The Avengers of Carrig (17 page)

Puzzled, Ambrus said, “Sir, you say you’re a stranger in this city—What makes you take so keen an interest in our affairs?”

“I’m a man who hates injustice where it’s found,” the gray-haired man answered. “Sit down, have a drink, and let’s talk of what needs to be done.”

“If you hadn’t got out of the way in time,” the woman Yanna said, “I swear that barbarian would have strangled you!”

“Ambrus?” Belfeor leaned back in his chair. “Ambrus is a silly little coward. Not like his father, who was in charge here when Pargetty and I first arrived. Old Sir Bavis had guts and to spare. They said a lot of dirty things about how he’d fixed the king-hunt to keep himself in his job for the previous eighteen years, but no one ever called him a coward and lived to repeat it. He even tried to give me orders—me! Of course, when he found out I wasn’t impressed by his threats of divine vengeance he chucked himself off the tower, but you can’t imagine Ambrus having even that sort of misplaced courage, can you?”

“I think you’re leading us into real trouble,” Pargetty said in a hesitant tone.

“Trouble?” Belfeor echoed sarcastically. “What trouble? Everything’s going as smooth as oil! We’re getting enough ore out to—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Pargetty interrupted. “You may laugh at the idea of divine vengeance, but to these people it’s something absolutely real. And the way you’re flouting local superstitions—”

Belfeor snorted. “You and your damned Corps indoctrination! Next you’ll be telling me that the Corps is right to leave these barbarian worlds to their own devices.”

Pargetty flushed. He said defensively, “You know how the Corps treated me! And it was because I stood up and said what I thought about their attitude to the ZRP’s, leaving dozens of habitable worlds to the mercy of a bunch of mud-grubbing barbarians. But they’re still a factor to be reckoned with, and there’s no point in deliberately courting extra problems, is there? You’re willing enough to listen to me when I’m talking about untapped resources on this planet, but when I try and give you advice about the people you spit in my eye!”

His voice had risen to a raucous pitch. Startled at this from the normally diffident Pargetty, Belfeor shrugged.

“Okay, so tell us about the people!”

Pargetty drew a deep breath. “Look! Of course it’s true that thanks to the Corps these people have been cut off from Galactic civilization and reverted to such a primitive level you can’t really regard them as human, but even so they do have their own hopes and beliefs and ambitions and aspirations, and they have to be taken into account.”

“Hark at the preacher!” Belfeor sneered. “I never knew you cared so much about these savages, Meard!”

“Don’t use that name on this world!” Yanna broke in. It was her turn to sound nervous. She glanced around as though expecting someone to have overheard.

“You stay out of this,” Belfeor snapped. “Our friend Pargetty was lecturing us about the natives. Let him finish—he hasn’t made a worthwhile point yet, and he’d better if he doesn’t want to waste my time.”

“Think about our situation!” Pargetty exclaimed. “There are a hundred and two of us in a city of seventeen thousand-odd. Already the peasants from the surrounding area are pouring in by the villageful for the spring festival. How are they going to react to your canceling the king-hunt? We’re outnumbered a hundred and seventy-to-one even without the villagers! And what about the people who’ve come with the spring caravans? They’re bound to be angry and disappointed—the king-hunt is what draws them here, and they won’t like to be cheated of their chance to trade. Haven’t you thought of all that, Belfeor?”

Belfeor negligently drew the energy gun with which he had threatened Ambrus. “There’s enough charge in one of these to fry a hundred and seventy people,” he said. “If they stand still long enough and don’t run away in panic as they’ve done up till now! Damnation, Pargetty, what’s made you change your tune like this? Were you lying when you said if I made myself legal ruler of Carrig I could run the show without opposition?”

“Didn’t you pay attention to anything I told you?” stormed Pargetty. “You made yourself ‘regent’ of Carrig, not ‘ruler’! As far as the natives are concerned, the lords of this city are only viceroys for the gods, and to prove that the gods still approve of them being in charge they
have to perform various rituals and symbolic actions, like killing the parradile. They see themselves as existing in a universal nexus of divine forces, and they expect their rulers to be bound by the laws they themselves repect.”

Belfeor gazed at him coldly. “Hah! This is a far cry from what you told us while we were planning the operation, isn’t it? You insisted the scheme was foolproof; you said the natives would blindly obey anyone who went through the initial rigmarole to make things look legal!”

Pargetty slumped back in his chair. “I thought it was obvious that you couldn’t change the people’s superstitious nature overnight,” he retorted. “Don’t you understand anything about the primitive mentality?”

Yanna said slowly, “Belfeor, I think Pargetty has a very important point there. You ought to do as he says. After all, he’s been right all along the line so far.”

Belfeor slapped his open hand on the table before him. He said, “Now you listen to me! Pargetty, you asked if I’d given any thought to our situation. I’ll ask you the same question. Have you forgotten that those stupid fools aboard the
Wolfshark
shot down a ship? We don’t know what it was—it fell into atmosphere and burned up—but what else is it likely to have been except a Patrol cruiser, here to rotate an agent or maybe even to drop someone off to replace Heron? Sure, we can rely to some extent on the Corps’s resources being overstretched, so they probably couldn’t spare a ship to investigate immediately, but they’re bound to turn up sooner or later.

“Before that happens, I want, you want, we all want to stockpile enough radioactives to keep us in luxury the rest of our lives. That’s the purpose of the operation, isn’t it? What’s more, we need enough in hand to finance any legal fight we may get involved in if someone opens his big mouth later on and they find out where our ore-strike was actually made. That means we
have
to drive the natives and keep up the output from the mines. We’ve just about broken even so far; having to buy a second ship used up our first year’s profit—or hadn’t that occurred to you? Once we get clear of here, with a decent cache of radioactives in the home system that we can draw on as it suits us, we’re laughing! We can lie till we’re blue about where it’s coming from; we can live in style, and with luck we’ll even
be able to afford longevity treatments. That’s what you’re after, isn’t it? You missed out on your chance to earn a century of extra life in the Corps, and this is your only way to recoup! So why in the galaxy do you want to waste time on some lunatic superstition when what we have to do is mine and ship, mine and ship, every possible minute until we’re forced to quit?”

“Fixing up the king-hunt to keep the natives happy isn’t wasting time!” Pargetty flared. “It’s—it’s insurance!”

“Go and fix it, then! You’re no use to me in your present state of dithering. Put on your little show for the locals—it’s about all you’re fit for. Though I’ve no idea where you’re going to find a parradile for the hunt. I had them cleared out of the hills; I told you.”

“You should have consulted Pargetty before you did that,” Yanna said. “What was the point of it, anyway?”

“They were such a damned nuisance!” Belfeor rapped. “They interfered with our prospectors—you could hardly walk into a cave in the hills without finding one—and what’s more they’ve been bleeding the local farmers white, eating about a fifth of their produce. Parasites would be a better name for them than parradiles!”

Pargetty looked pale and sick. “Oh, you’ve probably already cooked us,” he said, getting to his feet. “You’ve blasted local tradition wide open like the insensitive idiot you are. I’ll go and arrange a king-hunt with Sir Gurton Knole. Maybe that’ll give us a breathing-space. But I won’t make any promises. My guess is that your stupidity and incompetence have made certain of a rebellion already!”

Belfeor was so surprised at this display of spirit from the normally inoffensive Pargetty that he was still gaping wordlessly when the door of the room slammed shut.

“Good news,” Gus Langenschmidt said quietly into the communicator.

“Tell me, then,” Brzeska invited.

“I’m speaking from a tavern in Carrig that we’ve more or less taken over. Slee fixed it up for us to come in with a caravan from Dayomar. The way he organized adequate cover on short notice for the whole sixty of us was an absolute model of efficiency, and I think he deserves a merit entry on his record for it. We came in as a group of
mercenary soldiers to guard the caravan; he planted a bandit-scare in Dayomar and within days it got to the point where no caravan master could have put his show on the road without an escort. Then, of course, Slee offered our services, and there we were.

“We’ve been here about twenty days now. It’s very lucky that this turned out to be a year when the spring new moon falls late; we’ve had a chance to take proper stock of the situation, and it’s just what we hoped for. I don’t know whether Belfeor realizes, though if he is relying on a failed Corps probationer for advice he damned well ought to, but he’s sitting on a ticking bomb. He’s disregarded local custom so flagrantly even the turncoats who threw in their lot with his gang have had second thoughts. The other evening I walked out of the tavern and found Ambrus being stoned by a gang of kids. Know who I mean?”

Brzeska nodded. “The renegade son of the former regent, correct?”

“That’s him. Well, he’d just had it from Belfeor’s own lips that there wasn’t going to be a king-hunt this year, and he was scared out of his wits, scared enough to come down into the city at the risk of his life to spread the news. So I put him up on a table in the tavern and made sure that the most gossipy clients heard the story right away.

“That was precisely what we needed. The city’s on the boil now. Everyone’s just waiting for the night of the new moon; then, if Belfeor doesn’t call the king-hunt as he’s meant to, they’ll go and pull him into little bits, energy guns notwithstanding. It’s going to be a bloody mess, but it means we can keep our interference to a minimum.

“Possibly it was hearing the reaction to Ambrus’ announcement which changed Belfeor’s mind—I don’t know. Anyway, a day or two later Sir Gurton Knole, the current head of Clan Parradile, was instructed to organize a king-hunt after all. But it’s too late for that. It’ll be a farce, and everyone knows it. Traditionally, the best young pilots from all the clans practice for months on end in their gliders before going out to shoot the king down with great-big pointed darts. They’re fired from a sort of crossbow arrangement, the bow part being fixed and the bowstrings being made of the dried elastic juice of a local tree, called kowtschook. Look into the etymology of that if
you get time—it’s an interesting survival.

“After what happened last year, when Belfeor just stood on a handy hill, looking inappropriately bored, and shot down a parradile with his energy gun, the young men are understandably not enthusiastic. Instead of spending their time practicing for the hunt, they’ve preferred to plot against Belfeor—when they were allowed a rest from the mines in the Smoking Hills. For all I know, there’s a local underground resistance as well as the one we’re whipping up. In fact I’m sure there must be.

“Speaking of the mines, by the way, I managed to plant a couple of agents there, and they say there’s no doubt at all of what the gang are up to. They have crushers, grinders, sedimentation apparatus, all kinds of prospecting and mining gear, which they’ve illegally imported. They’re refining the radioactives down to about 88 percent pure and flying them out by glider to the place you told us about. I’ve been wondering whether you could locate their cache. It must be pretty close to Cyclops, probably even in their home system if they have an asteroid belt, which seems like the logical hiding place, and by this time it’s probably big enough to give a blip on a mass-detector. They’re refining about four or five tons a day, and that’s a hell of a lot of heavy elements.”

“We’re taking care of that,” Brzeska said. “As soon as we can detach a cruiser from somewhere else, it’s going to scout the Cyclops system. As you say, by now the cache must be pretty conspicuous.”

“Excellent.”

“How about the—ah—the
divine intervention?”

“All in hand,” Langenschmidt said. “That’s why I planted those agents in the mines. Half Carrig will probably be knocked down by the eruptions, but Belfeor won’t be among the people who get up afterward.”

No matter how widely publicized, a denial never catches up with a rumor. Gus Langenschmidt watched with satisfaction, during the days that followed, how that ancient precept was being proved all over again in Carrig.

Once having allowed Ambrus to put into circulation the original story that there was to be no king-hunt, Belfeor had made certain that even those who most dearly desired to see him return to conformity with the obligations of a regent, scoffed at the parody of a hunt that was being organized this year. It was clear that the usurper was acting under duress, not from a proper sense of his duty toward the gods, and consequently the most ignorant and docile of the peasants who had massed in the city for the festival decided that he was no longer the lawful lord of Carrig, but a tyrant and blasphemer to be defied at all costs. The city-folk, of course, had had two full years to reach the same conclusion, and in every home, every tavern, every inn, the commonest toast was always to Belfeor’s downfall.

Late arrivals wanting to place their usual wagers on the contenders in the king-hunt found there were no betting-tables set up; over the doors of the houses and shops there were symbols of all the clans except the clan of the invaders, who had long ago forgotten the totem Pargetty advised them to adopt; bolder spirits dipped their festival garlands in black dye and hung them out in tatters, stark sign of the city-wide mourning … and not merely mourning, but grumbling that grew louder and louder with each day that passed.

A sense of sullen resistance was abroad, until one could almost feel the foundations of the city vibrating with suppressed anger.

Other factors reinforced the universal sense of the gods’ displeasure. Sited where it was, Carrig had a level of background radiation ten or twelve percent higher than the planetary average, thanks to the radioactive deposits in
the volcanic range. However, the local people had developed good tolerance for it, and while the incidence of abortions was higher than in the southland, they hardly realized the fact.

Among the peasants farming the actual slopes of the Smoking Hills, though, the chances of stillborn and deformed children were unsually great. The peasants themselves generally put up with this; they were used to having to bury every second or third child before the age of a year, and anyhow their little farms could not support very large families. Moreover, in the hot southlands it was notorious that disease accounted for an equally high proportion of babies.

Despite this customary resignation to fate, there had always been a slow trickle of young married couples toward the city, in the hope of escaping the danger of bearing dead offspring. Now that they were being compelled to work in Belfeor’s mines without adequate radiation shielding, the city-folk also were losing their babies, and once Langenschmidt had planted a rumor to account for this in terms of a curse from the gods, it ran through the entire territory like wildfire.

Pleased, he cast about for ways of stressing Belfeor’s evil nature still further. The citizens of Carrig were much concerned about signs and portents, he remembered. Obviously it would help things along if a few suitable miracles could be arranged …

Carved in the rock at the foot of the citadel on which the temple and the fortress perched, there was an ancient statue of Larso-Veng, the god of good fortune, which was very popular with the townsfolk. It was the custom for people concluding contracts about some business venture to go to the statue and pat its plump jolly face before putting things in hand. Even foreign caravan-masters often did so, and no barge-skipper would fail to visit the statue before shipping cargoes down-river to the coast.

The morning after Langenschmidt decided it was time for omens, the skipper and helmsman of a boat that had come specially to Carrig for the king-hunt, decided not to stay after all, since the hunt would be such a sorry farce this year, and went gloomily to touch the statue. They
reached up toward its face, on which centuries of gentle stroking had put a high gloss, and discovered to their amazement that the stone cheeks were wet.

Exclaiming, they looked closer, and saw that out of the god’s eyes slow tears were oozing.

The same evening a graat went mad in the marketplace. One moment it had been standing quietly under its load of cloth while its owner discussed the price of a bale of felt with a stall-holder, looking docile enough for a curious soldier, a caravan guard, to prod and pat it as though with a mind to buying it; the next instant saw it rear on its hind legs, shrieking and kicking out in all directions. It took six men to rope it and hold it still long enough for it to be killed.

Furious, the owner entirely agreed with the soldier about the reason for the graat’s maddened cavorting. This whole city of Carrig was unlucky now. Had not the god of good fortune wept over the condition of the place?

Going to the never-failing well in the back courtyard of Clan Twywit’s town house, to which the family always moved from its country estate for the season of the spring new moon, a brawny cook dropped her bucket twenty feet to the water and drew it up full of scarlet blood. She let it fall again, screaming, and a score of scullions, turnspits, skivvies and footmen came to see what was wrong. Gawping, they agreed among themselves that so many miracles in so short a time could indicate only one thing.

As one, they turned and stared at the high pinnacle of the watchtower atop the fortress. Belfeor was there …

One of them was deputed to take the news to Sir Malan Corrie himself, so that he should be fully aware of the serious situation.

When the stories of the omens he had organized came back in embroidered form to the tavern where Langenschmidt had established his headquarters, he was astonished and delighted to discover how word-of-mouth transmission had improved the raw material. The well in Clan Twywit’s house, for example, into which he had contrived to have spilled a scarlet dye, was now reported to be full
of dead bodies, murdered and thrown there during the winter by Belfeor’s henchmen. People swore that the maddened graat in the marketplace had screamed curses in a human voice, damning Belfeor. And the god of good fortune had not merely had tears oozing from tiny sacs concealed in its eye-sockets; its whole expression was said to have changed from merry joviality to deepest gloom.

It sounded as though he was on the right track. With the help of his colleagues he dreamed up another handful of similar omens and made sure that they were witnessed by the largest possible number of solid, trustworthy citizens. It was like pouring oil on a fire of damp wood.

Two days later still, with the new moon imminent, the workers in the mines mutinied. One of the overseers was tossed into an ore-crusher before the lavish use of energy guns restored order; and even then the men refused to work at more than a snail’s pace until Belfeor himself came and assured them that the king-hunt would indeed take place and they would be given time off to watch it. According to Langenschmidt’s two agents in the mine, Belfeor looked badly upset and kept screaming insults at his followers.

In the evening it was announced that he had sent for Sir Gurton Knole, presumably to discuss matters of ritual, but by that time Langenschmidt had played his ace of trumps. He had sent out his entire band of sixty Corps agents on a single errand: to inform as many people as possible that Belfeor had driven the parradiles out of the Smoking Hills. What then was he going to hunt this year?

Then he sat back, rubbing his hands, and Waited for the usurper to tumble into the trap he had dug himself.

Last year Ambrus had still felt sure enough of himself to endure standing on this parapet around the watchtower without brooding on the fact that his father had cast himself to his death from a spot not five yards distant.

This year …

He tried to avoid the eyes of his uncle, Sir Gurton, standing beside Belfeor in his ceremonial regalia, and to concentrate instead on watching the sun set over the westerly end of the Smoking Hills. It was a fine clear evening, and the sun was tinging the few low clouds with pink.

But to look at the Smoking Hills now was to look at Belfeor’s handiwork. A web of machinery had been spun across them, at the cost of who could tell how many lives: gantry cranes, cableways, chains of ore-buckets leading down from the mine openings to the huge crushers and refining machines. By turning his coat, Ambrus had escaped having to slave over there like the majority of the adult males in Carrig, but he knew at secondhand all about what went on there, and the memory of what he had been told made his stomach churn.

Against his will he found himself turning to glance at Belfeor, and was pleased to see how completely the man had lost his self-possession. His face was dark with suppressed anger and he was sweating copiously. By his side Pargetty was trying to calm him, but that seemed to be just one more irritation. Finally he burst out savagely, “How much longer do we have to stand around here like dummies?”

Pargetty looked appalled. His eyes burning, Sir Gurton half-turned.

“Till the evening star appears,” he snapped.

“This—this rigmarole!” Belfeor took out a kerchief and mopped his perspiring forehead. “Stupid, time-wasting … Oh, what’s the odds? It’s got to be done, I guess.”

Pargetty made another attempt at hushing him. He took no notice. “And what happens if there isn’t a parradile out there for me to kill, hey?” he demanded. “Is that allowed for in your damn-fool ritual?”

Sir Gurton scowled and did not deign to answer. Ambrus clenched his fists. How could he ever have been so blind as to throw in his lot with this arrogant babbler? He felt his cheeks grow hot with shame. To put an extra pace between himself and the man for whom he now felt only repugnance, he took a step back, and the heavy ceremonial sword slung at his side tapped his thigh, swinging.

Faint in the distance could be heard the noise as the nobles of Carrig assembled for the evening ceremony. In past years there would have been shouting and excitement, a sense of grand occasion. Now there was merely the dull tramp of many feet, with sometimes a door slamming to. The servers, acolytes, and sages, ranked on the parapet according to traditional form, shifted restlessly from foot
to foot. Ambrus wondered why they had permitted him to join them; having disowned his clan he should not legally be taking part. Possibly the answer was that they gave him so little thought now they did not care whether he was present or not.

“I think I see the evening star,” whispered the sharpest-eyed of the young servers, staring upward with concentration. He reached for Sir Gurton’s staff, meaning to guide it in the right direction in case the old man’s vision had not yet shown the star to him.

At that very moment, however, something dark and flapping rose from among the smoke that crested the volcanoes. All those on the parapet exclaimed with one voice.

“The king! The king!”

“Yes, but there’s something strange about it!” Ambrus said excitedly. “Look! It’s carrying something in its talons!”

Sir Gurton, peering where the others pointed, hesitated. He said, “Can anyone discern what it is?”

“I think,” the young server said, and had to swallow nervously before going on—“I think it’s a man. Hanging by some kind of harness under the parradile’s body!”

They stared incredulously for a long moment. This was so extraordinary that even Sir Gurton forgot he had not yet made the formal announcement to open the king-hunt season. Belfeor broke the silence impatiently at last.

“Well, what different does it make?” he roared. “There’s a parradile—isn’t that what you wanted?”

No one took any notice. The parradile was gliding closer, crossing the outskirts of the city, giving the occasional lazy stroke with its vast wings to keep it on a course directly toward the fortress. It was plain now that the server’s keen sight had been as reliable as ever. A man was indeed hanging under the parradile’s belly, cradled in a sitting position in a web of strong cords.

“Oh, I’ve had enough of this nonsense!” Belfeor said suddenly. “There’s a parradile, and you’ve been pestering me to kill a parradile, and to me it makes no difference whether I kill it now or later. I’m going to get the job over with!”

He pulled the energy gun from the holster on his belt.

Ambrus did not consciously decide what he was going to
do. He seemed to be driven by a force outside himself—a force stemming from centuries of tradition, but reaching back beyond tradition to an original divine law. His right arm jerked down; his hand closed fast on the hilt of his ceremonial sword and tugged it from the scabbard.

The blade whistled as it slashed the air.

With his energy gun raised in the very act of sighting on the parradile, the usurper’s skull was cleft from crown to chin. The sword stuck fast and Belfeor’s fall snatched it from Ambrus’ hand.

Pargetty screamed like a woman and fumbled for his own gun. Ambrus snarled at him—no one else had had time to move—and hurled himself in a wild charge. His shoulder took Pargetty in the chest and his impetus carried them both across the parapet, over the low ledge, and into the empty air beyond.

When the screaming had ended, Sir Gurton made a sign with his right hand. “He has made amends,” he said heavily. “Now may his father be reborn in peace.”

As though an enormous load had been lifted from their backs, all those standing around straightened themselves and began to smile. Only the young server, shocked at the sight of Belfeor’s gory corpse, had to turn away and vomit against the wall.

“The question remains,” Sir Gurton said after a pause, “what shall be done with those who follow this—this lump of carrion here? In a moment men will go to see what fell from the tower; they will find Pargetty dead and Ambrus with him. Moreover, it is my obligation to declare the king-hunt due. Since the parradile approaching us is male, that in default of challengers must be the new king. And tomorrow—”

He was interrupted by the keen-eyed server. Recovered from his fit of nausea, the boy had turned back to resume his proper position, but suddenly he was shouting and waving.