“No breath,” I gasped, and ran grimly. Not for worlds was I going to send him on to the gate on his own. And I new I was right as I pelted into sight of it. Beyond the sparks his feet and mine were kicking up in the half-dark, I could see the dark gap in the wall where the gate was now standing open. Low down against the darkness were two small light-coloured lumps. “Too – bloody – late!” I panted. I slid up in a spray of blue sparks and turned the nearest lump over. The elder boy. His pigtail wrapped stickily into the big open gash across his throat as I turned him. The pool of blood under him squelched and stank faintly. He was still warm. I left the other pathetic little lump to lie and rounded on the young centaur. “Someone came through this gate,” I said, “someone you know, and they told you to keep out of the way, didn’t they?”
His hands were clasped under his mouth. His hooves trampled. There was still light enough to see the tears pouring down his face. “Yes, but,” he said. “Yes – but—”
“But nothing,” I said. “Who was it? Who?”
His tail slashed. He looked down at the small corpses and back at me. The tears ran across his mouth. “I – I can’t say,” he said. “I really can’t say!” Then, while I was still thinking that all the things Stan had told me about centaur loyalty were entirely true, he hurdled the two small heaped-up bodies and vanished out through the gate in a wild thudding of hooves.
I ran again, round to the other side of the yard this time, until I came to the house the girls had gone into. It was dark inside and seemed empty. I crashed through its door, raising light as I went. There was one miserable little room in there with three narrow beds in it. The corpse of the youngest girl was curled up in the space between them, and a long stream of her blood made shiny puddles in the uneven floor. I looked down at the poor kid and swore. At the sound, to my acute astonishment, one of the older girls put her head out from under the nearest bed. The second emerged from under another.
“Who did this?” I said to them. “Did you see?”
They stared at me, almost like animals. Probably it was shock. And as we all stared, light slanted into the room and there was a strong thudding drone. Leave this to Lady Alexandra! I thought with huge relief and dashed outside again. A small hover was just landing in the yard. To my extreme pleasure it came down right on top of that unpleasant bush. It could have been an accident, but my bet was that the pilot worshipped a different deity. Other hovers were rising up into the yard from all round. Dakros jumped down across the altar stone and ran to meet me.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him. I seemed to have gone shrill and hoarse with the horror of it all. “God, I’m sorry! The only survivors are two girls in a state of shock.”
“What went wrong?” he snapped.
It was hard to watch the way his shoulders sagged as I told him – as if the weight of seven or more worlds were landing there. But he was very good at his job all the same. He barked orders and several of the hovers instantly took off to look for the young centaur. The rest landed and efficient police-like troops scrambled out of them, unreeling arclights. We went on a glaringly lit tour of the disaster, of which military men and women efficiently took pictures. Lady Alexandra had not been included in the expedition, but I was glad to find that several soldier-women almost at once took charge of the two girls, sat them by the well and began trying to coax out of them what they knew. Dakros strode about in the middle of it receiving reports from all sides. I was impressed that, faced with this almost total destruction of all his hopes, he never once seemed inclined to blame me. I would have done, had it been the other way round. I was feeling bad – vile – and would have welcomed any kind of reprimand. And the worst of it was that, though I knew it was the act of a rat to leave Dakros with this disaster in his lap, I was going to have to. The people who did this were from Earth. Apart from anything else, I had the ignoble fear that the murderers could be at this moment stealing my car.
I tried to break some of this to him about a quarter of an hour later. We were standing outside the hut where Knarros still lay and someone had just handed each of us a paper cup of strong Empire coffee. “Whoever killed Knarros used a weapon from my world,” I said, “and I suspect they’ve gone back there with whatever they took from his safe—”
“Excuse me, General Dakros.” A woman trooper came up beside us. “We found this gripped in Knarros’s other hand, sir. We’ve got pictures, but the Captain thought you ought to see it straight away.”
It was a corner of a thick, official manuscript, raggedly torn off. I could see it was fluted with the grasp of Knarros’s powerful fingers. Dakros took it and eagerly shone his big flashlight on it. It was written by hand in the fine slanting official script the Empire used and most of it was numbers and letters that meant nothing to me. All I could pick out was a name, or part of a name: Sempronia Marina Timosa Th, that had survived in the widest part.
It meant something to Dakros, however. “DNA, blood group, ocular scan,” he said. “There may be enough of this to match with one of those girls. Well done, trooper.” He turned to me, but was at that moment interrupted by some sort of message coming in from one of the carriers. “When did they give you the slip?” he demanded into his com. “Oh, I see. No, that’s all right. They have to be sightseers then.” He turned back to me. “Sorry about that. We keep having country folk coming to stare. Not used to seeing carriers in Thalangia. For one happy moment, I hoped we might have got the murderers. Pity. Anyway, Knarros must have hung on to this certificate when he realised he’d been deceived. Do you read it that way, Magid? Maybe they had to shoot him to get it. They must have kidded him they were bringing the true heir in – you did say it’s a girl, did you? That’s odd. Knarros ought to have suspected that, with two boys in his charge. We always take the boys first in succession in the Empire. And they must have come on foot at sunset, so we couldn’t spot them, and somehow persuaded Knarros to stall everything until then. Then they steal the details so they can fake themselves an heir and make sure we’ve got no heirs except their fake. Must have been something like that, don’t you agree?”
I stood swigging coffee in the luridly lit yard and thought about it. I did not think it was like that at all. One thing which particularly did not fit was the heavy thump I had felt while I was lifting the protection spell to let Knarros get past it. That had been a shot. It had been a shot from the same revolver that killed Knarros. I was sure of it now. And as soon as I realised that, my mind went to that time on the outskirts of Iforion when the sniper only just missed me. How stupid not to notice that this had been an Earth-type projectile weapon too! How stupid! And, following this trail of violence further back, it occurred to me to wonder about the exact nature of the explosion that had killed the Emperor.
This was planned! was my thought, from the bomb in the palace onwards. Whoever planned it assumed I knew things that Knarros also knew. And Knarros had stalled me – lied to me. I had thought centaurs never lied. This was something I was going to have to ask Stan about. But I could see now that Knarros had kept Dakros off until I arrived, then taken the magical embargo off the path so that the murderers could use it. That nonsense with the Magid ceremony was purely to give them time to get into position and keep my mind off anything else. Then he had taken care to leave me standing by the altar, against the skyline, nicely placed for a shot. Luckily for me, whoever did the shooting had taken his time, no doubt trying for a perfect shot, and I had quite accidentally thwarted him by moving and lifting a bundle of impermeable protection spell into the path of the bullet. Then I had put myself out of range by running the other way. The murderer had then cut his losses by simply shooting Knarros. I had no idea if he had always meant to shoot Knarros, or not, but I knew I had been lucky. Very, very lucky.
My hands were shaking as I passed my paper cup to the waiting trooper. In fact, tremors were running up both my arms and affecting my knees too. “Yes, I’m certain Knarros was deceived,” I told Dakros. The tremor had got into my voice
too. “But the most important thing is that the killers are from Earth. They’re probably back there by now. If you don’t mind, I think I’d better get back there too and get after them. Could one of the hovers take me over to my car?”
Dakros agreed, and we made the usual arrangements to contact one another. But there was one thing he was emphatic about. He wanted the killers brought back to the Empire to be tried and shot. So did I. There was no evidence against them on Earth. “And we may have to take this fake Empress of theirs,” he said ruefully, “unless we can prove a claim for one of those two girls. I hope you can trace the rest of that document, Magid.”
I didn’t think there was any chance of that, but I promised to try and climbed tremulously into a hover. It had a neutral metallic smell inside, which lifted the horror from me slightly. I realised that it was truly urgent to get back home. In the artificial light glaring across the devastated colony, it had felt more like running away, but as the hover swung out over the woods of the hillside I began to see round the edges of my narrow escape and even round the cynical killing of those children. I looked down at the trees and saw that my duty as a Magid was to find these people. For one thing, they knew too much about me for comfort, and for another, they were assuming I knew more than I did about them. But the main thing was that they were using a Naywards world as a base from which to attack an Ayewards one, and that was just not on.
Rupert Venables continued
As the hover left the hill and droned the short distance across the plain, I was surprised at how much light there still was out here. The golden, dusty soil and the lighter criss-cross of the lanes were quite clear to see, and the orderly black lines of the vines against the yellow ground. Out in the distance, the lights of the hovers hunting for the young centaur looked like dots stolen from the yellow sky. I was not sure they were going to find Kris out there. People who planned things this thoroughly would surely have been waiting for him in the woods. Kris knew who the murderers were. The peculiar thing was the way they had left him alive at first. And Rob almost certainly knew too much as well. I was suddenly urgently worried about that, and for Will’s safety, if Will tried to defend Rob. And about my car. They could so easily have stolen my car. And Stan, of course. That would make problems I didn’t want to think about.
But the car was there, standing in the lane where I had left it. I was so relieved to see it that I thanked the hover pilot hastily, dropped down into the stinging whirl of dust the hover raised, and sprinted for my lovely sleek silver vehicle.
Its door, which I had left open, was now shut. I nearly stopped. But as the hover swept above and away, taking its drone with it, I could hear Scarlatti tinkling in the gloaming. Maybe all was well. But in case it was not, I readied a fairly massive stasis and came on at a run as if I had not noticed any difference.
The driver’s door started to open. I slammed the stasis on. The door stuck, half open, with someone’s hand on its edge and someone’s foot appearing below. The Scarlatti stopped in mid-phrase. But I could hear Stan shouting as I covered the last few yards and pulled the door open, preparing to do things that hurt.
Nick Mallory toppled out sideways and fell to the ground, still in the forward-leaning crouch of someone getting out of a car. Dust rose around him, white in the feeble shine of the courtesy light, and pattered back on his already dusty clothes. I was particularly astonished at the way the dust made crusty streaks out of the tears on his face. Nick Mallory had never struck me as a boy who cried.
Here Stan’s hoarse croakings got through to me. “Blimey, that was fierce! It’s OK, Rupert. It’s OK, honest! Let him up and let him talk. There’s something real bad going on and he’s not the one doing it.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
“Things I saw and heard,” he said. “Come on. Let him up.”
In the normal way, I would have taken Stan’s word for it, but this was not the normal way. I stayed where I was, holding the car door, half astride Nick. “Tell me what you saw and heard first.”
“If that’s your attitude…” he said. “Oh all right. I think I saw this kid arrive – must have been in the other car – but I didn’t take much note of it, just a dust trail over in the distance that I thought must be someone tending a plantation. The first thing that really shook me up was around sunset. Red sky and all that. From up on top of that hill. Two shots.
“Two shots?” I said. “Thanks.” Now I knew I was not being paranoid.
“Yes, two,” Stan said. “Rang out real clear from here. Then about half a minute after, there were three squirts of red fire from up there – looked like a signal gun.”
“That was me,” I said.
“I thought it must have been,” said Stan. “People around these troop carriers starting acting like a stirred-up ants’ nest, hovers popping out of things’ bellies, lights, folk running. And the hovers sit there, half up in the air, grinding, troops running to get in them, panic. Took an age for them to get airborne and go howling away up to that hilltop. Looked as if your signal took them by surprise.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think they assumed I was omnipotent. What then?”
“Nothing for a while,” said Stan. “Then there was this sheet of fire—”
“Sheet of fire?” I said.
“That’s right, but only for a blink of time, over to your right, quite near that wood. Them in the carriers may not have caught it. It was round the hill from them. I only caught it because in my state it’s like having eyes all round. And I was on the alert anyway, wondering if you were in trouble,” Stan admitted. “Frustrating being pinned inside this car. I kept trying to think if there was anything I could do. But there was nothing going on for a while, and then a whole lot of stuff. First this kid comes bursting out through that vinefield there, acting like he’d run himself legless, and makes for this car, glad like. But just as he gets here, all the hovers start going off in different directions off the hill, like pips squirting—”
“That would be when I told Dakros about the young centaur,” I said. “Did you—?”
“See him? Yes, I did,” said Stan. “And I’ll tell you about it as soon as you let that kid up. He’ll be right royally bruised, falling the way he did, and there’s no need to give him cramp as well. And my word on it, he’s not part of this. He was coming to this car for help, Rupert. What’s his name, by the way?”
“Nick,” I said. I looked down at Nick’s sizeable curled-up figure. Stan was probably right. He would be getting cramp. I compromised. I eased the stasis a little and levitated the boy back into the seat of my car in a rattle of dust. The effort brought back the tremors in my legs. “That’s as far as I go,” I said. “Now tell me about the centaur.”
“Then let me tell it in order,” Stan said. “You need to know it all. This Nick here doesn’t want the hovers to see him for some reason. This car’s sitting here with one door open and the light on inside, the way it is now, and instead of getting into it, he dives on his face and crawls under between the front wheels. And I think, Aye, aye! Thinks they’re looking for him, does he? Using the warm engine to hide body heat, is he, in case they use detectors? Well, well. But I don’t think they do use detectors, or they’d have found the centaur kid by now, and I can see them still looking.”
I turned to see over my shoulder. The very distant lights were now bright, droning hither and thither far out over the dark blue flatness. The sky was dark blue too with only a few pale streaks to the west. “Damn. No, they haven’t found him. What happened next?”
“Well,” Stan said, “I took a bit of a hand then, knowing the free way they have with executions in this Empire. I put a real strong Don’t Notice round this car. Lucky I did too. It’s thanks to me you don’t have your tyres shot out. Young Nick hadn’t hardly wriggled out of sight when this centaur of yours comes by like a bat out of hell. Talk about go! They can go. Two hearts, two pairs of lungs. Beat any racehorse hollow. And this one had good reason to go. First, he go
es flying up this path, and next thing I know there’s a car, normal Earth-style car, screaming round the corner of that vineyard there, shimmying sideways, clouds of dust, and roaring flat out after the centaur. Man and a woman in it, woman driving. She sees the centaur, puts on her full headlights, pins him as he gallops, and the man leans out of his window and starts firing a pistol at the centaur. Bang, bang, bang. Centaur jumps sideways like a goat and then hurdles the hedge into the vineyard on the other side. Man missed, I think. I hope. Jumped like a bird flying, that centaur.”
“Did you see the people in the car?” I said urgently.
“No, too dark, what with their headlights on,” Stan said. “Man was on the other side, so I only caught a glimpse after they went past. Head, elbow, flash, crack – you know. Woman was just a shape.”
“Did she wear glasses?” I demanded. If Nick was here, then that car was almost certainly Maree’s.
“Don’t think so,” said Stan. “Anyway, they’re long gone now. They stopped where the centaur went over the hedge, brake lights, squeal, more dust, and the man starts getting out. Anyway, his door opens and I know he’s seen this car too. They were both magic users, so they were bound to see it in the end. And I start thinking quick, What can I do to stop him coming back and making a mess of this car, and maybe finding Nick as well? Not a lot, frankly. Then luckily one of those hovers spotted them and comes bawling down this lane, straight overhead of me. I was more or less yelling at them to go and beam their tyres, but they’d got no orders to do that, so they just sit in the air overhead of the other car. Man gets back in. Woman drives off, and they make transit as they start up, and hey presto! Gone. The hover goes back and forth a bit, and they don’t see this car, or maybe they know it’s yours, and anyway they’re after the centaur, but by then they’ve lost him too. So off they drone. Then, after a bit, when things are quiet again, young Nick crawls out from under, gets in the driving seat, shuts the door and more or less cries his eyes out. He was so upset, I wondered whether to speak to him, to tell the truth.”