David Drake - Balefires

"God, that's dirty!"the girl hissed. Grimy hands levered her shanks back across the couch to the edge.

Rigsbee laughed, a humorless cackle of sound that echoed in the room. "Yes. It is," he agreed, the skin stretched bone-tight across his face. "Far fouler than you can dream. I made the contact that I… desired."

He lifted down the bird cage."Shall we see what they say?"The starling chopped at Rigsbee's hand as he slipped it through the cage door. His pudgy fingers were swifter than the bird; thumb and forefinger closed about its neck and hooked it from the cage.

"What-"the girl blurted. Her muscles tensed as she tried to remember which swatch of burning fabric hid the exit.

Rigsbee was not speaking aloud, but the agonized tremors creeping across his flesh showed his concentration. The bird seemed forgotten, clasped in both his hands. The fingers on its throat kept the starling from crying, but it had enough freedom to snap its pinions. The feathers clattered together like boards slapping.

Rigsbee shifted his grip, then wrenched his fists in opposite directions. The girl's scream covered the faint pop as the starling's neck parted. The bird's tiny heart thumped out two powerful jets, the last choking off as the veins feeding it emptied.

The adept's eyes stared at the floor. Half-unwillingly, the girl leaned over to see what was there. Instead of lying in a ragged pool with satellite splotches, the blood was crawling of its own volition into connected words. The letters were spidery but perfect, and they stood out ironically black against the sanguine background:

"My hounds await," Rigsbee whispered. He began to laugh. His mouth was open, lips unmoving, and the empty syllables tumbled out in a terrible cacophony.

"Stop!" the girl screamed, and she clapped her hands over her ears. Rigsbee took no notice of her shuddering frame. He raised both hands in the air, choked off his laughter as if by main fore, and shouted a word, inhuman and ghastly with power. For the girl, for all the world but Rigsbee and one other, time froze in that instant.

The red robes slipped over his head easily. They had no designs worked into them, and they billowed loosely, sashless. The bloody light permeating the chamber coalesced as Rigsbee moved, flowing into the semblance of an ape's skull hanging in the air before him. It leered, then glided silently through the door which opened for it. Rigsbee followed, his scuffling slippers making the only sounds in the static house.

Down the stairs into the street. The skull's pace was a deliberate walk, the certain leisure of the squad escorting the tumbril. Other movement joined Rigsbee; gentle rustlings from the ivy, a tremulous scraping of metal on masonry. Only a petrified night scene showed in the wash of scarlet light preceding him. Streetlights no longer poured their mercury blue in pools on the asphalt. A car was caught rigid in the middle of a turn, the tip of its driver's cigar dead and black. A dog skipped for the curb-one foot in the street and the other three in the air so that its brindled body hung at an impossible angle. House after high, old house, built close to the sidewalks with walled courts in back for privacy. Rigsbee followed his guide without turning his head to look for the things tittering just beyond his zone of vision.

Newer houses, smaller but set back further. Rigsbee's monocentric mind had no idea how far he had walked. The skull halted at last, rotated tremblingly toward a brick-veneer residence. Rigsbee remained where he was, a hundred feet back in the middle of the street. His guide eased forward. The reflectors of the old Buick in the carport winked back in carmine brotherhood.

The inside of the house showed as red light approached, flooded through the front window. A woman had pulled the drapes back in the instant before stasis. Now she stared unseeing at the glass, her hair rinsed black and the cover of the baby in her arms striped red on red.

Shockingly loud in a universe that had only scufflings and scratching, a man's voice slashed out of the house, "Did you finally come, Rigsbee? I've been waiting for you."

A moment's pause. The front door banged back, the screen squealed open. The man on the narrow porch was tall, his hair a brighter yellow than his mother's in any normal light. Now it was a crown of dull carbuncle burning over his anguished face.

"Where are you, Rigsbee?" Trader called, taking a step out onto the gravel sidewalk, a step nearer the skull motionless in the air. "I know you're behind this. Your witch of a niece told me what you are.

"Do you want me to say it? I killed her! You can send me to any Hell you please, but I killed Anita and I'm glad of it. I rid the world of her!"

"She was my daughter, Harvey." Unlike Trader's harsh, desperate tones, Rigsbee's words were almost inaudible. His robes hung motionless, a frozen torrent of blood.

Trader took three steps down the gravel. The ape skull blocked his path without moving. A curse twisted Trader's powerful face and he spat at the thing. It burst soundlessly into a ball of glowing vapor that slowly dissipated in the still air. The murky red light continued to flow about the two men after its apparent source was gone.

"I wouldn't have anything to do with her," the younger man said tautly. "I told her Stella was plenty for me, even with the baby coming. But she couldn't take that, not your Anita, and she'd have me anyway. Up the ivy and in her window, Rigsbee, every night. And I couldn't go home in the mornings, then, and face Stella."

Rigsbee closed his eyes, rubbed them as if he were tired. Trader continued to advance, narrowing the distance between them. The globe of light shrank with every step he took. Beyond it, gravel skittered impatiently.

"I broke away when Kim was born," the tall man went on, his words as brittle as a coping saw on glass. He stretched his arms out in instinctive supplication. "She was… you can't imagine, Rigsbee! Hadn't she had enough? She'd proved she could take me away once, why did she have to-"

For the first time, Rigsbee stared straight into the other's tortured eyes. His tone softer than a fledgling's down, the adept said, "Harvey, when you strangled Anita, you made this certain. You and I are as much a part of nature as the sun and stars are, and our courses are as fixed. You chose then the course for both of us, and there is no changing now.

"Goodbye, Harvey." And Rigsbee raised his hand.

The world brightened stunningly as if the sun had risen scarlet. Harvey lurched back in shock, seeing what came scrabbling toward him. He tried to run.

A slender hand of wrought iron snatched his ankle. The railing from Rigsbee's house now scampered on the lawn, fifty separated manikins. Harvey screamed as his ankle crunched under the black fingers. Fifty faceless, pointed heads tossed in delight. They clanked as they minced toward their frenzied quarry, trembling as each new howl cut the air.

Trader disappeared behind the living fence. The human noises ceased a moment later when something round and bloody pitched into the air.

The light began to fade. Before long there was only a dull glow surrounding Rigsbee. Then the full moon came out and traffic moved again.

Dawn rained on the city. Rigsbee's empty house brightened slowly in the wan gray. A spatter of droplets whipped the shingles, followed by a pale drizzle that flowed over the eaves and splashed to the ground in sheets. The spidery pentacles of the railing blackened under the impacts of the rain, and the gutters ran red.

Men Like Us

In 1979 I had the start of a writing career going. I'd sold a fantasy novel (The Dragon Lord) and an SF short-story collection (Hammer's Slammers), plus quite a lot of short fiction about equally divided between fantasy and SF. In all, I had around 200,000 words in print when I stopped to think about it.