A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  My subconscious mind added the clues my conscious mind had overlooked.

  I awakened understanding the Harish.

  “His name is a joke,” Fetch had said.

  It wasn’t a funny one. It was pure arrogance.

  One of the arch-villians of the Great Eastern Wars had been a sorcerer named Ko Feng. He had commanded the legions of the Dread Empire briefly. But his fellow wizards on the Council of Tervola had ousted him because of his unsubtle, straightforward, expensive, pounding military tactics. For reasons no one understood he had been ordered into exile.

  His nickname, on both sides of the battle line, had been The Hammer.

  Aboud had told me he was my enemy . . .

  The savages bothered us no more. Lord Hammer’s sorcery had sufficed.

  Only a dozen men were fit to travel. Chenyth and I were the only surviving Kaveliners . . .

  Kavelin had borne the brunt of the Great Eastern Wars. The legions of the Dread Empire knew no mercy. The nation might never recover . . .

  I was sitting on a rock, fighting my conscience. Chenyth came to me. “Want something to eat?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kill-dagger. Aboud’s.” I had been staring at it, and had hidden it at his approach. I showed him.

  What’s the matter, Will?”

  “I think I know who he is. What he’s doing. Why.”

  “Who?”

  “Lord Hammer.”

  “I meant, who is he?”

  “Lord Ko Feng. The Tervola. The one we called The Hammer during the wars. They banished him from Shinsan after it was over. They took his immortality and drove him into exile. He came for the dragon’s blood to win the immortality back. To get the time he needed to make his return.”

  “Oh, Gods. Will, we’ve got to do something.”

  “What? What’s the right thing? I don’t know that he’s really Ko Feng. I do know that we’ve taken his gold. He’s treated us honorably. He even saved my life when there was no demand that he do so. I know that Fetch thinks the world of him, and I think well enough of Fetch for that to matter. So. You see what’s eating me.”

  My life wasn’t usually that complicated. A soldier takes his orders, does what he must, and doesn’t much worry about tomorrow or vast issues. He takes from life what he can when he can, for there may be no future opportunity. He seldom moralizes, or becomes caught in a crisis of conscience.

  “Will, we can’t turn an evil like Ko Feng loose on the world again. Not if it’s in our power to stop it.”

  “Chenyth. Chenyth. Who said he was evil? His real sin is that he was the enemy. Some of our own were as violent and bloody.”

  I glanced toward the split in the mountain. The giant black stallion stood within a yard of where Lord Hammer had posted him yesterday. Hammer slept on the ground beneath the animal.

  Easy pickings, I thought. Walk over, slip the dagger in him, and have done.

  If the horse would let me. He was a factor I couldn’t fathom. But somehow I knew he would block me.

  My own well-being wasn’t a matter of concern. Like the Harish, it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about whether or not I got out alive.

  I saw no way any of us could get home without Lord Hammer’s protection.

  Fetch dragged herself to a sitting position.

  “Come with me,” I told Chenyth.

  We went to her. She greeted us with a weak smile. “I wasn’t good for much down there, was I?”

  “How you feeling?” I asked.

  “Better.”

  “Good. I’d hate to think I lugged you all the way up here for nothing.”

  “It was you?”

  “Lord Hammer carried the Scuttarian.”

  “The others?”

  “Still down there, love.”

  “It was bad?”

  “Worse than anybody expected. Except the dragon.”

  “You got the blood?”

  “We did. Was it worth it?”

  She glanced at me sharply. “You knew there would be risks. You were paid to take them.”

  “I know. I wonder if that’s enough.”

  “What?”

  “I know who Lord Hammer is, Fetch. The Harish knew all along. It’s why they came. I killed two of them. Lord Hammer slew two. Foud killed Sigurd. That’s five of the company gone fighting one another. I want to know what reason there might be for me not to make it six and have the world rid of an old evil.”

  Fetch wasn’t herself. Healthy she would have screeched and argued like a whole flock of hens at feeding time. Instead she just glanced at Lord Hammer and shrugged. “I’m too tired and sick to care much, Will. But don’t. It won’t change the past. It won’t change the future, either. He’s chasing a dead dream. And it won’t do you any good now.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “I hated him for a while, too. I lost people in the wars.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. He lost people, too, you know. Friends and relatives. All the pain and dying weren’t on our side. And he lost everything he had, except his knowledge.”

  “Oh.” I saw what she was trying to say. Lord Hammer was no different than the rest of us leftovers, going on being what he had learned to be.

  “Is there anything to eat?”

  “Chenyth. See if you can get her something. Fetch, I know all the arguments. I’ve been wrestling them all morning. And I can’t make up my mind. I was hoping you’d help me figure where I’ve got to stand.”

  “Don’t put it on me, Willem Potter. It’s a thing between you and Lord Hammer.”

  Chenyth brought soup that was mostly mule. He spooned it into Fetch’s mouth. She ate it like it was good.

  I decided, but on the basis of none of the arguments that had gone before.

  I had promised myself that I would take my little brother home to his mother. To do that I needed Lord Hammer’s protection.

  I often wonder, now, if many of the most fateful decisions aren’t made in response to similarly oblique considerations.

  XIII

  I need not have put myself through the misery. The Fates had their own plans.

  When Lord Hammer woke, I went to him. He was weak. He barely had the strength to sit up. I squatted on my hams, facing him, intimidated by the stallion’s baleful stare. Carefully, I drew the Harish kill-dagger from within my shirt. I offered it to him atop my open palms.

  The earth shook. There was a suggestion of gargantuan mirth in it.

  “The Dragon mocks us.” Lord Hammer took the dagger. “Thank you, Willem Potter. I’d say there are no debts between us now.”

  “There are, Lord. Old ones. I lost a father and several brothers in the wars.”

  “And I lost sons and friends. Will we fight old battles here in the cupped hands of doom? Will we cross swords even as the filed teeth of Fate rip at us? I lost my homeland, and more than any non-Tervola could comprehend. I have nothing left but hope, and that too wan to credit. The Dragon laughs with cause, Willem Potter. Summon Bellweather. A journey looms before us.”

  “As you say, Lord.”

  I think we left too soon, with too many wounded. Some survived the forest. Some survived the plains. Some survived the snows and precipices of the Dragon’s Teeth. But we left men’s bones beside the way. Only eight of us lived to see the plains of Shara, west of the mountains, and even then we were a long way from home.

  It was in Shara that Lord Hammer’s saga ended.

  We were riding ponies he had bought from a Sharan tribe. Our faces were south, bent into a spring rain.

  Lord Hammer’s big stallion stumbled.

  The sorcerer fell.

  He had been weakening steadily. Fetch claimed only his will was driving him toward the laboratories where he would make use of the dragon’s blood . . .

  He lay in the mud and grass of a foreign land, dying, and there was nothing any of us could do. The Harish dagger still gnawed at his soul.


  Immortality rested in his saddlebags, in that black jar, and we couldn’t do a thing. We didn’t know how. Even Fetch was ignorant of the secret.

  He was a strong man, Lord Hammer, but in the end no different than any other. He died, and we buried him in alien soil. The once mightiest man on earth had come to no more than the least of the soldiers who had followed him in his prime.

  I was sad. It’s painful to watch something magnificent and mighty brought low, even when you loath what it stands for.

  He went holding Fetch’s hand.

  She removed the iron mask before we put him into the earth. “He should wear his own.” She obtained a Tervola mask from his gear. It was golden and hideous, and at one time had terrorized half a world. I’m not sure what it represented. An animal head of some sort. Its eyes were rubies that glowed like the eyes of Lord Hammer’s stallion. But their inner light was fading.

  A very old man lay behind the iron mask. The last of his mystique perished when I finally saw his wizened face.

  And yet I did him honor as we replaced the soil above him.

  I had taken his gold. He had been my captain.

  “You can come with us, Fetch,” Chenyth said. And I agreed. There would be a place for her with the Potters.

  Chenyth kept the iron mask. It hangs in my mother’s house even now. Nobody believes him when he tells the story of Lord Hammer and the Kammengarn Dragon. They prefer Rainheart’s heroics.

  No matter. The world goes on whether geared by truth or fiction.

  The last shovelful of earth fell on Lord Hammer’s resting place. And Chenyth, as always, had a question. “Will, what happened to his horse?”

  The great fire-eyed stallion had vanished.

  Even Fetch didn’t know the answer to that one.

  1982

  THE TICK TOCK THIEF

  Nick Mancuso

  The tick took thief carpet-stepped through the shut eye dark. He heard ahead of himself as far as he could. The pump and pullers of his very legs fist-tightened thick as sponges swelled with blood. And he was very wary all around.

  At ankle height in the dark ahead, the electric rods ran trying to trip him up. Stony staring Cyclopes’ eyes to eye streamed the beamed traps. But the thief passed over.

  The pulleys and levers of his skill made sure the sure steps were without boom, and the room quite grave like; quiet, with the presence of a deserted library. Science-Tech (concrete) Building muffled the sound around by him, and on he toed.

  Noise was the occupational hazard of the time thief for it was useless and could not be fenced. Years since back cat alley childhood had he crept, stealing time; . . . the freeze box resurrection coffins (time evaded) . . . longevity drugs and philtres (time fooled) . . . endless plastic parts of men (time synthesized) . . . all stored in his whenhouse, buried there. But now, August 8th 2089, if you want to pin the stream, he was stealing toward the one . . . The Time Distorter, the fun house mirror of the moments passing. Here, in the rapidly eroding concrete building, he crept to the stream-stopper, the dammer of time, the Distorter. And mind tightened to loosen body’s step, to soften sole to floor.

  The doorknob flamed, and the acetylene fire froze into a knob-shape. Then, with quick, clipped speed, it fell!

  . . . But onto leathers stuffed with finger flesh. No sound.

  Into the final room he soundless stepped. “How will I explain to Emi Jane?” the thought floated past. Past the final barrier he passed, past the past. The room was wall-less, sight less, light-less; all close and suffocating dark save for the single spotlit pedestal on which the Time Distorter sat, unmoving, while everything—everything else—moved in the watchwork river around it.

  His mind clicked “forever” as he reached for the machine he had wanted for so long. But as he handed towards it, the room was boom exploded and the noise was all over, drowning the already flooded sense centers of his brain. His alarm at the alarm panicked his spine and fumbled with the machine as though he were a rag doll caught in shaking dog jaws. How he switched the switch on as he ran was never clear. But he ran as fast as his fear could carry him towards the escaping door.

  Shiny buttons sparkled as he spoke for he was a brass buttoned copper. “We couldn’t have caught,” he said again, “couldn’t have caught him, Lieutenant, but he had not moved.”

  “What do you mean?” The cigar bounced out the words like a band leader’s baton, but the Lieutenant’s eyes moved counter-time. More facts he asked, “I just arrived . . . He had the Distorter with him, right? Is it damaged?”

  “He had the Distorter undamaged. But strange the thing that my man, Homer, walked into the darkness first and there the time thief was running for the door with the Distorter in arm. Homer took the Distorter from him then the other men grabbed him and he’s downstairs in the wagon now.”

  “You mean to say, that he was there . . .” finger pointing to pedestal once again, Distorter setting, “and he had not moved all that time it took for you to get down here?”

  “Oh, maybe an inch or two,” the copper said, and sparkled.

  GREEN-EYED LADY, LAUGHING LADY

  Alison Tellure

  Every relationship between two sentient beings is unique. But some are (may my English teachers forgive me) more unique than others . . .

  “. . . thus Yd wills, thus Yd commands, thus let it be.”

  The hymn ended. Young Green-Eyed She, Wink to her friends, slowly let her long-held violet note fade. No priestess or soloist, the merest novice, she nonetheless took pride in her ability to emit the precise frequency of God in the holy refrain, and to maintain it with never a waver; she found a satisfaction in the skill with which she disappeared into the anonymity of the chorus. Red-Footed He was not the only friend who tuned from her spectrum, when Choirmaster wasn’t looking.

  A sparkling and twinkling erupted in the night, from the shadowed lawn below the City of God—the populace praising the singers, and adding their devout “amens.” Wink’s eyestalks stretched yearningly toward the Holy Water, peering out over that place, barely discernible in the gathering dusk, where bulked what might have been a small island. But if God had seen the hymn, Yd gave no sign.

  Choirmaster dimmed until he radiated only in the infrared, but for a dull, gray-yellow pulse that rippled across his abdomen: a disappointed sigh. He quickly blanked it, and blinked a curt dismissal at his young protégés.

  Matins over, they scattered to begin the long night’s activities, claws clattering over limestone, blipping and glimmering idle chatter. Wink found Red at her shoulder.

  “Have you seen the latest rumor?” His eyestalks extended suggestively.

  “No, nor do I wish to, lazy hatchling,” she replied virtuously, in disapproving blues and grays. “Have you nothing better to do than to spy upon peripheral reflections?”—That is, unreliable communications.

  “Not a thing!” Red twinkled cheerfully, his habitual good humor unruffled. “Watch: there’s to be a shake-up in the Servants’ Corps.”

  She flashed him a disgusted greenish-yellow smudge.

  “Feh? . . . Always there are such rumors! Your brain must be even smaller than I have always suspected it to be. The rumors grow to brilliance, the novices waste their time jostling one another when they could be studying, and then the rumor fades away into the sensible darkness of nightly life, leaving only frustrations and broken friendships for its beacon. And why any novice ever expects the theoretical vacancies to be filled from our ranks, rather than from the Fishers, whom God knows have earned it, is beyond me.”

  “Well, naturally everyone dreams of avoiding the hazards of Fishing, and wants to skip right up to Servant status. Hope springs eternal in the mortal thorax, however irrational,” he admitted in a sheepish sine wave down his middle. “Still, I saw this from a good authority: Sweetscales saw it direct from The Gimp, who happened to glimpse two Elders talking about it.”

  “Dim your nonsense, naming people!” she sparked tightly. “An Elder may be watching us
even now!”

  He reduced his intensity but slightly, an indifferent concession. “So? Let him, her, or Yd watch. Want to see something else?”

  “No.”

  “Gimp also says—” he began.

  She rolled her eyes—a complex gesture, with eyestalks—then shrugged her carapace and laughed, staccato orange and silver rays fountaining outward from her braincase to disappear around behind her.

  “Oh well! I can perceive that you won’t be happy until you’ve shown me everything you know about anything, so go on; I have a few moments.”

  He snapped an impudent claw beneath her jaws, but returned to his gossip with relish. “The Gimp says that this time they really are going to throw out some Servants, maybe as many as seven or eight. And there really is a possibility that they won’t replace them with Fishers, at least not all of them. Yd says that God’s long absence from our songs and ceremonies has so alarmed the priests and Elders that they are beginning to wonder whether the current Servants have offended Ydjn some way, or even whether perhaps the entire system needs a change. There were hints of an experiment. And look, everyone knows that something happens to the Fishers, out there in the wilderness. Only some of them are elevated by the experience, or unchanged. Many return . . . altered, unfit to resume life in the City of God, unfit for anything but Fishing, in fact. So why couldn’t that rumored experiment be that the Elders intend to try putting novices in as Servants?”

  “Your path of logic crosses deep chasms of wishful thinking, Red,” she chuckled. “As for me, I look forward to my tour of duty as a Fisher.”

  “Yah, even if it makes you a savage?” he challenged, fringing affectionate magenta spiral patterns with jeering yellow filaments.

  “What could be more devout and blessed than to spend one’s life feeding God?” Wink rejoined, in pious purples and greens.

  “To spend it serving Yd in comfort, right here in the City of God!”