by Unknown
"Have you ever seen vids of the snakes?" Panera asked.
"No," she replied, and was about to add that it was an education she could do without, but he was already bringing the hovercraft even lower, so that it barely skimmed the surface of the dark waters where odd, twisted trees reached up with dark branches.
"There's one now!" he said, pointing.
He put the craft into a sharp turnand then she saw it! An involuntary cry escaped from her as she stared at it in horror. He reached out to lay a hand briefly over hersa gesture that was nearly unnoticed as she gaped at the sight just below them.
"Don't worry. They're intelligent creatures, and they have enough sense not to attack a hovercraft."
She didn't answer because she was staring into the yellow eyes of the creature as it reared up on the front part of its body and watched them warily. Its black head measured at least five feet across, and its body was only slightly less thick. She couldn't even begin to guess its length, since most of it was hidden beneath the murky waters of the swamp.
"That's not a particularly large one," Panera remarked as he circled above the snake and it turned its wedge-shaped head to watch them. "It's probably about twenty feet long."
"I've never seen anything so . . . evil-looking in my life!" she gasped, wishing he would stop circling it.
"Some of the Torondis still worship them," he said as he finally resumed their journey to the town. "But they see them as evil too. They deny it, but we suspect that some of them might still be sacrificing children to the 'snake-gods.' Supposedly, that stopped when they fell under the sway of the Coven, but we think it may have resumed."
She was truly appalled. "I've never heard that. Why do you allow it to go on?"
"First of all, we have no proof that it does. And secondly, Torondi has just never worked its way to the top of the agenda." "Because it has nothing you need," she stated angrily.
He shot her a brief glance. "Nothing we need, Jalissa. You benefit from our science too."
His tone was surprisingly gentle, but it did little to calm her anger. "Someone has to find out if they're really sacrificing childrenand if they are, it must be stopped! This is unconscionable, Miklos!"
"Speaking personally, I agree with you, of course. It's time the Council pays some attention to Torondi. If I can persuade them, we'll undertake a mission to find out the truth. If not, I'll try to look into it on my own. Would you be willing to come back here with me?"
She was caught completely by surprise, and just stared at him.
"Well, if I'm going to find out the truth, I'll have to bring a Whisperer alongand a very good one, because of the difficulty of their language. I'll fund the expedition if the Council won't."
"I'll come," she said quickly. "Even if I have to use vacation time. But what will we do if we discover that the rumors are true? The Council still may not do anything about it. They're so reluctant to interfere with religious matters."
"What I'll do is try to reason with the Torondis. And if that doesn't work, I'll threaten to kill every last one of their scaly 'gods.'"
"The Council would definitely never approve of that," she said, knowing that the destruction of any species was forbidden, no matter how much of a problem it was.
"By the time the Council found out, all they could do would be to voice disapproval. And I can see to it that you aren't implicated."
"You surprise me, Miklos. That is, if you really mean what you say."
"I do mean it. Those stories have always bothered me, but I knew I couldn't verify them without a Whisperer. I hope that threats alone will work, though, because I agree with the Non-Extinction Policy."
"If anyone else did such a thing, he or she would be sent off to a penal colony," she mused. "But you could probably get away with it."
He nodded. "I could get away with it. There are some advantages to being a Panera."
"Are there any disadvantages?" she inquired archly.
He laughed. "There are someincluding one that you yourself must be familiar with. It's difficult to go anywhere unnoticed."
"But at least no one treats you with hostility," she said.
"I wasn't referring to your being a Whisperer, though I'm sorry if you've encountered any hostility. It's really only envy. Many Vantrans are overly sensitive about their lack of affinity for the crystals."
Once again, his candor shocked her, but she hid it carefully. "Then what were you referring to?" she asked curiously. Surely he couldn't mean because she was an off-worlder. Vantra was filled with them.
He turned to her briefly again, a smile hovering on his lips and in his eyes. "Your beauty, of course: a very exotic sort of beauty to us."
Jalissa looked away quickly, embarrassed because it now sounded to her as though she'd begged for a compliment. Even the most trivial conversations with Miklos Panera had become fraught with nuances. His words had suggested nothing more than a general statement, but his eyes seemed to indicate otherwiseand that brought her back to her earlier thought that he might try to seduce her.
She was a sophisticated woman, a galactic traveler whose work frequently brought her into contact with powerful men on a variety of worlds. And as a Whisperer, she was a member of a small elite corps that had an allure all its own. Furthermore, since she was well-schooled in the art of diplomacy, she knew how to deflect attempts at seduction, and had often done so.
But never before in her career had she been faced with a situation like this one. Miklos Panera was the most dangerous man she'd ever met, and it seemed that she was drawn to him as the moth is drawn to the flame.
"There's the town," he said, interrupting her confused thoughts.
By the time the hovercraft had settled down on the rough stones of the town square, dozens of Torondis were hurrying toward them. Panera was wearing a stunner attached to his belt, but she was pleased to note that he kept his hand away from it.
The square was elevated, formed by many layers of small stones. Beyond it, stretching for some distance, lay the homes of the Torondis. All of them stood high on stone columns and were connected by elevated stone walkways. It was certainly one of the stranger sights Jalissa had ever seen, but she had to admit that it was an excellent adaptation to living in a swamp.
The dark, opaque waters lay all around them and gave off an unpleasant smell that made her want to wrinkle her nose. She wondered what these people would think of clean, fresh air. Perhaps it would smell bad to them.
Jalissa and Panera stood side by side as they waited for the people to approach them. Jalissa saw no overt hostility, to her very great relief. But after casting wary glances at Panera, they all stared unabashedly at hernot surprising, since no Whisperer had set foot on Torondi in a very long time.
She scanned the small group of men who continued to advance toward them while the others hung back. When it became apparent which of them was the leader, Jalissa addressed herself to him through the medium of the crystal. ''We come in peace, to seek information. No harm will come to you." As she spoke, Jalissa used her body to convey her peaceful intentions, though she was certainly hampered by having an armed Special Agent at her side.
The reaction of the man to whom she addressed herself was completely predictable. Anyone encountering a Whisperer for the first time was invariably either confused or frightenedor, as in this case, both. The problem was in the way the crystal worked. She spoke in Vantran, for Panera's sake, but the man heard her in his own language. It took great skill to prevent the language she was actually speaking from overwhelming the translation. Add to that a half-second delay in the translation, and it was no wonder that first-time listeners were overwhelmed.
She hurried on to explain who she was, not bothering to introduce Panera. They knew what he was, if not his name, and as far as she was concerned, he was irrelevant at the moment.
The man fixed his strange amber eyes on the crystal as she explained what it was. Then he began to move closer to her, and from the corner of her eye, she
saw Panera stiffen. His hand began to inch toward the stunner on his belt.
"Step back," she told him. "He wants to touch the crystal, but he's afraid of you."
Panera hesitated, but finally did as told. That gesture seemed to reassure the man, and he put out his hand as she held the warm crystal to him, stretching it to the limit of its platinum chain.
She continued to speak encouragingly to the man, and her speech caused the crystal to glow with faint colors. The Torondi touched it, then drew away as though burned. Murmurs arose from the crowd and they pressed closer, now surrounding her and separating her from Panera. She glanced his way and saw him standing there rigidly, his hand now resting on his belt, next to the stunner.
Several others touched the crystal as well, as she continued to speak words of reassurance. At the same time, she tried to gauge the mood of the crowd. It seemed that they were more curious than hostile, and they were all but ignoring Panera at this point.
Then the leader spoke for the first time in his strange, whistling tongue. "Is it magic?" he asked, pointing to the crystal.
She smiled. "In a way. But it's good magic, since it allows me to talk with you. Please tell me your name. Mine is Jalissa."
He gave her his name, which she did her best to repeat. Then, apparently emboldened, he asked if she'd come because of the stranger.
"Yes," she replied. "What can you tell me about him?"
"He was very sick, we think," came the reply. "Sick in the head." He touched his own head and there were murmurs of agreement from the others.
"How did you know that?" she asked, fairly certain now that it couldn't have been the Warlock. These people would surely remember the Coven, and they wouldn't mistake magic for mental illness.
They knew he was sick because he had behaved very strangely, yelling at them in a language they couldn't understand and then becoming very agitated at their failure. He had, it seemed, a pronounced facial tic, which the Torondis imitated for her, as well as some spasmodic jerking of his limbs.
"Could you describe him?" she asked, and they told her that he had dark hair and blue eyes and that he was very thin.
Jalissa knew now that he wasn't the Warlock, and she also knew what the poor man's problem was: space-sickness. It was seen most often in space travelers who used ancient craft with malfunctioning ventilation systems. Deprived of the oxygen it required, the brain began to deteriorate. And the physical description the people gave told her which world he was likely from: a poor place where many traders took to space in vehicles that should have been scrapped decades ago.
Finally, she asked what had happened to him, and learned that he had simply walked off into the swamp, leaving behind his hovercraft. "He sacrificed himself," the Torondi said solemnly, to the accompaniment of sober nods from his companions.
Jalissa felt ill, but nothing showed on her face. "How do you know that?" she asked, hoping they were only making an assumption.
"When the snake-god has accepted a sacrifice, he roars. We all heard it."
Jalissa's mind was filled with the image of that snake they'd seen, and for once, her aplomb nearly failed her. But whether deliberately or not, Panera distracted the Torondis by once again moving to her side. She couldn't be sure if he'd overheard the conversationat least not until he asked her to find out where the hovercraft was.
She asked, and they pointed toward a largish building that sat at the other side of the town square, the only building not elevated on stone blocks, since it sat on the square itself. Panera took her arm and began to lead her in that direction. He bent close, his breath fanning warmly against her ear.
"You're doing fine. We'll get out of here as soon as I have a look at the hovercraft."
His words, almost certainly meant in kindness, had the opposite effect on her. She became angry with herself. If he could tell how upset she was, then she'd failed. Maintaining a cool neutrality no matter what the situation was essential to Whisperers. The hovercraft was an old model, one she hadn't seen in years. Panera searched it for any personal belongings, but found nothing. She suspected that whatever had been there had been taken by the Torondis and hoped that Panera didn't intend to make an issue of it. The man certainly couldn't have had much.
The Torondi leader then inquired rather timidly if they could keep the hovercraft, since its owner had "gone to the snake-gods." Panera overheard the conversation as he was climbing out of the vehicle.
"They can keep it. It was rented from a place I know, near the base. I'll take care of it."
She translated for the Torondis and they all smiled, then made a high, keening sound that she took to be pleasure. Obviously, Panera had known that his gift would be greatly appreciated.
As they walked back across the square to their own hovercraft, Jalissa was having a difficult time controlling her anger with these people. She was no stranger to wars between groups who spilled each other's blood with abandon, but never before had she encountered a situation like this, where people had allowed a mentally ill man to wander off and be eaten by a snake.
"We have to look for him," she said frantically the moment they both were airborne. "He could still be alive out there."
"Our backup will be here in a few minutes," he told her, then picked up the comm speaker and ordered whoever was on the other end to commence a search in the area to the west of the town.
"We should help," she said, already scanning the dark swamp below them. "There are some dry places. He could be"
"He's dead, Jalissa," Panera said gently.
"How can you be sure of that?" she demanded, her voice rising.
"Because the snake roared. They only do that when they've captured a human."
"I know that's what they said, but they could be wrong," she insisted.
He shook his head. "In the two months I was here, I saw more of those damned snakes than I ever wanted to, but the only time I ever heard one roar was after it caught one of our men."
She swallowed hard and stared at him. He reached over to take one of her hands in his, covering it warmly.
"I'm sorry, Jalissa. I know you haven't had much experience with primitive people like this."
For one brief moment, Jalissa allowed herself to feel the warmth of his touch and the gentleness in his voice. The horror and the anger receded as a part of her felt that pleasurable ache, that hunger for more. In the clear, deep green of his eyes, she saw that same hunger. His hand tightened around hers, sending shivers of promised ecstasy through her body.
And then she shattered the momentwillfully but not willingly. She pulled her hand from his only to discover that it did no good. She could still feel him holding it.
Two more hovercraft came into view, circling slowly over the dark waters. She wondered if he had summoned them only for her sake. He seemed so certain the man could not be alive.
"They called it a 'sacrifice,' " she said when she could trust her voice. "The stories must be true."
"Not necessarily," he replied, the hard edge back in his voice. "They apparently believed that he went willingly to the snake and simply used that term for it."
"The man was mentally ill, Miklos, and they knew it. He was suffering from space-sickness."
"Among many primitive peoples, the mentally ill are believed to have been touched by the gods. From their point of view, that could have made him an appropriate sacrifice."
Jalissa said nothing. She was beginning to understand just how much she was out of her depth here. The worlds she had until now considered to be primitive were in fact highly advanced compared with Torondi. And it could be even worse in the Outer Ring.
"He wasn't the man we're looking for," she said, forcing her mind back to their mission as he headed toward the base.
"How can you be sure? I couldn't hear all of the conversation."
"Because they said he had blue eyes and blue eyes don't exist among members of the Coven."
"How do you know that?"
She froze for a moment, the
n relaxed quickly, hoping he hadn't noticed. "Every Tevingian knows that. Witches and Warlocks are invariably described as having dark hair and dark eyeslike most Tevingians."
He was silent for a moment. She didn't turn toward him, but she could feel his gaze on her. "You're right," he said finally. "The man we seek was described as having dark eyes, and nothing was mentioned about facial tics or spasms."
"Well, what do you think?" Miklos reached over to turn off the recorder. They were back aboard the U- and headed toward Tevingi. He had just played a recording made of the witness's account of the supposed Warlock's speech.
She stared at the recorder distastefully. "They used drugs on him."
"You know as well as I do that those drugs don't harm anyone. And they promote total recall."
"From the description, it sounds as though he could be Tevingian. He's probably delusional and actually believes himself to be a member of the Coven. Such delusions aren't unheard of on Tevingi. A form of Coven worship persists to this day among some of the rural folk. They even celebrate Coven festivals. I can remember attending one as a child." "But you don't personally believe that they still exist?"
"No. I already told you that. But it seems to me that the Special Agency must not be so sure. Otherwise, why would you be sent after one deluded man?"
Miklos decided to answer her honestly. "There are those among my people who have always suspected that the Coven still exists. And there have been enough unsubstantiated rumors over the years to keep that fear alive."
"'Fear'?" she echoed derisively. "What could Vantrans possibly have to fear from the Coven noweven if it does exist?"
"Quite a lot, actually. Its magic may no longer be a match for our science, but the hold the Coven could have on the minds and hearts of people could be enormous."
She didn't respond, so Miklos lapsed into silence as well, thinking about the part of the recording he hadn't played for her. He'd edited it carefully, so all she'd heard was the physical description of the man and his speech. But the other part included the witness's testimony that the man had "called the fire" and had then vanished in a puff of smoke just before the troops arrived.
