Poul Anderson - Operation Chaos

“Ohe, Child of Light!” she cried.

A ripple went down the salamander’s back. Its tail switched restlessly, and a tree across the way kindled. I can’t describe the voice that answered: crackling, bellowing, sibilant, Fire given a brain and a throat. ; “Daughter of Eve, what have you to say to the likes of Me?”

“I command you by the Most High, return to your a proper bonds and cease from troubling the world.

“Ho—oh, ho, ho, ho!” The thing sat back on its haunches-asphalt bubbled—and shuddered its laughter into the sky. “You command me, combustible one?”

“I have at my beck powers so mighty they could wither your puny spark into the nothingness whence it came. Cease and obey, lest worse befall you than dismissal.”

I think the salamander was, for a moment, honestly, surprised. “Greater than Me? ” Then it howled so the tavern shook. “You dare say there are mightier forces than Fire? Than Me, who am going to consume the earth?”

“Mightier and more beautiful, O Ashmaker. Think. You cannot even enter this house. Water will extinguish you. Earth will smother you, Air alone can keep you alive. Best you surrender now—”

I remembered the night of the afreet. Ginny must be pulling the same trick-feeling out the psychology of the thing that raged and flared beyond the door—but what could she hope to gain?

“ More beautiful! ” The salamander’s tail beat fury, rows in the street. It threw out bursting fireballs and a rain of sparks, red, blue, yellow, a one-being Fourth of July. I thought crazily of a child kicking the floor in a tantrum.

“More beautiful! Stronger) You dare say- Haaaaa—” Teeth of incandescence gleamed in a mouth that was jumping fire. “We shall see how beautiful you are when you lie a choked corpse!” Its head darted to the broken glass front. It could not pass the barrier of cold iron, but it began to suck air, in and out. A furnace wave of heat sent me gasping back.

“My God . . . it’s going to use up our oxygen .... Stay here! I sprang for the door. Ginny shrieked, but I scarcely heard her “No!” as I went through.

Moonlight flooded me, cool and tingling between the unrestful guttering fires. I crouched to the hot sidewalk and felt a shudder when my body changed.

Wolf I was, but a wolf that my enemy could not kill ... I hoped. My abbreviated tail thrust against the seat of my pants, and I remembered that some injuries are beyond the healing powers of even the therio shape.

Pants! Hell and damnation! In the excitement, I’d forgotten. Have you ever tried being a wolf while wrapped in shirt, trousers, underwear, and topcoat designed for a man?

I went flat on my moist black nose. My suspenders slid down and wrapped themselves about my hind legs. My tie tripped me in front and my coat gleefully wrapped everything into a bundle.

Frantic, I rolled over and tore at the cloth with my fangs. The salamander grew aware of me. Its tail slammed across my back. For a moment of searing pain, hair and skin scorched with the fabric. But that burning shredded it and I was free. The labile molecules of my body rebuilt themselves in seconds. The salamander had turned its attention away, deeming me out of action. Hardly realizing what I did I snatched with my jaws a shoe which had dropped from my now smaller foot, laid it on the salamander’s nearest white-hot toe, and bore down with both forepaws.

It bellowed and swung around to attack me afresh. That mouth gaped wide enough to bite me in half. I skittered aside. The monster paused, gauged the distance, flicked into nothingness, and materialized right on top of me.

This time I had no escape. Weighted down, I inhaled the fire that cooked my flesh. Agony sent my being whirling out of me like another flame.

Aloneness was not broken by the face which looked upon me, a face for which I have no words save that it was huge and its eyes were those of a corpse. But then, I did not see it, nor feel the cold which was deeper and stabbed me more cruelly than any I had known since last the thought-voice came through notspace and not-time to shake the senses I did riot have. And the end of every hope and every faith was upon me.

“Be proud, Steven. I myself have worked to bring the death of you and your companions. To that end, I myself planted a prank in the head of a fool; for know, only thus may we safely work in the world, and I would not trust the subtleties of this one task to any minion. Pleasing though the general destruction is, material harm to men is not the true aim, and indeed my maneuverings to encompass the doom of you twain could prove costly if they provoke retaliation from the Other Side. But the danger to ours that you represent has become ever more clear as time runs toward a certain moment. I cannot know when that moment waits or what lineaments it will bear; but I know you must not be part of it.”

That which was I would have cringed, were it not less than a point in nothingness. “And yet,” tolled through me, “and yet, Steven, you need not be dead. I forebode that the woman Virginia can be a worse enemy than you. Yes, I forebode that, lacking her, you are no threat to the Plan; but she, without you, might well prove so, if not as great a menace as you two conjoined. How this may be, there is no augury. But note her skills and her Gift; note that she has not twice been trapped like you; note what a spirit she bears within her. Vengefulness for your death may drive her to search below the appearance of things. Or she may take some other course. I cannot tell what. But I see that although you burn, she is not absolutely inescapably caught.

“Would you live, and live well, Steven?”

Fainter than light from the farthest star flickered out of me: “What must I do?

“Take my service. Accept my geas. The salamander will release you before irreparable injury has occurred. When your hurts have knit, the geas will make you do a single thing; nothing else for a long, rich lifetime. You will call her outside, stand well clear, and distract her wariness for the moment the salamander will need to materialize upon her as it did upon you.

“If you refuse this, return to the instant of your own cremation alive.”

Virginia was more than infinitely remote, and I hack no body to feel with nor tongue to speak yea or nays But the focus that was I considered her within the anguish it had known; and it became absolute rage, match the absolute hate that had stormed it free another timelessness; and the not-scene exploded back into the void whence it had come.

I think that my fury overcame my torment to the degree that I started fighting. I am told I got a fang-grip on the obvious place to bite a beast that is sitting on you, and did not let go. But the pain was too great for me to recall anything other than itself.

Then the salamander had vanished. The street lay bare, dark except for the moon and a distant unbroken lamp and the uneasy red glow from kindled houses, quiet except for the crackle and crash of their burning. When I’d recovered to the point of having a functional nose, what I first noticed was the acrid smoke.

That took several minutes. Barely enough unseared tissue remained to provide a DNA pattern for reconstructing the rest. When sanity returned, my shaggy head was in Ginny’s lap. She was stroking it and crying. I licked her hand, feebly, with a tongue like dried-out leather. If a man, I’d have stayed a while where she had me. But being a wolf with lupine instincts, I struggled to sit up and uttered a faint, hoarse yip.

“Steve . . . almighty Father, Steve, you saved our lives,” Ginny whispered. “Another couple of minutes and we’d have been suffocating. My throat still feels like mummy dust.”