Генри Каттнер - Lands of the Earthquake

Recklessly Boyce said, “Yes!”

There was a drawn breath all around the table. Then the white–haired man straightened in his chair and smiled. His face was in shadow, like all the rest, but Boyce could see the triumph on it.

“Very well,” said the man. “That is good. We are ready—now!”

The red–haired man laughed, seeing Boyce’s face.

“We tricked you there! You were not expecting that. But we must go quickly, as soon as the streets have cleared.” He glanced involuntarily toward the door, and a shadow of pure revulsion touched his ruddy face.

The white–robed man stood up.

“No delay,” he said. “Or Jamai’s spies may warn him what we plan. Now as for the course we take—”

Boyce was not listening. He knew he could not go through with it. Even if he were willing to play the traitor, he could not for he knew no secret ways into Kerak, if any such existed. Also, it was no part of his vague plan to leave the City now, just as he had entered it. There was Godfrey to be rescued, for one thing. And for another—he had not yet come any nearer to the girl in the iron crown.

“Wait,” he said harshly. The men around the table were all on their feet now, tightening their belts, talking eagerly among themselves.

They turned to him expectantly, suspicious eyes gleaming in the shadow.

“This is beyond my bargain,” Boyce said. “I was not paid for such a risk as this. I’ll need more money.”

“You were paid beyond your desserts the first time,” the red man began angrily. “You—”

“I’ll be a masterless man when Kerak falls,” Boyce told them brazenly. “I must look out for myself then. I’ll need more silver for that.”

Someone who had not yet spoken laughed in the shadows.

“He betrays his lord for money and demands more because he’s masterless,” the new voice said. “I like this man, friends!” Boyce thought there had been something familiar in the voice and in the strange tone of the laughter. Later—if there was to be any such time as later for him—he would try to remember. Just now he had no time to spare.

“More money or I go nowhere,” he said stubbornly.

The red–haired man growled a curse in some odd language that sounded as if it had been made for curses. He took a purse from his belt reluctantly and threw it jingling on the table.

“There, dog. Buy yourself a new master with that, then.”

“Not enough!” Boyce sneered beneath his new moustache. “For alms like that I’d get no better man than you!”

The red man laid a freckled paw upon his whip–belt. He snarled in his blasphemous language and Boyce thought for an instant the battle would begin there and then. But the snarl died. The man set his teeth grimly, took out another purse and flung it beside the first.

“Dogs come high in this place,” he growled. “And now—”

It was no use. They needed him too badly. Boyce would have to provoke them still farther before he could escape.

“Money or no money,” he roared suddenly, “I’ll not lead you to Kerak, red–head! You stay behind or the bargain’s ended. I’ve taken a dislike to the color of your hair.”

In the amazed silence, the young man in the chain mail laughed softly.

“Don’t you see?” he said. “The fellow is trying to force a quarrel. He doesn’t mean to go at all!”

For a moment, no one moved. Then the white–haired man with the gentle face tossed his cloak back over one shoulder.

“I think—” he said quietly, “I think he had better die.”

There was a quick, concerted motion in the room, and Boyce heard a sound he had never heard before—a curious metallic minor note all through the crowd. It was the whine of swords drawn simultaneously from their sheaths.

The shadows were suddenly alive with the flash of bare blades. Boyce’s hand flew to his own belt and the light sword the Crusaders had given him leaped into his fist. But this was no magical blade. It was good, sharp, beautifully balanced, but he must fight this battle alone, without Tancred’s magic gripping the hilt of the sword he wielded.

The red man bellowed once, a deep sound of pure fury, and his hand flashed toward his belt. There was a ripping sound as the barbed whip uncoiled and arched through the air like a serpent with fangs along its sides.

“Now, dog—howl for your master!” His voice was choked with rage. The whip sang through the air and Boyce had an instant’s vision of his own face laid open to the bone as the lash fell.

He leaped back, groping behind him for the door. His hand found it just as the whip fell. It fell so little short of his cheek that the wind of it fanned his mustache, and he could hear the vicious whine of the barbs along the edges of the lash singing in his ear.

The door was locked.

He heard the whip strike the floor at his feet with a metallic crash of jangled barbs. He heard the redhead’s sobbing breath of fury, saw him step back and brace his thick legs wide for a second try. He saw beyond the red man the flicker of nervous blades as the others crowded tensely forward, poised to close in if the whip should fail again.

He saw the young man in chain mail, a dagger in each hand as long as a short sword, come lightly around the table toward him, walking as if on air, his whole body poised as lithely as the whip itself.

Then again the lash sang. With the motion of a snake it arched backward and seemed to hang in midair for a tense and singing moment. The red man’s wrist curved forward and so did the hanging whip.

This time he could not avoid it. Boyce’s back was against the door and the youngster in chain–mail barred the only other exit. He could feel his flesh crawl already in anticipation of that terrible clawed lash, and he knew there was no hope for him now. The adventure that had begun with the first of that lost year would end in this room with the ripping of his flesh from his bones, and he would never know the answers he had sought.

In this last moment before the lash fell he had one vivid glimpse of a scene he had remembered only dimly before. He saw a crowned girl standing before a window as delicately crystalline as a snowflake’s pattern. He saw her very clearly in memory as she turned and glanced at him once across her shoulder. He saw her eyes bright with violet fire, and the whiteness of her smile and the deep crimson of her lips. He saw all the brilliance and the danger of that nearly forgotten face.

And this time, in the stress of his danger, a name rose in his mind. He did not know if he whispered it aloud or not. It couldn’t matter. Nothing mattered now—not even the fact that he could speak her name—at last.

“Irathe!” he said it to himself in a passion of fury and despair. “ Irathe. ”

And then the whip came down.

Laughter—familiar laughter—sounded again from the far side of the room. And beside him, just as he saw the lash’s tip leaping straight for his eyes, feet suddenly made a soft, quick thudding on the floor.

Something dazzling shot past his face. Boyce braced himself for the impact of the whip. It took him a perceptible moment to realize that the barbed blow had not fallen. Dizzy with bewilderment and surprise, he fell back a pace to the right and stared, hearing a clang from the opposite wall.

Before him on the floor lay the severed whip. A long dagger, bright in the lamplight, clattered across the floor and lay still. A thrown dagger that had flashed past his eyes to cut the whip in two.

He turned his head and saw the young man in mail poised beside him, the second dagger lifted in his hand.

“Get me that knife,” the youngster said peremptorily to Boyce. “Quick! I’ll put this one through the first man that moves!”