Date:         Mon, 16 Oct 1995 23:52:18 -0700
Reply-To:     Noah Johnson <streak@WELL.COM>
Sender:       Highlander TV show stories <HLFIC-L@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
From:         Noah Johnson <streak@WELL.COM>
Subject:      Pawn Takes Knight 1/1

PAWN TAKES KNIGHT
By Noah Johnson

    This story is copyright 1995 by Noah Johnson.  Permission is given to
reproduce it, in its entirety, and including this message.

     It was in the desert, in the vast emptiness that lies in between
civilization in the American Southwest.  Reuben Smits was trying to
hitchhike across it.  He walked beside the long two-lane blacktop that
bisected the world from horizon to horizon.  In the flat, empty desert air,
he heard the engine long before the motorcycle resolved itself out of the
blurry haze that is distance in Nevada.
     Reuben didn't know why he had dropped out of college, unless it was to
try and escape the loud, conflicting chorus inside him.  It seemed they had
been with him since childhood, always shouting for his attention, each voice
pleading a different case, never giving him peace.  He'd studied psychology,
learned that it was nothing more than the conflict and confusion endemic to
the young, and though that was perfectly true, it brought Reuben no peace.
He couldn't keep his mind on studies that had never interested him anyway
when the calling from inside kept begging him to go, to move, to be
something else.  Eventually, he gave in.  Dropped out and went looking for
wherever it was he was supposed to be, in hopes of at last silencing the
voices of his need.  He had not yet found such a place, so there he was,
making his unenthusiastic way down an infinite road, a dilapidated figure in
a much-scuffed denim jacket.
     The motorcycle went from being invisible to being a shimmery black dot.
 As it drew closer, it was clearly one of the great black beasts of the
American freeways, a man in a coat equally black sitting astride it.
Floating copies of man and machine shimmered beneath them, mirages that
seemed reflections in a pool of quicksilver.  As it came near him, Reuben
stuck out a dusty thumb, more by reflex than anything else.  Motorcycles
never stopped...
     This one did.  As it came almost upon the lone hitchhiker, the bike
suddenly swerved.  Reuben would have sworn a bee had flown in the rider's
ear, but no such creature was to be found for miles.  The motorcycle pulled
off onto the rough dirt shoulder, the man in black letting it slip to its
side as he dismounted, flipping open the faceplate of his helmet and putting
one gloved hand inside the long leather coat he wore.
     "I am Maximillian Venner." he said, blue eyes narrowing as he assessed
Reuben, apparently not finding quite what he looked for.
     There was a moment of frozen stillness in the thick, hot air.  The man,
Venner, obviously expected a response of some kind.
     "Ah... Reuben Smits.  Um... got a ride, man?" Reuben knew he had not
met whatever criterion the rider had set, and felt inexplicably embarrassed.
 The chorus in his head muttered that this was all very important, and
Reuben was failing.
     Venner's blond eyebrows contracted.  Something was wrong.  "You... I
could have sworn..." he murmured, half to himself. "Reuben!  When were you
born?"
     Reuben was about to ask him what the hell business that was of his when
his mouth opened and "1973." fell out.
     Venner's eyes crinkled at the corners in a smile. "My god.  Of course.
You're still..." he blinked, obviously cutting himself off. "Come with me.
Where are you headed?"
     Reuben opened his mouth again, but this time there was nothing in it.
After a pause that lasted too long, he finally admitted, "I don't know."
     The answer seemed to please Venner.  He walked over to his cycle,
pulling it up with a fluid shift of his body.  Reuben's eyes widened at this
demonstration of the physical power of this stranger, and he was about to
decline the ride when he found he was walking over to the bike and getting
on behind Venner.  As the engine roared to life and Venner's faceplate
snapped down, the man in the dark coat with the strange ways spoke again.
"Look back for a moment.  Is there a gray car on the horizon?"
     Reuben twisted around.  The road continued to be an unbroken line to
the edge of the world. "No."
     "Good." said Venner tersely, and they roared off.
     It was a memorable half-hour Reuben spent behind Maximillian Venner on
the Nevada road, but afterward it was all one image, the black-clad man
crouched low over his cycle's handlebars, not speaking, as air blasted past
and the desert rolled on in front of them.  No words were exchanged, and
Reuben spent the trip arguing with himself.  Part of him said that this man
was dangerous, crazy, and Reuben was insane himself to voluntarily be
anywhere near him.  The other part kept quietly insisting that the man was
important, possibly the most important person Reuben would ever meet.
     The road was hissing past like an asphalt ribbon a million miles long
when everything changed at once.  A hidden pothole pounced on the front
wheel, and the bike swerved.  Reuben could feel Venner panic for the instant
before the bike hit the soft ditch at the edge of the roadway and stopped
moving forever.  Its passengers did not.  Gravity and perspective
relinquished their hold on Reuben as he spun through the air in directions
he didn't even understand.  Something was seemingly watching over him, and
he landed rolling and sliding in the relatively soft dirt that had once been
removed from the ditch.  His jacket was abraded to rags, two of his fingers
were broken, and his left shoulder was dislocated.
     He screamed with the pain for a moment, then began, laboriously, to get
up.  He didn't want to, he wanted to lie still and wait for someone to help
him make his world sane again, but the compulsion inside him drove him to
his feet.  Up he dragged himself, and back towards where the wreck was.  He
saw Venner's helmet lying on its side in a pool of blood.  His eyes turned
to Venner himself, lodged against a rock.  Reuben wondered how the rock
could be where it was with respect to the corpse.  It seemed the head should
be in the way.  His stomach tried to tear its way free of him when he looked
from the body to the blood pooled around the bottom of the helmet, some of
it already soaking into the bone-dry desert earth.  The helmet wasn't empty.
     Reuben looked back to the body, and assumed the pain was causing him to
hallucinate.  There was a ghost hovering over Venner's corpse.  A dim white
mist, almost invisible in the baking sun, was slowly, questingly spreading
outward from Venner's neck.  Suddenly, before Reuben had quite decided if he
was seeing it or not, it leapt on him like a tiger.  Lightning struck him
from nowhere in a thousand places at once.  He screamed again, and the world
turned black.

     When consciousness drifted back, Reuben's first impression was that
something was wrong.  There was something in his head that didn't belong
there.  There was
     _Maximillian Venner._
     a bubbling of thoughts that never quite coalesced.  He knew that in one
sense, this was right,
     _Quickening_
     but something was still wrong.
     _Wrongwrong *wrong*.  Too young.  I've not yet ??????_
     Knowledge kept boiling up from inside him, ideas, words without
context.  None of it made sense.  Something was part of him, something he'd
never asked for.
     _Different.  Forever._
     Something made him bend over Venner's body, pulling the coat to one
side.  Inside, there was something
     _Beautiful_
     strange.  A sword.  Reuben picked it up, hefting it, not noticing that
his arm was no longer dislocated nor his fingers broken.  The blade was
long, double-edged steel.  The grip was wood, with a simple, brief brass
crossguard.  Both wood and brass held the deep, warm shine that is the mark
of a thing often polished, worn smooth by years of loving use.  Reuben knew
somehow that it was a bastard sword, with a name.
     _Marignac._
     Marignac, after a man in
     _1880, in????????_
     the 19th century, somewhere far away.
     Reuben had no idea what the sword was for,
     _...only one..._
     but he knew that it was important.  He didn't know where it had come
from.  He didn't know why Venner had been carrying it under his coat.
Whatever was rattling around his mind, it was like a radio that receives
only static, but from which can be heard occasional, distant voices.  Still,
Reuben noticed, there was one thing to be said for this strange phenomenon;
it had silenced the voices from the back of his mind.  For the first time he
could remember, Reuben Smits was alone in his own head.  The muttering of a
dead man ricocheted from the edges of his consciousness, but it was a
different thing from the jeering chorus he was used to.  It wasn't quite
muttering, though, there was no living mind behind it.  It was more of an...
echo.
     For an hour  Reuben sat and tried to make things come out in some sort
of sense in his mind.  The sun beat down on him, striking slivers of
reflected light from the blade of the sword he held contemplatively in his
lap.  He didn't want it far from him.  Maximillian Venner's blood dried on
the ground.
     He knew that something was wrong, that a procedure had been disrupted,
that he had taken something he had not yet been qualified to hold.  Whatever
it was, it had never happened before, he had the impression.  Venner had
recognized him for... something.  He'd intended to... do something, as soon
as... some kind of crisis or situation was dealt with.  Or finished.  Or
avoided.  Or ended.  Something.  It would all have been maddening if there
hadn't been the quiet truth of experience ringing in the words and ideas
that simmered in Reuben's brain.
     After a time, the sound of a quiet, well-tuned engine came to him from
across the flat openness.  He looked up and saw a gray car in the distance.
     _Dangerdangerdanger! Enemy.  Fear.  Stalking._
     Reuben was afraid.  There was someone dangerous in the car.  Someone
who meant
     _Me_
     him harm.  His hand closed nervously on the sword's grip.
     As the car approached him, it began to slow.  As it came closer, Reuben
gasped suddenly as a prickling sensation passed through him.  It quickly
settled into a tingling inside him somewhere, and he could feel his pulse
speed up.  Adrenaline, he guessed.  He knew, somehow, that the man in the
car was... something.
     _Another of your kind._
     The car stopped a hundred feet from Reuben, pulling casually off to the
side of the road, as though the driver wanted to check his map.  A man
stepped out, narrow of face and body, with dark hair and eyes, and a thin
mustache.  In his hand was a light sabre, gleaming in the unrelenting sun.
     "You're not Venner." called the stranger, barely having to raise his
voice in the still air.
     _Name._
     "I'm... Reuben Smits." Reuben called back.
     "Never heard of you.  Leslie Gouldman." said the stranger, walking
casually towards Reuben, sword up.  As he came closer, he noticed Venner's
body lying by the crashed bike. "I see you got Venner.  Well, one head is as
good as the next, I always say."
     "What are you doing?" said Reuben nervously as Gouldman drew closer.
     "There can be only one, Reuben." Gouldman said almost apologetically,
with a smile that belied his tone.  He brought his sabre up in a fast circle
that turned into a cut at Reuben's head.
     _PARRY!_
     Reuben was surprised to find the sword, Marignac, still in his hand,
and his arm jerked it up and across his body like a shimmer across his
vision.  The sabre clashed against it inches from his neck.
     _Duck!_
     Reuben's left foot swept out to the side as Gouldman's blade whirred
around in a circular recovery and cut.  His weight went down and left, his
head describing a crescent, and the sabre flickered through space he no
longer occupied.
     _Cut!_
     Marignac rose, edge inside Gouldman's guard, slashing his right forearm
to the bone.
     _Lunge!_
     Reuben leapt forward through where Gouldman's body was, the point of
his sword preceding him.  Marignac punched through the thin man with all of
Reuben Smits' body behind it.  Reuben found himself stepping back,
withdrawing the blade with a ripple of his shoulders as Gouldman bent
double, eyes a maelstrom of confusion.  It was plain that he thought it was
never supposed to happen this way.
     _Now!  Cut!_
     Reuben brought the blade up over his head, and froze.  This was madness
embodied.
     _CUT!  You know how!_
     He knew, but couldn't.  He wasn't ready.  It was insane.
     _*CUT!*_
     Reuben brought the blade down, though Gouldman's neck, leaving his head
to fall undramatically to the ground with a quiet thud.  His body followed
it a second later.
     For a second, nothing moved for ten miles around.
     Then the lightning began again.  This time, the motorcycle, already
wrecked beyond repair, exploded.  Reuben only noticed peripherally.

     When Reuben could stand again, things had fallen into an order.  The
voices had stopped.  All of them.  Reuben was, for the first time ever,
completely at peace.  There was a soft glow within his being, but that was
all.  The echoes had died out, and his own mind was apparently finally
content with itself.
     He picked up Gouldman's sword, taking his car keys and wallet as well.
The name on the driver's license was not Leslie Gouldman.  This did not
surprise Reuben, nor did the six hundred dollars in the billfold.  He chose
to leave Venner with all his material belongings, with one exception.  As he
started Gouldman's car, he carefully placed Marignac on the passenger seat,
caressing the grip once as he did so.
     He knew that Venner had been going to Denver, to see an old friend
named Alton Walker.  Reuben thought that he and Walker had a lot to talk
about.
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