From that day to this, I have seen no evidence of magic and have had no need of it. I am Mardik the blacksmith, and I stand as tall as any man in the village, though it’s true some muttered darkly about me for a time until I silenced them. I do what I will, and none can say me nay. For my sake they treat mad Festil with respect.
And yet I am not what I was. There is a lack in me that ale cannot quench and work and women cannot fill. For I have failed the testing of the Lady in White in my way, and that is a failure not to be forgotten or redeemed. There was a thing that I needed, and it was not in me.
The Lady in White, I say, though I do not expect to be believed. I have thought long and painfully of all that has befallen me and have concluded that the wizard was like the demon-creature and the leprous crone—another test. By means of testing, the Lady in White sought to winnow men, seeking one worthy of her love. This I believe, though Festil gives it no answer but his smile and his joy. Well, smile, then, Festil my brother. You have won your heart’s desire, though it has made you blind. But I failed the tests of the Lady; verily,, I failed them all and knew it not. But this, also, I do not utter aloud.
In truth, we do not speak much of the matter. Betimes Pendit the son of Pandeler comes to our hut in the evening,, and we three who have endured the ordeal of the cottage sit together in the darkness, where Festil’s eyes are as good as any, and better than most. But we do not speak of what we have endured. Rather Festil spins dreams for us in the night, and we share them as best we may, loving him because he sees the thing that we do not.
Her old pot I keep in the name of remembrance, though without mending it is of little use.
There are some who say that we have been blighted, that we have become old and withered of soul before our time. But we are not blighted, Festil and I. For he has gained his heart’s desire, and I—why,, I am Mardik the blacksmith, wheelwright and ironmonger; and despite all my failures I have been given a gift worthy of treasuring, for I have been kissed by the Lady in White.
1
I WAS STANDING IN FRONT OF ELIZABETH’S CAGE WHEN the hum behind my right ear told me Inspector Morganstark wanted to see me. I was a little surprised, but I didn’t show it. I was trained not to show it. I tongued one of the small switches set against my back teeth and said, “I copy. Be there in half an hour.” I had to talk out loud if I wanted the receivers and tape decks back at the Bureau to hear me. The transceiver implanted in my mastoid process wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up my voice if I whispered (or else the monitors would’ve spent a hell of a lot of time just listening to me breathe and swallow). But I was the only one in the area, so I didn’t have to worry about being overheard.
After I acknowledged the Inspector’s call, I stayed in front of Elizabeth’s cage for a few more minutes. It wasn’t that I had any objection to being called in, even though this was supposed to be my day off. And it certainly wasn’t that I was having a particularly good time where I was. I don’t like zoos. Not that this wasn’t a nice place— for people, anyway. There were clean walks and drinking fountains, and plenty of signs describing the animals. But for the animals…
Well, take Elizabeth, for example. When I brought her in a couple months ago, she was the prettiest cougar I’d ever seen. She had those intense eyes only real hunters have, a delicate face, and her whiskers were absolutely magnificent. But now her eyes were dull, didn’t seem to focus on anything. Her pacing was spongy instead of tight; sometimes she even scraped her toes because she didn’t lift her feet high enough. And her whiskers had been trimmed short by the zoo keepers—probably because some great cats in zoos keep trying to push their faces between the bars, and some bastards who go to zoos like to pull whiskers, just to show how brave they are. In that cage. Elizabeth was just another shabby animal going to waste.
That raises the question of why I put her there in the first place. Well, what else could I do? Leave her to starve when she was a cub? Turn her over to the breeders after I found her, so she could grow up and go through the same thing that killed her mother? Raise her in my apartment until she got so big and feisty she might tear my throat out? Let her go somewhere—with her not knowing how to hunt for food, and the people in the area likely to go after her with demolition grenades?
No. the zoo was the only choice I had. I didn’t like it much.
Back when I was a kid, I used to say that someday I was going to be rich enough to build a real zoo. The kind of zoo they had thirty or forty years ago, where the animals lived in what they called a “natural habitat.” But by now I know I’m not going to be rich. And all those good old zoos are gone. They were turned into hunting preserves when the demand for “sport” got high enough. These days, the only animals that find their ways into zoos at all are the ones that are too broken to be hunters—or the ones that are just naturally harmless. With exceptions like Elizabeth every once in a while.
I suppose the reason I didn’t leave right away was the same reason I visited Elizabeth in the first place— and Emily and John, too. I was hoping she’d give some sign that she recognized me. Fat chance. She was a cougar—she wasn’t sentimental enough to be grateful. Anyway, zoos aren’t exactly conducive to sentimentality in animals of prey. Even Emily, the coyote, had finally forgotten me. (And John, the bald eagle, was too stupid for sentiment. He looked like he’d already forgotten everything he’d ever known.) No, I was the only sentimental one of the bunch. It made me late getting to the Bureau.
But I wasn’t thinking about that when I arrived. I was thinking about my work. A trip to the zoo always makes me notice certain things about the duty room where all the Special Agents and Inspectors in our Division have their desks. Here we were in the year 2011—men had walked on Mars, microwave stations were being built to transmit solar power, marijuana and car racing were so important they were subsidized by the government—but the rooms where men and women like me did their paperwork still looked like the squadrooms I’d seen in old movies when I was a kid.
There were no windows. The dust and butts in the corners were so old they were starting to fossilize. The desks (all of them littered with paper that seemed to have fallen from the ceiling) were so close together we could smell each other working, sweating because we were tired of doing reports, or because we were sick of the fact that we never seemed to make a dent in the crime rate, or because we were afraid. Or because we were different. It was like one big cage. Even the ID clipped to the lapel of my jacket, identifying me as Special Agent Sam Browne, looked more like a zoo label than anything else.
I hadn’t worked there long, as years go, but already I was glad every time Inspector Morganstark sent me out in the field. About the only difference the past forty years had made in the atmosphere of the Bureau was that everything was grimmer now. Special Agents didn’t work on trivial crimes like prostitution, gambling, missing persons, because they were too busy with kidnapping, terrorism, murder, gang warfare. And they worked alone, because there weren’t enough of us to go around.
The real changes were hidden. The room next door was even bigger than this one, and it was full to the ceiling with computer banks and programmers. And in the room next to that were the transmitters and tape decks that monitored Agents in the field. Because the Special Agents had been altered, too.
But philosophy (or physiology, depending on the point of view) is like sentiment, and I was already late. Before I had even reached my desk, the Inspector spotted me from across the room and shouted, “Browne!” He didn’t sound in any mood to be kept waiting, so I just ignored all the new paper on my desk and went into his office.
I closed the door and stood waiting for him to decide whether he wanted to chew me out or not. Not that I had any particular objection to being chewed out. I liked Inspector Morganstark, even when he was mad at me. He was a sawed-off man with a receding hairline, and during his years in the Bureau his eyes had turned bleak and tired. He always looked harassed—and probably he was. He was the only Inspector in the Divisio
n who was sometimes human enough, or stubborn enough, anyway, to Ignore the computers. He played his hunches sometimes, and sometimes his hunches got him in trouble. I liked him for that. It was worth being roasted once in a while to work for him.
He was sitting with his elbows on his desk, clutching a file with both hands as if it were trying to get away from him. It was a pretty thin file, by Bureau standards—it’s hard to shut computers off once they get started. He didn’t look up at me, which is usually a bad sign; but his expression wasn’t angry. It was “something-about-this-isn’t-right-and-I-don’t-like-it.” All of a sudden, I wanted that case. So I took a chance and sat down in front of his desk. Trying to show off my self-confidence—of which I didn’t have a hell of a lot. After two years as a Special Agent, I was still the rookie under Inspector Morganstark. So far he’d never given me anything to do that wasn’t basically routine.
After a minute, he put down the file and looked at me. His eyes weren’t angry, either. They were worried. He clamped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. Then he said, “You were at the zoo?”
That was another reason I liked him. He took my pets seriously. Made me feel less like a piece of equipment. “Yes,” I said. For the sake of looking competent, I didn’t smile.
“How many have you got there now?”
“Three. I took Elizabeth in a couple months ago.”
“How’s she doing?”
I shrugged. “Fair. It never takes them very long to lose spirit—once they’re caged up.”
His eyes studied me a minute longer. Then he said. “That’s why I want you for this assignment. You know about animals. You know about hunting. You won’t jump to the wrong conclusions.”
Well, I was no hunter, but I knew what he meant. I was familiar with hunting preserves. That was where I got John and Emily and Elizabeth. Sort of a hobby. Whenever I get a chance (like when I’m on leave), I go to preserves. I pay my way in like anybody else—take my chances like anybody else. But I don’t have any guns. and I’m not trying to kill anything. I’m hunting for cubs like Elizabeth—young that are left to die when their mothers are shot or trapped. When I find them, I smuggle them out of the preserves, raise them myself as long as I can, and then give them to the zoo.
Sometimes I don’t find them in time. And sometimes when I find them they’ve already been crippled by careless shots or traps. Them I kill. Like I say. I’m sentimental.
But I didn’t know what the Inspector meant about jumping to the wrong conclusions. I put a question on my face and waited until he said, “Ever hear of the Sharon’s Point Hunting Preserve?”
“No. But there are a lot of preserves. Next to car racing, hunting preserves are the most popular—”
He cut me off. He sat forward and poked the file accusingly with one finger. “People get killed there.”
I didn’t say anything to that. People get killed at all hunting preserves. That’s what they’re for. Since crime became the top-priority problem in this country about twenty years ago, the government has spent a lot of money on it. A lot of money. On “law enforcement” and prisons, of course. On drugs like marijuana that pacify people. But also on every conceivable way of giving people some kind of non-criminal outlet for their hostility.
Racing, for instance’ With government subsidies, there isn’t a man or woman in the country so poor they can’t afford to get in a hot car and slam it around a track. The important thing, according to the social scientists, is to give people a chance to do something violent at the risk of their lives. Both violence and risk have to be real for catharsis to take place. With all the population and economic pressure people are under, they have to have some way to let off stew. Keep them from becoming criminals out of simple boredom and frustration and perversity.
So we have hunting preserves. Wilderness areas are sealed off and stocked with all manner of dangerous beasts, and then hunters are turned loose in them—alone, of course—to kill everything they can while trying to stay alive. Everyone who has a yen to see the warm blood run can take a rifle and go pit himself, or at least his firepower, against various assortments of great cats, wolves, wildebeests, grizzly bears, whatever.
It’s almost as popular as racing. People like the illusion of “kill or be killed.” They slaughter animals as fast as the breeders can supply them. (Some people use poisoned darts and dumdum bullets. Some people even try to sneak lasers into the preserves, but that is strictly not allowed. Private citizens are strictly not allowed to have lasers at all.) It’s all very therapeutic. And it’s all very messy. Slow deaths and crippling outnumber clean kills twenty to one, and not enough hunters get killed to suit me. But I suppose it’s better than war. At least we aren’t trying to do the same thing to the Chinese.
The Inspector said, “You’re thinking, ‘Hooray for the lions and tigers.”‘
I shrugged again. “Sharon’s Point must be popular.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said acidly. “They don’t get Federal money, so they don’t have to file preserve-use figures. AU I get is death certificates.” This time, he touched the file with his fingertips as if it were delicate or dangerous. “Since Sharon’s Point opened, twenty months ago, forty-five people have been killed.”
Involuntarily, I said, “Sonofabitch!” Which probably didn’t make me sound a whole lot more competent. But I was surprised. Forty-five! I knew of preserves that hadn’t lost forty-five people in five years. Most hunters don’t like to be in all that much danger.
“It’s getting worse, too,” Inspector Morganstark went on. “Ten in the first ten months. Fifteen in the next five. Twenty in the last five.”
“They’re very popular,” I muttered.
“Which is strange,” he said, “since they don’t advertise.”
“You mean they rely on word-of-mouth?” That implied several things, but the first one that occurred to me was, “What have they got that’s so special?”
“You mean besides forty-five dead?” the Inspector growled. “They get more complaints than any other preserve in the country.” That didn’t seem to make sense, but he explained it. “Complaints from the families. They don’t get the bodies back.”
Well, that was special—sort of. I’d never heard of a preserve that didn’t send the bodies to the next of kin. “What happens to them?”
“Cremated. At Sharon’s Point. The complaints say that spouses have to sign a release before the hunters can go there. A custom some of the spouses don’t like. But what they really don’t like is that their husbands or wives are cremated right away. The spouses don’t even get to see the bodies. All they get is notification and a death certificate.” He looked at me sharply. “This is not against the law. All the releases were signed in advance”
I thought for a minute, then said something noncommittal. “What kind of hunters were they?”
The Inspector frowned bleakly. ‘The best. Most of them shouldn’t be dead.” He took a readout from the file and tossed it across the desk at me. “Take a look.”
The readout was a computer summary of the forty-five dead. All were wealthy, but only 26.67% had acquired their money themselves. 73.33% had inherited it or married it. 82.2% had bright financial futures. 91.1% were experienced hunters, and of those 65.9% had reputations of being exceptionally skilled. 84.4% had traveled extensively around the world in search of “game”—the more dangerous the better.
“Maybe the animals are experienced too,” I said.
The Inspector didn’t laugh. I went on reading.
At the bottom of the sheet was an interesting information: 75.56% of the people on this list had known at least five other people on the list; 0.00% had known none of the others.
I handed the readout back to Inspector Morganstark. “Word-of-mouth for sure. It’s like a club.” Something important was going on at the Sharon’s Point Hunting Preserve, and I wanted to know what it was. Trying to sound casual, I asked, “What does the computer recommend?”
&n
bsp; He looked at the ceiling. “It says to forget the whole thing. That damn machine can’t even understand why I bother to ask it questions about this. No law broken. Death rate irrelevant. I asked for a secondary recommendation, and it suggested I talk to some other computer.”
I watched him carefully. “But you’re not going to forget it.”
He threw up his hands. “Me forget it? Do I look like a man who has that much common sense? You know perfectly well I’m not going to forget it.”
“Why not?”
It seemed like a reasonable question to me, but the Inspector waved it aside. “In fact,” he went on in a steadier tone, “I’m assigning it to you. I want you out there tomorrow.”
I started to say something, but he stopped me. He was looking straight at me, and I knew he was going to tell me something that was important to him. “I’m giving it to you,” he said, “because I’m worried about you. Not because you’re a rookie and this case is trivial. It is not trivial. I can feel it—right here.” He put his hand over the bulge of his skull behind his right ear, as if his hunches came from the transceiver in his mastoid process. Then he sighed. “That’s part of it, I suppose. I know you won’t go off the deep end on this, if I’m wrong. Just because people are getting killed, you won’t go all righteous on me and try to get Sharon’s Point shut down. You won’t make up charges against them just because their death rate is too high. You’ll be cheering for the animals.
“But on top of that,” he went on so I didn’t have a chance to interrupt, “I want you to do this because I think you need it. I don’t have to tell you you’re not comfortable being a Special Agent. You’re not comfortable with all that fancy equipment we put in you. All the adjustment tests indicate a deep-seated reluctance to accept yourself. You need a case that’ll let you find out what you can do.”