The Fallable Fiend

by L. Sprague DeCamp

  Fearing that Aithor might, in one of his playful moments, have my tail or some other member cut off, I forbore to argue the point. I was compelled, however, to say: “But good my sir, whilst I might manage with that horse, I can hardly cover the distance hence to Shven without any money at all, to buy food and lodging for myself and fodder for my beast.”

  “Ye mean ye demons buy things with money, like a human being?”

  “On the Prime Plane, I needs must do as the Prime Planers do. If you send me forth destitute, my journey will abort ere well begun.”

  “Ye can borrow from taverners on the credit of the Syndicate.”

  “O Aithor, from the way Solymbrians scream and run at the sight of me, I anticipate enough trouble even to gain admission to inns. Were you a taverner, would you give me credit?”

  Aithor chewed his beard. “I see what ye mean. Well then, steal a lamb or a fowl and dine on it.”

  “And have the countryside up and hunting me? Come, come, Captain Aithor. You know better.”

  “Oh, the nine hells with it. I’ll give you enough to take you to Shven, if ye be careful. Ye should get there in a sennight, and three marks a day should be ample therefore.” He counted out twenty-one marks and dropped them into my wallet. “How ye fare after ye shall have reached the steppe is your problem, and wherret me no more about it.”

  My tendrils told me that one of Aithor’s rages was brewing not far beneath the surface, so I did not “wherret” him further. A couple of robbers led me back to the road and dismissed me.

  The gait of that swaybacked old nag certainly proved sedate. It took a mort of beating with a switch I cut from a branch to get the creature from a walk up to a trot, and never did I persuade it to canter more than three lopes at a time.

  Withal, I reached Solymbria City on the evening of that same day. I rode in through an unguarded gate. The streets were deserted. When I halted the horse and leaned over to ask a passerby the way to an inn, the man stared at me for a trice, then put his fingers in his mouth and whistled.

  Two other men ran out of a tumbledown house, and all three attacked me. One tried to pull me out of the saddle by one leg, while the other two strove to reach me with knives. I grasped my mace, which hung by its lanyard from my saddle, and crushed the skulls of two attackers with one blow each. The third man fled into the night.

  I looked around for some officer to whom to explain the two corpses but saw none. So I left them lying and rode on until I passed an inn, which I recognized by the skull of an ox above its door.

  This door was bolted, and it took much knocking and shouting to get the taverner to open it a crack. When he glimpsed my face, he gave a cry of terror and tried to shut it again, but I got my foot into a crack.

  “I am a cash customer!” I cried. “A guest! An envoy from Ir!”

  By much repetition and argument, I prevailed upon the man to admit me, even if he stood nervously with an iron-bound cudgel poised while I showed him my documents. When I had made arrangements for lodging, I told the taverner of my encounter of that evening.

  “No wonder, if you ride the streets of Solymbria after dark!” said he, whose name was Rhuys. “The place swarms with brigands.”

  “Is nought done to abate this nuisance?”

  “Practically speaking, no. The constables, being unpaid and undisciplined, have oft turned robber themselves. Others have hired out to citizens as private bodyguards.”

  “A strange land and a strange city,” I said. “Has it always been thus?”

  “Nay; last year ’twas a fine, orderly place. But under that ninny Gavindos, pox take him, all’s gone to pot. Ah, well, an we can survive another month, there will be another election. Belike the gods will give us an abler archon.”

  ###

  Despite my protests, it took me two days to get an audience with the archon. In the meantime the taverner Rhuys, finding that I was not quite the monster I looked, became friendly. I was his only current guest, business having become ruinously bad. When, on the day after my arrival, he set forth to buy provisions, he urged me to come with him.

  “Nobody would be such a dunce as to attack me in your company,” he said.

  “What are those?” I pointed to a gaggle of women being shepherded along the street by a pair of burly men-at-arms.

  “Housewives on their way to market,” he explained. “The armed men are former constables whom the householders of one block have hired as guards. They’ve arranged for all the women of the block to market in concert, so that the guards can go with them to ward them from rape and robbery.”

  “You Prime Planers are strange creatures,” I said.

  “How so? Do you better in demon land?”

  “On the Twelfth Plane, a demon properly reared by his parents adheres to decent behavior thereafter without constant compulsion. Hence we have little of this raveled and oppressive machinery of laws and coercion that obtains here. But you human beings—the instant you are freed from constraints, you run wild like insensate beasts, abusing and preying upon one another, like—like—”

  “Like crabs in a bucket,” said Rhuys.

  “Thank you, sir; I could not recall the name of those scuttling aquatic creatures.”

  “We’re not all thieves and murderers at heart,” quotha. “In fact, most of us do be peaceable and orderly, asking only to be let alone to earn our livings.”

  “But enough of you are of the other kind, if I may say so,” I said.

  Rhuys sighed. “I fear me you are right. Do no demons ever misbehave?”

  “Oh, certes; but the fraction is small enough to be easily mastered. Besides, our wizards have puissant spells, which compel one accused of crime to speak the exact truth. This greatly simplifies the task of ascertaining the culprit’s guilt.”

  Rhuys looked sharply at me. “Does the Twelfth Plane permit immigration?”

  “I misdoubt the question has hitherto come up. When I return thither, I will try to learn and let you know.”

  ###

  When at last I was ushered into the palace, I found Gavindos of Odrum a short man with a barrel-shaped body and very long, muscular arms. He reminded me of my friend Ungah, the apeman.

  “Siddown,” he said. “What said you your name was?”

  “Zdim, Your Excellency.”

  “Stim, Za-dim—oh, the nine hells with it. I’ll call you ‘Hey, you.’ Have some beer. What you here for?”

  “I am an envoy from Ir . . .” and I explained the circumstances of my visit.

  “Ir. Let’s see. That’s some futtering foreign country, isn’t it?” As the man spoke, my tendrils picked up emotions of bewilderment, as a child might feel when these high matters were explained to it.

  “It is the republic adjoining yours on the south, sir.”

  Gavindos: “I always get them futtering foreign places mixed up. So, what’s that got to do with me?”

  “The Syndicate of Ir urgently requests that you, sir, dispatch an armed force to break the siege of Ir City.”

  “Huh? You mean they want my futtering army to go down and fight these clowns from—what did you say the futtering invaders are called?”

  “Paaluans, sir. They come from across the Western Ocean—”

  “All right, all right. I heard you the first time. Have some more beer. So why should I send my futtering army to this place—Ir, be that it?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “And send my futtering army across the ocean to fight these clowns in some place I never heard of—what was I saying?”

  I explained again. Gavindos wrinkled his brow. At last he said: “But look here, if the people of Ir have tails and scales like you, I don’t want no futtering part of them. If these other clowns kill them and eat them, I say good riddance.”

  “But, sir, as I have tried to explain, the Irians are just as human as you are. I am merely a demon bound to their service.”

  “Then if they be human, why didn’t they send a futtering human being to me?”


  “Because I was the only one who could get through the Paaluan lines.”

  The archon took a mighty swallow of beer, “Let’s see, now. Be those clowns from over the sea attacking Ir, or be Ir attacking them?”

  I explained once again.

  “Well,” said Gavindos, “I don’t see what good it would do me to interfere. We don’t seem to have no futtering money to pay our futtering army where it be, let alone sending it into foreign countries I never heard of.”

  “Your Excellency! When the Paaluans have cleaned out Ir, they’ll invade Solymbria next.”

  “Huh? You think they might?’

  “Certes!”

  “Which of ’em be likely to invade? Ir or—I’ve forgotten the futtering name of the other?”

  I explained again. The archon pondered. At last he said: “Well, let ’em come. I’ll challenge their head man to a wrastle! I’ll break his futtering back, and they’ll have to go home because they won’t have no general no more to give ’em orders. Have some more beer before you go.”

  VIII

  YUROG THE SHAMAN

  Like the southern part of Solymbria, the northern was infested by robbers. I suspect that some of the rough-looking men I saw on the road or in inns were of this type. Some gave me hard looks, but none molested me. I suppose my appearance dissuaded them from any nefarious plans they may have entertained.

  On the second day after leaving Solymbria City, I came to the foothills of the Ellorna Mountains. While eating my supper, I showed the taverner, one Hadrubar, my map and asked him about the road across the mountains.

  “Hard to tell,” said he. “The Needle’s Eye”—he pointed to the place on my map that showed the pass over the crest of the range—“is closed in winter by snow. Now it’s high summer, and the pass should have been open for two months or more. But nary a traveler has come through from the land of the Hruntings.”

  “How about travelers northward bound?”

  “Some have set out hence, but none has returned. Some say the Zaperazh have closed the pass.”

  “The what have closed the pass?”

  “The Zaperazh—you know, the tribe of cavemen that dwell thereabouts. It used to take a regular military campaign every year to open the pass against their opposition. Then the government made a treaty with ’em, but with murthering savages like that, one never knows.”

  “What are these cavemen like?”

  “Would you see one? Step hither.”

  He led me to his kitchen. There a surly-looking, tawny-haired youth, with a thin iron collar of a slave around his neck, was washing dishes.

  “That’s Glob, my Zaperazh slave,” said Hadrubar. “An ill-natured scrowle, almost more trouble to train and discipline than he’s worth.”

  “Are cavemen enslaved as a regular thing?”

  “No more, since the treaty.”

  “This treaty did not, evidently, restore to Master Glob his liberty.”

  “Of course not! Some such silly proposal was mooted when the treaty was being higgled; but it roused such a towrow among Solymbrians who’ve paid good money for slaves that the archon rejected it. After all, unjustly to rape us of our property were a tyranny no man of spirit would submit to.”

  As he led me back into the common room, Hadrubar continued in a lower tone, so that Glob should not overhear: “Under previous archons, the border was so well patrolled that runaways had little chance of slipping across, but now . . .”

  “As we say in demon land,” quoth I, “it is an ill tide that washes nobody’s feet clean.”

  Hadrubar shot me a sour look. “Waste not your sympathies on those brutes, who esteem not the niceties of civilization even when they’re forced upon ’em.”

  “This is not my world, Master Hadrubar, and it is no concern of mine how you Prime Planers entreat one another. I am, however, often puzzled by the gap between your professed principles and your actions. For ensample, you contemn Glob’s primitive folk; yet methought Solymbrians believed all men to be created equal?”

  “You have it wrong, sir demon. That Immur created all Solymbrians equal is a plain fact, attested by divine revelation. Who made the other peoples of the world, and how, I know not. The Zaperazh have a god of their own, hight Rostroi. Belike this Rostroi made the Zaperazh; if so, he botched the job.”

  I forbore to carry the argument further, thinking it illogical to dogmatize about these Zaperazh without having known any personally.

  ###

  Novaria has excellent roads linking the capitals of the eleven mainland city-states. (The twelfth, Zolon, is on an isle in the Western Ocean, off the Solymbrian coast.) The road north from Solymbria City, however, was less well kept. After it crossed the border of the polis—where I passed another deserted customs house—it dwindled to a mere track, suitable for pack animals but hardly passable to wheeled vehicles. In the steeper places, freshets had washed the dirt off the bare bones of the mountains. My poor old horse slipped and stumbled so on the rocks that I had to dismount and lead him, scrambling from ledge to ledge.

  By the end of the first day out of Hadrubar’s Inn, I had left the border leagues behind and begun to climb. All the next three days I climbed, while the snowy ridges ahead loomed closer and closer. In the foothills rose dense stands of trees with dark-green needles, looking almost black. As I got higher, these forests thinned out to a mere scattering.

  As Hadrubar had implied, there was no traffic. The silence was broken only by the sigh of the wind, the purl of a torrent, and the echo of my horse’s hooves from a cliff. I sighted distant flocks of wild goats and sheep, and once a bear on a far hillside frightened the horse.

  The increasing cold made me sluggish and stiff. The robe that Aithor had given me was of little help, since we demons do not have a source of internal heat like the higher animals of the Prime Plane. Hence our bodies cool down to the temperature of the ambient air, and our activity slows proportionately. The first two nights, I could thaw myself out enough by my campfire to carry me through the following day; but then I found that I needs must stop at midday, build a fire, and warm myself then as well.

  On the fifth day after leaving the inn, I reached the pass called the Needle’s Eye. The track wound up and down fearsome precipices. Snow lay in isolated banks and patches. Huge, snow-clad peaks towered to right and left.

  At noon by my pocket sun-ring, I stopped to build a fire. The horse ate a small bagful of grain that I carried for such emergencies, since there was too little herbage at this height to keep him fed.

  Gathering material for a fire proved onerous, for there was nothing to burn save a few gnarled and scattered shrubs. Moreover, between the cold and the thinness of the air, I had become so sluggish that I could scarcely move. After an hour of burdensome efforts, I collected enough combustibles. Moving like one of those Prime Plane garden pests called snails, I kindled my fire.

  I hardly had the blaze going when a strange thing happened. My tendrils detected magic. Then, with a roar, a blast of ice-cold air swept down upon me. It seemed to come from overhead. It flattened out my little fire, which blazed up fiercely and then died almost as quickly as the twigs were consumed.

  I lurched to my feet, meaning to put more fuel on the fire. By the time I had stood up, however, the cold had so slowed my movements that I became as rigid as a statue. Not being well braced, I toppled slowly over—fortunately not into the dying fire—and lay stiffly in the posture I had reached when I lost the power of movement.

  The horse pricked its ears, snorted, and began to shamble away, clop-clop. Then came a snapping of bowstrings and a whistle of arrows. The horse screamed, reared, and fell over thrashing as several shafts struck it in the side. Others, missing their target, clattered and tinkled against the rocks. One fell near me, and I saw that the arrowhead looked like glass.

  Later, I learnt that this was indeed the case. The cavemen of the Ellornas are in the stone age of culture. Discovering that glass was as easily worked as flint and furnish
ed even sharper edges, they had made a practice of trading furs with the Solymbrians for the cullet from broken bottles and windowpanes.

  This they wrought into arrowheads and other tools and weapons.

  The archers now appeared from behind boulders and streamed down into the path. Some began cutting up my dead horse with knives of flint and glass. Others clustered around me.

  The Zaperazh looked at first sight like some sort of bearmen, but as they got closer I saw that this was the result of the furs wherein they were clad from head to boots. They were evidently of the same species as the Novarians and other human Prime Planers, not members of another species as in the case of Ungah. They were taller and heavier on the average than the Novarians. From what I could see of their faces past the fur hoods, beards, and dirt, they were not ill-looking men as Prime Planers go, with hair of assorted hues and eyes of brown or gray. Their smell, however, was overpowering. Frozen stiff as I was, I could do nought to avoid it.

  They yammered in their own tongue, being even greater chatterboxes than the Novarians. I did not, naturally, understand a word of their speech. There seemed to be two leaders among them: a very tall, middle-aged man, and a stooped, white-bearded oldster. The former ordered the tribesmen about but paused betimes to consult in an undertone with the latter.

  They turned me over and unfastened my robe to examine me in detail, with much pointing of fingers and a perfect torrent of words. At last four of them picked me up, one by each limb, and bore me off. The rest followed laden with masses of flesh from the horse, of whom little was now left but the skeleton.

  I could see little of the route we followed, since I was in a supine position and could neither turn my head nor roll my eyes. I could only stare at the sky, with my pupils closed down to slits against the glare of the sun.

  ###

  The Zaperazh dwelt in a village of leathern tents, clustered about the entrance to a huge cave at the base of a cliff. They bore me through the village, which swarmed with women and young, and into the cave. The darkness of the cave was soon banished by torches and by a multitude of little stone lamps, which they set around the floor at the edges. Each lamp was a shallow dish with a handle to one side, and in it a wick in the form of a lump of moss, floating in a pool of melted fat.