Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance Page A

fled, perhaps the wife alone knows."
    The woman's mouth opened slightly. "He is my brother—please—"
    "Ah! So you know!" cried Liane in delight, and strode back and forth before the fire. "Ah, you know! We renew the trial. Now attend. With this staff I make jelly of your man's legs, and bring his spine up through his stomach— unless you speak." He set about his task.
    "Say nothing—" gasped the man, and lapsed into pain. The woman cursed, sobbed, pleaded. At last: "I tell, I tell you all!" she cried. "Dellare has gone to Efred!"
    Liane relaxed his efforts. "Efred. So. In the Land of the Falling Wall."

    He pursed his lips. "It might be true. But I disbelieve. You must tell me once more, under the influence of the truth-evoker." And he brought a brand from the fire and adjusted it at her ankles—and set to work on the man once more. The woman spoke not.
    "Speak, woman," snarled Liane, panting. "I am in perspiration with this work." The woman spoke not. Her eyes were wide, and stared glassily upwards.
    "She is dead!" cried her husband. "Dead! My wife is dead! Ah—Liane, you demon, you foulness!" he screamed. "I curse you! by Thial, by Kraan—" His voice quavered into high-pitched hysteria.
    T'sais was disturbed. The woman was dead. Was not killing wicked?
    So Pandelume had said. If the woman were good, as the bearded man had said, then Liane was evil. Things of blood and filth all, of course.
    Still, it was vile, hurting a live thing till it died.
    Knowing nothing of fear, she stepped out from her hiding place and advanced into the fire-light. Liane looked up and sprang back. But the intruder was a slender girl of passionate beauty. He caroled, he danced.
    "Welcome, welcome!" He glared in distaste at the bodies on the ground. "Unpleasant; we must ignore them." He flung his cloak back, ogled her with his luminous hazel eyes, strutted toward her like a plumed cock.
    "You are lovely, my dear, and I—I am the perfect man; so you shall see."
    T'sais laid her hand on her rapier, and it sprang out by itself. Liane leapt back, alarmed by the blade and likewise by the blaze which glowed deep from the warped brain.
    "What means this? Come, come," he fretted. "Put away your steel. It is sharp and hard. You must lay it away. I am a kind man, but I brook no annoyance."
    T'sais stood over the prone bodies. The man looked up at her feverishly. The woman stared at the dark sky.
    Liane sprang forward, planning to clasp her while her attention was distracted. The rapier sprang up by itself, darted forward, pierced the agile body.
    Liane the Wayfarer sank to his knees coughing blood. T'sais pulled away the rapier, wiped the blood on the gay green cloak, and sheathed it with difficulty. It wished to stab, to pierce, to kill.
    Liane lay unconscious. T'sais turned away, sick. A thin voice reached her. "Release me—"
    T'sais considered, then she cut the bonds. The man stumbled to his wife, stroked her, flung off the bonds, called to her uplifted face. There was no answer. He sprang erect in madness and howled into the night.
    Raising the limp form in his arms he stumbled off into the darkness, lurching, falling, cursing ...
    T'sais shivered. She glanced from the prone Liane to the black forest where the flickering circle of the firelight failed to reach. Slowly, with many backward glances, she left the tumbled ruins, the meadow. The bleeding figure of Liane remained by the dying fire.
    The glimmer of flame waned, was lost in the darkness. T'sais groped her way between the looming trunks; and the murk was magnified by the twist in her brain. There never had been night in Embelyon, only an opalescent dimming. So T'sais continued down the sighing forest courses, stifled, weighed, yet oblivious to the things she might have met—the Deodands, the pelgrane, the prowling erbs (creatures mixed of beasts, man and demon) the gids, who leaps twenty feet across the turf and clasped themselves to their victims.
    T'sais went unmolested, and presently