The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  Gurden twitched and moved his hands. His arms flew apart. Whatever bonds had held him, back in that janitor's closet off the reaction hall of the Mays Landing Fusion Power Plant, they had not crossed time with him to this place.

  He lifted his head and rolled forward and up, onto his knees and palms, into a crouch, and got his feet under him. Gurden was prepared to spring in any direction, to attack or avoid, depending on where Hasan was and what his intentions might be.

  Hasan stood on his outcropping of rock, arms down at his sides, chin up, chest forward, eyes closed—like a diver about to launch himself out into space.

  "I remember," Gurden said, standing up slowly. "It's about the Stone, isn't it?"

  Hasan's eyes snapped open.

  "Yes, curse it. For nine hundred years I have guarded its fragments. I have examined them, prayed over them, exposed them to electric currents and magnetic fields, spoken to them with my mind and my eyes. And yet they are just—chips of agate.

  "Time and again over the years, I have found you in your fleshly guises. I have tested you, subjecting you to the barest brush with its smallest pieces. And your reaction has always been extreme.

  "What is the Stone that it gives you such power? What are you that, of all men, the Stone will work for you?"

  Gurden considered the question for two minutes, or perhaps two years.

  "I am the one who stole it in the first place," he said.

  "I recall your story now... You are this Loki?"

  "No, just a fragment of the elemental spirit that men once called by that name. My father-self has owned many names in many different languages: Chance, Pan, Puck, Old Nick, Quixote, Lucifer, Shaitan, Mo-Kuei, Jack Frost. I am the unpredictable, the unexpected, the willful, the sometimes malicious, and so the—usually—unwelcome. And I always turn up."

  "What happened to Loki after he—you—robbed heaven of the Stone?" Hasan asked.

  "He tried to use it to help men in their struggle with the gods... Men always end up fighting with their gods. They always want to know, to understand, to control, and to use what is about them. They cannot seem to rest, to let the world alone, to accept it as just another place to be... The Stone is a force of creation. It gives its human user the power to control space, exchanging one place for another. It further gives a sense of the course that time follows, letting the user turn one branch of that river into another."

  "What happened to Loki?" Hasan would not put his question aside to play with metaphysics.

  "He got bored with helping men and went back to meddling among the Aesir—gods to you," Gurden replied. "He managed to set two twin brothers, Hoder and Balder, to killing each other. As Hoder was a favorite of Odin's, the one-eyed old bastard had Loki chained to a rock at the center of the world, about which the Asgard serpent coils itself. The serpent spits venom into Loki's eyes, and he doesn't like it."

  "Will no one help him?"

  "One of Loki's daughters, Hel—who is a goddess to the dead, when she's not too busy tending her father—holds a pan in front of his face and tries to catch the sprays of poison. But sometimes she has to empty the pan."

  "For all eternity?"

  "Is there any other kind of time for a god?"

  "You remember a lot, Thomas Gurden."

  "I remember that you have pieces of my Stone," Gurden said in a dead-level voice.

  "Alexandra gave them to you, did she not? As you lay bound in—"

  "She displayed before me a tenth part of its weight." Gurden spread his hands, and the dancing fragments she had dumped out before him were suspended in a globe twenty centimeters in diameter. They orbited a point of bright energy and shone with its russet light. "Where is the rest?"

  "The missing parts are those I used over the years to lure you," Hasan replied. "A sliver melted into a crystal pendant, a caret's worth set into a ring or a sword hilt, a slice embedded in the base of a tumbler. They all add up."

  "And the power of those pieces is now firmly mine. But there were more. Six large fragments—"

  "The Templars stole them from me. It was years ago."

  "And then Sandy took them off the old man, I recovered them from her, and you took them back. When we last met, at the fusion plant, you put them in your pocket." Gurden pointed at the Palestinian's wide-cut trousers.

  "So I did. I wonder if they have survived the journey to this nexus." Hasan put a hand down into his back pocket and drew out the flat case. "Ah! They have."

  "You will give them to me."

  "And let you complete that rosette of power you are building?" Hasan pointed with the end of the case at the dance going on between Gurden's fingers. "You must think me stupid."

  "You cannot use them, Hasan. You cannot unmake them. And you cannot throw them away far enough, fast enough to deny their power to me. So your only course is to release them."

  For the first time, Hasan as-Sabah seemed uncertain. His eyes strayed down to the box.

  Gurden reached for it, not with his hands, but with the force at the center of his being.

  Hasan sensed the attack immediately and clutched the box close to his navel, into the protective shield of his aura.

  "It's weight will bear you down, Hasan. You cannot enter the battle so encumbered."

  "And you cannot move from that spot while you hold the rest of the pieces in spin," the Palestinian countered.

  "You are just a man, Hasan. Long-lived, yes, and wise in the things that a long life can teach. But you are no match for me."

  "Once I knocked you flat to the ground, you fool!"

  "That was my own power, Hasan, which you turned against me. You have no power of your own."

  "You miscount the Tears of Ahriman, then." Hasan produced a vial of cloudy glass, also from his back pocket.

  What else was in that pocket? Gurden wondered. Or was it some kind of dynamic portal to the world-nexus which they both had left?

  Holding the box in his left hand and the vial in his right, Hasan drew the stopper with his teeth and spat it aside. He tipped his head back and raised the vial over his mouth. Perhaps thirty cubic centimeters of clear fluid drained into him. What had Hasan once said? One drop would buy him fifty years of life. How much life was he absorbing in that gulp?

  "You told me that the real tears of Ahriman had dried up long ago," Gurden said. "That you have to make the liquor yourself. What is the formula?"

  "Since it cannot help you now, I will tell you.

  "As a base, I capture the tears of mothers and young widows whose sons and husbands have died in hopeless foreign wars; these I distill until the agony is as pure as crystal salt. To this I add a tincture of the blood from a murdered child, battered beyond recognition; that is for protection against terror. For strength, I draw the sweat of the parent who, in demon fury, had destroyed that child. I take the essence of all the ways by which one human shortens and embitters the life of another: the musk of a young girl, lured and seduced by her brothers; the seed of a young man, spilled among harlots; and the bile of the parents who had hoped for eternity out of both of them.

  "That is my elixir, my perfect copy of the tears which Ahriman shed upon beholding the creation of Ahura Mazda—the world in its youth and beauty."

  As he talked, Hasan grew. His chest swelled like a ripening gourd. His shoulders spread apart like the limbs of an oak tree. His head rose like a sunflower lifting and seeking the sun. His hands clenched like the roots of a willow clasping a stone. The left hand curled around the case that held six pieces of the Stone, and his fingers cracked its plastic surface easily. The foam padding crumbled away and the chips fell loose between his knotty fingers.

  With the barest gesture, Gurden had them. They sailed in a long S-curve from Hasan to take their place in the rosette shaping between his hands.

  Tom Gurden knew things from the experience of many lives that Thomas Amnet the Knight Templar could never have suspected.

  For all his sophistic
ation in the manners and wiles of twelfth-century politics, finance, and religion, Thomas Amnet had been a creature of Norman France. He had been a man of direct appetites and linear tastes. He had trained to fight with the broadsword, cut and thrust, leaning into the blows like a tavern brawler on a tear. His magic had been the brute force of fulcrum and lever: pull on it, and the truth sprang forth. But the complexities of jazz, the subtleties of a lysergic-acid high, the inverted physics of aikido—these would have been lost on the old crusader.

  Thomas Gurden had lived with all those complexities and more. He had seen with a dozen sets of eyes the remorseless budding of human spirit and emotion, pressures and tensions which Europe and the New World had been subject to since at least the seventeenth century. It had all begun—he reflected in a flash—when gentlemen gave up small beer for breakfast, took to frequenting the local coffeehouse, and got to work on the Enlightenment. What came after that had been polyphonic music, dictionaries, calculus, plays of manners, Spencerian penmanship, the Jacquard loom, orthography, the steam engine, Viennese waltzes, percussion caps and the cartridge revolver, Sousa marches, trench warfare, internal combustion, four-part harmony, saturation bombing, nuclear fission, five-eight tempo, rhyming slang, syncopation, crystalline methamphetamine, binary mathematics, pulse-tone dialing, geostationary satellites, fiber optics, gas lasers, and the nine-digit Personal Code.

  Now how could Hasan, this antique human being from the wretched Palestinian desert, hope to keep up with what Tom Gurden had seen and done and become?

  He could try.

  Hasan, swollen with the energy of his poison, lashed out at Gurden. The bolt passed into the globe of stone chips and fed its core, like the laser pulses of a fusion reactor passing into a kernel of deu-trit. Gurden absorbed it and spun the stones more quickly.

  Hasan's body trembled and he threw another blast of energy, directly from the fourth nexus beneath the heart. He aimed high, hoping to pass over the globe and strike Gurden's head. Tom raised his hands slightly, putting the mass of fragments in front of his face. Again they absorbed the bolt. The globe expanded by five or six centimeters as the chips orbited yet more rapidly.

  "Breaking the Stone was a mistake, I see," Hasan observed.

  "The essence divided remains the essence," Gurden agreed.

  "You don't believe that, Thomas Gurden. Your western science has made your mind a prisoner of physical laws. You will find yourself unable to ignore the principle of the conservation of mass and energy."

  Hasan belched forth another gout of pure psychic force, and once more the stones took it in, spinning faster. Gurden had to move his hands far apart to encompass the globe now.

  "It takes energy to contain energy, mass to support mass," Hasan mocked. "With what you must support now, I can choke you with one more blow."

  The Palestinian threw his last breath, another surge of power, and the globe absorbed it. But the point source that Gurden was maintaining could no longer hold and enfold the energy of the orbiting chips. They flew off at tangents like shrapnel.

  The point source expanded like the gas cloud of a star gone nova. As it expanded, its energy thinned and dimmed, until it scarcely warmed the air about Gurden's body.

  "Poor boy," Hasan cooed. "Naked at last."

  * * *

  Gerard de Ridefort ran out of the stifling gloom in King Guy's red tent into the blazing sunlight. The chanting of the Moslems was rising by half-notes up the scale, like cicadas buzzing in the summer heat.

  The circle of knights defending the King's tent had drawn tight around the broken well and the base of the two high horns of rock at Hattin. The men were wilting before Gerard's eyes, baking in their layers of heavy mail and woolen padding. They leaned on the shields with which they opposed a sea of brown faces and a field of long, curved swords.

  The Grand Master of the Temple drew breath to exhort these soldiers, who represented the entire strength of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, to stand fast. Without a word, however, he let that breath go. These men were on their last legs. One determined rush by the Saracen horde would overbear them and drag them down to slavery and the headman's sword.

  A shadow passed over Gerard's face—a portent of death?

  He looked up.

  A cloud was passing over the sun, passing eastward. As it went, it trailed a raveling end that tied it to another, larger cloud.

  A gust of wind stirred the dust about his feet.

  Gerard scanned the western sky. A squall line, puffy white on top, blue-black on the bottom, was hurrying in from the Mediterranean. Usually the summer heat in these upland valleys was enough to evaporate a storm before it got twenty miles inland. And this month's heat was even greater than usual.

  As he watched, the stormclouds seemed to be bunching together, concentrating their front. For whatever reason, he turned his head to the east, where the first cloud had gone. That way lay the Galilee, placid sea of Christ's first fisher-disciples. The wind was now parting the veils of dust which had hid that expanse of water since they first drew rein at Hattin. Gerard could see an edge of its silvered surface, like a piece of metal wedged into the horizon of the sand hills. The stormcloud that had passed over seemed to be drawn, descending toward the sliver of water.

  Another cloud flashed overhead like a raven's wing, and the temperature of the air around Gerard plummeted. It was disorienting: a gust of icy March wind intruding on a sultry July day.

  The knights about Gerard, glazed with heat and thirst, lifted their heads and looked around as if rising from a fever dream.

  The Saracen infantry shivered in their places. The rising pace of their chant faltered for a moment.

  * * *

  The muscles of the Palestinian's chest and stomach expanded, ready to send out another blast of energy. His eyes gleamed, his spirits buoyed by the elixir's stimulants and by Gurden's looming defeat.

  Tom Gurden waited passively. His arms hung limp at his sides. His knees bent slightly. One leg fell just ahead of the other. His feet angled forty-five degrees apart in the sandy soil. To Hasan, puffing himself up for the death blow, the position of his enemy's body would mean nothing, would signal resignation and acceptance of the darkness to come, would increase the Assassin's sense of security. However, to a martial arts student, trained in the ways of ki, that stance would be ringing alarm bells. Gurden sent his breath out in one long, slow letting go.

  Hasan flexed and sent a final burst of energy across the gap between them. To Gurden's inward eye, it had the vague shape of a blunt, large-caliber bullet, its bow-wave cupped to enfold Gurden's defenseless head, delivering killing force simultaneously across the front of his capital aura. As it moved, it blue-shifted from Gurden's perspective, deepening in intensity until—

  He was not there. His feet did not step. His legs did not swing aside. His hips did not tilt. His back did not flex. His shoulders did not twist. His head did not bow. But suddenly his body was not in the line of that killing wave.

  The flow of energy crossed behind Gurden into a small tree, withering it on the spot and charring its bark to black. Its leaves, once green, exploded into ashes.

  Hasan puffed quickly and delivered another, weaker wave-front toward Gurden's new position.

  The energy quanta reached for Gurden and almost enveloped him. Then, with no twitch or start to signal his going, Gurden flowed to the side once again.

  Hasan drew breath for a third attack.

  He paused.

  "Stand and defend yourself!" he called.

  "How is that required?"

  "You can't dodge forever."

  "Is that what you believe?"

  Hasan launched his third wave.

  Again Gurden side-stepped it.

  "This is pointless," Hasan grated.

  "I quite agree."

  "You cannot win with your tricks."

  "I don't have to win. Just not lose."

  "Stand and let me kill you."

/>   "Why?"

  "To resolve this time nexus."

  "To whose benefit?"

  "Of the one who is not unmade here."

  "You will beg me to unmake you, Hasan."

  For answer, Hasan gathered himself, drawing from deep in the center of his being. Clearly he was overtired. His chest hardly rose, his stomach remained flat, as he prepared for the launch. His eyes screwed up with concentration's he focused on the place Gurden was standing. Tom could see he was trying mentally to stretch his wave, to cover the spaces on either side as well, where Gurden might momentarily be standing. But an attack, even a psychic one, had the disadvantage of possessing real forces expended over finite time; it could not be launched against three loci at once.

  Hasan threw it. At the last instant he changed its targeting, choosing not the place Gurden stood but the shell of space to his immediate left.

  Gurden stepped-without-stepping to the right. His avoidance was not a matter of wagering probabilities. He perceived with the speed of thought and reacted with no lag in time. He was not-there by choice and observation.

  Drained by his effort, Hasan slumped to his knees on the edge of his outcrop. His head hung forward on his neck. Hasan's elixir—and much of his great natural force—were nearly spent.

  In three huge steps that made no passage of wind and arched across the brook separating them, Gurden reached the base of the outcrop and climbed half-a-leg up it. In the same fluid motion, his hand curled up and around, catching Hasan by the nape of the neck. Gurden let his weight slip back down, at the same time snapping his cupped hand forward and down.

  Hasan flew off his perch. Before he could extend his arms for protection, his face met the coarse sand of the streambank. His body followed at an awkward angle. The tendons in his neck cracked.

  Even that would not have killed him.

  As he tried to rise, swinging his head in a broken list, Gurden caught him by a trailing foot, lifted it, and flipped Hasan forward again, onto his face, with his elbows flopping in the sand a second afterward. Hasan's neck snapped, this time isolating his body from the energy flows directed by his brain.