Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  More bad security. A nice loud rusty screech would warn the house.

  The door swung outward, just enough to pass them through into the courtyard. It was a narrow cobbled rectangle, with stables and barracks and storage along one side, a row of horse-troughs, and the merchant’s own dwelling on other; that probably had an inner court of its own, for his womenfolk. The tower was against the far wall, freestanding, probably a refuge against riot and a treasure-house for the most valued goods.

  “Wait,” Sergey said.

  He took another inheritance from his grandfather from his belt. It was a length of flexible metal with wooden handles on either end; he looped it about the bolt of the lock and pulled it back and forth. A nearly soundless rasp followed, and metal filings drifted down to the pavement. He was careful to go slowly—Grandfather had warned him that it might lose its temper and snap if it was overheated, and no modern smith could duplicate its magical properties.

  “Bortë will be interested in that; she loves things from before the Change,” Dorzha said softly.

  She covered the courtyard as she spoke, recurve bow half-drawn and ready to flick out a shaft. After half a minute, the bolt dropped free, and Sergey caught it before it could drop to the stones. Then he eased the door shut again and locked it, leaving the key in the plate. That might not make a difference, or it might fool someone into thinking the door was secure when it wasn’t. You never knew, Grandfather had said....

  They walked over to the tower; Sergey scooped a handful of water out of one of the troughs as they passed, to wet a mouth gone a little dry. The darkened buildings seemed to loom around him like banks of angry, watchful eyes, and his shoulders crawled with anticipation of a sudden arrow or crossbow-bolt. On the steppe, or even in a forest, he felt at home. This was like a fight in a coffin.

  A narrow eyehole opened, and a voice spoke in some musical, liquid-sounding language, much muffled by the thick iron-strapped door.

  “The password is Azazrael’s Sword,” Dorzha replied in Tartar, naming the Death Angel.

  A surly grunt, and more of the strange tongue. Dorzha spoke again:

  “Speak something beside that sheep-bleating, you peacock-worshipping Kurdish apostate. Our chief wants us to check on the Kalmyk woman.”

  “She is as well-guarded as the wives of my master Ibrahim al-Vani themselves!” the man said, in bad Tartar—worse than Dorzha’s Russki had been when she and Sergey met.

  “His wives are guarded by the fifty fathers of their children,” Dorzha sneered. “Or Kurdish eunuchs—as if there were any Kurds with balls. We caught her—now we want to see her.”

  “It is my head if anything happens to her,” the guard said, grumbling. “Curse the evil witch anyway, with her alchemy from Satan!”

  Sergey gave a soundless sigh of relief; the man was going to open the door.

  “And it’s my head if I don’t do what the Chief says,” Dorzha replied. “And my head is worth more than yours. I gave the password—open! Or I go and we come back with a battering ram, and a flaying knife to peel the skin from your worthless arse!”

  “You Tartars don’t rule the universe, you just think you do,” the man grumbled. “Wait, then, wait.”

  They could hear clicking and shunking sounds. The door opened, only a narrow crack, and a thick chain spanned the gap. A blue eye looked through it, going wide for an instant before the point of Dorzha’s yataghan punched through it with a crunch of steel in the thin bone that separated eyesocket from brain. The man toppled backwards like a cut-through tree. Sergey shouldered Dorzha aside, flicked the cutting wire around the chain, and went to work.

  “Hurry!” Dorzha said.

  “We may need this again. I’m not going to break it,” Sergey said stubbornly. “Besides, it was my grandfather’s.”

  Dorzha said something explosive in her native language—but quietly— and soon the forged-iron link parted, falling to the stone floor with a musical tinkle. Sergey blew his lips out in mute relief when the door opened after that.

  Because I have no idea what we would have done if there had been another lock!

  The hallway within the tower was empty; on either side were chambers that the Tartar had said were used to store goods—and there was a square concrete shaft in the middle, from the looks of it a relic of the old world. Stairs started to the left; they took them in a swift quiet rush, Sergey leading and the Kalmyk woman following behind. There was an odd, acrid odor in the air, growing stronger as they ascended. Behind him, Dorzha chuckled.

  “That is Bortë,” she said.

  She smells like rock oil and sulfur? he thought, puzzled.

  The door was unbarred from the outside; a sliver of lamplight showed under the bottom of the thick planks. Sergey pushed at it, sword poised— probably there would be a guard within, as well as the Princess. The door gave a little, and then halted with a yielding heaviness. Sergey grunted and set his boot to it, pushing hard. Behind him, Dorzha spoke in her own language.

  The door slid open. Sergey leapt through, cat-agile but trying to stare in three directions at once...and then relaxing a little as he saw a woman in a long hooded caftan standing with a lamp in her hand. The smell of acid and strange metals came from the room behind her; he could see that it held benches and odd-looking bits of glass.

  The body at his feet attracted his attention first; it was a big man, very big, with a good deal of fat over solid muscle. He wore a turban but was beardless, and his great smooth torso was bare above sash, baggy pantaloons of crimson, and curl-toed boots. A broad curved sword lay beside one set of sausage-thick fingers; a look of fixed horror was on his face, and his eyes bulged as if they were about to pop out of his smooth, doughlike features.

  Interesting, Sergey thought, looking around the room, noting a spilled chess set by the dead man; the furnishings were cushions and rugs rather than chairs, as you might expect from a Kurd.Something killed him....

  Dorzha pushed past him, sheathing her yataghan. “Bortë!” she cried.

  “Dorzha!” the other replied, setting her lantern on the floor.

  They embraced, a fierce hug, and then Dorzha held her half sister at arm’s length.

  “Are you all right?” she said—in Russki, which must be for his benefit.

  “Fine. Bored. They let me keep my gear, the fools, so I had plenty of time to prepare,” Bortë replied. “What took you so long?”

  “There were...problems.”

  Bortë threw back the hood of her caftan. Sergey blinked; the family resemblance was unmistakable, though the khan’s other daughter was shorter and not quite so slim, and the night-black hair that fell loose down the young woman’s back was glossier than Dorzha’s. The face beneath was snub-nosed, with a rosy, ruddy-pink complexion, full lips, and narrow slanted black eyes.

  Perhaps it was the lantern-light streaming up from below, but he felt a slight prickle of alarm in belly and back at that face. She reminded him of something like a cat, or better still, a ferret—small, quick, comely, and quite evil. The black eyes glanced up and down his long form.

  “Where did you get this great Cossack ox?” she said—also in Russki, with a pellucidly clear but old-fashioned, bookish accent. “I’m not surprised you’re late, with him to drag around.”

  Dorzha shrugged. “He’s useful for the heavy-lifting chores,” she said. “Now let’s go!”

  “How did you kill him?” Sergey asked, intrigued, while she snatched up a bundle and slung it over her back like a knapsack.

  He nudged the dead man with his toe. Bortë was smaller than her sister, and while she held herself well he couldn’t see her killing a man this size with a blade unless she took him utterly unawares. Also there was no blood—even a small stiletto left in the wound leaked a little when stabbed deep into the body.

  Bortë smiled, revealing small, very white teeth; the first two were slightly buck-shaped. Instead of replying, she held up her hand; there was a piece of leather across her palm, and a steel needle con
cealed within it. There was blood on the tip of the little sliver of metal, with some purplish discoloration beneath that.

  “But I let him win the last game,” she said. “He wasn’t a bad man. For a eunuch.”

  Sergey swallowed. “Your sister said you were a scholar,” he said.

  “I am,” she replied, and smiled more broadly. “Of chemistry.”

  The Cossack crossed himself.

  * * * *

  “Yob tvoyu mat’,”Sergey said; it struck him as more manly than screaming We’re fucked! and slapping himself on the top of the head.

  The lights and voices at the bottom of the stairs were both indistinct, but they were getting louder. And there was no other way out of this tower. Screams of rage cut through the brabble; someone must have discovered the body and the cut chain.

  “We’re fucked,” Dorzha said, then cursed in Kalmyk and kicked the wall viciously.

  Not fair, Sergey said. She doesn’t have to be manly.

  Dying heroically was always more pleasant when you were drunk and listening to some balalaika-twanging gypsyguslars lying song than in a situation like this. His mind hunted back and forth like a wolf he’d seen trapped in a pit once. Suddenly, he felt a new sympathy for its snarling desperation.

  “We killed plenty of those Tartars before,” Dorzha said, but with a note of doubt in her voice.

  “Da,” Sergey said. “When we ambushed them or surprised them. A stand-up fight...”

  He shrugged. Dorzha did too, and whipped her yataghan through a circle to loosen her wrist.

  “We knew this was risky,” she said.

  “Da, “ the man said again. “Well, Cossacks don’t usually die old anyway.”

  The sound of hands clapping came from behind him. He turned and glared at Bortë, who had dragged a sack out of the inner room. Now she applauded again.

  “Hear the baatar,” she said, jeering. “Hear the hero! Listen to him meet death unafraid—because it’s so much easier than thinking.”

  Dorzha scowled at her sister. So did Sergey. I could really come to dislike this woman, if I had the time, he thought.

  Then he ducked with a yelp as she pulled a stoppered clay jug out of her sack and lofted it over his head. It dropped neatly down to the next landing, a story below, and shattered. He couldn’t see anything come out of it, not in the darkness of the stairwell...but a sudden scent sharp enough to slice your lungs made him cough and backpedal, rubbing at his streaming eyes.

  “It is heavier than air,” Bortë said.

  “Poison?” he asked, as the shrieks of rage below turned to choked howls of panic.

  “Chlorine. Quite deadly. It will flow downward. Come!”

  She turned and began dragging the sack with her into the inner sanctum. Sergey ignored the shadowed forms of retorts and glass coils on tables; the square inner shaft ran through this room, and there was an open door in it that showed modern ropes, not rusted ancient cable. That looked much better than fighting his way down the stairs, even if the air there was breathable, which just now it wasn’t. Mikhail had told stories about war gases in the old days, and how he’d used them against the moujids in some place far to the east. The Princess took half a dozen of the jars from her sack and dropped them through the opening.

  “That will take care of anyone waiting below,” she said. “There’s a tunnel out under the walls. The eunuch told me about it. The joke is on him, eh?”

  “Ha. Ha,” Sergey said as his testicles tried to crawl up into his belly. “If that stuff burns out your lungs, going down there will kill us! Or at least me, you witch!”

  “Not with these,” she said, and pulled improvised masks out of the sack. “I have been thinking all the time I was here, baatar. Luck favors the prepared.”

  “She never stops,” Dorzha said, taking one of the masks and examining the ties that would hold it on her face. “It’s no wonder Father tried to marry her off to someone two months’ journey away.”

  “These will protect us?” Sergey said.

  Bortë smiled again. “The chemicals need to be activated with uric acid,” she said.

  “That’s what?” he said, baffled; the words were Russki but he’d never heard them before.

  She told him.

  * * * *

  Sergey ripped the mask from his face half an hour later, spitting. “You enjoyed that!” he snarled.

  To his surprise, Dorzha laughed with her sister. “Only the sight of your face, Cossack,” she said.

  He looked around the darkened streets; they were near the docks, and the masts of the ships showed over the roofs, some of them with the flickering stars of riding-lanterns burning at their tops.

  “Well, I suppose we should try and get you to your father,” he said. Odd. I will miss Dorzha. And her sister is interesting. Terrifying, but interesting.

  Bortë looked southward for a moment. “Why?” she said. “He’ll only marry me off to some other fat imbecile.”

  Sergey rocked back on his heels. “Why, why—” His mind churned. “What else is there to do with you?”

  Dorzha spoke. “You wouldn’t believe there were larger cities than Astrakhan,” she said. Then, wistfully: “I’ve never seen any bigger. But they say in China . . .”

  In the shadows, Bortë’s head turned toward her. “They say that in China, Toghrul Khan rules now,” she said thoughtfully. “A Yek, but a Mongol like us; our ancestors came west from there, very long ago—the tongues are still close kin. At least, he rules the portions near the Gobi, and they also say he wars against the Han farther south. I wonder ... I wonder if he could use a scholar of the ancient arts? His court in Xian is the richest in the world, the stories say.”

  “Gold,” Dorzha said thoughtfully. “Silk. Rank.”

  Bortë shook her head. “Books!” she said, and her eyes glowed. “Scholars! Laboratories!”

  Suddenly, Sergey’s irritation lifted, and he began to laugh. “A real bogatyr—hero—I was, escaping with a woman’s piss-soaked scarf over my nose!”

  “You might do better with instruction,” Bortë said.

  “He is useful for the heavy work,” Dorzha said.

  Sergey laughed again, a booming sound that rattled off the warehouses around them. And if he went home, Olga and Svetlana would be waiting. Probably with their threshing-flails in hand.

  “Which way is China?” he said.

  <>

  * * * *

  Howard Waldrop

  Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, having been called “the resident Weird Mind of our generation” and an author “who writes like a honkytonk angel.” His famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, Going Home Again, the print version of his collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (formerly available only in downloadable form online), and a collection of his stories written in collaboration with various other authors, Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, as well as the chapbook A Better World’s in Birth! He is at work on a new novel, tentatively titled The Moone World. His most recent book is a big retrospective collection, Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Short Fiction 1980—2005. Having lived in Washington State for a number of years, Waldrop recently moved back to his former hometown of Austin, Texas, something that caused celebrations and loud hurrahs to rise up from the rest of the population.

  Here he ushers us to a bright new world, a better world in the making, in the last place you’d think to look for it—among the frozen mud and razor wire and whistling death of No-Man’s Land.

  * * * *

  Ninieslando

  The Captain had a puzzled look on his face. He clamped a hand to the righ
t earphone and frowned in concentration.

  “Lots of extraneous chatter on the lines again. I’m pretty sure some Fritzs have been replaced by Austrians in this sector. It seems to be in some language I don’t speak. Hungarian, perhaps.”

  Tommy peered out into the blackness around the listening post. And of course could see nothing. The LP was inside the replica of a bloated dead horse that had lain between the lines for months. A week ago the plaster replica had arrived via the reserve trench from the camouflage shops far behind the lines. That meant a working party had had to get out in the night and not only replace the real thing with the plaster one, but also bury the original, which had swelled and burst months before.