Night & Demons Read online

  Table of Contents

  THE RED LEER

  A LAND OF ROMANCE

  SMOKIE JOE

  AWAKENING

  DENKIRCH

  DRAGON, THE BOOK

  THE FALSE PROPHET

  BLACK IRON

  THE SHORTEST WAY

  LORD OF THE DEPTHS

  THE LAND TOWARD SUNSET

  CHILDREN OF THE FOREST

  THE BARROW TROLL

  THAN CURSE THE DARKNESS

  THE SONG OF THE BONE

  THE MASTER OF DEMONS

  THE DANCER IN THE FLAMES

  CODEX

  FIREFIGHT

  BEST OF LUCK

  ARCLIGHT

  SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE

  THE WAITING BULLET

  THE ELF HOUSE

  THE HUNTING GROUND

  THE AUTOMATIC RIFLEMAN

  BLOOD DEBT

  MEN LIKE US

  A WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DAVID DRAKE’S WRITING

  NIGHT & DEMONS

  DAVID DRAKE

  Baen Books

  by David Drake

  The RCN Series

  With the Lightnings

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  The Far Side of the Stars

  The Way to Glory

  Some Golden Harbor

  When the Tide Rises

  In the Stormy Red Sky

  What Distant Deeps

  The Road of Danger

  Hammer’s Slammers

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Butcher’s Bill

  The Sharp End

  The Complete Hammer’s

  Slammers, Vol. 1 (omnibus)

  The Complete Hammer’s

  Slammers, Vol. 2 (omnibus)

  The Complete Hammer’s

  Slammers, Vol. 3 (omnibus)

  Independent Novels and Collections

  All the Way to the Gallows

  Cross the Stars

  Foreign Legions, ed. by David Drake

  Grimmer Than Hell

  Into the Hinterlands

  (with John Lambshead)

  Loose Cannon

  Night & Demons

  Northworld Trilogy

  Patriots

  Ranks of Bronze

  The Reaches Trilogy

  Redliners

  Seas of Venus

  Starliner

  The General Series

  Warlord with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  Conqueror with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  The Chosen with S.M. Stirling

  The Reformer with S.M. Stirling

  The Tyrant with Eric Flint

  The Heretic with Tony Daniel

  (forthcoming)

  The Belisarius Series with Eric Flint

  An Oblique Approach

  In the Heart of Darkness

  Belisarius I: Thunder Before Dawn (omnibus)

  Destiny’s Shield

  Fortune’s Stroke

  Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide (omnibus)

  The Tide of Victory

  The Dance of Time

  Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset (omnibus)

  Edited by David Drake

  The World Turned Upside Down

  (with Jim Baen & Eric Flint)

  NIGHT & DEMONS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by David Drake. A shorter version of this volume appeared in 2007 as Balefires.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-3847-9

  Cover art by Alan Pollack

  First Baen printing, October 2012

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drake, David.

  Night & demons / by David Drake.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3847-9 (trade pb)

  1. Monsters--Fiction. 2. Heroes--Fiction. 3. Horror tales. I. Title. II. Title: Night and demons.

  PS3554.R196N54 2012

  813'.54--dc23

  2012029578

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acknowledgments

  “Denkirch” © 1967 by David Drake; first published in Travelers by Night.

  “Lord of the Depths” © 1971 by David Drake; first published in Dark Things.

  “Arclight” © 1973 by David Drake; first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1973.

  “The Song of the Bone” © 1973 by David Drake; first published in Whispers, December 1973.

  “The Shortest Way” © 1974 by David Drake; first published in Whispers, March 1974.

  “Something Had to Be Done” © 1975 by David Drake; first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1975.

  “The Master of Demons” © 1975 by David Drake; first published in Dark Horizons #11, Winter/Spring 1975.

  “The Barrow Troll” © 1975 by David Drake; first published in Whispers, December 1975.

  “Awakening” © 1975 by David Drake; first published in Nameless Places.

  “Black Iron” © 1975 by David Drake; first published in Nameless Places.

  “Firefight” © 1976 by David Drake; first published in Frights.

  “Blood Debt” © 1976 by David Drake; first published in The 4th Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories.

  “The Hunting Ground” © 1976 by David Drake; first published in Superhorror.

  “Children of the Forest” © 1976 by David Drake; first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1976.

  “Smokie Joe” © 1977 by David Drake; first published in More Devil's Kisses.

  “Best of Luck” © 1978 by David Drake; first published in The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VI.

  “The Red Leer” © 1979 by David Drake; first published in Whispers II.

  “Men Like Us” © 1980 by David Drake; first published in Omni, May 1980.

  “Than Curse the Darkness” © 1980 by David Drake; first published in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

  “The Automatic Rifleman” © 1980 by David Drake; first published in Destinies v2, #4, Fall 1980.

  “The Dancer in the Flames” © 1982 by David Drake; first published in Whispers, August 1982.

  “The False Prophet” © 1989 by David Drake; first published in Vettius and Friends.

  “The Land Toward Sunset” © 1995 by David Drake; first published in Cormac Mac Art, by Robert E. Howard. Riverdale, NY: Baen.

  “The Waiting Bullet” © 1997 by David Drake; first published in Weirdbook 30 Combined with Whispers, Spring, 1997.

  “Dragon, the Book” © 1999 by David Drake; first published in Catfantastic V, A. Norton and M. H. Greenberg, eds. New York, NY: DAW.

  “Codex” © 2003 by David Drake, first published by Sidecar Preservation Society.

  “The Elf House” © 2004 by David Drake; first published in Masters of Fantasy.

  “A Land of Romance” © 2005 by David Drake; first published in The Enchanter Completed.

  THE RED LEER

  I was born in Dubuque, Iowa, and at age ten moved with my family to Clinton, fifty miles south along the Mississippi River. Outsiders tend to think of Iowa as flat. Much of the state is, but where I come from the bluffs rise straight up out of the river. Dubuque has an operating cable car (funicular railway) that a wealthy banker built to carry him from his office in the floodplain to his home on the bluffs 300 feet above. The view out over the river into Illinois is spectacular.

  Others thought so too. All over the area are Amerind grave mounds looking down from the bluffs. One of them’s on the farm that belonged to my father-in-law.

  My dad was an electrician, but nobody in Iowa is very far from a farm. Family friends had farms when I was a boy; my wife’s family were and are dairy farmers. I’ve spent enough time on and around some of the most productive family farms in the world to have a feeling for the life.

  Which is very, very hard. The work has to be done every day, no matter how you feel or what the weather’s doing: you can’t call in sick and tell the cows that they won’t be milked this morning. The machinery is dangerous beyond the imagination of a modern factory worker; the organo-phosphate insecticides were invented just in time for World War II, where they provided the Nazis with the first nerve gases; and even city-dwellers know that if anybody gets rich from agriculture, it isn’t the family farmer.

  The characters in this story are modeled on real people but they’re not my in-laws. The farm is one my in-laws owned, including details like the curio cabinet and the hunting rifle.

  I frequently use a story that has greatly impressed me as a model for one of my own. This isn’t quite so direct a case as some, but I want to mention the similarities to Theodore Sturgeon’s “Killdozer.” The title (which was the genesis of the story) comes from Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”

  * * *

  As he swung the tractor for a final pass across Sac Ridge Field, Deehalter saw that dirt had been turned on the side of the Indian mound. The big man threw in the hand clu
tch of the Allis-Chalmers and throttled the diesel back to idle as he glared at the new trench through the barbed wire. “That goddam Kernes,” he whispered. “If I’ve got to work with him much longer . . . .”

  He revved the engine and slammed the tractor back in gear. The farmer’s scowl was as black as the hair curling up his arms from the backs of his hands to the shirtsleeves rolled at his biceps.

  At the south end of the field, Deehalter raised the cultivator and drove the Allis down the long, looping trail back to the farm buildings. There was a way of sorts straight west from the top of the ridge, but it was too steep for the tractor. The more gradual slope took Deehalter through half a dozen gates and eventually back to the buildings from the southwest. To the left loomed the barn and the three concrete silos peering over its roof at him. The milking parlor was a one-story addition to the barn’s east side, facing the equipment shed and the gas pump. And at the pump was Tom Kernes with his ten-year old son, Deehalter’s nephew, putting gas in the jeep.

  Deehalter pulled up beside them and let the diesel clatter for a moment before he shut it off. Kernes, a short, ginger-headed man, looked up. His arms were not tan but a deep red, with brighter slashes where the straps of his undershirt had interrupted part of the sunlight. Kernes was thirty-five, five years younger than his brother-in-law, but his crinkly, sunburned face would have passed for any age. “Finish Sac Ridge already, Dee?” he asked in his pleasant, throaty voice. The tension in his muscles showed that he had correctly read Deehalter’s anger.

  “Kernes, what’ve you been doing with the Indian mound?” the bigger man demanded from the tractor seat. “You know to leave that the hell alone!” A pick and shovel lay in the back of the jeep. Deehalter noticed them and a black flush moved across his face.

  Kernes’s skin was too red to show the blood, but his voice rose to the challenge. “When Old John owned the farm, he could say what he pleased; but he’s dead now. I’m damned if I’m not going to get an Indian skull like yours.” Gesturing eastward at the ridge, the little man added, “I own half this goddam place and I’m going to get a skull.”

  The curio cabinet in Deehalter’s parlor had been assembled by his grandfather before the first world war. Among its agates and arrowheads, sword-cane and ostrich plumes, was a brown human skull. The family had always assumed the skull came from a mound somewhere, but not even Old John had been sure. It fascinated Kernes, perhaps only because Deehalter had refused to give it to him. The main house and its furnishings, including the cabinet, had gone to Deehalter under his father’s will—just as the new house in which his sister Alice lived with Kernes and their children had gone to her. The rest of the six-hundred-acre farm was willed to Deehalter and Alice jointly, with the provision that if either of them tried to partition the property, the whole of it went to the other. Deehalter had talked to a lawyer and he was sure Kernes had done the same. The worst news either of the men had heard in a long time was that the will would probably stand up in court.

  “There’s a law against digging up mounds,” Deehalter muttered.

  “There’s a law against keeping an Indian skull on display,” the shorter man blazed back. “You going to bring the law in here, Dee?”

  “Well, Deehalter said lamely, “you don’t get everything in the mound. You’ve no right to that.”

  Kernes stood, arms akimbo, sweat from the June sun glittering on his face. “If I do all the goddam digging, I do,” he said. “And anyhow, I get the skull out first.”

  Deehalter wiped his face with his huge, calloused palm. He didn’t like to fool with the mound. Old John had whaled him within an inch of his life thirty years ago, when he had caught his son poking into the smooth slope with a posthole digger. But Deehalter remembered also the nightmare that had awakened him for months after that afternoon, and that dream was of nothing so common as a beating by his father. Still, to let Kernes take everything “All right,” Deehalter said, “I’ll help you dig. But I get my pick of anything besides a skull. Wouldn’t be surprised if there was gold in with a chief.” Actually, Deehalter knew enough about mounds to doubt there would be anything that would interest a non-archeologist—often the mounds hadn’t even been built over a body. But that wasn’t anything the big farmer was going to say to his brother-in-law.

  “Dad,” said the Kernes boy unexpectedly.” If Uncle Dee helps you, you don’t need me, do you?”

  Kernes looked at the child as though he wanted to hit him. “Go on, then,” he snapped. “But I want that goddam toolshed painted when I get back. All of it!”

  The boy took off running for the house. Wiener, the farm’s part-collie, chased after him barking. “Kid’s been listening to his mother,” Kernes grumbled. “From the way Alice’s been carrying on, you’d think Old John was going to come out of his grave if I dug up that mound. He must’ve knocked that into her head with a maul.”

  “He was strong on it,” Deehalter agreed absently.”I know when he was a boy, there was still a couple Sac Indians on the farm. Maybe they talked to him. But he was strong about a lot of things.”

  “Well, you ready to go?” Kernes demanded. He had hung up the pump nozzle and now remembered to cap the jeep’s tank.

  Deehalter grimaced. “I’ll put the cultivator in the shed,” he said. “Then we’ll go.”

  Kernes drove, taking the direct trail through the east pasture. There was a rivulet to ford and a pair of gullies that had to be skirted, but the hard going didn’t start until they reached the foot of the ridge. They had bought the jeep ten years before from Army surplus, and the sharp grades of the ridge slope made the motor wheeze even in the granny gear. Cedars studded the slope, interspersed with bull thistles whose purple bracts were ready to burst open. There was a final switch-back just before the trail reached the summit. As Kernes hauled the wheel hard to the left, the motor spluttered and died. Deehalter swung out of the jeep and walked the last thirty yards while the smaller man cursed and trod on the starter.

  The mound was built on the north end of the ridge. That part had never been opened as a field because the soil was too thinly spread above the bedrock. The mound was oval, about fifteen feet long on the east-west axis and three or four feet high. Though small, it was clearly artificial, a welt of earth on the smooth table of the ridge. Kernes’ trench was in the center of the south side, halfway in and down to the level of the surrounding soil. Deehalter was examining the digging when the jeep heaved itself up behind him and was cut off again.

  “We just kept hitting rocks,” the smaller man explained. “We didn’t get near as far as I’d figured before we started.”

  Deehalter squatted on his haunches and poked into the excavation with a finger like a corncob. “You didn’t hit rocks,” he said, “you hit a rock. One goddam slab. There’s no way we’re going to clear that dirt off it without a week of work or renting a bulldozer. And even if we cleared down to the rock, that slab’s a foot thick and must weigh tons. We’re just wasting our time here—or we would be if we didn’t go on back right now.”

  Kernes swore. “We could hook a chain to the Allis—” he began.

  Deehalter cut him off. “We’d have to get the dirt off the top first, and that’d take all goddam summer. This was a bad idea to start, and it got worse quick. Come on, let’s go back.” He straightened.

  “What about dynamite?” blurted Kernes.

  Deehalter stared at his brother-in-law. The smaller man would not meet his gaze but continued, “There’s still a stick under the seat from when you blew up the beaver dam. We could use it.”

  “Kernes,” Deehalter said, “you’re so afraid of that dynamite that you’d rather leave it in the jeep than touch it to get it out. Besides, it’ll blow the shit out of anything under that slab—if there is anything and the slab’s not flat on bedrock all the way across. What’re you trying to prove?”