Brother Assassin

by Fred Saberhagen

  From high above, Will was shouting down to his master, “She be mounted free to turn any way, but there be nothing turning her!”

  Vincento shouted up, “Come down!”

  “… bit more study if ‘ee wants a sketch—“

  “Come down!” The thick lips spat it out.

  Derron kept the pressure on as best he could, switching the emphasis now to relentless generosity. “My only wish, of course, it to help you, sir. I have put aside thoughts of personal advantage to come .to your rescue. In bygone days you have accomplished very substantial things, very substantial, and you must not now be cast aside. My lance is at your disposal; I will gladly repeat this demonstration of my discovery for the authorities in the Holy City, so that the entire world may witness—“

  “Enough! I have no need of help!” Vincento made the last word an obscenity. “You will not—meddle-in—my—affairs. Not in the least degree!”

  In his contempt and wrath the old man became a towering figure. Derron found himself physically retreating—even as he realized that he had won his gamble, that Vincento’s pride was indeed as monumental as his genius.

  The outburst of proud anger was short-lived.

  Derron ceased retreating and stood in silence as Vincento, shrinking once more under his burdens of age and weariness and fear, shot him a parting look of hate and turned away. Now Vincento would never use the Foucault proof, nor believe it, nor even investigate in that direction. He would force the whole thing from his mind if he could. The smallness and jealousy that were leading Vincento on to trial and humiliation existed not only in other men, but in himself.

  Derron knew from history that at his trial Vincento would not only recant, he would go beyond what his judges asked or wanted of him and offer to write a new pamphlet, proving that the sun did after all fly in a circle around the world of men.

  My only wish is to help you, sir. Vincento’s shuffling figure dwindled at last to the end of the nave, and at last the door boomed shut behind him. Exhausted, Derron sagged against a column, hearing now in the silence the pendulum’s unperturbed, repeated hiss. Will came scrambling down the stair to scowl uncomprehendingly at him and then hurry on after his master.

  And now even Vincento’s tragedy could be forgotten for the moment. Real victory and real hope were powerful stimulants. They gave Derron energy enough to hurry out of the cathedral by a side door and go skipping down a steep stair that led directly to the monastery. If the berserker had not also smashed the backup communicator hidden in his staff, he could transmit the joy of victory at once to all the Modern world.

  The enemy had not bothered with anything in his cell. As he hurried toward it along the vaulted passage, an emergency summons from Operations began to throb in the bone behind his ear.

  Brother Saile was puffing, though he had certainly been making no effort to hurry. The narrow cattle path the friars were following went mostly up and down hill, winding its way through scrubby bushes and thin woods. Saile was actually hanging back, and trying, with almost every labored breath, to discourage Brother Jovann from going on.

  “I thought—to have said a few prayers in the village—would have been sufficient. These peasants, as you know—are often foolish. They may have— greatly exaggerated—the depredations of this—supposed wolf.”

  “Then my own peasant foolishness is not likely to cause any harm,” said Jovann, leading on implacably. They were miles from the cathedral now, deep in the wolf’s supposed domain. Their peasant supplicants and guides had turned back through fear a quarter of a mile earlier.

  “I spoke too harshly of them. May the Holy One forgive me.” Saile wheezed to the top of a hill and gathered breath for readier speech on the descent. “Now, if this one beast has really caused in a few days all of the death and damage attributed to it, or even half so much, it would be utter folly for us to approach it, unarmed as we are. It is not that I doubt for an instant the inscrutable wisdom of Providence that can cause a fish to leap for joy after you have released it, nor do I doubt the story that is told of the gentle little birds listening to your preaching. But a wolf, and especially such a wolf as this, is quite another …”

  Brother Jovann did not appear to be listening very closely. He had paused briefly to follow with his eyes a train of scavenger insects, which crossed the path and vanished into the brush. Then he went on, more slowly, until a similar file appeared a little farther along the trail. There Brother Jovann turned aside and walked noisily into the brush, leading his companion toward the spot where it seemed the two lines of insects must intersect.

  Staff in hand, Derron made the best cross-country time he could, running fifty steps and walking fifty.

  “Odegard!” Time Ops had cried out. “There’s another lifeline just as vital as Vincento’s right there with you. Or he was with you. Now he and one of the others have moved out a couple of miles; they’re about to leave the safety zone. You’ve got to get there and protect him somehow. The berserker will have him cold if it’s out there waiting!”

  And of course it would be out there, in ambush or pursuit. The attack on Vincento had been in deadly earnest, as the first punch in any good one-two should be. But it was the second punch that was really expected to get through and do the damage. And humanity had been left wide open for this one.

  Running fifty steps, walking fifty, Derron steadily covered ground along the bearing Operations had given him. He asked, “Just who am I looking for?”

  And when they told him, he thought he should have guessed the name, should have been alerted by his first look into that loving face.

  In the midst of the thicket there had been havoc. It had happened days ago, for the tree branches that had been broken were now quite dead. And though the insects were still busy amid the wreckage of bone and gray fur on the ground, there was no longer much for them to scavenge.

  “This was a very big wolf,” said Brother Jovann thoughtfully, bending to pick up a piece of jawbone. The bone had been shattered by some violent blow, but this fragment still contained teeth of impressive size.

  “Very big, certainly,” agreed Brother Saile, though he knew little about wolves and had no wish to learn any more. He kept looking about him nervously. The sun was slanting into late afternoon, and to Saile the forest seemed ominously still.

  Jovann was musing aloud. “Now, what manner of creature can it be that deals thus with a big male wolf? Even as I in my greed have sometimes dealt with the bones of a little roast fowl… But no, these bones have not been gnawed for nourishment. Only broken, and broken again, as if by some creature more wantonly savage than any wolf.”

  The name of Brother Jovann symbolized gentleness and love to Modern historians as well as laymen, to skeptics as well as the orthodox temple members who venerated him as a saint. Like Vincento, Saint Jovann had become a towering folk figure, only half-understood.

  “We’re just this hour catching on to Jovann’s practical importance,” said Time Ops’ voice in Derron’s head as Derron ran. “With Vincento stabilized, and all our observers concentrated on the area you’re in, we’re getting a better look at it than ever before. Historically, Jovann’s lifeline goes on about fifteen years from your point, and all along the way it radiates support to other lines. What has been described as ‘good-turn-a-day stuff.’ Then these other lines tend to radiate life support in turn, and the process propagates on up through history. Our best judgment now is that the disarmament treaty three hundred years after Jovann’s death will fall through, and that an international nuclear war will wipe out our civilization in pre-Modern times, if Saint Jovann is terminated at your point.”

  When Time Ops paused, a woman’s voice came in briskly. “A new report for Colonel Odegard.”

  Walking again, Derron asked, “Lisa?”

  She hesitated for just an instant, then continued, business first. “Colonel, the lifeline that was described to you earlier as having an embryonic appearance is moving out of the safety zone after the
other two. It seems to be traveling at a high rate of speed, faster than a man or a load-beast can run. We can give no explanation of this. Also, you’re to bear five degrees left.”

  “Understand.” Derron turned five degrees left, as near as he could judge. He was getting out of the lowlands now, and there was a little less mud to impede his progress. “Lisa?”

  “Derron, they let me come on because I said I’d tend strictly to business.”

  “Understand. You do that.” He judged he had walked fifty steps and began to run once more, his breath immediately turning into gasps. “I just want to say—I wish—you were carrying my baby.”

  There was a small, completely feminine sound. But when Lisa’s voice came back on intelligibly, it was cool again, with more bearing corrections to be given.

  From the corner of his eye Brother Saile caught the distant moving of something running toward them through the trees and brush. He turned, squinting under the afternoon sun, and with surprise at his own relative calm he saw that their search for the wolf had come to an end. Wolf? The thing approaching should perhaps be called monster or demon instead, but he could not doubt it was the creature that had spread terror among the peasants, come now to find the men who dared to search for it.

  Poisonous-looking as a silver wasp, the man-sized creature was still a hundred yards away, running through the scrub forest silent, catlike, four-legged. Brother Saile realized that he should now attempt to lay down his life for his friend, should shove Brother Jovann back and rush forward himself to distract the thing. And something in Brother Saile wanted to achieve such heroism, but his belly and feet had now turned to lead, leaving him immobile as a statue. He tried to shout a warning, but even his throat was paralyzed by fear. At last he did manage to seize Brother Jovann by the arm and point.

  “Ah,” said Jovann, coming out of a reverie and turning to look. A score of paces away, the monster was slowing to a halt, crouching on its four slender legs, looking from one friar to the other as if to decide which of them it wanted. Peasants glimpsing the creature might call it wolf. Shreds of gray fabric festooned it here and there, as if it had been clothed and then had, beastlike, torn itself out of the garment. Naked and hairless and sexless, terrible and beautiful at once, it flowed like quicksilver as it took two rapid strides closer to the men. Then it settled again into a crouching, silent statue.

  “In God’s n-name, come away!” Brother Saile whispered, his jaws shivering. “It is no natural beast. Come away, Brother Jovann!”

  But Jovann only raised his hands and signed the horror with the wedge; he seemed to be blessing it rather than exorcising.

  “Brother Wolf,” he said lovingly, “you do indeed look unlike any beast that I have ever seen before, and I know not from what worldly parentage you may have sprung. But there is in you the spirit of life; therefore never forget that our Father above has created you, as He has created all other creatures, so we are all children of the one Father.”

  The wolf darted forward and stopped, stepped and stopped, inched up and stopped again, in a fading oscillation. In its open mouth Saile thought he saw fangs not only long and sharp, but actually blurring with vicious motion like the teeth of some incredible saw. At last there came forth a sound, and Saile was reminded simultaneously of ringing sword blades and of human agony.

  Jovann dropped to one knee, facing the crouching monster more on a level. He spread his arms as if willing an embrace. The thing bounded in a blur of speed toward him, then stopped as if a leash had caught it. It was still six or eight paces from the kneeling man. Again it uttered a sound; Saile, half-fainting, seemed to hear the creak of the torture rack and the cry of the victim rise together.

  Jovann’s voice had nothing in it of fear, but only blended sternness with its love.

  “Brother Wolf, you have killed and pillaged like a wanton criminal, and for that you deserve punishment! But accept instead the forgiveness of all the men you have wronged. Come now, here is my hand. In the name of the Holy One, come to me, and pledge that from this day on you will live at peace with men. Come!”

  Derron, approaching at a staggering, exhausted run, first heard a murmur of speech, and then saw the figure of Brother Saile standing motionless, looking off to one side at something concealed from Derron by a thicket. Derron lurched to a halt, raising his staff but not yet aiming it. He knew now that Saile was not the berserker. What Operations had reported about the embryo-like lifeline had fitted in at last in Derron’s mind with something the berserker had said to him in the cathedral, fitted in to make a wondrous kind of sense. Three steps sideways brought Derron to where he could see what Saile was gaping at.

  He had come in time to see the berserker-wolf take the last hesitant step in its advance. To see it raise one metal paw—and with its steel claw-fingers gently touch the kneeling friar’s extended hand.

  “So, my guess was right; it had become a living thing,” said Derron. His head was resting in Lisa’s lap, and he could if he chose look up past her face at the buried park’s real treetops and artificial sun. “And, as such, susceptible to Saint Jovann’s domination. To his love … I guess there’s no other way to put it.”

  Lisa, stroking his forehead, raised her eyebrows questioningly.

  Derron put on a defensive frown. “Oh, there are rational explanations. The most complex and compact machine the berserkers ever built, driven up through twenty thousand years of evolutionary gradient from their staging area—something like life was bound to happen to it. Or so we say now. And Jovann and some other men have had amazing power over living things: that’s fairly well documented, even if we rationalists can’t understand it.”

  “I looked up the story about Saint Jovann and the wolf,” said Lisa, still stroking his brow “It says that, after he tamed it, the animal lived out its days like a pet dog in the village.”

  “That would refer to the original wolf. I guess the little change in history we had wasn’t enough to change the legend. I suppose it was the berserker’s plan all along to kill the original animal and take its place during the taming episode. Killing Jovann then might make people think he had been a fraud all his life. But tearing the original wolf into bits was an irrational, lifelike thing to do—if we’d known about that sooner, we might have guessed what’d happened to our enemy. There were other little clues along the way—things it did for no reason that would be valid for a machine. And I really should have guessed in the cathedral, when it started babbling to me about passages between life and not-life. Anyway, Operations isn’t as trusting as Jovann and his biographers. We’ve got the thing in a cage in present-time while the scientists try to decide what to …”

  Derron had to pause there, to accommodate a young lady who was bending over him with the apparent intention of being kissed.

  “Did I mention how nice some of that country looked around there?” he went on, a little later. “Of course, the big hill is reserved for the rebuilding of the cathedral. But I thought you and I might drop into a Homestead Office sometime soon, you know, before the postwar rush starts, and put our names down for one of those other hilltops… .”

  And Derron had to pause again.

  BAEN® Books

  by

  Fred Saberhagen

  The Berserker Series

  The Berserker Wars

  Berserker Base (with Poul Anderson, Ed Bryant, Stephen Donaldson, Larry Niven, Connie Willis, and Roger Zelazny)

  Berserker: Blue Death

  The Berserker Throne

  Berserker’s Planet

  The Dracula Series

  The Dracula Tapes

  The Holmes-Dracula Files

  An Old Friend of the Family

  Thorn

  Dominion

  A Matter of Taste

  The Swords Series

  The First Book of Swords

  The Second Book of Swords

  The Third Book of Swords

  The First Book of Lost Swords: Woundhealer’s Story


  The Second Book of Lost Swords: Sightblinder’s Story

  The Third Book of Lost Swords: Stonecutter’s Story T

  he Fourth Book of Lost Swords: Farslayer’s Story

  The Fifth Book of Lost Swords: Coinspinner’s Story

  The Sixth Book of Lost Swords: Mindsword’s Story

  Other Books

  A Century of Progress

  Coils (with Roger Zelazny)

  Earth Descended

  The Mask of the Sun

  A Question of Time

  Specimens

  The Veils of Azlaroc

  The Water of Thought

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Baen Books®

  Brother Assassin Copyright © 1969 Fred Saberhagen

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