The Lily Hand and Other Stories by Ellis Peters

between me and the door there was only the dwarf and the knife. If he would once look away from me I might attempt it.
    I did not know what inspired in me the fiery and despairing calm with which I contemplated this act of hopeless defiance. I think it was her eyes, newly opened still in my mind’s eye, that drowned in their deep blueness the fierce, thin blue of the knife blade. I waited, watching the slight movements it made above my chest, praying for it to be withdrawn, only for a moment.
    Then the door was pushed open, and a giant came in out of the night. I felt no surprise. No prodigy could surprise me any more. Only the normal, only daylight, and traffic, and a man shaped like other men could have astonished me now. This man looked enormous, towering above me, towering above the dwarfs, talking to them in a deep, resonant voice, in some language I could not recognize even as German. He had a pointed beard, and high-arched brows, and a handsome, angry face like a devil’s, famished and corroded with rage. He stared at me, and swept through to some inner room, and the door closed behind him.
    One more apparition out of the submerged world, cast up through the rift of night and storm and solitude. But when he spoke they all listened, and when he had passed they turned to look after him. Even the dwarf with the knife. It was the only moment I could hope for, and I took it. I reached up and caught him by the wrists and, springing up, jerked him backwards off his perch, and jumped over him, and ran.
    The shrilling of their voices and clutching of their hands were like a wind that blew me onward, and the pain that filled me was like a fire burning its way forward over a dry plain, and sweeping me with it. I hit the edge of the door blindly, and wrenched it open, and fell into the night; and ran, and ran, and ran, leaping aside from bushes, ducking under the branches of trees, jumping over sodden hollows, fending myself off with outstretched arms from the trunks of trees.
    I heard the hunt pour out of the house after me, saw light streaming from door and window for a few minutes, and then sound and light fell far behind me, and I was running off the ground, floating, drifting effortlessly through a void, almost without pain any longer. For a long time it seemed. A very long time. An eternity.
    After that I remember a road under my feet, quite suddenly, out of nowhere, and two lights gleaming like eyes on its wet, silver surface, and voices, and men tumbling out from the brain behind the eyes. I remember falling through miles of air into long arms, and gasping out my story and my appeal, between breaths that hurt me clean through to the heart, as though the knife had transfixed me at last. I remember a face above me, big white teeth and great, astonished eyes, and a deep, soft voice uttering sounds of reassurance in English.
    â€˜All right, son. All right, now, take it easy!’ the incredible voice was purring. And the face – it seemed only the last fantasy of the night to me that this face should be black.
    I went down, fathoms deep, into the blueness of remembered gentian eyes, and in the depths there was darkness and silence.
    When I came to myself, I was lying in a bed in an American military hospital in Aschaffenburg, where the black highway patrol had rushed me in the jeep that night; and Franz Eisner was sitting by my bed, as round and rosy and ordinary as ever, beaming at me through his thick glasses.
    He patted my shoulder, and fed me grapes, and told me where I was, and how I’d got there. And all the time I wanted to know only one thing, the single thing that mattered.
    â€˜Did they find her?’ I asked, hearing a thin voice that hardly seemed to be mine. ‘Did they get there in time? Did they find the girl?’
    An odd, embarrassed smile flickered over his face, but he said soothingly, ‘Oh yes, they found her.’
    â€˜So I did manage to tell a straight tale before I passed