Night & Demons (22 page)

His right drew the short, heavy blade with a musical
sring!

“Guards!” Glaukon shouted again.

The serpent had left its perch. It was slithering in long curves toward Dama.

Pyrrhus reached for the doorlatch with one reptilian hand; Vettius swung at him off-balance. He missed, but the spatha’s tip struck just above the lock plate and splintered its way deep into the age-cracked wood.

Pyrrhus hissed like tallow on a grill. He leaped toward the center of the room as the soldier tugged his weapon free and turned to finish the matter.

Glaukon struck like a cobra at Dama. The merchant, moving with a reflexive skill that would have impressed Vettius if he’d had time to think, blocked the bronze fangs with the scabbard in his left hand. Instead of a clack as the teeth met, light crackled like miniature lightning.

Dama swore in Greek and thrust with his sword at the creature’s head. Glaukon recoiled in a smooth curve. The serpent’s teeth had burned deep gouges into the scabbard’s iron chape.

Vettius pivoted on the ball of his left foot, bringing his blade around in a whistling arc that would—

Pyrrhus’s eyes blazed into the soldier’s. “Put down your sword, Lucius Vettius,” rang the voice in his mind. Vettius held as rigid as a gnat in amber.

There were shouts from outside. Someone knocked, then hammered the butt of his baton on the weakened panel. Splinters of gray wood began to crack off the inside.

Glaukon was twenty feet of shimmering coils, with death in its humanoid jaws. Dama feinted. Glaukon quivered, then struck in earnest as the merchant shifted in the direction of Pyrrhus who was poising in the center of the anteroom as his eyes gripped Vettius.

Dama jumped back, almost stumbling over the chest in which he’d hidden. He was safe, but the hem of his tunic smoldered where the teeth had caught it.

Put—

Several batons were pounding together on the door. The upper half of a board flew into the room. An attendant reached through the leather facing and fumbled with the lock mechanism.

—
down your sword, Lucius Vettius.

Dama’s sword dipped, snagged the bolt of cloth that had covered him, and flipped it over the head of the bronze serpent. Wool screamed and humped as Glaukon tried to withdraw from it.

Dama smiled with cold assurance and stabbed where the cloth peaked, extending his whole body in line with the blow. The sharp wedge of steel sheared cloth, bronze, and whatever filled the space within Glaukon’s metal skull.

The door burst inward. Pyrrhus sprang toward the opening like a chariot when the bars come down at the Circus. Vettius, freed by the eyes and all deadly instinct, slashed the splay-limbed figure as it leaped past.

The spatha sliced
in
above the chin, shattering pointed, reptilian teeth.
Down
through the sinuous neck.
Out,
breaking the collar bone on the way.

The blood that sprayed from the screaming monster was green in the lamplight.

Attendants hurled themselves out of the doorway with bawls of fear as the creature that had ruled them bolted through. Pyrrhus’s domination drained with every spurt from his/its severed arteries. Men—men once more, not the Prophet’s automatons—hurled away their cudgels and lanterns in their haste to flee. Some of the running forms were stripping off splattered tunics.

The point of Dama’s sword was warped and blackened. The merchant flung his ruined weapon away as he and Vettius slipped past the splintered remnants of the door. Behind them, in the center of a mat of charred wool, the serpent Glaukon vomited green flames and gobbets of bronze.

Pyrrhus lay sprawled in a green pool at the bottom of the steps. The thin, scaly limbs twitched until Vettius, running past, drove his spatha through the base of the creature’s domed skull.

The soldier was panting, more from relief than exertion. “Where did he come from?” he muttered.

“Doesn’t matter.” Dama was panting also.
“He
didn’t expect more of his kind to show up.”

“I thought he was a phony. The tablets—”

They swung past the bollards where they’d talked the previous evening. Dama slowed to a walk, since they were clear of the immediate incident. “He was a charlatan where it was easier to be a charlatan. That’s all.”

Vettius put his hand on the smaller man’s shoulder and guided him to the shadow of a shuttered booth. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming back tonight?” the soldier demanded.

Dama looked at him.
“
It was personal,” he said. Their faces were expressionless blurs. “I didn’t think somebody in the Prefect’s office ought to be involved.”

Vettius sheathed his blade and slid the scabbard parallel to his left leg. If the gods were good, the weapon might pass unnoticed on his way home in the cloud-swept moonlight. “I was already involved,” he said.

The merchant turned and met Vettius’s eyes. “Menelaus was my friend,” he replied, almost too softly to be heard. “Lucius Vettius, I didn’t come here with a sword tonight to
talk
to my friend’s killer.”

In the near distance, the night rang with cries of horror. The Watch had discovered the corpse of Pyrrhus the Prophet.

BLACK IRON

Ammianus Marcellinus was the last great Latin historian and in fact the only great Latin historian to follow Tacitus, his predecessor by some three hundred years. (There were major historians of the second and third centuries AD—and after—but they wrote in Greek.) He had an enormous impact on me, and one small aspect of his influence is “Black Iron.”

Ammianus was an officer in the imperial bodyguard during the middle of the fourth century AD, the period covered by the surviving books of his history. Emperors used their bodyguards as couriers and for other special missions. Ammianus was not only in a position to talk to virtually anyone in the empire, he was personally present at some of the most important events of his time. Though Ammianus isn’t as good a writer as Tacitus (who’s one of the finest prose stylists in Latin or any other language), he paints a vivid picture of his world.

That world was sliding into blood and chaos. It would not emerge from darkness for centuries.

The timing may be important here. I read Ammianus while I was in Vietnamese language school and during interrogation training afterwards. The future I saw before me was one of blood, chaos, and darkness, so I could identify—indeed had to identify—with the ancient soldier and historian as I read his work.

I came back to the World, reentered law school, and resumed writing fiction. “Black Iron” is the first story I wrote after my return. It’s also the first story I wrote after getting to know two Chapel Hill fantasy writers, Manly Wade Wellman and Karl Edward Wagner.

Karl had just dropped out of UNC medical school to write full time (he later completed his schooling and got his MD). Manly was a giant of SF and fantasy; he’d been making virtually his whole living from freelance writing since the late ‘30s. Neither Karl nor I was ever a student of Manly’s, but we were his junior colleagues and friends. We got together regularly for family meals and to read to one another the fiction we were working on.

This was the first thing I read to Manly and Karl. There would be many other stories over the years.

Ammianus was in Amida when the Persians besieged and captured that city. It wasn’t a critically important event in the millennia-long struggle between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Basin, but Ammianus produced a bleak, brilliant piece of first-hand reporting. When I visited Turkey many years later, I stood on the enormous walls of Amida (modern Diyarbakir) and thought of Ammianus.

One further thing about “Black Iron” is worth mentioning. I sent the story to Mr. Derleth, who’d bought three previous stories from me. He wrote me a letter of acceptance in June 1971, and followed it with an Arkham House check dated July 3.

The next morning Mr. Derleth died of a heart attack. This was not only the last story I was to sell him, it was the last story he bought from anyone.

* * *

V
ettius’ markers were of green tourmaline that glinted cruelly in the lamplight. The pieces had been carven by a Persian. Though as smoothly finished as anything Dama had seen in the West, the heads had a rudeness, a fierceness of line that he disliked. Living near the frontier had shaken him, he thought with a sigh.

The soldier moved, taking one of Dama’s pieces. The slim Cappadocian countered with a neat double capture.

“God rot your eyes!” Vettius exploded, banging his big hand down on the game board.
“
I should know better than to play robbers with a merchant. By the Bull’s blood, you’re all thieves anyway. Doris, bring us some cups!”

The little slave pattered in with a pair of chalices. As she left the room Vettius slapped her on the flank and said, “Don’t come back till you’re called for.”

The girl smiled without turning around.

“Little slut,” the soldier said affectionately. Then, to Dama, “How do you want your wine?”

“One to three, as always,” the blond merchant replied.

“I thought maybe your balls had come down since I saw you last,” Vettius said, shaking his head. “Well, here’s your wine; water it yourself.”

He filled his own cup with the resin-thickened wine and slurped half of it. “You know,” he said reflectively, “when I was on Naxos three years ago I made a special trip to a vineyard to get a drink of this before they added the pitch to preserve it in transport.”

Vettius paused. “Well,” Dama pressed him, “how was it?”

“Thin,” the soldier admitted. “I’d rather drink Egyptian beer.”

He began to laugh and Dama joined him half-heartedly. At last Vettius wiped the tears from his eyes and gulped the rest of his wine. When he had refilled his cup he rocked back on his stool and gazed shrewdly at his friend. “You brought a bolt of cloth with you tonight,” he said.

“That’s right,” Dama agreed with a thin smile. “It’s a piece of silk brocade, much heavier than what we usually see here.”

Vettius smiled back at him, showing his teeth like a bear snarling.
“
So I’m a silk fancier now?” he asked.
“
Come on, nobody will come until I call them. What do you have under the silk that you didn’t want my servants to see?”

Dama unrolled the silk without answering. The lustrous cloth had been wound around a sword whose hilt gleamed richly above a pair of laths bound over the blade. He tugged at the hilt and the laths fell away to reveal a slim blade, longer than that of a military sword. The gray steel was marked like wind-rippled water.

“Do you believe that metal can be enchanted?” Dama asked.

“Stick to your silk, merchant,” the soldier replied with a chuckle, and took the sword from Dama. He whipped the blade twice through the air.

“Oh, yes,” he went on, “it’s been a long time since I saw one of these.”

Setting the point against the wall, the big soldier leaned his weight against it. The blade bowed almost double. The point shifted very slightly and the steel sprang straight, skidding along the stone. The sword blurred, humming a low note that made both men’s bowels quiver.

“Thought the way it bends was magical, hey?”

Dama nodded. “I thought it might be.”

“Well, that’s reasonable,” Vettius said.
“
It doesn’t act much like a piece of steel, does it? Just the way it’s tempered, though. You know about that?”

“I think I know how this blade was tempered,” the merchant answered.

“Yeah, run it through a plump slave’s butt a few times to quench it,” Vettius said off-handedly. His fierce smile returned. “Not very . . . civilized, shall we say? But not magic.”

“Not magic?” Dama repeated with an odd inflexion.
“
Then let me tell you the rest of the story.”

Vettius raised his cup in silent consent.

“I was in Amida . . .” the merchant began, and his mind drifted back to the fear and mud-brick houses overlooking the Tigris.

“We knew that Shapur was coming, of course; that spring, next spring—soon at least. He’d made peace with the Chionitae and they’d joined him as allies against Rome. Still, I had a caravan due any day and I didn’t trust anyone else to bring it home to Antioch. It was a gamble and at the time it seemed worth it.”

Dama snorted to himself, “Well, I guess it could have been worse.”

“Aside from waiting to see whether my people would arrive before the Persians did, there was nothing to do in Amida but bake in the dust. It had never been a big place and now, with the shanties outside the wall abandoned and the whole countryside squeezed in on top of the garrison, there wasn’t room to spit.”

The merchant took a deep draught of his wine as he remembered. Vettius poured him more straight from the jar. “Mithra! There were two regiments of Gaulish foot there, half-dead with the heat and crazy from being cooped up. That was later, though, after the gates were shut.

“Wealth has its advantages and I’d gotten a whole house for my crew. I put animals on the ground floor and the men on the second; that left me the roof to myself. There was a breeze up there sometimes.

“The place next door was owned by a smith named Khusraw and I could see over his wall into the courtyard where his forge was set up. He claimed to be Armenian but there was talk of him really being a Persian himself. It didn’t matter, not while he was turning weapons out and we needed them so bad.”

“He made this?” Vettius asked, tapping the sword with his fingernail. The steel moaned softly.

Dama nodded absently, his eyes fixed on a scene in the past. “I watched him while he worked at night; the hammer ringing would have kept me awake anyway. At night he sang. He’d stand there singing with the hearth glaring off him, tall and stringy and as old as the world. He had a little slave to help him, pumping on the bellows. You’ve seen a charcoal hearth glow under a bellows?”

Vettius nodded. “Like a drop of sun.”

Dama raised his eyebrows.
“
Perhaps,” he said, sipping at his thick wine, “but I don’t find it a clean light. It made everything look so strange, so flat, that it was hours before I realized that the plate Khusraw was forging must have weighed as much as I did.”