More Than Fire

by Philip José Farmer

  Thunder, amplified by the deep chasm, rumbled in the distance. With the suddenness of a Panzer attack, dark clouds were speeding from the west. In a few seconds, they had covered the bright sky, and a wind whistled over the top of the pit. The air that reached down into the pit blew away the sweltering heat and chilled Kickaha’s naked body.

  He said, “We’ll hear the rest of your story later, Clifton. We’ve got to get out of this hole.”

  Anana did not have to ask him why they had to vacate the pit. She knew what a big downpour in this chasm would do.

  Kickaha had considered using the beamers to make a forty-five-degree channel from the bottom of the hole to the surface. They might be able to escape from the pit that way. But there was no time to use the beamers.

  Kickaha gave his orders. The two men stood side by side, their faces close to the north side of the pit. Anana, who was very strong and agile, climbed up onto them and stood with one foot on Kickaha’s right shoulder and one foot on Clifton’s left shoulder. By now, Eleth had recovered enough to join them in their effort. The lightest in the group and very athletic, she had no difficulty climbing up until she was on Anana’s shoulders. The thin rope taken from Kickaha’s backpack was coiled around Eleth’s waist. A few seconds later, she called down.

  “The edge is just too slippery for me to get a hold.”

  “What do you see?” he said. “Anything that might hold a grappling hook?”

  “Nothing at all!” Eleth sounded desperate. A bellow of thunder and the cannon blast of nearby lightning tore her next words to shreds. She shrieked and fell backward off Anana. But she twisted around and landed, knees bent, on her feet.

  After Anana had come down, she said, “What were you going to say?”

  Eleth’s reply was again shattered by thunder and lightning. A few raindrops fell on them. Then she shouted, “I saw a torrent of water pouring down the mountainsides! We’re all going to drown!”

  “Maybe,” Kickaha said, grinning. “But we might be able to swim out of this pit.”

  He sounded more hopeful than he felt.

  “Red Orc wouldn’t put us here just so we could drown!” Eleth shrilled.

  “Why not?” Anana said.

  “Besides,” Kickaha said, “he may have overlooked the possibility of flash floods. He may have picked this place out but not been around when it rained.”

  By then, a darkness not as black as midnight but blacker than the last gasp of dusk filled the pit. The wind was stronger and colder, though it was not in its full rage. Suddenly, a heavy rain fell upon them. Whips of lightning exploded near them. A few minutes later, water spilled over the edges of the pit. The water rose to Kickaha’s ankles.

  Eleth cried, “Elyttria of the Silver Arrows, save us!”

  A wave of cold water crashed into the pit and knocked all of them down. Before they could struggle to their feet, a second and larger one fell on them. And then a third wave, the edge of the flood, cataracted into the pit.

  Kickaha was rammed against the wall. He almost became unconscious but struggled to swim upward, though he did not know where upward was. When his hand struck stone, he knew that he had been swimming downward. Or had he gone horizontally and felt the side of the pit?

  Somebody bumped into him. He grabbed for him or her but missed. Then he was sliding and bumping against stone for an indeterminable time. Just as he thought that he had to suck air into his lungs or die, his head rose above water. He gulped air before he was again drawn down. But he had seen a mass to his right, a mass darker than the darkness around him.

  It must be a mountainside, he thought. Which means that I’ve been carried out of the pit.

  He swam again in the blackness. If he had not been turned upside down, he was going for the surface. His chances for surviving were few, since he could, at any moment, slam into a mountainside. He kept struggling, and his head was suddenly out of the water, though a wave at once slapped his mouth and filled it. Choking and spitting, he got rid of the water.

  It was no use to call out. The lightning and thunder were still cursing the earth. No one could hear him, and what if they did?

  Now he was also in danger of being electrocuted. Lightning was plunging into the flood. But he could see in their flashes that he was being sped past solid rock that soared almost straight up into a darkness not even the lightning could scatter.

  A roaring louder than the thunder’s was now ahead of him. A waterfall? And he was swept over the edge and fell he knew not how far. When he struck the bottom of the raging river and was scraped along it, he was again half out of his wits. By the time he had recovered them, he was on top of a maelstrom. It whirled him around and around, and then, once again, he slammed into something hard.

  When he awoke, he was lying on rock, his upper body out of the stream. It tugged feebly at him. Lightning still blazed through the darkness, though it was not near him.

  He lay choking and coughing for a while. After he had gotten back his wind, he crawled painfully up the sloping rock. His face, feet, knees, ribs, hands, elbows, buttocks, and genitals felt as if they had been skinned with a knife. He hurt too much to crawl far. He rolled over; the scene was briefly lit by the lightning. He was on a triangular shelf of stone that dipped its apex into the storming river. Across it was a straight-up God-knowswhere-its-top-is wall.

  He turned, grunting with pain, sat up, and looked upward. Another flash showed him the wall that towered there. It was only about fifty feet from him. When the rain first came down its side, it must have been a torrent. But now it was a shallow brook.

  Kickaha’s luck, he thought. One of these days, though….

  He got up and staggered through a thin waterfall and under a wide shelf of stone. He sat down. After a while, the thunder and lightning retreated far down the canyon. Somehow, despite the cold and wetness, he fell asleep. When he woke, he saw daylight. Hours passed, and then the sun had come over the edge of the seemingly sky-high mouth of the chasm. It seemed to him that he was even deeper in it than when he had been in the pit.

  He said, “Anana!”

  His equipment and most of his weapons had been torn from him. He still had his belt and the beamer in its holster. Somehow, the bag containing the Horn of Shambarimem had not been torn from the loop on his belt … he grinned then, because he would have given up even the knife and the beamer in exchange for the Horn.

  By the time that the sun was directly overhead, he rose stiffly. The storm had cooled the air, but tomorrow the heat would be stifling. He had to get to the top of the chasm. He went back and forth as far as he could along the base of the cliff. When he found cracks and fissures and plants to hold on to even at this depth, little treelike plants projected at angles from the wall-he began to climb. His hands ached, and some skin had been ground off four of his fingers. Gritting his teeth and groaning, he got to an estimated eighty feet above the river. By then, the water had ceased falling down the wall. And he saw, fifty feet above him, the side of a large nest sticking out from a small ledge.

  Maybe the nest contained eggs that he could eat.

  When, shaking with fatigue and hunger, he got to the nest, he found that it was made of sticks and twigs and a gluey substance that had dried out. Inside the nest were four mauve eggs, each twice as large as a hen’s. He looked around to make sure that the mother was not in sight. After piercing the eggs with the point of his knife, he sucked some yolk from each. Then he broke them open to disclose embryonic chicks. He ate these raw except for the heads and the legs.

  Having rested a while, he rose to climb again. It was then that he heard a scream. He whirled. Mama Bird was home, and she was so angry she had dropped the rabbit-sized animal she had been bringing home. It fell, and he did not see it strike the river because he was busy defending himself. The sky-blue bird, somewhat larger than a bald eagle, slammed into him. He gutted it with a slash of his knife, though not before its beak had slashed open an arm and its talons had sunk deep into his chest.
/>   He had thought he could not hurt more than he had. He was wrong.

  After defeathering the bird, he butchered it and ate part of it. Then he spent the rest of the day and all of the night on the ledge. At least the night air was warm.

  Twelve days later, he got to the top of the chasm. He had eaten on the way, though not much. Despite the regenerative powers of his body, it still had many abrasions and bruises. But these had been acquired recently.

  He pulled himself over the edge after he had looked to make sure that nothing dangerous was there. Then he lay on his side, panting. After several minutes, he rose.

  It was as if the vessel had appeared out of the air, and perhaps it had. It was a silvery and shiny craft, a cylinder with a cone at each end. Under the transparent canopy at the end nearest Kickaha was a cockpit that ran half of the length of the cylinder. From two sides of the craft, four struts extended to the ground to stabilize the vessel while it was on the ground.

  The airboat landed, and the forepart of the canopy rose. The man sitting in the front seat climbed out and strode toward Kickaha, who by then had risen shakily to his feet.

  The pilot was tall and muscular; his face was handsome; his flowing hair was shoulder-length and red-bronze. He was clad in a black-and-whitestriped robe that came down to his calves. A belt set with many jewels held a holster. It was empty because the beamer it had held was in the man’s hand.

  The man smiled broadly, exposing very white teeth.

  He spoke in Thoan. “Kickaha! You are truly a remarkable man to have survived! I respect you greatly, so much that I could almost just salute you and let you go on your way! However…”

  “You’re full of howevers, Red Orc,” Kickaha said. “Not to mention other things.”

  8

  AT THE THOAN’S COMMAND, KICKAHA SLOWLY TOOK HIS BEAMer and knife out and threw them ten feet ahead of him. Very reluctantly, he cast the bag containing the Horn to a spot near the weapons. Red Orc, his face glowing with triumph shot with delight, picked up the bag with his right hand.

  He gestured with his weapon. “Turn your back to me, reach for the sky, and get down on your knees. Stay in that position until I tell you otherwise.”

  Kickaha obeyed, but he was considering what his chances were if he leaped up, ran to the chasm’s edge, and jumped. He might go out far enough to avoid the projecting parts of the side of the chasm and fall into the river. But would he survive the plunge into the water? Would the Thoan be able to shoot him before he got to the chasm’s edge?

  The answer to the first was no; to the second, yes. Anyway, he was crazy even to think of such a plan. But it might be better to die thus than to get what Red Orc could have in mind for him.

  He never heard the man’s footsteps. He did hear a slight hissing and feel something against his back. When he awoke, he was in the back seat of the vessel. A long sticky cord bound him around and around and secured him to the seat of the chair and its back. His wrists were tied together, and his feet were also bound. His head ached; his mouth was very dry. When he looked through the canopy, he saw that the boat was at least a thousand feet in the air and was heading northward.

  Red Orc, seated before the control panel, was looking at the TV screen to one side and above him. He could see Kickaha in it. He rose, having set the vessel on automatic, and walked back in the narrow aisle between two rows of seats.

  The Thoan stood about four feet from his captive. “You’ve always gotten away before this,” he said. “But you’ve come to the end of the road.”

  Kickaha spoke huskily. “I’m still living.”

  “And you may live for quite a while. But you’ll be wishing that you were dead. Perhaps. I really haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you.”

  Kickaha glanced through the canopy and saw the chasm he had climbed or, perhaps, another chasm. At this point, it was at least forty miles wide and went down so far that he could not see the dark bottom. He did not think that erosion had caused this. There must have been one hell of a cataclysm at one time on this planet.

  Apparently, Red Orc guessed what he was thinking. He said, “This is the planet Wanzord, created by Appyrmazul. My father, Los, and I fought each other here. Los had a weapon of terrifying destructive powers. I don’t know where he got it. Probably he found it buried in some ancient vault. He used it on me and my forces, and I was forced to gate out, leaving my men behind me. That chasm was caused by Los’s weapon.”

  “What happened to it?” Kickaha said. His voice rasped.

  “My father won that campaign. Eventually, during an attack on his army, I got hold of the ravener, as it was called. But I had to destroy that ancient weapon. Luck went against me, I was forced to retreat, and I didn’t want my father to have it. So, I blew it up.

  “However, as you may have heard, the final victory was mine. I captured my father. After I’d tortured him almost enough to satisfy me, I killed him. A long time before that, I had cut off his testicles and eaten them, after I stopped him when he was trying to kill my mother. I should have slain him then. When his testicles regrew, he launched an all-out war against me.

  “But in the end, I won, and I burned his body and mixed the ashes in a glass of wine and drank him down. That was not quite the end of him. The next day, I flushed him down the toilet.”

  Red Orc laughed maniacally. And maniac he is, Kickaha thought. But he’s quite rational and logical in most matters. Very cunning, too.

  “That’s interesting and informative,” Kickaha said. “But what about Anana, Clifton, and Eleth?”

  Red Orc smiled as if he was pleased by what he was going to tell his prisoner.

  “While you were struggling to get out of the chasm, I was looking for the others. Eleth’s body was left on a large rock when the flood subsided. The face was torn off, and one side of her head was caved in and the scalp ripped from it. But enough of her blond hair was left to identify her. Thus ended the last of the iron-hearted daughters of Urizen. No one will mourn them.

  “Clifton is probably buried under tons of silt and gravel. End of his story. He was in the pit because he was caught in one of my resonantcircuit traps and directed to the same terminal, the pit, to which you and your party were channeled. That pit and the circuit in which Clifton was caught were made by Ololothon long ago. But I took over ownership. In fact, he arranged it as a sort of catch-as-catch-can for any Lord who came along. But it got the Englishman for me. I had almost forgotten about him after I last saw him in Urthona’s floating palace on the Lavalite World. Urthona got away from there with you two. What happened to him?”

  “Urthona was killed just after we escaped from the palace and gated through to the World of Tiers. He got caught in his own trap, you might say. Cheated me out of killing him.”

  Red Orc raised his brows and said, softly, “Ah! One more of the very old Lords is dead. I am unhappy about that, but only because I wanted to be the one who killed him. Since he was my father’s ally, I had him down in my books.”

  Kickaha said, “What about Anana?”

  A ghost of a smile hovered over the Thoan’s lips. He knew that Kickaha knew that he was delaying his account of her to torment him.

  “Anana? Yes, Anana?”

  Kickaha leaned forward, preparing himself for very bad news. But Red Orc said, “I had expected Ona to be caught in the pit, too, but I assume that something happened to her while she was with you. Or did she escape from you to wander around on Alofmethbin?”

  “She died trying to escape. What about Anana?”

  “You must be wondering just how you were trapped. Only I could have done it. The many obstacles and the little time to get the necessary things would have been too much for anyone else. Fortunately, the circuit in which you two were caught, originally set up by Ololothon, had a three-day delay holding you in one gate before you were sent forward again. That gave me the time I needed to bring in the necessary equipment in an airboat through a gate from my base. You have heard of Ololothon?”
/>
  “For Christ’s sake!” Kickaha said in English. Then, speaking in Thoan, “You are going to drag out the suspense, aren’t you? Although you’ve lived so long, you’re juvenile as hell!”

  “I am not above taking pleasure in small things,” Red Orc said. “If you are almost immortal, you find that there are long intervals between pleasures, and these are short-lived. So, even the smallest pleasures are welcome, especially when they are unexpected.”

  He paused, meeting Kickaha’s glare with his unwavering gaze.

  Then he said, “Ololothon?”

  “We were on his world, the planet of the Tripeds,” Kickaha said. “You know that.”

  “I know it now,” the Thoan said. “Before you told me, I had only suspected that you were there. But I could not be sure. What I was sure about was that if you took the only exit gate on Ololothon’s world, you would be caught in the resonant circuit he set up. Long, long ago, after I invaded his palace and slew him, I studied the charts of his gates and recorded them to file in my bases. I might need to use them someday. And I was right: I did. Very few Lords, perhaps none, have such foresight.”

  Brag, brag, brag, Kickaha thought. However, he was interested in knowing just how the Thoan’s plot had been carried out.

  “Eleth and Ona were very clever. They managed to escape from my prison on my base while I was elsewhere. I suspected that they had bribed the guards, but I did not have time to torture the truth out of anyone. I killed all of them. However, the corruption might have spread throughout my palace. So, I completely depopulated it. I did not slay their children, of course. I made sure that they were adopted by a native tribe.”

  Just like that, Kickaha thought. Torture and murder, and then he compliments himself for his mercy.

  “It took me some time to track the sisters down to this planet and then locate them. I found them wandering half-starved and totally miserable in the forest where you came across them. Instead of immediately punishing them as I had promised, I decided to use them against you and Anana. They were in such terror, wondering if they would be released without harm, as I had promised they would be if they cooperated. Or would I break my word? I also arranged for a raven, an Eye of the Lord, and an oromoth to work with them, to keep a watch on you and Anana when you showed up and also to make sure the sisters did not betray me. The Eye and the oromoth would get a suitable reward, but I promised them they would die if they tried treachery. I-“