Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  He passed a little man in grey rags, who carried a striped paper lantern over his shoulder on a long stick, and touched the man’s arm, saying, “Nain?”

  The man smiled at him and nodded up the street, indicating a turn at the next corner. Boyce thanked him in English, grinned to himself to hear how fantastic the familiar tongue sounded in this dim, wet street, and went on.

  Twice more he asked his way, once of a grim-faced woman wearing a horned helmet and a green velvet robe that swept the ground, once of a man in armor whose plates glinted like mirrors in the light of the colored lanterns. On the third try, he found the temple he sought.

  It was a big stone building, lightless, without windows, standing in the center of a square. The streets parted around it, flowing noisily with colorful crowds, but the temple of Nain maintained its austere silence even in the midst of that rioting crowd.

  Boyce climbed the grey stone steps and paused under the archway at their top to look down a long room that twinkled around its walls with row upon mounting row of colored globes, thousands upon thousands of them, each burning in its paper lantern upon shelves that lined the walls. There were others here, a throng as motley as the street crowds, strolling and whispering through the big empty room. If there were ceremonies in honor of Nain, evidently they had not yet begun.

  Boyce went straight down the room toward a translucent wall at the far end. Guillaume had said there was a magical tree growing there. He found it was a tree of glass, espaliered flat against the crystal wall. Clusters of luminous, richly colored fruit dangled within the worshiper’s reach.

  Calmly Boyce reached up and pulled a round blue fruit the size and shape of a pear. It vibrated in his hand for a moment, as alive and resilient as something of blown glass. Then there was a tiny exploding sound and the fruit vanished, leaving only a drop of blue moisture in his palm.

  Someone touched his arm from behind. He whirled a little too quickly. It was a brown girl, barefooted, bare limbed, with gold bands on her wrists and ankles and a heavy gold collar locked around her throat.

  She said, “Come,” in the old French, spoken with an accent that might be the City patois, and led him back down the room toward a side door. They came out upon another street, lined with great crouching stone beasts that shone with the moisture of the fog.

  The beasts had lanterns around their necks and the crowd went by under their stone jowls in the swinging light of the lamps. The brown girl beckoned to Boyce and then hurried down the steps on soundless bare feet and plunged into the throng.

  There was something wrong with this crowd. He was not sure just what, but he saw how the people kept glancing over their shoulders uneasily. Their noise was a little hysterical now. Sometimes they looked up, into the misty sky, and presently Boyce heard a thin, shrill keening overhead that was louder than the noise of the crowd, and grew louder still as he paused to listen.

  The effect upon the people was electrical. Faces turned up, suddenly pale in the uncertain light of the lanterns. There was a little echoing moan that seemed to run like a breeze over the whole crowd, a sound coming in one breath from every throat there. And then, like magic, the crowd began to melt away.

  DOORS opened all along the street to receive them. Here and there someone beat impatiently at closed panels, calling in a low voice to those within. No one called loudly. It seemed to Boyce that within a moment after the first shrilling sounded from overhead, there was no one left upon the street.

  The bright crowd had scurried by under the stone images and then, in a twinkling, the wet street was empty except for a straggler or two who glanced curiously at Boyce standing there alone and then vanished into the nearest shelter.

  There was a patter of feet on stone. Boyce looked down. The brown girl was motioning impatiently to him.

  “Come,” she said urgently. “Come—hurry! There’s no time!”

  He went uncertainly toward her over the wet pavement. It was not fast enough to suit his guide. She swooped down on him, seized his arm and pulled him along at a run toward a door behind one of the stone beasts.

  “What is it?” Boyce demanded. “I don’t understand—”

  “They come,” the girl said. “Hurry! In here—quick, before They reach this street!”

  The door creaked on its hinges. Within was darkness and Boyce remembered Guillaume’s warning to go carefully. He held back a little, not sure whether it would be more dangerous to enter or to stay outside.

  Then from the street before him a little breath of cold air blew past, fluttering his cloak. It was a cold that seared like heat. And terror came with it—terror and such a revulsion as he had not known since the moment in the fog when he first came to this land and saw from a hilltop the dark procession winding down toward the City gates.

  It was They indeed—those who walked among a twinkle of lights and a twinkle of tiny bells and a cloud of darkness that veiled them mercifully from sight. They who went upright like men, and were not men—They whom he knew he had seen once with the woman whose name and face he could not remember—or forget.

  The old sickness came over him when he thought of Them. He turned swiftly and stumbled down three steps and fell against the door the brown girl held for him. He was shaking hard. He felt the cold burning down the street as the door shut behind him, heard the first thin tinkling of the bells. And the high shrilling from overhead was like a ringing in the ears, maddening, impossible to shake away.

  The door shut out most of the noise. It was dark now, but a firm hand took his elbow and he hurried down an unseen hall beside the pattering steps of his guide.

  What kind of a woman is it I’m hunting? he wondered, when all I know about her is that she once went familiarly with Them?

  “The King summoned Them again,” the girl in the dark beside him volunteered, speaking in her strangely accented patois. “There must be strange things happening among the tents tonight. A rumor is that the lords have attacked that castle in the mountains you can sometimes see from our walls.”

  So there was some connection, then, Boyce thought. Perhaps at last the pattern was beginning to click into place, and his own part in it might come clear.

  A door opened before him upon light and smoke and voices. The brown girl pushed him through.

  He saw first a lamp hanging from the center of the ceiling over a broad table. The table was tiled into intricate patterns, and some sort of game seemed to be in process upon it. A circle of men bent above the counters, their faces in shadow because of the hanging lamp.

  One of them was laughing and sweeping counters in. They were carved and jeweled pieces a little like chessmen, and each one rang with a different note when the players touched it.

  When the door opened there was a little hush and the men looked up.

  “The man from Nain’s temple,” the brown girl said.

  “You’re late,” one of the players declared. “Have you brought what you promised?”

  “Waste no time on him,” someone else urged in a belligerent voice. “He’s made us wait too long already. His stories are probably lies from the beginning. I say—waste no time.”

  Boyce looked at them blankly. Guillaume had not told him about this. The Crusader had been lying on the last brink of exhaustion and there were obviously things he was unable to recall. This must be one of them.

  Obviously Guillaume had been pretending to offer secrets for sale on the castle defense or Tancred’s strength or something else that the lords of the City would buy. Boyce felt a surge of anger and dismay. The risks were great enough, certainly, in his coming here at all, without walking into a trap unarmed and unwarned.

  There was only one course to take. He strode forward with Guillaume’s arrogant, rolling step and struck the table a blow that made all the counters jump on their squares and ring faintly together.

  “By all the gods!” he roared with Guillaume’s great bellow. “You’ll take what I give and wait my pleasure on it!”

  There was
an angry murmur around the table. Chairs scraped back across the tiled floor and one man rose and threw down the counter he had been holding. It rolled across the board, jingling as it went.

  “You speak with a big voice, for a traitor,” the man said. He was young, by his tone, and slender in an ankle-length robe of chain steel, slit on both sides above the knee to show red leather boots and red breeches. He carried two long daggers in his belt and his plumed hat’s brim dipped broadly down in front to shade his eyes.

  “Later we’ll brawl if you still want it Now you’ll give us your news if we have to tear it out of you.” He glanced around the table. “Many of us would rather take it that way. I would myself.” He laughed and laid both hands on his dagger-hilts.

  One of the others, a short broad man with flaming red hair, jumped to his feet and tossed back the purple cloak he wore to show the long barbed whip coiled like a belt about his thick waist.

  “Why should we pay the dog anything for his secrets?” he demanded in an unexpectedly high voice. “I know a way to make him howl! We’ll—”

  A white-haired man in a white fur cloak lifted his hand placatingly.

  “Friends, friends, be silent! Let the man speak.”

  “Let him lie, you mean,” the red-head said sullenly. “The last time we met him and his friend they promised us Kerak on a silver tray and that was the last we saw of them. They’ve had payment already for secrets they never told us. It was wonderful how fast they vanished once they got their hands on our silver.

  “Now this one comes back alone and talking as lordly as Jamai himself. How do we know where the other one is? Offering the same secrets to someone else who’ll get to Jamai before us—that’s my word on it. I’m finished. Deal with him as you will. I say—let him die.”

  BOYCE laughed contemptuously.

  “The least talk the loudest,” he said. “I’m back among you—isn’t that proof enough of good faith?”

  He wondered if it was. Evidently Guillaume and Godfrey had dealt with these men just before their capture by Jamai. And the story of that capture must be secret or he would not now be in danger for having disappeared without reason. Desperately he wondered what secrets Guillaume had meant to invent for them. If he could only have found Godfrey first.

  “Enough babble, enough!” the red-haired man broke in. “I want my own answer! Will you lead us by that secret way you spoke of, dog? That I’ve paid for and I demand your word on it. Are you ready to take us secretly to Kerak when our master gives the signal?”

  Recklessly Boyce said, “Yes!”

  There was a drawn breath all around the table. Then the white-haired man straightened in his chair and smiled. His face was in shadow, like all the rest, but Boyce could see the triumph on it.

  “Very well,” said the man. “That is good. We are ready—now!”

  The red-haired man laughed, seeing Boyce’s face.

  “We tricked you there! You were not expecting that. But we must go quickly, as soon as the streets have cleared.” He glanced involuntarily toward the door, and a shadow of pure revulsion touched his ruddy face.

  The white-robed man stood up.

  “No delay,” he said. “Or Jamai’s spies may warn him what we plan. Now as for the course we take—”

  Boyce was not listening. He knew he could not go through with it. Even if he were willing to play the traitor, he could not for he knew no secret ways into Kerak, if any such existed. Also, it was no part of his vague plan to leave the City now, just as he had entered it. There was Godfrey to be rescued, for one thing. And for another—he had not yet come any nearer to the girl in the iron crown.

  “Wait,” he said harshly. The men around the table were all on their feet now, tightening their belts, talking eagerly among themselves.

  They turned to him expectantly, suspicious eyes gleaming in the shadow.

  “This is beyond my bargain,” Boyce said. “I was not paid for such a risk as this. I’ll need more money.”

  “You were paid beyond your desserts the first time,” the red man began angrily. “You—”

  “I’ll be a masterless man when Kerak falls,” Boyce told them brazenly. “I must look out for myself then. I’ll need more silver for that.”

  Someone who had not yet spoken laughed in the shadows.

  “He betrays his lord for money and demands more because he’s masterless,” the new voice said. “I like this man, friends!” Boyce thought there had been something familiar in the voice and in the strange tone of the laughter. Later—if there was to be any such time as later for him—he would try to remember. Just now he had no time to spare.

  “More money or I go nowhere,” he said stubbornly.

  The red-haired man growled a curse in some odd language that sounded as if it had been made for curses. He took a purse from his belt reluctantly and threw it jingling on the table.

  “There, dog. Buy yourself a new master with that, then.”

  “Not enough!” Boyce sneered beneath his new moustache. “For alms like that I’d get no better man than you!”

  The red man laid a freckled paw upon his whip-belt. He snarled in his blasphemous language and Boyce thought for an instant the battle would begin there and then. But the snarl died. The man set his teeth grimly, took out another purse and flung it beside the first.

  “Dogs come high in this place,” he growled. “And now—”

  It was no use. They needed him too badly. Boyce would have to provoke them still farther before he could escape.

  “Money or no money,” he roared suddenly, “I’ll not lead you to Kerak, red-head! You stay behind or the bargain’s ended. I’ve taken a dislike to the color of your hair.”

  CHAPTER IX

  Escape by Water

  IN THE amazed silence, the young man in the chain mail laughed softly.

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “The fellow is trying to force a quarrel. He doesn’t mean to go at all!”

  For a moment, no one moved. Then the white-haired man with the gentle face tossed his cloak back over one shoulder.

  “I think—” he said quietly, “I think he had better die.”

  There was a quick, concerted motion in the room, and Boyce heard a sound he had never heard before—a curious metallic minor note all through the crowd. It was the whine of swords drawn simultaneously from their sheaths.

  The shadows were suddenly alive with the flash of bare blades. Boyce’s hand flew to his own belt and the light sword the Crusaders had given him leaped into his fist. But this was no magical blade. It was good, sharp, beautifully balanced, but he must fight this battle alone, without Tancred’s magic gripping the hilt of the sword he wielded.

  The red man bellowed once, a deep sound of pure fury, and his hand flashed toward his belt. There was a ripping sound as the barbed whip uncoiled and arched through the air like a serpent with fangs along its sides.

  “Now, dog—howl for your master!” His voice was choked with rage. The whip sang through the air and Boyce had an instant’s vision of his own face laid open to the bone as the lash fell.

  He leaped back, groping behind him for the door. His hand found it just as the whip fell. It fell so little short of his cheek that the wind of it fanned his mustache, and he could hear the vicious whine of the barbs along the edges of the lash singing in his ear.

  The door was locked.

  He heard the whip strike the floor at his feet with a metallic crash of jangled barbs. He heard the redhead’s sobbing breath of fury, saw him step back and brace his thick legs wide for a second try. He saw beyond the red man the flicker of nervous blades as the others crowded tensely forward, poised to close in if the whip should fail again.

  He saw the young man in chain mail, a dagger in each hand as long as a short sword, come lightly around the table toward him, walking as if on air, his whole body poised as lithely as the whip itself.

  Then again the lash sang. With the motion of a snake it arched backward and seemed to hang in midair
for a tense and singing moment. The red man’s wrist curved forward and so did the hanging whip.

  This time he could not avoid it. Boyce’s hack was against the door and the youngster in chain-mail barred the only other exit. He could feel his flesh crawl already in anticipation of that terrible clawed lash, and he knew there was no hope for him now. The adventure that had begun with the first of that lost year would end in this room with the ripping of his flesh from his bones, and he would never know the answers he had sought.

  In this last moment before the lash fell he had one vivid glimpse of a scene he had remembered only dimly before. He saw a crowned girl standing before a window as delicately crystalline as a snowflake’s pattern. He saw her very clearly in memory as she turned and glanced at him once across her shoulder. He saw her eyes bright with violet fire, and the whiteness of her smile and the deep crimson of her lips. He saw all the brilliance and the danger of that nearly forgotten face.

  And this time, in the stress of his danger, a name rose in his mind. He did not know if he whispered it aloud or not. It couldn’t matter. Nothing mattered now—not even the fact that he could speak her name—at last.

  “Irathe!” he said it to himself in a passion of fury and despair. “Irathe.”

  And then the whip came down.

  Laughter—familiar laughter—sounded again from the far side of the room. And beside him, just as he saw the lash’s tip leaping straight for his eyes, feet suddenly made a soft, quick thudding on the floor.

  Something dazzling shot past his face. Boyce braced himself for the impact of the whip. It took him a perceptible moment to realize that the barbed blow had not fallen. Dizzy with bewilderment and surprise, he fell back a pace to the right and stared, hearing a clang from the opposite wall.

  Before him on the floor lay the severed whip. A long dagger, bright in the lamplight, clattered across the floor and lay still. A thrown dagger that had flashed past his eyes to cut the whip in two.