The Ladder in the Sky (2 page)

II

Hego’s self-control broke. He gave a low shuddering moan, and could be heard to shuffle his feet backwards on the floor. Only his intense determination not to show such weakness prevented Kazan from doing the same, but he had to clench his teeth together so tightly that his jaw muscles ached. The rigid cuffs linking his wrists prevented him clasping his hands. He could only drive his nails hard into his palms.

He had thought he knew darkness. But the thing which had appeared in the circle of blue light was
absolutely
black except for the ember glow of the eyes—if they were eyes; they had neither iris nor pupil, and only the way they turned this way and that suggested that the thing looked out of them. Kazan stared at them greedily. To look anywhere else on that black form was to feel that the soul within him was being sucked out by the totality of the darkness, like air pouring into the vacuum of space.

The voice that came from the blackness was vast and sighing with an overtone of agony, like a gale piping on mountains, a noise that made Kazan shiver and shiver and shiver. At its sound, even Bryda flinched back, although the conjurer sat calm on his cushions.

“What world is this?” the awful voice inquired.

The conjurer, as though prepared for the question, reeled off something Kazan could not follow; he assumed it to be a charm and hoped it was a very strong one. He had never before seen a spirit evoked; although the Dyasthala was full of cheating witches and wizards who played on the superstition of wealthy customers, he knew how most of their tricks were worked and took the rest to be trickery also. But not this.

He felt ice cold, and yet sweat was trickling into his eyes.

“And what do you want with me?” the thing said then.

The conjurer looked at Bryda and indicated that she should speak. Uncertain, she licked her lips. The first time she tried to address the thing, her voice was a whisper; she broke off, swallowed hard and swelled her shapely bosom with a deep breath.

“I am the Lady Bryda,” she said. “Until four years ago my—lover—Prince Luth was ruler of this land of Berak. Foreigners in league with the traders from space had taken the land over piecemeal; at last they grew so bold they dethroned the prince and set up a usurping government. They did not dare to kill the prince outright, but they hold him captive.”

Kazan was beginning to make sense, if not of the thing in the circle, at least of Bryda’s motives. But where did he come into her plan? He did not want to think of that.

“If he could be freed,” Bryda said, “the people would rise and restore him to power.”

For all its inhuman quality, Kazan thought that the thing’s voice matched well with its master’s faintly bored expression when it spoke again. It said, “Did the people desire his return so strongly, they would have released him.”

Kazan reflected that this business was of small interest to the people of the Dyasthala. Who governed them mattered little; what counted was that they were always governed, never governors. Hence they were opposed to Prince Luth, or anyone else, and would not lift a finger to aid him.

“Many attempts have been made,” Bryda said in a subdued tone. “But understand: he is held in a fortress in the middle of a mile-wide lake of sour water, where savage carnivorous monsters dwell. A small boat cannot cross the lake; its crew would be spilled into the water by these creatures, and devoured. We have no way of getting a great boat to the lake, and in any case there are two heavily armed boats that patrol the lake continually, as well as the armed ferry which links the fortress and the mainland. We have considered tunneling, but the lake is too deep; we have considered flying, but there is no place to set down. The fortress completely covers the rocky island on which it is built, and there are rocket stands on the roofs. Yet we can see him at the open window of his apartment, and signal to him.”

“And you wish him to be released,” the thing said.

“Yes,” Bryda said.

“It can be done,” the thing sent on, as though ignoring her. “It can be done at once.”

Bryda did not relax. She looked at Yarco, who sat with his face shiny with sweat and his lips pressed close together. Not turning to the thing again, she said in a barely audible voice, “For what price?”

“There is only one price,” the thing said. “Service for a year and a day.”

What could that terrifying voice mean by
service?
What could a black thing with eyes like coals want of a human being? Kazan’s blood thundered in his ears, and forgetful of his hobble he tried to get to his feet.

“He will serve you,” he heard Bryda say, and knew she was pointing towards him. Somehow, though, he could see nothing. Except a swimming pattern of dots which seemed to be inside his eyes. He felt himself seized and held, most likely by Hego, because the hands that closed on his arms were slippery—wet with the sweat of pure fear.

“It’s gone,” Yarco said wonderingly.

Then the conjurer’s voice, “I must pass the ring over him. Free him, you!”

For a moment the grip on his arms ended. Something cold touched his nape—metal. The ring! He tried frantically to duck underneath it and escape, but it was let fall. He flung out his arms, but it was too wide to catch, and like the knell of doom he heard it clang as it struck the floor at his feet.

Then he fainted.

He was lying on his back, his mouth slackly open. A taste of something warm and sweet invited him to swallow, and he did. Passive, he let the fluid run down his throat.

Memory seemed to trickle back with it. When the flow ended he opened his eyes. He was on a padded couch against the wall of the same room. A wheeled trolley stood next to the couch, with a steaming tureen on it. Yarco was ladling the contents into a spouted jug. It was that spout which had come between his teeth, Kazan decided.

Yarco’s hand was shaking so badly that the ladle clinked against the jug each time he lifted it, and his face was as shiny as it had been when the thing was present. But he went on methodically with what he was doing.

“I suppose the others were afraid,” Kazan said. He licked his lips.

Startled, Yarco almost dropped both jug and ladle. He said, “I—yes, I guess they are.”

“And you?”

“I don’t believe in being afraid,” Yarco said. “We are at the mercy of the stars. If I am to be killed by a man possessed of a devil, it’s the decree of the wyrds and I can’t change it. Meantime, possessed or not, you seemed to have fainted with hunger. Do you want more of this?”

Kazan sat up, wondering at the calmness in his mind. He took the full jug from Yarco and drained it. Yarco stood watching, his face relaxing from tension to puzzlement.

He said at last, “You’re all right?”

Kazan nodded. He stretched his arms out and flexed them. “Did you take off my manacles?” he asked.

“I did. For the same reason. Moreover, the thing which was called up seemed powerful, and you were pledged to it, and it would be well to attend to your needs.” He hesitated, and then put the question that had clearly been itching in his mind.

“Do I speak to Kazan, or to the
thing?
”

For a moment Kazan was startled. Then the words made sense, and he realized that he might have asked the same of himself.

“How can I answer?” he said. “I feel like Kazan, I think-no, I think I think like Kazan.”

Abruptly he leaped from the couch. He took a pace away from it and planted his feet together on the floor. His face went pale as death, and he began to shake from head to foot.

“For the love of life!” he forced between his teeth. “What have you done to me?
What have you done to me?
”

Accusing, his eyes sought Yarco’s. The stout man met his gaze unflinchingly, and after a moment gave a sorrowful shake of the head.

Behind Kazan there were footsteps on the stairs leading from the upper story. Not changing the direction of his gaze, Yarco said, “He has not harmed me. Nor will he. You may come here.”

It was Bryda. Her face showed the ravages of tiredness when she moved into Kazan’s field of view, but her eyes were keen and searched his face eagerly.

Under her breath she said, “To think that this—this ragged wretch will be his salvation and mine.” And then more sharply to Yarco, “What’s to be done? Have you learned yet?”

“Did the conjurer say nothing?” Yarco countered, sounding puzzled.

“No! He said that the—the devil, if it was a devil, had entered into
him
and would know what needed to be done.” A flash of dark suspicion crossed her face. “If he should try to trick us—!”

“What will you do?” Yarco broke in. “He’s powerful—not one of these rune-casters and gibberers. I have not seen a devil before,” he added in a lower tone.

Bryda shot out her hand and swung the unresisting Kazan to face her. She said, “What’s to be done? How do we rescue the prince?”

Eyes haunted, Kazan returned her gaze. The unnatural calm which he had felt on waking from his faint was gradually returning. Yet in a detached way he was still frightened. To himself, the strange episode of the thing in the circle felt like a nightmare—unreal, and over now. But this was impossible, for here Yarco and the Lady Bryda were speaking of it as a reality.

“If you don’t speak,” Bryda spat at him, “I’ll send for Hego and make him beat you till you do!”

“Hego won’t come,” Yarco said. “It will be days before he can recover his wits.”

Bryda, a prince’s mistress, waiting for his word. His! Kazan’s. Who spoke of devils? Were a man to be filled with a devil, he would know it for sure! And here he was, himself, thinking like himself, talking like himself—Kazan, the waif of the Dyasthala, self-taught thief, hungry, despised. With the calm, a cunning thought was entering his mind. Why not, for a while at least, make the pretense? Why not make Bryda for all her rank and airs squirm on his hook? He turned the idea over, as it were to taste it, and it tasted as sweet as honey.

He gave a little crooked smile. He said, “Of course I know what must be done. But I’m a ragged wretch, Lady Bryda. I’m a starving wretch, too. You get nothing without paying for it, Lady Bryda, not unless you’re a thief like me. You’ve tried it, and you’ve failed. You’ve got to pay. You don’t like it, do you? But that’s the risk you run if you take without asking.”

He threw his hand out in front of him, palm up, not in the beggar’s gesture, but as a merchant would wait for payment.

III

Hate him she might—
did,
Kazan corrected himself smugly—but pay him she must, until the day she found out how she was being fooled. And the payment he was taking was not small.

For the moment he was alone. He could let himself enjoy it. From sheer jubilation he jumped in the air and spun round through half a circle to land without a sound on the soft warm floor.

By the wyrds, though Bryda could complain of this house as a place of misery and squalor, for him it was luxury unimaginable. Space! Thirty feet on a side, the room, and the ceiling so high he could not touch it if he jumped straight up; light always on call—not as it was in the few houses in the Dyasthala where there was a supply, an unreliable glimmer, but a steady brilliant glow; warmth unceasing and color. Almost, the color mattered more than anything; the greenness of the walls, the rich tan of the floor, the sunlight-yellow above.

There was a bowl of fruit on a low table. He snatched some and crammed it in his mouth, and washed it down with a swig of iced wine from the cup beside the bowl. Licking his lips, he took stance before the man-high mirror on the wall and stared at himself.

Even now, a disbelieving expression came to his face. The black shirt with the silver piping and the plain black pants, the low shoes, were things he would never have dared to steal for himself—only if he were sure of selling them, perhaps to a spaceman who would leave the planet before questions could be asked. It wasn’t only their rich appearance; it was their thermostatically controlled circuitry.

His hair had been barbered by a slight, quiet girl who attended to Bryda’s and Yarco’s hair as well, and was brilliant as new silver. The edge had not been taken off his leanness. Indeed, the strange battle of wits of the past twenty days seemed to have sharpened it. But the pure animal hunger was gone from his appearance.

Now the only question was: how long would it last?

Vaguely at the back of his mind, when he began this, there had been the idea of making Bryda submit to the ultimate humiliation and lie with him. That possibility had vanished. Already only a hairline separated her suspicion from the certainty that he was deceiving her and Yarco and the other, rather shadowy figures who came and went at this house, usually by night, on business probably connected with the escape of Prince Luth. Now it had become a delicate problem of balance, of postponing the inevitable moment when he himself fled by teasing out her hope that he would work the promised miracle.

Twice now she had threatened a showdown. The second time had been only yesterday. An inspiration had saved him. He had insisted on being taken out to look at the fortress in the lake where Prince Luth was imprisoned. She could not turn down such a sensible request, but she hadn’t like her bluff being called.

That lake … The self-approving grin disappeared from Kazan’s face. They had taken him up in the late afternoon to a high hill overlooking it, a mile from its shore, and given him powerful glasses to study it and the fortress. They had pointed out the main window of Prince Luth’s suite, and the sheer sixty-foot drop from it to the water. But he had not wasted much time looking at the fortress. Prince Luth, for all Kazan cared, could stay there till he rotted.

He’d stared at the lake instead.

He hadn’t known that such things existed in Berak. All he had ever seen of Berak, after all, was the Dyasthala. He was vaguely aware of a world outside, but it never mattered to him. The trip out to the lake—a twenty-mile journey—was the farthest he had ever been from the spot where he was born. And he was uncomfortable when there were no buildings anywhere in view, as happened for part of the time. Even the fortress, though it was gray and forbidding, was comforting when he tore his hypnotized gaze away from the water.

There were things swarming there. Twice he caught sight of slime-dripping, ropy tentacles that cracked out across the mirror surface like vast whips; once he saw the back of a monstrous, glistening, brown creature rise into view and spit blood reeking to the sky before something still more huge and very hungry cut it in two with a beak like giants’ scissors. After that there was blood on the water, like an oil slick.

And a horde of little creatures came to feed on that.

“There,” Bryda had promised, throwing out her arm in a regal gesture, “is where I shall have you thrown if you do not keep your promise.”

If he had had the slightest hope that she was voicing an empty threat, Kazan would have reminded her that he had promised nothing, that the conjurer had made the promises, and that he, Kazan, was merely a victim snatched at random off the streets to meet the price that the devil demanded. And that, if she wanted satisfaction, she would do better to go in search of the conjurer again.

But she meant what she said. It couldn’t be doubted.

Kazan frowned at himself in the mirror.
Was
that devil real? Was it a devil? Had it all been a superbly clever trick by the man in black to part Bryda from her money? He would have been well paid, that was sure.

Because it was the likeliest explanation, and because he felt no different from the way he remembered feeling before, Kazan had accepted it as the truth and tried not to question it further. Seeing the monsters in the lake yesterday, though, had put him vividly in mind of the thing in the blue-lit circle, and he wasn’t certain any longer.

Abruptly the dangerous nature of the game he was playing hit him, full force. He stood for a moment, calming himself, but seeing the way his eyes widened and the tendons stood out on his neck.

That couldn’t be faced alone. He had to go somewhere. He had to get out, maybe. He had to go back to the Dyasthala and lose himself. At the back of his mind was the faint, unformulated idea that perhaps when it came to claim its year and a day of service the devil would fail to find him.

In the grip of something like panic, he slammed out of the room and went clattering down the stairs.

Halfway, he stopped dead, grasping the baluster. He had believed himself alone in the house; even Hego, who was his constant guard by night and day, would be outside the only door in preference to staying under the same roof as a man possessed of a devil.

But there, sitting comfortably on the padded plinth of one of the square pillars, was Yarco. He had a jug of wine beside him, and he was turning the pages of a large book on his lap.

He glanced up, nodded to Kazan, and went back to his reading.

That was a piece of bad luck, Kazan thought. Yet provided Yarco was on his own, not irremediable. He slowlydescended the rest of the stairs, as though he had left his room out of mere restlessness, and began to wander about, eying the pictures, the racked books and recording crystals, the slow changing lines of words on the news machine.

Passing the window set in the front wall, he caught a glimpse of Hego standing stolidly before the door. Some small boys were going by in a group; they seemed to be shouting at him, because he turned thunder-faced and shook his fist. But no sound from outside ever entered the house if the door was closed.

He wandered on. Rounding the pillar at whose base Yarco sat, he looked down at the book he was reading. Reading. Well, the guy seemed contented enough, and maybe when a man got to Yarco’s state, podgily middle-aged, and the fire in his belly started to die down, it was a way of passing the time. He craned his neck. There was a picture at the top of the page on the left, and he couldn’t quite get the angle right for the depth effect from where he was standing.

“Can you read, Kazan?” Yarco said.

Kazan started. He hadn’t noticed Yarco turn his head. Now he’d got his attention, and it would take a while to lose it again. Cursing his thoughtlessness, he said, “Why—a bit. I can read street names, and names on stores, and like that.”

“Not much call for more than that, I guess,” Yarco nodded. “You write your name?”

Uncomfortable, Kazan shook his head.

“You should learn,” Yarco said. He put his book aside and helped himself to wine from the jug. “You can’t go back into the Dyasthala the way you are now, and you won’t get by outside without it. When do you work your miracle, by the way?”

“Miracle?” Kazan said slowly, studying Yarco’s. bland face.

“Yes. You know!” Yarco waved a negligent hand. “Your vanishing act.”

There was a moment of frozen silence. “I don’t know what you mean,” Kazan said at last.

“You know only too well,” Yarco corrected him. He got up and replaced his book in the rack on the far wall. Swinging back towards Kazan, he could be seen to be smiling.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to interfere. As I told you when we first met, I believe we’re at the mercy of the stars. If the wyrds decreed that you should become possessed of a devil, what can a mere man like myself do about it? Or you, for that matter! Of course, that may not be your fate. Perhaps you’re due to wind up in the sour lake, eaten by savage animals. Perhaps you’re due to disappear into the Dyasthala, to be garroted for your fine new clothes and dumped in a sewer, to end as an anonymous corpse. I hope not. You’re a very astute young man, and I’m sure you’re going to go far. If you live, that is.”

A cold chill walked down Kazan’s spine like an animal with feet of ice. He said, “I—no! What’s your loyalty to Bryda?”

A shadow crossed Yarco’s face. He said shortly, “None.”

“Then what are you doing in this?” Kazan snapped.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” Yarco said after a second of hesitation. “I was lost on a bet to the prince’s father a month before I was born. I have been the property of the royal family all my fifty years of life. I have never been able to lift a hand to serve myself. That is, I never could until Prince Luth was kidnaped and made captive. So I’m in no great hurry myself to let him free. But my experience of a lifetime has convinced me—oh, foolishly perhaps, but thoroughly—that it’s no good railing against one’s fate.”

“So in one sense at least, you too are possessed,” Kazan said. He gave a harsh laugh.

“Too?” Yarco picked the word up like a hungry scavenger pouncing on a scrap of food. “Do you mean—?”

It was clear what he would have said, “Do you mean that you are truly possessed by that thing—whatever it was?” And to that Kazan still had no answer. For, after all, he had no information to guide him. What should a possessed man feel like?

But at that moment the entrance door was flung open, Hego appearing momentarily beyond it and then stepping back to make way for Bryda at the head of a small procession of men in dark clothes and outdoor boots. The one directly following Bryda was known by sight to Kazan, but not by name; he had visited the house twice at night, and Kazan had been produced for his inspection.

It was the man behind, however, who strode into the center of the room on entering and stared Kazan up and down. Meantime, his companions formed a close group just inside the door, their expressions dour and threatening.

He carried a short cane with jeweled ends, which he tapped on the palm of his hand while he was scrutinizing Kazan. When he was through for the moment, he glanced at Bryda, poking Kazan in the chest with the cane.

“Him?” he said in a disgusted tone.

“Not him precisely,” Bryda snapped. “The devil which possesses him.”

“I’ve heard too much of this devil nonsense,” the man growled. “I want to hear—now!—what he proposes to do to help us, and if it doesn’t make sense, he goes quietly tonight into a lonely grave. And there’ll be a reckoning later. Is that understood?” He glared at Bryda.

“And you?” he went on after a moment, prodding Kazan again. “Do you understand it? Do you want to save your skin?”

One moment before he uttered an unconvincing lie, Kazan hesitated. Something had occurred to him, something he had not expected. A good and sensible reason for having delayed.

He said, “If I’d talked about what was going to be done, how many people in Berak do you think would know about it by now? And what do you think would be stupider than to try a rescue on a night when there’s a moon?”

A sardonic twist of the lip went with the words, as unexpected and as unfamiliar as they had been—and as effective. Uncertainly, his challenger drew back half a pace. He said after a moment, “I’ll accept that. But what’s to be done?”

Kazan didn’t answer. He felt his mouth open a little. He stared unseeing and disbelieving past the man before him and towards Yarco, on whose face a look of astonishment was dawning.

Because he knew. He did know after all. And he didn’t see how it was possible.