by David Drake
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 h
alted 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 au
dibly 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.