Brother Assassin

by Fred Saberhagen

  With his arms still bound behind his back, men ahead and behind holding on to him, Matt was led across the single-file ridge, then made to scramble up through a long twisting chute, almost a tunnel between high walls of rock that shaded out the moon. Only Nomis, leading through the darkness, seemed to know the way. The sound of surf became audible, drifting from somewhere below.

  A cloud was over the moon when the party straggled at last onto a tiny tableland of rock. Only Nomis immediately saw the figure that had been waiting, motionless as stone, for their arrival. When he saw it, he quickly drew Matt’s sword; and when Matt was pushed up out of the chute to within his reach, he gripped Matt’s hair with one hand and with the other laid the bare blade against Matt’s throat.

  The moon came out then, and the other men saw the thing that stood watching them. Like odd chicks of some gaunt black bird, they squawked and scrambled to get behind Nomis, all making sure they stood within the old chalked diagram. For a few seconds, then, everything was still, save for the faint wind and the surf and one man’s muttering in fear.

  Keeping the sword against Matt’s neck, Nomis pulled the gag from his face and displayed him to the berserker. “What say you, mud thing, is this man indeed your enemy? Shall I slay him, then?”

  The metal puppet might have been sent charging forward, far faster than any man could move, to pull Matt away to captivity. But there was the keen edge right against the jugular. The berserker would not risk a thread of responsibility for Matt’s death.

  “Wizard, I will give you power,” said the demon. “And wealth, and the pleasures of the flesh, and then life everlasting. But first you must give me that man alive.”

  Nomis crooned in his certainty of victory, while at his back his men huddled in terror. In this moment when all desires seemed possible of attainment, there rose uppermost in his mind the memory of a day long ago, when a child-princess’s mocking laughter had burned at him. “I want Alix,” he whispered. To him the breaking of her pride would mean more than her young body.

  “I will give her to you,” lied the demon solemnly, “when you have given me that man alive.”

  In Nomis’s ecstasy of triumph, his arm wavered slightly as he held the long sword. Matt was ready. His bound wrists still allowed him some arm movement, and as he jerked free with all his strength his elbow struck the wizard’s old ribs with force enough to send Nomis sprawling and the sword spinning in the air.

  The other men’s terror was triggered into panic flight. They burst up from their crouched positions, first scattering blindly and then converging on the only path of escape, the narrow way by which they had ascended. Running straight, head down, Matt kicked the fallen sword ahead of him and still got there first by a stride, thanks to what the Moderns had done for his nerves and muscles.

  The berserker was delayed by its need to avoid mangling the men who got in its way, but even as Matt reached the top of the path he felt a hand harder than flesh scrape down his back. It seized his clothing, but the fabric tore free. Then he was leaping, falling into the descending passage. At his back the other men were screaming in raw fear as they collided with one another and with the berserker.

  When he landed he naturally fell, cutting and bruising himself without really feeling the injuries. The way was so narrow that he could not miss finding the sword he had kicked ahead of him. With his bound hands he groped behind him in the dark to pick it up by the blade, heedless of nicked fingers. Then he got his feet under him and scrambled some distance farther downward. He stumbled and fell again, hurting his knee, but he had gained a substantial lead on the tangled terror that was jamming the narrow chute behind him. One or more men had probably fallen and broken bones or injured themselves in other ways, and the rest were unable to get past them. They were all howling with mindless fear, and no doubt lacerating themselves further in the dark when they felt the chill touch of the berserker; it would be sorting through the men to find the one it wanted, trying to get the others out of its way….

  Matt propped the sword on its hilt behind him and, with the new skill of his nerves, slid his bonds against the edge of its blade. He had freed himself before he heard the machine’s footsteps come crunching toward him in the dark.

  “That’s it, that’s it! We’ll nail the damned thing now!” In Time Operations, men were crying out a hunter’s jubilation that was as old as mankind. On their screens their giant computers were limning out the radii of a spiderweb, the center of which would hold the dragon. The data needed to draw the web was flowing in from human lifelines being bent and battered; the berserker seemed to be struggling with men in some enclosed space.

  But still it had not killed again. And the locus of its keyhole was not yet in sight.

  “Only a little more.” Time Ops, staring wildly at his screens, pleaded for bloodshed. “Something?”

  But there was no more.

  Matt retreated, limping, out into the moonlight where he could see. The thing followed unhurriedly, sure of him now. He backed out onto the thin ridge, between yawning crevices too deep for the moonlight to plumb, gripping his sword’s hilt in bleeding fingers. Pale in the moonlight and almost skeleton-thin, the machine followed him carefully. It did not want him to fall. It would choose the precise moment and then rush to catch him, as easily as a human athlete picking up a toddler from a broad walk.

  Keeping his sword’s point centered on the narrow way along which it would have to come, he had just time enough to steel his arm. A moment ago the berserker had been twelve feet away, and now it was on him. It made a wiping motion with one hand, to clear what appeared to be an ordinary sword blade from its path—and four steel fingers leaped free like small silver fish in the moonlight, while the mono-molecular blade stayed where it was, centered by Matt’s braced muscles.

  The inertia of the machine’s rush was great. Before it could halt itself, the sword point had gone through its torso, and what had been delicately controlled mechanism became dead hurtling weight. Matt went down before the force of it, but he clung to the edge of the rock. He saw it go tumbling over him, then falling in an endless slow somersault, taking with it the transfixing sword, which already glowed like a red-hot needle with the inner fire that it had kindled.

  The demon vanished. From far down inside the crevice came a crash, and then another and another, echoing remotely. Matt pulled himself back onto the ridge and crawled a few feet; then he made himself stand and walk before he reached the place where the path was broad and safe.

  He was battered and bruised, but he could move. Trying to keep in shadow, he limped past the phlegmatic, waiting load-beast. He had gone a dozen steps farther when the two men Nomis had left there as sentries pounced out of deeper shadows. As they seized him, his injured leg was twisted again, and he fell.

  “Best let me go and run yourselves,” he said to the buskined knees standing before him. “Back there, the devil has come for your master.”

  It made them take a moment to look back toward the distant commotion on the path. And then they themselves were seized, not by the devil but by the two men Matt had seen running up from the direction of the castle, ax and sword in hand. Around Matt there swirled a brief clashing of metal and choked cries that were quickly ended.

  “Is this leg your worst hurt, lord?” Harl asked anxiously, putting his ax in his belt and bending over Matt.

  “Yes, I do well enough.”

  Torla muttered grimly, “Then we will go on and slaughter the rest of them.”

  Matt tried to think. “No. Not now, at least. Nomis. called up a thing from the sea—“

  Torla shuddered now at the distant moaning. “Then let us away?”

  “Can you stand, lord?” asked Harl. “Good, then lean on me.” And having pulled Matt to his feet, he next detached something from under his cloak and held it out. “Your helmet, lord. It fell outside the postern gate and set us on the right trail.”

  Harl and Torla might think that he was dazed, or that it was the pain in
his leg that made him slow to reach out for the helmet. Harl had carried it under his cloak as if it was no more than a shell of metal; but, worn like a crown, it weighed enough to crush a man.

  Down in the sea-bottom muck the dragon stirred. The tantalizing bait signal of the life unit that the Moderns had sent as Ay’s replacement was now very near the shore. If that life unit could be captured without further damage to other lifelines, a berserker victory would be insured. To pursue the replacement inland, among other lives, would involve creating too much change: the dragon’s auxiliary man-shaped device might have conducted such a pursuit almost unobtrusively, but it had been somehow lost. Still, the chance of seizing the important life unit right along the coast was too good an opportunity to let slip. Darkening the water with an upheaved cloud of mud, the dragon rose.

  Supported by a strong man on either side, Matt could make fair speed along the rough path that led back to Blanium. Not, he thought, that there was any real need for haste. Nomis and his men would certainly not be in pursuit; if Nomis had survived at all, his influence must have been thoroughly destroyed.

  And the dragon? It had done what it could do to capture him, to take him alive, quietly and gently. He shuddered. It must be hiding in the sea. And it seemed that, unless he went to the water’s edge and waved at it, it was not going to chase him. It could have come inland to kill him anytime; peasants and armies and the walls of Blanium would not stop it.

  No, if the berserker wanted him dead he would have been dead now, and even his magic sword would not have helped him for a moment. He had seen and heard enough of berserkers to be sure of that. “How made you your escape, lord?” “I will tell you later. Let me think now.” Make the dragon chase you, said Time Ops. We will try to pull you out in time. So far there had been no pulling out. A king must be ready to give his life, said the Planetary Commander, making what he thought was an important point, as he spoke from the depths of his own missile-proof shelter.

  The Moderns were fighting to save the tribe-of-all-men, and to them Matt or any other individual was only an implement for fighting. Save his life once, then shove him forward again to draw the lightning of the stone-lion’s eye….

  In a flash of insight, many things suddenly fell into place for Matt. Scraps of knowledge he had picked up in the Moderns’ world, about the war as it was fought with screens and missiles, lifelines and keyholes, suddenly dovetailed with what had happened to him here in the world of Ay. Of course, he should have seen it before! It was the Moderns who wanted him killed here, by the berserkers. And the berserkers, knowing this, wanted instead to take him alive!

  He was still bleakly pondering this insight when the communicator in his helmet began to speak into his ear with its tiny voice that no one else could hear. In his new anger, he paid no attention to what it was saying; he came near pulling the helmet off and throwing it away, with all its lying voices. He would throw it away, he told himself, when he came to the sea… . No, he must avoid the shore from now on. When he came to another bottomless crevice, then.

  But instead he gripped his companions’ shoulders, stopping them. “Good friends, I must be alone for a little while. To think—and pray.”

  His good friends exchanged glances with each other; his request must seem a strange one, coming at this time. But then their king had been through a day that might make any man act strangely.

  Harl frowned at him. “You are weaponless.”

  “There are no enemies about. But let your dagger stay with me if you will; only let me have a short time to myself.”

  And so they left him, though with repeated backward glances, left him sitting alone on a rock in the moonlight. He was their king now, and they loved him, and he smiled after them with satisfaction, thinking that he would have them at his side for many a year yet. He could and he would. There was no way for the Moderns to punish him, if he chose never to go hunting dragons. Matt was all the Moderns had between themselves and chaos; they would not dare to pull him back to the future, not while he worked at living King Ay’s life. He might bungle the job now and then and provide only a second-best defense for the Moderns’ world; but it was all the service they were going to get.

  He took off the buzzing helmet and scratched his head leisurely. Then, holding the helmet before him, he twisted its right wing, letting Time Ops’ tiny voice come out above the faint murmur of the unseen surf.

  “Matt, answer me, it’s urgent!”

  “I am here. What would you have?”

  “Where are you? What’s going on?”

  “I am going on. To my bride and my kingdom.”

  There was a pause. Then: “Matt, it may be that that won’t be enough, your going on trying to take Ay’s place.”

  “No? Enough for me, I think. I have already been demon-hunting and have used up your sword. So I think I will not chase after a dragon that seems content to let me live.”

  “Demon-hunting? What?”

  Matt explained. He could hear consternation at Operations’ end; they had not thought of the enemy’s trying to capture him alive.

  Time Ops was soon back, pleading with a ragged urgency that Matt had never heard in the commander’s voice before. “Matt, whatever else happens, you can’t let that thing capture you alive.”

  “No? I have often been ordered to make it chase me.”

  “Forget that. No, wait. You can’t be captured. But just avoiding capture and going on playing Ay’s part isn’t going to be enough, not now. You’ve done as well as anyone could, but your filling in for Ay simply isn’t going to work.”

  “Then why does the enemy want to stop me?”

  “Because you are buying us a little time here. They want to eliminate any lingering chance we have—any chance of finding some new defense, of pulling off a miracle. They want to play it safe and finish us off quickly. All I can do is tell you—ask you—to go down along the seashore where the damned thing is hiding. Make it come out and chase you and stir up some change.”

  “And if it should capture me?”

  There was a pause, a murmur of voices exchanged at the other end, and then another familiar voice came on.

  “Matt, this is Derron. All these people here are trying to figure out the best way to tell you to die. You’re to get the berserker to kill you. If it catches you alive, then you must find a way to kill yourself. Kill yourself because it’s caught you. Understand? Die, in one way or another, and make the dragon somehow responsible. All along, that’s been what Operations wanted of you. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how it was until after you were dropped.”

  Time Ops came back. “Matt, you can shut us off now and go on to claim your bride and your kingdom, as you said you were going to. But if you do that, all your life your world there will be slowly decaying around you. Decaying inside, where you won’t be able to see it, becoming less and less probable. Up here we’ll be dying, all of us. At your end of history the chaos will begin in your children’s time—that’s what you’ll be leaving them.”

  “You lie!” But Matt’s voice broke with the cry, for he knew that Time Ops was not lying. Or, if he was lying again about this fact or that, still he was telling the truth about what was needed to win the war.

  “Matt? This is Derron again. What you just heard is the truth. I don’t know what more to say to you.”

  Matt cried bitterly, “My friend, there is no need for you to say anything more!” And with a jerk of his hand that almost broke the helmet wing, he cut the voices off.

  Too late. He had silenced them too late. Slowly he put the helmet back on his head and stood up. Soon he saw Harl and Torla coming toward him; they had doubtless been watching protectively from not far away, overhearing some of the strange language of his prayers.

  When they came up to him he said, no longer angry, “My leg gives me trouble. I think the path will be easier along the water’s edge.”

  Between his friends, he moved toward the sound of surf. He went slowly, for in truth his leg did feel w
orse, having stiffened while he sat. No matter, now. He walked along thinking only hi disconnected pictures and phrases, since the time for thought and worry was now past.

  He had pulled the stone-man from the poison-digger’s pit—that was twenty thousand years ago, and indeed it seemed to him that he had lived through twenty thousand years since then. He had been able to see the tribe-of-all-men grown to stretch across immensities of space and time. He had known, a little, the spirits of life. He had been a king, and a woman with the spirit of a princess had looked at him with love.

  They had been walking for a minute along the water’s edge, when, without surprise, he saw a shoreline rock ahead suddenly move and become a nightmare head that rose amid moonlit spray on a sinuous column of neck. The dragon’s vast body heaved itself up from the sea and lurched toward the men, moving faster than a man could run.

  “I have the dagger,” Matt said to his friends. “And right now both of you can use sword and ax better than I.” The dragon was not coming for Harl or Torla, and it would have been a pointless insult to bid them run.

  He kept the dagger hidden in his hand, the blade turned up flat behind his wrist, as the dragon’s head came straight toward him on its tree-trunk neck that could swallow a man and hold him safe. Sword and ax hewed at it uselessly from either side. Matt was very tired, and in a way he welcomed the grave-wide jaws, which, he saw now, held no teeth. Only in the instant of the jaws’ soft powerful closing did he bring the dagger up, holding the point steady at his own heart while the pressure came down… .

  “It killed him.” The first time, Time Ops whispered the words unbelievingly. Then he let them out in a whoop. “It killed him, it killed him?” The other hunters, who had been frozen at their screens, sharing their computers’ creeping certainty of failure, were galvanized once more into action. On their screens the spiderwebs tightened like nooses, imaging a target greenly solid and sure.

  In the deep cave called Operations Stage Two, metallic arms extended a missile sideways from its rack while a silvery circle shimmered into being on the floor beneath. With a cluck and a jolt the arms released their burden. Falling, the missile was gone.