Kenneth Bulmer: Demons' World

“We’re not going far today,” Cargill told them tartly. He walked now at Delia’s other side and he seemed to want to keep touching her at the slightest obstacle in their way. When Stead leaped lightly down a six-foot break in the paving, where far below he glimpsed a curious silver reflection, he saw Cargill holding up his arms to Delia, above.

“Jump, Delia,” said Cargill. “I’ll catch you.”

Delia jumped, but she jumped easily and lithely to avoid the soldier. He moved swiftly sideways in the path of her descent; they crashed together breast to breast and his arms went about her. He laughed in a curious, high-pitched way that irritated Stead.

“You oaf!” blazed Delia, stumbling sideways. Cargill’s Tiands were upon her, her body caught up to his.

“You nearly fell,” he said with that odd husk in his voice.

“I did not, and take your beastly hands off me!”

Cargill stepped back, reluctantly. His face flushed with color and he licked his lips. Delia brushed her long blue dress back into place, ignoring Cargill, took Stead’s arm, and said unsteadily, “We’d better get back.”

“Look, Delia,” Cargill’s voice held a note that Stead dimly realized was pleading, “I’m a soldier. You know that. And he doesn’t understand.”

“Of course he doesn’t!” blazed Delia. “You imbecile, you Demon-fodder. You deserve to be stepped on! He’s got to learn in the right way—when we say so—and not before! Now we’re going back. And I’m going—”

“No, please, Delia! Don’t report me! I couldn’t help it! By all the Demons, Delia, I’m crazy about you. I only—”

“ Shut up!”

The words cracked from Delia like the lash of a whip.

Stead looked on dumbly, not understanding, sensing mysteries glowing with awful secrecy and wanting more than anything on the Earth to know.

Delia’s face had tautened, her mouth expressed her complete disdain for this oafish soldier; she swung Stead violently away. “We’ll have to go around the other way to avoid that gap,” she said coldly. “All right, Cargill.”

Cargill was not listening. He was staring along the beam of his headlamp, staring into the far darkness of the concrete roadway. His gun slithered from the holster in a metallic sigh.

“Keep quiet,” he said in a soft, controlled voice.

Delia looked; her hands flew to her face and their pressure stifled the scream her nerves could not suppress.

Stead looked. His body suddenly crawled with revulsion. He did not know at what he stared with such horror; he had never seen anything like it in his limited new experience. The thing was perhaps twice the size of a man, but bulky, with a multitude of legs stemming from its middle. The head, small and furry with two long horny projections forming a beak, stared at them unblinkingly from four small, hooded eyes. He felt a great sickness in his stomach. Car-gill’s gun came up as the horrific monster charged.

Stead could not be sure of his impressions in that chaotic moment. Something incredibly hard and horny lashed him across the back and he fell. A monstrous bloated shadow reared above him. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed Delia reeling, a long hairy something wrapped around her waist. The blue dress ripped upwards. A vast and sudden booming concussion hit him, the sound of a great explosion.

Struggling to rise, he saw the hairy thing around Delia slacken, then lopped and writhed away spouting a blasphemous ichor. A sword, gleaming in parts not covered by a glistening thick syrup, slashed again.

Delia toppled free. Stead reached for her, and Cargill’s hand raked down, took the girl by her back, hefted her, and carried her away.

Numbly, Stead crawled after them.

Cargill dropped Delia, turned, and grabbed Stead by the hand, dragging him free. Something soft and warm and furry had enveloped Stead’s legs. The touch of that abhorrently caressing softness brought a sickness again into his stomach, made his jaws ache with a revulsion of reaction.

“If you want to vomit, vomit,” Cargill said.

The soldier turned at once to Delia, propped her head against a knee, his hands very gentle, and felt her pulse. Her eyes flickered open.

“Thank you, Cargill! You saved—”

“Forget that,” he said, quite normally. “That’s my job. I’m good at that.”

“Is Stead all right?”

“Yes. He looks green, but hell recover.”

“What,” said Stead weakly, “was that?”

Cargill stood up, helping Delia to her feet, holding her hand. Fleetingly Stead wondered why, if the soldier wanted to put his hands on Delia’s body, he hadn’t done so then. There was a lot more to the soldier than appeared. “We call those beasts Scunners. No brains. Pretty fierce with those sixteen legs. You saw how the brute used ’em on Delia. But a gun will usually see ’em off, unlike the Rangs.”

Stead did not particularly look forward to meeting a Rang.

Delia had regained her composure and, not without a shuddery glance back at the ghastly thing that lay in its own blood, the three set off for the warrens. Now Stead understood more clearly the reason for Cargill’s alertness. If things like that Scunner infested the outer darkness, then a man’s total attention and courage was needed to leave the warren.

“There are many animals inhabiting the world,” Delia told him as they passed the barrier beneath its blue light and re-entered once more the warm brightness of home. “As you can see, physiologically we have no relationship with the Scunner, nor with any other animal of the country.”

They had entered a different control point from the one they had left and their way led past a series of cubicles lining the main street. In each cubicle a man or youth, a woman or girl, sat engrossed before a whirring, glinting machine.

“Who are they?” asked Stead. “What are they doing?”

“They are workers,” Delia told him. “This is the street of the tailors and they are making clothes for us to wear. Each street has its own trade, all under the direct supervision of a street Controller, and each contributes something to the wealth of Archon.”

But Stead found it difficult to concentrate on the economic system of Archon. He saw workers laboring to produce all the things needed, saw electric and dog-drawn carts distributing the products, saw the great markets with their blazing never quenched electric lights, heard the bustle and hum of commerce, smelt the scents of the factories where foraged food was brought to be processed. But his imagination darted restlessly outside the warrens.

The revelation of the animals to be found outside, the Scunner he had seen, excited him with the wonder and awe of it all. He wanted to go out and explore, to know, to learn more and more of this world in which he had been flung with the careless inconsequence of a workman rejecting a scrap of unwanted material.

Over it all, like the haze he had been told enveloped the Outside, the blurred longings for revelations of self wilted and died. He had long since given up trying to cudgel his reluctant brain into yielding up the secret of his personality, his memories, his hidden lore.

Now all that lay in the past, in another world into which he had no desire to return. He had not been a man of Archon but the immortal being had been kind and had given him a second chance, a second birth, and he was now privileged to be one of Archon. And the humble gratitude he felt sustained him at the fading thoughts of any losses he might have suffered.

No other race could be so well-favored as the people of Archon. He believed that implicitly.

His schooling proceeded apace. Not without a smile, Delia had decreed he should work completely through a standard school course normally occupying an Archon child for six years. Stead completed the whole in the course of a quarter, one hundred and nineteen days.