The Witling (10 page)

Once in every generation, the passage from the Highroom to the Keep was unblocked. New members of the royal family climbed the narrow stairs that led up the cliff to the Highroom, and then walked down the passage from the Highroom to the Keep. A very few trusted servants—those destined to become Highroom attendants—accompanied them on the second leg of their pilgrimage, but only those of royal blood ever made the entire trip.

Most of the palace servants had made the pilgrimage up the stone stairs to the Highroom, so they could teleport themselves and—if need be—their masters that far. The Highroom attendants could then teleport the visitors inside the Keep. It sounded like a pretty good system: except for the royal family (and the Guild, of course), no one could get all the way into the Keep without another’s help.

“And the lake? Why is that there?” asked Leg-Wot as Pelio’s talk petered out. The boy still seemed friendly—after all, he had agreed to take her here this morning—but he was a good deal quieter, more nervous than before. Sometimes she thought he didn’t even want their conversations overheard by the bodyguards. She didn’t know what to make of it, and now that they were so near her goal, it was beginning to get on her nerves.

Pelio looked at her as she spoke, and his face creased with a shy smile. By human standards that face was strange—all round, with scarcely a chin or a point of a nose—and she wasn’t sure quite how to read it. Certainly no other person had ever looked at her the way he did. “The lake is for transport. We’re within one league” (one jump?) “of five different royal roads, so the members of my family can come quickly into the Keep even from outside the palace. That’s the whole point, you know: the royal family must have some retreat safe from all attack—a Guild attack excepted, of course.”

There it was, that “Guild” again. Sometime, she was going to have to learn more about that organization. But right now, she was much more interested in getting at their equipment; even with the maser they might have problems calling for help. It wasn’t a matter of power: Novamerika was at conjunction, not more than fifty million kilometers away. The maser could easily punch through to any medium-sized antenna at that distance—if the antenna pointed in her direction. But what if she and Ajão and Draere’s people had all been given up for dead? Then, the only time the Novamerikan colonists would aim their receivers at Giri would be to monitor the robot telemetry station Draere had left on that godforsaken island on the other side of the planet. She might have quite a problem synchronizing her transmissions with that station.

Once on the Keep’s main floor, Pelio guided them around the edge of the lake. The four-footed ball of fur that Pelio called Samadhom kept right at their heels.

Her eyes were adjusted to the dark now, and the place seemed like an open harbor lit by hundreds of tiny green moons. The air was not absolutely still; a faint draft riffled gently by her dress. The walls of the cavern swelled inward to the central lake, forming little hillocks along the floor. Pelio pointed to the holes in the walls. “Most of the rooms here share the air of the entire Keep. It’s too much trouble to reng fresh air into each room separately; the fewer servants allowed into the Keep, the better. And in general, no foreigners get in except when we have diplomatic receptions here. My family stores too much of value in the Keep to let just anyone enter.” Yoninne almost smiled at the unconscious pride of his tone. He was so self-contradictory. “I’ve had everything that was found where you were captured put in my own storage room.” They turned right and moved away from the central lake. In the dim green light she saw the rock rising on either side of them: they were walking up a miniature valley cut across the long axis of the Keep. The “valley” narrowed till it was more like a hallway without a ceiling. Finally they came upon a small transit pool.

Pelio said, “We could have jumped directly here, but I wanted to show you the Keep.” He turned to the guards as they caught up. “Jump us into my storeroom,” he said quietly, pointing at the nearest wall. “It’s about twenty yards in that direction.”

The shorter of the guards shut his eyes in concentration. “I seng it, Your Highness,” he said softly, matching Pelio’s tone. Somehow even small sounds seemed loud in the emptiness.

They slipped into the pool and emerged seconds later from a similar one in the interior room. The green-lit room was crowded with wooden cabinets and bronze bowls—the bowls filled to overflowing with what must have been gems and precious metals, though in the dull light their sparkle and flash were muted. Yoninne looked across the tangled heaps of treasure. The place was more like an unkempt attic than anything else. What was the use of all this stuff if they kept it hidden away?

Pelio started across the room, then came to an abrupt halt. The others piled up behind him, looked down, and saw the bodies. There was not a mark on them and their kiltlike uniforms seemed in perfect order, yet they lay on the floor like puppets with cut strings. One of the bodyguards pushed past Pelio, knelt beside the bodies, and felt for a throat pulse.

“They’re not even warm, Your Highness. Shall we sound alarm?”

“Yes—no!” The boy clenched and unclenched his hands. “Stand outside the room now. I must think—I mean, I must inspect the room for loss.”

“But, Sir-”

“Go!” he said. The two guards snapped to attention, but left only after they had convinced themselves no one was hiding in the room.

After they were gone, Pelio stood for a long moment as if dazed. Yoninne looked at him, then at the bodies. “Were they murdered?” she asked.

The prince nodded abstractedly. “Kenged, I should think,” he said, then noticed her blank look. “Someone jumbled their insides.” He said something else she couldn’t understand, but it sounded like cursing. “I just don’t see how something like this could happen
here
, in the Keep.” He was talking to himself now.

Samadhom sniffed mournfully around the bodies, as if trying to wake them. Yoninne looked abruptly away. The Azhiri race didn’t need knives or pistols; their Talent was enough. Those two men—servants by the look of them—had simply been … turned off. Draere’s death had been bad enough, but at least it hadn’t been murder.

You sentimental fool. Get off your tail and find that maser
. The thought brought her back to her normal, efficient self. It was just her luck that when she finally got near her goal, some palace intrigue would get in the way. She moved closer to Pelio, and said, “The equipment? Where is that stored?”

Pelio glanced up, pointed carelessly at a cabinet across the room. It was a big one, more than four meters on a side. Its massive, deeply carved door was ajar and through the opening she could see a jumble of parachute fabric. The sight affected Pelio, too. “That door should be closed!” He strode swiftly across the room, Leg-Wot close on his heels. The prince pulled the door open wide and they waded through the knee-deep fiberene chute material. The ablation skiff and the burned-out hulk of the motor sledge sat within the cabinet, along with a rack of empty metal trays. A cold and unpleasant certainty was forming in Leg-Wot’s mind; most of their equipment had burned up with the sledge, but the maser and the machine pistols, at least, should be here. She scrambled around the side of the skiff to look in the hatch. Even in the dim light she could see it was empty. There were the sealed instruments and the web restraints, but that was all. The maser was gone. Gone.

She described the missing items to Pelio. “I had those all put here,” he said, pointing at the metal trays. From the stricken look on his face, she knew this was not some elaborate game he was playing with her. “So they killed to get just those things … . But how could anyone steal from the royal Keep?” His eyes widened. “Unless the thief were a Guildsman … or a member of the royal family.”

Leg-Wot turned angrily away from him. Now she and Bjault really were marooned—and under a death sentence to boot.

Ten

T
hat morning Ajão Bjault pretended to be asleep as Leg-Wot rose and dressed in the skimpy green kilt she had worn the night before. The pilot was exceptionally quiet and Bjault guessed she would be just as happy if he didn’t wake. After she was gone Ajão got up and washed in the room’s primitive lavatory. A few minutes later, two servants emerged from the transit pool with breakfast. The food didn’t taste bad, though the thought of the insidious poisons it contained made him want to gag. Bjault finished the meal and watched morosely as the servants slid back into the water and disappeared. It was all very well that Leg-Wot was having so much success with Pelio, but he was going out of his mind with boredom and suspense.

He stepped into the morning sunshine, and walked down the path toward the beach. The sky was filled with a rippling of clouds, and it wasn’t quite as tropically warm as the day before. This place was beautiful, there was no question about that. And it was beginning to look as if he had all the time in the world to explore it; except for a small group lounging on the beach a quarter of the way around the lake, there was no one to stop him. Perhaps he and Yoninne weren’t really prisoners anymore. Only his inability to teleport kept him prisoner here: he couldn’t enter a single building—except that one they had punched a doorway in.

Bjault walked along the edge of the woods, and listened to the animals scurrying back and forth among the wide-leafed tropical trees. They seemed relatively tame; he had seen several hop across the narrow path. Ahead, a mouselike creature spread a silken web between two trees. It was an amazing fact: Ajão had seen no animal life that didn’t look mammalian. Oh, most of the ecological niches were filled: there were “birds” of sorts, and from the finned monsters he had seen in Azhiri murals, he knew there were sea creatures. But the birds had fur and suckled their young, and the sea monsters were clearly air-breathers. There was even an insect analog here on Giri, though up close the creatures looked more like miniature shrews.

Bjault could think of only one explanation for all this. Back fifty or one hundred million years ago, Giri had had reptile and insectoid forms, and the first mammals were coming on the scene. But one of those mammals was a mutant like none ever seen on any of the thousands of worlds man had visited: this animal could teleport—“reng” was the Azhiri term—matter. Certainly the creature hadn’t been able to teleport itself; probably the best it could do was reng tiny masses just a few centimeters. But consider: if the matter teleported was within the brain or the heart of an enemy, then that enemy would most likely be killed. So the lucky renging mutant was the undisputed master of its environment. Considering how rare the mutation must be, it was not surprising that no other species ever learned to use the Talent or defend against it. All other macroscopic fauna had been wiped out, and now every creature was descended from that single fluke. Bjault shuddered.

Of course the Azhiri race itself had come along millions of years later, just as
Homo sapiens
had only developed in the latter stages of mammalian evolution. But where their animal precursors could teleport only a small fraction of their body mass, a trained Azhiri could reng whole tons. At least most Azhiri could—Pelio was an exception, a cripple. Apparently, he couldn’t even defend himself against the Talent.

Bjault noticed a small transit pool half-hidden in the trees up the hillside. He left the beach to climb toward it. There really wasn’t much reason to, but he had nothing else to do. He would just have to be patient another day or two. Leg-Wot was so close to recovering their equipment. He entered the clearing and walked to the marble rim of the pool. Leaves and other forest debris floated on the surface. Apparently this pool was little used. Bjault wondered how the Azhiri managed to avoid accidents. Sooner or later, some poor fellow would get into a pool just as someone else arrived, and be chopped in half, his lower body teleported wherever the newcomer had departed. Perhaps the Azhiri clairvoyance—“seng,” or whatever they called it—was even more effective than Leg-Wot reported.

It suddenly occurred to him that there was another reason why accidents didn’t happen. It takes energy to cut a solid or liquid, to break the molecular bonds along the surface of the cut. If—as it seemed—the Azhiri didn’t expend energy to do their tricks, then there was only one way they could cut an object by use of the Talent: if the materials along the cleavage were chemically identical at both the departure and arrival points, then there was little
net
energy expense during a teleportive exchange. Thus you could reng two equal volumes of water. (Or, if you wanted to kill somebody, you could reng two equal volumes of your victim’s medulla oblongata; jumble his brain, in effect. Witlings led a precarious existence indeed on Giri.)

Bjault gazed idly across the clearing, and happened to be looking right at the man as he popped into existence, then dropped three or four centimeters onto the deep grass. The archaeologist rose abruptly to his feet, but not before two more men materialized.

“Don’t move, witling,” the first of them said. “The prince requires your presence.” All three wore the standard kilts of the household guard, but there was something tense and furtive about them. Ajão had been dealing with bureaucratic and military types for well over a century, for so long that he almost had a feeling for their lies. These three behaved like soldiers in enemy territory. He took a step backward, toward the path that led to the beach. One of the three disappeared, popped back into existence a little way down the trail. At the same instant an incredibly sharp gust of wind struck Ajão’s ankles, knocking his feet out from under him. Two of the men closed in, grabbing his arms. “We can kill you before you even start to scream. Don’t hinder us, and we may let you live.” Ajão gritted his teeth in pain and fear as they dragged him across the grass toward the transit pool. This was kidnapping, not the lawful activity of jailers! And the difference was not academic—he might never see Yoninne or the maser.