Читать книгу Tower if the Medusa - Lin Carter - Страница 2

THE DEATH DWARVES

It was on Zha the Jungle Planet that the strange little yellow men with three eyes finally caught up with the Earthman, Kirin.

They came at him in a muddy alleyway behind the Spaceman’s Rest. It was a stormy night in the Month of Rains. Lightning flared in storm-dark skies; the nine moons of Zha were veiled behind clouds. Rain lashed the red jungles that hemmed in the little trading port the starmen had built in a raw clearing. It thundered on the sheet-plastic roofs of the equipment huts, the cabins, the store sheds, and turned the narrow, twisting alleys between these buildings into glistening rivers of slick mud.

Out on the landing field, intermittent flares of lightning lit the glossy curving hulls of the merchant ships. The tall vessels loomed up into the stormy heavens like tapering steel projectiles. Wind whistled around them, across the jet-baked duracrete, and shook the walls of the flight control center that climbed on stilt-like metal struts into the rainswept darkness.

Kirin was a tall man, lean and sinewy rather than burly. He had a dark, secretive, mocking face, a sardonic smile and clever, sly black eyes. His hair was a curious dark red inherited from his Celtic father, while his Iberian mother had perhaps contributed the swarthy tone of his skin. He was lithe, supple, swift; nimble as any acrobat. Women found him devilishly attractive. Beneath his ironic mask of mockery they sensed a cold, hard core of bitter loneliness. It posed an irresistible challenge to their femininity: They would not be women if they did not long to melt that frozen bitterness. As yet, none had succeeded. Kirin had known many women. But he had never known love. Which was just as well, considering the hazardous career which he pursued.

Kirin was a thief.

There were many like him in those dark, troubled days of the Interregnum, between the collapse of the Old Empire and the rise of the New. Man built many forms of society during his first three thousand years in space. The strongest had been the mighty Carina Empire. For six thousand years it had lasted, and its boundaries had included most of the stars in the Carina-Cygnus arm of the galaxy. At last it crumbled from within, and yielded to the attack of the Barbarians from the Rim. In flame and thunder it fell, man’s greatest experiment in government. With it passed much of what is called civilization. Trade and communications lapsed; commerce ebbed. World was cut off from world. Technology broke down and science became a jumble of half-forgotten formulas. Cluster by cluster, the star worlds slid into the red murk of barbarism. Magic was reborn, built on the mysterious, micro-miniaturized instruments of the legendary Ancients, whose incredible machines, built to last for eternity, were sensitized to mental controls.

With the rebirth of magic came witchcraft and superstition, and dark nameless cults and evil gods. It seemed, to bitter, disillusioned men like Kirin, that civilization had failed—power lay with the cold, hard, unscrupulous men who had courage or strength or cunning enough to seize it. There were many like him on the Frontier Worlds—outlaws, adventurers, treasure hunters. Men who went boldly forward to take what they wanted.

It was said that things were on the mend. In this one-thousandth year of the Interregnum it was now two centuries since Calastor broke the lingering remnants of the Rim Barbarians and founded the beginnings of the New Empire at Valdamar. For two hundred years the sons of Calastor had been busy. A dozen worlds of the Inner Stars were now leagued together under the banner of the Empire, striving to build civilization anew. From tattered books and aged computers, half-forgotten sciences were being rediscovered. Men built starships again for the first time in a millennium. Commerce between the more settled and peaceful worlds had sprung up; lines of communication were being established. Perhaps the long decline was over, and a new day was dawning. Perhaps.

Kirin put no faith in dreams. He valued only material things he could see and handle. Like jewels.

It was because of jewels that he was stuck here on Zha. He had been after the fabulous Stardrop of Kandahar. There were only seven of them known to man, and six were in the crown of the Valdamar Emperor. The seventh was set in the alabaster brow of an idol on Shuthab in the Dragon Stars. Kirin had been after it when he tripped an invisible alarm-ray and had to flee empty-handed with half the warriors of a dozen worlds howling at his heels. Then the Star Legions of the Empire joined the thief hunt, for Shuthab was allied with Valdamar although not a member world of the Empire. He had to run fast and far to elude pursuit; in fact, he had run all the way to primitive Zha.

Here he had been holed up for the past three months, until the chase and furor died down and the Near Stars would be safe for him to venture into again. With the last of his funds he had purchased a hut and rental space on the landing field for his sleek little speedster. The first month or so had not been so bad. He had gone hunting with the savage Zhayana, trekking through the red jungles on the spoor of dragon cat and flying lions and the other exotic beasts of the Jungle World. The twenty or so other starmen who shared the little trader’s encampment with him asked no questions and bothered him little. They were used to mysterious men with shadowy pasts.

But this rude life had long since begun to pall. Kirin was of too active and inquiring a mind, too restless and footloose, to endure this dull existence without boredom. By now he was sick of Zha and everything about it—sick of the little cluster of prefab huts in the raw little clearing hacked by lasers out of the sprawling jungles that covered most of the land surface of Zha—sick of seeing the same hard faces and hearing the same dreary conversation. Even the natives no longer intrigued him, the broad-shouldered, bronze-skinned barbaric warriors with grim eyes and startling manes of metallic crimson who brought priceless dragonskins and mountain crystals and superb native scimitars of ion-steel to trade for power guns and star-man’s liquor and energy tools.

And now, on top of it all, the rainy season had come. The perpetual rains that lasted weeks on end had confined him to his cramped little hut on the edge of the clearing and chained him to the companionship of a handful of dull traders and exporters. There was nothing to do but drink and gamble and sleep. Kirin was sick of it all.

But here, at least, he was safe. No pursuit could follow him here. Zha lay far beyond the limits of the New Empire, among the little known and half-explored wilderness worlds of the frontier. Here beyond the border the monitors of Valdamar had no authority, and the fanatic priesthood of Shuthab had no followers. Here he could hide until he was forgotten. All he had to do was keep cool, watch his temper, and endure stolidly the stinking mud, the endless rains, the vile liquor and the dull company. Another month should do it. If I can last another month, he thought.

They were waiting for him in the alley behind the port’s only bar, a shed called Spaceman’s Rest. There were four of them and they came at him without a word, lunging through the roiling mists, eyes glittering like snakes.

They almost had him in that first half-second, for he was dull-witted from an evening spent hunched over a rear table nursing a bottle of that fiery purple brandy the Eophim distill from the wine-apples of Valthomé. When he reached his limit he paid his bill, drew the hooded weather cloak about his broad shoulders, snapped on the rain-repelling power field, and stepped out into the oily muck of the street, shoulders hunched against the cold drizzle. His mind was lax and befuddled and the last thing in the universe he expected was to be attacked.

But Kirin the thief had not survived this long on the rough Frontier Worlds without developing hair-trigger senses. As the four shadowy figures lunged at him through the fog, he sprang back with a grunt of surprise and tossed back a fold of his cloak to clear his gun hand. The little power gun appeared out of nowhere, so swiftly did he draw. They paid it no attention.

Strange little men they were, surely no monitors from Valdamar, and as unlike the scaly-skinned Reptile Men of Shuthab as could be. They were short, scarcely more than four feet tall, built squat and bowlegged, with sallow yellow skins and three black eyes set triangle-wise in their little ugly faces. They snarled and spat at him as they struck.

He fired. A spear of blinding radiance caught one full in the chest and sent him reeling away to thud against a wall and slide down into the mud, blackened and tattered and reeking of cooked meat. Then his beam accounted for a second of the dwarfed assassins. Its head vanished in a flare of light with a sound such as a giant might make if he clapped his huge hands once.

Then they were at him like snarling hounds worrying a tiger. They were not armed with energy weapons nor with swords, but carried curious little rods of ebony or some smooth slick black wood about eighteen inches long, knobbed at both ends.

They were very adept at the use of these strange weapons.

One laid his rod along Kirin’s wrist with a flickering stroke like that of a striking serpent. The blow seemed only to graze his skin but the shock of the blow numbed him from wrist to shoulder. His power gun fell spinning from fingers suddenly strengthless. It clattered and clanged against muddy cobbles and he was unarmed.

But not entirely helpless. He was a tall man, lean and hard. He had long sinewy arms and tough scarred fists, and he knew how to use them. He had fought for his life many times in his far-ranging career of crime, and he knew every trick of in-fighting ever invented by human ingenuity—especially the dirty ones. He kneed one snarling little dwarf in the gut and knocked the other aside with a shrewd blow of the flat of his hand against the side of the throat. The dwarf’s neck broke with an audible snap, like a rotten branch underfoot, and the snarling thing slid down in the muck.

Two were dead and two were down, and Kirin stood there in the rain panting, feeling tingles run through his paralyzed arm. It hung there at his side like dead meat and he wondered if it were broken. He bent to snatch up the power gun that had fallen from his benumbed hand. He bent just in time to avoid being brained by one of the knobbed ebony rods. As it was it slammed against his temple with stunning force, it sent red flares of bright agony lancing through his brain. He staggered, almost fell, lurched to his feet and looked around.

There were more of them coming down the alley. Nine of them!

He ran, and that was the first mistake. He should have ducked back in the bar, but there was no time to think. He just let instinct take over, and ran for his life. Boots thudding through the slop underfoot, gasping for breath, he pelted down the misty street to an intersection. He paused and took a swift, all-encompassing glance around. His dire forebodings proved true. They were coming at him from three directions now, and there were about two dozen of them. They came loping through the seething fog like hunting-hounds, silent and deadly, the knobbed batons glistening in their fists.

He turned and ran down the street. The little grading port was not very large, a score of huts at the most. At this time of the month it was largely deserted—a few men were snoring in their cabins, but most of the others were back in the Spaceman’s Rest, boozing it up. If he were to yell his lungs out they could not hear, not with the cold rain sleeting down, drumming on the roofs, and the bellowing rumble of thunder.

He was alone, and, in a few minutes, he discovered he was trapped.

So he turned and fought. He snapped up a length of fallen pipe from a tarpaulin-covered pile near a supply shed. He set his broad back up against the rear wall of a large store shed and fought them with everything he had. The long pipe was heavy. Dull steel glistened wetly down its length. It made a terrible weapon. With every blow it killed or maimed. In no time at all, it seemed, seven or eight twisted little corpses lay in the rain, crimsoning the mud.

The dwarfed assassins drew back from the swing of the terrible steel weapon that now glittered wetly red for half its length. He stood against the wall and let the red haze drain from before his eyes and tried to discover the secret of breathing again. One of the deadly knobbed rods had taken him in the solar plexus and his lungs were on fire with the lust for air.

He knew it was only a matter of time. He was far away from the cabins now. There was nothing on these streets but locked sheds and the landing field that lay beyond. He could see the hulls of the ships towering into the murky sky. His own little cruiser was among them. If he could reach it, he would have an impregnable fortress to protect him, for the little flying sticks could not get through a thirteen-inch hull-plate of ion-bathed steel. If…

Out of the fog a knobbed ebony rod flew. He jerked his head aside but a little too late. It smacked the side of his jaw with stunning force. The blow snapped his head back and made stars dance before his eyes. He fell, and the steel pipe rang against the cobbles and rolled out of reach.

Then they came at him again, silent and deadly as panthers. His boot-heel caught one full in the belly. The little monster fell backwards in the slop, gagging and spitting. Three more sprang at his throat. One he slew with a swift jabbing blow to the nerve-clump just below the base of the skull behind the ear—a stroke with stiffened fingers he had learned years ago from a Ghadorian nerve killer he met on Shimar in the Dragon Stars.

But more came at him through the mists. He fought them with everything he had. Never had he battled so desperately, not even that time the murderous priests of Zodah trapped him in the act of stealing the tiara of their harlot queen. But the little men with three eyes were the most deadly adversaries he had ever faced. They fought in utter silence with a grace and skill and economy of strength that was astonishing.

Then he knew them for what they were—trained killers! Members of the weird assassin cult of Pelizon across the cluster from Zha.

The Death Dwarves!

* * * *

Then, somehow, he was out in the open again. He had fought his way through them and the street lay open before him. He ran again, knee-high boots slipping on muddy cobbles, for the space field, and the safety of his ship.

And he almost made it.

A knobbed rod caught him in the back of the skull with staggering force and he went down on his face in the mud. This time he knew he could not rise in time, to turn and face them again. This was the end. Oddly, the thing that nagged at him was not the fact of death, but a question—why? Why were the little men from Pelizon after him? He had never been on Pelizon in his life, or near it for that matter. And even the fanatics of Shuthab, raving for his blood, could not purchase the service of the Death Dwarves. They fought only for their dark gods. They killed only the foes of those gods. Why, then, kill him?

They were almost on him when a shadowy figure loomed out of the mist to confront them. One yellow claw-like hand was at his throat when the mysterious figure stepped forward and intervened. Even as the little dwarf bent over the fallen Kirin, three black eyes glinting with malignant fires, the deadly rod poised for the death-stroke, a slender ivory wand came flickering through the driving rain to brush gently against the dwarf’s supple wrist.

It was a light, glancing blow. But it was enough. Suddenly the dwarf sucked in his breath like a hissing serpent and snatched back a hand. Kirin could see the agony in the three eyes. Scalding agony, as if the hand had suddenly been dipped full to the wrist in a beaker of molten lead.

The others fell back before that dancing ivory wand. For a long moment the stranger held them at bay while he reached down, puffing with exertion, and hauled the exhausted, groggy Earthman to his feet.

“That way—my ship,” Kirin panted. They backed up, the stranger half-dragging and half-supporting Kirin as his stumbling legs sagged under his weight.

The dwarves came forward through the mist in an ominous ring, circling them and the ship.

Kirin yelled the recognition code and the airlock swung open. He lurched into it.

“Come on,” he grunted.

Then a hail of flying rods hurtled into them. Thudding blows that caught them and pummeled them mercilessly. The stranger went sprawling on the slick wet tarmac of the field, out cold with an ugly red bruise above one eye.

Afterwards, Kirin never quite remembered how he managed to drag his unknown rescuer in after him and seal the doors. Things were dark and confused for quite some time thereafter. Then they got darker. In fact, he was out cold.