Spacebread

by Oscar Steven Senn

  Sonto was huddled with some of the Wiss-Koth in the bow. It was hard for her to see him, except for the black sliver of his face and his sable whiskers spraying. Sonto was her friend. He was like her. They seemed to fit together in certain very nice ways, ways that made her lonely heart plan new chests and cabinets in her spaceship. His presence meant gladness inside her. She loved him, she supposed. She tried to pay little attention to labels and symbols, but sometimes nothing else would quite express reality. Yes, she loved him.

  Lucidan’s face came like a pang. It hung, surrounded by white fur and gray fluttering hair, at the front of the sled, her snowy eyes matching the colorless glare of the landscape. And yet Lucidan, too, triggered certain echoes inside Spacebread. They were echoes from some deep and timeless part of her, a part where her mother and her native legends still endured.

  They raced. That day ended; they drove on through the velvety zero darkness with snow lamps on. The column’s lights diminished, and then vanished from the rear horizon.

  They camped near midnight, beneath the shelter of a frozen primeval tree. The night sky rippled with a menacing aurora. Some in the troop said they had never seen the lights dance so electrically or so fitfully. It was as if the northern sky was angry. Spacebread huddled with her friends and slept.

  The next day dawned misty and foreboding. There were few words spent as they broke camp and started off again. Once more they lashed themselves into the protective shadow of the bow and bent their limbs into the painful positions they had learned the day before. Spacebread passed the time polishing her sword. The figlet finished his new cryo-gun a little after noon. It looked sturdier and better-made than the first one, and more powerful. He caught Spacebread’s gaze on it and gave her a miniature smile. He holstered it and clung to his rope.

  They again traveled at full speed, the snow hissing as it flurried against the motor housing. They cooked strips of Wiss bacon by skewering it and holding it next to the motor.

  Disaster struck in the afternoon. The leading helmsman failed to notice some shading in the ice that announced a thinly frozen stream. The sled crashed through the crust in a freezing spray, slammed against the far bank, then bounced out and skidded over the ice. The second helmsman, who happened to be Colden, reacted instantly and avoided the same fate. But they lost three men in the icy river. Their bodies, the warm life quickly sucked from them, floated far under the ice and were left behind.

  They also lost an hour righting the sled and hammering some of the dents out of its runners. The time neared the appointed hour, and they were not in sight of the Old Palace.

  FAR BEHIND THEM, in smoldering Krath, the regent’s legions settled in. Martial law was augmented and a rudimentary post set up to protect those craft still landing from Northwil and ruined Sar-Kath. A token force was left behind to deal with the conquered city while the main contingent marched northward. The hard-faced troops soon ruthlessly suppressed what resistance had at first spontaneously sprung up. There were executions and massacres answering each random potshot or ambush.

  The people of Wiss-Ko, who were used to calling themselves the free people, were at first stunned at the invasion, then murderously angry. But when brutality followed each attempt at resistance, the anger evaporated into horror. They feared they had lost, in their long centuries of freedom, the warrior’s edge to keep freedom. In thousands of Wiss-Koth minds a tradition of liberty remembered only in words had atrophied, and withered into numbness.

  The city officials who remained alive at the end of the first day bowed with cold, but real, deference to the new commanders. Only a little more than a day had passed, but the city of Krath lay broken and vulnerable.

  Saucers shuttled troops to Krath through a thin haze of smoke, and the people lowered their heads without noticing.

  THE SKY AT THE POLE was darkening into deep, freezing blue, its stars glaring sharply through a wavering aurora. The riders were now in sight of the spires and minarets of the Old Palace of the Wiss. The figlet crawled on ropes to point out the area Basemore had activated. Lights shone dully there through the crystal and ice.

  The Old Palace was huge, even on the horizon. Domes, spires, twisting pathways between slanting rooftops, all were now encased in ice and glinting with the red light of approaching sunset.

  Spacebread nodded and motioned for the figlet to direct the helmsman. Their speed, and the din of the engine, dropped as Klimmit showed the pilot where the entrance was. The two sleds slowed and slid to a gentle stop, spraying ice across the cornices of the nearly hidden gateway.

  They stood and tried to accustom their limbs to moving again. Their joints still felt the jolting rattle of motorized ice travel. The Wiss-Koth got their land legs first and quickly covered the craft with snow white tarpaulins.

  They were about two miles from the palace. Klimmit’ s voice sounded strange after hours of the motor’s whine. “They should all be in that lighted area.” He pointed.

  Spacebread nodded. “It will be best if I, Sonto, Klimmit, and five of you make our way into the tunnel. Klimmit can direct our efforts, and I hope, pilot us right into their ranks. The rest of the Wiss-Koth can creep up to the area outside and attack simultaneously. Let’s say in an hour. How does that sound?”

  Colden grunted. “As workable a plan as any. I will come with you.”

  While Colden picked the men to descend beneath the ice with them, Spacebread checked her weapons. Sonto was doing the same with his, and when he looked up, he met her gaze. There was a long pause between them, their eyes communicating things that words could only touch upon. Sonto slid the housing back on his pistol and looked away from her painfully. She forced herself to put him from her mind and turned to Lucidan, resting a hand on the old woman’s arm. “You must stay behind, mother.”

  Lucidan seemingly surveyed her with those dim star-sighted eyes. “Must I wait, now that I have come so far? I feel I should be there.”

  Spacebread shook her head. “You would be in too much danger. You have been of great help, don’t get in the way now.”

  Lucidan nodded sadly and turned to the warmth of the fur tent they were leaving for her.

  They bade farewell to the Wiss-Koth who were to sneak around the palace. As they turned to descend the icy steps into the tunnel, the drone of approaching armies could be heard behind. Colden drew his old Wiss saber and cast a weary look at the horizon.

  “Perhaps the free people of Wiss-Ko have been free too long. There seems to have been no resistance. We must do our work swiftly.”

  He did not add that even if they wrecked Basemore’s plan, they would surely not have time to escape from the army behind them.

  The figlet held a lantern ahead of them as they filed down into the darkness. Spacebread was next, with her sword in one paw and her blaster in another. Sonto, then Colden and his men followed. Lucidan alone stayed behind, like a blind sentinel in the shelter of the doorway.

  They crept through tunnels of ice. Strange fixtures jutted from the walls, and half-clogged passages branched off from the main path. They occasionally had to crawl, for the way had collapsed in places. The figlet always whisked ahead of them, like a small grim firefly. It was cold, bitterly cold, and when Spacebread looked back at Sonto, she chuckled at the white sunburst of ice on his whiskers. He laughed softly with her. It eased the tension a little.

  They crawled, scrambled, and fought through the passage for what seemed like an eternity of numbing cold. Many bodies were frozen in lumps on the floor, and as they neared their destination, there were icicles clustered everywhere, like glass forests. The tunnel grew wider the farther they went, but ice and cave-ins still limited their travel. Spacebread moved rhythmically, trying to keep her joints limber in the biting cold. She hated cold.

  At first as an illusion, and then as a dawning reality, light crept toward them to meet Klimmit’s light. The passage began a noticeable incline. The ice above them transmitted a cold light that grew brighter as they neared the end. Klimmit
slowed the pace carefully.

  They were at a frozen stair that climbed at the same steep angle as the gateway steps. Klimmit put out the lantern, for now there was light all around them, shining down from the top of the steps.

  There was an old doorway at the top, frozen over for a thousand years, but a large hole had thawed in the ice, and that was their way in. A half-lit corridor beyond was the source of their light. Spacebread followed the figlet through, and then stood guard while the rest clambered out.

  They stole, single file, along the blue-veined wall toward the light. Warm currents in the air, the currents that had melted the door for them, made their noses tingle and thaw. As they approached a lighted doorway at the end of the corridor, Spacebread realized that a sound she had thought she was only remembering was real. It was Basemore’s mummified orchestra, the one that he carried with him, playing the same triumphal air with mournful precision. The sound set her jaw and limbered up her sword arm.

  The light from a large chamber spilled across them. Only a few steps down was a huge domed room, upheld by amethyst columns. On one side the orchestra was seated, stiffly playing. A half-dozen guards stood watching the musicians. A few more lounged with their backs to the corridor entrance, watching several technicians readying a gigantic console. Behind the console, like a crystalline cathedral organ, fluted girders held a delicate system of tubes, lenses, and mysterious boxes aloft in the chimney of a great tower. Spacebread’s eyes narrowed, for in the center of the strange network her buckle was set in a round geared mounting. It seemed to collect various faint rays from other lenses and mirrors in the machine and focus them down, into a black shaft beneath the tower. Stairs spiraled up the inside of the crystal tower.

  Basemore and Dezorn stood looking at diagrams before the console, discussing something in low voices.

  Soon all the invasion party had jostled a look inside the hall, all jammed out of sight around the doorway.

  “Klimmit, you fly high into the dome and concentrate on the far guards,” Spacebread whispered hurriedly. “Sonto and I will attack the technicians and try to destroy the mechanism. Colden, you and your men take out these closer guards and help Klimmit when you’re finished. Sound okay?”

  The Wiss-Koth nodded. The figlet was about to begin the fray when two more soldiers marched in the chamber and saluted Basemore.

  “The army will be here in less than an hour, Your Highness.”

  Basemore nodded, then called to the technicians.

  “How long?”

  One of them looked up nervously. “Perhaps half an hour, when the moons are above the tower.”

  Basemore returned to the charts, but the guards still faced the invasion party’s hiding place and they dared not attack yet. Spacebread motioned Klimmit to wait.

  That wait cost them dearly. The heat from so many bodies warmed the stalactites above the doorway. Suddenly heavy ice crashed down the stairs ahead of them, and while all eyes in the hall pivoted to them, nervous Wiss-Koth hands tripped Spacebread, and they all spilled down the steps like a bowling strike.

  They grappled with their weapons, but by the time they could recover, every gun in the room was staring at them.

  “Wait!” Basemore’s voice hissed like ice in fire. “Disarm them!”

  Two soldiers collected their arms and stacked them in a pile. Spacebread looked helplessly at Sonto and Klimmit.

  “Welcome,” Basemore gurgled, regaining his composure, “you’ve come just in time. The moons of Ralph are rising, and soon your precious belt buckle will render me master of the entire planet!” His eyes blazed like coals.

  “My figlet!” trilled the gnorlff in delight. Spacebread stepped in front of Klimmit. “Me first, Dezorn,” she snarled. Her claws unsheathed and projected from her mittens.

  “Yes,” Basemore nodded. “You first, my pussycat. You are the most dangerous. Then the other cat, then these miserable Ralphians you have brought with you. I don’t know how you escaped Dzackle, but you will all become statues in my museum. All except the figlet. He is a gift to Lord Dezorn.”

  Plodding, ghoulish music sounded around them, echoing off the crystal walls.

  “Bring them here, guards. In front of me, where they may see me better.”

  They had no choice; a dozen guns were on them. They shuffled into a group before the basilisk. Spacebread felt Sonto’s mittened hand in hers. She shook it off as if to say, “This is not the end. Not yet.”

  Basemore addressed them in a glutteral voice, his arms folded up behind his purple cape. “The price you traitors to the new Ralph will pay for your treason is not to be allowed to see me usher in the new age. You will be turned to stone long before then …” Sonto growled, “There is no king but Gallwort, and there will be no new order, lizard.”

  “Oh, but there will.” Basemore smiled menacingly. “But none of you will see it because—”

  Suddenly the basilisk whipped off his glasses, his eyes flashing.

  Spacebread looked at the floor. “Don’t look at his eyes!” she shouted.

  But even before her compatriots had averted their eyes, Basemore had looked away, in the direction of the dull thunder that sounded outside. The Wiss-Koth were attacking at the agreed upon time. Another volley peppered off, and the palace echoed with footsteps.

  In a second, a melee ensued.

  Spacebread sprang upon the distracted guards before her, as did the Wiss-Koth. Gunfire sounded all around them. She kicked one of the soldiers away, peeling his weapon from his grasp and firing on the others. Sonto threw her her sword as he found his pistol and fired.

  Basemore hissed to the technicians to keep working and hid behind the console with them. Klimmit wriggled from Dezorn’s grasp as it went for its ceremonial sword. As Spacebread finished off the guards in front of her, brandishing her sword in one hand, Sonto made for the tower and its crystal machinery. But suddenly, moving faster than its bulk would seem to allow, Dezorn made a dash at Sonto, howling in rage. The sword point buried itself in the black fur beneath his arm; he flinched and fell as Dezorn yanked the sword away. The gnorlff, its natural cowardice quickly replacing its one hot action, took one look at the blood on its sword and fled the hall. Spacebread grabbed Sonto as he fell and, firing rapidly, pulled him to cover behind some boxes.

  The guards were now in flight. Colden Xarc and his Wiss-Koth had overpowered them with fury and now were chasing the rest of them from the chamber. A well-aimed blast swept across his chest, however, and he tumbled to the floor before the console, his saber rattling from his dying grip.

  From high above the fight, Klimmit BarKloof watched Dezorn pierce Sonto and flee. His eyes narrowed. He drew his small dagger from his parka and hummed down through the doorway after the gnorlff.

  Shots sounded randomly. The orchestra played dumbly, oiled gears keeping cadence. The remaining guards crouched behind orchestra members, some around the door, and tried to pick off the Wiss-Koth. Basemore’s orange gaze swept the room to snare the Ralphians’ gaze and ossify them.

  Spacebread clutched Sonto to her in grief. His precious breath ruffled her fur. He smiled up weakly at her, his violet eyes sleepy.

  “There was no time before to tell you in words …”he began in a ragged whisper.

  She put her hand on his lips. “How could there be, when you have already told me more, beyond time and without words, than I expected when I met you first. Your eyes told me all those things.”

  Silence filled the din for them, for just a moment, as their eyes met.

  The violet eyes dimmed. “There is darkness coming. Darkness like my black pelt, like Lucidan’s darkness. But it is rest …”

  His head pitched forward limply, the life dying from the violet eyes.

  Spacebread’s shoulders stiffened, her head shot up. All had been killed except a lone Wiss-Koth, who was firing at the console, where Basemore was trying to glimpse into his eyes and the technicians huddled, still working. Suddenly, Basemore’s vision poured into his Wiss-K
oth eyes, and the gun clattered from his frozen grasp.

  DOWN THE DARK and frigid corridor the gnorlff careened, its three eyes bugged in fright. It had tried to wipe Sonto’s blood—and its guilt, from the sword. Behind it, a slight hum turned each corner and dipped down each flight of stairs, matching its pace.

  Dezorn cast a hurried glance behind, then, terrified, fled on.

  Klimmit BarKloof was right behind, his small dagger drawn and ions streaming. His small jaw was set.

  “Stand and fight, eater-of-figlets,” he called. Only puffing answered.

  Just down the hall, Dezorn thought, just down this hall and to the right the saucer lies in the snow. If I can just reach it, I can explain the whole thing to Gallwort. I was extorted. That’s right …

  But the humming grew louder behind. It raced.

  Dezorn spun, cried out, and swung at the figlet. He dodged easily and hung waiting for the next blow. He moved around to block the gnorlff’s flight.

  “Fight me, slave master,” he taunted.

  “I-I will pay you,” Dezorn stuttered.

  “No,” the figlet shook his head. “I will pay you. For my life which you wished to take and for Sonto’s which you have taken.”

  He darted in close, but only nicked the creature, who snorted in shock and swiped at him. Another thrust, but the gnorlff parried well.

  They fought on, slowly, spasmodically, the figlet superior in speed but Dezorn longer of sword and stronger of force. Sap trickled down Klimmit’s side.

  Abruptly, a concussion wobbled the foundations beneath them and an icicle bumped the figlet aside. Wildly, Dezorn took the chance and dove ahead through an iced archway. Before Klimmit could pursue, they were both kicked by another blast. The palace rocked.

  A splitting, shrieking sound grated overhead, the iced gateway cracked and pitched against itself. Ice and crystal thundered through the cloven ceiling, almost drowning the gnorlff’s terrified scream.