Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

“It was. It was!” she screamed. There were fury and passion in her voice, and a strange, wild grief he could not understand. But above all, there was evil, sheer, pure evil such as he had never dreamed to see so nakedly in a human face. No face could be wholly human and hold so much of it.

  “No!” he shouted and saw her double suddenly, with a motion like a striking snake, and snatch at something hidden inside the loose top of her high scarlet boots.

  He should have taken warning. He should have dodged. But she moved too fast for him. She straightened and her red arm flew back, and he saw something black and blurred flying straight at his face. He saw it come, and grow enormously and spread to shut out all the room behind it. But he did not see it strike, for he was no longer there to see or feel.

  He floated in oblivion, rocking on mists like the clouds that move over the face of the drifting lands . . .

  Pain in bright, regular flashes roused him slowly. He groaned and stirred, not knowing it was himself who moved. It hurt to breathe. He opened his eyes and looked up blankly at a high window framing a fantastic panorama, twilight and a City lighted as always with colored lanterns swinging in the breeze above wet, narrow streets.

  He tried to get up, and could not. Little by little, awareness came back. He was lying on the floor by the divan. His wrists and ankles were tied tightly—with vicious tightness—as if Irathe had drawn the bonds with all her strength. His head ached and he had been struck a number of times across the face, by the stiff, stinging feel of it Also, he thought, she must have driven her booted toes into his ribs, to judge by the pain that accompanied each breath.

  He wondered how long he had lain here. There was no way of telling time—if time existed at all inside the City. There were things he had to do. Godfrey still lay imprisoned, hoping for rescue from Kerak, and he knew there were other duties he might remember later, when his head stopped spinning.

  What had happened? He had angered Irathe, of course—he was not quite sure how, but he had touched her in a very sore spot if the fury in her voice and her actions had been any criterion.

  And yet—it had not been she. Lying there on the floor, he forgot for a moment his more urgent problems in the all-encompassing mystery of just who that crowned girl was whom he remembered so vividly. The name, the face—yes. But this fiery-eyed girl with evil like a lantern burning in her—no, it had not been she . . .

  He stirred again, and said softly, to himself, “Irathe.”

  Instantly there was a sound in the room. Bare feet came across the floor almost in silence, cautiously, and a brown face bent above his, unfamiliar from this awkward angle on the rug.

  “Master,” said a gentle voice with fear in it, “master—do you know me?”

  SHE was brown and bare-limbed, and she wore heavy golden bands on wrists and ankles, and a golden collar about her throat. She was the little guide who had taken him from Nain’s temple to meet Irathe and her quarrelsome fellow-conspirators. He had not yet had time to wonder about that strange combination, or what Irathe had been doing there among them, in disguise.

  “Master,” the girl whispered again, her eyes rolling above him so that the whites showed as she watched the corners of the room for—Irathe? Was she a servant of Irathe herself, or was this show of terror genuine? He could not trust anyone at all in the City now.

  “Master, I followed all the way,” the brown girl whispered. “I must ask a question, master. Are you Jamai’s man?”

  Boyce’s head ached. He did not know Jamai except as a name and a menace. He was tired of all this intrigue of which he knew so little and he had no strong feeling just now for any in the City but one.

  “I’m no one’s man but my own,” he said angrily. “But if Jamai is against Irathe, I’d like to know him. Is that what you want?”

  She smiled a white smile above him.

  “Thank you, master.” The brown face disappeared briefly. Then he felt hands turning him gently, felt the coldness of a blade against his wrists, felt the intolerable tightness of his bonds fall away.

  “That will be painful, master, in a moment,” she warned, working on his ankles. “When the pain passes, we will go.”

  He rubbed his wrists.

  “Where?”

  “If the gods are with us and we leave this tower alive”—her eyes rolled again, fearfully—“we go to one who is Jamai’s deadliest foe.”

  “And Irathe’s?”

  She looked down evasively.

  “We must go quickly,” she said. “It is better not to talk until we’re free of this house.”

  Boyce shrugged. His limbs were beginning to prickle with returning circulation, but the pain in his side lessened as he waited, and he was eager to go. He could deal with Irathe later, and he would. That was a promise to himself.

  The brown girl was holding one of the draperies aside and beckoning to him. There was a grille in the wall, and a steep stairway winding down into blackness. Limping, Boyce followed her into the dark.

  CHAPTER XI

  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 th
is 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 kidding 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 halfrose 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.

  “You knew her in your world,” the Huntsman said. “You helped her in her work, which was—important. She left with you a certain talisman—a crystal, cold to the touch—that opens the gateway here. You used it, half by accident, I suspect, and came through the broken window on that cliff. I saw the flash the magic made from my tower here, and when I reached the cliff you were just awakening.” He paused, a curious look flickering across his face.

  “I meant to kill you then,” he said. And Boyce suddenly recognized his look. Jealousy was in it. Yes, the Huntsman loved Irathe too, and hated her and himself because of it, and Boyce, because of—because of Boyce’s year with her on Earth.

  “I would have killed you on sight,” he went on gently, his voice soft. “But I was not sure Irathe hadn’t summoned you. Until you did not return my signal, I could not be sure. And by then—well, my mind changes easily, William Boyce. I indulge my fancies.

  “I let you go because a better thought had come to me. So I drove you toward Kerak. I knew an attack was starting on the castle then—Jamai’s efforts have redoubled of late because he grows weary of the struggle and longs to end it.

  “I thought to myself, ‘He will die in Kerak if the attack succeeds. Let him die. But if it fails, let him live and be my eyes and brain to spy out what I can of Tancred’s secrets.’ Because, you see, you wore the talisman, and I have power over that crystal as well as Irathe. I made it for her, long ago, when she was—not as she is now.”

  This time a shadow crossed the Huntsman’s face and Boyce saw the pale, strong features draw up in a grimace almost of pain.

  “I think she left that amulet to summon you by when she was ready, and I think you came too soon. I saw you too soon. When she learned of your presence here it was too late, for I had entered your mind already by power of the talisman and there was no room for her.”

  He laughed.

  “She was wild when she learned that. She—but you do not know the secret of Irathe, do you, William Boyce? You do not know why you remember her as all that was lovely and delightful, or why she is not now—herself. Well, you shall know. Better still—you shall see!”

  He got up lazily, reining in the frantic beasts, and strolled to the wall at the head of the dais. He pulled a cord hanging among the dark draperies, and curtains swept back on both sides to uncover a wall of clear mirror glass, in which only blue-gray mists swam as if it were a window upon the plains.

  “Tancred has a mirror like this,” the Huntsman said casually. “But smaller. Now watch.”

  The mists rolled back on both sides. A room took shape in the glass, as vividly as if the mirror were a wall of the room, and that wall transparent. The room was gigantic, ringed with pillars that reflected themselves in the shining black floor.

  The pillars marched up in a double line to a great throne at the far end, black, hung with scarlet. A man sat on the throne, light catching in the crown he wore. He was not young, and he was bending forward eagerly in his robe of yellow satin, stroking a dark beard and watching.

  Boyce closed his eyes suddenly and whirled on his heel, his back to the mirror. He was shaking and the sweat felt
cold on his forehead.

  The Huntsman laughed softly.

  “Yes, I know. They are not good to look at. But watch if you can, my friend. They wear robes, so you need not look Them in the face. And this they do is important to my story—and to you.”

  CHAPTER XII

  A Cure for Sorcery

  SLOWLY, his body rigid, Boyce turned back to the mirror. He could not look directly at Them, but by watching the comers of the picture and keeping his jaw set hard and his fists clenched, he managed to control his shaking and to see what went on in the mirrored room.

  They were only two, tall, robed figures hidden entirely from sight, but moving with an impossible litheness that somehow set the teeth on edge. They were walking—gliding—about a circle of glittering stones laid upon the black floor before the throne. Their robed limbs moved now and then in gestures of ritual.

  “The Sorcerer King,” the Huntsman said, “is a man hungry for power. He loves power and knowledge for their own sakes. He guides this City along the drifting lands as ships are guided in other worlds, seeking new people and new places and new sources of power. Also, he picks up other treasures.

  “When he was younger, he found one treasure he prized highly—a lovely fairhaired Woman in outlandish garments, wearing a cross emblazoned on her bosom. She came from a castle built high on the cliffs of certain mountains the City was then drifting near. The King was pleased with her and took her into his household.

  “You know that story. She bore him a daughter and then died. He loved the daughter, but he did her a terrible wrong. He had not guessed how what he did would affect himself or her, or many people he had not then heard of. The daughter was a lovely creature. Also she was wise and skilled in many arts. When the King came across a source of power and knowledge beside which all he had discovered before seemed tame, he shared the discovery with his daughter.

  “There was one trouble only. That source—those who knew what he wished to share—were so alien that eyes like ours can not bear to look upon Them. They live in another city, traveling these drifting lands, but very far from here.