Android at Arms (23 page)

There had always been a strong strain of mysticism in his race. In some this took the form of formal religion, or a delving into philosophy, or experimentation with esper. With others it followed a darker trend—to such things as the worship of the Old Woman, the researches of the Nessi. It was in him, too—when he had reacted to the ring he had taken from Abena.

But he would have to set aside beliefs and fears if he was going into this battle. Men—and women—who had been ground down to the extremity of these foresters, of Shara, half starved as she was, perhaps did not have the inner will to break old bounds. They would be easy prey for such devils tricks as the crawlers.

Perhaps because he was not fully one with them—and he had Yolyos who was not of them at all—he would have a chance. But it might be that he would be forced to take that chance alone.

Andas dropped the knife. He reached within his coverall and brought out the key. It shown ruddily in the torch light. And he kept it in his right hand. But with the left he freed the ring and drew it from that pocket in his closed fist, holding it well away from the key—for they still stood in his mind as opposite poles of light and dark, good and evil.

Then he gave an exclamation, for the cool metal circlet in his fist was not cool any longer. He opened his hand. On his palm lay the ring. And it glowed—but from no reflected torchlight. It was the gleam of life. And at the same time the device he had dug out of the crawler gave a spark of flame and began a low humming.

15

“A seer ring!” Shara drew away farther yet.

At her cry the others, except for the Salariki, stared at him.

“A seer ring.” Deliberately Andas confirmed her identification. “One I took from a handmaiden of the Old Woman when she sought to use it to my betrayal. But think you that I could also hold this”—he raised the key so that they could see it clearly—“if I had surrendered my will to such a ring?”

Perhaps the foresters did not know the key, but Shara would surely understand. She had witnessed the other Andas's reaction to it.

“He is right,” she said after a moment. “This is the key to the heart. But to bear it together with the ring—”

“The ring must be destroyed. But how can that be done until I find a place in which it can be forever hid?” Andas countered. “Bury it in the ground, throw it into a chasm or lake, and can you say that there will not be those whose nature will draw them to it? Also, perhaps it can be made to aid us—”

“Look at it!” Shara had been watching the ring. Andas did indeed look.

The milky-white setting showed a thickening swirl of color—something was coming through! But he had done nothing to summon—Andas raised the key between him and the ring as a protection, the only one he could think of.

“Back,” he ordered, “out of line with this!”

The others were only too ready to obey, pulling away as if he had a live flamer in his hand, one about to spew destruction.

“Throw it away!” Shara cried. “My lord, meddle not with the things of that she-devil!”

Every instinct in Andas agreed with her. Yet he held tight command over his desires and continued to hold the ring. At that moment it spelled contact with the core of the enemy force. And all he could learn would be to his advantage. But he did flip the glowing circlet about so that he was not looking into the setting, but rather down from above, while it was focused on the device from the crawler.

In addition to sputtering sparks from that device, the wires he had ripped loose came alive, writhing on the floor as if they still governed movements in the body from which they had been pulled. The ring was now yellow-green, and in it moved, not the picture he had expected, but a series of spark impulses that made tiny patterns. But those came and vanished so quickly that he could not be sure of any.

“The question is”—Yolyos had not withdrawn as the others and now squatted on his heels by Andas, watching those sparks—“is that broadcasting or receiving? Does the ring activate that device, or the unit the ring? And can such a broadcast be picked up elsewhere?”

He was interrupted by Ikiui. “Listen, my lord!”

He need not have warned them, for it was plain to hear—that wailing that could be heard in the night, yet rang in one's head.

“Crawlers—more than one!” Kai-Kaus had gone on hands and knees to the entrance for the ladder. “They are coming—”

“The ring! Perhaps it called them!” cried Shara.

Andas closed his fist again about it and almost cried out at the head radiating from the metal. He slipped it back in hiding.

“Perhaps this is for the best.” Yolyos had drawn his needler. “I would rather meet those things on a field of my choosing than loose in the woods. Summon them in and pick them off—as we do the goop in the great hunts!”

“You are right!” With only crossbows for defense, the crawling horrors might seem menaces to the foresters. But faced with superior weapons, they could be disposed of with what appeared now to Andas as ease. And to have them gathered in one place for slaughter—

He dropped a hand on Kai-Kaus's shoulder. “Is there a way we can set an ambush above that trail—pick them off as they come?”

“For us perhaps, my lord. But you are not trained so—”

“Just show me a stable perch.”

“If we have time.” There was a new eagerness in Kai-Kaus's face. Their triumph over one of the weird beasts had given him confidence.

Shara moved into Andas's path. “My lord, you bear the ring, and you would go to meet those things which answer to it. I beg of you, do not leave with what may be a break in your defenses! You do not know how that acts, only that it has been alerted by the device which directs the crawlers. What if it can compel you to meet them on their own ground?”

“It did not before.”

“Then, my lord, you had not deliberately exposed it. It was not ‘alive'—not until you held it before that device. But alive it has powers.”

Was it the old superstition working in her, or was her warning a legitimate one? Before he could decide, Yolyos closed in on the other side.

“A suggestion, Prince. If that ring is bait, let it be bait indeed. Set it or suspened it so as to pull them to our best advantage.”

Andas was reluctant to let the ring out of his control. From the first he had feared that if he loosed it, it might escape him altogether. But Shara's warning influenced him somewhat. After all, to battle enemy forces holding that which might prove traitor was folly. And Yolyos's suggestion had good logic.

“The stranger lord is right, my lord,” Ikiui agreed. “Use it for bait.”

Andas left it to the foresters to select the proper ambush, and they moved swiftly. The wailing, which had only been a faint cry at first, was growing louder. Also the forest itself had come alive about them, its inhabitants fleeing a common doom as they might have run before a fire. Bushes threshed, flying things cried with small hoots and flutings, and there was a scurrying on the ground beneath their trees.

The prince discovered that the foresters were indeed right in mistrusting his ability aloft. He had to be pushed and shoved along one of the tree branches that supported the platform to reach another lower limb, which was not so comfortable and swayed under him. Kai-Kaus passed him a length of vine rope made fast to the tree trunk, so that he had a lifeline.

He was slightly irritated to learn that the Salariki was far more surefooted in his limb travel, having little or no difficulty in scrambling aloft in another tree across the trail. Andas knotted the ring, testing the fastening over and over again, before he allowed the vine end to which it was tied to drop. The glow of the set increased in color as it swayed back and forth. And now that wailing was silenced.

Andas turned to Kai-Kaus, not too far away on the same leafy perch.

“They are—?” he began when a faint hiss warned him into silence.

He balanced as well as he could, waiting, though the interval was not long, for out of the brush pushed the white mass of a crawler. It came at a pace faster than he would have allowed for its bulk to squat below the ring. The forepart of its half-seen body, visible because of its paleness in the general gloom, reared as it tried apparently to reach the ring.

Its repeated failures did not seem to matter. It kept on rearing, even though at best it was well below the dangling treasure it sought. And it was still single-mindedly busy when a second of its kind appeared.

The monsters took no notice of each other. It was as if their world had narrowed to the ring. The smaller rocked against the larger as they both reared, sending it off balance. There was a sharp grunt, and the head of the larger swung around to butt its companion away from the bait.

Since the smaller accepted the challenge, they were striking at each other when a third and greater one arrived, plowing up and over the struggling bodies of the other two, aiming at the ring. Its questing forelimbs (if you could call them such) came close to achieving the goal. Andas, afraid that a second try might be successful, fired. He had given no warning to Yolyos. But at the same instant his needler rayed out, the other fired also, so that the twisting bodies below were caught in a cross fire that was fatal.

Were there any more? And would the lure of the ring suffice to draw them even though some signal of their companions' ending might have been broadcast? The men waited in the branches above for what seemed to Andas such a stretch of time as must comprise half the night. But no more crawlers appeared, nor did they hear any wailing.

At last, Andas, stiff from his unaccustomed position and wondering if he could cope as well with a second attack, hooked in the vine and loosed the ring, to stow it away safely. Evil token it might be, but tonight it had served them well. And there was a chance that they might continue to use its calling powers for their own ends. He was more confident about the future since they had won this engagement. First they had taken the skimmer by wild chance and now defeated these monsters.

When they were back again in the tree fort, Andas was willing enough to stretch out on the bed place. His body ached from that cramping vigil in the treetop, and he could not remember sleeping since that abortive try in the commander's quarters.

Green light sifted down through the branches when he awoke. At least it was day, but what hour he could not tell. He rolled over to see that he had shared his bed. Shara's head was pillowed beside his. Her sunken eyes were closed, but he thought she looked a shade less gaunt now and younger—

How old was she? She had announced herself the Chosen of the Emperor. There had been cases in the past of marked disparity of ages for dynastic reasons, but he began to believe that she was no worn woman as she had first appeared—haggard with the hardships of her hunted life—but a girl instead. And he was still searching her face for some clue as to the truth of that when her eyes opened.

There was instant awareness in those eyes. She was like a trained warrior who wakes at once to any alarm. But she said nothing, only returned his study, surveying his face with the same intensity he turned upon her.

They were alone on the bed platform of the tree as he saw when, embarrassed, he sat up, a little ashamed he had been detected spying on her as she slept.

“You are the Emperor's Chosen.” He was at some loss as how to approach the matter of his own feelings.

“But not yours.” Her voice was the faintest murmur of sound, meant to carry to his ears only. “My choosing was a matter of state—or began so—”

For once imagination told him what he guessed was the truth. “But later it became otherwise between you two?” Inwardly he was now doubly ashamed at his own blindness. The death of that other Andas might have ended part of her world for her, but it had meant nothing but a burden for him. In his self-centeredness he must have been cruel where he should have been kind. He had thought only what events meant to him and inwardly struggled against enmeshment, resentful of the man who had committed him to this life. That the other Andas had been devoted to duty and had taken the only way left to save his plans, he did not doubt. But he, too, had been selfish, or he would not have sentenced a stranger to this.

“It became otherwise.” Again her light whisper wrenched him from his thoughts to consider her. But she did not enlarge upon that admission.

The Chosen of the Emperor—his wife, though not his empress, until he could crown her publicly. He had a wife in the sight of his loyal followers and one he could not possibly disown.

That thought bothered him. His father's solitary life, which he had shared, had been devoid of feminine company. They had not even had a woman servant. And when Andas had been drawn into the life of the court, he had shortly thereafter gone to Pav for warrior training, again a world without women. There had been ladies enough at court on his return ready to toss him their flower bracelets. But he had been too shy, too ill at ease in such company, to react to their invitations. And there had been no official marriage made for him before that night when he had gone to bed in the palace—to awaken in the prison on another planet.

Since then, there had been Elys for whom he had been sorry, judging her by his own fears and feelings, only to learn that she had been more alien than the furred Salariki. And he had seen the Princess Abena—he smiled wryly at the memory of that meeting. Abena was supposedly
his
daughter. Now here was this frail-looking yet tough wraith, with her drab barbaric dress, who claimed to have been the other Andas's Chosen. How closely would she expect him to carry out that previous relationship?

He had no feelings about her, save a kind of impatient pity—impatient because she was part of the new life he could not discard. Could it be that lack of emotion was the sign of an android? The old fear bubbled in him. If he only knew more about androids! They had been forbidden for so long that the references he had were mainly hearsay. But could they have made an android so physically human that he could deceive a medic, even father children? But if the false emperor was not false—then he, Andas, was android!