Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 1

by Eric Flint

  They weren't replaceable.

  He took one more deep breath, closed his eyes on Marion's blurry outline, and with his joined wrists rattling pulled the hood over his head.

  In the dark underneath, sounds were muffled. Concentrated rum fumes made his eyes water, but at least he could no longer smell the cockatrice. Chalk grated— Marion closing the pentagram. He heard his flask uncorked, the splash of fluid as she anointed the diagram with the remaining rum. Matthew tugged restlessly against the restraints on his wrists as she began to chant and a deep uneasy curdling sensation answered.

  God, too much rum. He wobbled and caught himself, fretting the handcuffs, the tightness on the bones. The sensual thrill of the magic sparking along his nerves was accentuated by the blinding darkness. He wobbled again, or maybe the world did, and gasped at the heat in his blood.

  Magic and passion weren't different. It was one reason sublimation worked.

  The second gasp came cleaner, no fabric muffling his face, the air cooler if not fresher and the scent of rum less cloying. Marion seemed to have moved, by the sound of her chanting, and somehow the tightness had jumped from Matthew's wrists to his calves. He lay belly-down on rough ground.

  He pushed with his arms to try to balance himself to his feet. The chanting stopped, abruptly, and someone was restraining him, folding his arms against his side gently but with massive cautious strength. "Matthew?"

  He turned his head, seeking the voice. It echoed. The . . . arms? holding him retreated. "Matthew, if you understand me, flap once."

  He extended odd-feeling arms and did so. A moment later, a half-dozen fists, it seemed, were unhooding him. He blinked at dizzy brilliance, and found himself staring into Marion's enormous face from only a few inches away. He hopped back and fouled himself on the gaffs. Fortunately, the needle point slipped between his feathers rather than stabbing him in the wing, and he stopped, precariously balanced, wings half-bent like broken umbrellas.

  He clucked.

  And flapped hard, surprised to find himself lifting off the ground. He flew the two feet to Marion's shoulder, landed awkwardly, facing the wrong way, and banged her in the eye with his wing. At least he had the sense to turn carefully, keeping the needle-tipped gaffs pointed away from her thin-skinned throat. He crouched on his heels, trying not to prick her with his claws, the alien body's balance far better than his own.

  Only if he thought about it did he realize that the warm shoulder he nestled to Marion's warm cheek was feathered, that it was peculiar to be able to feel the beats of her heart through his feet like the footfalls of an approaching predator, that the colors he saw were abruptly so bright and saturated —so discriminate— that he had no names for them. That he balanced on her moving shoulder as easily as he would have roosted on a swaying branch, and that that was peculiar.

  "Wow," he said. And heard a soft contemplative cluck. And laughed at himself, which came out a rising, tossing crow.

  Marion flinched and put a hand up on his wing. "Matthew, please. My ears."

  He ducked his head between his shoulders, abashed, and clucked sorry. Maybe she would understand.

  His body stood stolidly, restrained, inside a wet circle of chalk and rum. The cockerel wearing it was quieted by the hood and the handcuffs, and Matthew turned his head right and left to center himself in his vision. He failed— he had the peripheral view, and only by turning to see it first with one eye and then the other could he reliably guess how far away it was. Almost no binocular vision, of course. But with a shock, he realized that he could see clearly around to the back of his head.

  That was pretty tremendously weird. He'd have to practice that. And think about his small sharp body and its instincts, because the enemy could be along any moment.

  Marion was pulling back, stepping into the shadows, an alcove near the gate concealing them. Matthew pressed against her warmth, feeling her heart beating faster. He clucked in her ear.

  "Shh."

  He hoped the cockatrice would come quickly. This could be very, very awkward to explain if something happened to the glamours. Still, they had brought alcohol, talent, and innocence —symbolically speaking— and left them, special delivery, in the thing's front yard. Wherever it was nesting, it should come to investigate before too long.

  He was still thinking that when he heard the singing.

  * * *

  The three of them had been following for a long time, it seemed, when Doctor S. and the woman gave one another a conspiratorial glance and stepped through an archway, past a rusted gate. Gina drew up short, stepping out of the traffic flow into the shelter of a doorway. A moment later, Katie heard glass breaking and something kicked or thrown.

  Katie ducked in behind Gina, rubbing her elbow nervously. This wasn't the best neighborhood at all. "That's a dead end, I bet," Gina said, when Melissa came up beside them. "Either they're going inside, or that's where they're going."

  "Here?"

  Gina winked. "Want to sneak up and peek through the gate?"

  Katie and Melissa exchanged a glance, and Melissa angled her head and said, "What the heck." Side by side, the three stepped back out onto the sidewalk, picking their way over chewing gum spots and oily, indeterminate stains. Katie somehow found herself in the lead, as Gina and Melissa fell in single file behind her. She had to glance over her shoulder to make sure they were still with her.

  She stopped two feet shy of the broken gate and tried to still her hammering heart. No luck, and so she clenched her hands at her sides and edged forward.

  She could see through plainly if she kept her back to the wall and turned her head sideways. She saw Doctor S. and the cop sketch the diagram, saw them pull a black rooster from the box and do something to its head and feet. She flinched, expecting some bloody and melodramatic beheading, but instead Doctor S. went to the center of the star and began chaining himself up, which made her feel distinctly funny inside. And then he blindfolded himself with a hood, and the woman did some more sketching with the chalk and walked around the circle pouring something in between its lines from a flask.

  A moment later, the rooster began to struggle, while Doctor S. stood perfectly still. The woman crouched down and unhooded it, and a moment later it flapped onto her shoulder and settled itself.

  "This," Melissa whispered, a warm pressure against Katie's side, "is freaking weird."

  "Gosh," Gina said, very loudly, "would you listen to that?"

  Katie turned to shush her, and heard it herself. She took a deep breath, chest expanding against her shirt, as if she could inhale the music too. It seemed to swell in her lungs and belly, to buoy her. She felt Melissa cringe, and then fingers caught at her shoulder. "Fuck," Melissa said. "What is that?"

  "Beautiful." Katie stepped forward, moving out of Melissa's grasp. Into the courtyard, toward the woman and the chicken and the blindfolded English professor. Katie lifted her arms and twirled, her feet light as if she walked on flowers. She strode through a pile of garbage that the magicians had piled up when they cleared the center of the courtyard and her airy foot came down on glass.

  A cracked bottle broke further under her foot, shattering and crunching. The soft sole of Katie's tennis sneaker clung to broken glass; she picked it up again and stepped forward, to another crunch.

  The noise was almost lost under the music. Rising chorales, crystalline voices.

  "It sounds like a rat being shaken to death in a bag of hammers," Melissa groaned, and then sucked in a squeak. "Oh, fuck, Katie, your foot . . ."

  There was something slick between her sole and the bottom of the shoe. She must have stepped in a mud puddle. She looked down. Or a puddle of blood.

  Well, her foot was already wet. And the singers were over there somewhere. She took one more step, Melissa's fingers brushing her wrist as her friend missed her grab. Behind her, Melissa made funny sobbing noises, as if she'd been running and couldn't get a breath.

  Somehow, Gina had gotten ahead of her, and was walking too, kick
ing rubbish out of the way with her sandaled feet, crunching through more glass, leaving red footsteps. The courtyard was filthy, the buildings moldy-looking, scrofulous: brick black with soot and flaking mortar.

  Something moved against the wall. A gleam of brightness, like sun through torn cloth. And then —so beautiful, so bright, oh— a spill of jadevioletandazure, a trailing cloak of feathers, a sort of peacock or bird of paradise emerging like an image reflected in a suddenly lit mirror. Its crested head was thrown back, its long neck swollen with song. Its wings mantled and rays of light cracked from between its feathers.

  Gina was still ahead of her, between her and the bird. Katie reached out to push her, but then suddenly she was gone, fallen down, and Katie stepped over her. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever heard.

  And oh, it was blind, the poor thing was blind. Somebody had gouged out its eyes, she saw now. The old wounds were scarred gray, sightless.

  And still it sang.

  She reached out her hand to touch it, and couldn't understand why Melissa was screaming.

  * * *

  Matthew saw both young women hurry across the glass and stones, faster than he could reach them— not that he could have stopped them. Even though he was airborne, and already on his way.

  He saw his body react, too— it hurled itself at the edge of the pentagram, hurled and kept hurling, but the wards they'd so carefully constructed held him, and he bounced from them and slid down what looked like plain still air. So strange, watching himself from the outside. Marion and the red-haired girl both crumpled, Marion with her hands over her ears, belly-crawling determinedly toward the running children; Melissa Martinchek down in a fetal position, screaming.

  And he saw the cockatrice.

  The movement caught his eye first, a ripple of red like brick and gray like concrete, its hide patterned in staggered courses that blended precisely with the blackened wall behind it. It was bigger than a cock, but not by much, and his rooster's heart churned with rage at its red upright comb and the plumed waterfall of its tail. His wings beat in midair; he exploded after it like a partridge from cover.

  It chameleoned from stone to brilliance, colors chasing over its plumage like rainbows over oil. The two girls clutched for it, their feet pierced with unnoticed shards, their hands reaching.

  Matthew saw them fall, their bodies curled in around their poisoned hands. He saw the way they convulsed, the white froth dripping from the corners of their mouths.

  He shrieked war, wrath, red rage, and oblivion. The spurs were heavy on his shanks; his wings were mighty upon the air. He struck, reaching hard, and clutched at the enemy's neck.

  An eruption of rainbow-and-black plumage, a twist and strike and movement like quicksilver on slanted glass. Matthew's gaff slashed the cockatrice's feathers; the cockatrice whipped its head back and forward and struck like a snake. Pearl-yellow droplets flicked from fangs incongruous in a darting beak; the rooster-tail fanned and flared, revealing the gray coils of an adder.

  Matthew beat wings to one side; his feathertips hissed where the venom smoked holes through them. He backwinged, slashed for the cockatrice's eye, saw too late that that wound had long ago been dealt it. A black cockerel was immune to a cockatrice's deadly glare, and to the poison of its touch. If he could hit it, he could hurt it.

  Except it wasn't a cockatrice, not exactly. Because cockatrices didn't sing like loreleis, and they didn't colorshift for camouflage. Maybe it was hatched by a chameleon rather than a serpent, Matthew thought, beating for altitude, and then reminded himself that now was not the time for theory.

  Some kind of hybrid, then.

  Just his luck.

  And now the thing was airborne, and climbing in pursuit. He dropped —the cockerel was not more than passably aerodynamic— and struck for its back, its wing, its lung. The breast was armored, under the meat, with the anchoring keel bones. His spurs would turn on those. But they might punch through the ribs, from above.

  He missed when the monster side-slipped, and the blind cockatrice turned and sank its fangs into his wing. Pain, heat and fire, weld-hot needles sunk into his elbow to the bone. He cackled like a machine gun and fell after the monster; wing-fouled, they tumbled to stone.

  It lost its grip at the shock of impact, and Matthew screamed fury and pain. The hurt wing trailed, blood splashing, smoke rising from the envenomed wound. He made it beat anyway, dragged himself up, his spurs scraping and sparking on stone. The cockatrice hissed as he rose; his flight was not silent.

  They struck hard, breast to breast, grappling legs and slashing spurs. He had his gaffs; the cockatrice had weight and fangs and a coiling tail like a rubber whip. Wings struck, buffeted, thundered. The cockatrice had stopped singing, and Matthew could hear the weeping now. Someone human was crying.

  The cockatrice's talons twined his. Left side, right side. Its wings thumped his head, its beak jabbed. Something tore; blood smeared its beak, his face. He couldn't see on his right side. He ripped his left leg free of its grip and punched, slashed, hammered. The gaff broke skin with a pop; the cockatrice's blood soaked him, tepid, no hotter than the air. A rooster's egg hatched by a serpent.

  The cockatrice wailed and thrashed; he ducked its strike at his remaining eye. More blood, pumping, slicking his belly, gumming his feathers to his skin. The blood was venom too. The whole thing was poison; its blood, its breath; its gaze; its song.

  The monster fell on top of him. He could turn his head and get his eye out from under it, but when he did, all he saw was Marion, each arm laced under one of Melissa's armpits, holding the redheaded girl on her knees with a grim restraint while Melissa tried to tear herself free, to run to the poisoned bodies of her friends. The bodies were poison too, corrupted by the cockatrice's touch. The very stones soaked by its heart's blood could kill.

  It was all venom, all deadly, and there was no way in the world to protect anyone. Not his sacrifice, not the unwitting sacrifice of the black cockerel, made any goddamned difference in the end.

  Matthew, wing-broken, one-eyed, his gaff sunk heel-deep in the belly of his enemy, lay on his back under its corpse-weight and sobbed.

  * * *

  The building was emptied, the block closed, the deaths and the evacuations blamed on a chemical spill. Other Prometheans would handle the detox. Matthew, returned to his habitual body, took the shivering black cockerel to a veterinarian with Promethean sympathies, who —at Matthew's insistence and Jane's expense— amputated his wing and cleaned and sewed shut his eye. Spared euthanasia, he was sent to a farm upstate to finish his days as a lopsided, piratical greeter of morning. He'd live long, with a little luck, and father many pullets.

  Matthew supposed there were worse deaths for a chicken.

  Marion did the paperwork. Matthew took her out to dinner. She didn't make another pass, and they parted good friends. He had a feeling he'd be seeing her again.

  There were memorial services for his students, and that was hard. They were freshmen, and he hadn't known them well; it seemed . . . presumptuous to speak, as if his responsibility for their deaths gave him some claim over their lives. He sat in the back, dressed in his best black suit, and signed the guest book, and didn't speak.

  Katherine Berquist was to be buried in Appleton, Wisconsin; Matthew could not attend. But Regina Gomez was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Flushing, her coffin overwhelmed with white waxy flowers, her family swathed in black crepe and summer-weight worsted, her friends in black cotton or navy. Melissa Martinchek was there in an empire-waisted dress and a little cardigan. She gave Matthew a timid smile across the open grave.

  The scent of the lilies was repellent; Matthew vomited twice on the way home.

  Melissa came to see him in the morning, outside of his regular office hours, when he was sitting at his desk with his head in his heads. He dragged himself up at the knock, paused, and sat heavily back down.

  Thirty seconds later, the locked door
clicked open. It swung on the hinges, and Melissa stepped inside, holding up her student ID like a talisman. "The lock slips," she said. "Gina showed me how. I heard, I heard your chair."

  Gina's name came out a stammer too.

  "Come in," Matthew said, and gestured her to a dusty orange armchair. She locked the door behind her before she fell into it. "Coffee?"

  There was a pot made, but he hadn't actually gotten up and fetched any. He waved at it vaguely, and Melissa shook her head.

  He wanted to shout at her— what were you thinking? What were you doing there?— and made himself look down at his hands instead. He picked up a letter opener and ran his thumb along the dull edge. "I am," he said, when he had control of his voice again, "so terribly sorry."

  She took two sharp breaths, shallow and he could hear the edge of the giggle under them. Hysteria, not humor. "It wasn't your fault," she said. "I mean, I don't know what happened." She held up her hand, and his words died in his open mouth. "I don't . . . I don't want to know. But it wasn't your fault."