In Green's Jungles (26 page)

"Troopers," I began, "you deserve to know why I'm doing what I'm going to do, and what I expect from you. I'm going to explain all that, and it won't take long. To start with, we're on Green, the green whorl that you've seen in the sky since you were children. Green is the breeder of storms and the breeding grounds of the inhumi."

There was a rattle of excited talk.

"Some of you may doubt that we're really here. I won't argue the point-you'll be convinced soon enough. A minute ago, I was about to explain to your officers how I thought we could get back to our own whorl. I said I'd do it, if they'd give me back my staff. I'll make you the same offer: give my staff back, and I'll explain how we may-I said may-be able to get back home."

I stood silently then, concentrating, and let them talk. After some minutes, Gorak approached me. "We haven't got it, Rajan."

"Do you still consider yourselves troopers in the Duko of Soldo's horde, Sergeant?"

"If you're asking me personally, Rajan-"

"I'm asking about the whole company," I told him firmly. "Do you?"

At my elbow, Kupus said, "Yes."

His tone had been at least as firm as mine. After looking for a moment into that hard-featured, somewhat fleshy face, I shrugged and raised my voice. "In that case, I'm going to tell you nothing more, and leave you here." Closing my eyes, I extended my hands before me, and thought with all my might of the sword the Neighbor had revealed to me. I do not mean that I described it to myself in so many words, saying that the blade was black and keen, and all the rest. Instead, I recalled its weight in my hand, and the bitter edge that had killed so many inhumi and severed the head of the spitting horror.

I heard the hiss of a hundred indrawn breaths, and a little gasp from Fava. To me, I thought, to me! I extended my right hand as I had offered it to the lieutenants. And something hard, cold, and hauntingly familiar grasped it from within.

DUKO RIGOGLIO

I
opened my eyes. The blade was somewhat darker, if anything; its curve may have been a shade less pronounced.

Sfido was goggling at me, his mouth gaping. "You have your needler," I told him, "and these troopers of yours, slug guns. Surely you won't begrudge me a mere sword."

Pushing past him, I began to tap the mottled gray flagstones with the point, willing one to sound hollow. "Here," I said at the third, "lift it for me, please, Fava. Help her, Oreb."

Together they did, struggling with its weight until Sergeant Gorak stepped forward to add his much greater strength to theirs. At once the stink of rotting flesh seemed to fill the whole chamber. Steep stairs, narrow and treacherous with slime, descended from the opening. I told Fava, "You had better precede me. It may be dangerous down there, but it would be worse for you to remain up here alone."

She nodded, hesitated, and at length took the first step, shuddering.

"You too, Oreb. Take care of her."

"Bird go?" he croaked doubtfully. (His voice was exactly as it had always been, though he had come to seem a sort of clumsy, feathered dwarf, and I had seen undulant arms wrestling with the flagstone as well as his now-armlike wings.) "Bird save?"

"Yes," I told him firmly. "Bird save. Protect her as much as you can. Go on, Oreb."

Fava's head sank out of sight below the level of the floor. Oreb started forward, flinched in a way I found very human, then dove after her, spreading his stubby wings almost before they were clear of the rectangular opening.

"Good-bye," I told the mercenary troopers peering into it. "This is a hard road and a dangerous one, but in the end it may lead us home. You will be safe here, I believe, until you die."

"Rajan!" Twenty hands at least reached out to stop me.

Kupus pushed his men aside, aiming his needier at my head. "You are our prisoner."

"No." I stepped down. "There cannot be a prisoner of a prisoner, Captain. We are prisoners, you and I-the prisoners of the inhumi who rule this whorl. But I intend to escape them, if I can."

Fava's voice reached me, distant and hollow. "Incanto! There's a man down here!"

Thinking that she had come upon the blind man I remembered, I nodded and went down into the opening.

Querulously, a voice behind me ventured, "Rajan…?"

Recognizing it as Sfido's, I turned. "Yes? What is it, Captain?"

"May I…? May we come with you?" He was crouching at the edge of the opening.

"No," I told him. "But they may go with you, to the place to which you go. You're their leader. You are Duko Rigoglio's representative, and their commanding officer."

Oreb sailed past, his tubby body and stubby wings suggesting an airship in miniature. "Man come!"

I stepped off the narrow stair, which disappeared as my foot left it.

"Rajan!"

It was Sfido again; I stopped and looked back up at him. "I thought I'd asked you not to call me that. I can tolerate it from the men I knew in Gaon; but when you use it, it puts us both in false positions."

"This hole." I watched him choke back the title he wished to give me. "It's getting smaller."

I waved, told him that I wished them all well, and left him.

A new voice called, "It's me, sir. Lieutenant Valico."

Darkness had closed about me with Sifido's last, despairing cry. Very much afraid of falling, I halted and opened my hand. The light the Neighbor had given me gleamed in a crease in my palm; as I focused my attention upon it, it grew stronger. I held it up and looked around me.

The sewer was a flattened oval, its thick obsidian walls cracked and near collapse. A trickle of water ran along its bottom some considerable distance below the narrow walkway on which I stood; a man's rotting corpse sprawled there, half in and half out of the dark water, a patient traveler waiting for a current strong enough to move him.

"Incanto!" It was Fava, the fact confirmed by Oreb, who sailed past me calling, "Girl say!"

Holding my light higher, I caught sight of her some distance down the sewer.

"He says we're all asleep!"

Valico himself called, "It's true, sir. I-I mean that's how it looked."

I nodded to myself. "Can you see the opening from where you are, Lieutenant?"

"No, sir."

It was night in that case, I thought. Night, or we had far to go.

As I drew nearer, Fava said, "He was looking for us, Incanto. Inclito sent him. I mean, Papa did."

Valico nodded. "Are you really the general's brother, sir?"

"Why do you ask?"

"It's what a lot of people were saying when he came back and you stayed in his place, sir. They say you're his older brother, and you stayed behind with your father when him and his mother left Grandecitta, and you've come to Blanko to help him out."

I smiled, although I doubt that Valico saw it. "And what does General Inclito himself say?"

"Nothing, sir. Colonel Bello asked him point-blank, but he wouldn't talk about it."

"No doubt that's wise. Let us be wise, too, Lieutenant."

"Sir…?"

Fava said, "He can't understand how you brought him here. Neither can I, Incanto. How you do this?"

"We brought him," I told her. "Or at any rate I believe we did, that both of us are necessary for it to take place. I want to talk to you about that, and about the Vanished People, when we're alone. Meanwhile, you must remember what happened in Inclito's house, shortly before you left."

"I didn't understand that, either, or how you got into my story."

Overhead, Oreb called, "Thing come! Bad thing!"

"That will be an inhumu, I suppose," I told Valico. "You have a slug gun, I see. Be prepared to use it." I heard the jingle of the sling swivels and a faint click as he pushed off the safety. "I was wrong," I told him. "It's not an inhumu."

"That's good," Fava said; narrow though the walkway was, she was walking beside me and pressing herself against me, as children often do when they seek protection.

Valico ventured, "You'd better let me go first, sir."

"So that you can have a clear shot."

"Yes, sir."

I shook my head. "Fava said you didn't understand how you came to be here. I'm not at all sure I do, either. Will you tell me? What occurred, from your perspective?"

He cleared his throat. "General Inclito sent us, sir. He told my men and me what happened when you and those two colonels went to try to make a bargain with the enemy, sir, and how they thought his daughter's friend was his daughter, and all that."

"In back!" Oreb had returned.

Far down the sewer, I caught sight of something faint that moved. At almost the same instant, Valico's slug gun boomed behind me; I whirled, nearly knocking Fava off, and was in time to see a long-fanged beast whose naked body was as wrinkled and repulsive as the white-headed one's neck fall from the walkway.

Before the echoes died away, Valico turned to face me, his gun still smoking. "I'll try to keep a better lookout behind, sir."

"And I, a better lookout ahead." The white thing I thought I had seen had vanished, if it ever existed.

"Bird find," Oreb announced proudly; I asked him to fly ahead and tell me what he found there.

"General Inclito said to get in as close as we could, sir," Valico continued, "and see how they were treating you, and to try to get you out if we could. We waited till about midnight before we started off, me and six men."

"You came as close as you dared. Then you yourself went forward alone. Isn't that how it was?"

"Yes, sir. They had sentries out, sir, just like you'd expect."

"But you slipped past them and got in among the sleepers?"

"Yes, sir." Valico paused. "The sentry I came closest to was asleep too, sir. That was the first thing that surprised me."

"What was the second?"

"Everybody was asleep, sir. Just like the sentry."

Oreb returned to report. "No see."

"When it's cold, sir, you've just about always got a few that can't sleep. And unless you make them, there's some that won't even try. But these mercenaries the general told us about were all asleep, and their fires died down to just about nothing, sir. Some just ashes and smoke."

"I understand. How did you find us, Lieutenant? They wouldn't allow us a fire, and there can't have been enough light for you to see our faces."

"I didn't, sir. I was just going from fire to fire," Valico paused to gulp, "and something smelled just… just so awful, sir. And the fires went out, it seemed like, but all of a sudden I was hot."

I nodded. "Fava, you know more about the inhumi than most of us. I hope you don't mind my saying that."

"It's all right."

"Good. Many people fear that the inhumi may begin to breed on Blue as well as Green. Quite some time ago, I theorized that they could not, that their eggs were hatched by the heat of the Short Sun, which is not sufficiently intense on Blue. Was I correct?"

"I think so."

I halted, conscious that something was lying in wait for us only a few steps farther on, whether Oreb could see it or not.

Pressing closer still, Fava asked, "Is that good enough? A good enough answer? I could just say you were right, if it would be better."

"Fava…?" My mind was racing.

"What is it?"

"You saw me create this sword."

"Yes, but I still don't understand how you did it."

"Neither do I, but I may be getting closer than I was a minute or two ago. This is a real place, this sewer. I've actually been here. Have you?"

"Have I? You mean before this?" The light in my hand revealed the confusion in her face. "No… No, I couldn't forget this."

"Good. Remember the jungle? We went there from Inclito's. Did that seem familiar? I may well have been there myself, I mean there in that particular spot, but I can't say with any certainty."

"Yes, I was, once. I remembered the little pool."

"Better and better. These are real places. I was held a prisoner in that room up there, for example, and I recall it very vividly. You agree that they're real?"

She nodded. "I suppose so."

"So do I. You told me the Duko had wanted you to murder Inclito, but you refused, remember? Your refusal made me think about my adopted son, who had died in that jungle."

I glanced back to see whether Valico was close enough to overhear me, and lowered my voice. "Then you showed your fangs and we went; but it was to a place you remembered, not to the exact spot where he died-a real place, though we ourselves were not actually there, and no more real than my sword. You've been in the Duko's palace?"

She nodded again. "What are you getting at?"

"Mora told me once that you didn't believe in the Neighbors, in the Vanished People. When she said it, I thought that was simply foolish of you; I myself have seen the Vanished People and spoken to them, and even been saved by them. Later, when I'd had time to think about it, I realized that it wasn't nearly so foolish as it looked, that the Vanished People I'd seen and spoke to here and on Blue were no more physically present than you and I in that jungle on Green."

"Do you think they might help us now, Incanto?"

"I doubt it very much. For one thing, I no longer have the ring Seawrack gave me. Fortunately, I'm not at all sure we need them."

Again, I glanced behind me. "Your… Never mind. The inhumi preyed upon the Vanished People once. You must know it. That was one of the reasons that they left these whorls, and it may even have been the principal one. When the inhumi prey upon us, they are like us. I won't be more specific now, but you must know what I mean. What do you suppose the inhumi were like when they were preying upon the Vanished People?"

"I've wondered about that. It must have been marvelous. Miraculous… For them, I mean."

"I agree. Let us suppose that some small trace of that remained behind, passed from generation to generation in some fashion. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

"I think so."

"Good."

I halted, waiting for Valico to catch up to us, then called to Oreb, who landed teetering at my feet.