The Altar at Asconel (2 page)

P
UZZELED
, the gaping country-folk fell silent, apart from one who laughed. But he too was silent the moment after Vix had scythed him with a murderous glare.

“Vix!” Spartak cried, and lost the self-control which ten years on Annanworld had ingrained in him. He caught up his robe and closed the distance between himself and his half-brother in a dozen loping strides, the loose soles of his sandals slapping up little clouds of yellow dust. “Was that why you came to seek me out?”

Vix spun to face him and set his hands squarely on his hips. He had to throw back his head to look directly into the younger man’s eyes; he was head and shoulders shorter of the two, but made up in muscles like steel springs for his lack of inches.

“I couldn’t believe I’d been told the truth about you!” he blazed. “I never thought that the son of a Warden of Asconel would skulk in his hole and make no move to right injustice! Well, now I’ve had it forced down my throat. I’m
off to find Tiorin and see if he still speaks a language with which an honest man needn’t fear to foul his mouth!”

“What are you talking about?” said Spartak in icy tones.

Vix’s green eyes flashed. “Ah, so you think to save your newly bearded face, do you? What’s this—you’re claiming not to have heard the news? That’s rich! On Annanworld, the university planet of the Empire, where all knowledge is collected and stored!”

Spartak took a deep breath, fighting the premonition that had overcome him at Vix’s astounding behavior. He said, “Our business is more with the past, trying to analyze what brought about the downfall of the Empire, than with the present. I’ve been doing the research for a history of Asconel, but the latest news I’ve had is—oh—five years old at least.”

“Save the sales talk for the yokels,” Vix grunted, jerking his head towards the villagers grouped by the roadside. “Well—I’ll believe you, because you’re my own father’s son. And then I’ll see what counterfeit metal you hide under that cheap brown robe. Hodat is dead, and—”

“Dead?” Spartak blurted. “When? How?”

And on the instant, so swiftly that he returned to full attention in time for Vix’s answer, he felt himself transported back in space and time to their last meeting: in a glade on the royal island of Gard, in Asconel’s placid tropical ocean.

They had come together, the three brothers, alone: Tiorin the eldest, Vix the next, and—standing a little apart, because he had been apart from birth, being the child of his father’s second wife—Spartak.

For long moments after the departure of the attendants who had accompanied them here, there was no sound except the distant plashing of the summer sea and the quiet humming of insects about their immemorial business of fertilizing the flowers. Spartak used the time to look at his half-brothers and fix them in his memory. He would miss them, despite the fact that they had never been as close to him as they were to each other.

They had the red hair of their mother and the stocky, brawny build of their father; so did Hodat, who was to be Warden of Asconel at noon today. But Spartak had the gaunt tallness of his mother’s line, rooted in a past of which
even she herself knew little—the late Warden had taken her a year after being left a widower, and then she was only a wandering singer and teacher who had been born twenty systems distant of an unknown father. Younger than Vix by four years, he already had the scholar’s stoop, the hooded thoughtful eyes of one much given to study.

Tiorin broke the uneasy silence. He had called the meeting, so the others waited on his words.

“It has all happened so suddenly,” he muttered, little above a whisper. There were nods of encouragement.

Suddenly!
Spartak thought. Why, only last month … And now three orphans, himself included. He thought of his mother, gone to death with her lord in the flaming ruin of their lightning-struck skyboat, and found he was picturing visions more horrible than he could bear—a roasted face, from the lipless hole of which came screams.

“I’m sure none of us ever made plans for this day,” Tiorin resumed. “Nor Hodat either—except that he knew he was to take the Warden’s chair eventually. So this is a matter we’ve never discussed between us. Now we must face it. Spartak?”

Startled at having his name thus uttered, Spartak raised his bent head.

“You’ve learned a deal about the fall of the old Empire,” Tiorin said. “You know what’s happened in many places—too many—since the prop of Imperial support was withdrawn.”

“You mean—” Spartak was groping. “You mean when there was a quarrel over the succession to power? Why, yes!”
So this is what it’s all about,
he added silently to himself.

“Now just a moment!” Vix took a pace forward. “Is there supposed to be some notion going around of usurping Hodat’s chair?”

Tiorin, who had matured a little past Vix’s suspicious touchiness, raised a pacifying hand. “You jump ahead of me, Vix. We’ve known since childhood that Hodat would one day succeed to the Warden’s chair, and I don’t think any of us would envy him this task. We’ve seen from the inside what it’s going to be like—an infinity of hard work,
a paucity of reward and comfort. But what I’m afraid of is something more subtle than the possibility you mentioned.”

He found himself a seat on a chair carved from the living trunk of a tree, and relaxed into it, his hair very bright against the dull brown bole.

“I don’t pretend to Spartak’s knowledge of what’s gone one elsewhere,” he continued. “But I’ve heard stories that frighten me.…It doesn’t have to be the doing of a rival heir which oversets a smooth succession. It might be an independent faction taking someone’s name in vain. Vix, you’ve generaled an army to put down insurrections in the northern islands, and you’re pretty well regarded over there.”

“I should think so,” Vix agreed without a trace of modesty, letting his hand fall to the butt of his sidearm.

“Now suppose in five years, or ten, some discontent arises there, and the rumor goes about that you’ll seize power and deliver them from some harsh decree of the Warden—may you not find yourself called to put down a revolt of which you’re the patron without your knowledge?”

Spartak felt a stir of admiration at the way Tiorin was broaching this subject to the touchy Vix; he himself could never have found such tact, being unused to the devious paths of diplomacy.

“It could well happen,” Vix conceded grudgingly.

“We have nine hundred million people on this planet,” Tiorin stressed. “It could happen far too easily! It could happen to me, likewise—I’ve never disciplined myself as Hodat had to, for I’ve always assumed he’d live and inherit, and consequently I’ve been … let’s say more popular than he was. I’ve had a lot more fun as a result. But I’d hate to think that anyone could visualize me as a more easy-going Warden, and try to rebel against Hodat in the hope of having me take over. Even you, Spartak, might find yourself in a similar plight.”

“Me? How?” Spartak raised his eyes in disbelief.

“I mean no disrespect,” Tiorin emphasized. “But your reputation isn’t so—so fiery as ours. An ambitious party wishing to become a power behind the Warden’s chair might think of you as pliable, a potential puppet. Knowing you as I do, I believe they’d be mistaken.
But …!”

Vix clapped his half-brother on the shoulder with bear-like
clumsiness; the blow stung, but Spartak, from long habit, smiled under it. “I’ll grant that,” Vix declared. “I used to think he was just a milksop, but I’ve come to have some respect for brains since I’ve had a man’s problems to contend with. He doesn’t fool easily, this boy here!”

At age twenty-two, it was Vix’s use of the term “boy” which made Spartak wince, rather than the bang on his shoulder. He said, to cover his annoyance, “Well, Tiorin? What lies behind this smoke screen of verbiage?”

“I think we should all leave Asconel,” Tiorin said.

Once more there was silence. During it, Spartak thought with an aching heart of a lifetime without this green, hospitable world, its orderly cities, its prosperous commerce, its high reputation among less fortunate neighbor systems, its bleak majestic mountains and its soft tropical sea.…He almost cried aloud:
Not to see Gard again, not to stand and watch the sun go down behind the Dragons Fangs, not to eat island-caught fish and bread from the plains of Yul—!

And then he thought of his mother, a wandering singer and teacher who had seen and perhaps loved twenty worlds before she saw and loved the man to whom she bore her son.

He said, in a voice that surprised him by its steadiness, “I think you’re right, Tiorin. And I’ll go. I’ve often wanted to visit Annanworld—wished I could have been sent there to school as used to be done in the old days of the Empire. I think I could almost be happy there, among the stored-up knowledge of the galaxy.”

“I can believe that,” Tiorin said with a wry smile. “And it makes me envy you. For myself, I propose to travel, merely. It will take a long time to blot out Asconel in my heart. And you, Vix?”

They both turned and looked at him. Spartak half expected him to bluster that he would not leave his home-that to be asked to go was tantamount to accusing him of plotting a revolution against Hodat. But though some such outburst apparently trembled on the tip of his tongue, it never emerged.

“Well, indeed, what is there to keep me?” he began in a high angry voice, as though rebuking himself. “It’s going
to be a quiet dull place under sober Hodat, isn’t it? There’s no more discontent in the north that can’t be snuffed out by a squad of men under a drunken sergeant, and if I pick fights in the street to pass the time the city guard will haul me in and my brother—my own brother—will talk to me like a father! And I’ve had most of the women I ever wanted here, and tasted all the best vintages and hunted the few remaining game-animals so successfully we’re reduced to mere cubs and ancient cripples! Yes, I’ll go, and with good will, to some place where they fancy a fighting man—take service, maybe, with the army of Mercator or go hunting pirates in the Big Dark. Yes, I’ll go.”

But he looked desperately unhappy as he stared straight ahead of him, not seeing the green foliage of the trees.

And all the memory of that final meeting was vivid in one single second when Spartak hung on Vix’s answer ten years afterward, there beside the stone gatehouse of his order on Annanworld.

“Hodat is dead. Murdered,” the redhead stressed. “And a usurper has made himself Warden. And he has brought a foul cult from no one knows where, and his evil priests lord it over the citizens of Asconel!”

“But—when? How?” Spartak clutched at the other’s arm, a torrent of questions rising in his mind.

“The news was already stale when it reached me on Batyra Dap. My first thought was to raise forces and liberate the planet, but it costs hard cash to hire an army, and I’ve—not been so lucky as I hoped.” A grim sardonic twist drew up half his mouth; the sword-slash seemed to have paralyzed the other side of his lips. “And anyway, by this time Bucyon—that’s his name, mark it well—has by all reports made a cringing pack of dogs of our once-proud people. I thought you’d have left Annanworld as I left Batyra Dap, hot on the news; instead, I’ve found you here.”

“You must tell me—” Abruptly aware of where they stood on the hot dry road, Spartak broke off. “No, come inside and take refreshment and tell me there.”

“They won’t let me in,” Vix grunted.

“Not you—the weapons you wear. We’re an Order sworn to absolute non-violence; no knife, sword or gun is permitted
inside the gate. But you may safely leave your weapons with Brother Ulwyn, and collect them on departure.”

“Much help you’ll be,” Vix sighed. “To think I came so far, and find you bound by an oath to abjure violence, when that’s what it’ll take to set our home-world free. Still, I’ll come with you and tell the tale, and see if the horrors in it stir some spark of love for Asconel after all this time.”

“A
FINE
comfortable backwater you picked yourself!” Vix exploded. He was in a padded chair in the anteroom of the refectory; the order to which Spartak had pledged himself had a tradition of hospitality to travelers, and it had only taken a word about Vix’s journey to the chief steward to produce a meal of cold meats, bread and fruit such as the Warden himself on Asconel would have been proud to present. Also there was wine aplenty, though not stronger drink nor any of the Imperial euphorics like ancinard. The rules of the foundation decreed a clear head.

“Now I begin to see,” the redhead added around the leg of katalabs on which he was chewing, “why you decided to come here rather than be a wanderer like Tiorin and me!”

It was going to take a long time to dispel the hostility Vix had conceived towards him, Spartak realized. And that wasn’t so surprising if one reflected on it. After all, at their last meeting at home, Vix had confessed that he had regarded Spartak as a mere milksop, not recognizing until he came of age that the difference in their temperaments which he mistook for cowardice was the mask covering a considerable degree of intelligence. Overlay this lasting childhood impression with the setbacks and disappointments leading up to this encounter on distant Annanworld, and you got an inevitable antagonism.

Determined not to feed it, Spartak said mildly, “Annanworld has been as little touched by the disasters associated with the downfall of Argus as was Asconel—less, perhaps. I don’t know why it was originally decided to make the main center of galactic learning an isolated world like this—maybe the idea was that it should be free from the hustle
and bustle of Imperial affairs—but it certainly paid off in the long run.”

“Don’t tell me,” Vix muttered. “I can see, and taste, all that!” He drained his wine-mug and offered it for replenishment to the gray-robed novice waiting on them.

“By the stars, I haven’t had a meal like this in five years! And to think I was fool enough to pick a fighting order for myself!”

Startled, Spartak blinked at him. “You joined an order too?’

Mouth full, Vix nodded. “I took service with one of the rump forces left over from the Imperial collapse, full of big-headed ideas about re-imposing galactic rule on the rebellious worlds. But it’s all comet-dust. I’ve slept on the bare ground as often as not, drunk dirty water till the medics had to stick me full of needles and bathe me in rays, collected this scar and others which I can’t show in polite company.…Ah, but it hasn’t all been so bad. I’ve enjoyed myself in my own fashion, for if I hadn’t I’d have dug myself a piece of mud somewhere and planted corn.”

He swallowed the last of his food, leaned back in his chair, and burped enormously. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he stared at Spartak.

“You’re waiting there very calm and smug, aren’t you?” he accused. “I thought you’d ply me with questions all the time I was eating!”

“I was sure you’d tell me in your own good time,” Spartak answered peaceably. He was going to have to tread very carefully in his dealings with this irascible older brother, that was plain. “In any case, the shock of hearing Hodat was dead seems to have—” He made a vague gesture. “Chilled my mind, so to speak. I can hardly credit it.”

“Ah, you always were a corked bottle. Ashamed to show your feelings in front of anyone else. If you have any feelings, that is.” With the solid food in his guts, Vix was reverting to his normal manner.

“I’d like to hear the full story now,” Spartak suggested.

“From me you won’t get the full story,” Vix countered. “I guess no one knows it except those devils on Asconel—Bucyon, and the witch Lydis, and maybe that monster Shry!” He shot a keen look at Spartak. “You flinched when
I said ‘witch’, and ‘devil’ too—don’t you hold with such terms?”

Spartak looked at the table before him, choosing his words carefully. “There are certainly records of mutations developing possessed of what are generally called supernormal talents,” he granted. “Indeed, it was part of Imperial policy for some millennia to maintain the stability of the
status quo
by locating such mutations and—if they hadn’t already been put to death by superstitious peasants or townsfolk—transporting them to the lonely Rim worlds. There are said to be whole planets populated by such mutations now. But words like ‘witch’ have—ah—unfortunate connotations.”

“I’ll tell you something,
kid brother.
You’re talking like your dust-dry books, not like a human being!” Vix gulped another mouthful of wine. “Maybe you’ve been cooped up here so long you’ve forgotten how to make regular conversation!”

The jab went home. Spartak flushed. “I’m sorry. It’s true I’ve spent more time reading than talking these past several years. But it’s been in a good cause,” he added defensively, thinking to penetrate the other’s hostility. “I’m working on a history of Asconel.”

“Faugh! I’m not concerned with the dead past. I’m worried about the future. Don’t your books tell you that that’s under our control, while the past is what we find it and we can’t set it to rights?” Another gulp of wine, and once more the mug was held out for refilling. “Besides, I don’t much hold with working at distance. Asconel is its own history.”

“I—” On the verge of a hot objection, Spartak checked. “I’ll tell you something, too,” he continued after a moment’s pause. “That’s a far more philosophical remark than I ever expected to hear from your lips!”

“By the nine moons of Argus, if you can’t learn something in ten years’ traveling, you might as well be dead.” Vix put his hand to his waist, as though uncomfortable at the absence of his sidearms. “And I’m not dead. Well, let’s not bicker among ourselves. I’ll tell you what I can, if you’ll agree not to argue about my calling Lydis a witch.”

You challenged me on the term
—But Spartak bit back the retort. He was now absorbing the important points of what Vix had told him: Hodat dead, a usurper ruling Asconel,
some cult with an arrogant priesthood dominating the citizens. All this added up to a frightening whole. He nodded for Vix to go on.

“The reason they call Lydis a witch seems plain enough to me,” the redhead asserted. “Don’t you recall Hodat as the most levelheaded of us? Don’t you recall what plans he’d made, of his own accord, for his eventual marriage and fatherhood?”

“Surely,” Spartak agreed. “He had in mind to make a formal alliance with some other world which had recovered well from the Imperial collapse.”

“Right. What could have made him settle for a woman whose very home planet wasn’t known?” Vix thundered. “If that wasn’t witchcraft, I’m a—No, I get ahead of myself. Listen.

“This woman Lydis appeared one day, off a ship from no one knows where. Somehow, she got herself to the attention of Hodat, and once they’d met, things went out of control. He said, so the story runs, that this woman knew his innermost thoughts—that she was like a part of himself. Before anyone knew what had happened, she was being talked of as his wife-to-be.

“True, for a while things went well enough, I’m told. The witch Lydis was said to be beautiful, which is a good start for any woman, although she never appeared in public except in a long black gown with a veil over her hair. Like Tiorin foresaw, there was a plot to depose Hodat because of some decree or other, and allegedly she warned him of it, having seen into the minds of those who planned it.”

“A telepathic mutant,” Spartak muttered. “There are said to be some such.…I’m sorry. Continue.”

“So far so good. Then the priests of Belizuek started to come in. It had always been Imperial policy that if anyone was fool enough to want to spend time talking to idols or the empty air they should be allowed to get on with it, so under the guise of religious freedom they were permitted to land. Hodat started listening to them a great deal. I ought to say this was some cult to which Lydis herself adhered, by the way—said it was from her home world of Brinze.

“People started to get worried when the rumor got around that Hodat was considering adopting this belief himself; when the word was passed that he might impose it on the whole of Asconel, people got really alarmed.” Vix broke off, noting an expression of dismay on Spartak’s long bearded face. “Hm! Taking notice now, aren’t you?”

“But—Oh, never mind,” Spartak snapped. “Go on!”

“The first and worst of the priests was a man called Shry, a cripple of some sort in a black gown. By then, Hodat was completely obsessed with Lydis, and Shry had Lydis’s ear. A new tax was imposed to finance a foundation of Belizuek teaching and build a temple, and that was just the thin end of the wedge.

“They say Grydnik was the first person to grow anxious. Remember him?”

“Ah—Port Controller of the main spaceport,” Spartak rapped.

“Correct. I knew him well at one time. He started to wonder where these hordes were coming from—there seemed to be a never-ending supply of priests and acolytes and whatever. He checked on this place Brinze in all the Imperial records. There is no Imperial record of any such planet.” Vix slapped the table with a look of triumph.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The Empire never embraced the whole of the galaxy, though people generally assume it did. It could be a Rim world, some distance from the hub.” But Spartak felt sweat crawling on his skin.

“And what benefit to Asconel is likely to come from a Rim world probably peopled by pirates and mutants?” countered Vix. “But wait a while longer. I haven’t told you the half of it.” His face darkened.

“The tax was followed by the extension of special privileges to the priests, the foundation of temples in all the big cities—this thing one year, and that the next. And then …

“I guess it was the sacrifices which sparked the last resistance in Hodat. Bemused though he was by the witch, he yet had enough love for Asconel and its people to refuse that horrible last step.”

“Sacrifices?” Spartak heard his own voice utter the word an infinitely long distance away. “Not—human sacrifices?”

“Human,” Vix echoed, and the word seemed to curdle the air of the room. “And it was then, while Hodat yet refused, that Bucyon came from space with a fleet the equal of the one I used to fight with over by Batyra Dap—ex-Imperial ships.

“They took over. They killed Hodat. And Bucyon sits in the Warden’s chair with Lydis at his side—she having been the bait dangled ahead of Hodat to lead him to disaster. And Asconel is a ruin of all our father’s hopes.”

“Is there no resistance to the usurper?” Spartak whispered.

“Some, some. I hear that Trigrid Zen—remember him?—is either in exile or in hiding on one of the outer planets of the home system, trying to find an opening in the net Bucyon has cast around Asconel. But at last hearing, the devils had proved too clever, and there’s no spirit in the people to support an uprising.”

Spartak got blindly to his feet. He said, “I—I must go and speak to Father Erton, and tell him I’m called away. And then I’ll fetch my belongings and come with you.”

“Well!” Vix studied him. “That’s more like the response I’d hoped for, late though it is. But I warn you, I can’t tote all your beloved books and such around the galaxy! I’ve grown used to traveling light in these past ten years.”

“My books are in my head,” Spartak said quietly, and went out.