The
Salamander
Outside, the stars seemed brighter, and for
the first time in many weeks the Claw had ceased to drive itself
against my chest.
When I descended the narrow path, it
was no longer necessary to turn and halt to see the city. It spread
itself before me in ten thousand twinkling lights, from the
watchfire of Acies Castle to the reflection of the guardroom
windows in the water that rushed through the Capulus.
By now all the gates would be closed
against me. If the dimarchi had not already ridden forth, they
would do so before I reached the level land beside the river; but I
was determined to see Dorcas once more before I left the city, and,
somehow, I had no doubt of my ability to do so. I was just
beginning to turn over plans for escaping the walls afterward when
a new light flared out far below.
It was small at that distance, no more
than a pinprick like all the others; yet it was not like them at
all, and perhaps my mind only registered it as light because I knew
nothing else to liken it to. I had seen a pistol fired at full
potential that night in the necropolis when Vodalus resurrected the
dead woman—a coherent beam of energy that had split the mists like
lightning. This fire was not like that, but it was more nearly like
that than like anything else I could call to mind. It flared
briefly and died, and a heartbeat afterward I felt the wash of heat
upon my face.
Somehow I missed the little inn called the
Duck’s Nest in the dark. I have never known if I took a wrong
turning or merely walked past the shuttered windows without
glimpsing the sign hanging overhead. However it happened, I soon
found myself farther from the river than I should have been,
striding along a street that ran for a time at least parallel to
the cliff, with the smell of scorched flesh in my nostrils as at a
branding. I was about to retrace my steps when I collided in the
dark with a woman. So hard and unexpectedly did we strike each
other that I nearly fell, and as I went reeling back, I heard the
thud of her body on the stone.
“I didn’t see you,” I said as I reached
down for her.
“Run! Run!” she gasped. And then, “Oh,
help me up.” Her voice was faintly familiar.
“Why should I run?” I pulled her to her
feet. In the faint light I could see the blur of her face, and
even, I thought, something of the fear there.
“It killed Jurmin. He burned alive. His
staff was still on fire when we found him. He …” Whatever she had
begun to say after that trailed off into sobs.
“What burned Jurmin?” When she did not
answer, I shook her, but that only made her weep the harder. “Don’t
I know you? Talk, woman! You’re the mistress of the Duck’s Nest.
Take me there!”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m afraid. Give
me your arm, please, sieur. We ought to get inside.”
“Fine. We’ll go to the Duck’s Nest. It
can’t be far—now what is this?”
“Too far!” She wept. “Too
far!”
There was something in the street with
us. I do not know whether I had failed to detect its approach, or
it had been undetectable until then; but it was suddenly present. I
have heard people who have a horror of rats say they are aware of
them the moment they enter a house, even if the animals are not
visible. It was so now. There was a feeling of heat without warmth;
and though the air held no odor, I sensed that its power to support
life was being drained away.
The woman seemed still unaware of it.
She said, “It burned three last night near the harena, and one
tonight, they said, close by the Vincula. And now Jurmin. It’s
looking for somebody—that’s what they say.”
I recalled the notules and the thing
that had snuffled along the walls of the antechamber of the House
Absolute, and I said, “I think it has found him.”
I let her go and turned, then turned
again, trying to discover where it was. The heat grew, but no light
showed. I was tempted to take out the Claw so as to see by its
glow; then I recalled how it had waked whatever slept beneath the
mine of the man-apes, and I feared the light would only permit this
thing—whatever it might be—to locate me. I was not sure my sword
would be more effective against it than it had been against the
notules when Jonas and I had fled them through the cedar wood;
nevertheless, I drew it.
Almost at once there was a clatter of
hooves and a yell as two dimarchi thundered round a corner no more
than a hundred strides away. Had there been more time I would have
smiled to see how closely they corresponded to the figures I had
imagined. As it was, the firework glare of their lances outlined
something dark and crooked and stooped that stood between
us.
It turned toward the light, whatever it
was, and seemed to open as a flower might, growing tall more
swiftly, almost, than the eye could follow it, thinning until it
had become a creature of glowing gauze, hot yet somehow reptilian,
as those many-colored serpents we see brought from the jungles of
the north are reptilian still, though they seem works of colored
enamel. The mounts of the soldiers reared and screamed, but one of
the men, with more presence of mind than I would have shown, fired
his lance into the heart of the thing that faced him. There was a
flare of light.
The hostess of the Duck’s Nest slumped
against me, and I, not wishing to lose her, supported her with my
free arm. “I think it’s seeking living heat,” I told her. “It
should go for the destriers. We’ll get away.”
Just as I spoke, it turned toward
us.
I have already said that from behind,
when it opened itself toward the dimarchi, it seemed a reptilian
flower. That impression persisted now when we saw it in its full
terror and glory, but it was joined by two others. The first was
the sensation of intense and otherworldly heat; it seemed a reptile
still, but a reptile that burned in a way never known on Urth, as
though some desert asp had dropped into a sphere of snow. The
second was of raggedness fluttering in a wind that was not of air.
It seemed a blossom still, but it was a blossom whose petals of
white and pale yellow and flame had been tattered by some monstrous
tempest born in its own heart.
In all these impressions, surrounding
them and infusing them, was a horror I cannot describe. It drew all
resolution and strength from me, so that for that moment I could
neither flee nor attack it. The creature and I seemed fixed in a
matrix of time that had nothing to do with anything that had gone
before or since, and that, since it held us who were its only
occupants immobile, could be altered by nothing.
A shout broke the spell. A second party
of dimarchi had galloped into the street behind us, and seeing the
creature were lashing their mounts to the charge. In less than the
space of a breath they were boiling around us, and it was only by
the intercession of Holy Katharine that we were not ridden down. If
I had ever doubted the courage of the Autarch’s soldiery I lost
those doubts then, for both parties hurled themselves upon the
monster like hounds upon a stag.
It was useless. There came a blinding
flash and the sensation of fearful heat. Still holding the
half-unconscious woman, I sprinted down the street.
I meant to turn where the dimarchi had
entered it, but in my panic (and it was panic, not only my own, but
that of Thecla screaming in my mind) I rounded the corner too late
or too soon. Instead of the steep descent to the lower city I
expected, I found myself in a little, stub-end court built on a
spur of rock jutting from the cliff. By the time I realized what
was wrong, the creature, now again a twisted, dwarfish thing but
radiating a terrible and invisible energy, was at the mouth of the
court.
In the starlight it might have been
only an old, hunched man in a black coat, but I have never felt
more terror than I did at the sight of it. There was a jacal at the
back of the court: a larger structure than the hovel in which the
sick girl and her brother had suffered, but built of sticks and mud
in the same fashion. I kicked its door in and ran into a little
warren of odious rooms, bolting through the first and into another,
through that into a third where a half dozen men and women lay
sleeping, through that into a fourth—only to see a window that
looked out over the city much as my own embrasure in the Vincula
did. It was the end, the farthest room of the house, hanging like a
swallow’s nest over a drop that seemed at that moment to go down
forever.
From the room we had just left I could
hear the angry voices of the people I had wakened. The door flew
open, but whoever had come to expel the intruder must have seen the
gleam of Terminus Est; he stopped short,
swore, and turned away. A moment later someone screamed and I knew
the creature of fire was in the jacal.
I tried to set the woman upright, but
she fell in a heap at my feet. Outside the window there was
nothing—the wattled wall ended a few cubits down, and the supports
of the floor did not extend beyond it. Above, an overhanging roof
of rotten thatch offered no more purchase to my hand than gossamer.
As I struggled to grasp it, there came a flood of light that
destroyed all color and cast shadows as dark as fuligin itself,
shadows like fissures in the cosmos. I knew then that I must fight
and die as the dimarchi had, or jump, and I swung about to face the
thing that had come to kill me.
It was still in the room beyond, but I
could see it through the doorway, opened again now as it had been
in the street. The half-consumed corpse of some wretched crone lay
before it on the stone floor, and while I watched, it seemed to
bend over her in what was, I would almost swear, an attitude of
inquiry. Her flesh blistered and cracked like the fat of a roast,
then fell away. In a moment even her bones were no more than pale
ashes the creature scattered as it advanced.
Terminus Est I
believe to have been the best blade ever forged, but I knew she
could accomplish nothing against the power that had routed so many
cavalrymen; I cast her to one side in the vague hope that she might
be found and eventually returned to Master Palaemon, and took the
Claw from its little bag at my throat.
It was my last, faint chance, and I saw
at once that it had failed me. However the creature sensed the
world about it (and I had guessed from its movements that it was
nearly blind on our Urth), it could make out the gem clearly, and
it did not fear it. Its slow advance became a rapid and purposeful
flowing forward. It reached the doorway—there was a burst of smoke,
a crash, and it was gone. Light from below flashed through the hole
it had burned in the flimsy floor that began where the stone of the
outcrop ended; at first it was the colorless light of the creature,
then a rapid alternation of chatoyant pastels—peacock blue, lilac,
and rose. Then only the faint, reddish light of leaping
flames.