by Brian Lumley
Lardis watched Jazz strip down to his combat suit, then approached him smilingly with outstretched right hand. Jazz tried to take his hand, found himself clasping his forearm instead; Lardis likewise clasped his. It was a Traveller greeting. 'A hell-lander,' Lardis nodded. 'How are you called?'
'Michael Simmons,' Jazz answered. 'Jazz to my friends.'
Again Lardis's nod. 'Then I'll call you Jazz — for now. But I need time to make up my mind about you. I've heard rumours about hell-landers like yourself; some take sides with the Wamphyri, working for them as wizards.'
'As you've seen,' Jazz told him, 'I'm not one of them. And in any case, I don't think any, er, hell-lander, would side with the Wamphyri of his own free will.'
Lardis took Jazz aside, guided him toward a spot where a party of men sat forlornly on broken boulders, heads hanging low. Around them stood a guard composed of Lardis's men. The ones who were seated had been Arlek's followers; Jazz recognized several faces. As Jazz and Lardis approached, the captives hung their heads lower still. Lardis scowled at them, said: 'Arlek would have given you to the Wamphyri Lord Shaithis. But he was a great coward, and he coveted the leadership of the tribe. You've seen the fire burning there?'
Jazz nodded. 'Zek told me what you'd do,' he said.
'Zek?' Lardis's smile faded a little. 'Did you know her before? Did you come to seek her out and take her back?'
'I came because I had no choice,' Jazz answered, 'not because of Zek. I had heard something of her; we'd never met, not until now. Back in our own world, our people are… not friends.'
'But here you're both hell-landers, strangers in a strange world. It draws you together.' Lardis's assessment was fairly accurate.
Jazz shrugged. 'I suppose it does.' He looked straight into Lardis's face. 'Will you make Zek an issue?'
Lardis's expression didn't change. 'No,' he said. 'She's a free woman. I have no time for small things. The tribe is my main concern. I have had thoughts about Zekintha, but… she would be too much of a distraction. Anyway, I fancy she'd rather be friend and adviser than wife. Also, she's a hell-lander. A man shouldn't get too close to something he doesn't understand.'
Jazz smiled. 'The place you call the hell-lands is very large, with many people of diverse cultures. It's a strange place, but hardly the hell you seem to imagine it to be.'
Lardis raised his eyebrows, thought about what Jazz had said. 'Zekintha says much the same thing,' he said. 'She's told me a great deal about it: weapons greater than all the Wamphyri war-beasts put together; a continent of black people dying in their thousands, of disease and starvation; wars in every corner of your world, men against men; machines that think and run and fly, all filled with fire and smoke and a terrible roaring. It sounds close enough to hell to me!'
Jazz laughed out loud. 'Put it that way and you could be right!' he said. He had kept his SMG, whose strap he now adjusted where it crossed his shoulder. Lardis glanced at the weapon, said:
'Your… gun? The same as Zekintha's. I saw her kill a bear with it. The bear had more holes than a fishing net! Now it is broken, but she still carries it.'
'It can be repaired,' Jazz told him. 'I'll do it as soon as I have the time. But your people understand metal. It surprises me no one has tried to fix it.'
'Because they're afraid of it,' Lardis admitted. 'Me too! They're noisy things, these guns…'
Jazz nodded his agreement. 'But noise doesn't kill the Wamphyri,' he said.
Lardis grasped upon that, became excited as a child. 'I heard the chattering of it, echoing up the pass! Did you really strike at Shaithis?'
'At close range, too.' Jazz smiled wryly, ' — for all the good it did! I put a good many holes in their flyers, and a few in them, too, I think — but it didn't stop them.'
'Better than nothing!' Lardis slapped his shoulder. 'Their wounds will take time to heal. Give the vampires in them something to do. Keep them out of mischief a while!' Then he grew thoughtful again. 'These men,' he scowled at the seated group of unfortunates, 'were Arlek's followers. If they'd had their way you'd be vampire-fodder by now. With your gun, you could kill them all as easy as that!' He snapped his fingers.
Zek had followed on behind; she heard what Lardis said and her eyes went very wide. The men Lardis had been speaking about had also heard him (he'd ensured that they had); they straightened up where they sat, their faces suddenly gaunt and full of apprehension.
Jazz looked at them, remembered how a few of them had seemed ill at ease with some of Arlek's ideas and actions. 'Arlek made fools of them,' he answered Lardis. 'Great fools. And you weren't here to set it right. He was a coward, as you've said; he needed others to lend his opinions strength. These are the ones who were foolish enough to listen to him. Obviously they wish they hadn't. But you punish traitors, not fools.'
Lardis glanced at Zek, grinned. 'It might have been me speaking,' he said; and she relaxed and took a deep breath. 'On the other hand,' Lardis continued, 'one of these men struck you from behind. Don't you feel any anger toward that one?'
Jazz touched the tender bump behind his ear. 'Some,' he admitted. 'But not enough to want to kill him. I could teach him a lesson, perhaps?' He wondered what Lardis was after. Obviously he'd heard how Jazz had dispatched Arlek. Maybe he wanted to see his fighting skills at first hand. It would be a bonus for the tribe to have a man who could teach them or at least introduce superior fighting skills.
'You want to teach him a lesson?' Lardis grinned. Jazz had guessed right. Now Lardis walked among the seated men, pushing them left and right off their boulder seats, roughly away from him as he poured his silent scorn on them. 'Which one of you struck him?' he demanded.
A young man, muscular, nervous-looking, slowly stood up. Lardis pointed to an area of flat ground fairly clear of rocks. 'Over there,' he growled.
'Wait!' Jazz came forward. 'Let's at least make it a match. He doesn't stand a chance on his own. Does he have a friend? A close friend?'
Lardis raised his expressive eyebrows, shrugged. He scowled at the youth. 'Well, do you? Unlikely, I should think.'
Another young man, burlier, craggier, less apprehensive, got to his feet. As he joined the first on the open ground, Jazz thought: deal with you first! Out loud he said: 'That should do it.' He made sure his SMG was on safe and handed it to Lardis — who accepted it gingerly and held it awkwardly.p>
Jazz approached his two opponents. 'Whenever you're ready,' he said casually. 'Unless you haven't the guts for it, in which case you can get down on your knees and kiss my boots!' The last was a deliberate ploy — to goad them into speedy action, cause them to lose their self-control.
Which it did!
They looked at each other, their chests filled out, and they charged like young bulls. And almost as wildly.
Jazz had determined to put on a show for Lardis. He avoided the rush of the man who'd clubbed him, delivered a slicing rabbit punch to his neck as he flew past. Not sufficient to put him out of the fight — not yet — but just hard enough to send him dazed and sprawling to the hard ground. The second man, sturdier and a shade more wary, swerved his body and threw himself into a dive, rolling to knock Jazz's feet out from under him. The plan failed as Jazz leaped high, avoiding his tumbling body, then stepped in close as the clever one sprang to his feet. He offered a feint, telegraphing a blow to his opponent's face. The other saw it coming, snatched the top half of his body back out of harm's way — which left his lower half not only exposed but proffered. Jazz kicked him smartly in the groin; but again, not hard enough to cripple him, sufficient only to make him curl up and drop like a stone.
The first one, groggy but game, was back on his feet. He'd picked up a jagged rock, now commenced circling Jazz while looking for an opening. Jazz was long-legged and knew that in certain circumstances the reach of his legs was greater than that of his arms — and in any case, this was no boxing match. He half-turned from the man with the rock, who at once stepped forward. But as Jazz turned away, so he bent his body sh
arply forward and downward from the waist, lifting and lashing out with his right foot. The move was so fast and so alien to any of the other's previous fighting experience that he seemed hardly aware of its offensive character at all! But suddenly his arm was numb and the rock had been kicked from his grasp. Still in fluid motion, Jazz straightened up, continued his turn through its natural circle, and sliced the other stiff-fingered across the Adam's apple. And again he pulled his punch.
Then he fell into a defensive crouch, looking to see what damage he'd done. And finally he relaxed, straightened up, stepped back and folded his arms.
Both opponents were on the ground, one clutching his groin and groaning, rocking himself to and fro, and the other choking, sucking at the air, massaging his throat. They'd recover soon enough, but it would be a long time before they'd forget.
For a moment there was a stunned silence, then Lardis began clapping his hands in spontaneous applause. Many of the men with him followed suit, but not Arlek's ex-gang. They sat very quietly, looking anywhere except at Jazz. To them he offered: 'Well, is there anyone else would like to try me?' But there were no takers.
'I leave their punishment to you, Jazz,' Lardis shouted. 'What shall be done with them?'
'You've shamed them enough,' Jazz answered. 'Arlek had his warnings, which he failed to heed. He's paid for that. Now these men have been warned. If it's my choice, then I say leave it at that.'
'Good!' Lardis barked his agreement.
Men at once stepped forward to help their two fallen colleagues to their feet. One of them was a mirror-bearer; he carefully laid his mirror down as he stooped to assist the man with the bruised throat. Jazz glanced at the large oval mirror where it lay face-down, then looked again — then pounced on it.' What?' he gasped. 'What in all the — ?'
Zek had been moving toward him. Now she came flying. 'Jazz, what is it?'
'Lardis,' he called out, ignoring her for the moment. 'Lardis, where did you get these mirrors?' And suddenly, quite out of character, his voice had a breathless, unbelieving quality.
Lardis came over. He was grinning ear to ear. 'My new weapons!' he answered, with something of pride. 'I went to seek out the Dweller — and found him! As a sign of our friendship, he gave me these. Fortunate for you that he did…'
Jazz picked up the mirror, stared incredulously at its backing. 'Fortunate indeed!' he finally got the words out. 'Maybe in more ways than you know.' He licked his lips, looked at Zek for her confirmation that his eyes weren't playing games with him.
She looked at what he held in his suddenly trembling hands and her jaw dropped. 'My God!' she said, very faintly.
For the mirror was unmistakably backed with chipboard, to which some Traveller had attached leather straps. What was more, it bore a manufacturer's label, carrying the embossed legend:
MADE IN THE DDR.
KURT GEMMLER UND SOHN,
GUMMERSTR.,
EAST BERLIN.
14. Taschenka — Harry's Quest — The Trek Begins
Taschenka Tassi' Kirescu was nineteen, small and slim, completely unpolitical and very frightened.
Her skin was a little darker than that of the rest of her family; her eyes were large and very slightly tilted in an oval face; her hair was black and shiny to match her eyes, and she wore it in braids. Tassi's father, Kazimir, whom she hadn't seen since the night they were arrested, had used to explain jokingly that she was a throwback. There's Mongol blood in you, girl,' he'd told her, his eyes sparkling. 'Blood of the great Khans who came this way all of those hundreds of years ago. Either that… or I don't know your mother as well as I think I do!' Following which Anna, Tassi's mother, would invariably sputter furiously and chase him with whatever she could lay her hands on.
That, of course, had been in the good times, all of a few weeks ago, which now felt like several centuries.
Tassi had known nothing of Mikhail Simonov's real reason for coming to Yelizinka in the Ural foothills; the story she'd heard was that he was a city boy who'd been something of a wild one, that he'd always been getting himself into one sort of trouble or another, until finally he'd been sent logging as a punishment, a penance guaranteed to cool him off. Well, places didn't come much cooler than Yelizinka, not in the winter, anyway; but Tassi wasn't at all sure that Mikhail's blood had been cooled by it. In fact they'd very quickly become lovers, in a strange sort of way. Strange because he'd always been quick to warn her that it couldn't last, and that therefore she mustn't fall in love with him; strange, too, in that she'd felt exactly the same way about it: he'd serve his time here and wipe his record clean, and then he'd move on, probably back to the city, Moscow, and she would find herself a husband from the logging communities around.
The attraction had been the loneliness she'd felt in him, and a contradictory bowstring tension lying just beneath the surface of him. For his part: once, in a dreamy, faraway moment, he'd told her that she was the only real thing in his life right now, that sometimes he felt the entire world and his place in it were just an enormous fantasy. And now she'd been told that he was a foreign spy, which to Tassi had seemed like the greatest possible fantasy — at first. But that had been before they took her down into the Perchorsk Projekt.
Since then… everything had turned into a real fantasy, a horror story, a living nightmare.
Her father had been incarcerated in the cell next door to hers and she knew he had been tortured on a number of occasions. She'd heard it all coming right through the sheet-steel walls. The hoarse, terrified panting, the sharp slapping sounds, his anguished cries for mercy. But there'd been precious little of that last. Then, three days ago, there'd been one especially bad session; in the middle of it, at its height, the old man had screamed… and then, he'd stopped screaming — abruptly. Since when Tassi had heard nothing from him at all.
She couldn't even bear to think what might have happened; she hoped the silence meant that her father was now in a hospital somewhere, recovering; she prayed that's what it meant, anyway.
Almost as bad had been Major Khuv's questioning. The KGB Major had not once laid a hand on her, but she'd had the suspicion that if he did he would hurt her terribly. The awful thing was that she didn't have — didn't know — anything to tell him. If she had then fear on its own would have obliged her to tell it, or if not fear certainly the desire to stop them hurting her father.
And then there had been the beast Vyotsky. Tassi hadn't stood so much in fear of that one as in horror of him. And she had sensed — had known instinctively — that he enjoyed her horror, feeding upon it like a ghoul on rotting flesh! There had been little or nothing sexual about his treatment of her that time when he'd had her photographed naked with him. It had all been done for effect: partly to shame her, underline her vulnerability and make her feel the lowest of the low; partly to show her the power of her tormentor — that he could strip her naked, leer at her and paw her body, while she was incapable of lifting a ringer to stop him — but mainly to aid him in the mental torture of someone else. The sadist Vyotsky had told her that the photographs were for the 'benefit' of the British spy, Michael Simmons, whom she had known as Mikhail Simonov: 'to drive the poor bastard out of his mind!' Plainly the idea had delighted Vyotsky. 'He thinks he's so cool — hah.r he'd said. 'If this doesn't get him boiling, then nothing will!'
The KGB bully was quite mad, Tassi was sure. Even though he hadn't been back to torment her for quite some time now, still she would freeze whenever she heard someone approaching the door of her cell; and if the footsteps should pause… then her breathing would go ragged at once, and her poor heart begin beating that much faster.
It had started to beat that way just a little while ago, but on this occasion her visitor was only Vyotsky's superior officer, Major Khuv.
Only Major Khuv! Tassi thought, as the suave KGB officer entered her cell. That was a laugh! But she wasn't even close to laughing as he cuffed her wrist to his own, then told her:
Taschenka, my dear. I want to show you
something. It's something I feel you really ought to see before I question you again at any great length. You'll understand why soon enough.'
Stumbling along behind him, she made no effort to even guess where he was taking her. Essentially a peasant girl, to her the Projekt was a maze, a nightmare labyrinth of steel and concrete. Her claustrophobia had so disoriented her that she was lost from the first step she took across the threshold of her cell.
'Tassi,' Khuv murmured, leading her on through the almost deserted, dimly lit night corridors, 'I want you to think very carefully. Much more carefully than you've been thinking so far. And if there's anything at all you can tell me about the subversive activities of your brother, your father, the people of Yelizinka in general — and in particular about the underground, anti-Soviet organization to which any or all of them belonged… I mean, this really is going to be your last chance, Tassi.'
'Major,' she gasped the word out, 'sir, I know nothing of any of these things. If my father was what you say he was — '
'Oh, he was,' Khuv glanced at her and nodded gravely. 'You may be sure that… he was!'
It was the way he said the last word, its ominous emphasis. And in a moment it had Tassi's free hand flying to her mouth. 'What… what have you done to him?' Her question was the merest whisper.
They had arrived at a door bearing a legend familiar to Khuv but one which Tassi had never seen before. She only glanced at it; it said something about a keeper and security classified persons only. Using his plastic ID tag, and as the door's mechanisms were activated, Khuv turned to Tassi and answered her question:
'Done to him? To your father? Me? I have done nothing! He did it all himself — with his refusal to cooperate. A very stubborn man, Kazimir Kirescu…'
The door opened with a click. Khuv held it open a crack, called out: 'Vasily, is all in order?'