David Drake - Balefires

"You'll never make it with a broken kneecap," the swarthy man said, more to himself than to the fallen man.

"God damn you!"Coster shouted. He had flung the shielding carton away from the automatic rifle. He aimed the weapon at Penske's midriff. "Help me!"

The safety clicked on. Both men heard the sound. Coster went a shade still paler and tried to force the slotted bar forward with his index finger. It would not move.

"Sure, I'll help you," Penske said softly. He slipped his dagger from its sheath and stepped forward.

The van was waiting at the curb with its rear door ajar. Penske leaped in, thrusting the carton before him. He shouted, "Drive!"

"Wait!" Kerr snapped to Davidson. "Where's Coster?"

Penske had the automatic rifle out on his lap now. He was feeling a little dizzy. "He fell and I had to leave him," he said. "Don't worry-he won't talk."

Without further orders, Davidson swung the van out into traffic. Occasional pedestrians were looking around for the source of the sirens they heard, but no one gave the escape vehicle a second glance.

Kerr's eyes narrowed as he watched the smaller man's fingers play with the action of the automatic rifle. After a moment he said, "Well, maybe it's for the best."

Penske did not reply. His mind was filling with images of men staggering and falling, each scene a separate shard differing in costume and background. Together the images turned smoothly like gear teeth engaging, each a part of a construct as yet incomplete.

"You know, I don't think I ever got a chance to look at that," Kerr remarked conversationally. He reached out to take the weapon.

"No!" said Penske, and the automatic rifle swung to cover the black's chest.

For an instant Kerr thought of drawing his pistol, but the thought passed and the pressure on the trigger of the automatic rifle passed also. "Okay," the big man said, "so long as you shoot what you're told to shoot with it."

Penske was no longer listening. The pattern was now complete. It stretched from a cold world whose remaining energies were all harnessed in a great design, to an Earth without native life forms. Winds whipped sand and nerve gas around badlands carven in past millennia, and the poisoned seas surged against blue-glowing shorelines. But over those landscapes coursed metal creatures who glittered and shifted their forms and raised triumphant cities to the skies.

And in Penske's mind something clicked. A voice said in no human language, "Yes, this replacement will be quite satisfactory…"

Blood Debt

I got interested in witchcraft when I was in high school (or maybe even earlier), as an outgrowth of my interest in traditional fantasy. When I became an undergraduate at Iowa the university library gave me more to read on the subject, but the real outpouring of material came in the later '60s when "The Occult" became hugely popular. There's a lot of crossover between the Occult and the more recent New Age, but the earlier version seems to me to have had more sharp edges.

I focused on scholarly sources like Margaret Alice Murray and Montague Summers, writers who purported to collect original documents and theorize from them. I say "purported" because I now know that both authorities were phony.

Murray was a real scholar, but she falsified her cites to show that medieval witchcraft had an organized structure which the facts do not support. Summers was far, far worse. His erudition was as false as his claim of a religious vocation, and his retailing of the worst medieval bits of misogyny (for example, the absurd derivation of femina, female, from femina, "lesser in faith") wears quickly even on me (who can't claim to be a feminist).

I never believed in the effectiveness of witchcraft. If my reading misled me, it was by causing me to accept that numbers of ordinary people in the Middle Ages practiced witchcraft in an organized fashion. That was no more harmful to a fiction writer (which is what I was trying to be) than believing in a reality behind the Airship Flap of 1897, now known to be a hoax, hurt "Travelers," one of my best novellas.

The thing is, though I don't believe in witchcraft at a gut level, I'm intellectually convinced that there's something real out there. Occasionally I ran into a writer-Elliott O'Donnell in his fiction (rather than his non-fiction) was a prime example-whom I thought and think really understood things that I'd prefer not to know about.

The fact that gangsters in Sierra Leone believed that bullets would bounce off their magically armored bodies didn't prevent the SAS from stacking up corpses like cordwood when they went in to rescue British hostages. Likewise, my personal disbelief in witchcraft won't help me if I'm attacked by someone who can manipulate occult powers. The effectiveness of the weapon doesn't depend on the belief system of the target. That's the background from which I wrote "Blood Debt." On rereading it, I'd say that the story accurately reflects my combination of scholarship and skepticism, leavened by the tiniest measure of fear.

The shadow of the house next door razored down Rigsbee's in the winter dawn. First the red light tinged the wrought-iron rail of the widow's walk. Spidery star-shapes writhed in the glow, the uprights molded as blunt arrowheads and the slanted pairs of limbs linked with fanciful hands. Below, the dark green shingles of the mansard roof sharpened but did not brighten when the light touched them. Only the small-paned French window winked back at the sun.

The left half was off the catch and swung as the air stirred around it. The dawn paled as it glided more swiftly down the white sidewalls of the second story, walking the crazy angles of the trellis and the ancient ivy clambering up into the gutters. There were already lights on in the kitchen on the ground floor. The tall, blonde woman put a last plate on the breakfast tray, then pushed the stairwell door open with her heel. She moved with precision, as she had for forty years. Life, ignoring her hopes and trampling her certainties, had been unable to change that; but crow's feet now softened the hard lines of her face.

Her shoes rapped steadily up the back stairs, pausing at the triangular landing where her dress flashed through the slit window before swinging up the flight. The old house had high-ceilinged rooms and she liked the feel of them, though of course heating was a great expense to Mr. Judson. She made out the checks herself, who should know better.

A bolt snicked back and the door to the second floor opened before she had to knock. Judson Rigsbee was wrapped in a velvet robe-the green one, this morning-and smiling at her."Good morning, Mrs. Trader; I hope you slept well."He did not smile often, and even with her it was a slightly uncomfortable expression, that of a stranger who is afraid to embarrass by seeming over-warm.

Mrs. Trader set the breakfast things neatly on the table inside the door-toast, poached eggs, coffee; the big glass of orange juice. Mr. Judson didn't care for orange juice but she insisted, it was good for him. The man would waste away to nothing if she didn't bully him-no chance Anita would stir a finger for her uncle.

"Thank you, I did indeed," the tall woman said aloud. "Now that Harvey and Stella are back together, I haven't been having those headaches at all, Mr. Judson."

"Well, I'm certainly glad," he said diffidently. He edged back slightly from the housekeeper's determined confidences, a pudgy-seeming man of fifty with no hardness showing except in his eyes.

"I'm certain I don't understand men," Mrs. Trader plowed on as she poured the coffee, "not even my own boy. They were as sweet a couple as you could find, he and Stella. For five years, and I'll say it even though I didn't want the marriage myself, they were too young. And then with the little one due any day, there Harvey goes off with never a word to Stella or even to me. But he was there in the waiting room when Kimberly was born, and Stella took him back though I wouldn't have blamed her if she hadn't… But itwas a weight off my mind."