Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Matt’s buying us a little more present-time here, and that’s all he’s doing. Is it clear now why we want the thing to kill him? Millions have died in this war for nothing, major.”

  “Yes sir, I guess it’s clear. We won’t win unless we find that dragon’s keyhole.” Derron held the helmet out in front of him for a moment, looking at it as if it was an archeological find he had just unearthed. “Matt never was anything but bait, was he?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that, major. When you first suggested that he be used, we weren’t sure but that he’d come out alive. But the first fullscale computer simulation showed us the way things pretty well had to go. No doubt you’re right, bugging his helmet made the trap a little too obvious. The way things stand now, he may be safer from berserkers than we are.”

  X

  Matt came painfully awake, trying to cough around a gag of dirty doth that had been stuffed into his mouth. His head ached as if he had been drugged. He was being carried in a sickening jogging motion, and when his head cleared a little more he understood that he was riding slung across a loadbeast’s humped back, his head hanging down on one side and his feet on the other. His helmet of course had fallen off somewhere; nor was there any bouncing tug at his waist from the weight of sword and scabbard.

  Six or eight men had him prisoner; they were walking near the loadbeast in the darkness, guiding and leading it along a narrow winding path. They looked behind them frequently and now and then exchanged lowvoiced words.

  “. . . I think two of them are following, or they were . . .”

  Matt heard that much. He tried the cords holding his wrists and ankles, and found them tight. Turning his head, he saw that the trail ahead wound among jagged pillars and outcroppings of rock; from what he knew of the country near Blanium he judged they were right along the coast.

  And he saw without surprise that one of his captors, the one who led the way, was tall and thin and robed in black. Round this man’s lean waist was belted a sword and scabbard that looked like Matt’s. Nomis had taken for himself one of the power-symbols of a king.

  The way grew rougher until the little procession came to a thin ridge with deep clefts in the rock on either side of it. Here the loadbeast must be left behind. At Nomis’ order some of the men lifted Matt from its back. Pausing often in their work to look uneasily round them, starting at every sound of the night, they untied Matt’s feet but made his arms doubly secure. They seemed to fear Nomis and whatever lay ahead almost as much as they feared the pursuit that must be coming from the castle.

  With 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 passage, almost a tunnel between high walls of rock. Only Nomis, going ahead, seemed to know the way. The sound of surf became audible.

  A cloud was over the moon when the party straggled at last onto a tiny tableland of rock. Only Nomis immediately saw the figure, motionless as stone, which waited for them. Nomis quickly drew Matt’s sword, and when Matt was pushed up 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 scrambled then to get behind Nomis, all making sure they were within the old chalked diagram. It was very still, save for the faint wind and the surf, and one man’s low muttering in fear.

  Keeping the sword against Matt’s neck, Nomis pulled the gag from his face and displayed him to the berserker. “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 berserkers would not risk a thread of responsibility for Matt’s death.

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

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

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

  In Nomis’ ecstasy of triumph his arm wavered slightly, holding the long sword. Matt was ready. His bound wrists allowed him still some arm-movement. As he jerked free with all his strength his elbow struck old ribs with force enough to send Nomis sprawling, 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 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 Modems had done for his nerves and muscles.

  The berserker had been delayed by its need to avoid mangling the men who were 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 free into the descending passage. At his back the other men were screaming, colliding with one another and the berserker.

  He landed, 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. He got his feet under him and scrambled some further distance downward. He stumbled and fell again, hurting his knee, hut he had gained a substantial lead on the tangled terror jamming the way behind him. One or more men had probably fallen with broken bones or other disabling injuries, and the others were stuck with them or behind them. They would be howling with mindless fear and lacerating themselves further in the dark when they felt the chill touch of the berserker; it would be sorting through men to find the one it wanted, trying to get the others out of its way without harming them.

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

  XI

  “That’s it, that’s it, we’ll nail the damned thing now!” In Time Operations men were crying out in a hunter’s jubilation as old as mankind. On their screens their computers were limning out the radii of a spiderweb, whose center would hold the dragon. The data needed to draw the web was coming 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 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 to deep for the moonlight to plumb, holding his sword ready in bleeding fingers. Pale in the moonlight and almost skeleton-thin, it followed carefully. It did not want him to fall. It would choose the precise moment and then rush to catch him, easily as a human athlete picking up a toddler from a broad walk.

  When it came, he kept his point centered on the narrow way, and he had just time 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 swordblade from its path—and four steel fingers leaped free like small silver fish in the moonlight, while the monomolecular blade stayed where it was, centered by Matt’s braced muscles.

  The inertia of the machine
’s rush was great. Before it could halt, the swordpoint was through its torso, and what had been a delicately controlled mechanism became dead hurtling weight. Matt went down before the force of it, but he clung to rock somehow and saw it go on over him, falling in an endless slow somersault—taking with it the transfixing sword, which glowed already like a redhot needle with the inner fire it had kindled.

  The tumbling demon vanished. From far down inside the crevice came a crash. And then another and another, echoing remotely. Matt pulled himself 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.

  Trying to keep in shadow, he limped his way past the phlegmatic, waiting loadbeast. He had gone a dozen steps farther when the two men Nomis had left here as sentries pounced out of deeper shadows. As they seized him, the leg he had injured 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’s come for your master.”

  It made them look back toward the distant commotion, until they themselves were come for; not by the devil but by the two men Matt had seen running up, axe and sword in hand. A brief clashing of metal swirled around Matt and choked cries that were quickly ended.

  “Is this leg your worst hurt, lord?” asked Harl anxiously, bending over him.

  “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 he detached something from under his cloak and held it out. “Your helmet, lad. It fell outside the postern gate, and set us on the right trail.”

  Harl and Torla might think it was pain in his leg that made him so slow to reach out for the helmet. Harl had carried it under his cloak as if it were only a shell of metal; but put on 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 sure, as matters now stood. To pursue the life-unit inland would involve creating too much change—especially since the dragon’s auxiliary device had been somehow lost. But the chances of seizing the lifeunit 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 leading back toward Blanium. Not that there was any great need for speed. Nomis and his men would certainly not be in pursuit. And Matt saw now that it was pot the berserker that sought his death. No, it had wanted to be given him alive, and then it had tried to capture him. He shuddered.

  “How made you your escape, lord?”

  “I will tell you later. Let me think now.”

  Make the dragon chase you, said Time Ops. A king must be ready to give his life, said the Planetary Commander, speaking from the depths of his own missile-proof shelter. If the berserkers had wanted to kill him, he would be dead, his sword would not have helped.

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

  In a flash of insight, the scraps of knowledge Matt had picked up about the war of screens and missiles, lifelines and keyholes, suddenly fell into place with what had happened to him here. Of course, the Moderns wanted him killed here, by the berserkers. And the berserkers knew this, and wanted to take him alive.

  The communicator in his helmet suddenly began to speak in a tiny voice, as it would for his ears alone. He would throw the helmet away with all its lying voices, he told himself, when he again came close enough to the sea, or to another crevice.

  But he gripped his companions’ shoulders, stopping them. “Good friends, I would be alone for a little time, to think and—pray.”

  His good friends exchanged glances. His must seem a strange request, coming at this time. But then their king had been through a day strange enough to put any man in need of thought.

  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 backward glances. He was their king now, and they loved him; and he smiled now with satisfaction, thinking that he would have them at his side for many a year yet. There was no way for the Modems to punish him for a reftisal to go anymore a-dragon hunting. They would not dare pull Him to the future, not while he worked at living King Ay’s life. That might be a second-best defense for the Modems’ world, but it was all they were going to get.

  He sat down on a rock in the moonlight and took off the helmet. Holding it before him, he twisted its right wing, letting Time Ops’ tiny voice come out above the nearby murmur of surf.

  “—Matt, answer me, urgent.”

  “I am here. What would you have?”

  “Where are you? What’s going on?”

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

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

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

  “Demon-hunting? What?”

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

  Time Ops was soon back. “Matt, you can’t let it take you alive. But just avoiding capture isn’t going to be good enough, not now. Your filling in for Ay just 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 and finish us off quickly. All I can do is ask you again to make the damned thing chase you and stir up change.”

  “If it catches me?”

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

  “Matt, this is Derron. These people here are trying to find a way to tell you to die. Get the berserker to kill you, or if it catches you find a way to kill yourself. Kill yourself because it’s caught you. Die, in one way or another, and make it somehow responsible. All along that’s been their objective here. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was like that at first.”

  Time Ops came back. “Matt, you can shut us off and go on to your bride and your kingdom the way you said you were going to. But if you do that, all your life your world will be slowly decaying around you. Decaying inside, where you won’t 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!” Matt’s voice broke on the cry, for he knew Time Ops was not lying. Or if he was lying again about this fact or that, he was telling the truth about what was needed to win the war. Whatever Time Ops did would be 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!” He twisted the helmet wing, silencing the voices; he put the helmet hack on his head and stood up. Soon he saw Harl and Torla coming toward him.

  When they had come up to him he said quietly: “My leg gives me trouble. I think die path will be easier along the water’s edge.” He knew th
at the dragon dwelt in the sea.

  Between his friends he moved toward the sound of surf. He went slowly, for truthfully his leg felt worse, having stiffened while he sat. He thought of nothing, as the time for thinking was now past. Long long ago he had pulled the stone-man from the poison-digger’s pit. Then he had seen the tribe-of-all-men stretching across space and time; he had known something of the spirits of life; he had been a king, and a princess among others had looked at him with love.

  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 from the sea, and lurched toward the men faster than a man could run.

  “I have the dagger,” he said to the men at his sides. “And right now both of you can use sword and axe better than I.” The dragon was not coming for Harl or Torla, and anyway it would be 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 for him, on its treetrunk neck that could swallow a man and hold him safe. Sword and axe hewed 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 heart while the pressure came down . . .

  “It killed him.” At first, 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 click and a jolt the arms released their burden. Falling, the missile was gone—