sound of a maul on a wedge. Warm fluids spattered the snow while the Sarmatians moaned in disbelief. Hydaspes knelt screaming on the ground, his fists pummeling terror from a mind that had forgotten even the invocation it had just completed. The earth began pitching like an unmastered horse. It split in front of the wizard where the tooth had been planted. The crack raced jaggedly through the crowd and beyond.

“Lucius!” Dama cried, lifting the corner of the tent.

The soldier pulled his leg free from the giant’s pinioning body and rolled toward the voice, spilling endwise the only Sarmatian alert enough to try to stop him. Dama dropped the tent wall and nodded toward the front, his hands full of crossbow. “There’s horses waiting out there. I’ll slow them up.”

Vettius stamped on a hand that thrust into the tent.

“Get out, damn you!” the merchant screamed. “There aren’t any more weapons in here.”

A Sarmatian rolled under the furs with a feral grimace and a dagger in his hand. The soldier hefted a full case of books and hurled it at his chest. Wood and bone splintered loudly. Vettius turned and ran toward the horses.

The back flap ripped apart in the haste of the Sarmatians who had remembered its existence. The first died with a dart through his eye as Dama jerked the cocking handle of his weapon. The next missile fell into position. The merchant levered back the bow again. At full cock the sear released, snapped the dart out into the throat of the next man. The Sarmatian’s life dissolved in a rush of red flame as the bolt pricked his carotid to speed its load of poison straight to the brain. The third man stumbled over his body, screamed. Two darts pinged off his mail before one caught the armpit he bared when he threw his hands over his face.

Relentless as a falling obelisk, Dama stroked out the full magazine of lethal missiles, shredding six screaming victims in the space of a short breath. The entrance was plugged by a clot of men dying in puling agony. Tossing his empty bow at the writhing chaos behind him, Dama ran through the front flap and vaulted onto his horse.

“We’ll never get clear!” Vettius shouted as he whipped his mount. “They’ll run us down in relays before we reach the Danube.”

Wailing Sarmatians boiled around both ends of the tent, shedding helmets, weapons—any encumbrance. Their voices honed a narrow blade of terror.

“The control,” Dama shouted back as the pair dodged among the crazy pattern of wagon tongues. “He used his own mind and a monkey’s to control something not quite a man.”

“So what?”

“That last tooth didn’t come from a man. It didn’t come from anything like a man.”

Something scaly, savage and huge towered over the wreckage of the tent. It cocked its head to glare at the disappearing riders while scrabbling with one stubby foreleg to stuff a black-robed figure farther into its maw. Vettius twisted in his saddle to stare in amazement at the coffin-long jaws gaping twenty feet in the air and the spined backfin like that of no reptile of the past seventy million years.

The dragon hissed, leaving a scarlet mist of blood to hang in the air as it ducked its head for another victim.

OUT OF AFRICA

Forty years of African sunlight glinting along Sir John Holborn’s gun barrels had bleached his eyes so that even after long retirement from hunting they were the frosty gray of bullets cast when the lead was too hot. The chill of those eyes softened when they turned from the heavy rifle over the mantle to his young grand-nephew.

“Go ahead,” Sir John urged. “Pick it up. I wasn’t much older than you when I took my first elephant.”

Randall carefully lifted the double rifle from its pegs and hefted it. “It’s so big!” he marvelled.

Holborn chuckled and took the weapon himself. “Has to be big, lad, or the return of the rifle would break your shoulder.” While his thoughts slipped into the past, the old hunter glanced around his trophy room. From the far wall projected the massive head and forequarters of a bull elephant, mounted as if trumpeting. With a single fluid motion, Holborn spun and trained the rifle on the gape of the beast’s mouth where a shot would penetrate straight to the brain. Chuckling again, he turned back to the boy and opened the rifle’s double breech.

“See lad,” he said, “this is an eight-bore. A round lead ball to fit this barrel would weigh two ounces, and the cylindrical bullets I used were a good deal heavier. You couldn’t put such power in a smaller rifle.”

“My father shoots elephant,” Randall said doubtfully, “and his rifle isn’t that big.”

“Aye, your father says there’s been no need for old cannons like this since 1890 and nitro powder,” Holborn agreed. “Well, maybe it did go out of date fifteen years ago; but if I went to Africa again, this is the rifle I’d carry there. Your father may be right to say his .450 express rifle will kill anything on the continent—but will it stop anything, that’s what I want to know. Your Latin is fresher than mine. Do you remember a tag about Africa…?”

“‘Always something new out of Africa,’” the boy suggested, translating Pliny’s words for the old man.

“That’s it,” Holborn agreed, “and it’s true, too. If you ever hunt Africa, don’t make the mistake of thinking you know all about her. She’ll kill you sure if you think that.”

“Why did you stop hunting, Uncle John?” Randall asked curiously, gazing in wonder at the trophies of five continents on the walls around him.

“Um,” the old hunter grunted, letting the rifle cradle naturally in the crook of his left arm. “For some hunters, there’s one chance for a real trophy. After that, it’s all the same whether you took it or missed. Gordon-Cummings had his when he bagged a rhino with five feet of horn, while Meyerling muffed an easy shot at an elephant he swore carried a quarter ton of ivory. When you’ve had that shot, the fire goes out of the sport, and it’s never the same again. And I, I had my shot.…”

Randall could see the old man’s mind focusing on the past. “Tell me about it, Uncle John,” he pleaded.

“Perhaps I should, lad,” Holborn replied. “I shan’t be around much longer to keep the story, and perhaps some day—but no matter. My last hunt was on the Kagera River, west and north of Lake Victoria. The country was all papyrus swamp.”

“But what could you do in that?” the boy asked in puzzlement.

“Hunt hippo, lad,” Holborn replied with a laugh, “and very political hippo they were. That was in ’92, you see, and—well, it’s an old story and doesn’t matter much any more. Our relations with the Kaiser were a good deal better then, and it occurred to some gentlemen in London and Berlin that King Leopold was showing himself quite unfit to rule the Congo Basin. Perhaps Britain and Germany could do better, they thought. Well, nothing came of it, of course … but negotiations got to the point that the Foreign Office thought they’d like to have a man on the ground. They contacted me because no eyebrows would raise at the news Sir John Holborn was back in the bush again. And so there I was, in German East Africa where it borders Uganda and the Congo.

“There were hippos in the river. Even if I hadn’t cared to try them, I had to keep up the pretence of being strictly a hunter. It was difficult, though, because none of the local boys would so much as guide me into the swamps around their village. They were afraid of the jimpegwes that lived there, they said.

“Now I hadn’t heard the word before, but it was clear enough from the natives’ description what they meant. After all, only three big animals live in the swamps: the kob and lechwe antelopes that can walk on the marshes with their broad, spreading hooves; and the hippo that browse the edges of the reed mats and keep channels open between them. When the natives said the jimpegwe was a big animal that ate reeds and had a terrible temper, they had to mean some sort of hippo.

“Some sort—that was the key. All the natives agreed the the jimpegwe was bigger than imkoko, as they called the hippo. They said in fact that it killed hippos that wandered into its territory. As I heard about how big and terrible the jimpegwe was, I began to dream of surprising the world with a breed of hippo as much bigger than the known variety as the white rhino is bigger than the black. That would put it in a class with the elephant, you know. After a day of hearing those stories while I tried to hire guides and bearers, I knew I’d have to get into the swamp if it meant lugging my own kit.

“Which is very nearly what it did mean, as it turned out. The local natives accompanied me to the edge of the swamp, but nothing I could offer would bring them further. I couldn’t entirely blame them. They had no reason to trust my eight-bore, and hippos can be very dangerous indeed. I’ve seen a native bitten in half by an old bull he’d harpooned. The hippo spat out the pieces, of course, but the beast’s diet was of no concern to the poor fellow by then.

“In any case, only the three boys I’d brought from the Coast would go in with me. I needed them to clear a path.

“I travelled as lightly as I could, carrying some biscuit and a water bottle besides rifle, compass, and six extra shells. Even so, it took us over an hour to cut through the reeds to what seemed a likely stand beside an open channel that zig-zagged between the reed mats.

“The swamp had an eerie feel to it. The papyrus shot up straight stalks fifteen feet in the air, where they tufted into bracts like bomb-bursts. There were no taller trees in sight to give a sense of direction, since the reeds were growing on top of the water itself. They had built up thick pads of vegetation over the centuries. Beneath that, I knew, the water might be ten feet deep. The quiver of the mat reminded me of that fact every time a breeze touched the papyrus bracts. The channel itself was covered with the poisonous green of swamp cabbage, so bitter that not even the hippos will eat it. The heat and insects were as unpleasant as anywhere else in Africa, but this swamp had as well an oppressive miasma of age that went beyond all lesser annoyances. After an hour of waiting, the realization grew on me that this swamp was unchanged since Cheops built his pyramid. Even a million years before that, the same swamp had squatted here like a cancer on the heart of Africa.

“There was no disguising its evil. Even on the Nile then, the papyrus sometimes swallowed steamers and held them till the passengers had all starved … and the Nile was like the Serpentine compared to the Kagera.

“The boys and I didn’t have the swamp to ourselves. There were hootings and splashings from the interior, no telling how far away. Still, nothing came down the channel beside us. The reeds shuddering overhead cut off vision except toward the open water. I began to feel as I had when tracking a wounded buffalo through heavy brush. By mid-afternoon, I thoroughly regretted the whole expedition. I had determined to go on with the Queen’s business the next day, leaving that damnable swamp.

“One of the boys touched me then, but I’d already heard the sounds. We had found our jimpegwe. Something big had begun browsing at our reed pad, splashing and making the whole island tremble. It was downwind of us and only a few hundred yards away, though I wasn’t particularly worried. No hippo on earth could plow straight through a mat of papyrus. No matter how irrascible the jimpegwe was, it had to approach us by open water where I’d have a clear shot.

“The jimpegwe scented us, all right. There was a loud splash and a bellow the like of which I never heard before or since. The reed mat began to shiver. To my horror, I realized that the sound I heard was that of a heavy body tearing its way through the four-foot thick pad of interlaced vegetation to get to us. The boys and I both knew then that whatever the jimpegwe was, it was no hippo.

“The boys panicked and tried to run back down the path we had cut that morning. They were too blind with fear to choose their footing. Their legs stabbed down into the mat as deep as their hips, and as soon as they struggled free, covered with squirming red leeches, they did the same thing again.

“I stood my ground, though all I could see were the swaying reeds a foot in front of my face. Sixty is no age to begin running through swamps. Besides, the noise told me that the jimpegwe was crashing through the pad much faster than I could have run anyway.

“The papyrus shuddered and I caught a glimpse of the jimpegwe through the tufted bracts: a great, broad head of gray-green, cocked so that the one red eye glittered full on me. The beast dropped back almost at once, with a loud splash that rocked the mat again. The brute had managed to heave itself up onto the pad for only a moment before its weight tore through. The flash I had seen told me only one thing about the jimpegwe: it stood higher than the papyrus bracts, fifteen feet in the air.

“Though there was too little time for running, it seemed far too long to wait. My eight-bore was ready, as it had been all day. After slipping the noses of the next two bullets between the fingers of my left hand, I had nothing to do but to stand with my rifle ported, trusting the beast would rise again when it was close enough for a shot. If it came low through the stalks at me, there would be no chance of placing a bullet. By then, I was under no illusions of being able to stop the jimpegwe with anything but a perfect shot.

“At scarcely fifty yards distance, the jimpegwe pitched upright a second time. I leveled at the head, but again the appearance was only momentary. The sloping skull bave little hope for penetration at that angle. Even so, I could see that the jimpegwe was reptilian. The head was not unlike that of a monitor lizard save in size, though it joined the neck at right angles as if the beast went two-legged much of the time.

“The reeds were bucking like a ship’s deck now as the jimpegwe ripped through the last few yards of matted vegetation separating us. The screams of my boys, still floundering on the path behind me, were drowned by the sound of the beast’s approach as it frothed reeds and water alike into the air. I watched the whipping stalks, waiting for a patch of gray-green hide to flash among them. I was afraid to chance a shot, more afraid of being pulped without firing. I even considered loosing at the blank, swaying mass before me and then trying to follow my boys.

“When it was within twenty feet—and I still had no fair sight of the beast—the jimpegwe made a wheezing sound and lurched into full view. Its forefeet were upraised. I could see each webbed foot was armed with a horny spike where a man’s thumb would be. I squeezed the front trigger when my muzzle steadied a hand’s breadth behind that glaring eye, then followed with the left barrel into the red-wattled throat.

“Even as the head snapped back, I broke the rifle. Strange. I remember clearly that one of the empty cases clinked against the stock when it ejected, while the other fell to the reeds without a sound. The swamp had stilled momentarily at the blast of my shots. Now it thundered with bellows and splashing as the jimpegwe thrashed just out of sight. When it raised again, broad-side to me as its mouth spewed rage and black blood, I slammed both shots high into its neck. One bullet must have broken the spine, for the jimpegwe arched like a bow and hurtled backwards into the water. A great hind leg clawed at the sky, but the beast was down for good.”

Randall had stood entranced beside the fireplace all the time the older man was speaking. Now he said, “That’s wonderful, Uncle John! But why did you keep it a secret? It’s been almost fifteen years.”

The hunter’s lips tightened. “The scientific chaps have their own notions as to what can be real in Africa, lad,” he said. “Remember how many kinds of fool they called Harry Johnston when all he wanted them to believe in was an okapi, a stunted giraffe in the Ituri Forest? And what sort of proof could I have brought out of that swamp alone?”

Snorting, Sir John walked over to a writing desk. After rumaging among a litter of papers, he handed an object to the boy. “There. D’ye know what that is?”

Randall handled the object gingerly. It was a cone of black horn about a foot long. At the base clung wrinkled shreds of skin that might have been reptilian.

“The thumb spike!” he boy blurted. “You cut it off the jimpegwe!”

“Between the two of us, lad, that’s just what I did,” the old man said. “But when I showed this to a very clever chap at Cambridge, he told me it was the horn from a deformed antelope—and he’s the one people will believe, you know.”

But for all the bitterness of his words, the hunter’s face had the look of a man whose life has found fulfillment.

THE DANCER IN THE FLAMES

The flames writhing out of the ashtray were an eyeball-licking orange. For an instant Lt Schaydin was sure that the image dancing in them was that of the girl he had burned alive in Cambodia, six months before. But no, not quite; though the other’s face had been of Gallic cast too.

The two enlisted men had turned at the sound of the officer brushing back the poncho curtain which divided his tent from the rear compartment of the command track. Radios were built into the right wall of the vehicle above a narrow counter. On that counter rested the CQ’s clipboard and a cheap glass ashtray, full of flame. The men within—Skip Sloane, who drove the command track and was now Charge of Quarters, and the medic Evens—had been watching the fire when Schaydin looked in. It was to that ten-inch flame which the lieutenant’s eyes were drawn as well.

He stared at her calves and up the swell of the hips which tucked in at a waist that thrust toward him. She looked straight at Schaydin then and her mouth pursed to call. Above the image hung the black ripples of smoke which were her hair. Abruptly the flame shrank to a wavering needle and blinked out. The compartment was lighted only by the instrument dials, pitch dark after the orange glare. The air was sharp with the residue of the flame; but more than that caused Schaydin’s chest to constrict. He remembered he had called out some joke as he touched the flamethrower’s trigger and sent a loop of napalm through the window of the hooch they were supposed to destroy. The Cambodian girl must have been hiding in the thatch or among the bags of rice. She had been all ablaze as she leaped into the open, shrieking and twisting like a dervish until she died. But this tiny image had not screamed, it had really spoken. It/She had said—

“How did you do that?” Schaydin gasped.

The enlisted men glanced at each other, but their commander did not seem angry, only—strange. Sloane held up a 20-ounce block of C-4, plastic explosive. Sweat rolled down the driver’s chest and beer gut. He wore no shirt since the radios heated the command vehicle even in the relative coolness of the Vietnamese night. “You take a bit of C-4, sir,” Sloane said. His hairy thumb and forefinger gouged out an acorn-sized chunk of the white explosive. Another piece had already been removed. “It takes a shock to make it blow up. If you just touch a match to it in the open, it burns. Like that.”

Sloane handed the pellet to Schaydin, who stood with a dazed look on his face. The C-4 had the consistency of nougat, but it was much denser. “We ought ’a air the place out, though,” the driver continued. “The fumes don’t do anybody much good.”

“But how did you get it to look like a woman?” Schaydin demanded. “I could see her right there, her face, her eyes … and she was saying.…”

Evens reached past the lieutenant and flapped the poncho curtain to stir the dissipating tendrils of smoke. “C-4 makes a pretty flame,” the stocky medic said, “but you don’t want to get the stuff in your system. We used to have a mascot, a little puppy. She ate part of a block and went pure-ass crazy. Seeing things. She’d back into a corner and snap and bark like a bear was after her.… Middle of that afternoon she went haring out over the berm, yapping to beat Hell. We never did see her again.”

The medic looked away from his CO, then added, “Don’t think you ought to breathe the fumes, either. Hard to tell what it might make you see. Don’t think I want to burn any more C-4, even if it does make the damnedest shadows I ever hope to see.”

The lieutenant opened his mouth to protest, to insist that he had seen the image the instant he pushed the curtain aside; but he caught his men’s expressions. His mind seemed to be working normally again. “You guys just saw a—fire?”

“That’s all there was to see,” said Evens. “Look, it’s late, I better go rack out.” Sloane nodded, tossing him the part block of explosive. The medic edged past Schaydin, into the tent and the still night beyond.

“Time for a guard check,” Sloane said awkwardly and reseated himself before the microphone. One by one the heavy-set man began calling the vehicles sited around the circular berm. The tracks replied with the quiet negative reports that showed someone was awake in each turret. The CQ did not look up at his commander, but when Schaydin stepped back from the compartment and turned away, he heard a rustle. Sloane had pulled the poncho closed.

Schaydin sat down on the edge of his bunk, staring at the morsel of explosive. He saw instead the girl he had glimpsed in the flame. She had danced with her body, writhing sinuously like a belly dancer as her breasts heaved against the fire’s translucence. Schaydin couldn’t have been mistaken, the girl had been as real as—the Cambodian girl he had burned. And this girl’s expression was so alive, her fire-bright eyes glinting with arrogant demand. What had the Cambodian girl been crying? But her eyes were dulled by the clinging napalm.…

The pellet of C-4 came into focus as Schaydin’s fingers rotated it. All right, there was a simple way to see whether his mind had been playing tricks on him.

Schaydin set the ball of explosive on top of a minican, the sealed steel ammunition box prized as luggage by men in armored units. C-4 burned at over 1000 degrees, the lieutenant remembered, but it would burn briefly enough that only the paint would scorch. The flame of Schaydin’s cigarette lighter wavered away from the white pellet and heated the case in his hand. Then a tiny spark and a flicker of orange winked through the yellow naphtha flare. Schaydin jerked his lighter away and shut it. Fire loomed up from the plastique. Its hissing filled the tent just as the roar of an incoming rocket does an encampment.

And the dancer was there again.

The engineer platoon ran a generator which powered lights all over the firebase through makeshift lines of commo wire. Left-handed and without looking at it, Schaydin jerked away the wire to his tent’s lightbulb. The sputtering fire brightened in the darkness, and in it the girl’s features were as sharp as if a cameo carven in ruddy stone. But the mouth moved and the dancer called to Schaydin over the fire-noise, “Viens ici! Viens a Marie!” Schaydin had studied French as an undergraduate in divinity school, enough to recognize that the tones were not quite those of modern French; but it was clear that the dancer was calling him to her. His body tensed with the impossible desire to obey. Sweat rimmed all the stark lines of his muscles.

Then the flame and the girl were gone together, though afterimages of both danced across Schaydin’s eyes. The lieutenant sat in the dark for some time, oblivious to the half-movement he might have glimpsed through a chink in the poncho. The CQ turned back to his microphone, frowning at what he had watched.

*   *   *

Schaydin was more withdrawn than usual in the morning, but if any of his fellow officers noticed it, they put it down to the lieutenant’s natural anxiety about his position. The next days would determine whether Schaydin would be promoted to captain and take on for the rest of his tour the slot he now held in place of the wounded Capt Fuller. Otherwise, Schaydin would have to give up the company to another officer and return to Third Platoon. Schaydin had thought of little else during his previous week of command, but today it barely occurred to him. His mind had been drifting in the unreality of South-East Asia; now it had found an anchorage somewhere else in time and space.

The thin lieutenant spent most of the day in his tent, with the orange sidewalls rolled up to make its roof an awning. The First Sergeant was stationed permanently in the Regiment’s base camp at Di An, running an establishment with almost as many troops as there were in the field. In Viet Nam, even in a combat unit, a majority of the troops were non-combatants. Bellew, the Field First, was on R&R in Taiwan, so an unusual amount of the company’s day-to-day affairs should have fallen on the commander himself.

Today Schaydin sloughed them, answering the most pressing questions distractedly and without particular interest. His eyes strayed often to his minican, where the paint had bubbled and cracked away in a circle the size of a fifty-cent piece.

She had seemed short, though he could not be sure since the image had been less than a foot tall when the flames leapt their highest. Not plump, exactly, for that implied fat and the dancer had been all rippling muscularity; but she had been a stocky girl, an athlete rather than a houri. And yet Schaydin had never before seen a woman so seductively passionate, so radiant with desire. Every time Schaydin thought of the dancer’s eyes, his groin tightened; and he thought of her eyes almost constantly.

Come to me.… Come to Marie.…

*   *   *

The activities of the firebase went on as usual, ignoring Schaydin just as he did them. Second Platoon and some vehicles from Headquarters Company bellowed off on a Medcap to a village ten kilometers down Route 13. There the medics would dispense antibiotics and bandages to the mildly ill. The troops would also goggle at ravaged figures whom not even Johns Hopkins could have aided: a child whose legs had been amputated three years past by a directional mine; a thirty-year-old man with elephantiasis of the scrotum, walking bowlegged because of the bulk of his cantaloupe-sized testicles.…

Chinook helicopters brought in fuel and ammunition resupply in cargo nets swinging beneath their bellies. Schaydin did not notice their howling approach; the syncopated chop of their twin rotors as they hovered; the bustle of men and vehicles heading toward the steel-plank pad to pick up the goods. The lieutenant sat impassively in his tent even when the howitzer battery fired, though the hogs were lofting some of their shells to maximum range. The muzzle blasts raised doughnuts of dust that enveloped the whole base. Schaydin’s mind’s eye was on a dancing girl, not men in baggy green fatigues; the roar he heard was that of a crowd far away, watching the dancer … and even the dust in Schaydin’s nostrils did not smell like the pulverized laterite of Tay Ninh Province.

“Time for the officers’ meeting, sir,” Sloane murmured.

Schaydin continued to sit like a thin, nervous Buddha in a lawn chair.

“Sir,” the driver repeated loudly, “they just buzzed from the TOC. It’s already 1500 hours.”

“Oh, right,” muttered the lieutenant dizzily. He shook his head and stood, then ran his fingertips abstractedly over the blackened minican. “Right.”

*   *   *

The Tactical Operations Center was merely a trio of command vehicles around a large tent in the middle of the firebase. Schaydin had forgotten to carry his lawn chair with him. He pulled up a box which had held mortar shells and sat facing the acetate-covered map with its crayoned unit symbols. The afternoon rain started, plunging sheets of water that made the canvas jounce like a drumhead. It sounded like an angry crowd.

The Civil Affairs Officer and the lieutenant from the military intelligence detachment shared a presentation on the results of the Medcap. They proved that zero could be divided in half to fill twenty minutes. Then the Operations Officer described F Troop’s morning sweep. It had turned up two old bunkers and some cartridge cases, but no signs of recent occupation. The sector was quiet.

The balding S-3 switched to discussing the operation planned in two days. When he directed a question to Schaydin, the lieutenant continued to rock silently on his box, his eyes open but fixed on nothing in the tent.

“Schaydin!” the squadron commander snarled. “Stop sitting there with your finger up your butt and pay attention!”

“Yes, sir!” Schaydin’s face flushed hot and his whole body tingled, as if he had just been roused from a dead faint. “Would you please repeat the question, sir?”

The meeting lasted another ten minutes, until the rain stopped. Schaydin absorbed every pointless detail with febrile acuteness. His flesh still tingled.

*   *   *

After Col Brookings dismissed his officers into the clearing skies, Schaydin wandered toward the far side of the defensive berm instead of going directly to his tent. He followed the path behind one of the self-propelled howitzers, avoiding the pile of white cloth bags stuffed with propellant powder. The charges were packed in segments. For short range shelling, some of the segments were torn off and thrown away as these had been. Soon the powder would be carried outside the perimeter and burned.

Burned. A roaring, sparking column of orange flame, and in it—

Schaydin cursed. He was sweating again.

Three ringing explosions sounded near at hand. The noise had been a facet of the background before the rain as well, Schaydin remembered. He walked toward the source of the sounds, one of First Platoon’s tanks. It had been backed carefully away from the berm, shedding its right tread onto the ground, straight as a tow line between the vehicle and the earthen wall. Four men hunched behind a trailer some yards from the tank. One of them, naked to the waist, held a detonator in his hand. The trooper saw Schaydin approaching and called, “Stand back, sir. We’re blowing out torsion bars.”

The lieutenant stopped, watching. The trooper nodded and slapped closed the scissors handle of the detonator. Smoke and another clanging explosion sprang from among the tank’s road wheels. The enlisted men straightened. “That’s got it,” one of them murmured. Schaydin walked to them, trying to remember the name of the tall man with the detonator, the tank commander of this vehicle.

“What’s going on, Emmett?” Schaydin asked.

None of the enlisted men saluted. “Emery, sir,” the TC corrected. “Our tank had six torsion bars broke, so she steered and rode like a truck with square wheels. Back in the World they’ve got machines to drift out torsion bars, but here we’re just using a couple ounces of C-4 to crack each one loose.” The tall non-com pointed at the block of explosive dropped on the ground beside him. Its green sandwich backing had been peeled away from both sides, and half the doughy white plastique had been pinched off. Several copper blasting caps lay on the ground beside the C-4.

Emery ignored the lieutenant’s sudden pallor. He stopped paying attention to Schaydin entirely since it was obvious that the officer was not about to help with the job. “Come on, snakes,” Emery said, “we got a lot to do before sundown.”

The crewmen scrambled to their fifty-ton mount, hulking and rusted and more temperamentally fragile than any but the men responsible for such monsters will ever know. Schaydin’s staring eyes followed them as he himself bent at the knees and touched the block of C-4. Its smooth outer wrapper was cool to his fingers. Without looking at the explosive, Schaydin slid it into a side pocket of his fatigue trousers. He walked swiftly back to his tent.

*   *   *

Tropic sunset is as swift as it is brilliant. It crams all the reds and ochres and magentas of the temperate zones into a few minutes which the night then swallows. But the darkness, though it would be sudden, was hours away; and Schaydin’s pulsing memory would not let him wait hours.

Sloane was radio watch this afternoon. The driver sat on the tailgate of the command vehicle with his feet on the frame of his cot. He was talking to the staff sergeant who would take over as CQ at 2000 hours. They fell silent when Schaydin appeared.

“Go ahead, Skip, get yourself some supper,” the lieutenant said stiffly. “I’ll take the radio for a while.”

“S’okay, sire, Walsh here spelled me,” Sloane said. He pointed at the paper plate with remnants of beef and creamed potatoes, sitting on his footlocker. “Go ahead and eat yourself.”

“I said I’d take the radio!” Schaydin snapped. He was trembling, though he did not realize it. Sloane glanced very quickly at his commander, then to the startled sergeant. The driver lowered his feet from the cot and squeezed back so that Schaydin could enter the track. The two enlisted men were whispering together at the open end of the tent when their lieutenant drew the poncho shut, closing off the rest of the world.

It was dim in the solid-walled vehicle, dimmer yet when Schaydin unplugged the desk lamp. Radio dials gleamed and reflected from the formica counter, chinks of light seeped in past the curtain. But it would serve, would serve.…

The texture of the C-4 steadied Schaydin’s fingers as he molded it. The high sides of the ashtray made it difficult to ignite the pellet. The hot steel of the lighter seared his fingers and he cursed in teary frustration; but just before Schaydin would have had to pull away winked the spark and the orange flare—

—and in it,
the girl dancing.

Her head was flung back, the black, rippling, smokey hair flying out behind her. Schaydin heard the words again, “A Marie! Ici! Viens ici!” The radio was babbling, too, on the command frequency; but whatever it demanded was lost in the roar of the crowd. Passion, as fiercely hot as the explosive that gave it form, flashed from the girl’s eyes. “Come to me!”

The flame sputtered out. Schaydin was blind to all but its afterimage.

The compartment was hot and reeking. Sweat beaded at Schaydin’s hairline and on his short, black moustache. He stripped the backing away from the rest of the explosive and began to knead the whole chunk, half a pound, into a single ball.

“Battle Six to Battle One-Six,” the radio repeated angrily in Col Brookings’ voice. “Goddammit, Schaydin, report!”

The ashtray had shattered in the heat. Schaydin swept the fragments nervously to the floor, then set the lump of explosive on the blood-marked formica. A shard of clear glass winked unnoticed in the heel of his hand. He snapped his lighter to flame and it mounted, and she mounted—

—and she called. Her
hands could not reach out for him but her soul did and her Hell-bright eyes. “Viens ici! Viens!”

The dancer’s smooth flesh writhed with no cloak but the flame. Higher, the radio dials melting, the lizard-tongue forks of the blaze beading the aluminum roof—Schaydin stood, his ankles close together like hers. He did not reach for her, not because of the heat but because the motion would be—wrong. Instead he put his hands behind his back and crossed his wrists. Outside the curtain, voices snarled but the dragon-hiss of the C-4 would have drowned even a sane man’s senses. She twisted, her eyes beckoning, her mouth opening to speak. Schaydin arched, bending his body just so and—

“Come!”

—and he went.

The poncho tore from Col Brookings’ fingers and a girl plunged out of the fiery radio compartment. She was swarthy but not Vietnamese, naked except for smouldering scraps of a woolen shift. Neither Brookings nor the enlisted men could understand the French she was babbling; but her joy, despite severe burns on her feet and legs, was unmistakeable.

No one else was in the vehicle.

*   *   *

On October 14, 1429, the assembled villagers of Briancon, Province of Dauphine, Kingdom of France, roared in wonderment. The witch Marie de la Barthè, being burned alive at the stake, suddenly took the form of a demon with baggy green skin. The change did not aid the witch, however, for the bonds still held. Despite its writhing and unintelligible cries, the demon-shape burned as well in the fire as a girl would have.

SMOKIE JOE

It was Saturday night but Tom Mullens’ numbers parlor was as still as the morgue Big Tom expected to grace the next day. He was sweating. He pretended not to, thinking that it would be read as fear by the three sets of eyes trained on him across the counting table; but the drops runneled out of his still-dark curls and down his beefy face. He had always bragged that his two knobbly fists made him a match for any cheap gunman. Tullio’s boys didn’t work cheap, and Big Tom’s throat had clogged with the old boast when he saw the cratered offal their Uzis had left of seven of his runners.

Lod Mahoney couldn’t have cared less about Mullens’ sweat: his eyes were blind and staring with his own fear. Lod was a paunchy, balding fifty-five, the armpits and long sleeves of his white shirt moist but his bow tie still a neat dark band of respectability. He had stayed this final, terrible week with Big Tom not out of loyalty but because he was only the bookkeeper he appeared to be. Criminal in his associations, not his instincts, Lod did not know how to run.

If Big Tom looked a boar at bay, his son Danny had the sulky nervousness of a well-whipped dog. His eyes darted back and forth among the others in the room, excited to be where he had never before been allowed, but pettish to know that it was only because his father did not trust him loose. Danny’s adolescent face was an armature for the conflicting emotions his mind threw on it. On Monday gunshots had called him to a window. Memory of what he had seen in the street now dolloped occasional terror onto his expression.

Across from Big Tom, his hands delicate but almost as dark as the scarred maple on which they lay, smiled Smokie Joe. His goatee bobbled in a humor that no one with him in the room could see. “I can find a couple hard boys,” he said in a honey-golden voice, “who can get you out of this yet, Big Tom.”

“What?” Mullens snarled, clenching a fist to wipe away the smirk he was sure underlay the words. But Smokie Joe’s calm belied a joke. The black eyes were placid, the perfect features composed beneath the slick black hair. “Iceman,” Big Tom muttered, but aloud he demanded, “All right, what’s the hitch? What does anybody out of a funny farm want to get mixed up with me now?”

“Oh, well,” his slim lieutenant said with the same suave ease that had taken him to the top of Mullens’ organization in the brief months since he had appeared. He spread his palms upward. “They’ll want a piece of the action, sure. Half of anything they generate after things get straightened around.”

“That’s nothing!” Big Tom said, astounded.

“Tom, they’ll be Syndicate—” blurted Mahoney, a new fear stamping itself across his face.

“Do you think I care?” Mullens shouted. He stood, his eyes flicking to the blinds drawn across windows in which bullet-proof Lexan had replaced the glass. He rolled his arms as if lifting a huge weight to his chest. “I won’t look at where help comes from now if it’ll take out Tullio,” he said. “My grandmother always said she was a witch, you know? When I saw this coming six months ago I opened her spell-book and prayed to the Devil he should help me. And I meant it, by God.”

“Thought it was that simple?” smiled Smokie Joe as he, too, rose to his feet. “One thing, though,” he added, leaning forward a little so that his knuckles rested on the table. “You’ve got a choice, Big Tom. But after you choose, there’s no going back … Do you understand?”

“I won’t go back on my word,” Mullens said. He took a deep breath because Smokie Joe seemed to have grown, to bulk huge in the artificial light. “I swear on my mother’s grave.”

“On your soul, Tom Mullens,” demanded the honeyed voice.

“I swear on my soul.”

“What the Hell do you think—” Danny Mullens began, but Smokie Joe’s contempt froze him at his father’s side.

“Hold your tongue when men talk, boy,” Joe sneered. Then, to the entranceway door that should have been guarded by slack-faced Rudy Luscher, he called, “Come on in, boys.”

The door opened. Both the figures standing there were tall and dressed with the greasy casualness of back-yard mechanics. One was thin and pale, the other a squat giant whose stumpy legs gave him the build of a dwarf twice magnified. “Nick, Angelo; meet Big Tom Mullens, your new employer,” said Joe, his hand indicating the newcomers with the grace of an emcee bringing on the star turn.

“Where the fuck is Rudy?” Big Tom asked.

“Drunk, asleep…,” the giant shrugged. “If your people were any good, you wouldn’t need us.” His voice was incongruously as sweet as a chapel bell. “You want us to take out Tullio, Mr Mullens?”

“Goddamned right,” Mullens agreed with an angry nod. “Any way you can.”

“And we’re part of your organization afterwards,” the corpse-pale newcomer added. Neither of them had any expression in their eyes. “We get half of anything we bring in, and you give us a free hand.”

“I already said so!” Big Tom blazed. “Now do you stand here all night waiting for Tullio to set up one last hit?”

Smokie Joe broke in with a laugh that chilled the room. “Oh, don’t worry about Tullio. Not after tomorrow morning.” He was still laughing when Nick and Angelo turned and left the room. They closed the door very gently behind them.

*   *   *

The black Cadillac got a final dab before Tullio’s chauffeur folded the chammy and stepped back. Every Sunday morning he parked squarely in front of St Irenaeus to let out two bodyguards and his employer: Tullio had not missed mass or made confession in thirty-seven years. By now people knew not to take Tullio’s place at the curb. People knew—or they learned, like the owner of the red VW was going to learn. The chauffeur spat a gobbet that dribbled down the suitcase lashed like a dorsal fin to the Volkswagen’s roof.

The small bomb behind the altar of St Irenaeus rattled the Sunday quiet and shivered the rose window on the street side. The chauffeur’s jaw trembled. He dropped the cloth and jumped in to crank the big, silent engine of the Cadillac. The church doors slammed back, the bodyguards fanning to right and left with pistols in their hands. Tullio stumbled out behind them, his thin face yellow except where spatters of the priest’s blood had marked it. The trio scuttled down the steps, their eyes darting about the street like lizards’ tongues. Ruthless elbows and gunbutts had ripped the gangsters through shocked churchgoers, but now the doors spilled-out net-veiled women and men in dark suits.

The directional mine on the Volkswagen’s roof sawed them down with over a thousand steel pellets.

Tullio’s chauffeur hammered at his door, wedged by the force of the explosion. The four-inch glass of the windshield was fogged with shatter marks. The church facade was a haze of powdered stone; fresh splinters raised a hundred rosettes against the dark wood of the doors.

The steps of the church were an abattoir. In the middle of it sat Enrico Tullio, screaming like one of the damned. Much of the blood splashing him now was his own.

*   *   *

“Seventeen fucking bodies,” screamed Big Tom Mullens, “and you didn’t get Tullio! He’ll use an H-bomb on us now if he has to!”

“Tullio won’t use anything,” Nick said unconcernedly. He opened his black eyes and stared full at Mullens. The heavy gang-boss felt the impact. His stomach sucked in and he used the back of his right fist to wipe spittle from his mouth.

“Tullio lost his guts through the holes that Claymore put in him,” amplified Smokie Joe from the chair he had leaned back against the wall. “Sure, he’ll live. He’ll set up somewhere else, maybe go back to Chi and crawl to the boys who backed him for the takeover here. But you’ve seen the last of him, Big Tom. Every time he hears your name he’ll remember the blast and the blood pouring down the stone beside him. When you play for keeps, you play the man; and Tullio knows now he can’t play as hard as you.”

The phone rang, loud and terrible in the silent room. Danny Mullens bit blood from his lower lip and backed against the wall. Big Tom stared at the phone as if it were a cobra clamped on his leg.

“Go ahead, Big Tom,” rolled Smokie Joe’s smooth voice. “It can’t be worse than you’re already thinking, can it?”

Mullens shot him a glance full of violence. He had no one to back a play, though, beyond a terrified 16-year old and a bookkeeper shock-stoned to immobility. He turned his anger on the caller instead, snarling, “Hello!” into the receiver. His red Irish face changed as he listened, moving through neutral blankness to beaming, incredulous triumph. “Sure,” he boomed, “but you got one hour. If you can’t get through the hospital bullshit by then, then God have mercy on you, Tullio—because I sure as Hell won’t.”

Whooping, Big Tom slammed down the receiver and swung over the table as if it were a vaulting horse. His arms embraced the two torpedoes. In his bubbling happiness he did not notice that they were still as coldly aloof as when he thought he had been tongue-lashing them for failure.

“Time to talk about payment, isn’t it, Big Tom?” suggested Smokie Joe easily.

“Pay? Oh, Christ, yeah,” Mullens said with startled generosity. “Look, what do you guys really want for what you done?”

“What you promised,” said bone-pale Angelo. “Half the take my girls pull in.”

“And half of what I turn from skag,” Nick added. “That’ll be plenty when a few kids get strung out and start pushing it to their friends.”

“Huh?” Big Tom said. “Jesus, nobody could get hooked on the shit that gets out here. It’s already been cut fifteen to one.”

“I’ve got contacts in Asia,” Nick grinned. “What I move’ll be pure as Ivory Soap.”

His words jogged a scrap of newsreel in Big Tom’s memory. “You were in Viet Nam, weren’t you?” he asked. “That’s where you learned to use one bomb to set up the real one out in front.”

“We were in Nam,” Angelo agreed with a smile that would have made a shark flinch. “We were sort of instructing there.”

Lod Mahoney stepped to Mullens’ side and caught him by the wrist. “Tom,” he pleaded, “for the love of God, you don’t mean to go into heroin? There’s money, there’s all the money we need in numbers. You know the people you got to deal with in drugs and whores.”

“Money?” sneered Smokie Joe from the other side. “Peanuts! If you stick with that, you’ll be a set-up for somebody else like Tullio who knows what can be done by a guy who’s willing to. And if you welsh on us now, Big Tom, you won’t have our help the next time it happens. What’ll it be?”

Mullens tongued both corners of his lips, looking from Mahoney to the expectant violence of the two torpedoes. “I gave my word,” he said at last. “I’ll back anything you need to set up.”

Their smiles dreadful reflections of one another, Nick and Angelo stepped to either side of the whimpering bookkeeper. “Smart cookie,” said Smokie Joe. Nick’s fist smashed Lod beneath the breastbone. As Mahoney doubled over, Angelo punched him in the back with enough power to pop a rib audibly. The plump man writhed on the floor like a crushed dog.

“He ain’t dead,” Nick said. “He ain’t even unconscious. But his spleen’s busted and he’ll bleed out in ten, twenty minutes.”

Danny Mullens turned his face to the wall and vomited.

“Get rid of the meat, boys,” Smokie Joe ordered. “Never trust somebody who gets religion,” he added earnestly to Big Tom as Nick and Angelo carried Mahoney out the door. “They’re worse than the ones who’ve been goody-goody all the time. They think they’ve got something to make up for, and they don’t mind putting your ass in the hot seat if they decide it’s the ‘right’ thing to do.”

The forelegs of Joe’s chair thumped the floor as he stood. He tapped Big Tom playfully on the shoulder. “Come on, give us a smile. We’re going places.”

Big Tom shook himself, a great bull of a man tearing loose the jaws of an emotion that troubled him. He forced a bloodless smile. “Yeah, up.”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Smokie Joe.

*   *   *

“I can’t believe this,” said Big Tom Mullens, shoving the account book across the scarred table.

“You think I’m cheating you?” asked Smokie Joe without rancor. “I’m not. And Nick and Angelo will keep their part of the bargain.”

“It’s not that I think you’re dragging me down,” Mullens admitted, frowning perplexedly at the slim figure. Smokie Joe had proven as perfect an accountant as he had been an operations man before Lod’s—death. “It’s—well, Hell, Joe; I don’t see how Nick could bring in this much, starting from scratch with no street organization. And Angelo running a cat-house in a college town—Christ, he could sell ice to Eskimoes.”

Joe laughed in a satisfied way, a father preparing to explain to his son how he has gotten the stalled lawnmower to work. “There’s no secret about Nick,” he said. “Sure, people push skag for money; but the best pushers are the ones who’ve just been turned on to it themselves. They’re riding the crest, they’re happy, and they want all their friends to be up there with them. God’s a white powder to them, and they’ve got just as much enthusiasm as Paul the Apostle did.”

Smokie Joe’s laughter as he stood was suddenly a terrible thing. He faced the window for a rippling but unshaded view through the Lexan panels. “And these kids, they’re so smart. They ‘know’ they can’t get hooked if they only snort the stuff, it doesn’t put enough in their bloodstream. Only they don’t know that what we sell is 97% pure heroin—not until it’s too late for them to care.”

Big Tom pressed his temples. The wealth that had trickled, then poured in over the past months had not improved his appearance. His suits were tailored silk, but his belly had begun to slop over his belt and sweat quickly marked whatever he wore. Perhaps his hair had not really thinned and it was only the heightened ruddiness of his face that made it seem so. “What about Angelo, then?” he asked.

Smokie Joe turned. “You sell a customer what no one will give him,” he said quietly. “I think a tour will do better than any words I could use to explain. Come on, let’s take a ride down to Third Street.”

“At three in the afternoon?”

Joe cocked a thin line of eyebrow. “At ten in the morning, Big Tom. Even bankers have started staying open the hours customers want—and we’re selling what they can’t get free, remember?”

The drive was short and without further discussion. Big Tom’s headquarters were in the old industrial section, near the railroad station and the car shops. Angelo had set up in a huge frame house, a Victorian leftover on the outskirts of the business district. The previous owner had once refused to sell, Mullens remembered, prefering to hold the property against future rezoning to commercial or apartment use. Until now, Big Tom had not wondered why the old fellow had decided to sell to Angelo.

Smokie Joe swung the car through the alley entrance to the fenced courtyard behind the house. There were already three cars within: a Buick, a Chrysler, and a rusted gray Nash. “The staff doesn’t park here,” Joe said. “Of course the girls don’t leave at all.”

The door opened before either of the visitors rang. Angelo gave Smokie Joe a brief nod that could have been either recognition or obeisance. “Good you could come, Mr Mullens,” he said. “I think you’ll be impressed by our operation—your operation, that is.”

Within, the house appeared to have been little modified from its original design. Down the rear stairs came a pair of laughing men, a huge black with boots, a loincloth, and a whip; and a middle-aged white man who used the brim of his hat to shield his face when he saw Big Tom. Mullens had already recognized Judge Firbairn.

Firbairn scurried out the door. The black nodded to Angelo, eyed Joe and Mullens with mild interest before he swaggered down the front hall and into a room to the side. Something had dripped from his quirt onto Big Tom’s wrist. It seemed to be blood.

“That’s Prince Rupert,” Angelo volunteered. “Some of our customers prefer watching to doing. Rupert does real nice for them. And we use him for other things too, of course.”

“Why does he pad his crotch that way?” Big Tom asked, disgusted but unwilling to admit it.

“It’s not padded,” Smokie Joe cut in, leading his employer down the high-ceilinged hall. “He has lymphogranuloma, and the scarring in his case has led to elephantiasis.”

“Jesus God!” Mullens grunted. “I don’t know how you could pay a woman enough for that.”

“We couldn’t,” agreed Angelo with a smile. He unlocked the first doorway to the left. “Not money, at least. All the girls are strung out. So long as they get their four jolts a day, they don’t care—they don’t even know—who does what to them.”

He threw open the door. Big Tom gagged as he took in the bed, the extensive props and the mewling woman who lay in the midst of them. He pulled the door closed himself. “She’s only eighteen!” he said.

Angelo spread his palms. “They age quicker than you’d think,” he replied. “Then we got to sell them south or to Asia.”

“They come to us, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. His eyes were as intense as diamond needles. “Remember that. Every one of them asks, uses the words, for everything that’s done to her. If they change their minds later, that’s too bad.”

Mullens shook nausea from his mind. “How in Hell are you running this? No fix on earth would cover up a deal like—” He waved his hands to save words he did not want to speak.

“Think Judge Firbairn would sign a search warrant for this place?” Smokie Joe gibed.

“There’s other judges in the district. They haven’t all been here.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Angelo. “And even some who don’t.…”

His voice trailed off but Smokie Joe had already opened the door of a converted broomcloset and unlocked a drawer of the filing cabinet within. “Suppose you were about to launch a push against—well, you’d call them ‘the forces of crime and decay’ when you held your press conferences, I suppose. Then your daughter got drunk enough to take a dare from some girlfriends—girls she’d grown up with, though maybe if you’d paid more attention you wouldn’t have cared for some of the company they’d been keeping recently. Took a dare and got in a little deeper than she expected.

“So the next morning,” Smokie Joe continued, snaking out a packet of photographs, “a messenger brings you a roll of Super-8 movie film. What do you do then, Mayor Lawrence?”

Big Tom Mullens riffed through the photographs. “Jesus Christ, you did get Betty Jane Lawrence! Jesus Christ! She goes to school with my son, he’s dated her!”

“Still think Prince Rupert wears padding?” Angelo asked.

“That’s—God, I want to puke,” Big Tom groaned, handing the stills back to his smiling lieutenant. “His cock, it looks like it’s rotting.”

“Well, LGV is an incurable disease, you know,” Smokie Joe agreed. “Not so very bad for a while, if you have the personality Prince Rupert does. And if you have an employer who gives you some fringe benefits.

“Want to see more?” he asked, waving at the scores of file folders. When Big Tom shook his head sickly, Joe slammed the drawer and continued, “Between payoffs and this kind of pressure, Angelo here isn’t in any danger. Nick’s operation is a little different, though, since the heat on him is mostly state and we don’t have the same kind of locks on that.”

“What’s the matter?” Big Tom asked, turning toward the outside door as if it were the gate of his prison. “Couldn’t you get a picture of the whole Drug Enforcement Division having a circle jerk?”

“Oh, anything is possible,” Smokie Joe said agreeably, following the big racketeer down the hall. “We’ll have better luck if we give the state boys something to go after besides us, though. Shall Nick arrange a little diversion for them, Big Tom?”

“Arrange whatever you want,” Mullens said. “I’m not sure I give a god damn about anything. Except that I don’t want to see you any more today, and I don’t want to see Angelo ever.”

He slammed the door behind him, within inches of Smokie Joe’s smile. From the front of the house came a scream, then another and another in rhythmic pulses. The smile grew broader.

*   *   *

Big Tom Mullens slapped folded newspaper down in front of Smokie Joe who waited for him with a stack of account books. “I’m getting goddam sick and tired of people playing goddam games with me,” he snarled. “I get a call from Shiloh Academy saying Danny hasn’t showed up for classes in a month and a half. I get here and Nick hands me this paper, asking how I like the job he did for me. What job?”

Joe calmly unfolded the paper. “It’s not unusual for boys your son’s age to drop out of school, you know,” he said.

“I’m not spending eight fucking grand a year for that kid to drop out!” Big Tom said. “He’s getting chances I never had to really make it by going straight, mixing with all the kids whose folks had money without having to scramble for it. If Danny thinks he’s going to throw that away, I’ll blow his fucking head off!”

“The money doesn’t matter, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. “You’ve got more money now than you could have dreamed of a year ago.” He smoothed the front page and rotated it back to Mullens. “Nick probably means the headline,” he said.

Big Tom mimed the words with his lips, then read aloud, “‘LSD Poisons Bloomington Reservoir; Hippie Terror-Plot Slays Scores; City Paralyzed.’ What the Hell?”

“It’s the diversion you told us to make,” Smokie Joe explained with a smile. “Acid goes through the treatment plant without being filtered out. We backed it up with a letter to the Daily News saying that unless marijuana were legalized and the army was disbanded in three days, we’d do the same to every other city in the country. So now the drug boys—and just about everybody else—are not only in Bloomington and out of our hair, they’ve just about dropped hard drugs statewide to hassle hippies about pot. Slick, isn’t it?”

Big Tom’s mouth was open but no sounds were coming from it. His palms were flat on the table to support his weight, but his forearms were trembling.

The door opened. Big Tom spun around. “Danny!” he cried. Then, “Hey, what in Hell happened to you?”

The boy wore a greasy sport coat and a pair of coordinated slacks from which most of the right cuff had been torn. While his father had gone to flesh in the past year, Danny was now almost as cadaverous as Angelo. He looked down at himself in mild surprise. “Hadn’t paid much attention to how I look,” he said. “Not since I went to the doctor.” His hand clenched a sheet of slick paper which he thrust at his father. “Does this mean anything to you?” he demanded.

Big Tom scowled at the sheet, a page torn from a medical text. “I can’t even read this crap,” he said. “No, it don’t mean anything.”

“Then maybe this does.” The tone would have snapped Big Tom’s head around even if the movement of Danny’s hand from beneath his coat had not. Smokie Joe was watching the boy with an expression of bored resignation. That remained unchanged at the sight of a .45 automatic wavering in the thin fist.

“The men have business to take care of, boy,” Smokie Joe drawled. His fingers drummed absently among the account books. “Why don’t you take your little playtoy out and close the door behind you?”

“You bastard,” the boy said, swinging the pistol full on the slim, seated figure. “You’re the real cause, aren’t you? I ought to use this on you.”

“Sure, kid,” Smokie Joe agreed, tilting his chair back a little, “but you don’t have the guts. You probably don’t even have the guts to use it on yourself.”

“Don’t I?” Danny asked. He looked at the baffled rage in his father’s eyes, then back to Smokie Joe’s cold scorn. The pistol seemed to socket itself in his right ear of its own volition.

“Wait, Danny!” Big Tom cried. He threw his hands out as the gun blasted. The windows shuddered. Danny’s eyeballs bulged and the ruin of his head squished sideways with the shot before his body slumped to the floor.

Big Tom more stumbled than knelt beside his son. Smokie Joe scooped up the torn page from where it had fallen. “Sure,” he said, “he probably tried curing it himself with what his room-mate had left over from a dose of clap last year. When the doctor told him what he had and what his chances were of getting rid of it now, Danny wouldn’t want to believe him—who would?—and picked up a book to check it out. ‘Lymphogranuloma venereum is a disease of viral origin, usually transmitted by sexual intercourse.’ Well, the only important thing about LGV is that it’s like freckles—it won’t kill you, but you’ll carry it till you die.”

Mullens was squeezing his son’s flaccid hands. “Normally just blacks get it,” Smokie Joe went on. He squatted beside the wax-faced racketeer. “That isn’t … shall we say, a law of God? Give her a chance and a white girl can catch it. And given a chance, she can pass it on to.…” Joe’s hand reached past Mullens to unhook Danny’s belt. “Funny thing—you wouldn’t have expected Betty Jane to have been interested in a man for a long time after Prince Rupert was done with her. Maybe she was too stoned to care, or maybe Danny-boy used a pretty—direct—approach. There’s no real harm done by screwing a girl, is there?” He jerked down Danny’s slacks.

The boy wore no underpants. His penis was distorted by three knotted sores slimed with yellow pus.

Big Tom choked and staggered upright. His right hand had wrapped itself around the butt of the automatic. Smokie Joe raised an eyebrow at it. “That’s a mistake, Big Tom. Don’t you hear that siren? When the police arrive, they’re going to think you shot your own son. Better let me take care of it—just tell me to and I’ll fix it so you won’t be bothered. You don’t care how I take care of it, do you?” He stretched out his hand toward the pistol.

“I’ll see you in Hell first!” Big Tom grated.

“Sure, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. “If that’s how you want it.”

Big Tom crashed out the six shots still in the pistol’s magazine. Amid the muzzle blasts rolled the peals of Smokie Joe’s Satanic laughter.

CHILDREN OF THE FOREST

When Teller came in from the field, gnarled as his hoe-handle and looking twice his forty years, his wife said, “The cow has gone dry, man.”

Teller scowled. She had slapped out her words like bolts from a crossbow. He understood them, understood also why she was whetting the black iron blade of their only knife. From his wife, warped and time-blackened by the same years that had destroyed him, Teller turned to his daughter Lena.

And Lena was a dazzle of sunlight in the darkened hut.

She was six, though neither of her parents could have told a stranger that without an interval of mumbling and dabbing fingers to cracked lips. But there were no strangers. In the dozen years since the Black Death had swept southern Germany, the track that once led to the high road and thence to Stuttgart had merged back into the Forest. The hut was all of civilization, a beehive with two openings in its thatch. Teller now stooped in the doorway; above him was the roof hole that served as chimney for the open fire in the center of the room. By that fire sat Lena, easing another baulk of wood under the porridge pot before looking at her father. Her smile was timid, but the joy underlying it was as real as the blond of her sooty hair. She dared not show Teller the welts beneath her shift, but she knew that her mother would not beat her in his presence.

“I said, the cow has gone dry,” the woman repeated. The rasp of iron on stone echoed her words. “You know we can’t go on until the harvest with three mouths and no milk.”

“Woman, I’ll butcher—”

“You will not.” She slid to the floor and faced him, bandy-legged and shorter on her own legs than when sitting on the stool. “The meat will rot in a month, we have no salt. Three mouths will not last the summer on the cow’s meat, man.

“Three mouths will not last the summer.”

She was an iron woman, black-faced and black-hearted. She did not look at Lena, who cowered as her mother stepped forward and held out the wood-hafted knife to Teller. He took it, his eyes as blank as the pit of his mouth opening and closing in his beard. “Perhaps … I can hunt more…?”

“Hoo, coward!” mocked the woman. “You’re afraid to leave the clearing now for the woods devils, afraid to go out the door to piss in the night!” The reek of the wall across from the pine-straw bedding proved her statement. “You’ll not go hunting, man.”

“But—”

“Kill her. Kill her!” she shrieked, and Lena’s clear voice wailed hopelessly as a background to the raucous cries. Teller stared at the weapon as though it were a viper which had crawled into his hand in the night. He flung it from him in a fury of despair, not hearing it clack against the whetstone or the ping! of the blade as it parted.

The woman’s brief silence was as complete as if the knife had pierced her heart instead of shattering. She picked up the longest shard, a hand’s breadth of iron whose edge still oozed light, and cradled it in her palms. Her voice crooned without meaning, while Teller watched and Lena burrowed her face into the pine needles.

“We can’t all three eat and live to the harvest, man,” the woman said calmly. And Teller knew that she was right.

“Lena,” he said, not looking at the girl but instead at his cloak crumpled on the earthen floor. It was steerhide, worn patchily hairless during the years since he had bartered eggs for it from a passing peddler. That one had been the last of the peddlers, nor were there chickens any more since the woods demons had become bolder.

“Child,” he said again, a little louder but with only kindness in his voice. He lifted the cloak with his left hand, stroked his daughter between the shoulder blades with his right. “Come, we must go for a little journey, you and I.”

The woman backed against the hut wall again. Her eyes and the knife edge had the same hard glitter.

Lena raised her face to her father’s knee; his arm, strong for all its stringiness, lifted her against his chest. The cloak enveloped her and she thrashed her head free. “I’m hot, Papa.”

“No, we’ll play a game,” Teller said. He hawked and spat cracklingly on the fire before he could continue. “You won’t look at the way we go, you’ll hide your head. All right, little one?”

“Yes, Papa.” Her curls, smooth as gold smeared with river mud, bobbled as she obediently faced his chest and let him draw the leather about her again.

“The bow, woman,” Teller said. Silently she turned and handed it to him: a short, springy product of his own craftsmanship. With it were the three remaining arrows, straight-shafted with iron heads, but with only tufts remaining of the fletching. His jaw muscles began to work in fury. He thrust the bow back to her, knots of anger dimpling the surface of his bare left arm. “String it! String it, you bitch, or—”

She stepped away from his rage and quickly obeyed him, tensing the cord without difficulty. The wood was too supple to make a good bow, but a stiffer bowshaft would have snapped the bark string. Teller strode from the hut, not deigning to speak again to his wife.

There was no guide but the sun, and that was a poor, feeble twinkling through the ranked pines and spruces. It was old growth, save in slashes where age or lightning had brought down a giant and given opportunity to lesser growth. Man had not made serious inroads on this portion of the Forest even before the Plague had stripped away a third of the continent’s population. Fear had driven Teller and his wife to flee with their first child, leaving their village for a lonely clearing free from contamination. But there were other fears than that of the Black Death, things only hinted at in a bustling hamlet. In the Forest they became a deeper blackness in the shadows and a heavy padding on moonless nights.

They were near him now.

Teller lengthened his stride, refusing to look to the sides or behind him. He was not an intelligent man, but he knew instinctively that if he acknowledged what he felt, he would be lost. He would be unable to move at all, would remain hunched against a tree trunk until either starvation or the demons came for him.

Lena began humming a little tune. Though off-key, it was recognizable as a lullaby. Teller’s wife had never bothered to rock Lena to sleep, but their elder daughter, born before the panicked flight into the wilderness, had absorbed enough of the memories of her babyhood to pass them on to her sister. It was not the Plague that had taken the girl, nor yet the demons. Rather, there had been a general malaise, a wasting fed by seven years in an environment that supported life but did nothing to make life supportable. In the end she had died, perhaps saving Teller the earlier agony of a journey like the one he made now.

Far enough, he decided. A spruce sapling thrust up from among three adult trees. Though its bole was only a hand’s breadth in diameter, the first branches were a full ten feet in the air. It formed a post firmer than that on which Sebastian was martyred.

“Now, Lena,” Teller said as he put the girl down, “You’ll wait here by this tree for a while.”

She opened her eyes for the first time since she had left the house with her father. The conifers around her were spearpoints thrust through the earth. Black-green branches shuddered in a breath of wind. The girl screamed, paused, and screamed again.

Teller panicked at the sound and the open terror of her bright blue gaze. He stopped fumbling at the cord knotted about his waist and struck open-handed, his palm smudging the soot on her cheek. Lena bounced back against the spruce trunk, stunned mentally rather than physically by the blow. She closed her mouth unblinking, then spun to her feet and ran. Teller gulped fear and remorse as he snatched up his bow to follow.

Lena ran like a startled fawn. She should not have been able to escape a grown man, but the fearsome shadows came to her aid. When Lena dodged around the scaly bole of a hemlock Teller, following, was knocked sprawling by a branch. He picked himself up, picked up also the arrows he had scattered as he fell. He nocked the one with the most fletching, though he could not have explained to a questioner what he meant to do with it. “Lena?” he called. The trees drank his voice.

A rustle and a stutter of light caught his attention, but it was a squirrel’s flag tail jerking on a spruce tip. Teller eased the tension on his bowstring.

There was another sound behind him, and he turned very quickly.

*   *   *

Lena, trembling in the crease of a giant that had fallen so long ago that the trees growing around it were of nearly equal girth, heard her father blundering nearby. Her frightened whimper was almost a silence itself, no more than the burr of a millipede’s feet through the leaf mould in front of her nose. She heard Teller call, then a ghastly double cry that merged with the twang of a bow. No more voices, then, but a grunt and the chock! of something hollow crushing against a tree trunk.

For a moment, then, there was real silence.

“Coo-o?” trilled a voice too deep to be birdlike. “Coo-o-o?” it repeated, closer now to Lena though unaccompanied by the crackling brush that had heralded her father’s progress. “Coo?” and it was directly above her. Almost more afraid to look up than not to, Lena slowly turned her head.

It was leaning over the log to peer down at her, a broad face set with sharp black eyes and a pug nose. The grinning lips were black, the skin pink where it could be glimpsed beneath the fine, russet fur. Lena’s hands swung to her mouth and she bit down hard on her knuckles. The creature vaulted soundlessly over the log. It was about the height of Lena’s father, but was much deeper in the chest. Palms and soles were bare of the fur that clothed the rest of it. Its right hand reached out and plucked away the arrow that flopped from its left shoulder. A jewel of blood marked the fur at that point, but the creature’s torso and long arms were already sticky with blood not its own.

The hands reached down for Lena. She would have screamed again, but her mind was folding up within her as a white blur.

“Coo-ree?” questioned a liquid voice in Lena’s ear, and she blinked awake. A girl with a shy grin was watching her, a child so innocent that Lena forgot to be afraid. Even though the child was as furry as the adult who must have brought Lena to the grassy hollow in which she now lay. A smile that bared square, yellowed teeth split the fur and the little—shorter even than Lena though more compactly built—creature held out a double handful of hemlock nodules, painstakingly knocked clean of dirt. The skin of her hands was a rich onyx black in contrast to the broken, copper-colored fingernails.

As shyly as her benefactress, Lena took the roots and crunched one between her teeth. The nodule had a rich, almost meaty, flavor and a texture pleasant to her gums. She smiled back. A twittering at the crest of the hollow caused her to spin about and gape at the broad-chested male creature she had met in the woods, now with a smaller companion to either side. On the right was a four-dugged female, slimmer than the male and slightly hunched. The remaining woods man— but Lena’s mind still shrieked demon, troll—was another child, obviously male and of lighter coloration than his parents. His cub-like roundness had not yet given way to ropy adult musculature, and his nervous smile was a reflection of his sister’s.

Lena stood. Her body had gone cold and the bright sunlight seemed suddenly to glance away as from a block of ice. The adult male had washed since she first saw him: his pelt was smooth and clean save for the smudged left shoulder. Another drop of blood oozed to the surface and the female, seeing it, cooed in vexation and nuzzled the wound. Her teeth chopped as she cleaned it. The male pushed her gently away, his eyes locked with Lena’s. Trembling with courage she had not known was hers, Lena bit off another hemlock nodule, then extended the remainder of the bunch toward the watching woods folk. The three before her began to caper with joy, and a warm, furry arm encircled Lena’s waist from behind.

*   *   *

They were foragers and therefore by necessity wanderers, the family of which Lena was now a part. After a month in the bowl which chance or ancient vulcanism had pocked into the Jura Mountains, they spent a pair of weeks combing a stream with a different sleeping place every night. Food was plentiful in that spring and the summer it wore into: roots and berries, spruce tips and the tender shoots of other vegetation; birds’ eggs while they lasted, but never the birds themselves. Lena was almost too young to remember the last of her parents’ hens. Still, learning that they had subcumbed to nest raiding, not slaughter, calmed a remaining bristle of unease.

She tried not to think of Teller at all.

Kort was the father of the family, even-tempered but awesomely strong. Rather than climb a hardwood to pick nuts before the squirrels had combed them, he would find a boulder or the largest fallen limb in the neighborhood and smash it against the tree trunk, showering himself and the ground with the ripe offerings. It was Kort, too, who trudged off on day-long journeys to the cave in which the family wintered, carrying in a bark-cloth basket the dried excess of their gleaning. The winter stores were kept beneath a stone too tight-fitting for a mouse to slide around and too massive for a bear’s awkward limbs to thrust aside.

But if Kort’s strength was the shaft which supported the family’s existence, it was the quick mind of Kue-meh, his mate, which provided directing force. Her fingers wove the strips of cambium into fabric as smooth and as supple as the wool and linen of the villages beyond the Forest. The woods folk used the cloth for carrying bulky goods, not as clothing, though Lena once ineptly wove a crossbelt for herself when her shift disintegrated. Kue-meh guided the foraging, judging its progress and determining when and where the family would move. She could tell at a glance which hickory nut was sound and sweet, which had been emptied in its shell by a worm.

At first the children were never wholly alone, for there were dangers in the Forest. Not the bears, so much, for their strength and ugly tempers were outweighed by clumsiness and their preference for other food. Even Lena was soon able to scramble up a tree before a peevish grunt gave way to a charge. Lynxes were more of a potential threat, for they were swift and had the blood-lust common to all cats. Still Chi, the female woods child and smallest of the three, weighed forty founds by now and was too strong and active to be a comfortable victim.

The wolves, though, the wolves.…

They feared nothing very greatly, those lean gray killers. Fire, perhaps; but the woods folk feared it more and Lena learned to avoid the flames after being cuffed fiercely away from a lightning-slashed tree. From spring through fall the wolves padded through the Forest alone and in pairs, tracking a plump doe or a healthy fawn to rip down and devour. Like most powerful carnivores, the wolves chose their prey not for its weakness but for its taste—and after years of chaos and the Plague, some of them had found a taste for men.

Lena’s long legs, and the new sense of freedom brought by roaming the Forest with folk who thought it home, not exile, took her and Faal, the young male, almost into long-toothed jaws. They were digging root nodules, using sharpened stakes and cloth bags while Kue-meh wove. Faal went around one side of a huge hemlock, Lena the other—the far side. The empty woods, a chorus of blacks and greens and browns, spoke to her suddenly. Dropping her equipment with a silent giggle, Lena darted off among the aisles of trees.

Faal heard the pad of her feet—months in the wild had trained Lena’s step, but not beyond notice of ears that had been born there. He followed her without calling or even thinking. Faal was swiftly gaining his father’s deep chest, but he showed signs of being in Kort’s mental image as well. The two children were gone a minute or longer before Kue-meh looked up from her own work and Chi to notice that her other charges were gone. She hooted in anger, but Faal was already beyond earshot and Lena was ahead of him.

She was a shuttle racing over a loom of needles and spruce twigs. Faal was stronger and his lungs might have brought him abreast of her in time, but Lena’s legs would have been the envy of a doe. Faal on his stumpy limbs could not outsprint the girl. But the two wolves which converged on Lena in a grove of beeches were quicker yet.

Lena stopped, too startled at first to be frightened. Faal had aimed a playful tackle at her before he saw the reason for her halt. He flopped to the leaf mould instead and skidded. The nearer of the red-tongued wolves lowered its tail and hunched.

Lena stepped without thought between Faal and the gray killer. The wolf drew back. It was more than the scent of a true man, the reivers with iron and fire, where only woods folk had been expected. There was something within Lena herself that allowed her, a slim six-year old, to face down a pair of wolves. They stood for an instant, each of them half again the girl’s size; then they bolted. Only their fresh spoor was visible a moment later when Kue-meh raced into the glade, Chi under her left arm and a six-foot pine knot in her right hand. Lena and Faal were pummelled heavily for the run, but Kue-meh spent the rest of the afternoon in thought. Afterwards she let all three children stray, so long as her own two kept close to Lena.

*   *   *

Early hunger and a vegetarian diet should have stunted Lena’s growth. Instead she gained willowy inches to quickly overtop Faal and Chi. The woods folk were a cleanly people and the grime that had disfigured Lena’s first six years disappeared in the ice-fed stream nearest the hollow in which she joined the family. It never returned. Her skin was clear and did not, even bare to the sun and the wind, take on the swarthy cast of her parents’. In the summer she was a warm brown, traced with the thin scabs of bramble cuts; in the winter her complection counterfeited the creamy yellowness of old ivory polished by loving hands.

For all the beauty of her body and skin, Lena’s hair was her crown. It had never been cut, a result of her mother’s apathy rather than any interest in the girl’s adornment. Washed out and laboriously carded with twigs by all four of the woods folk, it flowed down her back like liquid gold. Loose, it was a bright flood behind her as she ran—but then it snagged and caught and diminished. Faal began to plait it in the evening imitating Kue-meh’s bark weavings. Simple at first, the patterns grew increasingly complex and changed nightly. The hair was Faal’s delight. During the long winter evenings he spent hours braiding and reopening her tresses, then braiding them again. Lena bore the attention, but her mind strayed beyond the boy’s gentle fingers.

*   *   *

There was another predator in the Forest, though Lena was twelve before she encountered it. She was miles from the high crag the family then occupied, following Kort to the winter cave, when a horn wound in the near distance. Kort’s reaction was to panic. He danced in a little circle of indecision, then began scrambling up a princely fir tree. The bag of stores jerked with every hunch of his back, scattering bunches of hemlock nodules. Kort’s feet and long right arm—his left held the bag and, in any case, would not lift above shoulder height since the arrow wound had healed—had shot him halfway up the trunk before he realized that Lena’s progress was much slower than his own. There was more than a difference in strength. Though the woods folk did not have opposed big toes either, their control of their foot muscles was much greater than that of Lena’s sub-species.

Kort scrabbled down again, chattering haste in an angry voice. Lena, terrified by the uncertain situation, tried to obey and lost her grip, slipping ten feet to the ground. Kort’s nervous rage burst out in a clatter of syllables. Finally the stocky male threw himself up the bole in leaps that would have been impressive even if horizontal. He caught the bag of provisions in the crotch of a huge limb eighty feet in the air, then dropped back to Lena’s level in four incredible stages. Slinging the girl with as little ceremony as he had the bag, he remounted the tree with equal speed. Shuddering with fear, pressed between the bole and Kort’s great gasping breaths, Lena stared at the ground so far below that it trembled in the breeze. The horn blew again, very nearby.

A stag wobbled out of a clump of firs, its tongue grayish and drooling from the corner of its jaw. Twenty yards from the tree in which Kort and Lena sheltered, the deer fell under the whipsaw impact of a pair of mastiffs. Each dog looked as large as the victim. The stag cartwheeled. One of the great brindled dogs clamped on the deer’s throat, the other caught the right foreleg. There was a flurry of humus. The stag’s spine snapped like the first crack that follows the lightning.

There were a dozen dogs swirling on the forest floor now, hounds trained to back off after guiding the killer mastiffs to their prey. They belled and leaped for gobbets of the deer still thrashing in its death throes. The riders were on them then, two green-garbed huntsmen with full beards and long whips with which they cut at the milling pack … and a third man, a youth whose hair gleamed almost white in a stray beam of sun. He rocked back in the saddle of his great gray stallion and laughed to the sky. Lena froze to see his face lifting, but he was not searching the treetops, was only bubbling over with the joy of the kill.

He was splendid, perfect in her eyes.

There were more riders, scores of men on foot including dog handlers as shaggy and grim as the beasts they dragged off the mangled stag. A huntsman’s broad knife flashed and he raised the deer’s ears and tail to the laughing youth. An unexpected warmth had driven the fear from Lena’s mind. She watched, empty even of wonder at the scene beneath her—more men by ten times than she had ever before seen—while her eyes drank in every motion, every nuance of the young rider in red and gold.

Quick knives unlaced the deer, spilling the entrails to the reward of the hounds. The mastiffs sat aloof on their haunches, nearly the height of the footmen who skirted them with nervous eyes. Those killers were fed once daily and scorned to show interest in the game they brought down. Only their tongues … they flashed and rolled, infinitely flexible as they wiped clean the bloody jowls.

The babble thinned as did the crowd below. The hounds were tired and sated. They whined when the handlers chained them in pairs, but they allowed the men to lead them back the way they had come. Two brawny retainers slung the gutted deer on a pole and trotted off behind the youth on horseback. Riders drifted after them, talking and laughing as they passed out of earshot. Nothing remained but a ragged circle trampled black on the leaf mould. The horn was playing a caracol that seemed to hang in the air even after it was actually inaudible.

“The Ritter Karl,” Lena was whispering to herself. She slurred into the heavy Swabish of her parents the name purred by the retainers. “Karl von Arnheim.…”

Kort, already reslinging the load of food, paid her no attention. But Lena continued to roll the syllables under her tongue.

*   *   *

Months passed. Occasionally there were true men in the Forest: a pair of nervous travelers with packs and staves, whistling into the shadows; a vagabond whose rags were streaked with pus from the ulcers they covered; once a dozen men together, armed and as lean as the wolves … these wore mismated finery and as many as a dozen rings on each hand.

The von Arnheim hunt did not pass close enough for Lena to hear and run to it.

The woods folk travelled, but they did not roam. Lena’s wanderings, at first for hours and then for days, were a cause of great concern to the family. Kue-meh pleaded with her, but the soft, cooing language of the folk had no words for the emotions that were driving the girl. The pleading stopped in time, for none of the family could catch Lena now if she ran. A foraging people learns not to waste effort. Some useful knowledge came from the trips: food sources that the family could exploit now or in the future, caves that opened into spacious chambers from throats too narrow for a bear to enter. But more and more, Lena’s travels were to the edge of the fields of men; and this she did not explain to the woods folk, knowing instinctively that if she had, nothing would have kept Kue-meh from ordering an immediate move scores of miles deeper into the Forest.

And already the trips were considerable endeavors. Settlements had shrunk back from the trees, save for scattered households as Teller’s had been. There were more of those than Lena would have guessed in the days when the Forest was a prison wall, but rarely did the inhabitants attempt to farm the thin soil as had her parents. Most were charcoal burners, blackened men or couples too bent to display sexual distinctions, hiking ever further to find the hardwoods that stoked their greedy kilns. Their huts were ragged shambles, sometimes lean-tos sprawled against some Forest giant; but the kilns were anchors, too slow and demanding of construction to be abandoned for new sites nearer the fuel. The increasing journeys to find an oak in the evergreen forest, then to fell it and laboriously drag back lengths with a shoulder harness, left no time for the necessary leisure of building another kiln.

Spread by the Plague, the lonely farmers were men who had tried to escape Death by running and had delayed his approach by a score of miserable years. The charcoal burners were caught between the upper and nether millstones of shrunken markets and scarcer raw materials, the farmers between declining fertility and impoverishment of tools. The third group, the meat hunters, had shrunk also though they might have been expected to increase. Game had returned to the fringe lands when men had melted away in the black ooze of the Plague, but the Forest had grown darker. Even those who had made their living in it for decades began to edge out into the sunlight.

The demons that haunted the minds of humans in the Forest were not the woods folk. In all her ramblings, Lena found no sign of hairy men other than Kort and his family.

She searched farther, into the lands where farms still sprawled in the open and men plowed behind animals, instead of prodding the soil with a stick. In the dusk she eeled along hedgerows so silently that the hens nesting in them did not stir. Where there were dogs, they rose and stalked stiff-legged over to Lena. After they sniffed at her, they whined and walked away. Occasionally a persistant brute would nuzzle the girl until her fingers stroked a rumbling purr from his rib cage. None of the beasts barked or attacked her.

The domestic animals were new to her, but she paid them little attention. Lena had come to the lands of men to find a man.

The farmers’ huts were windowless, occasionally stone or proper wood but more often wattle and daub. The girl’s eyes found chinks when the buildings were lighted, raked the faces of sleepy residents when they stumbled out to relieve themselves on the ground. But the man she sought would not be found in a hovel. It was long months before she came to understand that, however, since her upbringing had been silent about the Herren, the Masters.

As the seasons passed, as a month of searching became twelve, Lena’s life was still almost wholly within the Forest. The trips beyond were windows of excitement that sparkled to set off well-loved panels of wood. The tall child had become a tall girl, muscled like a deer but with the same lithe slimness she had borne from the first. The woods folk did most things with grace, but they could not run. Faal watched Lena’s sudden fits of exuberance, her flashing spurts across a clearing or through a briar thicket without misstep. His eyes glowed with the wonder and delight of a prophet to whom an angel was descending.

At night his copper nails glinted as they plaited her hair in wondrous fashion.

*   *   *

In a human world with little romance, the golden wraith became a legend before she was truly a rumor. Cottagers nodded and swilled thin beer as one of their number embellished an instant’s vision. Sometimes Lena became a messenger from God or a Hell-sprite, searching for an infant’s soul to steal. More often the stories were rooted deeper in the soul-earth of the peasants than Christ would ever be, and lowered voices spoke of Forest shadows and spirits of the Earth.

Marvel in most listeners became professional curiosity in gray Rausch the huntsman. His belt knife, honed to a wire edge on a stream-tumbled egg of granite, had silver mountings and the rampant wyvern crest of the von Arnheims. The late Ritter, Karl’s father Otto, had presented it to Rausch twenty-one years before to replace the knife his junior huntsman had broken on a boar’s scapula. Barehanded, ignoring the blood-slick tusks, Rausch had wrestled the beast to the dirt at the feet of the Ritter’s pregnant wife. From that day he rode at Otto’s right stirrup and that of Karl after him. He would not have exchanged that blade for the Emperor’s sceptre.

Save for when von Arnheim hunted, Rausch’s time was his own. If he chose to examine a hedgerow on his knees, snuffling like a gray-jowled hound, who was there to gainsay him? So Rausch listened and he watched, while as carefully as a cathedral mason his mind was constructing the hunt that would crown him and his master.

When the first hound belled, Lena ignored it. She knew now from long experience that the dogs were not her enemies. She had been away from the family the past three days, spending the daylit hours in the Forest fringe and the nights deeper into the open lands than she had ever gone before. The castle sitting gray on a detached plateau had drawn her eyes months earlier, but anticipation itself had delayed her approach to it. Now at last she had slipped to the very edge of its straggling curtain walls, let her fingers caress the rough stone. It could easily be climbed, but its hidden interior made the act not a moment’s but a thing for long pondering in the Forest depths. That in her mind, Lena had started back, her course across the fields more hasty than deliberate since she had let the dawn stride too nearby as she studied the wall.

The second joyous bugling would have been a surface impression as well, except for the prompt echo of the hunting horn.

Lena was already among the trees. Her first reaction was that of her foster father, to choose the highest and secrete herself in the upper branches. A premonition that this hunt was no chance crossing of her path drove her instead to headlong flight. Panic rode her, a brutal jockey whose violence spewed out the strength that might otherwise have carried her free.

For a mile she sprinted, leaping obstacles and dreading at every instant that the hounds would give tongue again. They did not. She half turned, then, her nerves begging for the object of their fear, and her right shoulder brushed an oak sapling. It was no more than a glancing blow, but it sufficed to break her stride and allow reaction to her masterless effort throw her to the ground.

And as she lay sobbing on the needle-strewn earth, the hounds and the horn sounded again. She had gained on her pursuers; but they knew, dogs and men, that a hunt was decided in its last moments, not the first. They suited their pace to that certainty. With proper governance, Lena could have run all day. In the darkness, when the men were blind and the dogs nervously unwilling to range ahead, she would have disappeared. A night of sleepless excitement and the disasterous sprint had gutted her. Fear drove Lena back to her feet, but she had lost the ability to force the pace.

With leisure to choose the course, Lena might have led the hunt into empty stretches of the Forest where only squirrels would have been disturbed by its passage. Terror eliminated all chance of such forethought and she plunged straight as a plumb line for the distant cedar copse in which she had last huddled with the woods folk. Perhaps she would have done the same in any event: Lena had never before been hunted, and she lacked the instincts of the wild-born.

The sun was well up before a bright goosequill signalled the nearest of the hunters to Lena’s backward glance. The feather bobbed, visible when the green hat and man and charger beneath it were not. She turned as if unfeeling, her face an ivory cameo, her legs scissors of bronze. She did not pump her arms as she ran, avoiding a practice that could stitch a runner’s torso with cramps while the great veins of his legs still balanced oxygen and poisons in the working muscles.

The hounds were close behind her. The men may not have known how close, for except in that instant’s flash down an aisle of trees they had been beyond sight. Rausch left little to chance, and two of the riders were horse handlers leading picked remudas. But time was lost changing from foundered mounts to fresh ones, and the strings could not follow with the ease of the unhindered riders through brush that clutched at leadropes. The dogs, loping with their muzzles high and quivering with the fresh scent, yelped madly but did not attempt to close the twenty yards separating them from their quarry. They were the fingers of Death, but not his jaws.

In a noon-bright clearing deep in the Forest, Lena stumbled a second time. She rolled smoothly to her feet and collapsed, her reflexes whole but her body without the strength to effect them. The hounds were in a yapping, yelping circle around her. When she tried to rise again the foam-smeared breast of a great stallion slammed her down.

Lena’s lungs were balls of yellow fire. Above her bellowed the green-suited hunter, a little man who had unslung his cocked arbalest to wave it as a signal of triumph.

The knobbed end of a ten-foot tree limb dashed his brains out with the effectiveness of a trebuchet.

Kue-meh, bandy-legged and slight, had darted through the pack. If her strength was inferior to that of Kort, it was still beyond the standards of true men—and the female had the cold will to overcome panic and act in the face of catastrophe. The hounds gave back, snarling. The riderless horse lurched away from the dragging weight still caught in the reins. Two more men, Karl in red silk and cloth-of-gold and Rausch beside him, his grim face a fortress in the midst of chaos, burst into the clearing in which their victim lay. Kue-meh hissed at them and waggled her brain-spattered club.

Rausch reined up and his left hand caught his master’s bridle as well, preventing the youth from thrusting into the deadly circle of the club. Then he whistled and from behind his horse, stark as Furies, loped a pair of mastiffs.

There was neither choice nor hope. Kue-meh strode forward as boldly as if her death were not certain. She swung at the nearer of the mastiffs, missing her aim as it reared back. Kort bellowed from the edge of the clearing, but his rage was too late. The second mastiff’s leap ended with its fangs grinding on the bones of Kue-meh’s right shoulder. She cried out despairingly as the first dog’s jaws closed on her head.

Her neck popped loudly.

The smack of a hunting crossbow was simultaneous.

Halfway between the brush and the killer dogs, Kort’s body jerked backwards. The fourth hunter had ridden into the clearing, having paused first to lay a square-headed quarrel in the launching groove of his weapon. The great iron bolt lifted Kort, carrying part of his breastbone with it through the back of his ribs.

The mastiffs stalked away as the pack began to scuffle for its trophies. The archer slung his arbalest from the saddle of his blowing horse and dismounted to whip the dogs away from Kort. Rausch, too, slipped to the ground, a purposeful thumb on the edge of his blade as he walked toward Kue-meh.

“No, these—creatures—are unclean,” the Ritter said, triumph vibrant through the weariness of his voice. “We won’t carry those back. Let the dogs eat.” He lifted himself out of the saddle. His eyes remained fixed on Lena’s, holding her firm as a snake would a rabbit. His breeches and tunic were shot with gold no brighter than his unbound hair. Froth from the succession of horses he had ridden to death blackened his calves and thighs, and his tunic was dark with his own sweat. Still his broad shoulders did not droop and there was laughter on his tongue after he splashed it with wine from the skin Rausch offered. “So.… She gave us a run, did she not, my Rauschkin? But I think she was worth a few horses, no…? And even poor Hermann, he rode well, but it was his own fault if he let a troll brain him.”

In a more businesslike voice he added to Rausch, “Be ready to hold her arms.”

Lena’s eyes were open, staring. But even if the fact registered on her mind, she would not at first have understood why von Arnheim was unlacing his breeches.

*   *   *

Eventually, awareness returned. They had tied her for the ride back to the castle, her wrists to the saddlehorn and her ankles lashed to one another beneath the horse’s belly. That pain she had escaped as during the grim, slow jogging she lay slumped over the corpse of Hermann who hung crosswise in front of her. Her blond hair was matted over a pair of transverse welts. Rausch had finally used the loaded end of his whip to quiet the girl for his master.

Her thighs were sticky with blood, some of it from the brambles.

She was in a tiny room when she awakened. Outside, a mastiff growled. It had a low rumble, penetrating without being loud, that could terrify in a way that the frenzied barking of lesser beasts could not. The hour was long past sundown, but odor alone told Lena that she had been thrust into an empty kennel with the mastiffs on guard at the opening. Unlike Karl’s human retainers, the great dogs could be depended on to keep all others away from what was, for now, the Ritter’s property alone.

Lena squirmed to the doorway. A horse-huge mastiff lay across it. The beast’s head was raised and one of the dog handlers, well aware of the brute’s capabilities, was scuttling away across the muddy courtyard. Only the casks of strong ale, broached for the Ritter’s triumph, had given the man courage to approach as closely as he had.

Awakened by the intruder, the brindled dog turned to lick its own flanks. Lena froze, but moonlight on her hair drew the broad muzzle into the opening. The eyes were calm and dark-pupilled, larger than a man’s. The mastiff’s tongue flapped against Lena’s temple like a soft rag, sponging at the blood caked there.

Fearfully—no present kindness would erase memory of Kue-meh’s last moment of life—Lena brushed her fingers across the dog’s forehead, then caressed the upthrust ears. Power burred again in the dog’s thorax, but it now was rich with delight. The head gave back, directed by the girl’s proddings where it could not have been forced, and let her worm out into the open.

The courtyard was empty of all but the two dogs and a squalor which even the gentle moon limned clearly. The second, fawn-colored, mastiff whined and nuzzled Lena wetly. There was a faint murmuring from the other kennels, wattled domes little different in design from the huts of the peasants. No man or other dog appeared to try the wrath of the killer who now supported the girl on either side.

Her hands absorbing strength from the skin folded over the dogs’ withers, Lena made her way to the wall. Behind her, the tower of the keep climbed seventy feet from the ground. No lights gleamed through its arrow-slits. The drink that had enspirited one man had crumpled all his fellows. Even perfect success could only briefly have counteracted the exertion required to gain it, and the Ritter’s ale-sodden feast had done for the stay-at-homes as well. Three crossbowmen snored away their guard on the tower, and the occasional sounds from beyond the low wall to the inner court came from the fowl and pigs of the humans quartered there. The snorts of the horses sharing the outer courtyard with Lena and the dogs were muted. Seven had been ridden to death during the morning or had been swallowed in the Forest beyond later recall by the exhausted hunters.

Lena touched the stones of the curtain wall, massive gray blocks more of nature than of man. She was beyond strength or weakness now, as inanimate as the limestone in which her hands found natural holds. The larger, brindled mastiff raised itself to its full height on the wall and licked the sole of her foot. Then she was over, sliding down the face of the wall and beginning to run the instant she touched the rocky soil below. This time there was no pursuit.

She followed the trail broken by the day’s long hunt, knowing the confused scents would hinder the dogs if they were loosed on her. As she passed them, her hands plucked off berries and the pale, tender shoots of budding spruce. Once, in splashing across a rill, she paused for three quick gulps and a mouthful that she absorbed over the next minutes rather than swallowing. Her pace was not particularly swift, but it was as regular as a machine’s.

The forest floor paid little mind to dawn or darkness, but the needles of sunlight piercing to the loam were nearly vertical when Lena reached the scene of death and capture. Kort lay huddled, flies black on the raw wounds which crows had already enlarged. Three of the birds croaked angrily from the limb to which Lena’s intrusion had sent them, pacing from side to side and hunching their pinions.

Kue-meh’s face, undisturbed by the fangs of the pack, bore a look of peculiar kindliness and peace. It was the face with which she had greeted Lena seven years before, less resigned than willing to accept. Lena looked away. It was not that for which she had returned.

“Coo-ee?” she called softly.

The Forest grew very silent. Even the crows left off their grumblings.

“Coo-ee?” the girl repeated. The bushes parted as she knew they must, and Chi, then Faal, stood timidly before her. Gurgling sounds that were partly tears and partly words of a language even older than that of the woods folk, Lena threw herself into their arms. She hugged their smooth, furred bodies like the shades of her lost innocence. At last she thrust them back to arm’s length. Wiping her face free of the mingled tears, she said, “We must go now, very quickly. There are places in the Forest so far away from here that the Others will never come. They will never find us again.”

She spoke and led the way into the Forest without a glance behind her. Chi followed at once. Faal, a picture of his father now in all but the gray that had tinged Kort’s fur, hesitated. As yet he lacked the consciousness of strength that would let him unconcernedly follow into the unknown. But in a moment he ran to catch the females and, as he shambled on at Lena’s side, his fingers began caressing the tawny gold of her hair.

BLOOD DEBT

The shadow of the house next door razored down Rigsbee’s in the winter dawn. First the red light tinged the wrought iron rail of the widow’s walk. Spidery star-shapes writhed in the glow, the uprights molded as blunt arrowheads and the slanted pairs of limbs linked with fanciful hands. Below, the dark green shingles of the mansard roof sharpened but did not brighten when the light touched them. Only the small-paned French window winked back at the sun. The left half was off the catch and swung as the air stirred around it.

The dawn paled as it glided more swiftly down the white sidewalls of the second story, walking the crazy angles of the trellis and the ancient ivy clambering up into the gutters. There were already lights on in the kitchen on the ground floor. The tall, blonde woman put a last plate on the breakfast tray, then pushed the stairwell door open with her heel. She moved with precision, as she had for forty years. Life, ignoring her hopes and trampling her certainties, had been unable to change that; but crow’s feet now softened the hard lines of her face.

Her shoes rapped steadily up the back stairs, pausing at the triangular landing where her dress flashed through the slit window before swinging up the flight. The old house had high-ceilinged rooms and she liked the feel of them, though of course heating was a great expense to Mr Judson. She made out the checks herself, who should know better.

A bolt snicked back and the door to the second floor opened before she had to knock. Judson Rigsbee was wrapped in a velvet robe—the green one, this morning—and smiling at her. “Good morning, Mrs Trader; I hope you slept well.” He did not smile often, and even with her it was a slightly uncomfortable expression, that of a stranger who is afraid to embarrass by seeming over-warm.

Mrs Trader set the breakfast things neatly on the table inside the door—toast, poached eggs, coffee; the big glass of orange juice. Mr Judson didn’t care for orange juice but she insisted, it was good for him. The man would waste away to nothing if she didn’t bully him—no chance Anita would stir a finger for her uncle.

“Thank you, I did indeed,” the tall woman said aloud. “Now that Harvey and Stella are back together, I haven’t been having those headaches at all, Mr. Judson.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad,” he said diffidently. He edged back slightly from the housekeeper’s determined confidences, a pudgy-seeming man of fifty with no hardness showing except in his eyes.

“I’m certain I don’t understand men,” Mrs Trader plowed on as she poured the coffee, “not even my own boy. They were as sweet a couple as you could find, he and Stella. For five years, and I’ll say it even though I didn’t want the marriage myself, they were too young. And then with the little one due any day, there Harvey goes off with never a word to Stella or even to me. But he was there in the waiting room when Kimberly was born, and Stella took him back though I wouldn’t have blamed her if she hadn’t.… But it was a weight off my mind.”

“Thank you, Mrs Trader.”

“Thank you, sir.” She gathered up the part-loaded tray and stepped crisply up the remaining double flight of polished hardwood. Mr Judson was looking peaked and she did wish he would eat bacon in the morning, but on that score he was more determined than she. “Orange juice or bacon, Mrs Trader, but not both. Male, both of them, and together they would overbalance me hopelessly.” Terrible things, queasy stomachs, and the green robe did nothing for his complexion. A pretty thing it was by itself with all the astrology symbols in silver on the hem, but not proper dress for a sickly man in the morning.

She rapped smartly on the door to the third story, squarely in the middle of the great red-lacquer eye Anita had painted there. “If Uncle Jud won’t let me bolt my door, I at least have to know who’s coming, don’t I?” the girl had sneered. Mr Judson never talked very much about his sister, but Mrs Trader could guess that she had been the wild one of the family. Who could be surprised that the daughter took after the mother when the poor child had not so much as a father’s name to bear?

A second knock brought no response. The baleful eye waited, unblinking. Well, this was the first time it had happened, but Mrs Trader was not slow to act. Mr Judson insisted the house be run to a schedule so as not to disturb his work. Anita should have learned that in the months she had stayed here. If she hadn’t, well.… Mrs Trader swung open the door.

The room within, its walls skewed a little to the shape of the roof, was far different from Rigsbee’s own austere sitting room below. The dormers were blacked out by locked shutters; a volcano lamp lighted the rug and brocade chairs, but it had overheated during the night. Its paraffin and oil were in ugly stasis within the red glass base. Mrs Trader switched it off as she strode past into the middle room.

A pentagram had been freshly chalked on the floor; the candles at its points still stood at half their original lengths, snuffed before they burned out, and the air was heavy with incense. “Anita, it’s eight-thirty,” Mrs Trader called. Aping her uncle, she thought as she glanced around the room distastefully. Though in fairness to the girl, that couldn’t be true. Mrs Trader had seen the paraphernalia arrive with the rest of Anita’s baggage. Runs in the family, then.

The girl failed to come to the bedroom door either. Mrs Trader sniffed and unlatched it herself without knocking again.

The window slammed shut in the sudden air current. It left a damp chill in the room. The walls were a brilliant, metallic yellow that matched the spread, now rumpled at the foot of Anita’s bed. Anita, too, was rumpled. The coils of hair that lay silken over the sheets beneath her were no blacker than her protruding tongue. The breakfast tray slipped, smearing the golden carpet with strawberry preserve and coffee.

Mrs Trader turned stiffly and walked toward the stairs. A candle holder smashed unnoticed beneath her foot as she strode through the middle room. “Mis—” she started, but her voice cracked and she had to lick her lips before trying again. “Mr Judson!”

Rigsbee opened the door just in time to catch the rigid woman as she stumbled on the last step and fell toward him. The unexpected impact drove them back into his sitting room. For once, Mrs Trader would not meet her employer’s eyes as she blurted, “Dead, Mr Judson, she’s dead and murdered. Oh dear God! In her own bed!”

Rigsbee rotated the blonde woman’s weight into the room, then disengaged her arms to dart up the stairs. She wept in one of the straight-backed chairs until he returned; and her tears were real, but they were shed for the thing and not the girl herself.

Rigsbee was very quiet when he came back a few minutes later. His slippers rasped a little on the steps, that was all. The skin of his face was almost the color of his neutrally-short gray hair. “Look at me, Elinor,” he said softly. His fingers, gentle but inexorable, guided her jaw around when she was slow to obey. He was a little man in a comic robe, but his eyes were molten zinc. “You will go home now and forget all that you saw upstairs. When you return tomorrow, you will never have known Anita, there will never have been anyone living on the third floor. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” The voice from Mrs Trader’s lips was not her own, but it ruled her.

*   *   *

Alone in the center of his three rooms, Rigsbee changed into white. The symbols worked into the robe’s borders were of thread the same shade, differing only in texture from the base cloth.

“Well?” a voice inquired from a corner.

Rigsbee shrugged. His bald spot was more apparent whenever he was depressed. “She was my niece. She was the last of my blood.”

“You know what she was,” the voice rasped. “She was a slut, a whore—”

“Some things are necessary.…”

“Not to her. She was never that deep in—”

“She was my blood!” Rigsbee’s voice racketed through the dim room and shook it to silence. He turned toward the outer wall, clasping his hands to keep them from trembling. The windows on that side were blocked by the bookshelves running the length of the long wall. Spines of blue, green, and dull red library tape marched across the polished walnut with no markings beyond a few digits in white ink. He touched one of them.

Each thin volume was a typescript of Rigsbee’s own production, bound by him between sheets of gray card. No one had helped during the typing or compilation. Partly Rigsbee’s purpose had been to give the volumes the slight added virtue resulting from that close contact with him. More important, however, was another consideration: each typescript was treble-columned with groups of letters and numbers in no order that would have made sense to one not adept. Rigsbee had not intentionally encoded the results of his years of searching, but the form of notation he had come to use was far more specialized than Latin and Arabic symbols could accommodate in their normal values. One trivial error of pagination, one transposition among millions of letters, unnoticed and unnoticable, would mean instant disaster in the dark moment when the data were used again.

A very few of the cased books were not of Rigsbee’s own composition. His hand moved to one of them: squat, age-blackened; its pigskin binding cracking away from the cords. He knew by heart every word of the cryptic Latin text, but he had never before seriously contemplated using it. The pages opened stiffly, parting with difficulty under his fingertips.

“You would go that far?” the voice behind him asked mournfully.

Rigsbee closed the book before answering, “Punishment that stopped with the body would not—would not for me—be enough. The finality of that act, whoever did it, can’t be answered by a gas chamber or a motor accident. I’m sorry, Vera; but I have no choice.”

And, “No,” he said sharply, wheeling with a strand of diamond in his voice before his listener could reply, “don’t tell me that I’ll have to give up all this, this.…” Rigsbee’s voice broke but his hand slashed an arc across the room. The books, the retorts joined by crystalline worms of tubing; the charts rolled in one corner beneath the ancient astrolabe. “That’s already gone, it’s dead. If I ignored what has happened … Vera, I wouldn’t be the same man, the man who … did the things I have done.”

His face was carved from gray steel. If he felt any hesitation, none of it trembled in his throat when he said, “You’ll help me, Vera.”

“So close,” the voice whispered. “In this short time—and you will understand how short it was, some day before you are as old as I—you came closer to unity than I have done in all these ages. And now, nothing.”

“Vera. You’ll help me?”

“Even to make the responses to you would bring me closer to the Blackness than a thousand cycles of the Fire would erase. Dos Lintros tried to walk that line after he wrote the book you hold. Where is he now, since they came for him?”

“I know,” Rigsbee admitted softly.

“You know? You think you know!” the voice shrieked. “But you will know, Judson, for eternity you will know if you.…

“But it’s no good to tell you that, is it?” the voice went on. “You will do this thing, I see. And you are wiser than I can ever hope to be; but because of what I am, I know things that you only accept. Not even you, Judson, can imagine what you are about to do to yourself. To your soul.”

Rigsbee shrugged, ran a hand through his thinning hair while his eyes stared unseeing at the numbered spines of his volumes. “I’m sorry, Vera—”

“Goodby.” Her word was as soft and as dull as the first handful of dirt on a coffin. Rigsbee shuffled to the corner, let his hand brush down the wire cage. The albino starling within croaked, darted its head forward to spike the ball of his thumb.

“Goodby, Vera,” Rigsbee muttered, and he turned away again.

*   *   *

The back door groaned. The lock had worked smoothly, but the hinges were frozen with the grit of long disuse. The girl glanced up the outer wall before entering. It was too dark to tell the ivy from the trellis it climbed.

“Nice place,” she said as she followed Rigsbee up the stairs. Her knee-length coat was of a plastic imitation cowhide, now torn at two of the seams. The belt was missing and she held the front closed with one thin, white hand. “You been here long?”

“Most of my life,” Rigsbee said as he unlocked the door to the second story. Despite the dimness of the stairwell, he inserted his key without fumbling.

Again the girl hung back, hipshot, in the doorway. She was a dark brunette; long snarls of hair bobbled against her coat as she suddenly giggled. “Aren’t the neighbors gonna wonder if they saw me come in?” She laughed again, stepping over the threshold with an exaggerated stateliness. Shrugging away the coat, she tossed it onto one of the straight chairs and stood in tank top and jeans. Most of the bright embroidery had worn away. Her bare toes, poking through handmade sandles, were an unhealthy blue beneath their coating of grime.

“This way,” Rigsbee directed briefly, swinging the stair door shut and motioning the girl inward toward his study.

“’Cause if you don’t care,” she went on, speaking over her shoulder as she slowly obeyed Rigsbee, “this doesn’t have to be a one night stand, you know.”

Rigsbee’s glance took in her too-thin face, her too-white skin. “That won’t be necessary,” he said flatly. “It’s in the next room.”

“It wouldn’t be so much,” the girl said with unshakeable coquetry. “I mean, not another of these—very often.” Both hands lifted the thin top up over the waistband of the jeans. A hundred dollar bill, folded vertically into eighths, was poked into the jeans on her midline. “I couldn’t put it in the top,” she said with another giggle. Raising the thin cloth higher, the girl pirouetted back toward Rigsbee. The motion flung out her breasts, bare beneath the hiked blouse. They were not large but seemed surprisingly full for a body so thin; the areoles were almost black against the dingy pallor of her flesh.

Rigsbee stepped past her, his neutral expression unchanged. He swung the room’s other door soundlessly toward him. White light flooded out. “Go in,” he ordered, holding the portal open. Its inner face was covered with a thin, hard fabric that seemed less reflectent than self-luminous. Despite the strangeness of it, the girl obeyed this time without hesitation. Her motion slowed; then, three steps inside the final room, she stopped completely.

The whole chamber and its only furnishing, a circular couch, were covered in the slick fabric. The high ceilings of the old house had allowed Rigsbee to dome the materia smoothly in the center of the room without making the edges uncomfortably low. The light was not harsh but was shadowless and omnipresent, the interior of a cold, white star. Rigsbee entered behind the girl, closing the door on the last rectangle of reality left to the room. In his right hand swung the bird cage from his study. The starling hopped uneasily on its perch.

The girl let her blouse fall; her head rotated, taking in featurelessness. “Hey, this is unreal,” she whispered. A hesitant step brought her to the couch. It was firm to the touch, warmer than blood. “You really go all out, don’t you?” she said. For the first time, there was a trace of something genuine in her voice.

Rigsbee slid off his shoes and stepped onto the couch. The cage hung from the center of the dome on a hook that had been invisible until then. “It’s time now. You can take your clothes off,” he said. He loosed the gold-shot sash he wore over his street clothes as a belt.

The girl pulled the top over her head, freeing it with a sharp tug when it caught in a loop of hair. With the same motion, she flipped the garment carelessly toward the wall. Seating herself on the edge of the couch, she hooked one long, slim-jointed toe over the backstrap of the other sandle, then paused. The surgical coldness of the light bit at her. “I—” she began. She hugged her breasts close without sexual intent. “Look she said, “you want me to take a shower? I mean, they shut the water off.…”

“I hired you as you are,” Rigsbee answered bleakly. “Afterwards you may bathe or not, as you please. Get off the rest of your clothes.”

The girl obeyed without enthusiasm. Both sandles struck the wall. They should have clattered but did not. She thrust the folded bill into a side pocket before sliding the ragged jeans down her thighs. “Look,” she repeated, her eyes on Rigsbee’s short, soft body so as not to have to see her own so clearly, “have we got to have the lights so bright?”

For the first time that night, Rigsbee smiled. “Yes,” he said, the tight rictus of irony still on his face as he reached for the girl, “but they’ll dim later.”

As she began the ancient mechanisms of her trade, the girl wondered again how a room with no visible light source could be so brilliant. Then, without paling, the lucence began to slip from white to violet in waves as mindless as the sea’s.

The room was yellow-green, a throbbing chartreuse that washed the fine gray hairs of Rigsbee’s chest into a new-sewn field. “Again,” he said quietly.

“Again, honey?” The girl ran her calloused palm over his belly with something like affection as she snuggled closer. “Say, you’re not bad. But this time—” She repositioned herself with a silken movement on the glowing couch.

“Yes,” Rigsbee muttered in a gelatinous voice as he bent. The girl’s high-thrusting legs flickered shadows across her prominent rib-cage. And the light in the room glissaded to orange.

*   *   *

Garnet light the color of congealing blood oozed across them. Rigsbee rose to his feet awkwardly. The girl squirmed on the couch, stretched. “Now what, honey?”

“Nothing.” Rigsbee’s eyes were focused beyond the throbbing walls of the room. “Now you can leave.”

Plucked eyebrows arched in surprise. “What’s the matter? Wasn’t I good?”

His tone itself a manner of ignoring the girl, Rigsbee went on, “The thing I had to do required that I be … sexless, that will suffice, to contact those who can aid me. With a female associate with whom I could have merged my spirit, I could have become a neuter entity. That was…”

He looked at the starling. It felt the impact of his eyes, the thin ruby whites around pupils which were still metal gray. The bird squawked, hopped to the far end of its perch.

“… impossible under the circumstances,” Rigsbee continued. “Where the body goes, the spirit must follow, then. It became necessary that I drain a part of my nature, the masculine portion. For that, I needed you. Nothing more.”

“My God,” the girl said, rising from her back to her elbows. “You mean you didn’t even want to fuck?”

“You?” Rigsbee asked wearily.

“God, that’s dirty!” the girl hissed. Grimy hands levered her shanks back across the couch to the edge.

Rigsbee laughed, a humorless cackle of sound that echoed in the room. “Yes. It is,” he agreed, the skin stretched bone-tight across his face. “Far fouler than you can dream. I made the contact that I … desired.”

He lifted down the bird cage. “Shall we see what they say?” The starling chopped at Rigsbee’s hand as he slipped it through the cage door. His pudgy fingers were swifter than the bird; thumb and forefinger closed about its neck and hooked it from the cage.

“What—” the girl blurted. Her muscles tensed as she tried to remember which swatch of burning fabric hid the exit.

Rigsbee was not speaking aloud, but the agonized tremors creeping across his flesh showed his concentration. The bird seemed forgotten, clasped in both his hands. The fingers on its throat kept the starling from crying, but it had enough freedom to snap its pinions. The feathers clattered together like boards slapping.

Rigsbee shifted his grip, then wrenched his fists in opposite directions. The girl’s scream covered the faint pop as the starling’s neck parted. The bird’s tiny heart thumped out two powerful jets, the last choking off as the veins feeding it emptied.

The adept’s eyes stared at the floor. Half-unwillingly, the girl leaned over to see what was there. Instead of lying in a ragged pool with satellite splotches, the blood was crawling of its own volition into connected words. The letters were spidery but perfect, and they stood out ironically black against the sanguine background:

CANES EXSPECTANT

“My hounds await,” Rigsbee whispered. He began to laugh. His mouth was open, lips unmoving, and the empty syllables tumbled out in a terrible cacaphony.

“Stop!” the girl screamed, and she clapped her hands over her ears. Rigsbee took no notice of her shuddering frame. He raised both hands in the air, choked off his laughter as if by main fore, and shouted a word, inhuman and ghastly with power. For the girl, for all the world but Rigsbee and one other, time froze in that instant.

The red robes slipped over his head easily. They had no designs worked into them, and they billowed loosely, sashless. The bloody light permeating the chamber coalesced as Rigsbee moved, flowing into the semblance of an ape’s skull hanging in the air before him. It leered, then glided silently through the door which opened for it. Rigsbee followed, his scuffling slippers making the only sounds in the static house.

Down the stairs into the street. The skull’s pace was a deliberate walk, the certain leisure of the squad escorting the tumbril. Other movement joined Rigsbee; gentle rustlings from the ivy, a tremulous scraping of metal on masonry. Only a petrified night scene showed in the wash of scarlet light preceding him. Street lights no longer poured their mercury blue in pools on the asphalt. A car was caught rigid in the middle of a turn, the tip of its driver’s cigar dead and black. A dog skipped for the curb—one foot in the street and the other three in the air so that its brindled body hung at an impossible angle. House after high, old house, built close to the sidewalks with walled courts in back for privacy. Rigsbee followed his guide without turning his head to look for the things tittering just beyond his zone of vision.

Newer houses, smaller but set back further. Rigsbee’s monocentric mind had no idea how far he had walked. The skull halted at last, rotated tremblingly toward a brick-veneer residence. Rigsbee remained where he was, a hundred feet back in the middle of the street. His guide eased forward. The reflectors of the old Buick in the carport winked back in carmine brotherhood.

The inside of the house showed as red light approached, flooded through the front window. A woman had pulled the drapes back in the instant before stasis. Now she stared unseeing at the glass, her hair rinsed black and the cover of the baby in her arms striped red on red.

Shockingly loud in a universe that had only scufflings and scratching, a man’s voice slashed out of the house, “Did you finally come, Rigsbee? I’ve been waiting for you.”

A moment’s pause. The front door banged back, the screen squealed open. The man on the narrow porch was tall, his hair a brighter yellow than his mother’s in any normal light. Now it was a crown of dull carbuncle burning over his anguished face.

“Where are you, Rigsbee?” Trader called, taking a step out onto the gravel sidewalk, a step nearer the skull motionless in the air. “I know you’re behind this. Your witch of a niece told me what you are.

“Do you want me to say it? I killed her! You can send me to any Hell you please, but I killed Anita and I’m glad of it. I rid the world of her!”

“She was my daughter, Harvey.” Unlike Trader’s harsh, desperate tones, Rigsbee’s words were almost inaudible. His robes hung motionless, a frozen torrent of blood.

Trader took three steps down the gravel. The ape skull blocked his path without moving. A curse twisted Trader’s powerful face and he spat at the thing. It burst soundlessly into a ball of glowing vapor that slowly dissipated in the still air. The murky red light continued to flow about the two men after its apparent source was gone.

“I wouldn’t have anything to do with her,” the younger man said tautly. “I told her Stella was plenty for me, even with the baby coming. But she couldn’t take that, not your Anita, and she’d have me anyway. Up the ivy and in her window, Rigsbee, every night. And I couldn’t go home in the mornings, then, and face Stella.”

Rigsbee closed his eyes, rubbed them as if he were tired. Trader continued to advance, narrowing the distance between them. The globe of light shrank with every step he took. Beyond it, gravel skittered impatiently.

“I broke away when Kim was born,” the tall man went on, his words as brittle as a coping saw on glass. He stretched his arms out in instinctive supplication. “She was … you can’t imagine, Rigsbee! Hadn’t she had enough? She’d proved she could take me away once, why did she have to—”

For the first time, Rigsbee stared straight into the other’s tortured eyes. His tone softer than a fledgling’s down, the adept said, “Harvey, when you strangled Anita, you made this certain. You and I are as much a part of nature as the sun and stars are, and our courses are as fixed. You chose then the course for both of us, and there is no changing now.

“Goodby, Harvey.” And Rigsbee raised his hand.

The world brightened stunningly as if the sun had risen scarlet. Harvey lurched back in shock, seeing what came scrabbling toward him. He tried to run.

A slender hand of wrought iron snatched his ankle. The railing from Rigsbee’s house now scampered on the lawn, fifty separated mannikins. Harvey screamed as his ankle crunched under the black fingers. Fifty faceless, pointed heads tossed in delight. They clanked as they minced toward their frenzied quarry, trembling as each new howl cut the air.

Trader disappeared behind the living fence. The human noises ceased a moment later when something round and bloody pitched into the air.

The light began to fade. Before long there was only a dull glow surrounding Rigsbee. Then the full moon came out and traffic moved again.

*   *   *

Dawn rained on the city. Rigsbee’s empty house brightened slowly in the wan gray. A spatter of droplets whipped the shingles, followed by a pale drizzle that flowed over the eaves and splashed to the ground in sheets. The spidery pentacles of the railing blackened under the impacts of the rain, and the gutters ran red.

THE BARROW TROLL

Playfully, Ulf Womanslayer twitched the cord bound to his saddlehorn. “Awake, priest? Soon you can get to work.”

“My work is saving souls, not being dragged into the wilderness by madmen,” Johann muttered under his breath. The other end of the cord was around his neck, not that of his horse. A trickle of blood oozed into his cassock from the reopened scab, but he was afraid to loosen the knot. Ulf might look back. Johann had already seen his captor go into a berserk rage. Over the Northerner’s right shoulder rode his axe, a heavy hooked blade on a four foot shaft. Ulf had swung it like a willow-wand when three Christian traders in Schleswig had seen the priest and tried to free him. The memory of the last man in three pieces as head and sword arm sprang from his spouting torso was still enough to roil Johann’s stomach.

“We’ll have a clear night with a moon, priest; a good night for our business.” Ulf stretched and laughed aloud, setting a raven on a fir knot to squawking back at him. The berserker was following a ridge line that divided wooded slopes with a spine too thin-soiled to bear trees. The flanking forests still loomed above the riders. In three days, now, Johann had seen no man but his captor, nor even a tendril of smoke from a lone cabin. Even the route they were taking to Parmavale was no mantrack but an accident of nature.

“So lonely,” the priest said aloud.

Ulf hunched hugely in his bearskin and replied, “You soft folk in the south, you live too close anyway. Is it your Christ-god, do you think?”

“Hedeby’s a city,” the German priest protested, his fingers toying with his torn robe, “and my brother trades to Uppsala.… But why bring me to this manless waste?”

“Oh, there were men once, so the tale goes,” Ulf said. Here in the empty forest he was more willing for conversation than he had been the first few days of their ride north. “Few enough, and long enough ago. But there were farms in Parmavale, and a lordling of sorts who went a-viking against the Irish. But then the troll came and the men went, and there was nothing left to draw others. So they thought.”

“You Northerners believe in trolls, so my brother tells me,” said the priest.

“Aye, long before the gold I’d heard of the Parma troll,” the berserker agreed. “Ox broad and stronger than ten men, shaggy as a denned bear.”

“Like you,” Johann said, in a voice more normal than caution would have dictated.

Blood fury glared in Ulf’s eyes and he gave a savage jerk on the cord. “You’ll think me a troll, priestling, if you don’t do just as I say. I’ll drink your blood hot if you cross me.”

Johann, gagging, could not speak nor wished to.

With the miles the sky became a darker blue, the trees a blacker green. Ulf again broke the hoof-pummeled silence, saying, “No, I knew nothing of the gold until Thora told me.”

The priest coughed to clear his throat. “Thora is your wife?” he asked.

“Wife? Ho!” Ulf brayed, his raucous laughter ringing like a demon’s. “Wife? She was Hallstein’s wife, and I killed her with all her house about her! But before that, she told me of the troll’s horde, indeed she did. Would you hear that story?”

Johann nodded, his smile fixed. He was learning to recognize death as it bantered under the axehead.

“So,” the huge Northerner began. “There was a bonder, Hallstein Kari’s son, who followed the king to war but left his wife, that was Thora, behind to manage the stead. The first day I came by and took a sheep from the herdsman. I told him if he misliked it to send his master to me.”

“Why did you do that?” the fat priest asked in surprise.

“Why? Because I’m Ulf, because I wanted the sheep. A woman acting a man’s part, it’s unnatural anyway.

“The next day I went back to Hallstein’s stead, and the flocks had already been driven in. I went into the garth around the buildings and called for the master to come out and fetch me a sheep.” The berserker’s teeth ground audibly as he remembered. Johann saw his knuckles whiten on the axe helve and stiffened in terror.

“Ho!” Ulf shouted, bringing his left hand down on the shield slung at his horse’s flank. The copper boss rang like thunder in the clouds. “She came out,” Ulf grated, “and her hair was red. ‘All our sheep are penned,’ says she, ‘but you’re in good time for the butchering.’ And from out the hall came her three brothers and the men of the stead, ten in all. They were in full armor and their swords were in their hands. And they would have slain me, Ulf Otgeir’s son, me, at a woman’s word. Forced me to run from a woman!”

The berserker was snarling his words to the forest. Johann knew he watched a scene that had been played a score of times with only the trees to witness. The rage of disgrace burned in Ulf like pitch in a pine faggot, and his mind was lost to everything except the past.

“But I came back,” he continued, “in the darkness, when all feasted within the hall and drank their ale to victory. Behind the hall burned a log fire to roast a sheep. I killed the two there, and I thrust one of the logs half-burnt up under the eaves. Then at the door I waited until those within noticed the heat and Thora looked outside.

“‘Greetings, Thora,’ I said. ‘You would not give me mutton, so I must roast men tonight.’ She asked me for speech. I knew she was fey, so I listened to her. And she told me of the Parma lord and the treasure he brought back from Ireland, gold and gems. And she said it was cursed that a troll should guard it, and that I must needs have a mass priest, for the troll could not cross a Christian’s fire and I should slay him then.”

“Didn’t you spare her for that?” Johann quavered, more fearful of silence than he was of misspeaking.

“Spare her? No, nor any of her house,” Ulf thundered back. “She might better have asked the flames for mercy, as she knew. The fire was at her hair. I struck her, and never was woman better made for an axe to bite—she cleft like a waxen doll, and I threw the pieces back. Her brothers came then, but one and one and one through the doorway, and I killed each in his turn. No more came. When the roof fell, I left them with the ash for a headstone and went my way to find a mass priest—to find you, priestling.” Ulf, restored to good humor by the climax of his own tale, tweaked the lead cord again.

Johann choked onto his horse’s neck, nauseated as much by the story as by the noose. At last he said, thick-voiced, “Why do you trust her tale if she knew you would kill her with it or not?”

“She was fey,” Ulf chuckled, as if that explained everything. “Who knows what a man will do when his death is upon him? Or a woman,” he added more thoughtfully.

They rode on in growing darkness. With no breath of wind to stir them, the trees stood as dead as the rocks underfoot.

“Will you know the place?” the German asked suddenly. “Shouldn’t we camp now and go on in the morning?”

“I’ll know it,” Ulf grunted. “We’re not far now—we’re going down hill, can’t you feel?” He tossed his bare haystack of hair, silvered into a false sheen of age by the moon. He continued, “The Parma lord sacked a dozen churches, so they say, and then one more with more of gold than the twelve besides, but also the curse. And he brought it back with him to Parma, and there it rests in his barrow, the troll guarding it. That I have on Thora’s word.”

“But she hated you!”

“She was fey.”

They were into the trees, and looking to either side Johann could see hill slopes rising away from them. They were in a valley, Parma or another. Scraps of wattle and daub, the remains of a house or a garth fence, thrust up to the right. The firs that had grown through it were generations old. Johann’s stubbled tonsure crawled in the night air.

“She said there was a clearing,” the berserker muttered, more to himself than his companion. Johann’s horse stumbled. The priest clutched the cord reflexively as it tightened. When he looked up at his captor, he saw the huge Northerner fumbling at his shield’s fastenings. For the first time that evening, a breeze stirred. It stank of death.

“Others have been here before us,” said Ulf needlessly.

A row of skulls, at least a score of them, stared blank-eyed from atop stakes rammed through their spinal openings. To one, dried sinew still held the lower jaw in a ghastly rictus; the others had fallen away into the general scatter of bones whitening the ground. All of them were human or could have been. They were mixed with occasion glimmers of buttons and rust smears. The freshest of the grisly trophies was very old, perhaps decades old. Too old to explain the reek of decay.

Ulf wrapped his left fist around the twin handles of his shield. It was a heavy circle of linden wood, faced with leather. Its rim and central boss were of copper, and rivets of bronze and copper decorated the face in a serpent pattern.

“Good that the moon is full,” Ulf said, glancing at the bright orb still tangled in the fir branches. “I fight best in the moonlight. We’ll let her rise the rest of the way, I think.”

Johann was trembling. He joined his hands about his saddle horn to keep from falling off the horse. He knew Ulf might let him jerk and strangle there, even after dragging him across half the northlands. The humor of the idea might strike him. Johann’s rosary, his crucifix—everything he had brought from Germany or purchased in Schleswig save his robe—had been left behind in Hedeby when the berserker awakened him in his bed. Ulf had jerked a noose to near-lethal tautness and whispered that he needed a priest, that this one would do, but that there were others should this one prefer to feed crows. The disinterested bloodlust in Ulf’s tone had been more terrifying than the threat itself. Johann had followed in silence to the waiting horses. In despair, he wondered again if a quick death would not have been better than this lingering one that had ridden for weeks a mood away from him.

“It looks like a palisade for a house,” the priest said aloud in what he pretended was a normal voice.

“That’s right,” Ulf replied, giving his axe an exploratory heft that sent shivers of moonlight across the blade. “There was a hall here, a big one. Did it burn, do you think?” His knees sent his roan gelding forward in a shambling walk past the line of skulls. Johann followed of necessity.

“No, rotted away,” the berserker said, bending over to study the post holes.

“You said it was deserted a long time,” the priest commented. His eyes were fixed straight forward. One of the skulls was level with his waist and close enough to bite him, could it turn on its stake.

“There was time for the house to fall in, the ground is damp,” Ulf agreed. “But the stakes, then, have been replaced. Our troll keeps his front fence new, priestling.”

Johann swallowed, said nothing.

Ulf gestured briefly. “Come on, you have to get your fire ready. I want it really holy.”

“But we don’t sacrifice with fires. I don’t know how—”

“Then learn!” the berserker snarled with a vicious yank that drew blood and a gasp from the German. “I’ve seen how you Christ-shouters love to bless things. You’ll bless me a fire, that’s all. And if anything goes wrong and the troll spares you—I won’t, priestling. I’ll rive you apart if I have to come off a stake to do it!”

The horses walked slowly forward through brush and soggy rubble that had been a hall. The odor of decay grew stronger. The priest himself tried to ignore it, but his horse began to balk. The second time he was too slow with a heel to its ribs, and the cord nearly decapitated him. “Wait!” he wheezed. “Let me get down.”

Ulf looked back at him, flateyed. At last he gave a brief crow-peck nod and swung himself out of the saddle. He looped both sets of reins on a small fir. Then, while Johann dismounted clumsily, he loosed the cord from his saddle and took it in his axe hand. The men walked forward without speaking.

“There…,” Ulf breathed.

The barrow was only a black-mouthed swell in the ground, its size denied by its lack of features. Such trees as had tried to grow on it had been broken off short over a period of years. Some of the stumps had wasted into crumbling depressions, while from others the wood fibers still twisted raggedly. Only when Johann matched the trees on the other side of the tomb to those beside him did he realize the scale on which the barrow was built: its entrance tunnel would pass a man walking upright, even a man Ulf’s height.

“Lay your fire at the tunnel mouth,” the berserker said, his voice subdued. “He’ll be inside.”

“You’ll have to let me go—”

“I’ll have to nothing!” Ulf was breathing hard. “We’ll go closer, you and I, and you’ll make a fire of the dead trees from the ground. Yes.…”

The Northerner slid forward in a pace that was cat soft and never left the ground a finger’s breadth. Strewn about them as if flung idly from the barrow mouth were scraps and gobbets of animals, the source of the fetid reek that filled the clearing. As his captor paused for a moment, Johann toed one of the bits over with his sandle. It was the hide and paws of something chisel-toothed, whether rabbit or other was impossible to say in the moonlight and state of decay. The skin was in tendrils, and the skull had been opened to empty the brains. Most of the other bits seemed of the same sort, little beasts, although a rank blotch on the mound’s slope could have been a wolf hide. Whatever killed and feasted here was not fastidious.

“He stays close to hunt,” Ulf rumbled. Then he added, “The long bones by the fence; they were cracked.”

“Umm?”

“For marrow.”

Quivering, the priest began gathering broken-off trees, none of them over a few feet high. They had been twisted off near the ground, save for a few whose roots lay bare in wizened fists. The crisp scales cut Johann’s hands. He did not mind the pain. Under his breath he was praying that God would punish him, would torture him, but at least would save him free of this horrid demon that had snatched him away.

“Pile it there,” Ulf directed, his axe head nodding toward the stone lip of the barrow. The entrance was corbelled out of heavy stones, then covered over with dirt and sods. Like the beast fragments around it, the opening was dead and stinking. Biting his tongue, Johann dumped his pile of brush and scurried back.

“There’s light back down there,” he whispered.

“Fire?”

“No, look—it’s pale, it’s moonlight. There’s a hole in the roof of the tomb.”

“Light for me to kill by,” Ulf said with a stark grin. He looked over the low fireset, then knelt. His steel sparked into a nest of dry moss. When the tinder was properly alight, he touched a pitchy faggot to it. He dropped his end of the cord. The torchlight glinted from his face, white and coarse-pored where the tangles of hair and beard did not cover it. “Bless the fire, mass-priest,” the berserker ordered in a quiet, terrible voice.

Stiff-featured and unblinking, Johann crossed the brushwood and said, “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.”

“Don’t light it yet,” Ulf said. He handed Johann the torch. “It may be,” the berserker added, “that you think to run if you get the chance. There is no Hell so deep that I will not come for you from it.”

The priest nodded, white-lipped.

Ulf shrugged his shoulders to loosen his muscles and the bear hide that clothed them. Axe and shield rose and dipped like ships in a high sea.

“Ho! Troll! Barrow fouler! Corpse licker! Come and fight me, troll!”

There was no sound from the tomb.

Ulf’s eyes began to glaze. He slashed his axe twice across the empty air and shouted again, “Troll! I’ll spit on your corpse, I’ll lay with your dog mother. Come and fight me, troll, or I’ll wall you up like a rat with your filth!”

Johann stood frozen, oblivious even to the drop of pitch that sizzled on the web of his hand. The berserker bellowed again, wordlessly, gnashing at the rim of his shield so that the sound bubbled and boomed in the night.

And the tomb roared back to the challenge, a thunderous BAR BAR BAR even deeper than Ulf’s.

Berserk, the Northerner leaped the brush pile and ran down the tunnel, his axe thrust out in front of him to clear the stone arches.

The tunnel sloped for a dozen paces into a timber-vaulted chamber too broad to leap across. Moonlight spilled through a circular opening onto flags slimy with damp and liquescence. Ulf, maddened, chopped high at the light. The axe burred inanely beneath the timbers.

Swinging a pair of swords, the troll leapt at Ulf. It was the size of a bear, grizzled in the moonlight. Its eyes burned red.

“Hi!” shouted Ulf and blocked the first sword in a shower of sparks on his axehead. The second blade bit into the shield rim, shaving a hand’s length of copper and a curl of yellow linden from beneath it. Ulf thrust straight-armed, a blow that would have smashed like a battering ram had the troll not darted back. Both the combatants were shouting; their voices were dreadful in the circular chamber.

The troll jumped backward again. Ulf sprang toward him and only the song of the blades scissoring from either side warned him. The berserker threw himself down. The troll had leaped onto a rotting chest along the wall of the tomb and cut unexpectedly from above Ulf’s shield. The big man’s boots flew out from under him and he struck the floor on his back. His shield still covered his body.

The troll hurtled down splay-legged with a cry of triumph. Both bare feet slammed on Ulf’s shield. The troll was even heavier than Ulf. Shrieking, the berserker pistoned his shield arm upward. The monster flew off, smashing against the timbered ceiling and caroming down into another of the chests. The rotted wood exploded under the weight in a flash of shimmering gold. The berserker rolled to his feet and struck overarm in the same motion. His lunge carried the axehead too far, into the rock wall in a flower of blue sparks.

The troll was up. The two killers eyed each other, edging sideways in the dimness. Ulf’s right arm was numb to the shoulder. He did not realize it. The shaggy monster leaped with another double flashing and the axe moved too slowly to counter. Both edges spat chunks of linden as they withdrew. Ulf frowned, backed a step. His boot trod on a ewer that spun away from him. As he cried out, the troll grinned and hacked again like Death the Reaper. The shield-orb flattened as the top third of it split away. Ulf snarled and chopped at the troll’s knees. It leaped above the steel and cut left-handed, its blade nocking the shaft an inch from Ulf’s hand.

The berserker flung the useless remainder of his shield in the troll’s face and ran. Johann’s torch was an orange pulse in the triangular opening. Behind Ulf, a swordedge went sring! as it danced on the corbels. Ulf jumped the brush and whirled. “Now!” he cried to the priest, and Johann hurled his torch into the resin-jeweled wood.

The needles crackled up in the troll’s face like a net of orange silk. The flames bellied out at the creature’s rush but licked back caressingly over its mats of hair. The troll’s swords cut at the fire. A shower of coals spit and crackled and made the beast howl.

“Burn, dog-spew!” Ulf shouted. “Burn, fish-guts!”

The troll’s blades rang together, once and again. For a moment it stood, a hillock of stained gray, as broad as the tunnel arches. Then it strode forward into the white heart of the blaze. The fire bloomed up, its roar leaping over the troll’s shriek of agony. Ulf stepped forward. He held his axe with both hands. The flames sucked down from the motionless troll, and as they did the shimmering arc of the axehead chopped into the beast’s collarbone. One sword dropped and the left arm slumped loose.

The berserker’s axe was buried to the helve in the troll’s shoulder. The faggots were scattered, but the troll’s hair was burning all over its body. Ulf pulled at his axe. The troll staggered, moaning. Its remaining sword pointed down at the ground. Ulf yanked again at his weapon and it slurped free. A thick velvet curtain of blood followed it. Ulf raised his dripping axe for another blow, but the troll tilted toward the withdrawn weapon, leaning forward, a smouldering rock. The body hit the ground, then flopped so that it lay on its back. The right arm was flung out at an angle.

“It was a man,” Johann was whispering. He caught up a brand and held it close to the troll’s face. “Look, look!” he demanded excitedly, “It’s just an old man in bearskin. Just a man.”

Ulf sagged over his axe as if it were a stake impaling him. His frame shuddered as he dragged air into it. Neither of the troll’s swords had touched him, but reaction had left him weak as one death-wounded. “Go in,” he wheezed. “Get a torch and lead me in.”

“But … why—” the priest said in sudden fear. His eyes met the berserker’s and he swallowed back the rest of his protest. The torch threw highlights on the walls and flags as he trotted down the tunnel. Ulf’s boots were ominous behind him.

The central chamber was austerely simple and furnished only with the six chests lining the back of it. There was no corpse, nor even a slab for one. The floor was gelatinous with decades’ accumulation of foulness. The skidding tracks left by the recent combat marked paving long undisturbed. Only from the entrance to the chests was a path, black against the slime of decay, worn. It was toward the broken container and the objects which had spilled from it that the priest’s eyes arrowed.

“Gold,” he murmurred. Then, “Gold! There must—the others—in God’s name, there are five more and perhaps all of them—”

“Gold,” Ulf grated terribly.

Johann ran to the nearest chest and opened it one-handed. The lid sagged wetly, but frequent use had kept it from swelling tight to the side panels. “Look at this crucifix!” the priest marveled. “And the torque, it must weigh pounds. And Lord in heaven, this—”

“Gold,” the berserker repeated.

Johann saw the axe as it started to swing. He was turning with a chalice ornamented in enamel and pink gold. It hung in the air as he darted for safety. His scream and the dull belling of the cup as the axe divided it were simultaneous, but the priest was clear and Ulf was off balance. The berserker backhanded with force enough to drive the peen of his axehead through a sapling. His strength was too great for his footing. His feet skidded, and this time his head rang on the wall of the tomb.

Groggy, the huge berserker staggered upright. The priest was a scurrying blur against the tunnel entrance. “Priest!” Ulf shouted at the suddenly empty moonlight. He thudded up the flags of the tunnel. “Priest!” he shouted again.

The clearing was empty except for the corpse. Nearby, Ulf heard his roan whicker. He started for it, then paused. The priest—he could still be hiding in the darkness. While Ulf searched for him, he could be rifling the barrow, carrying off the gold behind his back. “Gold,” Ulf said again. No one must take his gold. No one ever must find it unguarded.

“I’ll kill you!” he screamed into the night. “I’ll kill you all!”

He turned back to his barrow. At the entrance, still smoking, waited the body of what had been the troll.

THE HUNTING GROUND

The patrol car’s tires hissed on the warm asphalt as it pulled to the curb beside Lorne. “What you up to, snake?” asked the square-bodied policeman. The car’s rumbling idle and the whirr of its air conditioner through the open window filled the evening.

Lorne smiled and nodded the lighted tip of his cigarette. “Sitting on a stump in my yard, watching cops park on the wrong side of the street. What’re you up to, Ben?”

Instead of answering, the policeman looked hard at his friend. They were both in their late twenties; the man in the car stocky and dark with a close-cropped mustache; Lorne slender, his hair sand-colored and falling across his neck brace. “Hurting, snake?” Ben asked softly.

“Shit, four years is enough to get used to anything,” the thinner man said. Though Lorne’s eyes were on the chime tower of the abandoned Baptist church a block down Rankin Street, his mind was lost in the far past. “You know, some nights I sit out here for a while instead of going to bed.”

Three cars in quick succession threw waves of light and sound against the rows of aging houses. One blinked its high beams at the patrol car briefly, blindingly. “Bastard,” Ben grumbled without real anger. “Well, back to the war against crime.” His smile quirked. “Better than the last war they had us fighting, hey?”

Lorne finished his cigarette with a long drag. “Hell, I don’t know, sarge. How many jobs give you a full pension after two years?”

“See you, snake.”

“See you, sarge.”

The big cruiser snarled as Ben pulled back into the traffic lane and turned at the first corner. The city was on a system of neighborhood police patrols, an attempt to avoid the anonymous patrolling that turned each car into a miniature search and destroy mission. The first night he sat on the stump beside his apartment, Lorne had sworn in surprise to see that the face peering from the curious patrol car was that of Ben Gresham, his squad leader during the ten months and nineteen days he had carried an M60 in War Zone C.

And that was the only past remaining to Lorne.

The back door of Jenkins’ house banged shut on its spring. A few moments later heavy boots began scratching up the gravel of the common drive. Lorne’s seat was an oak stump, three feet in diameter. Instead of trying to turn his head, he shifted his whole body around on the wood. Jenkins, a plumpish, half-bald man in his late sixties, lifted a pair of canned Budweisers. “Must get thirsty out here, warm as it is.”

“It’s always thirsty enough to drink good beer,” Lorne smiled. “I’ll share my stump with you.” They sipped for a time without speaking. Mrs Purefoy, Jenkins’ widowed sister and a matronly Baptist, kept house for him. Lorne gathered that while she did not forbid her brother to drink an occasional beer, neither did she provide an encouragingly social atmosphere.

“I’ve seen you out here at 3 AM,” the older man said. “What’ll you do when the weather turns cold?”

“Freeze my butt for a while,” Lorne answered. He gestured his beer toward his dark apartment on the second floor of a house much like Jenkins’. “Sit up there with the light on. Hell, there’s lots of VA hospitals, I’ve been in lots of them. If North Carolina isn’t warm enough, maybe they’d find me one in Florida.” He took another swallow and said, “I just sleep better in the daytime, is all. Too many ghosts around at night.”

Jenkins turned quickly to make sure of the smile on the younger man’s face. It flashed at his motion. “Not quite that sort of ghost,” Lorne explained. “The ones I bring with me.…” And he kept his smile despite the sizzle of faces in the white fire sudden in his mind. The noise of popping, boiling flesh faded and he went on, “There was something weird going on last night, though—” he glanced at his big Japanese wristwatch—“well, damn early this morning.”

“A Halloween ghost with a white sheet?” Jenkins suggested.

“Umm, no, down at the church,” said Lorne, fumbling his cigarettes out. Jenkins shrugged refusal and the dart of butane flame ignited only one. “The tower there was—I don’t know, I looked at it and it seemed to be vibrating. No sound, though, and then a big red flash without any sound either. I though sure it’d caught fire, but it was just a flash and everything was back to normal. Funny. You know how you hold your fingers over a flashlight and it comes through, kind of? Well, the flash was like that, only through a stone wall.”

“I never saw anything like that,” Jenkins agreed. “Old church doesn’t seem the worse for it, though. It’ll be ready to fall down itself before the courts get all settled about who owns it, you know.”

“Umm?”

“Fellowship Baptist built a new church half a mile north of here, more parking and anyhow, it was going to cost more to repair that old firetrap than it would to build a new one.” Jenkins grinned. “Mable hasn’t missed a Sunday in forty years, so I heard all about it. The city bought the old lot for a boys’ club or some such fool thing—I want to spit every time I think of my property taxes, I do—but it turns out the Rankins, that’s who the street’s named after too, they’d given the land way back before the Kaiser’s War. Damn if some of them weren’t still around to sue to get the lot back if it wasn’t going to be a church any more. So that was last year, and it’s like to be a few more before anybody puts money into tearing the old place down.”

“From the way it’s boarded up and padlocked, I figured it must have been a reflection I saw,” Lorne admitted. “But it looked funny enough,” he added sheepishly, “that I took a walk down there last night.”

Jenkins shrugged and stood up. He had the fisherman’s trick of dropping the pull tab into his beer before drinking any. Now it rattled in the bottom. “Well,” he said, picking up Lorne’s can as well, “it’s bed time for me, I suppose. You better get yourself off soon or the bugs’ll carry you away.”

“Thanks for the beer and the company,” Lorne said. “One of these nights I’ll bring down an ice chest and we’ll really tie one on.”

Lorne’s ears followed the old man back, his boots a friendly, even sound in the warm April darkness. A touch of breeze caught the wisteria hedge across the street and spread its sweetness, diluted, over Lorne. He ground out his cigarette and sat quietly, letting the vines breathe on him. Jenkins’ garbage can scrunched open and one of the empties echoed into it. The other did not fall. “What the hell?” Lorne wondered aloud. But there was something about the night, despite its urban innocence, that brought up memories from past years more strongly than ever before. In a little while Lorne began walking. He was still walking when dawn washed the fiery pictures from his mind and he returned to his apartment to find three police cars parked in the street.

The two other tenants stored their cars in the side yard of the apartment house. Lorne had stepped between them when he heard a woman scream, “That’s him! Don’t let him get away!”

Lorne turned. White-haired Mrs Purefoy and a pair of uniformed policemen faced him from the porch of Jenkins’ house. The younger man had his revolver half drawn. A third uniformed man, Ben, stepped quickly around from the back of the house. “I’m not going anywhere but to bed,” Lorne said, spreading his empty hands. He began walking toward the others. “Look, what’s the matter?”

The oldest, heaviest of the policemen took the porch steps in a leap and approached Lorne at a barely-restrained trot. He had major’s pips on his shoulder straps. “Where have you been, snake?” Ben asked, but the major was between them instantly, growling, “I’ll handle this, Gresham. Mr Charles Lorne?”

“Yes,” Lorne whispered. His body flashed hot, as though the fat policeman were a fire, a towering sheet of orange rippling with the speckles of tracers cooking off.…

“… and at any time during the questioning you may withdraw your consent and thereafter remain silent. Do you understand, Mr Lorne?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see Mr Jenkins tonight?”

“Uh-huh. He came out—when did you leave me, Ben? 10:30?” Lorne paused to light another cigarette. His flame wavered like the blade of a kris. “We each drank a beer, shot the bull. That’s all. What happened?”

“Where did you last see Mr Jenkins?”

Lorne gestured. “I was on the stump. He walked around the back of the house—his house. I guess I could see him. Anyway, I heard him throw the cans in the trash and … that’s all.”

“Both cans?” Ben broke in despite his commander’s scowl.

“No, you’re right—just one. And I didn’t hear the door close. It’s got a spring that slams it like a one-oh-five going off, usually. Look, what happened?”

There was a pause. Ben tugged at a corner of his mustache. Low sunlight sprayed Lorne through the trees. Standing, he looked taller than his six feet, a knobbly staff of a man in wheat jeans and a green-dyed T-shirt. The shirt had begun to disintegrate in the years since it was issued to him on the way to the war zone. The brace was baby-flesh pink. It made him look incongruously bull-necked, alien.

“He could have changed clothes,” suggested the young patrolman. He had holstered his weapon but continued to toy with the butt.

“He didn’t,” Ben snapped, the signs of his temper obvious to Lorne if not to the other policemen. “He’s wearing now what he had on when I left him.”

“We’ll take him around back,” the major suddenly decided. In convoy, Ben and the other, nervous, patrolman to either side of Lorne and the major bringing up the rear, they crossed into Jenkins’ yard following the steep downslop. Mrs Purefoy stared from the porch. Beneath her a hydrangea bush graded its blooms red on the left, blue on the right, with the carefully-tended acidity of the soil. It was a mirror for her face, ruddy toward the sun and gray with fear in shadow.

“What’s the problem?” Lorne wondered aloud as he viewed the back of the house. The trash can was open but upright, its lid lying on the smooth lawn beside it. Nearby was one of the Budweiser empties. The other lay alone on the bottom of the trash can. There was no sign of Jenkins himself.

Ben’s square hand indicated an arc of spatters six to eight feet high, black against the white siding. “They promised us a lab team but hell, it’s blood, snake. You and me’ve seen enough to recognize it. Mrs Purefoy got up at four, didn’t find her brother. I saw this when I checked and.…” He let his voice trail off.

“No body?” Lorne asked. He had lighted a fresh cigarette. The gushing flames surrounded him.

“No.”

“And Jenkins weighs what? 220?” He laughed, a sound as thin as his wrists. “You’d play hell proving a man with a broken neck ran off with him, wouldn’t you?”

“Broke? Sure, we’ll believe that!” gibed the nervous patrolman.

“You’ll believe me, meatball!” Ben snarled. “He broke it and he carried me out of a fucking burning shithook while our ammo cooked off. And by God—”

“Easy, sarge,” Lorne said quietly. “If anybody needs shooting, I’ll borrow a gun and do it myself.”

The major flashed his scowl from one man to the other. His sudden uncertainty was as obvious as the flag pin in his lapel: Lorne was now a veteran, not an aging hippy.

“I’m an outpatient at the VA hospital,” Lorne said, seeing his chance to damp the fire. “Something’s fucking up some nerves and they’re trying to do something about it there. Wish to hell they’d do it soon.”

“Gresham,” the major said, motioning Ben aside for a low-voiced exchange. The third policeman had gone red when Ben snapped at him. Now he was white, realizing his mortality for the first time in his twenty-two years.

Lorne grinned at him. “Hang loose, turtle. Neither Ben or me ever killed anybody who didn’t need it worse than you do.”

The boy began to tremble.

“Mr Lorne,” the major said, his tone judicious but not hostile, “we’ll be getting in touch with you later. And if you recall anything, anything at all that may have bearing on Mr Jenkins’ disappearance, call us at once.”

Lorne’s hands nodded agreement. Ben winked as the lab van arrived, then turned away with the others.

Lorne’s pain was less than usual, but his dreams awakened him in a sweat each time he dropped off to sleep. When at last he switched on the radio, the headline news was that three people besides Jenkins had disappeared during the night, all of them within five blocks of Lorne’s apartment.

*   *   *

The air was very close, muffling the brilliance of the stars. It was Friday night and the roar of southbound traffic sounded from Donovan Avenue a block to the east. The three northbound lanes of Jones Street, the next one west of Rankin, were not yet as clotted with cars as they would be later at night, but headlights there were a nervous darting through the houses and trees whenever Lorne turned on his stump to look. Rankin Street lay quietly between, lighted at alternate blocks by blue globes of mercury vapor. It was narrow, so that cars could not pass those parked along the curb without slowing, easing; a placid island surrounded by modern pressures.

But no one had disappeared to the east of Donovan or the west of Jones.

Lorne stubbed out his cigarette in the punky wood of the stump. It was riddled with termites and sometimes he pictured them, scrabbling through the darkness. He hated insects, hated especially the grubs and hidden things, the corpse-white termites … but he sat on the stump above them. A perversely objective part of Lorne’s mind knew that if he could have sat in the heart of a furnace like the companions of Daniel, he would have done so.

From the blocky shade of the porch next door came the creak of springs: Mrs Purefoy, shifting her weight on the cushions of the old wing-back chair. In the early evening Lorne had caught her face staring at a parlor window, her muscles flat as wax. As the deeper darkness blurred and pooled, she had slipped out into its cover. Lorne felt her burning eyes, knowing that she would never forgive him for her brother’s disappearance, not if it were proven that Jenkins had left by his own decision. Lorne had always been a sinner to her; innocence would not change that.

Another cigarette. Someone else was watching. A passing car threw Lorne’s angled shadow forward and across Jenkins’ house. Lorne’s guts clenched and his fingers crushed the unlit cigarette. Light. Twelve men in a rice paddy when the captured flare bursts above them. The pop-pop-pop of a gun far off, and the splashes columning around Lt Burnes—

“Christ!” Lorne shouted, standing with an immediacy that laced pain through his body. Something was terribly wrong in the night. The lights brought back memories, but they quenched the real threat that hid in the darkness. Lorne knew what he was feeling, knew that any instant a brown face would peer out of a spider hole behind an AK-47 or a mine would rip steel pellets down the trail.…

He stopped, forcing himself to sit down again. If it was his time, there was nothing he could do for it. A fresh cigarette fitted between his lips automatically and the needle-bright lighter focused his eyes.

And the watcher was gone.

Something had poised to kill Lorne, and had then passed on without striking. It was as unnatural as if a wall collapsing on him had separated in mid-air to leave him unharmed. Lorne’s arms were trembling, his cigarette tip an orange blur. When Ben’s cruiser pulled in beside him, Lorne was at first unable to answer the other man’s, “Hey, snake.”

“Jesus, sarge,” Lorne whispered, smoke spurting from his mouth and nostrils. “There’s somebody out here and he’s a bad fucker.”

Carrier noise blatted before the car radio rapped a series of numbers and street names. Ben knuckled his mustache until he was sure his own cruiser was not mentioned. “Yeah, he’s a bad one. Another one gone tonight, a little girl from three blocks down. Went to the store to trade six empties and a dime on a coke. Christ, I saw her two hours ago, snake. The bottles we found, the kid we didn’t.… Seen any little girls?”

There was an upright shadow in front of Ben’s radio: a riot gun, clipped to the dashboard. “Haven’t seen anything but cars, sarge. Lots of police cars.”

“They’ve got an extra ten men on,” Ben agreed with a nod. “We went over the old Baptist church a few minutes ago. Great TAC Squad work. Nothing. Damn locks were rusted shut.”

“Think the Baptists’ve taken up with baby sacrifice?” Lorne chuckled.

“Shit, there’s five bodies somewhere. If the bastard’s loading them in the back of a truck, you’d think he’d spread his pickups over a bit more of an area, wouldn’t you?”

“Look, baby, anybody who packed Jenkins around on his back—I sure don’t want to meet him.”

“Don’t guess Jenkins did either,” Ben grunted. “Or the others.”

“PD to D-5,” the radio interrupted.

Ben keyed his microphone. “Go ahead.”

“10-25 Lt Cooper at Rankin and Duke.”

“10-4, 10-76,” Ben replied, starting to return the mike to its holder.

“D-5, acknowledge,” the receiver ordered testily.

“Goddam fucker!” Ben snarled, banging the instrument down. “Sends just about half the fucking time!”

“Keep a low profile, sarge,” Lorne murmured, but even had he screamed his words would have been lost in the boom of exhaust as Ben cramped the car around in the street, the left wheels bumping over the far curb. Then the accelerator flattened and the big car shot toward the rendezvous.

In Viet Nam, Lorne had kept his death wish under control during shelling by digging in and keeping his head down. Now he stood and went inside to his room. After a time, he slept. If his dreams were bright and tortured, then they always were.…

*   *   *

“Sure, you knew Jackson,” Ben explained, the poom-poom-poom of his engine a live thing in the night. “He’s the blond shit who … didn’t believe you’d broken your neck. Yesterday morning.”

“Small loss, then,” Lorne grinned. “But you watch your own ass, hear? If there’s nobody out but cops, there’s going to be more cops than just Jackson disappearing.”

“Cops and damned fools,” Ben grumbled. “When I didn’t see you out here on my first pass, I thought maybe you’d gotten sense enough to stay inside.”

“I was going to. Decided … oh, hell. What’s the box score now?”

“Seven gone. Seven for sure,” the patrolman corrected himself. “One got grabbed in the time he took to walk from his girl’s front porch back to his car. That bastard’s lucky, but he’s crazy as hell if he thinks he’ll stay that lucky.”

“He’s crazy as hell,” Lorne agreed. A spring whispered from Jenkins’ porch and Lorne bobbed the tip of his cigarette at the noise. “She’s not doing so good either. All last night she was staring at me, and now she’s at it again.”

“Christ,” Ben muttered. “Yeah, Major Hooseman talked to her this morning. You’re about the baddest man ever, leading po’ George into smoking and drinking and late hours before you killed him.”

“Never did get him to smoke,” Lorne said, lighting Ben’s cigarette and another for himself. “Say, did Jackson smoke?”

“Huh? No.” Ben frowned, staring at the closed passenger-side windows and their reflections of his instruments. “Yeah, come to think, he did. But never in uniform, he had some sort of thing about that.”

“He sheered off last night when I lit a cigarette,” Lorne said. “No, not Jackson—the other one. I just wondered.…”

“You saw him?” Ben’s voice was suddenly sharp, the hunter scenting prey.

Lorne shook his head. “I just felt him. But he was there, baby.”

“Just like before they shot us down,” the policeman said quietly. “You squeezing my arm and shouting over the damn engines ‘They’re waiting for us, they’re waiting for us!’ And not a fucking thing I could do—I didn’t order the assault and the Captain sure wasn’t going to call it off because my machinegunner said to. But you were right, snake.”

“The flames…,” Lorne whispered, his eyes unfocused.

“And you’re a dumb bastard to have done it, but you carried me out of them. It never helped us a bit that you knew when the shit was about to hit the fan. But you’re a damn good man to have along when it does.”

Lorne’s muscles trembled with memory. Then he stood and laughed into the night. “You know, sarge, in twenty-seven years I’ve only found one job I was any good at. I didn’t much like that one, and anyhow—the world doesn’t seem to need killers.”

“They’ll always need us, snake,” Ben said quietly. “Some times they won’t admit it.” Then, “Well, I think I’ll waste some more gas.”

“Sarge—” The word hung in the empty darkness. There was engine noise and the tires hissing in the near distance and—nothing else. “Sarge, Mrs Purefoy was on her porch a minute ago and she didn’t go inside. But she’s not there now.”

Ben’s five-cell flashlight slid its narrow beam across the porch: the glider, the wing-back chair. On the far railing, a row of potted violets with a gap for the one now spilled on the boards as if by someone vaulting the rail but dragging one heel.…

“Didn’t hear it fall,” the policeman muttered, clacking open the car door. The dome light spilled a startling yellow pool across the two men. As it did so, white motion trembled half a block down Rankin Street.

“Fucker!” Ben said. “He couldn’t jump across the street, he threw something so it flashed.” Ben was back in the car.

Lorne squinted, furious at being blinded at the critical instant. “Sarge, I’ll swear to God he headed for the church.” Lorne strode stiffly around the front of the vehicle and got in on the passenger side.

“Mother-fuck!” the stocky policeman snarled, dropping the microphone that had three times failed to get him a response. He reached for the shift lever, looked suddenly at Lorne as the slender man unclipped the shotgun. “Where d’ye think you’re going?”

“With you.”

Ben slipped the transmission into Drive and hung a shrieking U-turn in the empty street. “The first one’s birdshot, the next four are double-ought buck,” he said flatly.

Lorne jacked the slide twice, chambering the first round and them shucking it out the ejector. It gleamed palely in the instrument light. “Don’t think we’re going after birds,” he explained.

Ben twisted across the street and bounced over the driveway cut. The car slammed to a halt in the small lot behind and shielded by the bulk of the old church. It was a high, narrow building with two levels of boarded windows the length of the east and west sides; the square tower stood at the south end. At some time after its construction, the church had been faced with artificial stone. It was dingy, a gray mass in the night with a darkness about it that the night alone did not explain.

Ben slid out of the car. His flash touched the small door to the right of the tower. “Nothing wrong with the padlock,” Lorne said. It was a formidable one, set in a patinaed hasp to close the church against vandals and derelicts.

“They were all locked tight yesterday, too,” the patrolman said. “He could still be getting in one of those windows. We’ll see.” He turned to the trunk of the car and opened it, holding his flashlight in the crook of his arm so his right hand could be free for his drawn revolver.

Lorne’s quick eyes scanned the wall above them. He bent back at the waist instead of tilting his head alone. “Got the key?” he asked.

The stocky man chuckled, raising a pair of folding shovels, army surplus entrenching tools. “Keep that corn-sheller ready,” he directed, holstering his own weapon. He locked the blade of one shovel at 90° to the shaft and set it on top of the padlock. The other, still folded, cracked loudly against the head of the first and popped the lock open neatly. “Field expedients, snake,” Ben laughed. “If we don’t find anything, we can just shut the place up again and nobody’ll know the difference.”

He tossed the shovels aside and swung open the door. The air that puffed out had the expected mustiness of a long-closed structure with a sweetish overtone that neither man could have identified. Lorne glanced around the outside once more, then followed the patrolman within. The flames in his mind were very close.

“Looks about like it did last night,” Ben said.

“And last year, I’d guess.” The wavering oval of the flashlight picked over the floor. The hardwood was warping, pocked at frequent intervals by holes.

“They unbolted the old pews when they moved,” Ben explained. “Took the stained glass too, since the place was going to be torn down.”

The nave was a single narrow room running from the chancel in the north to the tower which had held the organ pipes and, above, the chimes. The main entrance was by a side aisle, through double doors in the middle of the west wall. The interior looked a gutted ruin.

“You checked the whole building?” Lorne asked. The pulpit had been ripped away. The chancel rail remained though half-splintered, apparently to pass the organ and altar. Fragments of wood, crumpled boxes, and glass littered the big room.

“The main part. We didn’t have the key to the tower and the major didn’t want to bust in.” Ben took another step into the nave and kicked at a stack of old bulletins.

White heat, white fire—“Ben, did you check the ceiling when you were here last night?”

“Huh?” The narrow Gothic vault was blackness forty feet above the ground. Ben’s flashlight knifed upward across painted plaster to the ribbed and paneled ceiling that sloped to the main beam. And—“Jesus!”

A large cocoon was tight against the roof peak. It shimmered palely azure, but the powerful light thrust through to the human outline within. Long shadows quivered on the wood, magnifying the trembling of the policeman’s wrist as the beam moved from the cocoon to another beside it, to the third—

“Seven of the fuckers!” Ben cried, taking another step and slashing the light to the near end of the room where the south wall closed the inverted V of the ceiling. Above the door to the tower was the baize screen of the pipe loft. The cloth fluttered behind Mrs Purefoy, who stood stiffly upright twenty feet in the air. Her face was locked in horror, framed by her tousled white hair. Both arms were slightly extended but were stone-rigid within the lace-fringed sleeves of her dress.

“She—” Lorne began, but as he spoke and Ben’s hand fell to the butt of his revolver, Mrs Purefoy began to fall, tilting a little in a rustle of skirts. Beneath the crumpled edge of the baize curtain, spiked on the beam of Ben’s flashlight, gleamed the head and foreclaws of what had been clutching the woman.

The eyes glared like six-inch opals, fierce and hot in a dead white exoskeleton. The foreclaws clicked sideways. As though they had cocked a spring, the whole flat torso shot down at Ben.

An inch long and scuttling under a rock it might have passed for a scorpion, but this lunging monster was six feet long without counting the length of the tail arced back across its body. Flashing legs, flashing body armor, and the fluid-jeweled sting that winked as Lorne’s finger twitched in its killer’s reflex—

Lorne’s body screamed at the recoil of the heavy charge. The creature spun as if kicked in mid-air, smashing into the floor a yard from Ben instead of on top of the policeman. The revolver blasted, a huge yellow bottle-shape flaring from the muzzle. The bullet ripped away a window shutter because a six-inch pincer had locked Ben’s wrist. The creature reared onto the back two pairs of its eight jointed legs. Lorne stepped sideways for a clear shot, the slide of his weapon slick-snacking another round into the chamber. On the creature’s white belly was a smeared, multi-brancate star—the load of buckshot had ricochetted off, leaving a trail like wax on glass.

Ben clubbed his flashlight. It cracked harmlessly between the glowing eyes and sprang from his hand. The other claw flashed to Ben’s face and trapped it, not crushingly but hard enough to immobilize and start blood-trails down both cheeks. The blades of the pincer ran from nose to hairline on each side.

Lorne thrust his shotgun over Ben’s right shoulder and fired point blank. The creature rocked back, jerking a scream from the policeman as the claws tightened. The lead struck the huge left eye and splashed away, dulling the opal shine. The flashlight still glaring from the floor behind the creature silhouetted its sectioned tail as it arched above the policeman’s head. The armed tip plunged into the base of his neck. Ben stiffened.

Lorne shouted and emptied his shotgun. The second dense red bloom caught like a strobe light the dotted line of blood droplets joining Ben’s neck to the withdrawn injector. A claw seized Lorne’s waist in the rolling echo of the shotgun blasts. His gunbutt cracked on the creature’s armor, steel sparking as it slid off. The extending pincer brushed the shotgun aside and clamped over Lorne’s face, half-shielding from him the sight of the rising sting.

Then it smashed on Lorne’s neck brace, and darkness exploded over him in a flare of coruscant pain.

*   *   *

The oozing ruin of Mrs Purefoy’s face stared at Lorne through its remaining eye when he awoke. Everything swam in blue darkness except for one bright blur. He blinked and the blur suddenly resolved into a streetlight glaring up through a shattered board. Lorne’s lungs burned and his stiffness seemed more than even unconsciousness and the pain skidding through his nerve paths could explain. He moved his arm and something clung to its surface; the world quivered.

Lorne was hanging from the roof of the church in a thin, transparent sheath. Mrs Purefoy was a yard away, multiple wrappings shrouding her corpse more completely. With a strength not far from panic, Lorne forced his right fist into the bubble around him. The material, extruded in broad swathes by the creature rather than as a loom of threads, sagged but did not tear. The clear azure turned milky under stress and sucked in around Lorne’s wrist.

He withdrew his hand. The membrane passed some oxygen but not enough for an active man. Lorne’s hands patted the outside of his pockets finding, as he had expected, nothing with a sharp edge. He had not recently bitten off his thumbnails. Thrusting against the fire in his chest, he brought his left hand in front of his body. With a fold of the cocoon between each thumb and index finger, he thrust his hands apart. A rip started in the white opacity beneath his right thumb. Air, clean and cool, jetted in.

“Oh, Jesus,” Lorne muttered, even the pain in his body forgotten as he widened the tear upwards to his face. The cocoon was bobbing on a short lead, rotating as the rip changed its balance. Lorne could see that he had become ninth in the line of hanging bodies, saved from their paralysis by the chance of his neck brace. Ben, his face blurred by the membrane holding him next to Lorne, had been less fortunate.

Ten yards from where Lorne hung and twenty feet below the roof beam, the baize curtain of the pipe loft twitched. Lorne froze in fearful immobility.

The creature had been able to leap the width of a street carrying the weight of an adult; its strength must be as awesome as was the rigidity of its armor. Whether or not it could drive its sting through Lorne’s brace, it could assuredly rip him to collops if it realized he was awake.

The curtain moved again, the narrow ivory tip of a pincer lifting it slightly. The creature was watching Lorne.

Ben carried three armor-piercing rounds in his .357 Magnum for punching through car doors. Lorne tried to remember whether the revolver had remained in Ben’s hand as he fell. There was no image of that in Lorne’s mind, only the torchlike muzzle blasts of his own shotgun. Slim as it was, his only hope was that the jacketed bullets would penetrate the creature’s exoskeleton though the soft buckshot had not.

Lorne twisted his upper torso out of the hole for a closer look at Ben, making his own cocoon rock angrily. The baize lifted further. The street light lay across it in a pale band. Why didn’t the creature scuttle out to finish the business?

Brief motion waked a flash of scintillant color from the pipe loft. The curtain flapped closed as if a volley of shots had ripped through it. Lorne recognized the reflex: the panic of a spider when a stick thrusts through its web. Not an object, though; the light itself, weak as it was, had slapped the creature back. Ben’s bright flashlight had not stopped it when necessity drove, but the monster must have felt pain at human levels of illumination. Its eyes were adapted to starlight or the glow of a sun immeasurably fainter than that of Earth. “Where did you come from, you bastard?” Lorne whispered.

Light. It gave him an idea and he fumbled out his butane lighter, adjusting it to a maximum flame. The sheathes were relatively thin over the victims’ faces to aid transpiration. At the waist, though, where a bulge showed Ben’s arm locked to his torso, the membrane was thick enough to be opaque in the dim light. Lorne bent dangerously over, cursing the stiffness of his neck brace. Holding the inch-high jet close, he tried to peer through Ben’s cocoon. Unexpectedly the fabric gave a little and Lorne bobbed forward, bringing the flame in contact with the material sheathing Ben.

The membrane sputtered, kissing Lorne’s hand painfully. He jerked back and the lighter flicked away. It dropped, cold and silent until it cracked on the floor forty feet below. Despite the pattern of light over it, the curtain to the loft was shifting again. Lorne cursed in terror.

A line of green fire sizzled up the side of Ben’s cocoon from the point at which the flame had touched it. The material across his face flared. The policeman gave no sign of feeling his skin curl away. The revolver in his hand winked green.

Lorne screamed. His own flexible prison lurched and sagged like heated polyethylene. Ben was wrapped in a cancerous hell that roared and heaved against the roofbeams as a live thing. Green tongues licked yellow-orange flames from the dry wood as well. Lorne’s cocoon and that to the other side of Ben were deforming in the furnace heat. Another lurch and Lorne had slipped twenty feet, still gripped around the waist in a sack of blue membrane. He was gyrating like a top. The loft curtain had twitched higher each time it spun past his vision.

The bottom of Ben’s cocoon burned away and he plunged past Lorne, face upward and still afire. Bone crunched as he hit. The body rebounded a few inches to fall again on its face. The roar of the flames muffled Lorne’s wail of rage. His own elongated capsule began to flow. Flames grasped at Lorne’s support. Before they could touch the sheathing, the membrane pulled a last few inches and snapped like an overstretched rubber band. The impact of the floor smashed Lorne’s jaw against his neck brace, grinding each tortured vertebra against the next. He did not lose consciousness, but the shock paralyzed him momentarily as thoroughly as the creature’s sting could have done.

Bathed in green light and the orange of the blazing roof panels, the scorpion-thing thrust its thorax into the nave. It walking legs gripped the flat surface, dimpling the plaster. The creature turned upward toward the fire, three more cocoons alight and their hungry flames lapping across the beams. Then, parti-colored by the illumination, its legs shifted and the opal eyes trained on Lorne. The light must be torture to it, muffling in indecision its responses, but it was about to act.

A small form wrapped in a flaming shroud dropped to thump the floor beside Lorne. His arms would move again. He used them to strip the remaining sheathing from his legs. It clung as the heat of the burning corpse began to melt the material. Something writhed from a crackling tumor on the child’s neck. The thing was finger-long and seemed to paw the air with a score of tiny legs; its opalescent eyes proved its parentage. The creature brought more than paralysis to its victims: it was a gravid female.

Green flame touched the larva. It burst in a pustulent smear.

The adult went mad. Its legs shot it almost the length of the nave to rebound from a sidewall in a cloud of plaster. The creature’s horizontally-flattened tail ruddered it instinctively short of the fire as it leapt upward to the roof peak. It clung there in pale horror against the wood, eyes on the advancing flames. Three more bodies fell, splashing like ginko fruits.

Lorne staggered upright. The fire hammered down at him without bringing pain. His body had no feeling whatever. Ben’s hair had burned. His neck and scalp were black where skin remained, red where it had cracked open to the muscle beneath. The marbled background showed clearly the tiny, pallid hatchling trying to twist across it.

Lorne’s toe brushed the larva onto the floor. His boot heel struck it, struck again and twisted. Purulent ichor spurted between the leather and the boards. Lorne knelt. In one motion he swung Ben across his shoulders and stood, just as he had after their helicopter had nosed into the trees and exploded. Logic had been burned out of Lorne’s mind, leaving only a memory of friendship. He did not look up. As his mechanical steps took him and his burden through the door they had entered, a shadow wavered across them. The creature had sprung back into the loft.

Lorne stumbled to his knees in the parking lot. The church had been rotten and dry. Orange flames fluffed through the roof in several places, thrusting corkscrews of sparks into the night sky. Twelve feet of roof slates thundered into the nave. Flame spewed up like a secondary explosion. There were sirens in the night.

Without warning, the east facade of the tower collapsed into the parking lot. Head-sized chunks of Tennessee-stone smashed at the patrol car, one of them missing Lorne by inches. He looked up, blank-eyed, his hands lightly touching the corpse of his friend. Of its own volition, the right hand traced down Ben’s shoulder to the raw flesh of his elbow. The tower stairs spiraled out of the dust and rubble, laid bare to the steel framework when the wall fell. On the sagging floor of the pipe loft rested a machine like no other thing on Earth, and the creature was inside it. Tubes of silvery metal rose cradleform from a base of similar metal. The interstices were not filled with anything material, but the atmosphere seemed to shiver, blurring the creature’s outline.

And Lorne’s hand was unwrapping Ben’s stiff fingers from the grips of his revolver.

Lorne stood again, his left hand locking his right on the butt of the big magnum. He was familiar with the weapon: it was the one Ben had carried in Nam, the same tool he had used for five of his thirteen kills. It would kill again tonight.

Even in the soaring holocaust the sharp crack of Lorne’s shot was audible. Lorne’s forearms rocked up as a unit with the recoiling handgun. The creature lurched sideways to touch the shimmering construct around it. A red surface discharge rippled across the exoskeleton from the point of contact. Lorne fired again. He could see the armor dull at his point of aim in the center of the thorax. Again the creature jumped. Neither bullet had penetrated, but the splashing lead of the second cut an upright from the machine. The creature spun, extending previously-unglimpsed tendrils from the region of its mouth parts. They flickered over a control plate in the base. Machinery chimed in response.

The shivering quickened. The machine itself and the thing it enclosed seemed to fade. Lorne thumb-cocked the magnum, lowered the red vertical of the front sight until it was even with the rear notch; the creature was a white blur beyond them. The gun bucked back hard when he squeezed; the muzzle blast was sharper, flatter, than before. The first of the armor-piercing bullets hit the creature between the paired tendrils. The exoskeleton surrounding them shattered like safety glass struck by a brick.

The creature straightened in silent agony, rising onto its hind legs with its tail lying rigidly against its back. Its ovipositor was fully extended, thumb-thick and six inches long.

“Was it fun to kill them, bug?” Lorne screamed. “Was it as much fun as this is?” His fourth shot slammed, dimpling a belly plate which then burst outward in an ugly gush of fluids. The creature’s members clamped tightly about its spasming thorax. The tail lashed the uprights in red spurts. The machine was fading and the torn panelling of the loft was beginning to show through the dying creature’s body.

There was one shot left in the cylinder and Lorne steadied his sights on the control plate. He had already begun taking up the last pressure when he stopped and lowered the muzzle. No, let it go home, whatever place or time that might be. Let its fellows see that Earth was not their hunting ground alone. And if they came back anyway—if they only would!

There was a flash as penetrating as the first microsecond of a nuclear blast. The implosion dragged Lorne off his feet and sucked in the flames so suddenly that all sound seemed frozen. Then both sidewalls collapsed into the nave and the ruins of the tower twisted down on top of them. In the last instant, the pipe loft was empty of all but memory.

A fire truck picked its way through the rubble in the parking lot. Its headlights flooded across the figure of a sandy-haired man wearing scorched clothing and a neck brace. He was kneeling beside a body, and the tears were bright on his face.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Drake (born 1945) sold his first story (a fantasy) at age 20. His undergraduate majors at the University of Iowa were history (with honors) and Latin (BA, 1967). He uses his training in both subjects extensively in his fiction. David entered Duke Law School in 1967 and graduated five years later (JD, 1972). The delay was caused by his being drafted into the US Army. He served in 1970 as an enlisted interrogator with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse, in Viet Nam and Cambodia. He has used his legal and particularly his military experiences extensively in his fiction also. David practiced law for eight years; drove a city bus for one year; and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1981, writing such novels as Out of the Waters and Monsters of the Earth. He reads and travels extensively. You can sign up for email updates here.

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Introduction

Men Like Us

Something Had to be Done

The Automatic Rifleman

Than Curse the Darkness

Firefight

The Red Leer

The Shortest Way

Best of Luck

Dragons’ Teeth

Out of Africa

The Dancer in the Flames

Smokie Joe

Children of the Forest

Blood Debt

The Barrow Troll

The Hunting Ground

About the Author

Copyright

FROM THE HEART OF DARKNESS

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Introduction copyright © by Karl Edward Wagner

Other contents copyright © 1983 by David Drake

All rights reserved.

A TOR Book

Published by:

Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

8-10 West 36th Street

New York, New York 10018

Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, ext. 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

ISBN: 812-53-607-X

CAN. ED. 812-53-608-8
eISBN 9780765387080

First eBook edition: July 2015

* AUTHOR’S NOTE: The present story was written in full awareness of Fritz Leiber’s 1940 classic, “The Automatic Pistol”, which I recommend to anyone who is not already familiar with it. DAD