I had teachers, plenty. Tenner looked okay, though, if kind of weird: cadaverouslike, with slicked-down hair, olive skin, a good smile. Good hands, with long, thin fingers. “Whitey?” He offered me one of the hands.
“Sergeant,” I answered, gravely adult as I could be, “What is that you are carrying, sir?”
“Not ‘sir’, ‘Sarge’. Take a look.” He handed me the case. I fumbled with the spring latches. Inside, in a tight-fitting bed of bright yellow plush, lay the most beautiful object I had ever seen.
About the length of my forearm, it had a long tapered neck on the flat face of which six inlaid columns of square brightly-colored buttons touched each other at the edges, like mosaic tiles, each about the size of a thumbnail. They marched down the neck in twenty-four rows, until it blended with the body: not much larger than the neck, very slightly ovoid. At its bottom was a cluster of tiny knobs. Six long plastic vanes stuck out from the face, centimeter-high, six centimeters long.
Tenner took the beautiful thing from my reluctant hands, arranged the fingers of his left on the neck-buttons, just-so, fluttered his right thumb down across the hinge-springed vanes.
A chord more wonderful than anything I had ever heard. E-minor-seventh.
“What do you think, Whitey?” Nobody had ever asked me that.
“What is it, Sarge?”
“A mandolar. From now on, it will be your life.”
The Sky Demons
Slop, I remember thinking, is a bit early today.
I had heard the barred doors slamming open along the length of the hallway. Now a shadow eclipsed the only light in my severely atrophied universe. To my immense astonishment, a heavy mallet rose, fell, rose again, fell—exactly as it had done when we were sealed into this purgatory, this time miraculously splitting the soft rivets in the hasp.
The rust-blistered door grated open noisily. Out in the hallway, forms moved erratically from side to side, throwing bizarre shadows into my world. I cringed backward, only partly in terror of renewed torture, mostly because my fear-filled eyes were painfully blinded by the raw, unfiltered glory of a smoky torch in the sconce across the passage.
“Ye’re of a certes as these be the ones ye’re wantin’?”
His harsh voice seared forever into my memory, the Bailiff stood before the door, visible from the waist down. I recognized his boots, the hem of his mailed shirt over its padded vest. A hammer with chisel dangled from one of his sword-callused hands. A hatchet hung from his belt.
Other figures, completely anonymous in their floor-length hooded robes, bent down nearly double to examine us, each in turn averting its hidden face as it did so, from the ghastly sight, from the vile stench of two once-human beings being slowly converted into piles of putrescence.
The rats skittered back into their niches.
The last of these hooded apparitions, in a dialect of Scavian that was almost unintelligible to me, spoke to both of us in a low sibilant crackle betraying not a hint of personality, or of gender, or even of humanity.
“You are the sky demons?”
Backlighted by the flickering torch outside, the vapor of its breath hung menacingly before my face within the frigid cell. I tried to look it straight in the face. Firelit shadows gave the impression of a brown-robed man, arms folded into opposing sleeves, faceless, terrifying.
“What is it you want from me now, torturer?” I managed to croak a question of my own in response. They were the first words I had spoken—besides Eleva’s name—in what seemed like centuries, “Yet another confession?”
“With the right truth, demon, yet may you live to see the moons rise.”
I had almost forgotten that this planet had two pairs of natural satellites. It had been very scenic, four moons, until the animal-riders slammed down on our half-built camp, shattering our dreams forever.
“I will see them—just before you light your bonfire! Now get out ... ”
The comparative fresh sweetness of the air outside our cell seemed suddenly unbearable. For some reason I began coughing uncontrollably, huge tears streaming down my face. Fever, followed by chills, passed through my body in waves. I was suddenly ashamed of the filth that covered me, worse of being humiliated before my captors. What would Eleva—
“Silence! Silence!” the whisper demanded. “Your silence or the truth! Now listen carefully! Do you hold the reins of the star-flying machine?”
It was another minute before I could speak. At this rate, I would not last much longer. The figure bending before me, after its brief tirade, remained mute. When my voice came, it was a hoarse sobbing rasp.
“What are you asking me, priest?”
“Guide you the star-flying machines?”
Burning, I reasoned dully, is probably better than being hanged. Once the flame sears your nerve-endings, I am told, you can not feel a thing. It certainly beat outliving my inoculations, as I seemed to be doing now, eventually contracting leprosy or perhaps something equally attractive.
Or being eaten in my sleep by rats, for that matter.
“Sure,” I lied. “Naturally. Of course. Also, ‘of a certes’. I piloted one such star-flyer here myself.” I paused, adding, “But it will not now return to the sky. It was not ever intended to. It has been burned, the ashes scattered by warriors. I have explained this before.”
Queerly, the anonymous form squatted on its robe-draped haunches, frozen for a long moment as if in deep meditation. Then one of its identically-clad companions still out in the passageway approached the Bailiff.
Coins clinked within the silence of stone walls. The Bailiff appeared to look both ways, then withdrew. Almost as if a switch had been thrown, the hooded figure halfway into our cell came to life again.
“Demon,” it hissed, even lower, even more threatening than before, “If you wish to return to life, tell us how your thunder-weapons are fashioned.”
So that was it.
In the furious one-sided battle at the landing-site, I had somehow managed to kill or wound a handful of the animal-riders, their thin metal plating being worse than no protection against my fast-moving eight millimeter slugs. Staging single-handed gunfights with barbarian warriors had not been part of my job-description when I had signed onboard the Asperance. I was supposed to prepare the arsenal for the officers. Had I done so, perhaps we Vespuccians might have fared better.
Instead, I had sat on a streambank, paddling my toes in a little brook. I had fiddled with my music, daydreamed about my girl, watched a couple of the moons rise, while, all the time, the enemy was coming to murder us. As an armorer, I had been much more useful playing the mandolar.
In any event, my guns had been emptied in due course, confiscated by the brawling killers while I lay unconscious, the remainder of our ammo surely destroyed. Back home, in the Final Vespuccian War, I had done what the field-manuals told me, employing a fancy kit of gauges, drift-punches, screwdrivers, confident in the certain knowledge that replacement parts were never further away than our field resupply depot.
I might be able to hand-make certain of the tools—screwdrivers are easy, even good ones—what I knew of manufacturing the Darrick 8mm Revolving Magazine Pistol could have been engraved upon the tip of the Bailiff’s back-up dagger with the chisel he had used to open the door.
Naturally, I said: “Of course I can tell you. Nothing to it. I know all of the proper incantations. Burn me, I cannot teach you a thing.”
The hooded speaker froze again, its companions likewise ceasing all movement in the hallway. Praying, maybe. Or thinking about a New Improved Holy Order of God’s Teeth, augmented with a little advanced military hardware. Old Vespuccian fairy tales told about such things: how, for example, Kalvan the Boss traveled back in time to teach the Olden People about modern machinery. That was before we learned that our Olden People had forgotten more about such things than we had ever known.
The Baron would not be happy, I thought. Then again—I started trembling at the idea—perhaps these “thunder-we
apons” of mine were religiously illegal. Perhaps the Bishop only wanted to assure himself that, by disposing of us, he was eradicating dangerous or forbidden knowledge.
Well, either way, at least I would die warm. The cold down here, the vile dampness had seeped into my very bones. The insides of my lungs felt coated with the same fine mildew that garnished the cuisine. I would not last very much longer at this rate, whatever I chose to say. When they discovered the true extent of my technical education ...
The faceless figure came back to reality.
“This other demon—” Like an image of Death itself, the dark apparition gestured with a long, empty sleeve. “Knows it these things as well, the making of thunder-weapons, the guiding of sky-flying machines?”
I coughed again, this time to give me time for thought. Lieutenant Enson Sermander, in these late, great days of the Vespuccian State, had the finest military career his family could buy him—one of the old Command Families, with a real name. Do him credit, though: he had spent another fat half-dozen years purchasing even more status on his own.
In the War, he had flown (or so he said) a ram-fighter against the Shirker States. Certainly at the launching ceremony nine—no, twelve—weeks ago, his chest had been ablaze with ribbons. I was glad Eleva was not there to see him in his glory. Five confirmed kills, three probables. Feats of arms against clumsy blimps, fragile biplanes. He was only here in this dungeon only because he had not thought quite quickly enough to buy himself into favor with the current regime. Being too slow on that kind of uptake clearly defines one as a threat to national security. So, he had been volunteered for the Asperance expedition.
As for flying the starclipper to this place, even the Lieutenant had admitted with a chuckle that the computer was the best pilot aboard.
Nevertheless, he had not been too bad a fellow, for an officer. A cheerful cynic, the only one of seventeen crew members who had ever spoken directly to me outside the line of duty. I had come to like him, in a way. Those who actually knew what they were doing, he left strictly alone to do it. That is what constitutes a good officer these days.
The Lieutenant was a good officer.
“This sky-demon is the great-grandfather of all sky-demons!” I announced, with as much enthusiasm as my weakened body would let me muster, “I am only his humble apprentice—but he is sick. He needs help!”
“He does, indeed.” A nod from beneath the hood, then that eerie, hackle-raising whisper again. “This may be arranged. Able are you to stand?”
“Not in here.”
The hooded figure backed out, straightened.
Its companions reached in swiftly to drag me out by the armpits to my feet. Agony tore through my right leg as I set weight on my much-abused foot. I bit my lower lip, choking back nausea. Tears squeezed from between my tightly-closed eyelids as the priests half-carried me across the narrow corridor, propping me against a comparatively dry wall where sooty cobwebs powdered my excrement-soaked uniform. I clung, breathing heavily, to a torch-sconce, my heart hammering like a machinegun.
They slid the Lieutenant’s body out of the cell.
He moaned, even fought them weakly, trying to speak. Restraining him with a surprising gentleness, one of the hooded figures extracted a relatively clean swatch of the ubiquitous burlap material from its robe, dabbed at the Lieutenant’s enormous pustulent wound until fresh blood broke through the crust. A new rag was then wrapped around his arm.
“Nothing can be done for this one ... ” the hooded figure whispered chillingly (was it the same one I had spoken with in the cell, or was this another one?) then, to my relief, added, “ ... here.”
Fighting dizziness, I croaked, “Then let us go where something can!”
They nodded; it almost amounted to a bow. The trip upward through seemingly endless underground corridors—there was no sign of the Bailiff nor of any other castle personnel—was a hazy purgatorial nightmare, reminiscent of the period, eons ago in some sense, of my daily torture-sessions. My foot was now three times its normal size, swollen up to the knee. I was queasy, half-conscious, weak. Terribly weak.
It seemed to be a busy place, this dungeon. Screaming issued out of every cross-corridor, pitiable moaning, the rattle of chains in their wall-rings. The priests looked at one another whenever this happened, their faces hidden from me in the shadows of their cowls, then looked resolutely straight ahead. The endless upward march went on.
I did manage distantly to wonder if it were day or night outside. This was no trivial matter on Sca, where all life was active during the well-lit nighttime hours, only to scurry from the dawn as if from an enemy horde. Already, in the higher-rent dungeons, my eyes smarted from the more numerous, better-trimmed torches. Outside, a naked blue-white sun would burn the optics out of my head, then start for the brain.
Suddenly we passed through a pointed stone arch to an outdoor court I recognized from our arrival here. Around the yard were railed places for the riding-animals, great piles of dried vegetation in long tied bundles, ragged servants busy with shovels. Near the gate stood another of those wooden-wheeled carts, hitched to four big pulling beasts.
It was nighttime.
Under the gentle light of a single risen moon, armored soldiers loitered about the yard, a great many of them. The Bailiff was among their number. He approached us as we slowly crossed the flagging. He was an old man for his culture, I suddenly realized, perhaps forty, white-haired, his face the usual Scavian battlefield of smallpox scars, fleabites, the marks of hard-fought mortal duels. He coughed as he spoke to us, a nervous hand fingering the pommel of his two-edged hatchet.
“Now tell me where ye might be taking these here captives?” he demanded, very loudly, “They be property, duly held for My Lord the Baron!”
Something official was happening here: he wore a breastplate over his mail now, a crested helmet, bearing the local symbol of authority, a gibbet—rampant or gules or something—on what looked like a field of bloodsoaked mud. The hooded folk gently placed the Lieutenant on the courtyard flagging. The priest I had been leaning on stepped out from under me. I swayed a little bit but managed to stay afoot. Soldiers all around us lost a bit of their transparently artificial nonchalance.
“Here is our warrant and seal!”
My guide had answered in a stage-whisper, nearly as loud as the Bailiff’s bellowed challenge. It was equally intended to be overheard. I let my eyes roam the high walls of the courtyard, looking for a noble face observing the proceedings through a narrow slit, but saw nothing.
From the broad trailing sleeve of a hooded robe, there appeared a parchment. With arthritic fingers, the Bailiff laboriously untied the ribbon, unrolled the document, skipped over the writing—which he likely could not read anyway—to the heavy wax seal affixed at the bottom. He eyed us, a swat-trickle escaping from under his dented iron cap.
Then he decided: “Why, may God blind me, this be but yon little Bishop’s seal! Where be that, and the written word, of My Lord the Baron?”
From all quarters, his men began sauntering oh-so-casually toward us.
“Here, thou treacherous canine, is word enough for the Baron!”
This was spoken by another of the hooded people—in that same low, threatening whisper—who had slipped up beside the Bailiff. Steel whispered from hidden leather. Something dark was thrust into the fellow’s undefended armpit, out of sight beneath the Bailiff’s arm as two of the priests picked the Lieutenant up. We marched past the bewildered guardsmen to the cart near the open gateway. The Bailiff waved his men away, beads of sweat decorating his unlovely cratered face.
“Th-the w-word of God be the Supreme Law...” he stammered loudly, “Thy Holiest of Orders rightfully acc-acc—b-bows to no temporal authority.”