Lenteiman bowed in the direction of the weakly glowing fire. “Venerable Master. It is Lenteiman who offers you greetings. I bring you the captain of the Imperial Shipsmen, who desires to speak with you.”
The response was a rustling and an indistinct movement in the vicinity of the fire. Only now did Wasra perceive next to the metal fire-stand a couch, not unlike a child’s cradle, and among the blankets and furs appeared the skull-like head and the right arm of an ancient man. When he opened his eyes, Wasra saw blind, silvery pupils reflecting the glow of the fire.
“What a rare honor…,” the old man whispered. His voice sounded frail and distant, as though he were addressing them from another world. “Greetings to you, Shipsmen of the Emperor. My name is Ouam. We’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”
Wasra exchanged nervous glances with Stribat. He decided to waste no time explaining to the Guild High Priest that they were by no means shipsmen of the Emperor, but rebels. At least not until they had concluded their mission. He cleared his throat.
“Greetings, Venerable Ouam. My name is Wasra. I asked to speak with you because I have an important question.”
Ouam seemed to be paying more attention to the sound of the foreign voice than to the meaning of the words. “Ask.”
“I seek a man named Nillian. I want to know from you, whether a man by this name was charged with heresy or executed in the past three years.”
“Nillian?” The high priest rocked his desiccated skull back and forth in thought. “I have to consult the books. Dinio?”
Wasra was beginning to wonder how this blind old man could manage to consult any books at all, when another face appeared out of the shadow of the couch. It was the face of a youth, who looked at the visitors with cool disdain before bending down to the old man to hear instructions whispered in his ear. He nodded assiduously, almost like an eager dog, and jumped up, disappearing through a door somewhere at the rear of the room.
He returned right away with a thick tome under his arm and squatted down on the floor next to the firestand to examine the entries. It didn’t take long. Again he bent over the couch to exchange whispers with the old man. Ouam’s smile was the ghostly grin of a death’s-head.
“We have no record of this name,” he declared.
“His full name is Nillian Jegetar Cuain,” said Wasra. “Maybe he’s listed by a different name.”
The Guild Elder raised his eyebrows. “Three names?”
“Yes.”
“A peculiar man. I should surely remember that. Dinio?”
The boy again consulted the register. This time when he whispered, he seemed to have more to say.
“There is likewise no record of the other two names,” Ouam noted. “In the past three years, there was only one single execution for sacrilege.”
“And what was that name?”
“It was a woman.”
Wasra considered this. “Do you receive reports, when someone is executed for sacrilege or heresy in some other city?”
“Sometimes. Not always.”
“What about your dungeons? Do you have any prisoners?”
Ouam nodded. “Yes, one.”
“A man?”
“Yes.”
“I want to see him,” demanded Wasra. He felt like adding that he was prepared to reduce the entire Guild Hall to rubble and ashes to get what he wanted.
But there was no need to threaten. Ouam nodded agreeably and said, “Dinio will take you.”
The dungeons were located in the most distant part of the Guild Hall. Dinio led them down decrepit, narrow stairways, holding the book containing records of executions and imprisonments tightly to him like a valuable treasure. Brown-stained plaster crumbled from the walls, and the deeper they went, the more acute became the stink of urine and rot and disease. At some point, the boy picked up a torch and lit it, and Stribad switched on the lamp he wore on his chest.
Finally they reached the first prison bars, a large gate guarded by a pale, bloated jailer. He gave them a dull stare, and if the large number of visitors surprised him, he didn’t show it.
Dinio ordered him to unlock the access to the dungeon, and Wasra left two of the escort soldiers as guards at the open gate.
The gloomy gallery was lighted only by torches burning in the entryway. On the right and left, the doors of unoccupied cells stood open. Stribat examined the area with his lamp. In every cell hung a large, colored picture of the Emperor. The prisoners had always been chained to the opposite wall, out of reach of the picture; the mercy of total darkness had been denied them—the barred ventilation shaft above them provided enough light that they were forced to stare at the Emperor’s image.
Dinio and the fat jailer, whose stench was even more disagreeable than that of the rotten straw covering the floor, stopped in front of the only occupied cell. Stribat shined his light through the gap in the door. They saw a dark figure with long hair lying curled up on the floor, arms chained to the wall.
“Unlock it,” Wasra commanded fiercely. “And unchain him.”
The man woke up at the sound of the key turning in the lock. When the door swung wide, he was already sitting up, watching them calmly. His hair shone white like silver, and Stribat’s lamp revealed that the prisoner was much too old to be Nillian.
“Unchain him,” Wasra repeated. The jailer hesitated. Only when Dinio nodded did he pull out his keys and remove the old man’s manacles.
“Who are you?” Wasra asked.
The man stared. Despite his squalor, he radiated dignity and serenity. He tried to begin several times before he was able to form words. It seemed he had not spoken for years. “My name is Opur,” he said. “I was once a flutemaster.”
With that he looked sadly down at his hands that appeared grotesquely mutilated. At one time or another, every one of his fingers must have been broken, and all the breaks had somehow grown back together without splints and without treatment.
“What did he do?” Wasra demanded.
As he spoke, he turned to the jailer who stared back stupidly. Answering for him, the boy responded with cold condescension: “He gave refuge in his house to a deserter.”
“A deserter?”
“An Imperial Shipsman. A cargo loader from the Kara, the last ship to land here.”
That must have been the first ship they pursued three years ago. Only to lose it and to discover another planet on which the inhabitants tied hair carpets and believed themselves to be the only ones. “What happened to the deserter?”
Dinio’s expression remained chilly. “He’s still on the run.”
Wasra watched the boy for moment, trying to imagine what position he held. Then he decided it didn’t really interest him and turned to the prisoner. He and Stribat helped him to his feet, and he told him, “You’re free.”
“No, he is not!” Dinio protested in a rage.
“He is free!” Wasra repeated sharply, giving the boy such a threatening look that he shrank back. “One more word about it, and I’ll lay you over my knee and thrash you black and blue.”
He handed Opur over to two soldiers from his escort with the instructions to get him to the ship for medical treatment and then to take him wherever he wanted to go. If he didn’t feel safe on this planet, Wasra was determined to take him with them to the next world of carpet makers they visited.
Sniffing angrily, Dinio watched the departure of the soldiers and the flutemaster but dared say nothing more. Instead, he shifted his book from arm to arm and finally pressed it to his chest like a shield. As he did this, a small white something slipped from between the pages and floated gently to the floor.
Wasra noticed it and picked it up. It was a photograph of the Emperor.
The dead Emperor.
The commandant stared at the picture in amazement. He knew the picture. He carried exactly the same one in his pocket. Every member of the rebel fleet carried a photograph of the dead Emperor, just in case he were ever in a situation where he needed to pr
ove that the Emperor really had been defeated and was dead.
“Where did you get that?” he asked the boy.
Dinio pouted obstinately, embraced his book still tighter, and said nothing.
“That must have belonged to Nillian,” Wasra suggested to Stribat. He held the white backside of the photo up to the circle of light from Stribat’s chestlamp. “It really did. Do you see that?”
The writing on the back of the picture was worn and smeared and so faded that it had almost disappeared. But at one spot there was a suggestion of the syllable Nill. Wasra’s look at Dinio seemed capable of felling trees and splitting open children’s skulls. “Where did this picture come from?”
Dinio swallowed nervously and finally grunted, “I don’t know. It belongs to Ouam.”
“Ouam surely didn’t bring it back from some long trek.”
“I don’t know where he got it.”
Wasra and Stribat exchanged glances, and it almost felt like old times when they each understood what the other was thinking.
“I would be interested,” the captain suggested, “in what Ouam can tell us about this.”
On the way back they back, they heard strange, keening sounds echoing through the dim halls of the Guild Hall, and they automatically quickened their pace. When they climbed the stair to the high priest’s rooms—rapidly this time, not reverently—they were not met by smoke and the red twilight from glowing embers, but by radiant light and fresh air.
The room was transformed. A man walked slowly from window to window, throwing them open, admitting ever more cascades of blindingly bright light. Outside the open windows, the hair carpets looked like the billows of a sea, breaking against the windowsill.
The fire in the metal tripod had been extinguished, and Ouam lay dead on his couch, his blind eyes closed, his shriveled hands folded over his chest. The couch was smaller than it seemed in Wasra’s memory, but, in spite of that, the corpse of the high priest in it seemed no larger than a child.
Guildsmen shuffled up the steps behind the space visitors. Paying no attention to the two strangers, they passed them by and sat down by the couch of the dead man and intoned a subdued lament. An echo of their dirge came in through the windows, and it spread through the whole Guild Hall and throughout the city. The man who had opened the window shutters and expelled what must have been years of smoke and stench now also joined the mourners; he presented the rebels with a memorable performance when his manner was transformed in a heartbeat from bustling efficiency to inconsolable grief.
At the sound of wild, hurried steps, Wasra swung about in surprise. Dinio was running breathlessly up the stairway, beside himself with despair. Without a sideways glance, he rushed to the dead high priest’s couch, threw himself on the floor in front of it, and shed bitter tears. His was the only lamentation in the room that sounded sincere.
Wasra looked again at the photograph in his hand and shoved it into his pocket. He caught Stribat’s eye, and again they understood one another without words.
* * *
By the time they were outside the Guild House gates once more, the sun was setting, glowing red like melted metal. The two armored tanks on the square glittered like precious gems in this light. The ritual singsong of the wailing and mourning guildmasters lent the scene the fantastic atmosphere of a dream.
“That picture was Nillian’s, wasn’t it?” Stribat asked.
“Yes.”
“That means that he was here.”
Wasra watched the merchants, who had closed their stands for the night and were directing occasional questioning glances toward the Guild Hall. “I’m not sure if that’s what it means.”
“Maybe he escaped, met a nice woman, and has been living happily somewhere on this planet ever since,” Stribat thought aloud.
“Yes, maybe.”
“Three years … He might have two children in the meantime. Who knows, maybe he’s begun to make a hair carpet himself?”
He’s dead, Wasra thought, don’t pretend anything else. They killed and buried him, because he said something against the Emperor. The immortal Emperor. Damn him. It took only one day to overthrow him, but for the twenty years since then, they had had to fight again every day to try to defeat him, as well.
“The landing craft!” Stribat burst out suddenly, and pulled excitedly at Wasra’s sleeve. “Wasra! What about the landing craft?”
“What landing craft?”
“This guy Nillian must have come to the surface in an airboat. We could track that down!”
“They found that long ago,” Wasra explained. “And they sent out disguised scouts who put their ear to the ground. Nillian had been arrested for heresy, and a carpet trader took him away to the Port City. Based on that, they looked around in the city, but Nillian never arrived here.” Wasra had studied the old reports. The reports had not been especially thorough—it would have required considerable effort, for example, just to find the city near which Nillian had landed—and they didn’t contain much helpful information. The hair carpets had been viewed back then as a quaint curiosity, and besides, everyone already had his mind on the trip back home. The attitude had been, He was commanded not to land, and he landed anyway—that’s what he gets.
“Wouldn’t it have made sense to have Nillian’s partner accompany us?”
“Sure.” Wasra nodded. He felt a wave of exhaustion spreading through his body, and he knew that it was more than a physical reaction. It never ended. Nothing ever ended. “Unfortunately, he’s dead. He was with the volunteers who made the first assault on the Portal Station, and one of those flying battle robots got him.”
Stribat emitted an inarticulate sound, probably meant to express something like amazement. “Why would a Kalyt pilot volunteer for a battle assignment?” When Wasra didn’t answer, he continued grunting as he sometimes did when thinking. “And why would the general accept him?”
Wasra wasn’t paying attention to his mumbling. Oblivious, he stared at the massive body of the Salkantar, a powerful presence rising into the sky in the distance, a dark silhouette against the setting sun, its outline shimmering like silver. Like all spaceships, it belonged in space; on the surface of a planet, it looked like a foreign body.
But the Salkantar would be sitting here for a long time, the captain thought unhappily. General Karswant would not set off for the Central World until he had learned Nillian’s fate. And until the general reported to the Council of Rebels, they could not decide what should be done. And until the Council made a decision, the flood of hair carpets would continue, and they would have to see these obscene stacks, these mountains, these unspeakable piles of hair carpets everywhere.
“Does that mean we’re supposed to scour the whole planet?” Stribat surmised.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No, but can that time and effort be justified? I mean, suppose Nillian is alive—then he would surely have made his way here to the Port City. This is where the spaceport is located; his chances of being found would be better here than anywhere else. The other possibility is that he’s dead; if so, he isn’t the only victim this expedition has to mourn.”
“But he discovered the whole phenomenon of the hair carpets.”
“So what?” Stribat peered quickly at the captain from the corner of his eye, as though he wanted to be sure he dared tell him what he had to say. “I don’t want to rob you of the pride you feel about General Karswant, Wasra, but could it possibly be that his motives are not quite as noble as you want to believe?”
Wasra pricked up his ears. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe he wants, more than anything else, to do a favor for a certain member of the Council?”
“A certain member of the Council?”
“Councilor Berenko Kebar Jubad.”
Wasra studied his comrade while giving serious thought to what he was trying to tell him. It had been Jubad who cornered the Emperor during the storming of the Star Palace and shot him single-handedly. Since
that time, he had enjoyed a positively legendary reputation.
“What does Jubad have to do with this?”
“Jubad’s father,” Stribat said slowly, “was named Uban Jegetar Berenko.”
The words hit Wasra like a slap in the face. His lower jaw dropped open. “Jegetar!” he repeated with effort. “Nillian Jegetar Cuain. They’re related—”
“It would seem.”
“And you think that’s the reason Karswant is waiting?”
Stribat just shrugged his shoulders.
Wasra raised his head, stared into the darkening sky, where the first stars were appearing at its zenith. The Emperor’s stars. It never ended. Was the Emperor dead? Or had it reached the point, where they were making his vanquisher into the next emperor?
“We’re returning to the ship,” he finally blurted out. He suddenly had the feeling he could not stay here one moment longer, especially not here at the gate to the Counting Court. “Immediately.”
Stribat gave the escort soldiers a hasty signal, and the rumbling, bone-rattling motors of the two tanks started at once. The draft animals, already unharnessed and bedded down together for the night, raised their startled heads and stared vacantly toward the sound.
Everyone on the square moved obligingly aside when they headed off. They followed the tracks of the third tank, which had gone ahead with the man they had freed. The flutemaster—for a while Wasra pondered this word and tried to imagine what it meant. Then, as the vibration of the seat spread through his body, he recalled his feelings during the drive toward the Guild Hall: he had felt powerful and superior and had enjoyed it. The seductiveness of power—even after 250,000 years of the Empire, it seemed no one would ever learn!
He bent down, grasped the microphone of the communication unit. When he reached the broadcast operator on duty, he ordered: “Send a multiformat message to the Trikood, to Gen. Jerom Karswant. Text: Confirm with almost total certainty that Nillian Jegetar Cuain is dead. All indications are that he was the victim of lynch-mob justice by religious zealots. I wish you a good flight home and send my best regards to the Central World. Signed, Captain Wasra … and so on.”
The Carpet Makers Page 22
