Bird of Prey

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Here—” she panted, “stand in—close to me, on the stone—” I drew back, startled.

  “Oh, don't stop to argue,” she whimpered. “Come here! Quick!"

  “Hai-ai! Earth man! There he is—"

  The girl's arms flung round me again; I felt her slight, hard body pressing on mine, and she literally hauled me toward the center of the shrine.

  The world tilted. The street disappeared in a cone of spinning lights, stars plummeted crazily, and I plunged down—locked in the girl's arms—spun—dropped head-over-heels through reeling lights and shadows that wheeled around us. The yelping of the Ya-men whispered away in unimaginable distances, and for a second I felt the swift unmerciful blackout of a powerdive, with blood breaking from my nostrils and filling my mouth....

  Light flared in my eyes. I was standing square on my feet in a little street-shrine—but the street was gone. Coils of incense still smudged the air, the God squatted, toadlike, in his recess; the girl was still hanging limp, locked between my clenched arms. As the floor straightened under my feet, I staggered forward, thrown off balance by the sudden return of the girl's weight, and grabbed, blindly, for support.

  “Give her to me,” said a voice at my ear, and the girl's light sagging body was lifted from my arms. A strong hand grasped my elbow; I found a chair beneath my knees, and sank gratefully into it.

  “The transmission isn't smooth between such distant terminals,” the voice remarked, “I see that Miellyn has fainted again. A weakling, the girl, but useful."

  I spat blood, trying to get the room in focus. For I was inside a room; windowless, but with a transparent skylight, through which pink daylight streamed in thin long splinters. Daylight—and it had been midnight in Charin! I'd come halfway around the planet in a few seconds!

  From somewhere, the room was filled with a sound of hammering; tiny, bell-like hammering, a fairy's anvil. I looked up and saw a man—a man?—watching me.

  On Wolf you see all kinds of human, nonhuman and half-human life. I consider myself an expert on all three. But I had never seen anyone who so closely resembled the ordinary human—and so obviously wasn't. He, or it, was tall and lean, humanoid, but oddly muscled, a vague suggestion of something less than human in the lean hunch of his body. Manlike, he wore tight-fitting trunks, and a shirt of green fur that revealed bulging biceps where they shouldn't be, and angular planes where there should have been swelling muscles. The shoulders were high and hunched, the neck unpleasantly sinuous, and the face, only a little narrower than human, was handsomely arrogant, with a kind of wary, alert mischief that was the least human thing about him.

  He bent, tilted the girl's inert body on to a divan of some sort, and turned his back on her, lifting his hand in an impatient gesture.

  All the little tinkling hammers stopped as if their switch had been turned out.

  “Now,” said the nonhuman, “we can talk."

  Like the waif, he spoke the archaic Shainsa, with its lilting, sing-song rise and fall. I asked in the same language, “What happened? Who are you? And where am I?"

  The nonhuman crossed his hands. “Do not blame Miellyn. She acted under orders. It was imperative to bring you here, and we had reason to believe you might ignore an ordinary summons. You were clever at evading our surveillance—for a while. But there would not have been two Dry-towners in Charin tonight. You are Rakhal Sensar?"

  Rakhal Sensar!

  Shaken, I pulled a rag from my pocket and wiped the blood from my mouth. As far as I knew, there was no resemblance between Rakhal and myself—but it occurred to me, for the first time, that any casual description would fit either of us. Humans, tall and lean and without distinctive coloring, with the Dry-towner's walk and speech, and the same scars across face and mouth—and I'd been hanging around in Rakhal's old haunts. The mistake was natural; and natural or not, I wasn't going to deny it.

  “We knew,” the nonhuman continued, “that if you remained where you were, the Earthman who has been trailing you—Cargill—would have made his arrest. We knew about your quarrel with Cargill—among other things—but we did not consider it necessary that you should fall into his hands."

  I was puzzled. “I still don't understand. Exactly where am I?"

  “This is the Master-shrine of Nebran."

  Nebran! Knowing what Rakhal would have done, I hastily made the quick good-luck gesture, gabbling a few archaic words.

  Like every Earthman on Wolf, I'd seen blanked impassive faces at mention of the Toad-god. Rumor made his spies omniscient, his priesthood virtually omnipotent, his powers formidable. I had believed about a tenth of what I heard, but even that was considerable. Now I was in his shrine, and the device which had brought me here, without a doubt, was a working model of a matter-transmitter.

  A matter-transmitter—a working model—Rakhal was after it.

  “And who,” I asked slowly, “are you, Lord?"

  The green-clad creature hunched his shoulders in a ceremonious bow. “My name is Evarin. Humble servant of Nebran and yourself, honorable sir,” he added, but there was no humility in his manner. “I am called the Toymaker."

  Evarin. That was another name given weight by rumor; a breath of gossip in a thieves market, a scrawled name on a torn scrap of paper—a blank folder in Terran Intelligence. A Toymaker...

  The girl on the divan sat up, passing slim hands over her disheveled hair. “My poor feet,” she mourned, “they are black and blue with the cobbles, and my hair is filled with sand and tangles! Toymaker, I will do no more of your errands! What way was this to send me to entice a man?"

  She stamped one small bare foot, and I saw that she was not nearly as young as she had looked in the street; although immature by Terran standards, she had a fair figure for a Dry-town girl. Her rags fell around her slim legs in graceful folds, her hair was spun black glass, and I suddenly saw what the confusion in the filthy street had kept me from seeing before.

  It was the girl of the spaceport cafe—the girl with the Toad-god embroidered on the breast of her robes, who had sent the Dry-towners to running madly, insane with terror.

  I saw that Evarin was watching me, and turned idly away. Evarin said, with a kind of rueful impatience, “You know you enjoyed yourself, Miellyn. Run along and make yourself beautiful again."

  She danced out of the room.

  The Toymaker motioned to me. “This way,” he directed, and led me through a different door. The offstage hammering I had heard, tiny bell-tones like a fairy xylophone, began again as the door opened, and we passed into a workroom which made me remember nursery tales from a half-forgotten childhood on Terra.

  For the workers were tiny, gnarled—trolls! They were chaks—chaks from the Polar mountains, furred and half-human, with witchlike faces, but transformed, dwarfed. Tiny hammers pattered on miniature anvils, in a tinkling, jingling chorus of musical clinks and taps. Beady eyes focused, like lenses, over winking jewels and gimcracks. Busy elves. Makers of—

  Toys!

  Evarin jerked his hunched shoulders with an imperative gesture; I recalled myself, following him through the fairy workroom, casting lingering glances at the work tables. A withered leprechaun set eyes into the head of a minikin hound; delicate fingers worked precious metals into invisible filigree for the collarpiece of a dainty dancing doll with living emerald eyes; metallic feathers were thrust in clockwork precision into the wings of a skeleton bird no larger than a fingernail. The nose of the hound wobbled sensitively, the bird's wings quivered, the eyes of the little dancer swiveled to follow me as I passed.

  Toys?

  “Come along.” Evarin rapped, and a door slid shut behind us. The clinks and taps grew faint, fainter. But never ceased.

  “Now you know, Rakhal, why I am called Toymaker. Is it not strange—the Masterpriest of Nebran a maker of Toys, the shrine of the Toad-god a workshop for children's playthings?” Evarin didn't wait for an answer. From a sliding cabinet, he took out a doll.

  She was, perhaps, the length
of my longest finger, molded to the precise proportions of woman, and costumed in the bizarre fashion of the Shainsa dancers. Evarin touched no button or key visible to me, but when he set the figurine on its feet, it executed a whirling, arm-tossing dance, in a familiar and tricky tempo.

  “I am, perhaps, in a sense, benevolent,” Evarin murmured. He snapped his fingers and the doll sank to her knees and posed there, silent. “Moreover, I have the means and—let us say—the ability to indulge my small fancies. The small daughter of the President of the Federation of Trade Cities was sent such a doll recently. What a pity that Paolo Arimengo was so suddenly impeached and banished!” The Toymaker clucked his teeth commiseratingly, “Perhaps a little companion—such as this—may comfort little Carmela for her adjustment to her new—position."

  He replaced the dancer and pulled down something like a whirligig. “This might interest you,” he mused, and set it spinning. I stared, entranced, at the wheeling pattern of lights and shadows that flowed and disappeared, melting in and out of visible patterns...

  Suddenly I realized what the thing was doing. I wrested my eyes away with an effort. Had I blanked out?

  Evarin arrested the compelling motion with one finger. “Several of these harmless toys are available to the children of important men,” he said absently, “an export of value for our impoverished and exploited world. Unfortunately, an incidence of nervous breakdowns is—oh—interfering somewhat with their sale. The children, of course, are unaffected, and—ah—love them.” Evarin set the hypnotic wheel moving again for an instant, glanced sidewise at me, and set it carefully back.

  “Now—” Evarin's voice, hard with the silkiness of a tiger-snarl, clawed across sudden silence. “We'll talk business!"

  He had something concealed in one hand. “You are probably wondering how we recognized and found you?” A panel cleared in the wall, and became translucent; confused flickers moved on the surface, then dropped into focus and I realized that the panel was an ordinary television screen and that I was looking down into the well-known interior of the Cafe of Three Rainbows, in the small Terran Colony at Charin. The focus gradually sharpened down on the long, Earth-type bar, where a tall man in spaceman's leathers was talking with a pale-haired Terran girl.

  Evan said at my ear, “By now, Race Cargill has decided that you fell into his trap and the hands of the Ya-men."

  It seemed so unbearably funny that my shoulders twitched. Since I landed in Charin, I'd gone to great pains to avoid the Terran colony. And Rakhal, somehow, discovering this, had conveniently filled my empty place. By posing as me.

  Evarin rasped, “Cargill meant to leave the planet and something stopped him. What? You could be of great use to us, Rakhal—but not with this blood-feud unsettled!"

  That needed no elucidation. No Wolfan in his senses will make any bargain with a Dry-towner carrying an unresolved blood-feud. By law and custom, formal blood-feud takes precedence over any other business, public or private, and is sufficient and legal excuse for broken promises, neglected duties—even theft or murder.

  “We want this feud settled, once and for all,” Evarin's voice was low, and unhurried, “and we're not above weighting the scales. This man Cargill can, and has, posed as a Dry-towner. We don't like Earthmen who can spy on us that way. In settling your blood-feud, you would do us a service, and we would be grateful. Look."

  He opened his closed hand, displaying something small, curled, inert.

  “Every living being emits a characteristic pattern of electrical nerve impulses. As you may have guessed, we have methods of recording these individual patterns, and we have had you and Cargill under observation for a long time. We've had plenty of opportunity to key this—Toy—to Cargill's personal pattern."

  On his palm the curled, inert thing stirred and spread wings; a fledgling bird lay there, small soft body throbbing slightly; half-hidden in a ruff of metallic feathers, I glimpsed a grimly elongated beak. The tiny pinions were feathered with delicate down less than a quarter of an inch long; they beat, with rough insistence, against the Toymaker's prisoning fingers.

  “This is not dangerous—to you. Press this point"—he showed me—"and if Race Cargill is within a certain distance—it is up to you to be within that distance—it will find Cargill and kill him. Unerringly, inescapably and untraceably. We will not tell you the critical distance. And we give you three days."

  He checked my startled exclamation with a gesture. “It is only fair to tell you; this is a test. Within the hour, Cargill will receive a warning. We want no incompetents who must be helped too much. Nor do we want cowards! If you fail, or try to evade the test—” there was green and inhuman malice in his eyes—"we have made another bird."

  He was silent, but I thought I understood the complexity of Wolf illogic. “The other bird is keyed to me?"

  With slow contempt, Evarin shook his head.

  “You? You are used to danger and fond of a gamble. Nothing so simple! We have given you three days. If, within that time, the bird you carry has not killed, the other bird will fly, and it will kill. Rakhal Sensar—you have a wife..."

  Yes, Rakhal had a wife. They could threaten his wife.... And his wife was my sister Juli...

  Everything after that was anticlimax. Of course I had to drink wine with Evarin, the elaborately formal ritual without which no business agreement on Wolf is valid, and go through equally elaborate courtesies and formalities. Evarin entertained me with gory and technical descriptions of the methods by which the birds—and others of his hellish Toys—did their killing and their other tasks. Miellyn danced into the room and upset our sobriety by perching on my knee and drinking sips from my cup, and pouting prettily when I paid her less attention than she thought she merited. She even whispered something about a rendezvous in the Cafe of the Three Rainbows.

  But eventually it was over, and I stepped through a door that twisted, and I spun again through a queer giddy blackness, and found myself outside a blank, windowless wall, back in Charin. I found my way to my lodging in a filthy chak hostel, and threw myself down on the verminous bed.

  Believe it or not, I slept.

  Later I went out into the reddening morning. I pulled Evarin's toy from my pocket, unwrapped the silk slightly, and tried to make some sense from my predicament.

  The little thing lay innocent and silent in my palm. It couldn't tell me whether it had been keyed to me, the real Cargill, or to Rakhal, using my name and reputation in the Terran Colony. If I pressed the stud, it might hunt down Rakhal, and all my troubles would be over. On the other hand, if it killed me, presumably the other bird, keyed to Juli, would never fly—which would save her life, but would not get Rindy back for her. And if I delayed past Evarin's deadline, one of the birds would hunt down Juli, and give her a swift and not too painless death.

  I spent the day lounging in a chak dive, juggling a dozen plans frantically in my head. Toys, innocent and sinister. Spies, messengers. Toys which killed—and horribly. Toys which could be controlled by the pliant mind of a child—and every child hates his parents now and again!

  I kept coming back to the same conclusion. Juli was in danger, but she was half a world away, while Rakhal was here in Charin, calmly masquerading as me. There was a child involved, Juli's child, and I had made a promise involving that child; the first step was to get inside Charin's Terran Colony, and see how the land lay.

  Charin is a city shaped like a crescent moon, encircling the small Colony of the Trade City; a miniature spaceport, a miniature skyscraper of an HQ, the clustered dwellings of the Terrans who worked there and those who lived with them and catered to their needs.

  Entry from one to another—since Charin is in hostile territory, and far beyond the impress of the ordinary Terran law—is through a guarded gateway; but the gate stood wide open, and the guards looked lazy and bored. They carried shockers, but they didn't look as if they'd ever used them. One raised an eyebrow at his companion as I shambled to the gate and requested permission to ent
er the Terran Zone.

  They inquired my name and business. I gave a Dry-towner name I'd used when I was known from Shainsa to the Polar Mountains, and tacked one of the Secret Service passwords to the end of it. They looked at each other again, and one said, “Yeah, this is the guy,” and they took me into the booth beside the gate and one of them used an intercom device. Presently they took me along into the HQ building, and into an office that said LEGATE.

  Evidently I had walked straight into another trap. One of the guards asked me, straight out, “All right, now. Just what, exactly, is your business in the Terran Colony?"

  “Terran business. You'll have to make a visicall to check on me. Put me straight through to Magnusson's office at Central HQ. The name's Race Cargill."

  The guard made no move. He was grinning. He said to his partner. “Yeah, that's the guy, all right, the one we were told to watch out for.” He put a hand on my shoulder and spun me around.

  There were two of them, and spaceforce guards aren't picked for their good looks. Just the same, I gave a good account of myself, until the inner door burst open and a man stormed out.

  “What's all this racket?"

  One of the guards got a hammerlock on me, giving my arm a twist. “This Dry-towner bum tried to talk us into making a priority call to Magnusson—the Secret Service Chief, that is. He knew one or two of the Secret Service passwords—that's how he got through the gate. Remember, Cargill passed the word that someone might turn up trying to impersonate him?"

  “I remember.” The strange man's eyes were wary and cold.

  I found myself seized by the guards, and frog-marched to the gate; one of the men pushed my skean back into its clasp, the other pushed me, hard, and I stumbled, and fell sprawling on the chinked street.

  First round to Rakhal. He had sprung the trap on me, very neatly.

  The street was narrow and crooked, winding along between double rows of untidy pebble-houses. I walked for hours.

  It was dusk when I realized that I was being followed.