“Exactly. I want you to keep it safe.”
“When you want me to come?” she asked, folding the letter and tucking it into the pouch that held her street pass.
“Tomorrow morning,” he told her.
“Okay, Basio,” she said in a sad, faraway voice. “I’ll see you in the mornin’.”
She wouldn’t. TeClar was going to sleep in the place overnight Abasio intended to leave in the dark hours when he’d be least likely to be observed. If he could keep himself awake until then.
TeClar turned up about dusk, with CummyNup. Abasio went over his instructions about Elrick-Ann until he knew they understood. He’d laid in a stock of the beer they favored. By the time Abasio had gulped down another half-dozen stimulants and left the rooftop, the brothers were barely able to hitch up the alarm and mutter garbled goodbyes.
Keeping quiet and largely out of sight, Abasio slipped through neutral territory to the slicks and slimes of the marketplace and through that to the no-man’s-land of the burned-out area, where unclaimed bodies still lay about, awaiting eventual disposal by the crows and wild dogs that had thronged the area since the fire. Then he darted across the bridge to the Patrol Post, where he skulked silently, seeing who was around. Nobody much by the look of it Anyone inside was asleep.
He felt his way along the paddock, testing this pole and that until he found a loose one. It came down with the barest creak, still alarmingly loud in the quiet. The one above it was better fastened, but not by much. Repeated tugging got it loose, and he dropped the end on the ground as though it had been pushed there from inside. He’d brought enough belts and straps to buckle together a serviceable bridle, and he held it with one hand as he shoved his way among the horses, muttering to them, patting them, selecting the animal who seemed friendliest.
He used the corral rail as a mounting block and got onto the horse’s back, awkwardly unbalanced by his blanket roll. Several horses found the break in the corral before his mount did, and when he moved south at the center of this small herd, the rest of the animals came ghosting from the corral to trail along.
He worried about the trail they were leaving, but the horses began to drop away, one here, one there, as succulent bits of browse presented themselves. Only half a dozen stayed with him until he reached the near side of the Edge, where he rode close to the wall, distancing himself from it only when he passed the lighted windows of the guard posts. In each of them uniformed men were awake, but none of them seemed to hear the grass-cushioned plopping of the hooves.
Small dark shadows fled before him He heard giggling from the grassy strip between the roads Goblins, probably. Or gnomes. Some said they were the same thing. No ditches though. At least he didn’t have that to contend with.
By the time dawn leaked its way along the eastern horizon, he and his mount were alone and far from the city He tried to dismount and succeeded by falling off the horse. He struggled erect, slapped his mount weakly into a tail-streaming canter back the way it had come, and dragged his pack into a nearby copse, where he fell at once into an exhausted sleep.
Despite Abasio’s worries, and even in the midst of her usual tantrums, Sybbis had sense enough not to talk. Even if she had talked, she didn’t know who her partner had been. Raging curiosity had made her try to find out by peeling the bandages off his hands while he slept, but old Nelda had materialized out of the shadows with a stern command to leave off. Nelda herself was too sensible to talk. Her stalwarts were mutes, which took care of their discretion. Posnia was afraid to say anything to anyone.
The doctor, however, was another matter. He had the twin problems of drink and needing to appear more clever than he was. He could not resist sharing the story with a fellow roisterer, who had no reason not to repeat it. As such stories will, the tale gained in color what it lost in specificity. When, some time later, it came to the ears of Old Chief Purple, nothing remained except amusing generalities. The beautiful young conk. The impotent gang leader. The assignation. The doctor’s extreme cleverness in drugging the anonymous donor.
It was the doctor’s misfortune that to the Old Chief, generalities were enough.
Old Chief sent for Soniff, who met him in a private room of a songhouse in which the Old Chief had a large financial interest.
“I hear the Bloodrun girl’s pregnant,” the Old Chief said in clear Edger accents. He’d stopped talking ganger when he’d retired and bought himself a place in the Edge. Not that it had done him any good. Edgers took his money, all right, and they let him buy a big beautiful house and live there among the trees and grass, but he couldn’t have conks there, or ganger visitors. Still, he was safe in the Edge. That was worth something. He could always come into the city to do business.
Soniff nodded. “That’s what the hags say.” He held up a hand, tipping it this way and that. “Of course, it’s real early yet.”
“How did Kerf manage that?” the Old Chief asked in a mild tone.
Soniff explained about Starlight, about Abasio, and about the reward Abasio had been given.
The Old Chief ruminated, sipping his wine and staring into the candlelight. “Tell you a story,” he said, and proceeded to relate the doctor’s story as he had heard it.
Soniff felt himself growing pale. “You don’t think.…?”
The Old Chief shrugged. “Way I heard the story, the one the doctor drugged was from the same gang as the conk. A real joke, funny, so? Suppose it’s true. Who was away from the house about that time?”
Soniff thought Before Abasio had showed up with the drug, he’d come in to see the Young Chief. And Young Chief had been angry with him, because he’d been gone.…
“Abasio,” he blurted.
“Mmm,” mused the Old Chief. “Where is this Abasio?”
“North,” murmured Soniff. “Said he wanted to see the lakeshore country.”
“Who is he?”
“Why, he’s a Purple. Been one for eighteen years or so.”
“Before that?”
Soniff didn’t know.
“Who recruited him?”
Soniff didn’t remember for sure. Lippy-Long, maybe, but it had been a long time ago.
“Find out,” said the Old Chief. “And send somebody after him. Send some Survivors.”
“You want him brought back, Chief?”
“No. No reason to do that. Tell them I want him dead.”
CHAPTER 8
In his workroom in the bowels of Gaddi House, Tom Fuelry put together the notes he had been accumulating for some days and sat regarding them thoughtfully for a time as he whistled tunelessly between his teeth. There was enough new information to warrant an interview with His Wisdom. He tapped the notes into a neat pile, folded them once, put them into his pocket, and stood up with a grimace. He’d been sitting too long He needed more exercise.
Despite this acknowledgment, he didn’t work up a sweat making his way through the labyrinth of the house. He strolled, pausing now and then to speak to certain of his fellow workers, giving himself still more time to think before he reached His Wisdom’s living quarters.
Only to learn from Nimwes that the old man was not there.
“Where is he, Nimwes?”
“Where he goes, Tom. You know better than I do.” Nimwes bit her lip and looked elsewhere.
“I didn’t think he did much, not anymore,” Fuelry said in a hushed voice that he struggled to keep from sounding either fearful or resentful.
“Well, he does. Just because his friends are … gone, doesn’t mean he’s forgotten them. Every now and then, he goes there and spends a few hours remembering them.”
Tom thought there might be other reasons, but he couldn’t have explained them if he’d tried. “How long has he been gone this time?”
“Maybe an hour.”
“I don’t like his being down there alone.”
“I don’t either, but I can’t go with him. I can’t get through the security. I’ve asked him to arrange it so I can go with him, but he
says he doesn’t want me burdened with—with that.”
Tom tapped his front teeth with a fingernail, sighed, muttered, “I can go. Prob’ly I’d better.”
He went back down the fairly well-traveled hall, nodding to this one and that one as he passed them, came to the end of the hall, unlocked a door, went through it, and locked it behind him. From where he stood now, he could hear distant voices, people talking quietly in some nearby laboratory or workroom, only these murmurs telling him he was still near inhabited space. The first secured checkpoint was a little way down the hall, and he negotiated two more after that before he was dropped into a dusty, utterly silent tunnel, deep beneath the labyrinth of Gaddi House proper.
Tom had not come this way in a long time. He was one of only three or four persons who could come here at all. He had always felt it was like a tomb, and every year that passed made it seem more so. The air was dank, and the floor dust-laden. The tunnel was round, as though bored by some monstrous worm, though enough dust had fallen over the centuries to make a narrow, level floor. This slender walkway showed the tracks of wheels, some fresh, some half-covered, some virtually vanished under the coating. If he had not already known the automatics were shut down, the dust would have told him, or the air, which was chill and stale and smelled of something alive but old, some ancient awful thing that lurked and sensed and that might, if one attracted its attention, come heaving out into the light. At least, so Tom always thought when he came here, even when he told himself he was being silly. The tunnels really hadn’t been bored by a worm. His Wisdom had told him so.
Though he was following wheel tracks that marked only one route, he still recited the code to himself as he twisted through the silent tunnels past great round doors with complicated locks: Two right, two left. … It always surprised him to see wheel tracks leading up to doors that Tom himself had never seen opened. The tracks showed that His Wisdom had been into those rooms, into some of them fairly recently, though he had said nothing about it to Tom.
… two left, one right, one left. The room ahead was the heart of the place. So far as Fuelry knew, it was impregnable. Or would have been, if the monstrously thick metal cylinder door had not been standing open, blocking further progress down the tunnel. One either stopped here or went in.
Fuelry made a face, took a deep breath, and stepped through the circular opening. The space inside was as he remembered it, full of stone pillars made to resemble—or perhaps grown to resemble—a forest of ancient trees. Though not identical, they were all much the same size, not evenly set but spaced as though by chance. The pillars went up into darkness. One of the worst things about the room from Tom’s point of view was the darkness up there, hiding whatever it hid, if anything. Spiders, perhaps. Bats.
He knew this was foolish. Spiders and bats couldn’t live down here. What little ashen light there was leaked from the pillars themselves, and as tree trunks hid distances in a forest, so the thick pillars hid distances here. The space they occupied might be as small as a room or as large as a county, it could be any shape at all, there was no way of knowing. Lichens spread patchily upon the pillars, and mosses grew on the floor in convoluted and oddly colored patterns that looked purposeful, like letters spelling something one could almost read.
Tom had never felt that the pillars were quite rigid. He thought they squirmed somehow. To avoid looking at them, he focused on the winding tracks of the wheels, a long, twisting way that brought him, as always, almost to the verge of panic before he came to open space. He had dreams, sometimes, of following tracks that never ended, that just wound on and on and on forever. Eventually the tracks came to space, however; the dimness ended at a place of misty veils and lofty, crepuscular rays that moved slowly, like pale searchlights focused from above. The old man’s chair sat in the open space in a puddle of light, only a few yards from the low dais.
Tom risked a quick glance upward from the floor. It was one of the misty days, and he could hardly see the dais, which was fine by Tom. He didn’t want to see the dais. He never wanted to see the dais, even though he assumed what was on the dais was mostly stone. Chairs, they were. Only three huge chairs, very tall, very old. Carved out of gray stone Granite, maybe.
He took a deep shuddering breath. The trouble was, things carved out of stone should not appear to be alive, and yet these did. Eyes carved out of stone shouldn’t see Ears carved out of stone shouldn’t hear. But he knew damned well they did. Also, they moved. He couldn’t catch them at it, but they did it, anyhow.
“Tom?”
The old man’s chair stood quite still, he in it unmoving, his slumped form showing no sign of life. Tom took another deep breath and went slowly forward, keeping his eyes fixed on the old man, not on anything else. He was close to the chair before old Seoca raised his head.
“It’s you, Tom. I wondered who it could be.”
Tom swallowed the hard, bitter lump in his throat and mumbled, “You know who it couldn’t be, Your Wisdom.”
“True. I suppose Nimwes told you I was here.”
“She did, yes.”
“I know it upsets her, but I need to come here sometimes. To commune with Werra And Hunagor. You never knew Hunagor.”
Tom flicked a sidewise glance at the dais, catching only a glimpse of the left-hand chair and who sat in it. The glimpse was enough. He pulled his eyes away. Sometimes they’d catch him looking, and then he couldn’t look away. Couldn’t unfix his eyes, which stayed glued there for—for a long time.
Tom said, “She was—ah.…”
“Transfigured?” offered the old man.
“Transfigured before my time, sir.”
“She chose to be so. She was finished with her duties, Fuelry. She believed her task was done. Werra, now, I brought him down here well before his time. Otherwise, we’d have been too late.”
“Brought him to be, ah”—Tom swallowed painfully once more— “transfigured.”
“Right.” The old man put his hands beneath his armpits and spoke with slight surprise. “It’s cold in here.”
“Can I take you back, sir?”
“Might as well. It’s getting harder all the time for them to … communicate. I miss having them to talk with. Sometimes I get confused. Sometimes I’m not sure I’m cleaving to the pattern, adhering to the philosophy, planning for everything. I come here hoping to be inspired, reassured, but today I’m not. Unless you bring me something reassuring?”
“I’m afraid not, Your Wisdom. I have a few bits and pieces, none of them so urgent it won’t wait until we get you back where it’s warmer.” He turned the old man’s chair and moved along beside it, wishing desperately that when he had to come here, he could do it more casually, leaving the place behind him when he left it. The damned room or cavern or whatever it was wouldn’t allow that! The feel of it followed him every time. The sense of being noticed by, watched by, known by the great chairs—it went with him, destroying his peace, disturbing his rest.
He sometimes felt he would be less troubled if he understood what was going on here, but though His Wisdom had tried to make it easier, Tom only picked up scraps here and there.
“It has to do with deities, Tom. All peoples have gods. Different people visualize them differently, and some people try not to visualize them at all because they know whatever they try to imagine, the truth is otherwise. The being who is seen in one way and called by one name in Artemisia may be seen another way and called by another name by the Faulty Sea.”
“You’re saying … Hunagor … Werra.…”
“I’m saying names are only labels, not identities. I’m saying reality goes beyond what we can see.”
Which was damned little help, Tom thought.
His Wisdom sighed. “I wish you were of Gaddir lineage. Gaddirs have a way of just—understanding these things.”
But he wasn’t Gaddir. He was just Tom Fuelry, whose great-great-grandfather had been a tribesman in the mountains, and whose grandfather had worked for. Gaddi House,
whose father had worked for Gaddi House. Faithfully, as the Fuelrys did all things. Sometimes His Wisdom patted Tom on the shoulder and said, “To the weak, succor; to the strong, burdens.” He should be flattered, he supposed.
“My own fault it’s cold,” the old man mumbled as they went through the great round door. “The heat and the filtered air come down from above. I turned them off It didn’t seem worth the expenditure of energy. The essential circuits go on running. There’s no way to shut them off.”
Tom quelled a shiver. Among other disturbing dreams, he sometimes had visions of those mighty engines of the deep, eternally purring, that deep-set, incredible power that had given its name to the Place. Fusion power, the Domers said. Well, it might be, but Tom had a hunch it wasn’t what Mitty meant when he said fusion power.
His voice cracked as he said, “When you want to come here again, let one of us come with you, sir And wear something warm.” His voice had become strident on the last few words. He bit his lip. “I’m sorry, sir, I—”
“Quite all right, Fuelry. I deserve to be scolded. Just wait until Nimwes gets hold of me. She’ll let me have it!” He chuckled. “Well, what’s your news?”
“A moment.” Fuelry went through his long-memorized and complicated ritual of setting locks. After a moment’s pause, the door swung shut with a deep grinding hum that made the floor vibrate beneath them as Tom sent the chair briskly along the dusty corridor. “Some time ago, you suggested that since I am not well known outside Gaddi House, I cultivate Qualary Finch.”
“That wasn’t the reason I gave you, but yes.”
“Right.” Fuelry had been doing a bit more than merely cultivating her, but he did not intend to discuss that. “When you get past her defenses, she’s a very nice person.” Comely, he thought. Comely and delightful, and—passionate.
“I’m glad you’ve found the assignment pleasant.” His Wisdom bent his mouth into a secretive smile. “What has she told you?”