From the Heart of Darkness

by David Drake

  Fearfully—no present kindness would erase memory of Kue-meh’s last moment of life—Lena brushed her fingers across the dog’s forehead, then caressed the upthrust ears. Power burred again in the dog’s thorax, but it now was rich with delight. The head gave back, directed by the girl’s proddings where it could not have been forced, and let her worm out into the open.

  The courtyard was empty of all but the two dogs and a squalor which even the gentle moon limned clearly. The second, fawn-colored, mastiff whined and nuzzled Lena wetly. There was a faint murmuring from the other kennels, wattled domes little different in design from the huts of the peasants. No man or other dog appeared to try the wrath of the killer who now supported the girl on either side.

  Her hands absorbing strength from the skin folded over the dogs’ withers, Lena made her way to the wall. Behind her, the tower of the keep climbed seventy feet from the ground. No lights gleamed through its arrow-slits. The drink that had enspirited one man had crumpled all his fellows. Even perfect success could only briefly have counteracted the exertion required to gain it, and the Ritter’s ale-sodden feast had done for the stay-at-homes as well. Three crossbowmen snored away their guard on the tower, and the occasional sounds from beyond the low wall to the inner court came from the fowl and pigs of the humans quartered there. The snorts of the horses sharing the outer courtyard with Lena and the dogs were muted. Seven had been ridden to death during the morning or had been swallowed in the Forest beyond later recall by the exhausted hunters.

  Lena touched the stones of the curtain wall, massive gray blocks more of nature than of man. She was beyond strength or weakness now, as inanimate as the limestone in which her hands found natural holds. The larger, brindled mastiff raised itself to its full height on the wall and licked the sole of her foot. Then she was over, sliding down the face of the wall and beginning to run the instant she touched the rocky soil below. This time there was no pursuit.

  She followed the trail broken by the day’s long hunt, knowing the confused scents would hinder the dogs if they were loosed on her. As she passed them, her hands plucked off berries and the pale, tender shoots of budding spruce. Once, in splashing across a rill, she paused for three quick gulps and a mouthful that she absorbed over the next minutes rather than swallowing. Her pace was not particularly swift, but it was as regular as a machine’s.

  The forest floor paid little mind to dawn or darkness, but the needles of sunlight piercing to the loam were nearly vertical when Lena reached the scene of death and capture. Kort lay huddled, flies black on the raw wounds which crows had already enlarged. Three of the birds croaked angrily from the limb to which Lena’s intrusion had sent them, pacing from side to side and hunching their pinions.

  Kue-meh’s face, undisturbed by the fangs of the pack, bore a look of peculiar kindliness and peace. It was the face with which she had greeted Lena seven years before, less resigned than willing to accept. Lena looked away. It was not that for which she had returned.

  “Coo-ee?” she called softly.

  The Forest grew very silent. Even the crows left off their grumblings.

  “Coo-ee?” the girl repeated. The bushes parted as she knew they must, and Chi, then Faal, stood timidly before her. Gurgling sounds that were partly tears and partly words of a language even older than that of the woods folk, Lena threw herself into their arms. She hugged their smooth, furred bodies like the shades of her lost innocence. At last she thrust them back to arm’s length. Wiping her face free of the mingled tears, she said, “We must go now, very quickly. There are places in the Forest so far away from here that the Others will never come. They will never find us again.”

  She spoke and led the way into the Forest without a glance behind her. Chi followed at once. Faal, a picture of his father now in all but the gray that had tinged Kort’s fur, hesitated. As yet he lacked the consciousness of strength that would let him unconcernedly follow into the unknown. But in a moment he ran to catch the females and, as he shambled on at Lena’s side, his fingers began caressing the tawny gold of her hair.

  BLOOD DEBT

  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 it was a weight off my mind.”

  “Thank you, Mrs Trader.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She gathered up the part-loaded tray and stepped crisply up the remaining double flight of polished hardwood. Mr Judson was looking peaked and she did wish he would eat bacon in the morning, but on that score he was more determined than she. “Orange juice or bacon, Mrs Trader, but not both. Male, both of them, and together they would overbalance me hopelessly.” Terrible things, queasy stomachs, and the green robe did nothing for his complexion. A pretty thing it was by itself with all the astrology symbols in silver on the hem, but not proper dress for a sickly man in the morning.

  She rapped smartly on the door to the third story, squarely in the middle of the great red-lacquer eye Anita had painted there. “If Uncle Jud won’t let me bolt my door, I at least have to know who’s coming, don’t I?” the girl had sneered. Mr Judson never talked very much about his sister, but Mrs Trader could guess that she had been the wild one of the family. Who could be surprised that the daughter took after the mother when the poo
r child had not so much as a father’s name to bear?

  A second knock brought no response. The baleful eye waited, unblinking. Well, this was the first time it had happened, but Mrs Trader was not slow to act. Mr Judson insisted the house be run to a schedule so as not to disturb his work. Anita should have learned that in the months she had stayed here. If she hadn’t, well.… Mrs Trader swung open the door.

  The room within, its walls skewed a little to the shape of the roof, was far different from Rigsbee’s own austere sitting room below. The dormers were blacked out by locked shutters; a volcano lamp lighted the rug and brocade chairs, but it had overheated during the night. Its paraffin and oil were in ugly stasis within the red glass base. Mrs Trader switched it off as she strode past into the middle room.

  A pentagram had been freshly chalked on the floor; the candles at its points still stood at half their original lengths, snuffed before they burned out, and the air was heavy with incense. “Anita, it’s eight-thirty,” Mrs Trader called. Aping her uncle, she thought as she glanced around the room distastefully. Though in fairness to the girl, that couldn’t be true. Mrs Trader had seen the paraphernalia arrive with the rest of Anita’s baggage. Runs in the family, then.

  The girl failed to come to the bedroom door either. Mrs Trader sniffed and unlatched it herself without knocking again.

  The window slammed shut in the sudden air current. It left a damp chill in the room. The walls were a brilliant, metallic yellow that matched the spread, now rumpled at the foot of Anita’s bed. Anita, too, was rumpled. The coils of hair that lay silken over the sheets beneath her were no blacker than her protruding tongue. The breakfast tray slipped, smearing the golden carpet with strawberry preserve and coffee.

  Mrs Trader turned stiffly and walked toward the stairs. A candle holder smashed unnoticed beneath her foot as she strode through the middle room. “Mis—” she started, but her voice cracked and she had to lick her lips before trying again. “Mr Judson!”

  Rigsbee opened the door just in time to catch the rigid woman as she stumbled on the last step and fell toward him. The unexpected impact drove them back into his sitting room. For once, Mrs Trader would not meet her employer’s eyes as she blurted, “Dead, Mr Judson, she’s dead and murdered. Oh dear God! In her own bed!”

  Rigsbee rotated the blonde woman’s weight into the room, then disengaged her arms to dart up the stairs. She wept in one of the straight-backed chairs until he returned; and her tears were real, but they were shed for the thing and not the girl herself.

  Rigsbee was very quiet when he came back a few minutes later. His slippers rasped a little on the steps, that was all. The skin of his face was almost the color of his neutrally-short gray hair. “Look at me, Elinor,” he said softly. His fingers, gentle but inexorable, guided her jaw around when she was slow to obey. He was a little man in a comic robe, but his eyes were molten zinc. “You will go home now and forget all that you saw upstairs. When you return tomorrow, you will never have known Anita, there will never have been anyone living on the third floor. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” The voice from Mrs Trader’s lips was not her own, but it ruled her.

  * * *

  Alone in the center of his three rooms, Rigsbee changed into white. The symbols worked into the robe’s borders were of thread the same shade, differing only in texture from the base cloth.

  “Well?” a voice inquired from a corner.

  Rigsbee shrugged. His bald spot was more apparent whenever he was depressed. “She was my niece. She was the last of my blood.”

  “You know what she was,” the voice rasped. “She was a slut, a whore—”

  “Some things are necessary.…”

  “Not to her. She was never that deep in—”

  “She was my blood!” Rigsbee’s voice racketed through the dim room and shook it to silence. He turned toward the outer wall, clasping his hands to keep them from trembling. The windows on that side were blocked by the bookshelves running the length of the long wall. Spines of blue, green, and dull red library tape marched across the polished walnut with no markings beyond a few digits in white ink. He touched one of them.

  Each thin volume was a typescript of Rigsbee’s own production, bound by him between sheets of gray card. No one had helped during the typing or compilation. Partly Rigsbee’s purpose had been to give the volumes the slight added virtue resulting from that close contact with him. More important, however, was another consideration: each typescript was treble-columned with groups of letters and numbers in no order that would have made sense to one not adept. Rigsbee had not intentionally encoded the results of his years of searching, but the form of notation he had come to use was far more specialized than Latin and Arabic symbols could accommodate in their normal values. One trivial error of pagination, one transposition among millions of letters, unnoticed and unnoticable, would mean instant disaster in the dark moment when the data were used again.

  A very few of the cased books were not of Rigsbee’s own composition. His hand moved to one of them: squat, age-blackened; its pigskin binding cracking away from the cords. He knew by heart every word of the cryptic Latin text, but he had never before seriously contemplated using it. The pages opened stiffly, parting with difficulty under his fingertips.

  “You would go that far?” the voice behind him asked mournfully.

  Rigsbee closed the book before answering, “Punishment that stopped with the body would not—would not for me—be enough. The finality of that act, whoever did it, can’t be answered by a gas chamber or a motor accident. I’m sorry, Vera; but I have no choice.”

  And, “No,” he said sharply, wheeling with a strand of diamond in his voice before his listener could reply, “don’t tell me that I’ll have to give up all this, this.…” Rigsbee’s voice broke but his hand slashed an arc across the room. The books, the retorts joined by crystalline worms of tubing; the charts rolled in one corner beneath the ancient astrolabe. “That’s already gone, it’s dead. If I ignored what has happened … Vera, I wouldn’t be the same man, the man who … did the things I have done.”

  His face was carved from gray steel. If he felt any hesitation, none of it trembled in his throat when he said, “You’ll help me, Vera.”

  “So close,” the voice whispered. “In this short time—and you will understand how short it was, some day before you are as old as I—you came closer to unity than I have done in all these ages. And now, nothing.”

  “Vera. You’ll help me?”

  “Even to make the responses to you would bring me closer to the Blackness than a thousand cycles of the Fire would erase. Dos Lintros tried to walk that line after he wrote the book you hold. Where is he now, since they came for him?”

  “I know,” Rigsbee admitted softly.

  “You know? You think you know!” the voice shrieked. “But you will know, Judson, for eternity you will know if you.…

  “But it’s no good to tell you that, is it?” the voice went on. “You will do this thing, I see. And you are wiser than I can ever hope to be; but because of what I am, I know things that you only accept. Not even you, Judson, can imagine what you are about to do to yourself. To your soul.”

  Rigsbee shrugged, ran a hand through his thinning hair while his eyes stared unseeing at the numbered spines of his volumes. “I’m sorry, Vera—”

  “Goodby.” Her word was as soft and as dull as the first handful of dirt on a coffin. Rigsbee shuffled to the corner, let his hand brush down the wire cage. The albino starling within croaked, darted its head forward to spike the ball of his thumb.

  “Goodby, Vera,” Rigsbee muttered, and he turned away again.

  * * *

  The back door groaned. The lock had worked smoothly, but the hinges were frozen with the grit of long disuse. The girl glanced up the outer wall before entering. It was too dark to tell the ivy from the trellis it climbed.

  “Nice place,” she said as she followed Rigsbee up the stairs. Her knee-length coat was of a
plastic imitation cowhide, now torn at two of the seams. The belt was missing and she held the front closed with one thin, white hand. “You been here long?”

  “Most of my life,” Rigsbee said as he unlocked the door to the second story. Despite the dimness of the stairwell, he inserted his key without fumbling.

  Again the girl hung back, hipshot, in the doorway. She was a dark brunette; long snarls of hair bobbled against her coat as she suddenly giggled. “Aren’t the neighbors gonna wonder if they saw me come in?” She laughed again, stepping over the threshold with an exaggerated stateliness. Shrugging away the coat, she tossed it onto one of the straight chairs and stood in tank top and jeans. Most of the bright embroidery had worn away. Her bare toes, poking through handmade sandles, were an unhealthy blue beneath their coating of grime.

  “This way,” Rigsbee directed briefly, swinging the stair door shut and motioning the girl inward toward his study.

  “’Cause if you don’t care,” she went on, speaking over her shoulder as she slowly obeyed Rigsbee, “this doesn’t have to be a one night stand, you know.”

  Rigsbee’s glance took in her too-thin face, her too-white skin. “That won’t be necessary,” he said flatly. “It’s in the next room.”

  “It wouldn’t be so much,” the girl said with unshakeable coquetry. “I mean, not another of these—very often.” Both hands lifted the thin top up over the waistband of the jeans. A hundred dollar bill, folded vertically into eighths, was poked into the jeans on her midline. “I couldn’t put it in the top,” she said with another giggle. Raising the thin cloth higher, the girl pirouetted back toward Rigsbee. The motion flung out her breasts, bare beneath the hiked blouse. They were not large but seemed surprisingly full for a body so thin; the areoles were almost black against the dingy pallor of her flesh.