“No!” The roar burst from my gullet. “Be off to Guaymas, I said! Haven’t I troubles enough? Let me alone till I can decide if I want you back!”

  Another instant she stared at me. May I never again see such eyes. Then she fled.

  I went out on the patio and became a wolf. The demon stench was thick on the air. I followed it over the mountainside.

  The earth was a dazzle of moonlight. My nose caught smells of dust, sage, cactus, kelp and iodine more remotely; my ears heard a bat’s sonar squeak, the terrified scuttering of a jackrabbit; my pelt tingled with sensations for which men have no words. I felt none of my human torture now. The lupine brain could only hold clean, murderous carnivore thoughts. It was like being reborn. I understand that some psychiatrists have gotten good results by turning their patients temporarily into animals.

  Presently the old watchtower lifted its corroded outline across the moon. I entered what had been a gateway, every nerve abristle for attack. The courtyard lay empty around me. Sand had blown in during the centuries, weeds thrust between the flagstones, only a shard of paving jutted here and there. Near the center was a heap which had once been a building. Cellars lay underneath. I’d explored them a little, once, but not deeply enough to come on the lair of the incubus.

  I bayed at the moon, to challenge him.

  It rustled in the tower door. A white form stepped out. My heart made one leap, and I crouched back. I thought wildly, could I slash his jugular on the first bite, it wouldn’t matter how much of that drug-blood I got, he would he dead in the flesh and his essense must return from this plane of reality…

  Laughter ran around me on soft little feet. She made another stride outward, so that she could stand under a cataract of moonlight, impossibly white against the black moldering walls. “Good even, fair youth,” she said. “I had not hoped for this much fortune.”

  Her scent entered my lungs and my blood. I growled, and it turned into a whine. I wagged the stump of my war-casualty tail. She came up and scratched me behind the ears. I licked her arm; the taste was dizzying. Somewhere in a thunderful wilderness, I thought it was no use remaining lupine. The currents of change ran through me. I stood up a man.

  She was as tall and ripplesome as Amaris, and she had the same strange pointed face and eyes that fluoresced under the moon. But the pale hair fell past her waist in a cloud, and she wore a gown obviously woven by stingy spiders, on a figure that— Oh, well, I won’t try to describe it. I suppose half the fun was simply in the way it moved.

  “Cybelita…I presume?” I managed to husk.

  “And thou art Stephen.” A slender hand fell upon mine and lingered. “Ah, welcome!”

  I wet my lips. “Er…is your brother at home?”

  She swayed closer. “What matters that?”

  “I—uh—” I thought crazily that one can’t very well explain that one’s business with a lady’s brother is to kill him. And after all, well, anyhow—“Look here,” I blurted. “You, he, you’ve got to leave us alone!”

  Cybelita smiled yieldingly. “Ah, thy grief is mine, Stephen. And yet, canst thou not find it in thy heart to pity us? Knowest thou what damnation in truth consists of? To be a creature in whom the elements exist unblent—Fire of love, Air of impulse, Water of wantonness, and the dark might of Earth—to be of such a nature, and then doomed to slink like a rat in these ruins, and howl to empty skies, and hunger and hunger for three hundred years! If thou wert starving, and two folk passing by spread a feast, wouldst thou not take such few crumbs as they could well spare?”

  I croaked something about the analogic fallacy.

  “ ’Tis not malignancy,” she pleaded. She drew close, her arms reached up to my shoulders and her bosom nudged mine. “ ’Tis need which forces us. And after all, Stephen, ye mortals are not so perfect. Were ye saints with never an impure thought, no demon could venture near. We are drawn by that in ye which is akin to ourselves.”

  “Uh, well, yes,” I choked. “You have two points there…a point. I mean. Yes.”

  Cybelita laughed again. “But la, sweet youth! Here I stand in moonlight, my arms about the most beautiful unclothed lad this world has ever seen—”

  “Oh, my God!” I remembered that my outfit was a pair of skivvies. Since she didn’t shrink away, my exclamation must not have counted as a prayer.

  “—and discourse on metaphysic! Nay, now thou’rt all a-blush.” Cybelita pirouetted from me. “I’d not have the advantage of thee. That’s not true friendship. So let us be alike in garb.” She snapped her fingers and the gown vanished. Not that it made a very big difference, except morally, and by that time morals seemed irrelevant.

  “And now, come, come, my darling. My wolf, thou’rt the first loup-garou that e’er I met—had I suspected so new a wonder, no time would have been wasted on the woman—Come!” She threw herself against me. I don’t know exactly what made me respond to her kiss. It was like being caught in a rose-colored cyclone.

  Somehow I found a last resting place in the fragments of my willpower. “No! I have a wife!”

  Cybclita laughed less pleasantly. “Ha! Where thinkest thou Amaris has been since the moment thou left the wench alone?”

  I made one garroted sound.

  “ ’Tis happened now,” she purred. “What’s done can ne’er be undone. Blame not thy wife. She is but mortal. Shouldst thou be more?”

  I previewed Purgatory for about a minute. Then, hardly aware what was happening, I snatched Cybelita to me. My kisses broke her lips a little and I tasted the demon blood. “Come,” she crooned, “my lover, my lover, bear me to the tower…”

  I picked her up and started across the courtyard.

  “Steve!”

  Ginny’s scream was a knife driven through me.

  I dropped my burden. Cybelita landed on her lovely tuchus and said a most unlovely word. I gaped at Ginny. She crouched on our Persian carpet, it hovered over the broken gateway, her red hair tumbled past her bare shoulders and I knew, in that moment when I had already lost her to Amaris (for it could nevermore be the same between us two), that she was all I would ever want.

  Cybelita got up. She looked bleached in the moonlight. I had no further desire for her. To hell with her.

  To Hell with her.

  She sneered upward toward Ginny, turned back and opened her arms to me. I said: “Defend yourself!” and became a wolf.

  Cybelita skipped back from my lunge. I heard Ginny cry out again, as if from another existence. My attention was all on the succubus. Cybelita’s body pulsed, grayed, suddenly she was a wolf too. She grinned shamelessly at me and her femaleness hit me like a club.

  I didn’t take the offer. I went for her throat. We rolled over and fought. She was tough, but hadn’t been trained in combat lycanthropy. I know the judo breaks for my animal shape, too. I got under her jaws and clamped my own teeth exactly where I wanted them.

  The demon blood was sweet and horrible to taste. But this time it couldn’t rouse my wishes. The powers in me of Love, for my wife, and Hate, for the thing I fought, were too strong. Or, if you insist on outmoded terms, my glands were now supplying enough testosterone and adrenalin to swamp whatever hormone was in that ichor.

  I killed her.

  I lay by the body, gasping. A part of me heard the shriek of the foul spirit, disincarnated again, its Schrödinger function changing mathematical form to put it back in the Low Continuum where it belonged. The wolf corpse writhed horribly through shapes of woman, man, horned and tailed satanoid; then its last cohesive forces were spent and it puffed away in gas.

  Piece by tattered piece, my wits returned. I lay across Ginny’s dear lap. Moonlight poured cool over us, under friendly stars, down to a castle which was nothing but piled stones. Ginny laughed and wept and held me close.

  I became a man again and drew her to me. “It’s okay, darling,” I breathed. “Everything’s okay. I finished her. I’ll get Amaris next.”

  “What?” Her wet face lifted from my breast toward my lips. “Don’t you n-n-n-know? You have!”

  “Huh?”

  “Yes. A little of my education c-c-came back to me…after you’d gone.” She drew a shaking breath. “Incubi and succubi are identical. They change their sex as…as…indicated…Amaris and that hussy were the same!”

  “Then she didn’t—he didn’t—you didn’t—” I let out a yell which registered on seismographs in Baja California. And yet that noise was the most fervent prayer of thanks which Our Father had ever gotten from me.

  Not that I hadn’t been prepared to forgive my dearest, having had some experience of the demon’s power. But learning that there wasn’t anything which needed to be forgiven was like a mountain off my back.

  “Steve!” cried Ginny. “I love you too, but my ribs aren’t made of iron!”

  I climbed to my feet. “It’s over with,” I whispered, incredulous. In a moment: “More than over with. We even came out ahead of the game.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, still timid, but with a sunrise in her eyes.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess we’ve had a useful lesson in humility. Neither of us turned out to own a more decorous subconscious mind than the average person. But in what counts, I learned how you care for me. You followed me here, not knowing what might be waiting, when I’d told you to run for safety—”

  Her tousled head rubbed against my shoulder. “I learned the same about you, Steve. It’s a good feeling.”

  We walked onto the carpet. “Home, James,” I said. After a second, when James was airborne: “Uh, I suppose that you’re dead tired.”

  “Well, actually not. I’m still too keyed up. But you, poor darling—”

  “I feel fine,” I grinned. “We can sleep late tomorrow.”

  “Mister Matuchek! What are you thinking?”

  “The same as you, Mrs. Matuchek.”

  I suppose she blushed in the moonlight. “So I see. Very good, sir.”

  Which turned out to have been a prophecy.

  The White King’s War

  -1-

  The sun that men had once named Mimir burned with four times the brightness of Sol but at a distance of five astronomical units it showed as a tiny, bluish-white firespot too intense for the unshielded eye. Covering its disc with a finger, one became able to see the luminous haze around it—gas, dust, meteoroids, a nebula miniature in extent but as thick as any that could be found anywhere in the known universe—and the spearpoints of light created by reflection within that nebula. Elsewhere darkness swarmed with remoter stars and the Milky Way foamed around heaven.

  Somewhat more than four million kilometers away from the scoutboat, Regin spread over two and a half times as much sky diameter as Luna seen from Terra. The day side of the giant planet cast sunlight blindingly off clouds in its intensely compressed atmosphere. The night side had an ashen-hued glow of its own, partly from aurora, partly from the luminosity rebounding off a score of moons.

  They included Wayland; this satellite dominated the forward viewscreen. The boat was heading straight down out of orbit. The vision of stark peaks, glacier fields, barren plains, craters old and eroded or new and huge, was hardly softened by a thin blanket of air.

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Dominic Flandry, Imperial Terrestrial Navy, sent his hands dancing over the pilot board. His vessel was technically Comet class but antiquated and minimally equipped. Without a proper conning computer, he must make his approach manually. The task did not bother him. Having gotten the needful data during free fall around the globe, he had only to keep alert to his instruments and direct the grav drive accordingly. For a twenty-one-year~old brain that is in charge of a tall, lithe body more trained and experienced than most, the operation was a dance with the boat for partner and to the lilt of cosmic forces.

  He whistled a waltz tune through his teeth.

  Nonetheless, he was taut. The faint vibrations of power, the rustle and chemical-sharp odor of ventilation and the pull of the interior weightmaking field stood uncommonly strong in his awareness. He heard the blood beat in his ears.

  Harnessed beside him, Djana exclaimed, “You’re not aiming for the centrum. You’re way off.”

  He spared her a look. Even now—and even with suspicion hardening her features—he enjoyed the sight.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Something mighty damn strange is going on there. I’m not about to bull straight in. Far better we weasel in.” He grinned. “Though I’d rather just continue tomcatting.”

  “If you try to pull any—”

  “Let’s have no she-wolfing.” Flandry gave his attention back to the board and screen. His voice went on abstractedly: “I’m surprised at you. I am for a fact. A hooker so tough—albeit delectable—not taking for granted we’d reconnoiter first. I’m going to put us down in that crater—see it? Ought to be firm ground, though we’ll give it a vibro test before we cut the engine. With luck any of those flying weirdies we saw—if one happens to pass overhead—should register us as another piece of meteorite. Not that I expect any will chance by. This may be a miniworld but it wears a lot of real estate. I’ll leave you inboard and do a verree cautious look about. And don’t think I don’t wish our kit included a repulsor harness.”

  His whetted senses registered her shiver. The first during their voyage. But then, she was a creature of cities and machinery, not of the Big Deep. Illimitable immensity and loneliness had chilled burlier spirits than hers.

  And there was also that mystery they had observed from orbit: where a complex of robots ought to have been at work—or at least quietly waiting out the centuries—an inexplicable crisscross of lines had been drawn across at least a hundred square kilometers in front of the old buildings and a traffic of objects like nothing ever seen before except in bad dreams was taking place. Daunting, yes. Left to himself, Flandry would have gone back for reinforcements. But to do so would be awkward under present circumstances. Besides, at his age he dared not admit to any girl that he could be scared.

  He felt a brief touch of pity for her. He knew she was as gentle, loving, and compassionate as a cryogenic drill. But she was beautiful—small, fine-boned, with exquisite features, great blue eyes and honey-gold hair—a quality he considered a positive virtue. Apart from insisting that he prepare meals—and he was undoubtedly far the superior cook—she had accepted the cramped austerity of the boat with wry good humor. During their three weeks of travel she had given him freely of her talents, which must command a high price at home. While her formal education in other fields was scanty, between times she had proven an entertaining talkmate. Half enemy she might be, but Flandry had allowed himself the imprudent luxury of falling only slightly in love with her and he felt he owed her something. No other scouting sweep had been as pleasant.

  Now she faced the spacefarer’s truth that the only thing we know for certain about this universe is that it is implacable. He wanted to reach across and console her.

  But the vessel was entering atmosphere. A thin scream began to penetrate the hull, which savagely bucked.

  “Come on, Jake,” Flandry said. “Be a good girl.”

  “Why do you always call the boat Jake?” his companion asked, obviously trying to get her mind off the crags lancing toward her.

  “Giacobini-Zinner is a bit ridiculous,” he answered her, “and the code letters can’t be fitted into anything bawdy.” I refrain from inquiring what you were called as a child— I prefer not to believe in, say, an Ermintrude Bugglethwaite who invested in a biosculp job as well as a house name…“Quiet, please,” he said aloud. “This is tricky work. Thin air means high-velocity winds.”

  The engine growled. Interior counteracceleration force did not altogether compensate for normal lurching—the deck seemed to stagger. Flandry’s hands flew, his feet shoved pedals and occasionally he spoke an order to the idiot-grade central computer that the vessel did possess. But he’d done this sort of thing before, more times than he could remember. He would make planetfall without real trouble.

  Then they came. The flyers.

  He had only a moment’s warning of them. Djana screamed as they whipped from a veil of driving gray cloud. They were metal, bright in the light of Mimir and of Regin’s golden horizon-scraping dayside crescent. Wide, ribbed wings upbore sticklike bodies, grotesque empennage, beaks and claws. The flyers were smaller than the spacecraft but they numbered a score or worse.

  They attacked. They could do scant harm directly. Their hammering and scraping resounded wildly in the hull. But however frail by the standards of a real ship, the Comet was built to resist heavier buffetings. The assailants did, though, rock it. Wheeling and soaring, they darkened vision. More terribly, they interfered with radar, sonic beams and every probing of every instrument. Suddenly, except for glimpses as they flashed aside, Flandry was piloting blind. The wind sent his boat reeling.

  He stabbed flame out of the single spitgun in the nose. A flyer exploded in smoke and fragments. Another, wing sheared, spun away to destruction. The rest were too many, too quickly reacting. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he heard himself yell and piled on power.

  Shock smashed through him. Metal screamed. Images whirled in the screens. In an instant he saw what had happened. Without light or sensors, in the turbulence of the air, he had descended farther than he knew. His spurt of acceleration had sideswiped a mountaintop.

  No time for fear. He became the whole craft. Two thrust cones remained, not enough to escape with but maybe enough to set down on and not spatter. He ignored the flock and fought for control of the drunkenly unbalanced grav drive. If he made a straight tail-first descent, the force would fend off the opposition. He would have an uncluttered scan aft that he could project onto one of the pilot-board screens and use for an eyeballed landing. If he could hold her upright.

  If not, he was dead.

  The noise lessened to wind whistle, engine stutter and drumbeat of beaks. Through abating sounds he was faintly astonished to hear Djana. He shot her a glance. Her eyes were closed, her fingers twisted together and from her lips poured ancient words, over and over.