Генри Каттнер - Lands of the Earthquake

Again the Huntsman

Before a high oval door that glowed silver in the light of her tiny lantern, Boyce’s guide paused at last, holding up her light to show him the latch.

“Beyond this door I dare not go,” she said frankly. “You must, if you seek Jamai’s downfall.”

“Who sent you?” Boyce demanded, keeping his voice as low as hers.

They had come a long way through winding underground corridors, surfacing only twice to walk a short distance along alleys or across lighted streets. The motley city life went on unheeding around them. If Irathe had missed him yet, her searchers were subtle. And the conspirators she had helped him evade might be looking for him too.

He could not guess about that. He followed the brown girl through devious paths because she, at least, promised him a chance of action. Alone he knew he could not accomplish anything in this inscrutable City. Allied with Jamai’s enemy—whoever that might be he could at least gamble on success.

“Who sent me?” the girl echoed now, holding up her lantern to look at him in the dark passage. “My master will answer that, lord. You go to him now. But he is—capricious, lord. You must go the rest of the way alone, and I dare not pass this door.”

She swung it open and stood back.

“My master awaits you at the end of the corridor, lord.”

Boyce went in cautiously. The corridor, like the door, was silver, walls, floor and ceiling polished to mirror–brightness. From overhead small lamps hung, swinging a little in the breeze from the opened door. It was a city of lamps, Boyce thought—little lanterns and glass and wet streets with mist blowing through them in a changeless twilight.

The door closed. He went boldly down the hall toward the curtains at its far end. His own reflections went with him, distorted in perspective above and below. Looking up, he saw himself grotesquely foreshortened and floating upside down in space. Looking down, he was a fantastic dwarf in unfamiliar garments, cross–blazoned, mustached, his image repeated infinitely everywhere he glanced. He felt dizzy in his own distorted company.

He was not alone.

Someone walked behind him, at his very heels, someone’s breath fanned his cheek when he turned. But the someone was transparent as the air. He saw in the mirrors only himself in those dizzy myriads. He went on.

Something padded before him on soft feet. There was a clink of metal like a blade in a scabbard, and a muffled laugh and something rushed by him down the hall with a thumping of feet and a gust of displaced air when it passed him.

Something whistled by his face, the wind of it cold upon his skin. It sounded like a sword.

He met his own startled glance, infinitely multiplied in the mirrors, when he looked around in alarm. Nothing more. But whatever the thing was, it had not touched him. He remembered what his guide had said—“My master is—capricious”—and smiled grimly to himself.

“He wanted me or he wouldn’t have gone to such trouble to get me here,” he reasoned. “If this is a test of nerve—well, let him play his games, whoever he is.”

And he walked on as calmly as he could, ignoring the footsteps around him, the sound of breathing, the padding of soft feet like the feet of beasts. The curtains looked very faraway at the end of the corridor, but he would not let himself hurry to reach them. Confidence was growing in him. He thought he had at last begun to understand a little of what lay behind his coming.

The curtains parted before his touch. He passed into a low–ceiled room whose dark walls were hung with embroidered draperies, beneath ceiling tented with a striped canopy that billowed now and then as if from passing breezes. Here, as everywhere, lamps hung from above. There was a dais across the other end of the room, and a low couch on it. But the dais was empty. The room was empty.

Boyce looked around him, half in anger. Before he could move, laughter sounded from behind him, along the way he had come. He turned, knowing the laughter at last. Low, and with a snarl in it. He had heard it often before, most lately in that quarrelsome company of conspirators where Irathe took his part.

The curtains through which he had just come opened again. For a moment no one was there—the curtains framed an empty hall mirroring only its own length in geometric confusion of walls and floor.

Then the curtains fell and a man in tiger–striped garments came into the room, laughing to himself, leaning back on the leash from which two snarling cat–creatures led him across the floor.

“William du Boyce,” the Huntsman said. “Welcome to my palace. We have postponed our meeting too long already, you and I.”

Boyce scowled at him, saying nothing. The Huntsman wrestled his sleek, restless beasts past him and went leisurely toward the dais, dropped to the divan there and smiled at his guest.

“You’ll forgive my little trick in the hall,” he said. “You were in no danger, of course.”

Boyce felt a touch of Guillaume’s arrogance creep into his own attitude as he faced the Huntsman.

“I knew that. I’ve begun to think I was in no real danger since I left Kerak, nor will be until you get whatever it is you want of me. I’ve walked through too many dangers already. It can’t all have been accident.”

The Huntsman smiled.

“Sound reasoning. Do you know why?”

“Why I’ve been safe, you mean? Why everything has worked out as you meant it to? I think I do know. It must be that you have had a hand in it.”

Under his tiger–striped hood the Huntsman’s pale face lost its smile for a moment. A haunted look came into it. Boyce thought he caught just a glimpse there of the same desperation he had seen upon Irathe’s face when she screamed her denial to him in the tower–room.

“What do they say of me in Kerak?” the Huntsman asked unexpectedly.

“They say you’re like the mist on the plains—blowing wherever the wind blows. But—” Boyce gave him a quick glance, “I think you know what they say in Kerak, Huntsman.”

The face beneath the tiger–hood grimaced.

“You do know, then.”

“I know I haven’t been—call it alone —since I first saw you on the cliff when I entered this world.”

The Huntsman flung back his head and laughed suddenly, his mercurial mood changing without warning.

“We won’t quibble about it. Yes, it was I. And I did protect you here in the City—most of the time. There is something I want of you, William Boyce. You can repay me for my care by helping me—” he paused delicately—“to destroy Kerak’s Oracle.”

Boyce met the expectant eyes coldly.

“I owe you nothing.”

“You owe me a great deal. You’ll do my bidding in this—or would you like to see the punishment of Godfrey Morel, my friend?” The Huntsman’s voice went thin in the last words, and the snarl sounded just beneath the surface.

“I came for that.”

“You speak too coolly, William Boyce. You think because you’ve walked safely so far through this City, you can afford to defy the Huntsman. Remember, it was my hand that kept you safe. You can’t afford my enmity, I warn you. Godfrey Morel you shall see—and join, if you choose.” He half–rose and the leashed beasts surged forward against their collars, their beautiful, mad faces wrinkled up in snarls. The Huntsman cuffed at them with his free hand and sank back again.

“No, wait. There’s too much you do not know. If I show you the truth, I think you may decide to help. You’ve been deceived too often to take anyone on faith just now. Irathe, for instance—she told you a little, I think.”

“A little.” Boyce was wary. He saw a flicker of emotion on the Huntsman’s face when he spoke Irathe’s name, and he began to think he had a clue to part of the Huntsman’s mystery. If Irathe brought that sick, longing, angry look to other faces than his own, then he and the Huntsman had one thing at least in common.