And then he was going to get very, very dead.
* * *
Chapter Thirteen: Exile
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They came out of the Tower, through the Veil, into dim red sunlight, the Bloody Sun rising over the foothills far away to the east. Jeff walked with his hand on his knife, feeling strange and cold. At this hour the streets of Arilinn were deserted; only a few startled onlookers in the street saw the three redheads, moving shoulder to shoulder, armed and ready for a fight; and those who did, suddenly discovered that they had urgent business in a couple of other directions.
They went through the outlying district, through the market where in a happier day Jeff had chosen a pair of boots, and into a crowded and dirty suburb. Auster, his hands still on the trap matrix, said in a low voice, “This won’t hold him much longer.”
Kerwin’s grin stretched his mouth, mirthless. “Hold him long enough for me to find him, and then let him go any damn time you please.”
They went through a narrow alley, a filthy courtyard cluttered with rubbish, a stable with a couple of ill-kept animals. A half-witted stableman in rags, his mouth hanging open, watched them briefly, then turned and fled. Auster pointed up a steep, crazy flight of stairs to an outside gallery with a couple of rooms opening off it. As they climbed the stairs, a girl in a torn skirt and scarf came out on the gallery, her mouth a wide O of astonishment. Rannirl made an angry, abrupt gesture, and she bolted back into one of the rooms and slammed the door.
Auster stopped outside the other door. He said, “Now,” and his bony hands did something to the trap matrix that Jeff didn’t see. From inside the room came a long cry of rage and despair as Kerwin, leaping forward, kicked the door open and burst in.
Ragan, still in the held-fast posture of the trap matrix, suddenly broke free and whirled on them like a trapped cat, knife flashing from his boot. He backed off and faced them, naked steel between them, baring his teeth with a snarl. “Three against one, vai dom’yn?”
“Just one! ” Kerwin rasped, and with his free arm, motioned Rannirl and Auster to stand back. In the next moment he reeled under the impact of Ragan’s body crashing into his. He felt the slash of the point along his arm as he whipped his knife up, but it had only torn his sleeve. He countered with a fast thrust, shoving Ragan off balance; then they were locked into a deadly clinch, and he was struggling to keep Ragan’s knife from his ribs. He felt his own knife rip leather; it came away red. Ragan grunted, struggled, made a sudden swift feint—
Auster, watching like a cat at a mousehole, suddenly flung himself against them. He knocked Jeff off balance, and Kerwin, hardly believing that this was really happening—he should have known he couldn’t trust Auster!—felt Ragan’s knife rip along his arm and go in a few inches below the armpit. Numbness, then burning pain, spread in him; the knife dropped from his left hand and he snatched it up with the other, fighting Auster’s deathgrip, dragging his arm down. Kerwin swore, brutally, kicking out with booted feet.
“Get away, damn you—is this your notion of a fair fight?” And Rannirl ran to fling his arms around Auster from behind, grab him and drag him away, taking a slash from Ragan’s knife that tore along his forearm and down the back of his hand. He was swearing.
“Man, are you crazy?” he panted.
Ragan wrenched loose. There was a crash, the sound of running feet on the staircase, the clatter of rubbish kicked loose on the staircase. Auster and Rannirl fell, still struggling, to the ground. Auster, somehow, had Ragan’s knife. Rannirl panted, “Jeff! Get the knife!”
Kerwin dropped his own knife, flung himself on the struggling bodies, and forced Auster’s hand back. Auster struggled briefly, then his hand relaxed and he dropped it, sanity coming slowly back to his eyes. There was a long slash on his cheek—Kerwin didn’t know from which knife—and his eye was darkening, blood streaming from his nose, where Jeff’s elbow had smashed at him.
Rannirl picked himself up, wiping the blood from his forearm. The knife had not gone into him at all; it was a cut less than skin deep. He stared down at Auster in shock and horror. Auster started to get up and Kerwin made a menacing gesture. For two cents he’d have kicked Auster’s ribs right in. “Stay right where you are, damn you.”
Auster wiped blood from his nose and mouth, and stayed where he was. Kerwin went to the window and looked into the dirty courtyard. Ragan, of course, was gone. There wasn’t a chance they’d find him again.
He walked back to Auster and said, “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kick your brains out!”
Auster sat up, bloody, but not beaten. “Go ahead, Terranan,” he said. “Pretend we owe you the protection of our codes of honor!”
Rannirl stood over him, menacing. “Do you dare call me traitor?” he said. “Kennard accepted the challenge; you did not speak to it then. And I have given this man my knife; he is my brother. By rights, Auster, I could kill you!” He looked ready to do it, too.
“Kennard gave him the right—”
“To murder his accomplice, so that we’d never know the truth! Didn’t you see he was set to kill the man before we could question him? Didn’t you see that he recognized him? Oh, yes, he put on a good show for us,” Auster said. “Damned clever; kill him before any of us could get at the truth. I wanted to take him alive, and if you’d have the sense of a rabbithorn, we’d have him, now, for questioning and telepathic interrogation!”
He’s lying, lying, Kerwin thought hopelessly, but doubt had begun to cloud even Rannirl’s face. As usual, Auster had managed to confuse the issue, to put him on the defensive.
“Come on,” he said wearily, “we might as well get back.” He felt weary and anticlimactic; his arm was beginning to ache where Ragan had stabbed him. “Help me get this shirt off and stop the bleeding, will you, Rannirl? I’m bleeding like a summer slaughterhouse!”
There were more people in the streets now, and more to stare at the three Comyn, one with his face smeared from a bloody nose, and one with his arm pinned up in an improvised sling from Rannirl’s undertunic. Kerwin felt all the weariness of a night spent at matrix work descending on him; he felt as if every step was his last effort. Auster, too, was staggering with weariness. They passed a cookshop where workmen were clustered, eating and drinking, and the smell of food reminded Kerwin that after a night in the matrix screens they had eaten nothing and that he was starving. He glanced at Rannirl and with one unspoken movement they went into the shop. The proprietor was awed and voluble, pouring out promises to set his finest before them, but Rannirl shook his head, caught up a couple of long loaves of fresh hot bread and a pan of cooked sausages, flung some coins at the cook and jerked his head at his companions. Outside he broke the bread, handed a portion to Kerwin and, glaring, one to Auster; they strode on through the streets of Arilinn, munching at the coarse food with wolfish hunger. It felt like the tiniest of between-meal snacks, a dainty morsel for a small and finicky child, but it did restore his strength somewhat. When they reached the Tower, and passed through the Veil, the faint stinging seemed to drain the last of Kerwin’s strength.
“Jeff,” said Rannirl, “I’ll come and bandage that for you.”
Kerwin shook his head. Rannirl looked exhausted, too, and it hadn’t even been his fight. “Go and rest—” awkwardly, he added—“brother. I’ll manage.”
Rannirl hesitated, but he went, and Kerwin, relieved to be alone, went into his own room and flung the door shut. In the luxurious bath he ripped off sling and shirt, awkwardly raising his arm with a grimace of pain. Rannirl had crudely stanched the bleeding with a heavy pad from his torn shirt; he worked it loose and examined the wound. A flap of skin had been sliced away, skin and flesh hanging down like a bloody rag, but as far as he could tell the wound was simply a flesh one. He stuck his head into the fountain; raised it, dripping but clear-headed.
The furry nonhuman who served him glided into the room and stood dismayed, green pupilless eyes wide in consternation; he went quickly and came back with b
andages, some thick yellow stuff he smeared on the wound; and deftly, with his odd , thumbless paws, bound it up. That done, he looked at Kerwin in question.
“Get me something to eat,” Kerwin said, “I’m starving.” The bread and sausages they had shared on the way back had only begun to fill the vast crater of emptiness inside him.
He had eaten enough for three hungry horse-breakers after a fall round-up when the door opened, and Auster came, unannounced, into the room. He had bathed and changed his clothes, but, Kerwin was gratified to see, he had a splendidly black eye that would take a good while to heal. Kerwin wiped his mouth, shoved his plate away, and gestured at Rannirl’s knife on the table.
“If you’ve had another brainstorm, there’s a knife,” he said. “If not, get the hell out of my room.”
Auster looked pale. He touched his eye as if it hurt. Jeff hoped it did. “I don’t blame you for hating me, Jeff,” he said, “but I have something to say to you.”
Kerwin started to shrug, found that it hurt, and didn’t. Auster watched him and flinched as if the pain had been his own. “Are you badly hurt? Did the kyrri make sure there was no poison on the knife?”
“A hell of a lot you care,” Kerwin said, “but that’s a Darkovan trick; Terrans don’t fight that way. And what the hell are you worrying about, when you did your level damnedest to make sure I got knifed in the first place?”
Auster said, “I deserve that, maybe. Believe anything you want to. I only care about one thing—two things, and you’re destroying them both. Maybe you don’t realize—but, damn it, it’s worse than if you did!”
“Get to the point, Auster, or get out.”
“Kennard said there was a block in your memory. Look, I’m not accusing you of betraying us on purpose—””
“That’s damn good of you,” Kerwin said with heavy sarcasm.
“You don’t want to betray us,” Auster said, his face suddenly cracking and going to pieces, “and you still don’t realize what this means! It means that the Terrans planted you on us! They put that block in your memory, probably before you ever left the Spacemen’s Orphanage, before you ever went to Terra. And when you came back here, they set it up, hoping that just this would happen—that we’d come to accept you, think of you as one of us, depend on you—need you! Because it was so obvious that you were one of us— ” His voice broke; in shock, Kerwin realized that Auster was fighting back tears, shaking from head to foot. “So we fell for it, Kerwin, and for you—and how can we even hate you for it— brother?”
Kerwin shut his eyes. This was the very thought he had been pushing away.
He had been maneuvered every step of the way, from the first moment when Ragan had met them in the shops. Perhaps Johnny Ellers had been set up to introduce him to Ragan; he would never know. Who but the Terrans could have done it? Maneuvered into his experiments with the matrix. Maneuvered into confrontation with the Comyn. And at last threatened with deportation, to force the Comyn to move and reclaim him.
He was an elaborate booby trap! Arilinn had taken him in—and at any moment, he might explode in their faces!
Auster took Jeff gently by the arm, careful not to injure his wounded shoulder. “I wish we’d liked each other better. Now you must think I’m saying this because we haven’t been friends.”
Kerwin shook his head. Auster’s pain and sincerity were obvious to anyone with a scrap of laran. “I don’t think that. Not now. But what could they hope to achieve?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps they thought the Tower Circle would disintegrate with you in it; perhaps they wanted information, leaked to them through the break in the barrier. I know they’re curious about how matrix science operates, and they haven’t been able to find out very much. Not even from Cleindori, when she ran away with your damned father. I don’t know. How the hell would I know what the Terrans want? You should; you’re one of them. You’ve lived with them. You tell me what they want!”
Kerwin shook his head. “Not now. I left them, didn’t I? I never was one of them, except on the surface,” he said slowly. “But now that we have the spy, now that we know what they’re doing—can’t we guard against it?”
“If it were only that, Jeff,” Auster said earnestly. “But there’s something else; the thing I’ve been trying not to see.” His face was set and white. “What have you done to Elorie, my brother?”
Elorie. What have you done to Elorie.
And if Auster knew, they all knew.
He could not speak. His guilt, Auster’s fear, was like a miasma in the room. Auster let him go and said earnestly, “Go away, Jeff. For the love of any Gods you know about on Terra, go away before it’s too late. I know it’s not your fault. You didn’t grow up with the taboo. It isn’t deep in your blood and bone. But if you care about Elorie, if you care about any of us, go away before you destroy us all.”
He turned and went out, and Kerwin went and threw himself face down on his bed, seeing it clearly for the first time.
Auster was right. He heard, like a grim echo, the words of the matrix mechanic who had paid with her own life for showing him a scrap of his own past. You are the one who was sent, a trap that missed its firing. But she had said something else too. You will find the thing you love, and you will destroy it; but you will save it, too.
True, her prophecy, that old and unlovely and doomed woman whose name or history he was never to know. He had found what he loved, and already he had come close to destroying it. Could he save it, if he went away now, or was it already too late?
Oh, Elorie, Elorie! But he must not even whisper her name. Even a thought could disturb her hard-won peace. Kerwin rose, grim-faced, knowing what he must do.
Slowly he stripped off the suede-leather breeches and laced boots, the bright jerkin; he dressed himself again in the Terran uniform he had laid aside—forever, he thought—when he came here.
He hesitated over the matrix stone, cursing, torn, wanting to fling it from the highest window of the Tower and shatter it on the stones; but at last he put it into his pocket. He was under enough stress now, and he had always felt uneasy when it was, physically, out of his reach.
It was my mother’s. It went with her into exile. It can go with me, too.
He hesitated, too, over the embroidered ceremonial cloak lined with fur that had begun this chain of events; but at last he put it round his shoulders. It was his, honestly bought with money earned on another world; and, sentiment aside, it was a bulwark against the bitter cold of the Darkovan night. He was still wearing the slash of Ragan’s knife (was this all the Comyn could give him, knife wounds in his body, keener wounds in his soul?) and he couldn’t afford to get chilled. And—another immensely practical consideration—on the streets of Arilinn, a man in Terran uniform would show up like a starflower on the bare glaciers of the Hellers. The cloak would keep him decently anonymous until he was a good long way away from here.
He went to the door of his room. There was a good smell of hot food somewhere; knife fights, blood feuds, endless telepathic operations within the matrix chamber could come and go, but practical Mesyr would plan their dinners, persuade the kyrri to cook them as she wished, chide Rannirl for spoiling his appetite with wine before dinner, search out new ribbons for Elorie’s filmy dresses, scold the men for flinging muddy boots in the great hall after riding or hunting. He heard her cheery calm voice with a wrench of nostalgia. This was the only home he had ever known.
I always wanted my grandmother Kerwin to be just like her.
He passed an open door. The drift of Taniquel’s delicate, flowery perfume wafted out, and he heard her singing somewhere in the suite. A brief vision caught at him, of her slim, pretty body half-submerged in greenish water, her curls piled atop her head as she scrubbed. Tenderness overwhelmed him; she had slept away the weariness of the night’s work, and did not yet know of the aftermath of the knife fight… nor did Kennard.
The thought froze him. Soon now, if not already, the touch of rapport would begin
to drift among them as they gathered for the evening, and then they would all know what he planned. He must go quickly, or he would not be able to go at all.
He flung the hood over his head, slipped down the stairs unseen, and out through the Veil. Now he was safe; the Veil insulated thought, too. Moving resolutely, holding his weariness at bay, he went through the cluster of buildings near the Tower, across the airstrip, and toward the city of Arilinn.
His plans were vague. Where could he go? The Terrans had not wanted him. Now there was no place for him on Darkover either, no safety; wherever he hid, from Dalereuth to Aldaran, there was no refuge so remote that the Comyn could not find him; certainly not while he bore the matrix of the renegade Cleindori.
Back to the Terrans, then. Let them deport him, stop fighting his fate. They might simply deport him. But if they had actually planted him on the Comyn, a giant booby trap, what would they do when they discovered that he had sabotaged their plan, a carefully-laid plan that had taken two generations to bring to fruition?
Did it matter? They could do their worst.
Did anything matter now?
He raised his eyes, looked directly into the great red bloodshot eye of what some romantic Terran, a few generations ago, had dubbed the Bloody Sun. It was sinking behind the Arilinn Tower; he watched it vanish, and with it came the swiftly lowering darkness, the chill and silence. The last gleam of the bloody sun went out; the Tower lingered a minute, a pale afterimage on Jeff’s eyelids, then dissolved in stinging rain. A single blue light shone from near the tip of the Tower, battling valiantly to pierce the mist and rain; then vanished as if it had never been. Kerwin wiped the rain from his eyes (was the rain salt and warm, stinging his face?) turned his back resolutely on the Tower and walked into the city.
He found a place where they did not recognize him either as Terran or Comyn, but looked only at the color of his money, and gave him a bed, and privacy, and enough to drink—he hoped—to blot out thought and memory, blur the vain, unavoidable reliving of those brief weeks in Arilinn.
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