More Than Fire

by Philip José Farmer

  He whirled, his hand darting at the same time for the holstered beamer.

  Red Orc stood forty feet from him. He was smiling, and his beamer was pointing at Kickaha. On the ground behind him was an airboat, its white needle shape gleaming, its canopy open.

  “No!” the Thoan said.

  Kickaha stopped his hand. At a gesture from Red Orc, he raised both hands above his head. His heart was beating so hard that it seemed to be close to exploding.

  “How … ?” Kickaha said, then closed his mouth. The Thoan would certainly explain how clever he had been.

  “Now you may move your hand slowly. Use two fingers to remove your beamer, and toss it far from you,” Red Orc said. “Then throw the finder to me.”

  Kickaha obeyed, looking at the same time for Thoan backups. The nearest cover for them was a grove of woods a hundred yards away.

  “I knew Manathu Vorcyon had gated you away,” the Lord said. “I detected her trap long ago, and I deliberately sent you through my gate so that she would bring you to her world. I knew that she would probably give you some device to find the crack-I admit I didn’t know why the hexagram was no longer there-and that you would use her gates to get here.”

  Kickaha had many questions. One was how Red Orc knew that Manathu Vorcyon had been the one to whisk him away to her world. But he would not ask them. What mattered was that he was in as bad a situation as he had ever been.

  “I don’t intend to kill you just now,” Red Orc said. “Rest a while while I use her device.”

  Keeping his eyes on Kickaha, he bent down and picked up the finder. Then he pointed the beamer at Kickaha. He must have set it only for stun power, but the ray hit Kickaha in the chest and knocked him backward and down. The effect was as if Kickaha had just opened a door and a team of men running with a big rammer had slammed its end into his chest. The world grew dim around him; his breath was knocked loose from him. He could not get up though he strove to do so.

  By the time that he could draw in enough air and raise himself on one elbow, he saw Red Orc looking through the device. A second later, he took it from his eye. He turned with a grin of delight and triumph toward Kickaha.

  A bright flash blinded Kickaha, and a roar deafened him.

  Pieces of bloody flesh struck his face and chest. Then the smoke surrounding Red Orc was blown away by the wind. His left hand and much of his lower arm gone, his head and torso a red ruin, the Lord lay on the ground.

  Kickaha fell back onto the grass and stared at the bright and blue sky. He just could not grasp what had happened. The man of many wiles, the man never at a loss, was bewildered. Not until his heart had slowed down to near a normal rate and his chest pain had eased was he able to think straight.

  Anger replaced the pain. Manathu Vorcyon had betrayed him. She had used him as a pawn, not caring that he might be mutilated or killed. Her “detector” was a fake designed to lure Red Orc. The light, the supposed crack in the wall, automatically came on a few minutes after he had turned the instrument on. And something, he did not know what, triggered the explosives when the Thoan came within a certain range. That her decoy also could be killed had not stopped her.

  The Great Mother was a great bitch.

  “She could at least have warned me,” he muttered.

  Her reasoning for not doing so would have been that he might act differently if he knew the true intent of the finder. And she would have explained that Red Orc was such a danger to everybody in the universes, to the existence of the universes themselves, that any means to kill him was justified.

  Not to me, he thought. Now I have to kill Manathu Vorcyon. I won’t go after her, but if I should ever happen to run across her, I’ll deal her the dead man’s hand.

  Then he groaned. A thought had inserted itself in the flow of his images of revenge against the Great Mother. Only Red Orc knew whether or not Anana had drowned in the flash flood, and he was dead.

  Groaning again, he rolled over on his side to get ready to stand up. He said, “God!” Shock had come after shock. Standing not ten feet from him was Red Orc. He held a beamer pointed at his enemy and was smiling as the slain man had been smiling. Behind him was another airboat, the exact duplicate of the first one.

  Kickaha looked at where Red Orc had been-where he still was. He was a corpse. Yet the living man was here. It was too much to understand. But if his mind could not handle the inrush of events, his body was able to struggle to its feet. Weaving back and forth slightly, he spoke hoarsely.

  “You have nine lives!”

  “Not quite as many as a cat,” Red Orc said.

  Kickaha waved at the dead man but did not speak.

  “Clones, flesh of my flesh, genes of my genes,” the Lord said. “I raised them from babies and educated them. Being, in a sense, I, they have my inborn drive toward power, so I have seen to it that they don’t have a chance to usurp me. I wouldn’t turn my back to any of them. Since they’re as intelligent as I am, though not nearly as well educated or experienced, they were reared to be staked-out goats, decoys with highly expendable lives. Four of them have been sacrificed so far, including that man there, but I did avenge the first three.”

  He paused, smiled, then said, “Of course, you could be talking to one of them now, not the real Red Orc.”

  “But how did you get here? How did you know when I got here?”

  “Manathu Vorcyon is not the only one who has secrets. Tell me what happened here. I assume that the device was not able to detect a crack and that it was a trick to blow my head off. You must also have thought of the high probability that your head could have gone the way of my clone’s. However, I take nothing for granted. There wasn’t a gate or a crack, was there?”

  “No.”

  Red Orc smiled. “I know there isn’t. I tried the Horn here, and nothing happened. If I’d known that when I sent you out, I would’ve told you not to waste your time or mine.”

  He gestured with the beamer and said, “Walk ahead of me to the boat.”

  Kickaha obeyed. He wondered where the Horn was now. Probably it was in the Lord’s boat. Then the same thing that had happened when Red Orc caught him at the cliff top occurred again. He felt a slight prick in his back, and he awoke in an unfamiliar room, a twenty-foot cube. He was not bound, and he was naked. There was in the cube no furniture, rugs, door, or window. In one corner was a hole in the floor, apparently for excretion, but it looked and smelled clean. Cool air moved slightly over him, piped in through a nozzle on a wall near the ceiling.

  His chest still hurt. When he looked down, he could see the five-inch-wide black-and-blue bruise across his breast. But his head was clear, and he no longer felt emotional shock. What he did feel was frustration and rage.

  To work off the stiffness in his muscles and his emotions, he exercised as vigorously as the chest pain would allow him. Then he began pacing back and forth while waiting for Red Orc to make his next move. Hours must have gone by before a cough behind him startled him. Red Orc or one of his clones stood there, holding a beamer. Kickaha was beginning to think that the weapon had been grafted to the Lord’s hand. And the Lord had popped out of a gate or had opened a section of the wall while his captive’s back was turned to him.

  “Turn around,” the Thoan said.

  Kickaha did so, and the upper and lower sections of the wall before him parted. The top section slid into the ceiling; the lower, into the floor. At the Lord’s command, Kickaha marched down a very wide and high hallway, doorless and windowless, then went around a corner and down a similar corridor. Two men armed with spears stood by the sides of a door twelve feet high. Their square steel helmets and bulging cuirasses were arabesqued in gold, and their short kilts were crimson and embroidered with small green female sphinxes. Kickaha had never seen such armor or dress before. The guards stepped aside, their spears ready to plunge into Kickaha. The door slid to one side into the wall.

  The two, followed by the guards, entered an enormous room furnished with laboratory
equipment, most of it strange to Kickaha. They walked down a half-mile-long aisle past many tables and big machines. When a wall barred farther progress, Red Orc told Kickaha to stop. The Thoan spoke a code word swiftly, but not too fast for Kickaha to understand it and to store it in his memory.

  A huge square area of the wall became transparent. Kickaha could not help crying out. Anana, unclothed, was in the room beyond the wall. She was bound into a chair, her head held in a brace. Her eyes were closed. Above her head was what at first seemed to be a giant hair dryer.

  He whirled around and snarled. “What are you doing to her?”

  “I would think you’d be overjoyed because she is alive. If I had left her on that ledge just above the floodwaters, she would have died. She had a broken leg and arm, three broken ribs, and a slight concussion. Now she’s in excellent physical shape because of my medical skills. You’re a hard man to please, Trickster.”

  “What are you doing to her?”

  The Lord waved his free hand. “What you see, leblabbiy, is a process I conceived and built and experimented with during those many times I worked to relieve myself of the inevitable boredom that comes to all immortals. The machine there is not an ancient device I inherited. I invented it.”

  He paused, but Kickaha said nothing. If Red Orc was waiting for another outburst, he was not going to get it.

  The Lord spoke sharply. “Look at her, Kickaha! And say good-bye to the Anana you knew!”

  Reluctantly, Kickaha turned to the window.

  “That machine is removing her memory. It’s doing so slowly, because a quick process injures the brain, and I do not want a mindless mistress.”

  Kickaha quivered but did not move or speak.

  “The machine requires an hour a day for ten days to remove all memory back to when she was approximately eighteen years old. When the process is completed, she will believe-and in a sense, it will be true-that she is on her native planet and her parents and siblings are still living. It will be as if she has journeyed back in time, but without any knowledge of the thousands of years that have passed since she was eighteen.”

  Kickaha could not speak for a moment, and when he did, he croaked.

  “She won’t remember me.”

  “Not at all. Nor will she remember me. But I will introduce myself and in time, make her love me. I can make any woman love me.”

  “What about when she finds out the truth?”

  “She won’t,” Red Orc said, and he laughed. “I’ll see to that. Of course, when I get tired of her, if I do…”

  “Do you plan to do the same thing to me? Or do you have something painful in mind?”

  “I could remove your memory up to the time, say, when you were a college student on Earth and went through Vannax’s gate to the World of Tiers. Or I could torture you until you scream for death. Any man, no matter how brave, can be made to do that, even I. Or, if you volunteered to kill Manathu Vorcyon and succeeded, you could earn your freedom. First, though, you would have to complete the mission of finding a way into the Caverned World. If you do so, you will get the gift of keeping all your memories. That would indeed cause you great pain because of your memories of Anana.”

  Kickaha had no trouble choosing one of the options. But he would not tell Red Orc his decision until he was forced to do so. Just now, he could think only of Anana.

  If we ever get free and are reunited, Kickaha thought, I’ll see that she loves me again. And I’ll tell her about our life together in detail.

  Red Orc spoke another code word. The window became the wall. All four marched off through three halls and entered a large room ornately furnished in a style that Kickaha assumed was that of the natives. He and the Thoan sat down in comfortable chairs, facing each other across a large table of polished red wood in which were spiral green streaks. The table legs were carved with the figures of mermen and merwomen. Food and drink were brought in by a man and a woman, one of whom stood behind the Lord and the other behind Kickaha.

  “You may bathe, eat, and rest after we’ve finished here,” the Lord said. “Now! I assume you’ve decided that you’ll try to carry out the two missions for me and for your own sake. I would certainly do so. While you live-“

  “While I live, I hope,” Kickaha said.

  “I know that. Let us eat.”

  “I am not at all hungry,” Kickaha said. “I would choke on the first bite.” “Sometimes the belly overrides everything. Very well. You may eat later in your own quarters.”

  The Thoan waited until he had chewed and swallowed several bites and drank some wine before he spoke again.

  “Describe your experiences while with the ogress slut.”

  Kickaha did so, holding nothing back except what the Great Mother had said about the scaly man. Red Orc might know something of what his “guest” had said and done while with Manathu Vorcyon. It did not seem likely, but he did not know what kind of espionage system his “host” might have.

  When Kickaha had finished, Red Orc said, “I did not want to drag her into my affairs. Not yet, anyway. But she did it when she snatched you away from me. By the way, she did not gate you through to the forest because she was considerate of you and wanted you to have time to get adjusted to her world before she met you. She did so to protect herself. If I had implanted a small atom bomb in you and set it to explode as soon as you arrived in her world, she would have been beyond its range.”

  He laughed, then said, “But I don’t have that capability. To make atom bombs, I mean. If I wanted to take the time and do the research to find the data for making one and then go through the long tedious process of mining the metals needed and building a reactor … you get the idea.”

  He drummed his fingers for a moment before speaking again.

  “Two days should be enough for you to recover. After that, ready or not, you will go out again. And this time I will launch you through a series of gates that I am sure Manathu Vorcyon has not trapped.”

  Kickaha had not yet eased his grief when he stepped through the gate the Lord had picked for him. At the second gate, he had time to slip a battery into his beamer before being shunted to the next station. Within three minutes, he had passed through five gates. One of these was in a cave high on a mountain. Before he was passed on, he glimpsed a valley at the bottom of which was a river. Near it was a tiny village and above that was a castle. He cried out with the joy of recognition. It was the keep of Baron von Kritz, an enemy of his when he had lived on the Dracheland level of the World of Tiers, the world he loved most. And then he was in the next station.

  But this was not the place described by Red Orc. It was a windowless cell with a heavily barred jailhouse door, and it was bare of furniture except for a toilet, a washbowl with a soap dish, towels on a wall rack, and a pile of blankets in one corner.

  It did have an occupant, whom Kickaha recognized at once though the man was unclothed.

  Eric Clifton!

  The Englishman was standing in a corner and looking confused.

  Before either could say anything, Kickaha felt his senses leaving him. Clifton was now down on his knees, his face going slack. When Kickaha regained consciousness, he was lying on the floor. Like his cellmate, he was nude. And his beamer, holster, belt, and backpack were gone.

  He struggled to his feet. Clifton was beginning to stir. Kickaha looked through the bars and gasped.

  The scaly man was standing outside the cell.

  12

  “I DID NOT THINK THAT ANYONE SAVE ME COULD HAVE BEEN spared death from the flood,” Eric Clifton said softly behind him. “But it might have been better if you and I had perished in it. Now we are in the merciless hands of a demon from Hell, perhaps the Prince of Darkness himself. Our very souls are in extreme peril.”

  Kickaha was aware of the words, but he was too intent on studying his captor to take in their full meaning. Close up, the creature looked even more monstrous and dangerous than when in the “coffin.” The massive muscles and thick skeleton we
re a Hercules’. The gold and green scales of his skin gleamed in the naked light above him. Around his neck from just below the jaw and to the shoulders were interlocking bands of bone on the surface of which were the snakish scales. And lines on his face revealed what Kickaha had not seen before. Bony plates underlay the scales there, too. But they seemed to be of thinner bone than on his neck and body.

  Now the scaly man opened his mouth to reveal long, sharp teeth like a lion’s, though the canines were much shorter.

  No fruit or vegetable eater, this thing, thought Kickaha. However, bears had a predator’s teeth, and their diet was more vegetarian than carnivorous.

  The long and very narrow tip of its tongue slid out like a reptile’s. It was a green tendril extending from a red tongue that looked like a man’s.

  Its large, green eyes were set an inch or so farther back than in a human skull. Though they reminded Kickaha of a crocodile’s, they had eyelids that blinked regularly.

  Behind him, on the other side of the hall, were two cells similar to his. “How long have you been here?” he said softly to Clifton.

  On hearing Kickaha’s voice, the creature’s flat ears moved outward and formed cups.

  Clifton whispered, “Since two days ago. I came close to drowning in the flood, and I was much battered. But I did manage to grab a tree trunk and float far down the flood. I was swept over the edge of a great cataract but still survived, thanks to God and my guardian angel. However, I was carried to the very deeps of the chasm, so deep that its top was a very thin ribbon of light and I was in the darkness of the bowels of Hell. I like to have died of the heat and the moisture, but I strove to reach the shore of the waters, which had become a mere river again by then. I groped around blindly, and once more, God and my guardian angel bestowed salvation upon me.”

  The scaly man had moved forward, closed his huge hands on two bars, and was eyeing the captives intently. Kickaha was startled when he saw on the creature’s right index finger the ring Clifton had worn in the pit. He turned swiftly and glanced at the Englishman’s right hand. The ring was gone. He turned back to face the scaly man. If he had taken the ring from Clifton, he had made it larger so that it could fit his huge finger.