Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra

by Poul Anderson

  Below the retaining wall, where shadows had already engulfed the slopes, lamps were twinkling to life. But fog rose up, to blur and finally smother those tiny strewn stars. Flandry guided a somewhat wobbly Djuanda, who sang songs, up the sharp trail toward the Inn of the Nine Serpents. Having negotiated the last ladder and crossed the terrace, he went down the fumarole to his door. It had an ancient type of lock, he must grope for his key... no, wait, it wasn't locked after all, so his companions must be in there expecting his return.... With a split second's hesitation, Flandry opened the door and stepped through.

  Two green-kilted men snatched at his arms. Across the chamber, Flandry saw a dozen more. Kemul and Luang sat with ankles lashed together. Flandry got one look at the girl's face turned toward his. "Get out!" he heard her scream. A Guard smacked his stick against her temple. She sagged into Kemul's lap. The mugger roared.

  Nias Warouw leaned against the farther wall, smoking an outplanet cigarette and smiling.

  Flandry had barely glimpsed the men closing in on either side. His reaction was too fast for thought. Spinning on his heel, he drove stiff-held fingers into the throat before him. It was one way to break your hand, unless you struck your enemy with a vector precisely normal to the skin. Flandry opened the throat and tore the windpipe across.

  The other man was upon his back. Arms closed around the Terran's neck. Flandry's head was already down, chin protecting larynx. He dropped straight through the hug, hit the floor and rolled over.

  The Guard backed into the doorway. His knife gleamed forth. The rest of Warouw's troop stalked closer, their own blades drawn.

  Flandry bounced to his feet, reached in his shirt, and yanked out the pistol he had captured.

  He didn't waste his breath crowing. Not when knives and clubs could be hurled from every side. He shot.

  Four men went down in as many explosions. The others milled back. Flandry's eyes searched through a reeking haze of cordite. Where was their chief now—? Warouw looked out from behind one of the rough pillars upholding the ceiling. Still he smiled. Flandry fired and missed. Warouw's right hand emerged, with a modern Betelgeusean blaster.

  Flandry didn't stop for heroics. He didn't even stop to make a conscious decision. His chance of hitting Warouw with his own clumsy weapon was negligible. A single wide-beam low-energy blaster shot couldn't possibly miss. It would roll him screaming on the floor. Later, if he wanted to take the trouble, Warouw could have his seared prisoner treated in some hospital.

  The Guard at the door was down with a slug in his chest. The door stood open. Flandry went through it.

  As he burst out on the terrace again, Warouw was close behind. The rest of the Guards swarmed shouting in their wake. The dusk was cool and blue, almost palpable, surrounding all things and drowning them. Mist and smoke hung in it. Flandry bounded down the ladder to the trailstreet.

  There went a rumbling through air and earth. Briefly, flame gushed in the sky. From an open doorway came the sound of crockery falling and smashing; a woman ran out with a scream. Flandry glimpsed several men halted in their tracks, looking up toward the crater. Their bodies were shadows in this vague twilight, but the gleam of a lamp touched white eyeballs. Further down the trail, the barely visible mass of the crowds had stopped seething. Their mutter lifted between black walls.

  Gunung Utara was angry.

  Warouw paused only an instant at the foot of the ladder. Then a flashbeam sprang from his left hand and speared Flandry. The Terran whirled, dashed from the light, over the pebbles to the retaining wall. He heard footfalls rattle behind him.

  At this point, he remembered, the downslope beyond the wall was steep and rugged. He made out a boulder, and leaped from the wall to its top. Another shock went through the ground. The boulder stirred beneath him and he heard lesser stones grind valleyward. Warouw's flash darted from the wall, here, there, hunting him. Where to go? He could see naught but darkness and thickening fogs. No, wait... was that another jut of rock, two meters away? No time to wonder. He sprang. Almost, he missed, and heard below him the shifting of debris which would cut his feet to rags if he landed in it. He grasped an invisible roughness, pulled himself up on top of the crag, spied another mass below him, and jumped to that.

  Warouw's light bobbed in pursuit.

  Flandry realized he was cutting across town. He didn't know how long he sprang from coign to coign. It was all mist and darkness. Somehow he crossed another safety wall, landed on a terrace, scrambled to the trail beneath, and sped among emptied caves.

  Panther to his mountain goat, Warouw followed. Once in a while, for a fractional second, his light picked out the Terran.

  Then Flandry was beyond the city. The trail petered out. He ran across a bare slope, over black cinders and among crags like tall ghosts.

  He could just see how sharply the ground rose on his left, almost a cliff, up to the crater rim. Gunung Utara thundered. Flandry felt the noise in his teeth and marrow. Cinders shifted, dust filled his nostrils. Somewhere a boulder went hurtling and bouncing down toward the valley. Smoke boiled from the crater, a solid column three kilometers high, lit from beneath with dull flickering red.

  Flandry looked back. The flashbeam jiggled in a gloom where streamers of mist seemed to glow white. He lurched onward. A few times he stumbled, teetered on the uneasy slope, and heard a roar as the scree slid downward. No use heading that way, unless he wanted to die in chunks. He sobbed for air, his lungs were twin deserts and his gullet afire.

  A sheer wall rose before him. He ran into it and stared stupidly for seconds before he comprehended. The magma dyke. Yes. Yes, that was it. Must be some way up... here, a ladder, iron rungs set into the concrete....

  He stood on a railed platform and looked down into the channel. The molten rock threw gusts of heat and poison gas at him. It growled and glowed, ember colored, but he thought he could see tiny flames sheet back and forth across its current. If he wasn't crazy. If he wasn't dreaming.

  There was no way to go from here. No bridge, no catwalk to the other side. Not even a flat top on the levee itself. Only the platform, where the engineers could stand to check the stone river. Why should there be more? Flandry leaned on the rail and fought to breathe.

  A voice from below, hardly discernible through racing blood and the snarl of Gunung Utara—but cool, almost amused: "If you wish to immolate yourself in the lava, Captain, you still have time. Or you can stay there, holding us off, till the fumes have overcome you. Or, of course, you can surrender now. In that case, the persons who assisted you will not be put in the cage."

  Flandry croaked, "Will you let them go?"

  "Come, come," chided Warouw. "Let us be sensible. I promise nothing except to spare them the ultimate punishment."

  Somewhere in the pounding weariness of his brain, Flandry thought that he should at least make an epigram. But it was too much like work. He threw his gun into the lava. "I'll be down in a minute," he sighed.

  X

  Awakening was slow, almost luxurious until he realized the aches and dullnesses in him. He sat up with a groan which turned into an obscenity.

  But the chamber was large and cool. Its view of gardens, pools, and small arched bridges was very little spoiled by a wrought-iron grille set in the window frame. A clean outfit of kilt and sandals lay waiting next to the low bedstead. An alcove behind a screen held a bathroom, complete with shower.

  "Well," murmured Flandry to himself, as he let hot needles of water wash some of the stiffness out, "it's the minimum decent thing they can do for me... after last night." That memory brought a shiver, and he hurriedly continued his graveyard whistling: "So let's hope they do the most. Breakfast, dancing girls, and a first-class one-way ticket to Terra."

  Not that they had tortured him. Warouw wasn't that crude. Flandry hoped. Most of the physical suffering had been due his own exhaustion. They didn't let him sleep, but hustled him straight to a highspeed aircar and questioned him all the way to wherever-this-was. Thereafter they cont
inued the grilling, established that he was indeed immune to any drug in their inquisitorial pharmacopeia, but did their best to break his will with his own sheer grogginess. Flandry was on to that method, having applied it himself from time to time; he'd been able to cushion the worst effects by relaxation techniques.

  Still, it had been no fun. He didn't even remember being conducted to this room when the party broke up.

  He examined himself in the mirror. His dyed hair was showing its natural hue at the roots, his mustache was noticeable again, and the high cheekbones stood forth under a skin stretched tight. Without their lenses, his eyes revealed their own color, but more washed out than normal. I was interrogated a long time, he thought. And then, of course, I may easily have slept for twenty hours.

  He was scarcely dressed when the door opened. A pair of Guards glowered at him. There were truncheons in their hands. "Come," snapped one. Flandry came. He felt inwardly lepidopteral. And why not? For a captain's lousy pay, did the Imperium expect courage too?

  He seemed to be in a residential section—rather luxurious, its hallways graciously decorated, servants scurrying obsequiously about—within a much larger building. Or... not exactly residential. The apartments he glimpsed didn't look very lived in. Transient, yes, that must be it. A hostel for Biocontrol personnel whose business brought them here. He began to realize precisely where he must be, and his scalp prickled.

  At the end of the walk, he was shown into a suite bigger than most. It was fitted in austere taste: black pillars against silvery walls, black tables, one lotus beneath a scroll which was a calligraphic masterpiece. An archway opened on a balcony overlooking gardens, a metal stockade, jungled hills rolling into blue distances. Sunlight and birdsong came through.

  Nias Warouw sat on a cushion before a table set for breakfast. He gestured at the Guards, who bowed very low and departed. Flandry took a place opposite their master. Warouw's short supple body was draped in a loose robe which showed the blaster at his hip. He smiled and poured Flandry's tea with his own hands.

  "Good day, Captain," he said, "I trust you are feeling better?"

  "Slightly better than a toad with glanders," Flandry admitted.

  A servant pattered in, knelt, and put a covered dish on the table. "May I recommend this?" said Warouw. "Filet of badjung fish, lightly fried in spiced oil. It is eaten with slices of chilled coconut—so."

  Flandry didn't feel hungry till he began. Then he became suddenly sharkish. Warouw crinkled his face in a still wide smile and heaped the Terran's plate with rice, in which meat and baked fruits were shredded. By the time a platter of tiny omelets arrived, Flandry's animal needs were satisfied enough that he could stop and ask for the recipe.

  Warouw gave it to him. "Possibly the aspect of your wideranging career most to be envied by a planet-bound individual such as myself, Captain," he added, "is the gastronomical. To be sure, certain crops of Terran origin must be common to a great many human-colonized planets. But soil, climate, and mutation doubtless vary the flavors enormously. And then there are the native foods. Not to mention the sociological aspect: the local philosophy and practice of cuisine. I am happy that our own developments apparently find favor with you."

  "Ummm, grmff, chmp," said Flandry, reaching for seconds.

  "I myself could wish for more intercourse between Unan Besar and the rest of the galaxy," said Warouw. "Unfortunately, that is impracticable." He poured himself a cup of tea and sipped it, watching the other man with eyes as alert as a squirrel's. He had not eaten heavily.

  The Terran finished in half an hour or so. Not being accustomed from boyhood to sit cross-legged, he sprawled on the floor in his relaxation. Warouw offered him Spican cigarillos, which he accepted like his soul's salvation.

  Inwardly, he thought: This is an old gimmick. Make things tough for your victim, then quickly ease off the pressure and speak kindly to him. It's broken down a lot of men. As for me... I'd better enjoy it while it lasts.

  Because it wasn't going to.

  He drew blessedly mild smoke into his throat and let it tickle his nose on the way out. "Tell me, Captain, if you will," said Warouw, "what is your opinion of the Terran poet L. de le Roi? I have gotten a few of his tapes from the Betelgeuseans, and while of course a great many nuances must escape me—"

  Flandry sighed. "Fun is fun," he said, "but business is business."

  "I don't quite understand, Captain."

  "Yes, you do. You set an excellent table, and I'm sure your conversation is almost as cultural as you believe. But it's hard for me to expand like a little flowerbud when I don't know what's happening to my friends."

  Warouw stiffened, it was barely perceptible, and the first syllable or two of his answer was ever so faintly off key. However, it came smoothly enough, with an amiable chuckle: "You must allow me a few items in reserve, Captain. Accept my word that they are not at the moment suffering at the hands of my department, and let us discuss other things."

  Flandry didn't press his point. It would only chill the atmosphere. And he wanted to do as much probing as he could while Warouw was still trying the benevolent uncle act.

  Not that anything he learned would help him much. He was thoroughly trapped, and in a while he might be thoroughly destroyed. But action, any action, even this verbal shadowboxing, was one way to avoid thinking about such impolite details.

  "Professionally speaking," he said, "I'm interested to know how you trapped me."

  "Ah." Warouw gestured with his own cigarillo, not at all loath to expound his cleverness. "Well, when you made your... eh... departure in Kompong Timur, it might have been the hysterical act of a fool who had simply blundered onto us. If so, you were not to be worried about. But I dared not assume it. Your whole manner indicated otherwise—not to mention the documents, official and personal, which I later studied on your ship. Accordingly, my working hypothesis was that you had some plan for surviving beyond the period in which your first antitoxin dose would be effective. Was there already an underground organization of extraplanetary agents, whom you would seek out? I admit the search for such a group took most of my time for numerous days."

  Warouw grimaced. "I pray your sympathy for my plight," he said. "The Guards have faced no serious task for generations. No one resists Biocontrol! The Guards, the entire organization, are escorts and watchdogs at best, idiots at worst. Ignoring the proletariat as they do, they have no experience of the criminal subtleties developed by the proletariat. With such incompetents must I chase a crafty up-to-date professional like yourself."

  Flandry nodded. He'd gotten the same impression. Modern police and intelligence methodology—even military science—didn't exist on Unan Besar. Poor, damned Nias Warouw, a born detective forced to re-invent the whole art of detection!

  But he had done a disquietingly good job of it.

  "My first break came when a district boss named Sumu—ah, you remember?" Warouw grinned. "My congratulations, Captain. He was unwilling to admit how you had taken him, but afraid not to report that he had unwittingly entertained a man of your description. I forced the whole tale from him. Delicious! But then I began to think over the datum it presented. It took me days more; I am not used to such problems. In the end, however, I decided that you would not have carried out so risky an exploit except for money, which you doubtless needed to buy illegal antitoxin. (Oh, yes, I know there is some. I have been trying to tighten up controls on production and distribution. But the inefficiency of centuries must be overcome.) Well, if you had to operate in such fashion, you were not in touch with a secret organization. Probably no such organization existed! However, you must have made some contacts in Swamp Town."

  Warouw blew smoke rings, cocked his head at the trill of a songbird, and resumed: "I called for the original reports on the case. It was established that in fleeing us you had broken into the establishment of a certain courtesan. She had told the Guards that she fled in terror and knew nothing else. There had been no reason to doubt her. Nor was there now
, a priori, but I had no other lead. I ordered her brought in for questioning. My squad was told she had left several days before, destination unknown. I ordered that a watch be kept on her antitoxin record. When she appeared at Gunung Utara, I was informed. I flew there within the hour.

  "The local dispenser remembered her vividly, and had a recollection of a tall man with her. She had told him where she was staying, so we checked the inn. Yes, she had been careless enough to tell the truth. The innkeeper described her companions, one of whom was almost certainly you. We arrested her and the other man in their rooms and settled back to await you."

  Flandry sighed. He might have known it. How often had he told cubs in the Service never to underestimate an opponent?

  "You almost escaped us again, Captain," said Warouw. "A dazzling exhibition, though not one that I recommend you repeat. Even if, somehow, you broke loose once more, all aircars here are locked. The only other way to depart is on foot, with 400 kilometers of dense rain forest to the nearest village. You would never get there before your antitoxin wore off."

  Flandry finished his cigarillo and crushed it with regret. "Your only reason for isolating this place that much," he said, "is that you make the pills here."

  Warouw nodded. "This is Biocontrol Central. If you think you can steal a few capsules for your jungle trip, I suppose you can try. Pending distribution, they are kept in an underground vault protected by identification doors, automatic guns, and—as the initial barrier—a hundred trusted Guards."

  "I don't plan to try," said Flandry.

  Warouw stretched; muscles flowed under his hairless brown skin. "There is no harm in showing you some of the other sections, though," he said. "If you are interested."

  I'm interested in anything which will postpone the next round of unfriendliness, acknowledged Flandry. Aloud: "Of course. I might even talk you into dropping your isolationist policy."

  Warouw's smile turned bleak. "On the contrary, Captain," he said, "I hope to prove to you that there is no chance of its being dropped, and that anyone who tries to force the issue is choosing a needlessly lingering form of suicide. Come, please."