by Jo Bannister
“He’ll never know that,” averred Shah. “He doesn’t know I’m telepathic, and he’s not going to. No one here does, except you.”
“I know,” he replied wistfully. “You wanted to confide in someone and I was the most harmless, inconsequential clown you could find.”
Her hand closed over his. “You have been my refuge. Your friendship has kept me sane. It’s the most valuable gift anyone has ever given me.”
The poet’s sad, sweet smile lit the grey room. “I live for you,” he said simply. “But Shah, for your own safety, remember that I am a coward and, much as I might wish it otherwise, I cannot die for you. If Harry Jess ever comes to suspect you and quizzes me, I will tell him. I shall hate myself and wish myself unborn, but if I can save myself by betraying you I shall not hesitate to do it.”
“I know,” she said kindly, patting his hand. “Don’t worry about it. It will never happen.”
Chapter Two
Paul first saw the crooked man in the square and thought nothing of it. Most of Chad, and most of the Northlanders too, were there then. Later he had seen him in the palace, scurrying along the corridor close to the wall like the other menials. But now here he was again, humping hay in the stables, hefting and hurling the bales mechanically, one eye on the door. Paul slipped back unseen and stood thoughtfully a moment, questing his memory, while his agile craftsman’s fingers strayed unconsciously to his belt, checking the weapons there, keeping them loose and ready. When he stepped through the door he knew both who the man was and what he wanted.
Paul made very few mistakes. It was a question not of pride but of survival. Men of his profession – of both his professions – fell into but two categories: the careful and the dead. Nevertheless, he made one of those rare mistakes when he walked past the labouring man and, offering it fruit from his pocket, remarked to the camel, “So Chad still has a king.”
Instinct rather than sight or hearing registered the movement behind him, the unexpected velocity, and he was already turning when a swinging fist like a morning-star crashed against his temple, exploding lights in his eyes and sending him reeling in the straw. Two thoughts raced through his head – that, unlikely as it was coming from an old cripple, he should have anticipated the assault, and that he was probably now fighting for his life – and were as swiftly gone as his mind moved into that overdrive condition in which mental and physical powers achieve communion. His hand was at his waist before he could see again, but the crooked man had gone with him as he rolled and kicked his wrist away: pain shot up to his shoulder-blade. Ignoring it, Paul rolled over the arm and got his feet under him. As he rose the cripple swung again: his boot connected forcefully with Paul’s jaw, crashing him backwards into the stable partition behind, his head colliding dully with the inch-thick wood. Under the combined effects of three concussive blows inside ten seconds Paul’s senses deserted him and, unconscious, his body crumpled and slumped along the timber wall.
Lockwood slapped him awake, but not before taking the precaution of wiring his hands behind him and his neck to the wooden upright carrying the stable door. Surprise had won him the encounter – nobody ever expected a hunchback to fight – but that advantage was now lost and Lockwood suspected, with the shrewd judgement of a man to whom such assessments were a matter of professional competence, that when he started feeling more like his old self this one could give trouble. Being a professional, Lockwood had no silly scruples about fair play: he tied the man up and then started hitting him.
Paul was not far away and when he came round he came fast, so fast he had started to move before he realised that the situation had changed. He was brought up short by the wire noose biting into his throat. The crooked man thumped him back against the stall and kept him there with one spread hand on his chest. The hand was enormous. Belatedly Paul recognised that the whole man was enormous, with long powerful arms, muscular from a lifetime’s industry, and short strong thighs. Even the distorted back had bent into an arch of strength, like a bow or a bridge. Crooked he was. Cripple he was not.
After he had surprised people with the effectiveness of his twisted body, Lockwood usually surprised them afresh with his voice. There is no law, either natural or of men, that hunchbacks come exclusively from the lower classes, but that particular blend of education and authority, the mellow tone with the steely edge that comes of being obeyed, tended to knock the breath out of people who had just got used to the shape of him.
A blade flickered dimly in his hand. He said, “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, and the only reason you’re alive now is so that you can tell me. One usually allows a little time for bluster, but if you know that you’re too dangerous to have around that long. So the first lie you tell me will cost you your left eye. The second will cost you your right eye, and if you’re still capable of lying after that I shall tighten this thing until it cuts your throat.” He demonstrated briefly. “Now, do we understand each other?”
When he could breath again Paul, his flecked eyes flashing with fury, choked, “You damn fool, Lockwood, if I meant to harm the boy I’d be talking to Harry Jess, not you.”
Lockwood nodded. “I thought of that. Then I thought perhaps you already had.” His knife had found a resting place on Paul’s bloody cheek, its chill point just puckering the outer corner of his eye. “That seemed a reasonable explanation of why you were taken into the palace by guards but left alone.”
“It wouldn’t explain how you left, though, would it?”
Lockwood was watching him very carefully. Beaten, bound, possibly not an enemy anyway, he still struck the hunchback as a formidable opponent. “Perhaps they hoped I would lead them to him.”
“That would be naive. Also unnecessary. I know where he is.”
In all his dangerous days Paul had probably never been closer to death than at that moment. A shutter seemed to fall behind Lockwood’s eyes. He took a handful of Paul’s hair and bent his head back, baring his throat for the execution stroke. He actually muttered the formal exculpation, then with the knife already poised, paused. “By all of heaven – how did you know?”
“You told me,” Paul managed. The effort of speaking seemed to tear his jugular.
Lockwood’s eyes, which had cleared fractionally, blanked over again. “I warned you about lying.” Searching the young man’s face he saw the obsidian eyes flick sideways and suddenly remembered what was behind him. He said swiftly, “One word to that beast and whatever it does as a result you won’t live to see it.”
“Then Emir will kill you and there will be no one left to rescue the boy.”
The logic was inescapable. Slowly Lockwood dropped his knife-hand, released his hold on his captive. “Explain.”
“You,” sneered Paul. “You betray him just by being here. Once I realised who you were – and let’s face it, there aren’t that many people answering your description – it followed that the prince was still here. If both the king and his son were dead, there was no way both you and Harry Jess would be alive. But I’ve seen Harry and I saw the king die. The only thing keeping you from a suicide raid on his murderer is your duty to his son. If you’d been able to get him out by now you wouldn’t be here: it’s too soon for you to have taken him to safety and returned, and anyway you wouldn’t be so afraid of discovery. I’ve seen you in the palace, coming and going as if you’d every right to be there. You’ve known that rambling old pile for fifty years: what better place to hide a prince than the rabbit-warrens of his own palace? But for some reason he’s less able to move around than you – because if you, who are fairly recognisable, can get in and out one 16-year-old boy in a city with hundreds of them should have no difficulty; and yet he’s still here. Is he sick, hurt, what?”
Lockwood stared at him until his eyes started to dry up and then he blinked. Then he said flatly, “Nobody thinks that good.”
Paul grinned, the feral gleam splitting his bruised and bloody face. “I do.”
“Are you a mag
ician?” Lockwood was an educated, intelligent and experienced man, a professional soldier, and he was absolutely serious.
“That’s right. I’m the magician who conjures the mysterious power machine in your backyard.”
“The pile?” Lockwood frowned, not understanding; then slowly recognition dawned. “Wait a minute, I know you – you’ve been here before —”
“Several times. If you wish to pursue this conversation, might I suggest that you remove the garrotte? – I find it inhibiting.”
Lockwood weighed up the risk and decided it was justified. As his powerful fingers worked at the noose he said, “It must be a couple of years ago you were here last. The king told me about you. He said he asked you to stay. He said you refused.”
“I like travelling. Cities make me cough.”
“And now, precisely now, you’re here again. Why did you come?”
“To service the power plant.”
“And?”
“To save the king.”
A spasm ran through Lockwood’s crouching frame, a twitch momentarily catching up one side of his face. “You left it too late.”
“I didn’t expect Chad to fall so quickly.”
Lockwood had directed the ill-starred defence. He swallowed the implicit insult and, breaking the wire binding Paul’s hands, rocked back on his heels. “And?”
“To get the boy to safety. I assume that’s what you want too.”
“Can you do it?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you doing it?”
Paul rubbed at the wire marks on his wrists, the right more gently than the left. “Someone is paying me.”
“In God’s name, who?”
“Nobody you know. Someone who will very shortly owe me an ion-drive battle-cruiser.”
Edmund dreamed. His dreams were not the usual loosely linked hotch-potch of memories, imaginings and sex. Once he had such dreams and enjoyed them and woken from them refreshed. Now his dreams were brittle, angry, kaleidoscopic progressions of raging images that made no Sense and when he woke, sweating and far-eyed, reality made no sense either. Because incomprehensible dreams are more acceptable than an incomprehensible reality he came to welcome the return of the mind-jangling, strength-sapping sleep, dismissing the increasingly short periods of comparative lucidity as an irrelevance.
Sometimes the perplexing actuality involved a strangely distorted figure crouching over him. Once he woke and saw two figures. He was not sure if there were really two or if it were the strangeness of his perception spreading. As a philosophical problem it seemed to him interesting but incapable of solution and therefore not worth worrying about. Dimly aware that one of the two – if they were two – was slapping his face, and considering it an impertinence, he waited for the brilliant lunacy that would deliver him from assault and from thought. As it came, sweeping through his synapses like a glittering tide, he heard the other – if there were two – say thinly, “God!” Then the madness took him.
“That,” Paul said at last, the words falling like drops of acid into the painful silence, “is the rightful king of Chad?” Lockwood nodded miserably. “Are you sure you won’t settle for Harry Jess?”
Marginally less depressed the soldier would have reacted with violence. But looking at the ruin of his prince he could only shake his head despondently. “He’s not going to have them rallying to him by the thousand, is he?”
“How long has he been like this?”
“He’s worse every time I look at him. I don’t understand it, he’s had nothing for days —”
“What was it – drax?”
“It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t —”
“Was it drax?” Paul’s voice came from the arctic no-man’s-land between disinterest and disgust; it was the voice of the tundra itself, chill, uncaring, unforgiving.
“Yes,” whispered Lockwood, remembering. He bent suddenly over the boy and tried to cover his lax body with a rag of blanket. “He was wounded at the West Scarp a month ago. That was our first line of defence against the Northlander; it collapsed, of course.”
Lockwood remembered the pure, savage beauty of the West Scarp, where the greater of the two glaciers feeding the Ice Desert swept down from the Tantalus Mountains, carving a snowcrusted swathe through towering intransigent rock. The escarpment was a natural barrier protecting the cities of the plain from the barbarian North, but the glacier was a weakness. In Lockwood’s youth it had been defended time and again against unorganised marauders, but Harry Jess had built himself an army.
Their studded surcoats had flashed like ice crystals as they came down the glacier, their dark horses snatching impatiently at their bits, pawing with greased hooves and snorting silver breath. They came without haste, their almost casual advance spreading out across the glacier like a broad carpet unrolling down the slope, an inevitability. They maintained this slow progression until their first rank – there were many ranks – came within bow range of the waiting men of Chad; then they struck silver spurs to their horses’ flanks and dropped their spearheads to the front, and the thunder of their charge filled the mountain, and the mayhem of their cries rose even above that.
The king was in the centre phalanx of the defence. Edmund, in his first battle, was on the left flank, the flush of excitement on his cheeks, the battle-light like alcohol in his eyes. Lockwood positioned himself close enough to the prince to give support if needed and far enough away to be overlooked if not. He had already given the boy a fighting education, instilled into him the principles of tactics, inculcated in him the priceless instinct for when to ignore them, and drummed into him the lesson of history – that a live king can lead a beaten army back to triumph while a superior force which loses its leader can, with equal contrariness, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Lockwood was confident that the prince knew enough and had enough of the right instincts to fight effectively. All he needed now to turn him into a soldier was the tempering fire of real combat; to survive which he would require, in addition to all the skills Lockwood had given him, that which he could not – luck.
The Barbarian also had some notion of tactics. As his foremost charge bore down on the central phalanx the line broke, the galloping arms sweeping smoothly by on either side, scything through the Chad flanks to round on the backs of the defenders as they met the spears of the second rank.
Fortunately the king, who also learned his trade largely from Lockwood, recognised the manoeuvre in time to turn his arrowhead bulwark into a defensive diamond, fenced in by shields and swords. In that formation the pride of the Chad army, invulnerable and unwieldy as a tortoise, staggered under the weight of the attack, tried valiantly but in vain to counter it, then finally acknowledged their position untenable and shuffled off, safely but without dignity, leaving Harry Jess the field.
Both Chad flanks suffered heavy casualties in that first unexpected onslaught. Afterwards those who still stood fought their way through the mêlée of tramping horses and battling men to join their colleagues in the turtle. But the prince was not among them.
Lockwood saw his pupil fall. He saw the encounter shaping up, knew what was about to happen, and was almost close enough to prevent it. After the main body of horsemen had swept through, leaving the margin of the glacier carpeted with casualties, Edmund was still on his feet and rallying his depleted troop about his flashing blade. Lockwood saw blood on his face from a sword scratch but it was plainly superficial and incommoding him not at all.
Then in the tail of the movement came another rider, driving his wild-eyed beast through the thick of the Chad injured in pursuit of his comrades. Lockwood doubted whether the Northerner had marked Edmund as a target before the boy sprang towards him, sword swinging, battle in his eyes and a challenge on his lips. Then the Barbarian, checking his beast’s charge momentarily, chucked it sideways towards the prince, couching his spear as he did so.
Even then Edmund could have parried the blow, or avoided it, had he not made the fundamental err
or common to foot-soldiers on first meeting cavalry: that of assuming the danger to lie in the horse, not the man. He knew better: he had been warned against it, trained against it. But Chad, fighting all its infrequent battles on its own doorstep, had never developed cavalry as an arm of warfare: its few horses were used for transport and for ceremony. Now, in the heat of battle, gut instinct ruling over learnt lessons, Edmund let his attention and his point slide from the spangled warrior to his thundering, innocuous steed. The leather shield which protected his body deflected the spear downwards into his thigh where it lodged, quivering, while the lancer rode away without it, pleased with his marksmanship.
Lockwood reached the shocked youth before he collapsed. With his left arm locked across Edmund’s chest and his right wielding a sword no one cared to meet, he cleared a passage through the turmoil and dragged his prince from the field.
“It was a bad wound,” Lockwood went on, his voice a dull monotone, “and the pain was bad, and the surgeon gave him drax for the journey back to Chad. After the wound was healing he gave him more so that he could ride through the city with his father to put heart into the people, and after that – well, it kept him going at a time when we needed to appear strong. I should not have permitted it, but we were fighting for survival, I needed every weapon I could get, the prince apparently fit and well was worth a hundred pikes.
“But of course he was neither fit nor well, he was by then verging on breakdown, so before the Barbarians attacked the city I sent him up here with a man to look after him. The city held out for three days; after it fell it was another twenty-four hours before I could come here unseen. I found him much as you see him, and alone; the man had fled. That was five days ago. He’s had no drug since but he gets steadily worse. I don’t know why. I decided that after he was dead I would go downstairs and try to kill Harry Jess.”
Paul said, “His brain’s synthesizing the stuff.”
Lockwood blinked, returning to the present with an almost physical effort. “What?”
