Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (341 page)

What I did then was as automatic as if it had been Juli. I pulled the kid loose, shoved her behind me, and scowled at the brute who lurched toward us.

“Make yourself scarce,” I advised. “We don’t chase little girls where I come from. Haul off, now.”

The man reeled. I smelled the rankness of his rags as he thrust one grimy paw at the girl. I never was the hero type, but I’d started something which I had to carry through. I thrust myself between them and put my hand on the skean again.

“You—you Dry-towner.” The man set up a tipsy howl, and I sucked in my breath. Now I was in for it. Unless I got out of there damned fast, I’d lose what I’d come all the way to Charin to find.

I felt like handing the girl over. For all I knew, the bully could be her father and she was properly in line for a spanking. This wasn’t any of my business. My business lay at the end of the street, where Rakhal was waiting at the fires. He wouldn’t be there long. Already the smell of the Ghost Wind was heavy and harsh, and little flurries of sand went racing along the street, lifting the flaps of the doorways.

But I did nothing so sensible. The big lunk made a grab at the girl, and I whipped out my skean and pantomimed.

“Get going!”

“Dry-towner!” He spat out the word like filth, his pig-eyes narrowing to slits. “Son of the Ape! Earthman!”

“
Terranan!
” Someone took up the howl. There was a stir, a rustle, all along the street that had seemed empty, and from nowhere, it seemed, the space in front of me was crowded with shadowy forms, human and otherwise.

“Earthman!”

I felt the muscles across my belly knotting into a band of ice. I didn’t believe I’d given myself away as an Earthman. The bully was using the time-dishonored tactic of stirring up a riot in a hurry, but just the same I looked quickly round, hunting a path of escape.

“Put your skean in his guts, Spilkar! Grab him!”

“Hai-ai! Earthman!
Hai-ai!
”

It was the last cry that made me panic. Through the sultry glare at the end of the street, I could see the plumed, taloned figures of the Ya-men, gliding through the banners of smoke. The crowd melted open.

I didn’t stop to reflect on the fact—suddenly very obvious—that Rakhal couldn’t have been at the fires at all, and that my informant had led me into an open trap, a nest of Ya-men already inside Charin. The crowd edged back and muttered, and suddenly I made my choice. I whirled, snatched up the girl in my arms and ran straight toward the advancing figures of the Ya-men.

Nobody followed me. I even heard a choked shout that sounded like a warning. I heard the yelping shrieks of the Ya-men grow to a wild howl, and at the last minute, when their stiff rustling plumes loomed only a few yards away, I dived sidewise into an alley, stumbled on some rubbish and spilled the girl down.

“Run, kid!”

She shook herself like a puppy climbing out of water. Her small fingers closed like a steel trap on my wrist. “This way,” she urged in a hasty whisper, and I found myself plunging out the far end of the alley and into the shelter of a street-shrine. The sour stink of incense smarted in my nostrils, and I could hear the yelping of the Ya-men as they leaped and rustled down the alley, their cold and poisonous eyes searching out the recess where I crouched with the girl.

“Here,” she panted, “stand close to me on the stone—” I drew back, startled.

“Oh, don’t stop to argue,” she whimpered. “Come
here
!”

“
Hai-ai!
Earthman! There he is!”

The girl’s arms flung round me again. I felt her slight, hard body pressing on mine and she literally hauled me toward the pattern of stones at the center of the shrine. I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t caught her closer yet.

The world reeled. The street disappeared in a cone of spinning lights, stars danced crazily, and I plunged down through a widening gulf of empty space, locked in the girl’s arms. I fell, spun, plunged head over heels through tilting lights and shadows that flung us through eternities of freefall. The yelping of the Ya-men whirled away in unimaginable distances, and for a second I felt the unmerciful blackout of a power dive, with blood breaking from my nostrils and filling my mouth.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lights flared in my eyes.

I was standing solidly on my feet in the street-shrine, but the street was gone. Coils of incense still smudged the air. The God squatted toadlike in his recess. The girl was hanging limp, locked in my clenched arms. As the floor straightened under my feet I staggered, thrown off balance by the sudden return of the girl’s weight, and grabbed blindly for support.

“Give her to me,” said a voice, and the girl’s sagging body was lifted from my arms. A strong hand grasped my elbow. I found a chair beneath my knees and sank gratefully into it.

“The transmission isn’t smooth yet between such distant terminals,” the voice remarked. “I see Miellyn has fainted again. A weakling, the girl, but useful.”

I spat blood, trying to get the room in focus. For I was inside a room, a room of some translucent substance, windowless, a skylight high above me, through which pink daylight streamed. Daylight—and it had been midnight in Charin! I’d come halfway around the planet in a few seconds!

From somewhere I heard the sound of hammering, tiny, bell-like hammering, the chiming of a fairy anvil. I looked up and saw a man—a man?—watching me.

On Wolf you see all kinds of human, half-human and nonhuman life, and I consider myself something of an expert on all three. But I had never seen anyone, or anything, who so closely resembled the human and so obviously wasn’t. He, or it, was tall and lean, man-shaped but oddly muscled, a vague suggestion of something less than human in the lean hunch of his posture.

Manlike, he wore green tight-fitting trunks and a shirt of green fur that revealed bulging biceps where they shouldn’t be, and angular planes where there should have been swelling muscles. The shoulders were high, the neck unpleasantly sinuous, and the face, a little narrower than human, was handsomely arrogant, with a kind of wary alert mischief that was the least human thing about him.

He bent, tilted the girl’s inert body on to a divan of some sort, and turned his back on her, lifting his hand in an impatient, and unpleasantly reminiscent, gesture.

The tinkling of the little hammers stopped as if a switch had been disconnected.

“Now,” said the nonhuman, “we can talk.”

Like the waif, he spoke Shainsan, and spoke it with a better accent than any nonhuman I had ever known—so well that I looked again to be certain. I wasn’t too dazed to answer in the same tongue, but I couldn’t keep back a spate of questions:

“What happened? Who are you? What is this place?”

The nonhuman waited, crossing his hands—quite passable hands, if you didn’t look too closely at what should have been nails—and bent forward in a sketchy gesture.

“Do not blame Miellyn. She acted under orders. It was imperative you be brought here tonight, and we had reason to believe you might ignore an ordinary summons. You were clever at evading our surveillance, for a time. But there would not be two Dry-towners in Charin tonight who would dare the Ghost Wind. Your reputation does you justice, Rakhal Sensar.”

Rakhal Sensar!
Once again Rakhal!

Shaken, I pulled a rag from my pocket and wiped blood from my mouth. I’d figured out, in Shainsa, why the mistake was logical. And here in Charin I’d been hanging around in Rakhal’s old haunts, covering his old trails. Once again, mistaken identity was natural.

Natural or not, I wasn’t going to deny it. If these were Rakhal’s enemies, my real identity should be kept as an ace in reserve which might—just might—get me out alive again. If they were his friends…well, I could only hope that no one who knew him well by sight would walk in on me.

“We knew,” the nonhuman continued, “that if you remained where you were, the
Terranan
Cargill would have made his arrest. We know about your quarrel with Cargill, among other things, but we did not consider it necessary that you should fall into his hands at present.”

I was puzzled. “I still don’t understand. Exactly where am I?”

“This is the mastershrine of Nebran.”

Nebran!

The stray pieces of the puzzle suddenly jolted into place. Kyral had warned me, not knowing he was doing it. I hastily imitated the gesture Kyral had made, gabbling a few words of an archaic charm.

Like every Earthman who’s lived on Wolf more than a tourist season, I’d seen faces go blank and impassive at mention of the Toad God. Rumor made his spies omnipresent, his priests omniscient, his anger all-powerful. I had believed about a tenth of what I had heard, or less.

The Terran Empire has little to say to planetary religions, and Nebran’s cult is a remarkably obscure one, despite the street-shrines on every corner. Now I was in his mastershrine, and the device which had brought me here was beyond doubt a working model of a matter transmitter.

A matter transmitter, a working model—the words triggered memory. Rakhal was after it.

“And who,” I asked slowly, “are you, Lord?”

The green-clad creature hunched thin shoulders again in a ceremonious gesture. “I am called Evarin. Humble servant of Nebran and yourself,” he added, but there was no humility in his manner. “I am called the Toymaker.”

Evarin
. That was another name given weight by rumor. A breath of gossip in a thieves market. A scrawled word on smudged paper. A blank folder in Terran Intelligence. Another puzzle-piece snapped into place—
Toymaker
!

The girl on the divan sat up suddenly passing slim hands over her disheveled hair. “Did I faint, Evarin? I had to fight to get him into the stone, and the patterns were not set straight in that terminal. You must send one of the Little Ones to set them to rights. Toymaker, you are not listening to me.”

“Stop chattering, Miellyn,” said Evarin indifferently. “You brought him here, and that is all that matters. You aren’t hurt?”

Miellyn pouted and looked ruefully at her bare bruised feet, patted the wrinkles in her ragged frock with fastidious fingers. “My poor feet,” she mourned, “they are black and blue with the cobbles and my hair is filled with sand and tangles! Toymaker, what way was this to send me to entice a man? Any man would have come quickly, quickly, if he had seen me looking lovely, but you—you send me in rags!”

She stamped a small bare foot. She was not merely as young as she had looked in the street. Though immature and underdeveloped by Terran standards, she had a fair figure for a Dry-town woman. Her rags fell now in graceful folds. Her hair was spun black glass, and I—I saw what the rags and the confusion in the filthy street had kept me from seeing before.

It was the girl of the spaceport cafe, the girl who had appeared and vanished in the eerie streets of Canarsa.

Evarin was regarding her with what, in a human, might have been rueful impatience. He said, “You know you enjoyed yourself, as always, Miellyn. Run along and make yourself beautiful again, little nuisance.”

The girl danced out of the room, and I was just as glad to see her go. The Toymaker motioned to me.

“This way,” he directed, and led me through a different door. The offstage hammering I had heard, tiny bell tones like a fairy xylophone, began again as the door opened, and we passed into a workroom which made me remember nursery tales from a half-forgotten childhood on Terra. For the workers were tiny, gnarled
trolls
!

They were
chaks
.
Chaks
from the polar mountains, dwarfed and furred and half-human, with witchlike faces and great golden eyes, and I had the curious feeling that if I looked hard enough I would see the little toy-seller they had hunted out of the Kharsa. I didn’t look. I figured I was in enough trouble already.

Tiny hammers pattered on miniature anvils in a tinkling, jingling chorus of musical clinks and taps. Golden eyes focused like lenses over winking jewels and gimcracks. Busy elves. Makers of toys!

Evarin jerked his shoulders with an imperative gesture. I followed him through a fairy workroom, but could not refrain from casting a lingering look at the worktables. A withered leprechaun set eyes into the head of a minikin hound. Furred fingers worked precious metals into invisible filigree for the collarpiece of a dancing doll. Metallic feathers were thrust with clockwork precision into the wings of a skeleton bird no longer than my fingernail. The nose of the hound wabbled and sniffed, the bird’s wings quivered, the eyes of the little dancer followed my footsteps.

Toys?

“This way,” Evarin rapped, and a door slid shut behind us. The clinks and taps grew faint, fainter, but never ceased.

My face must have betrayed more than conventional impassivity, for Evarin smiled. “Now you know, Rakhal, why I am called Toymaker. Is it not strange—the masterpriest of Nebran, a maker of Toys, and the shrine of the Toad God a workshop for children’s playthings?”

Evarin paused suggestively. They were obviously not children’s playthings and this was my cue to say so, but I avoided the trap. Evarin opened a sliding panel and took out a doll.

She was perhaps the length of my longest finger, molded to the precise proportions of a woman, and costumed after the bizarre fashion of the Ardcarran dancing girls. Evarin touched no button or key that I could see, but when he set the figure on its feet, it executed a whirling, armtossing dance in a fast, tricky tempo.

“I am, in a sense, benevolent,” Evarin murmured. He snapped his fingers and the doll sank to her knees and poised there, silent. “Moreover, I have the means and, let us say, the ability to indulge my small fantasies.

“The little daughter of the President of the Federation of Trade Cities on Samarra was sent such a doll recently. What a pity that Paolo Arimengo was so suddenly impeached and banished!” The Toymaker clucked his teeth commiseratingly. “Perhaps this small companion will compensate the little Carmela for her adjustment to her new…position.”