Night & Demons (23 page)

“Siege armor?” the soldier suggested.

“Not siege armor,” Dama replied.
“
There were other plates too, some of them that he welded into tubes, singing all the time.”

The blond Cappadocian paused to finish his wine. He held out the cup to his host with a wan smile. “You may as well fill it again. I’m sweating it out faster than I drink it.”

He wiped his brow with a napkin and continued. “It was a funny household in other ways. Khusraw, his wife, and his son—a boy about eight or ten. You can’t really say with Persians. Those three and one slave boy I never heard to speak. No other servants in the house even though the woman looked like she was about to drop quints.

“I saw her close one day, trying to buy a sword for my foreman, seeing the way things were tending. Her belly looked wrong. It didn’t shift like it ought to when she moved and she didn’t seem to be carrying as much weight as if she were really pregnant. Padded or not, there was something strange about her.

“As for my own problem, that was decided the morning the Persians appeared. Oh, I know, you’ve fought them; but Lucius, you can’t imagine what they looked like stretched all across the horizon with the sun dazzling on their spearpoints and armor. Mithra! Even so, it didn’t seem too bad at first. The walls were strong and we were sure we could hold out until Ursicinius relieved us.”

Vettius made a guttural sound and stared at the table. Dama laid his hand on the big soldier’s forearm and said, “Lucius, you know I meant nothing against you or the army.”

Vettius looked up with a ghost of his old smile, “Yeah, I know you didn’t. No reason for me to be sensitive, anyhow. I didn’t give the orders.

“Or refuse to give them,” he added bitterly after a moment’s reflection. “Have some more wine and go on with your story.”

Dama drank and set his cup down empty. “Until things got really serious I spent most nights on my roof. Khusraw was working on a sword, now, and I forgot about the other stuff he had been forging. But everytime he had the metal beaten out into a flat blade he folded it back in on itself and started over.”

The soldier nodded in understanding, running his finger along the watermarked blade. The merchant shrugged.

“Very late one night I awakened. Khusraw stood beside the forge and that evil white light flared over the courtyard every time the bellows pulsed. Tied to the anvil was a half-filled grain sack. The only noise, though, was the thump of the bellows and perhaps a whisper of the words Khusraw was chanting, and I couldn’t figure out what had awakened me. Then another moan came from the house. That sound I knew—Khusraw’s wife was in labor and I thought I’d been wrong about her belly being padded.

“Out in the courtyard the smith laid one hand on the grain sack. With the other, all wrapped in hides, he took the blade out of the hearth. The slave let the bellows stop and for an instant I could see both pairs of eyes reflecting the orange steel of the sword. Then Khusraw stabbed it through the sack. There was a terrible scream—”

“I’ll bet there was!” Vettius interjected, his eyes glittering like citrines.

“—and inside the house the woman screamed too. Khusraw drew the blade out, half-quenched and barely visible, then plunged it back in. There was no scream but his wife’s, this time. The slave had fallen to his knees and was making gabbling noises. When the smith drove the sword into the sack a third time, the woman bawled in the last agony of birthing and there was a crash of metal so loud I thought a Persian catapult had hit Khusraw’s house. He ran inside shouting, ‘My son! My son!’ leaving the sword to lie crossways through that sack.”

Dama paused. Vettius tossed him a fresh napkin and poured out more wine. “His own son,” the soldier mused. “Strange. Maybe Romulus really did sacrifice his brother to make his city great the way the old legends say.”

The merchant gave him a strange smile and continued.
“
That was the last night I spent in the house. Our garrison was too worn down to hold out any longer and every able man in the city had to help on the walls.

“Seventy-three days,” Dama said, shaking his head.
“
It doesn’t sound like much to hold out, does it? Not in so strong a city. But there were so many Persians . . .

“No matter. The end came when a section of wall collapsed. The Persians didn’t bring it down, we did ourselves—built it too high and it toppled. We tried to mass in the breach as the Persians poured through.”

Dama paused with a wry grin. “Oh, you would have liked that, Lucius; the dust was sticky with blood. The armory had been buried when the wall fell and because the Persians were pushing us back, whenever a man lost his weapon he was out of the fight. I dodged out of the melee when my sword shattered on a shield boss. Then, when I had caught my breath I ran to Khusraw’s shop, thinking he might still have some weapons I could carry back to the fighting.

“The front of the shop was empty, so I burst into the back. The smith was alone, holding a slender box open on his lap. When he saw me he slammed the lid shut, but I’d already caught the glint of steel inside. ‘Give me the sword!’ I said. ‘No!’ he cried, ‘it’s for my son to carry to King Shapur.’ I grabbed the box, then, and knocked him down with my free hand. There was no time to talk and gods! but I was afraid.

“I tore the box open and drew this sword while Khusraw shouted something I didn’t understand. Something clanged in the inner room. I turned to see the door swing open, and then I knew what the smith had made of his forgings.

“It was about a man’s height, but from the way the ground shook there must have been twenty manloads of iron in it. I took a step back and the thing followed me. Even with the weight I might have thought it was a man in armor, but the eyes! They were little balls of cloudy orange. No one could have seen out through them, but they swiveled as I moved.

“I cut at the head of the . . . the iron man. The sword bounced off. As sharp as the blade was, it only scratched the thing. Khusraw was backed against the wall to my left. He began to cackle, but I couldn’t take my eyes off his creation long enough to deal with him.

“I thrust at the thing’s throat. The point caught where the neck joined that black iron skull, but I didn’t have enough strength to ram it home. Before I could recover, the iron man closed its hand over the blade. I yanked back and the sword shrieked out of its grip, slicing the metal fingers as neatly as it would have flesh.”

Dama laughed grimly and tossed down his wine.
“
I’ve mentioned how Khusraw was giggling at me? Well, he stopped then. He shouted, ‘Son!’ and jumped at me, just as his toy tried to smash me with its fist. I ducked and the steel hand caught Khusraw on the temple and slammed him into the wall. I tried to dodge through the door then, but my boot slipped in the blood. I scrambled clear of the thing’s foot, but it had me backed against the wall.

“I thrust again, at the face this time. The tip skidded into an eye socket without penetrating, and the weight of the iron drove the hilt against the wall behind me. The blade bent but the very weight on it held the hilt firm. Then, as the thing reached for my head, the swordpoint shifted and the blade sprang straight, driving itself through the skull. The remaining eye went black and the thing crashed to the floor.

“There wasn’t time to think then. I tugged the sword free and ran into the street to find the Persians had . . . well, the rest doesn’t matter, I suppose. I was one of the lucky ones who slipped out of the city that night.”

The soldier sighted down the length of the blade.
“
So your smith put his own son’s soul in the sword and it wrecked his machine for him,” he said at last.

The slender merchant ran a hand through his blond hair, the tension gone from him now that he had finished his story. “No, I don’t think so,” he said quietly. “You’re forgetting Khusraw’s wife.”

“Her pregnancy?” the soldier asked in bewilderment.

“She wasn’t pregnant,” Dama explained, “she was just a vehicle. The smith had his materials, a soul and a body. Somehow his wife’s pretence of labor allowed him to join them. The thing was alive, an automaton.”

Vettius shook his head.
“
What you’re calling an automaton—there must have been a dwarf inside with some very clever machinery.”

Dama smiled gently. “There was no man inside. Lucius, when I pulled that sword free it was as clean as you see it now; no blood, no brains sticking to it.”

The soldier looked from his friend to the sword. The blade had a faint green cast to it now as it caught the reflection of the gaming pieces so finely carven by some Persian craftsman.

THE
SHORTEST WAY

Before I sent off my first story, I told myself that someday a story of mine would be published. After that first sale, I decided I’d like to sell another so that I wouldn’t be a one-shot author.

Let me tell you, selling stories is an addiction. The need just gets worse.

I did well enough in law school that I was offered a place on the Duke Law Journal at the beginning of my second year. The upperclassman describing the journal told me that if I was really lucky, in my third year I might be able to publish a one-paragraph Note under my own name. “It’s a real thrill to see your name in print!’’ he said.

And I thought, “You twit. People pay to put my name in print!’’

But that wasn’t true: August Derleth had paid to put my name in print, and he was dead. I was going to have to find another market if I hoped ever to sell again.

Two professional magazines in 1971 published some fantasy. I sent
Fantastic
a story which vanished utterly, an event perhaps concerned with the problems that later got the editor a felony conviction for drug dealing. After that experience,
Fantastic
was no longer a potential market for me.

And there was
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
an excellent periodical which at about that time published a heroic fantasy novella by a writer with a high literary reputation. (It wasn’t a very good story per se, which should have warned me.)

I wrote “The Shortest Way” and submitted it to
F&SF
with a covering letter that said, “I know you don’t publish much heroic fantasy . . . .’’ It came back with a nice personal rejection from the editor, Mr. Ferman, agreeing that they didn’t publish much heroic fantasy though this was a good story.

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. And indeed, my friend Karl had an even closer brush: one of his heroic fantasies (“The Dark Muse”) came back from
F&SF
already copyedited. Mr. Ferman had decided very late in the game not to publish.

“The Shortest Way” is based on the Sawney Beane legend. I’d heard of Sawney Beane many years before, but I first got the details when I read T
he Complete Newgate Calendar
in the Duke Law School library. (I didn’t like law school, but there were compensations.) The road itself is a real one in Dalmatia, torn up in the third century BC for reasons archeology can’t determine. And I used the same two characters for the story as I had in “Black Iron”: I’d started writing a series.

Stu Schiff—Stuart David Schiff, DDS—started
Whispers
magazine in 1972 with the stated intention of replacing
The
Arkham Collector
(which had died with Mr. Derleth) as a home for new fantasy-themed fiction, poetry, and articles. (Stu would’ve used the title
Whispers from Arkham
if Arkham House had agreed. They didn’t.) He bought the story and published it in the third issue of the magazine, with a wonderful Lee Brown Coye coverillo.

At the time I wrote “The Shortest Way,” I wasn’t sure “Black Iron” would ever be printed. (It finally came out in 1975 as part of an anthology Gerry Page put together for Arkham House, using all the material Mr. Derleth had acquired before his death, filled out by the considerable amount Gerry himself bought for the volume.) The stories don’t have to be read in any particular order; they’re just part of the same world.

Even so, the decision to write these stories in series probably had something to do with me a little later writing a second story about a group of future mercenaries called Hammer’s Slammers. That was the choice that got me started on a real career writing, though I didn’t know it at the time.

* * *

T
he dingy relay station squatted beside the road. It had a cast-off, abandoned look about it though light seeped through chinks in the stone where mortar had crumbled. Broken roof slates showed dark in the moonlight like missing teeth. To the rear bulked the stables where relays for the post riders stamped and nickered in their filthy stalls, and the odor of horse droppings thickened the muggy night.

The three riders slowed as they approached.

“Hold up,” Vettius ordered. “We’ll get a meal here and ask directions.”

Harpago cantered a little further before halting. He was aristocrat enough to argue with a superior officer and young enough to think it worthwhile. “If we don’t keep moving, sir, we’ll never get to Aurelia before daybreak.”

“We’ll never get there at all if we keep wandering in these damned Dalmatian hills,” Vettius retorted as he dismounted. His side hurt. Perhaps he had gotten too old for this business. At sunup he had strapped his round shield tightly to his back to keep it from slamming during the long ride. All day it had rubbed against his cuirass, and by now it had left a sore the size of his hand.

The shield itself galled him less than what it represented. A sunburst whose rays divided ten hearts spaced around the rim had been nielloed onto the thin bronze facing: the arms of the Household Cavalry. Leading a troop of the emperor’s bodyguard should have climaxed Vettius’s career, but he had quickly discovered his job was really that of special staff with little opportunity for fighting. He was sent to gather information for the emperor where the stakes were high and the secret police untrustworthy. There was danger in probing the ulcers of a dying empire, but Vettius found no excitement in it; only disgust.