by Andre Norton
“You seek Rerne?”
“I brought the fussel, by Merchant Kyger’s orders.” Troy was put on the defensive by the other’s attitude. During their brief time together Rerne had never made him conscious of the Dipple. With the other rangers Horan was ever aware of his knifeless belt and the fact he was a planetless man.
“There is a message,” Harse replied aloofly. “Rerne wishes to speak with you—”
“But I was just told he is not here.”
“So he is elsewhere. Come!”
Troy was tempted to reply “no” to that curt order. After all, he was not under contract to Rerne. Yet he could not deny that he was interested to learn why Harse had been sent to find him.
The other was as adept at threading a fast passage through the crowds as he might have been in finding a path through the forests. And he brought Troy not to any office or lounge, but to one of those small eating places that sprang up overnight by public favor and disappeared as quickly when some newer attraction drew the fickle pleasure seekers.
“Fourth booth,” Harse said and left him.
Troy pushed his way in and discovered that his shop livery did not make him conspicuous here. This café definitely catered to subcitizens and the lower ranks of shop employees. Two of the booths were curtained, signifying private parties. But there were two men without feminine company in the one to which he had been directed.
Rerne, wearing shop livery, sat with his back against the wall. And with him was an older man in a dark tunic lacking any emblems of rank, yet equipped with that indefinable aura of authority that Troy recognized as the inborn assurance of a man who has held responsibility from his early years.
“Horan—” Rerne uttered his name in what might be a greeting, but more likely was an introduction for the stranger’s benefit.
“Rogarkil.” Now the stranger nodded to Troy.
“You have taken permanent contract with Kyger?” Rerne shot that question at him bluntly, even as he waved the younger man to a seat.
“I will—tomorrow—” A subtle tone in the other’s demand made him uneasy, put him on the defensive—why, he could not have said.
“You are now under a short-term one?” That was Rogarkil.
“That is so.”
“And if you should be offered employment elsewhere?”
“I have given my word to Merchant Kyger. He would have to agree to my going.”
Rogarkil smiled wryly. “There are always such disadvantages when one deals with honorable men. And to deal with dishonorable ones is to lose before one takes the first stride in a race. So at this hour you are still Merchant Kyger’s man?”
“I am.”
What did they want of him? This talk of honor and dishonor made Troy uncomfortable. But Rerne did not give him time to speculate about the meanings that might lie behind their fencing blades of words.
“There are questions you can answer, which will in no way break contract. For example: Is it not true that Merchant Kyger is now in the process of importing a Terran animal known as a fox at the express order of the Great Leader?”
“You yourself heard that order given. Gentle Homo.”
“And he has imported other Terran animals?”
“As you say, Gentle Homo, he has imported other Terran animals. This must be general knowledge, since the display of such pets is the pleasure of those who buy them.”
“A pair of cats for the Gentle Fem San duk Var, a kinkajou for Sattor Commander Di—”
“I am a cleaner of cages and do general labor for the worthy merchant,” Troy returned stiffly. “I do not make sales, nor do I see many of the great ones who buy.”
“But among those cages that you clean,” cut in Rogarkil, “are doubtless those of some of these exotics. You have seen some of them with your own eyes, young man?”
Troy kept strictly to the record. “I was with Subcitizen Zul when he went to the port to accept delivery of the cats—”
“And you met with some trouble that morning—”
Troy looked slowly from one man to the other. “Gentle Homos,” he said softly, “if I speak now to patrollers not in uniform, I have the right to know that fact. There is still law to protect a man in Tikil—even one from the Dipple.”
Rogarkil grimaced. “Yes, you are entirely within your rights, young man, to deliver such a counterthrust as that. No, we are not patrollers—nor do we represent the law of Tikil. This is a Clan matter. Do you understand what that means?”
“Even in the Dipple, Gentle Homo, men have ears and lips. Yes, I know that the Clans are older than the city law, that they are rumored to have powers even beyond those of the Council Governor-General. But they are of the Clans and for the Clans. I am of the Dipple and if I am to climb out of the Dipple, I must do so under the laws of Tikil. Why you ask me these questions I do not know, but I hold by contract rights. This much I will say—and it is no more than you can learn from the patroller records—I have seen the cats. And I took the kinkajou from the villa of Sattor Commander Di. It had been frightened by rough handling there. I have seen the foxes, which are now in the shop. Why should these facts be of any importance?”
“That is what we are striving to learn,” Rogarkil answered enigmatically. “You are right, Horan. Clan law does not run in Tikil. But remember that it does run elsewhere—”
“A threat—or a warning, Gentle Homo?”
“A warning. We have reason to believe that you walk on the rim of a whirlpool, young man. Take good care that you do not leap into its current.”
“That is all you have to ask me?”
Rogarkil waved his hand in dismissal. But Rerne arose as Troy did.
“I will see Merchant Kyger.”
“Not tonight. The shop is closed.”
Both men eyed him now as if he had made some fateful announcement.
“Why?”
“Kyger had an errand—”
Rerne turned to his companion, spoke a sharply accented sentence in a language that was not Gal-basic. Rogarkil asked Troy another question: “Is not this foreign to your regular routine?”
“Yes.”
“So—well, maybe Merchant Kyger’s personal affairs are beginning to press him more acutely,” he commented. “One cannot carry a knife in two quarrels and give equal attention to both. But the foxes are still there?” He turned to Troy. “And where is the kinkajou you took from Di’s villa—also in the shop?”
Troy shrugged. “When I returned from the Wild, it was gone from the cage room. Perhaps it was restored to the Sattor Commander’s heirs. It is a very valuable asset of the estate.”
“Kyger did not return it so,” Rerne stated with finality. He was watching Troy narrowly now, coldly.
“It was gone from its cage.” Troy repeated the part-truth stubbornly. He was not going to add to that when he did not know the game they were playing—the nature of this “whirlpool” in which he, too, could be trapped.
“The boy is right, of course,” Rogarkil said. “Employed as casual labor, he would have no reason to know more than he has noticed. And he is a man under contract, apart from our problems. It is a pity this is so now, Horan. Under other circumstances we might have been of mutual assistance to one another. A rider of Norden is not too far removed in aspirations and desires from a Hunter of Korwar.”
“There are no riders on Norden today,” Troy pointed out. He was watching Rerne, and again it seemed to him that the Hunter was two-minded, about to speak and then thinking better of it. Instead he nodded and Troy took that gesture for one of dismissal. He lifted his own hand in a small salute—one of equality though he was not aware of that—and walked away from the booth. Why was he gnawed by the feeling that he had just slammed a door irrevocably, a door that might have opened on a new world? There was an ache of disappointment in him that was like the bite of an old unappeasable hunger.
He pushed through the crowds, hardly noticing those about him, made his way back to the shop and the side entrance i
nto the courtyard. Slapping his hand against the signal plate, he waited for the night yardman to activate the open beam for him. But instead, at that touch from his open palm, the panel swung inward and he was looking down the short covered way, a way that was unnaturally dim as if the usual night-radiance bars there had been set at least two notches lower than was normal.
Troy’s stunner was in the bunk room. He was unarmed, and he had no intention of walking that courtyard without some form of defense. The door had no right to be open; the dimmed lights underlined that silent warning. He could well be facing a trap.
Now he unfastened the polished silver buckles of his belt. The strip of metal-encrusted leather was the only thing on him that could serve as a weapon. With one end grasped tightly in his fist, the length ready to use as a lash, he edged along the wall of the passage, listening to catch any sound from the courtyard beyond.
The mild complaints of the animals penned there could cover an attack. But from whom and for what purpose? Troy reached the end of the passage, flattened his body against the wall just inside the entrance, and surveyed the open. There was something wrong about the south side—
Then he pinpointed that difference. The door that led to Kyger’s private quarters, which he had never seen open, stood ajar now—painting an unfamiliar shadow across a section of pavement. And in the center of the yard stood a flitter. Whether it was the shop flyer he could not tell.
The open door and that waiting flyer were not all. There was an atmosphere of sharp expectancy about the whole scene—as if the stage awaited actors. Maybe the animals were sensitive to that also, for there were only the most subdued sounds from the pens. Again Troy smelled “trap” as if it were a tangible odor in the air. But somehow he could not believe it was set for him.
Kyger then? That fitted better. He had had hints of some personal difficulty—perhaps even a knife feud—engulfing the merchant. And there was the Clan’s concern with the ex-spacer, too. Troy Horan was very small fry indeed. This suggested an operation on a much more important scale.
Prudence dictated his getting across that courtyard, into his own bunk room, without any exploration—if he could make it unobserved by what might hide out there. And what about Zul? The little man had left with Kyger—but what if he had returned separately? The yardmen? From what he could see, there was no indication that there was any human anywhere in the store block.
A flicker of movement, not in the courtyard but on the top of one of the blocks of pens, drew Troy’s eyes. There was a second such. Something small, dark, fluidly supple, had crossed a patch of light, been followed by another such. Far too small to be Zul—animals loose from some cage? But why on the roof coming in? The shadows into which both had slipped were far too deep for his sight to penetrate, and the speed with which they had disappeared suggested they might already be far away from that point.
A gathering—why did he think of that? Troy measured the distance between him and the nearest cover. Then, with as much speed as he could muster, he made that leap, stood listening once more, his breath coming raspingly.
Another surge of shadow, drawn toward that half-open door of Kyger’s. This moving, not with the slinking glide of the patch on the roof, but in a quick, scuttling dash, again too hurried for Troy to see clearly. But he was sure it whipped about the edge of the door, went into the merchant’s private quarters.
Troy made his own advancing rush. Then he saw round balls of green turned up toward him from close to ground level, feral animal eyes. The belt swung in his hand, his reaction to being so startled. They were gone as another form went through the door.
His earlier alarm had been tinged with curiosity. Now there was another emotion feeding it. Just as those shadows had gone to the waiting door, so did he have to follow. He crossed the last few feet and entered, somehow expecting an attack.
Here the sounds from the courtyard were muted. But there was that which was not a sound, rather a thrumming in the blood, a throb in the ears—less than audible sound, or more. He knew of whistles, animal and bird calls, that sounded notes beyond the human range of hearing. Yet he could feel this that he could not hear, and it was an irritant, a disturbance that nourished fear. But he could not turn his back upon it.
Troy groped his way forward, for there was no night ray on. Then his foot touched a rising surface and he explored a stairway with his hands. Step by step he climbed, the thick substance of the footing soaking up any sound of his boots. The throb was beating more heavily through his body as he went.
The stairway ended. He stood listening—and knew that no longer was he alone, though no sound, not even that of a hurried breath, betrayed whoever, or whatever, shared that darkness with him.
Troy had no idea of the geography of the space in which he now was, and there could not be any open window slits, for the dark was complete. He kept stern rein on his imagination, which tended to people this place with shapes that crept and slunk toward the target—which was himself. On impulse he squatted on his heels, marked off a foot or so on the belt he held, and swung it from left to right at floor level. Sure of that much clear space, he inched on to try the same maneuver again.
How long he might have taken to make the trip across the hall Troy was never to know, for a sudden shaft of light speared dazzlingly from right to left some feet away. And as his eyes adjusted to that, Troy saw it issued from a panel door not quite closed.
He was in a hallway from which three such doors issued, all of them on his right. And it was the last one that showed the light. No sound—but he could not retreat now. Someone—or something—knew he was there, was waiting. And he had to face it.
On his feet again, Troy moved lightly and swiftly to that panel. His hand touched its surface—now he could look in, though he was not sure the man in that room could see him.
Kyger sat there, not in the enveloping embrace of an eazirest, but upright on a queer, backless, armless stool, his shoulders against the wall. And between his hands was a cylinder perhaps a foot in diameter, one end resting on the floor guarded by his firmly planted boots, its top only slightly below his chin.
No man could sit that quietly, not if he was conscious. Yet Kyger’s eyes were open, staring—not at Troy as the other first supposed, but beyond and through him, as if the younger man had no existence. And that frozen stare moved Troy forward, made him push open the panel and step within.
Kyger did not stir. Troy, tongue running across suddenly dry lips, came on. It was an oddly bare room. There was Kyger on his stool, gripping his cylinder. There was a series of small polished cabinets, all closed and with plainly visible thumb locks, and that was all.
Troy spoke and then wished he had not as his words echoed hollowly. “Merchant Kyger—is there something wrong?”
Kyger continued to stare and Troy at last knew the truth—Kyger was a dead man. He whirled, seeking behind him the one who had put on the light—to see nothing save a wall on which there were patterned lines of red, black, and white laid down in a map’s design. A map of Tikil, he realized as he surveyed it, in which the open door panel had left a break in the eastern section.
Purposefully Troy moved to the right of the seated man. He could see no wound, no indication of any violence. Yet Kyger had not died naturally—his position, this room, argued that. And what of the thing or things that he had seen precede him through the downstairs door?
Leaving the panel open for light, Troy went back into the hall, pushed open both other doors. One gave on a bedchamber, the other on a small lounge-diner, both empty.
He went back to Kyger’s room. And now, fronting him out of nowhere, were those shadows—the black cat and its blue-gray mate, the kinkajou, no longer an indifferent ball but very much alert, the two foxes he could have sworn were safe in their cage in the other building. It looked as if the full roll of Terran imports to Korwar was before him now. And their lips were drawn back from their teeth, the hair of the cats was roughened on their arched backs, their united
menace could be felt as a blow.
“No!” Oddly enough he answered that unvoiced rage and fear with word and gesture, dropping the belt, holding his hands up and palm out to them as if he faced another of his own species.
The black cat relaxed first, pacing forward a paw’s length or so, and Troy dropped on one knee. “No,” he repeated as firmly but in a lower tone. Then he held out his hand as he had seen Kyger do on the morning they had first uncrated the cats in the courtyard.
A delicate sniff or two, and then sharp teeth closed on the back of his wrist, not to hurt, he knew, but as if to seal some agreement. Troy did not have a chance to learn more, for there was a sound from below. Someone who had no reason to disguise his coming was climbing the stairs.
Troy strode to the panel of the hall door. Then he knew that his silhouette could be seen from below, and be ducked to one side. It was the action of only a few seconds, but when he glanced at the animals, they were gone. Where they had vanished to he could not guess, but that they had their suspicions concerning the newcomer he could deduce from that disappearance.
There was no such escape for him. Troy stepped back a little, picked up his belt, and, with it ready in his hand, stood waiting.
Zul came into the path of the light. He gave Troy a wide-eyed stare, looked beyond to the motionless Kyger. Then, his lips pulled tight against his teeth, just as the animals had snarled, he launched himself at Troy, his knife out, a vicious streak of fire in his hand.
TEN
Troy dodged and licked out with his belt lash for the wrist of Zul’s knife hand. The buckle-loaded tip found its mark, and the smaller man yelped and swung around so that his outflung, balancing arm brushed against the tube Kyger’s dead fingers steadied. The cylinder fell and the body of the merchant followed it, wilting bonelessly to the floor. Zul screeched, a cry as high and unhuman as any the animals or birds could have uttered.
At the same time Troy felt a cessation of that thrumming throb. The tube rolled toward him, and Zul, seeming to forget his rage of only seconds earlier, made a grab for it.
