“That would be suicidal,” Riklo said. “OO is such a dangerous place that the Storoz team closed its headquarters there.”
“Nonsense. Why?”
Riklo said scornfully, “Don’t you know anything about Storoz and its history?”
“Just what I found in the moon base file,” Darzek said cheerfully. “I may not have been looking in the right place. Tell me about Storoz and its history.”
At some point in the island’s remote antiquity, the kingship had rotated among the dukes. Then one duke made himself king permanently, with the great port of OO as his capital city. The other dukes were reduced to the status of provincial administrators.
The king occupied a dual position: political leader and head of the island’s religion, with the title, Protector-King; he was ruler of the land and protector of the faith. But the kings became increasingly oppressive, and finally one took the ridiculous step of forbidding the dukes the right to make their own cider, and they revolted, deposed and murdered the king, and established their independence.
The king’s son survived, but he was reduced to the status of a mere duke, ruling the lands that the former king had held personally. As a result, the dukedom at OO was the smallest on Storoz, but it also was one of the wealthiest, containing the island’s largest and most prosperous city as well as its best agricultural land.
“Then the present Duke of OO is a direct descendant of the last King of Storoz,” Darzek mused.
“True,” Riklo said. “But so are all the other dukes, because of complicated intermarriages among the nobility. In fact, so is the Protector. He’s the brother of the present Duke of OO.”
Darzek leaned forward alertly. “That’s suggestive. Which of the present dukes have dreams of restoring the monarchy with themselves as Protector-King?”
“Probably all of them do. And the Protector, too.”
“Of course they do. Aristocracy and priests are the same all over the galaxy. Which brings us to religion. The Mound of the Sun and the Winged Beast. They’re in direct contention. Who’s winning?”
Before the revolution, the Winged Beast had been the symbol of the official Storozian religion. Afterward, the dukes had resented the control exercised over their subjects by the priestly knights of the Winged Beast, so they threw out the knights and fostered a rival, informal religion. It caught on, and the Winged Beast was worshiped in secret if at all. But within the past few years, the present Protector had gained some concessions: the return of the Winged Beast symbol to market places and forums and the freedom of the citizens to worship it if they chose. In addition, a few knights and lackeys of the Winged Beast had been admitted into each province and into the Free Cities as religious guides. The old religion was making a comeback.
“But they have to behave themselves,” Riklo said.
“I know,” Darzek answered. He had just learned that morning, from Sajjo, that the knights and lackeys of the Winged Beast had been expelled from Northpor for forty days by the Sailor’s League for attacking an unidentified free citizen, a perfumer, who had absently walked through their holy circle.
“The exception is OO,” Riklo said. “The Protector’s brother has re-established the old faith as the province’s official religion. There are enormous numbers of knights and lackeys of the Winged Beast in OO. They combine their role of religious leadership with that of an official police force. That’s what made the place so dangerous. It was the first province where we began to lose agents. After the fourth vanished there, the headquarters was closed. There hasn’t been an agent there since. It’d be suicidal to go to OO. It’d also be silly. Why would Rok Wllon be looking for agents who vanished months ago? Why wouldn’t he look for the ones who vanished most recently?”
Darzek was studying a map. “You have a point. Where did they vanish most recently? Merzkion or Fermarz?”
“I don’t know. Visiting either place would be suicidal. Both dukes have pazuls.”
Darzek smiled. “Did your Primores headquarters tell you so?”
“At least one of the missing agents was seen dead as his body was carried away,” Riklo said. “I talked with the agent who saw him. There’s no mistaking a death caused by a pazul. Anyway—your training was miserably inadequate compared to ours, and we’re novices. If we three start looking for twenty missing agents, there’ll soon be twenty-three missing agents.”
“In other words,” Darzek said, “it isn’t safe.”
She glared at him.
“And in the meantime, those missing agents may be tortured—or worse.” He was looking at the map again. “The best route would be Merzkion, Fermarz, and then OO. Merzkion first, since it’s closest.”
“I’ll come with you,” Wenz said. “I’d like to have a look inside the Duke Merzkion’s castle. If he has a pazul, I want to see it.”
Darzek regarded him with interest. “Do you know how to get in?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“Come outside, and I’ll show you.”
They went outside to the most shadowed corner at the rear of the house. While Darzek watched openmouthed, Wenz walked up the side of the building. No cat burglar on Earth could have approached such finesse. He deftly climbed a sheer wall and then climbed down again.
“I’ll climb up to the highest turret and pry open a window,” Wenz said. “That ought to be the last place they’d expect anyone to break in. I’ll dress like a lackey—that’s the lowest order of the duke’s servants. If I get into trouble, I’ll go out the nearest window and hide on the roof. I can spend a week there, if necessary, and search the place from top to bottom.”
“And if he gets into trouble, there’ll be no one to support him,” Riklo said bitterly.
“I wouldn’t want any support,” Wenz said. “Going alone, I’ll have no one to worry about but myself. But I won’t get into trouble. Who’d suspect a lackey on the top floor of the castle? If the Duke Merzkion has a pazul, I’ll find it.”
“I’m less concerned about the pazul than about who’s locked in the duke’s dungeon,” Darzek said.
“I’ll find that out, too,” Wenz promised.
“Very well. We’ll go together. Riklo can stay here or go back to Southpor.”
She said, still sounding bitter, “As long as the two of you are going—”
“I wouldn’t order any agent to do this,” Darzek said. “When twenty disappear out of twenty, it isn’t difficult to calculate the risk. We don’t even have a simple weapon for self-defense. The Department of Uncertified Worlds is run by nincompoops.”
Riklo held up an amulet she was wearing on a thong about her neck—a carving of the hideous Winged Beast. “These were in the last supply shipment,” she said. “There’s also a carton of stun rifles up there. Primores is finally conceding that we have a problem.”
* * * *
Darzek rushed the preparations. Riklo and Wenz had to return to Southpor to dispose of their nabrula, and he had to acquire another cart and a tandem of nabrula equal to rough rural travel. Certain work had to be performed—in the way of devising hiding places in the cart for their alien equipment—that the agents had to do themselves.
Finally the cart was packed and they were ready to set out—and then Darzek had to suffer a tempestuous and tearful parting from Sajjo, who seemed fiercely jealous of Riklo. They moved south through the province of the Duke Lonorlk, traveling slowly in the manner of itinerant tradesmen, pausing occasionally in a tiny peasant village in the hope of attracting a customer or two, and stopping each night at a wayside forum.
These foul little parks were the rural marts. The peasants came each evening to see what the day’s travel had tossed up there and to shop a little and gossip with neighbors—and to perform religious rites if they chose, for each forum featured a shabby Winged Beast on a pole and a diminutive hump that served as a Mound of the Sun.
Since the forums belonged to no one, no one cleared away the mountains of nabrula dung, and a night in th
at environment, surrounded by the stench of manure and the reek of the night creatures that came to feed on it, was almost more than Darzek could stand. He meditated again on the Kammians’ strange ability to smell selectively.
On the ninth day out of Northpor, they crossed an unmarked boundary into the province of the Duke Merzkion. The same day they encountered their first sponge forest. The spongy bark of these trees grew in tough layers like a thin parchment with porous material interleaved. Darzek recognized the parchment. It was used as wrappings for bread and other merchandise at the Northpor mart. The soft core of this tree, when dried and cured, was the basic building material of Kamm, and it could be processed to a toughness difficult to believe in a non-metal.
On the tenth day they were following a lane that took them obliquely past the Duke Merzkion’s castle. They found a vantage point and studied the massive stone building with binoculars. The stones were a foreboding gray; the dukes had no money to squander on costly imported colored stone and no ships that could occasionally bring such luxuries back as ballast.
As they studied the castle, Wenz made his final plans. While he investigated the fortress, Darzek and Riklo would explore the countryside, looking for traces of the missing agents. Their carts, equipment, and nabrula had vanished along with them. Peasants may have appropriated these, or they may simply have been abandoned. Either way, traces should have survived.
When Wenz had accomplished as much as he thought he could, he would signal them to meet him at the rendezvous point.
He left them with a grin, looking rather silly in his lackey clothing. The tight-fitting blouse-like tunic and the ankle-length apron that completely concealed his flopping trousers gave him an appearance of someone’s grandmother—except that not many grandmothers wore red, a highly appropriate personal color for the Duke Merzkion.
That night Wenz signaled on schedule from the highest window of one of the turrets. They answered him with a single flash of light, and then they moved off to begin their own search.
At dawn they were exploring the byways in the neighborhood of the castle, searching for abandoned camp sites. By midday they had found nothing at all, so they turned onto a principal surlane to take their search to the territory north of the castle.
And there the black knights overtook them on their way to a rendezvous with the dead Wenz, who had looked for the duke’s pazul and found it.
* * * *
Shrugging off Darzek’s protests, Riklo carried Wenz’s body all the way back to the cart. When they reached it, she proceeded with her own autopsy, trepanning the skull, removing the brain and the organs and nerves of sight, hearing, and smell. These she placed in a perfume jar, filled the jar with an essence that might serve as a passable preservative, and sealed it. She did the same with the lungs, with a length of intestine, with samples of tissue from various parts of the body.
While she worked, Darzek dug a grave. And when she was quite satisfied that she had enough samples for a careful study of the effects of a pazul, they buried Wenz.
The first light of dawn made little impression on the gloom of a sponge forest, but the night creatures knew what time it was. They were scurrying to their daytime lairs when Darzek and Riklo finally were able to wash up from their nighttime exertions. When they finished, they faced each other across the cart.
“Feeling squeamish again, Earthman?” Riklo asked hoarsely.
Darzek did not answer.
“He’d been dead almost a day—he must have died shortly after he signaled us.” Riklo added defensively, “We couldn’t take his body back. By the time we reached the lab it would have been too decayed to study. This way, we’re certain to learn something about the effects of a pazul. At least his life won’t have been completely wasted.”
“His life won’t be wasted,” Darzek said. “Now we know where the pazul is. All we have to do is find out what it is.”
She turned quickly. “You’re going into the castle?”
“Of course. How else can we find out what it is?”
“You’re going to walk into a castle you know nothing about, containing a pazul that looks like you don’t know what, located you don’t know where, and expect to come out alive? The pazul might be triggered to go off automatically. Wenz was the most alert and resourceful person I’ve ever known, and he didn’t survive in that castle for an hour.”
“That’s all right,” Darzek said. “I’ll watch the duke and be careful not to step anywhere he doesn’t.”
Riklo faced him in silence for a moment. “What do you want me to do?” she asked finally.
“I want you to get these specimens back to the lab as quickly as possible and get them into a proper preservative. And I want you to write a complete report on everything that’s happened and leave a copy in plain sight in the moon base. There’s no guarantee that either of us will survive until help comes.”
She said incredulously, “You’re going alone?”
“Of course. And I’m going tonight.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No. Positively not. We’re the last two agents on Kamm. One of us has got to hurry back and write that report. Too bad Rok Wllon isn’t available to read it.”
This proof that there actually was a pazul would have pleased Rok Wllon immensely. It was one of the few times Darzek could remember when the Director of the Department of Uncertified Worlds had been right.
By midday they were back at the scene of the previous day’s altercation. While Darzek retrieved one of the dead knight’s riding nabrula, which were still grazing in the forest, Riklo dug up clothing and equipment for him. Then they found themselves a secure clearing deep in the forest where Darzek could prepare for his foray.
He improvised a stunning set of mustaches for himself out of nabrula bristles, gave his hair a dark wash, and stained his face to produce the effect of the deep tan acquired by traveling knights. While he worked on himself, Riklo converted the blotched yellow nabrulk to a black- and purple-spotted creature of a different breed.
By midafternoon both of them had finished. Darzek was the complete knight of the Winged Beast, riding a steed that no one in the duke’s castle could possibly recognize. He parted from Riklo where the surlane forked—he to head for the castle and she to turn north. They cached a change of clothing and a package of emergency supplies for him in a clearing near the fork. He would leave a message there when he completed his mission—just in case something happened to him before he made contact again—and he would adopt the identity of the lowest of peregrinating vendors, a wandering foot peddler, and travel only by night until he reached the neighboring province of Duke Fermarz. Riklo would rush to Northpor and take the specimens to the moon lab. Then she would travel to Fermarz by ship and meet Darzek there.
Darzek turned his nabrulk and lopped away, whip raised, mustaches fluttering defiantly, a formidable picture of aggressive confidence. He practiced the fierce expressions he’d seen knights use and felt ridiculous. Fortunately he met no one on the lane, and when he was able to glimpse a corner of the castle roof above the trees, he retired to the forest to rest. The nabrulk grazed contentedly on young sponge shoots, and Darzek stretched out on a pile of fallen bark, closed his eyes, and mulled over his tactics. Since he had a long wait, he even dozed a little.
Shortly after nightfall, at the grunz, the hour of the Kammian evening meal, he started his reckless gallop toward the castle. By the time he swerved into the steeply ascending branch of the lane that led to the castle gate, he was traveling with all the speed he could coax from the lumbering nabrulk. He brought the beast to a snorting halt with its bulging nose pressed against the gate in the outer wall.
His dramatic arrival went for naught. Even to his impaired hearing, the clattering hoofs of his nabrulk had sounded as though they could be heard for kilometers—but in this castle there were no ears. Disgustedly he uttered a shout and leaned over to pound on the gate before he thought to look around for some kind of signal pull.
>
He saw a dangling rope. He grabbed it and jerked. Somewhere in the distance it set something in motion; the return stroke snatched the rope from his fingers.
He looked about him. The lane branched off on either side, probably leading to side entrances. There could be no rear entrance because of the cliff. Darzek held the nabrulk’s nose against the gate, snatched at the swinging rope, and pulled it again.
A panel covering a barred peephole in the gate opened. A moment later one of the massive sections began to swing aside. It stopped when the opening was wide enough to admit the nabrulk, but Darzek sat scornfully motionless and kept his mount from moving until the gate had been opened all the way. Then, without a glance on either side, he deigned to ride through.
The gate clumped shut behind him, and the dozen or so lackeys who had manipulated it chased after him through the castle grounds and overtook him before he reached the main entrance. In their grandmother costumes, they looked as ridiculous as Wenz had.
At the main entrance to the castle, other lackeys were waiting to raise the heavy, portcullis-like doorway. Darzek rode through it reflecting that Kammian history must have recorded some spectacular siege horrors to produce such a massive castle and a tradition of precautions still being faithfully adhered to even though no Duke of Storoz had been besieged for centuries. He had noticed how promptly the lackeys had closed the outer gate after admitting him; and he had noticed how the lackeys at the main entrance studied the landscape to see whether an army had accidentally slipped through the outer gate with him before they opened the castle to a solitary knight.
Darzek did not need an ultrasensitive Kammian nose to identify the ground level of the castle as its stable. He had hoped to arrogantly ride his nabrulk into the duke’s presence, wherever he was, for the name of Darzek’s game was bluff, the more insolent the better; but a single glance convinced him that he could coax the massive beast up the long ramp to the next level only by walking ahead of it and hauling on the reins, which would contribute very little to his necessary air of hauteur.
[Jan Darzek 04] - Silence is Deadly Page 10
