It was a genuine Reigner trait, having these voices. My one claim to fame, Vierran sometimes told the four of them. Mother had hit the roof and wanted Vierran seen by mind-doctors when Vierran first confessed to hearing them. Father had quashed that idea. After a long argument, in which he claimed that children often had imaginary companions and that Vierran would grow out of it, he had taken Vierran away into his hushed and air-conditioned study. This had always been a great privilege to Vierran, being allowed in Father’s study. And, even more of a privilege, Father had confessed to her, “I’ve never dared tell your mother – I have four voices too, an old woman, two girls and an elderly man. don’t worry. Neither of us is mad. I’ve done a lot of research on this. Quite a number of the old Reigners heard voices. There are sworn records of it. In the old days they seemed sure it was rather a special thing.”
“Tell Mother you hear them,” Vierran had urged him. But Hugon Guaranty refused. She suspected it was because two of his voices were girls. He told her, however, that he had found out about the people who seemed to speak to him, from what they told him of themselves. Two of them he could prove had actually, truly existed on adjacent worlds. One woman, creepily, had left: a record of speaking to him in her lifetime. This, as he said, suggested that the two he could not trace were equally real.
Together, they had tried to find out about Vierran’s people, but they had drawn four complete blanks. The Slave was always very reticent about himself, and gave them almost nothing to go on. The Prisoner could have been one of many hundred opponents of the present Reigners. And the Boy and the King were both too far away in space and time to figure in any records that either Vierran or Hugon could find.
“You see, they never give their names,” Vierran explained sadly.
“Of course they don’t,” said her father. “You’re not communicating on a level where you have names, any of you. You’re just ‘I’ and ‘me’ to them, and they are the same to you.”
Standing in the middle of the motel bedroom, Vierran muttered to the Bannus, “And I’ll get you for that too! Making me believe Mother and Father keep a greengrocer’s shop!” She had to laugh. What a comedown for the great merchant House of Guaranty! The Bannus had all the details, too: Vierran’s loving fights with Mother, and Father’s sweet tooth—Except who was Martin?
Your story, pleaded the King.
One last question first, said Vierran. How long ago would you say it was since you made that crack about wishing terminating had been so easy in your day?
Quite a while ago. Ten days at least, said the King. Please, your story, or I shall offend the dignitaries of my kingdom by yawning at holy things.
Ten days! They had been on Earth ten days and, Vierran was willing to swear, not even Reigner One was aware of this. Vierran hugged herself about that while she told the King all that had happened in the wood. He deserved to have his boredom relieved, poor King, for telling her this one extraordinary fact. Chalk up one to the Bannus! she thought. It had given her back hope.
But why, she wondered, had the Bannus left her able to talk to her four voices at intervals? Did it perhaps not know about them? No, the Bannus knew so much about Vierran that it had to know about the voices too. It had to be, she realised, for the same reason that she had been allowed to hear her own message to herself on the cassette. The Bannus wanted her to know exactly what tricks it had been playing.
As to why it wanted her to know – by the end of her narrative, Vierran was very sober indeed. There was such a difference between the Vierran who now sat down quietly on the motel bed to think and the Vierran who had worked in the basement of the House of Balance. The Vierran of ten days ago, thinking she was plotting rebellion, had played practical jokes on the Reigners and made her careful lists of all the people the Servant had killed, and thought she was so safe! Then Reigner One had plunged her into the fire she thought she was playing with.
Yes, playing! Vierran told herself bitterly. The Bannus was not the only one who had played – and the Bannus at least played seriously. Vierran had been playing with the feelings of the Servant and her own. Like the high-class sheltered little deb she was, she had been fascinated by violence, murder, secret missions – all the things her life had shielded her from – and she had found these things all the more fascinating because the Servant himself was so quiet and civilised. When he had first appeared in the basement in that scarlet uniform – which never suited him! – she had been astonished to find him so mild and shy and surprised to find a human working there instead of the usual robot. Vierran had detected instantly that this Servant found her attractive, unusual – though, she told herself now, this was probably only because she was willing to speak to him. That she had also detected a terrible lonely unhappiness in him, she dismissed now with bitter impatience. Pity! Pity was for happy people to look down on unhappy ones with! The fact was, Vierran had come down from her high place – slumming, just like Reigner Three on Earth – and decided she had a crush on the Servant. On the Servant, not the man.
Then the Bannus had neatly got round Reigner Ones compulsion. Vierran’s face flushed hot, and hotter yet as she thought of herself up in that tree dangling her legs in Mordion’s face. She just hoped Mordion had seen her only as the girl of twelve she had thought she was then. Yes, twelve. Ann thought of herself as fourteen, but Vierran well remembered the way, the moment her thirteenth birthday was in sight, she had gone round telling herself – and everyone else – “I’m on my fourteenth year now!” So old! Little idiot. And the Bannus had got round the Servant’s training too, and shown Vierran Mordion the man – a variety of Mordion’s, from the one who fussed over Hume, to the one who, so easily and expertly, snapped the neck of a rabbit.
Vierran put her hands to her heated face and shuddered. She would never dare go near Mordion again.
Perhaps none of it had happened, she thought hopefully. But it had. If she looked closely, she could see a whole variety of rips and snags in her trousers and her top, from where she had climbed that tree or wrenched herself through thickets. These rents were sort of glossed over with an illusion of whole cloth – no doubt partly for the benefit of the Reigners – but they were there if you knew to look. And – Vierran slowly and reluctantly rolled up her trouser leg – the cut on her knee was there all right. It had been deep and jagged, but was now mostly hard brown scab peeling off to leave new pink scar. About the state it would be if it had been done ten days ago. Had Mordion been in that box for a whole week before that, with the Bannus making him think he had been there for centuries? No – she did not want to know. One thing she was absolutely certain of was that she was never going to set eyes on Mordion again.
And no sooner had Vierran decided this than she found she would have to. She had to warn Mordion. If the things she remembered in the wood had truly happened, then the main thing she had seen happening was Mordion slowly making up his mind to go to the castle and confront the Reigners there. Worse, Vierran knew she had unintentionally pushed and bullied him that way herself. She had to stop him. Mordion would think he was going to the castle to face Reigners Two and Four. She did not think he even knew that Five had also come to Earth. He certainly had no idea that Three and One were here too. And even with the power that could demolish that waterfall, even with the other powers people said the Servant had, Vierran could not see him winning against all five Reigners. Whatever happened to him would be at least half her fault.
Vierran sprang up. She dug her second pair of jeans and her smarter top out of her bag and climbed into them hastily. It was not quite dark yet. There was still time to get to the wood.
She was halfway to the door when Reigner Three flung it open. “Why don’t you come when I call, girl? I’ve buzzed your monitor and I’ve tried to work that telephone-thing until I broke a nail. Come along. I’m very tired and upset. I need a bath and a massage and a manicure.”
Vierran could not escape the next morning either. When Reigner Three was upset, she wanted people around to vent h
er feelings on. Nothing would satisfy her but that Vierran should dance attendance on her everywhere she went. This included following respectfully behind the two Reigners after breakfast, when they set off on foot towards the factory that reared above the houses to the north.
Reigner One said, “Do you really need her, my dear?”
“I shall need my feet massaged after walking in these awful Earth shoes,” said Reigner Three.
So Vierran, itching to get away and warn Mordion, was forced to trail after Reigner Three – today tall and elegant in skimpy, clinging violet and a wide purple hat – and the shorter, wider, sauntering Reigner One. He was smoking a cigar again and staring benevolently over walls into people’s front gardens.
Vierran found herself looking at them from an Earth point of view, as if she was Ann again. What a ridiculous pair!
Don’t underestimate them, warned the Slave. Masters are masters.
It was not far to the factory. They reached it before Reigner Three’s tight purple shoes began to give her any obvious trouble, and turned along beside a tall green metal fence with spikes on top. Behind the fence, twisted metal chimneys steamed above white cylinders with the blue logo of the Balance painted on them. Reigner One beamed at the sight. Vierran wondered why, as Ann, she had never connected the white van with this factory.
The green fence turned a sharp corner beside a grassy, unpaved lane. A sign by the bushy fence opposite said MERLINS LANE. At the sight of the muddy ruts in the lane, Reigner Three gave a cry of dismay and began to hobble.
“Show a little resilience, my dear,” Reigner One said, almost impatiently.
This was enough to set Reigner Three limping from rut to rut, holding her hat and looking martyred. But she forgot to limp when the lane turned a corner.
There was a tall grassy mound there, swelling out into the lane. The lane made a swerve to go round it, and the factory fence also made a bend, to go round the back of the mound. But what held Reigner Three rigid, with one hand to her hat, was the way the hedge on the other side of the lane vanished beyond the mound. The lane had vanished too, into a vista of ploughed mud decorated with little orange tags. A big yellow mechanical excavator stood just beyond the mound.
“What is this?” said Three. “I understood that this land was to be left untouched!”
“So did I. But the mound’s still there,” Reigner One said. “All may yet be well.”
Both Reigners went with surprising speed up the smoothly turfed slope of the mound. And all was not well, to judge from their faces.
Vierran came up behind to find that rather more than a third of the mound was missing on the other side. It had been sliced away into a jumbled, rubbly pile. She was looking down into an old, old square space that had evidently once been lined with blocks of primitive black metacrete. Frayed silvery ends of stass-wires curled from the blocks here and there. More wires waved impotently from the heap of rubble, and there, among the earth and stones and broken metacrete, Vierran saw the glint of more than one stass-pisistor. Interesting.
More interesting still, people were moving busily in the pit. A man and a girl were working away with trowels and brushes. Another was crouching with a camera and a notebook, and a third man was edging around everyone with a clipboard.
“Excuse me, sir.” Reigner One selected the man with the clipboard as the most senior person there. “Sir, has some kind of interesting find been made here?”
The man glanced up in annoyance. He was a worried person with thinning hair and glasses, who clearly did not wish to be interrupted. But his annoyance melted away as he took in Reigner One’s good suit, his silver beard and his cigar. Reigner One was clearly someone in authority. The worried man responded, harassed but polite. “I’m afraid we’re not really sure what this is yet. That digger has certainly uncovered some kind of chamber, but it’s not clear what it is at all. The factory owners have only given us a week to investigate, more’s the pity.”
“There’s all these wires,” said the girl with the trowel. “They’re threaded round the whole chamber – almost like an installation of some kind.”
“But of course it can’t be,” said the worried man. He pointed with his clipboard to the sliced-open floor of the square space. “The level of this floor shows this chamber has to have been made something like a thousand years ago. But the wire is some kind of modern alloy.”
“Ah,” said Reigner One, pulling his beard. “You suspect a hoax.” Vierran could feel the pressure he was using to make all the people down there believe it was a hoax. “You’d think,” he said, with his eyes keenly on the dark, square hole, “that the hoaxer would have put in a corpse of some kind to help convince you.”
The archaeologist looked over his shoulder at the hole too. “There was,” he said. Both Reigners stiffened. “There was an imprint as if there had been a body,” he went on. “We’ve photographed it, but of course we’ve had to walk on the floor since. The puzzle is that there’s no sign of any organic matter in the pit. From the imprint, you’d expect there to have been a skeleton, but there’s nothing—” He was treading on a broken stass-pisistor as he spoke “—nothing but this obviously modern trash,” he said, kicking it away.
“Quite so,” said Reigner One, working away on the man’s mind. “And how long have you been wasting your time on this hoax, sir?”
“We only got here this morning,” the archaeologist said. And, under further pressure from Reigner One, the girl who had spoken before smiled and added, “The digger only uncovered it yesterday, you see. And we rushed here from the university as soon as we could.”
“Admirable,” said Reigner One. “Well, I won’t waste your time any further.” He beamed at them and marched away down the mound to the lane. Reigner Three beckoned Vierran and followed him. Vierran’s last sight of the archaeologists was of exasperation growing on all their faces. They had known it was a hoax all along. That was all she saw, because she sped after the two Reigners, very curious to know what this was all about.
“He’s gone!” Reigner Three said, tottering among the ruts.
“He’s not been gone long,” Reigner One replied. “And he’ll be weak as a kitten, all skin and bone for quite a while yet. We’re in time, provided we move fast. I’ll go after him. You do your part, and we’ll go after the bannus together when we’ve both finished.” He threw away his cigar into the hedge bottom. “Come along, both of you.”
Back they went, past the motel, and on into streets Vierran began to recognise from her time as Ann Stavely. Reigner Three strode impatiently, forgetting about her shoes. Reigner One kept pace with her. Who was this man who had been in stass? Vierran wondered. And why had the Bannus given Mordion his memories – because that seemed to be what it had done? One thing was clear. Whoever this man was, she thought, almost having to trot to keep up, he had the Reigners worried enough almost not to notice she was with them. With luck, she could slip away soon.
They reached Wood Street at the other end from Hexwood Farm. Vierran blinked as she recognised the row of shops. There was broken glass everywhere. The place was deserted, and it looked ready to stand a siege. Every shop was boarded up. There were barricades in the street and along the pavement. Was this my father who arranged all this? Vierran wondered – or was it really someone else entirely? Whoever had organised things here, it was clear no one was going to stand for any more raids from Reigner Four.
On the corner of Wood Street, Reigner One paused prudently and lit another cigar. “You go on,” he said, old and worn and out of breath. “I’ll catch up.”
Reigner Three gave him an impatient look and sailed on, followed quickly by Vierran. Both vanished before they reached the first of the barricades.
“Hm,” murmured Reigner One. “Bannus field’s spread a bit in the night. I thought it might.” He tossed aside his match and strolled back the other way, breathing blue smoke. He would go and take a look at the other two stass-tombs, and then pay a visit to the heads of Houses and oth
er Prisoners at the factory. It would pass the time while he considered how best to come at his enemy. Martellian was almost certainly inside the field of the bannus, that was the problem.
He did not see the trees appear behind him, softly springing into existence at intervals along Wood Street and standing in groves in front of the empty shops. For an instant, the shops could be seen in glimpses among the green branches. In the road, the trees briefly stood on mounds of broken tarmac. Then there was nothing but forest, and old leaves carpeted the ground.
Reigner One paced on obliviously, breathing out smoke, considering his enemy. He had never hated anyone as much as he hated Martellian. Martellian had stood in Orm Pender’s way all his life, certainly throughout Orm’s youth, maddening Orm with his gifts and his looks, his full Reigner blood and the easy way the goods of the galaxy fell into his lap. Most maddening of all had been Martellian’s pure niceness. Far from despising the young Orm Pender for being a half-breed with an off-world mother, and short, and squat, Martellian had gone out of his way to encourage Orm, to bring him along in the House. Orm hated him for that worst of all.
It had given him enormous pleasure to cheat the bannus at the selection trials, to become a Reigner, and then to prise Martellian out of office. It pleased him to make Martellian fight for his life and force him to return vicious blow for vicious blow. By the time he was exiled, Martellian had been forced to fight so hard that he was not nice at all, not any more. That pleased Orm wonderfully too. It still pleased him to work out his hatred on Martellian’s descendants, on generation after generation of Servants.
Blowing smoke, Orm swung his head. That smell. Martellian’s. Martellian was here in the wood, distant, but not too distant. He was here. All Orm had to do was find him. He swung in the right direction, further in among the trees, across a dry brake of brushwood. His long scaled tail slid round the trees after him and followed his great clawed feet over smashed twigs and flattened brambles.