This whole lunch was a waste of time. I was tired of listening to them, and felt an intense urge to get back to work. A couple of quick stings distracted them both: I had the advantage of surprise. I ate some more honey and quickly waxed them over. They were soon hibernating side by side in two large octagonal cells.
I looked around the restaurant. People were rather nervously pretending not to have noticed. I called the waiter over and handed him my credit card. He signaled to several bus boys, who brought a covered cart and took Greg and David away. “They’ll eat themselves out of that by Thursday afternoon,” I told him. “Store them on their sides in a warm, dry place, away from direct heat.” I left a large tip.
I walked back to the office, feeling a bit ashamed of myself. A couple days of hibernation weren’t going to make Greg or David more sympathetic to my problems. And they’d be real mad when they got out.
I didn’t used to do things like that. I used to be more patient, didn’t I? More appreciative of the diverse spectrum of human possibility. More interested in sex and television.
This job was not doing much for me as a warm, personable human being. At the very least, it was turning me into an unpleasant lunch companion. Whatever had made me think I wanted to get into management anyway?
The money, maybe.
But that wasn’t all. It was the challenge, the chance to do something new, to control the total effort instead of just doing part of a project …
The money too, though. There were other ways to get money. Maybe I should just kick the supports out from under the damned job and start over again.
I saw myself sauntering into Tom’s office, twirling his visitor’s chair around and falling into it. The words “I quit” would force their way out, almost against my will. His face would show surprise—feigned, of course. By then I’d have to go through with it. Maybe I’d put my feet up on his desk. And then—
But was it possible to just quit, to go back to being the person I used to be? No, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I’d never be a management virgin again.
I walked up to the employee entrance at the rear of the building. A suction device next to the door sniffed at me, recognized my scent, and clicked the door open. Inside, a group of new employees, trainees, were clustered near the door, while a personnel officer introduced them to the lock and let it familiarize itself with their pheromones.
On the way down the hall, I passed Tom’s office. The door was open. He was at his desk, bowed over some papers, and looked up as I went by.
“Ah, Margaret,” he said. “Just the person I want to talk to. Come in for a minute, would you.” He moved a large file folder onto the papers in front of him on his desk, and folded his hands on top of them. “So glad you were passing by.” He nodded toward a large, comfortable chair. “Sit down.
“We’re going to be doing a bit of restructuring in the department,” he began, “and I’ll need your input, so I want to fill you in now on what will be happening.”
I was immediately suspicious. Whenever Tom said, “I’ll need your input,” he meant everything was decided already.
“We’ll be reorganizing the whole division, of course,” he continued, drawing little boxes on a blank piece of paper. He’d mentioned this at the department meeting last week.
“Now, your area subdivides functionally into two separate areas, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well—”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, nodding his head as though in agreement. “That would be the way to do it.” He added a few lines and a few more boxes. From what I could see, it meant that Harry would do all the interesting stuff, and I’d sweep up afterwards.
“Looks to me as if you’ve cut the balls out of my area and put them over into Harry Winthrop’s,” I said.
“Ah, but your area is still very important, my dear. That’s why I don’t have you actually reporting to Harry.” He gave me a smile like a lie.
He had put me in a tidy little bind. After all, he was my boss. If he was going to take most of my area away from me, as it seemed he was, there wasn’t much I could do to stop him. And I would be better off if we both pretended that I hadn’t experienced any loss of status. That way I kept my title and my salary.
“Oh, I see,” I said. “Right.”
It dawned on me that this whole thing had been decided already, and that Harry Winthrop probably knew all about it. He’d probably even wangled a raise out of it. Tom had called me in here to make it look casual, to make it look as though I had something to say about it. I’d been set up.
This made me mad. There was no question of quitting now. I’d stick around and fight. My eyes blurred, unfocused, refocused again. Compound eyes! The promise of the small comb in my hand was fulfilled! I felt a deep chemical understanding of the ecological system I was now a part of. I knew where I fit in. And I knew what I was going to do. It was inevitable now, hardwired in at the DNA level.
The strength of this conviction triggered another change in the chitin, and for the first time I could actually feel the rearrangement of my mouth and nose, a numb tickling like inhaling seltzer water. The stiletto receded and mandibles jutted forth, rather like Katharine Hepburn. Form and function achieved an orgasmic synchronicity. As my jaw pushed forward, mantis-like, it also opened, and I pounced on Tom and bit his head off.
He leaped from his desk and danced headless about the office.
I felt in complete control of myself as I watched him and continued the conversation. “About the Model 2000 launch,” I said. “If we factor in the demand for pipeline throughput and adjust the media mix just a bit, I think we can present a very tasty little package to Product Marketing by the end of the week.”
Tom continued to strut spasmodically, making vulgar copulative motions. Was I responsible for evoking these mantid reactions? I was unaware of a sexual component in our relationship.
I got up from the visitor’s chair and sat behind his desk, thinking about what had just happened. It goes without saying that I was surprised at my own actions. I mean, irritable is one thing, but biting people’s heads off is quite another. But I have to admit that my second thought was, well, this certainly is a useful strategy, and should make a considerable difference in my ability to advance myself. Hell of a lot more productive than sucking people’s blood.
Maybe there was something after all to Tom’s talk about having the proper attitude.
And, of course, thinking of Tom, my third reaction was regret. He really had been a likeable guy, for the most part. But what’s done is done, you know, and there’s no use chewing on it after the fact.
I buzzed his assistant on the intercom. “Arthur,” I said, “Mr. Samson and I have come to an evolutionary parting of the ways. Please have him re-engineered. And charge it to Personnel.”
Now I feel an odd itching on my forearms and thighs. Notches on which I might fiddle a song?
TANITH LEE
Northern Chess
Tanith Lee is a highly respected English writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, with over seventy novels and hundreds of short stories to her credit. She has been a regular contributor over many years to Weird Tales magazine. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Nebula Award multiple times. “Northern Chess” is great example of how a traditional sword and sorcery tale can surprise and subvert, and features an early strong female character in a subgenre not known for such characters at the time. It was first published in Women as Demons in 1979.
Sky and land had the same sallow bluish tinge, soaked in cold light from a vague white sun. It was late summer, but summer might never have come here. The few trees were bare of leaves and birds. The cindery grassless hills rolled up and down monotonously. Their peaks gleamed dully, their dips were full of mist. It was a land for sad songs and dismal rememberings. and, when the night came, for nightmares and hallucinations.
Fifteen miles back, Jaisel’s horse had died. Not for any apparent cause. It had bee
n healthy and active when she rode from the south on it, the best the dealer had offered her, though he had tried to cheat her in the beginning. She was aiming to reach a city in the far north, on the sea coast there, but not for any particular reason. She had fallen into the casual habit of the wandering adventurer. Destination was an excuse, never a goal. And when she saw the women at their looms or in their greasy kitchens, or tangled with babies, or broken with field work, or leering out of painted masks from shadowy town doorways, Jaisel’s urge to travel, to ride, to fly, to run away, increased. Generally she was running from something in fact as well as in the metaphysical. The last city she had vacated abruptly, having killed two footpads who had jumped her in the street. One had turned out to be a lordling, who had taken up robbery and rape as a hobby. In those parts, to kill a lord, with whatever justice, meant hanging and quartering. So Jaisel departed on her new horse, aiming for a city in the north. And in between had come this bleak northern empty land where her mount collapsed slowly under her and died without warning. Where the streams tasted bitter and the weather looked as if it wished to snow in summer.
She had seen only ruins. Only a flock of grayish wild sheep materialized from mist on one hand and plunged away into mist on the other. Once she heard a raven cawing. She was footsore and growing angry, with the country, with herself, and with God. While her saddle and pack gained weight on her shoulders with every mile.
Then she reached the top of one of the endless slopes, looked over and saw something new.
Down in a pool of the yellowish-bluish mist lay a village. Primitive and melancholy it was, but alive, for smokes spiraled from roof-holes, drifting into the cloudless sky. Mournful and faint, too, there came the lowing of cattle. Beyond the warren of cots, a sinister unleafed spider web of trees. Beyond them, barely seen, transparent in mist, something some distance away, a mile perhaps—a tall piled hill, or maybe a stony building of bizarre and crooked shape …
Jaisel started and her eyes refocused on the closer vantage of the village and the slope below.
The fresh sound was unmistakable: jingle-jangle of bells on the bridles of war horses. The sight was exotic, also, unexpected here. Two riders on steel-blue mounts, the scarlet caparisons flaming up through the quarter-tone atmosphere like bloody blades. And the shine of mail, the blink of gems.
“Render your name!” one of the two knights shouted.
She half smiled, visualizing what they would see, what they would assume, the surprise in store.
“My name is Jaisel,” she shouted back.
And heard them curse.
“What sort of a name is that, boy?”
Boy. Yes, and not the only time.
She started to walk down the slope toward them.
And what they had supposed to be a boy from the top of the incline, gradually resolved itself into the surprise. Her fine flaxen hair was certainly short as a boy’s, somewhat shorter. A great deal shorter than the curled manes of knights. Slender in her tarnished chain mail, with slender strong hands dripping with frayed frosty lace at the wrists. The white lace collar lying out over the mail with dangling drawstrings each ornamented by a black pearl. The left ear-lobe pierced and a gold sickle moon flickering sparks from it under the palely electric hair. The sword belt was gray leather, worn and stained. Dagger on right hip with a fancy gilt handle, thin sword on left hip, pommel burnished by much use. A girl knight with intimations of the reaver, the showman, and, (for what it was worth), the prince.
When she was close enough for the surprise to have commenced, she stopped and regarded the two mounted knights. She appeared gravely amused, but really the joke had palled by now. She had had twelve years to get bored with it. And she was tired, and still angry with God.
“Well,” one of the knights said at last, “it takes all kinds to fill the world. But I think you’ve mistaken your road, lady.”
He might mean an actual direction. He might mean her mode of living.
Jaisel kept quiet, and waited. Presently the second knight said chillily: “Do you know of this place? Understand where you are?”
“No,” she said. “It would be a courteous kindness if you told me.”
The first knight frowned. “It would be a courteous kindness to send you home to your father, your husband and your children.”
Jaisel fixed her eyes on him. One eye was a little narrower than the other. This gave her face a mocking, witty slant.
“Then, sir,” she said, “send me. Come. I invite you.”
The first knight gesticulated theatrically.
“I am Renier of Towers,” he said. “I don’t fight women.”
“You do,” she said. “You are doing it now. Not successfully.”
The second knight grinned; she had not anticipated that.
“She has you, Renier. Let her be. No girl travels alone like this one, and dressed as she is, without skills to back it. Listen, Jaisel. This land is cursed. You’ve seen, the life’s sucked out of it. The village here. Women and beasts birth monsters. The people fall sick without cause. Or with some cause. There was an alchemist who claimed possession of this region. Maudras. A necromancer, a worshipper of old unholy gods. Three castles of his scabbed the countryside between here and Towers in the west. Those three are no more—taken and razed. The final castle is here, a mile off to the northeast. If the mist would lift, you might see it. The Prince of Towers means to expunge all trace of Maudras from the earth. We are the prince’s knights, sent here to deal with the fourth castle as with the rest.”
“And the castle remains untaken,” said Renier. “Months we’ve sat here in this unwholesome plague-ridden wilderness.”
“Who defends the castle?’ Jaisel asked. “Maudras himself?”
“Maudras was burned in Towers a year ago,” the second knight said. “His familiar, or his curse, holds the castle against God’s knights.” His face was pale and grim. Both knights indeed were alike in that. But Renier stretched his mouth and said to her sweetly: “Not a spot for a maid. A camp of men. A haunted castle in a blighted country. Better get home.”
“I have no horse,” said Jaisel levelly. “But coins to buy one.”
“We’ve horses and to spare,” said the other knight. “Dead men don’t require mounts. I am called Cassant. Vault up behind me and I’ll bring you to the camp.”
She swung up lightly, despite the saddle and pack on her shoulders.
Renier watched her, sneering, fascinated.
As they turned the horses’ heads into the lake of mist, he rode near and murmured: “Beware, lady. The women in the village are sickly and revolting. A knight’s honor may be forgotten. But probably you have been raped frequently.”
“Once,” she said, “ten years back. I was his last pleasure. I dug his grave myself, being respectful of the dead.” She met Renier’s eyes again and added gently, “and when I am in the district I visit his grave and spit on it.”
The mist was denser below than Jaisel had judged from the slope. In the village a lot was hidden, which was maybe as well. At a turning among the cots she thought she spied a forlorn hunched-over woman, leading by a tether a shadowy animal, which seemed to be a cow with two heads.
They rode between the trees and out the other side, and piecemeal the war camp of Towers evolved through the mist. Blood-blotch red banners hung lankly; the ghosts of tents clawed with bright heraldics that penetrated the obscurity. Horses puffed breath like dragon-smoke at their pickets. A couple of Javelot-cannon emplacements, the bronze tubes sweating on their wheels, the javelins stacked by, the powder casks wrapped in sharkskin but probably damp.
At this juncture, suddenly the mist unravelled. A vista opened away from the camp for two hundred yards northeast, revealing the castle of the necromancer-alchemist, Maudras.
It reared up, stark and peculiar against a tin-colored sky.
The lower portion was carved from the native rock-base of a conical hill. This rose into a plethora of walls and craning, squinnying towe
rs, that seemed somehow like the petrification of a thing once unnaturally growing. A causeway flung itself up the hill and under an arched doormouth, barricaded by iron.
No movements were discernible on battlements or roofs. No pennant flew. The castle had an aura of the tomb. Yet not necessarily a tomb of the dead.
It was the camp which had more of the feel of a mortuary about it. From an oblique quarter emanated groanings. Where men were to be found outside the tents, they crouched listlessly over fires. Cook-pots and heaps of accoutrements plainly went unattended. By a scarlet pavilion two knights sat at chess. The game was sporadic and violent and seemed likely to end in blows.
Cassant drew rein a space to the side of the scarlet pavilion, whose cloth was blazoned with three gold turrets—the insignia of Towers. A boy ran to take charge of the horse as its two riders dismounted. But Renier remained astride his horse, staring at Jaisel. Soon he announced generally, in a herald’s carrying tone: “Come, gentlemen, welcome a new recruit. A peerless knight. A damsel in breeches.”
All around, heads lifted. A sullen interest bloomed over the apathy of the camp: the slurred spiteful humor of men who were ill, or else under sentence of execution. They began to get up from the pallid fires and shamble closer. The fierce knights paused and gazed arrogantly across with extravagant oaths.
“Mistress, you’re in for trouble,” said Cassant ruefully. “But be fair, he warned you of it.”
Jaisel shrugged. She glanced at Renier, nonchalantly posed on the steel-blue horse, right leg loose of the stirrup now and hooked across the saddle-bow. At ease, malevolently, he beamed at her. Jaisel slipped the gaudy dagger from her belt, let him catch the flash of the gilt, then tossed it at him. The little blade, with its wasp-sting point, sang through the air, singeing the hairs on his right cheek. It buried itself, where she had aimed it, in the picket post behind him. But Renier, reacting to the feint as she had intended, lunged desperately aside for the sake of his pretty face, took all his own weight on the yet-stirruped leg and off the free one, unbalanced royally, and plunged crashing to the ground. At the same instant, fully startled, the horse tried to rear. Still left-leggedly trapped in the stirrup, Renier of Towers went slithering through the hot ashes of a fire.
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