KONRÁD, György

The Night Haunter

…..
The building was a tenement of ancient design. An older Night Haunter would have recognised the prefabricated sections as STC prints. He did not know that it had stood there for ages, the durable material barely showing the passage of millennia. It had been built upon a hillside in forgotten centuries, one of several dozen gradually swallowed by the hive. The ground was too unstable to support anything larger, and so they had not been demolished but remained while the area became a seedy district hemmed in by starscrapers. The perfect hunting ground.

Two youths were in the alleyway, knives out, looming over a young female, about to do what heartless young males did to women a thousand times an hour in the grim confines of the hive. They were street dregs, parentless and murderous. She was better dressed than they, of a higher caste. Whichever syndicate sheltered her people would seek these youths out and slaughter them for their temerity. It would not come to that.

…..
They were too busy cutting the clothes from their victim to see Night Haunter drop from the roof behind them. Ragged wings of cloth fluttered enough to give them warning, if they were vigilant. They were not. They were too occupied with their sordid pleasure to pay attention to the soft footfall of his landing, or the padding of his feet as he crept towards them, his hunched, cloaked form a darker shadow among the shadows.

Their blood was up and they were laughing. The girl wept softly. They were loud and she was quiet because both parties assumed no one would come to her aid.

The Night Haunter was close enough to smell the youths’ unwashed bodies over the pervasive garbage stink.

‘Let her go,’ said the Night Haunter.

…..
A heavy strike broke four of Karzen’s ribs and sent him back down. He managed to roll over before the thing was on him again, a huge, merciless hand snatching his feeble boy’s arm away from the knife holstered at his side. A second hand encircled his skinny ribcage, pinning him to the roof. Karzen screamed and punched ineffectually at his captor. The Night Haunter leaned over into the blows, taking them on his angular face. Karzen punched and punched until his knuckles split. The Night Haunter did not so much as flinch. Panting, Karzen let his hand flop down to the roof.

This was the Night Haunter: a pallid face of hard angles. Eyes as black as any Nostraman’s glittered with an inhuman intelligence. Thin lips parted. Seeing how white and even his teeth were, Karzen saw his captor anew. He was filthy, and stank with street living and careless murders, but under the grime he was…

‘Perfect,’ whispered the boy.

The Night Haunter tilted his head, intrigued. The rain fell heavily. Wet, reeking hair brushed against Karzen’s cheek. Water rusty with old blood coursed from it.

…..
He saw himself, taken with a moment’s doubt, a questioning of his assumptions that had him pause as the boy pushed himself backwards along the rooftop and Night Haunter extended a saviour’s hand instead of an executioner’s blow. Hesitantly, the boy stopped. The boy reached out. The boy…

…Karzen. The name came to him from unrealised futures…

…the boy grew under his guidance. His horizons expanded beyond the criminal margins that had trammelled him. A life of good works beckoned, more killers taken from the streets and changed, like he, from murderers to mentors, by the spreading of the word of the Night Haunter, each transformed soul a little force to the lever of change until, with rushing power, the rules of blood were scratched out and a new social contract took hold.

For this, the boy thanked the Night Haunter, and he was loved for the change he brought.

…..
The Night Haunter saw himself, taken with a moment’s doubt, a questioning of assumptions that had him pause as the boy pushed himself backwards along the rooftop and Night Haunter extended a saviour’s hand instead of an executioner’s blow.

The boy took his chance, and rammed his knife hard into the Night Haunter’s side, some fluke pushing it through the armoured box of his ribcage and into the meat of his primary heart.

That would not kill him. It could not, but it hurt, oh it hurt. And the boy…

…Karzen. Same boy, different future…

…the boy lived. The boy prospered. His legend as the man who had faced the terror in the dark grew and grew. A rise to power greased with blood, a climb to the heights of influence upon a ladder made of raw bones. A thousand killings he committed, at first by his own hand then at his command, and still it was not enough to garner all he craved. Money. Power. Women. A thousand other lives paid taxes of blood to build his future.

…..
You made me,’ said the older boy, in both visions, both as an apostle of a gentler age and devil of its worsening hell. ‘You made me,’ said the grown man, through strangulation and through grateful tears, whether the same pale hands choked his throat or caressed his face.

There can only ever be one future, thought the Night Haunter. Only ever one.

The kinder fate dimmed, obscured and extinguished by the darker. If, for a moment, the Night Haunter had stopped to turn these sights about in his mind, he might have apprehended the truth of choice – that both futures were valid, and favoured eventuality could be coaxed into being. But his sight was dark indeed. He saw only the need for immediate retribution.

…..