Jewels of the Dragon

by Allen Wold

  "I think you may be right," Polski said, "but it won't do you any good if you get yourself killed. Let's get you home. You've had enough excitement for one day."

  Rikard resented the patronizing attitude, but it didn't make any sense to protest. He let Polski lead him out of the alley by the other door. They went up a narrow hall to a shop, the nature of which he could not determine.

  "You've got a lot of courage," Polski said as they passed through the shop, "or else you don't know what kind of place this is."

  "I'm beginning to get a pretty good idea."

  "Then why'd you try to talk to Bedik?"

  "Because I thought he could tell me something. And he did."

  "You're lucky you got out of there alive."

  "Not at all. I'm lucky I got out of there with a loss of only twenty bills."

  Polski just shook his head. Rikard decided not to press the point.

  A block and a half from the shop they stopped at a parked floater. Polski opened a door for Rikard, then went around to the other side and climbed in behind the wheel.

  "Expense account," he explained as the car lifted up five centimeters from the pavement. He drove through the maze of streets as if he knew them.

  "You've been here before?" Rikard asked.

  "Several times. Got awfully lost the first time."

  "You're not down here for fun, I take it."

  "Just wrapping up the tail end of a long investigation."

  "Right, the thing I'm not supposed to ask about."

  They pulled into a courtyard two blocks from Rikard's hostel, where there were several other vehicles in parking slots. To make room the plant shelves started high up on the walls.

  "Thanks for the lift," Rikard said as they walked from the lot out onto the street. "I wasn't sure I could have made it back before dark."

  "Assuming you could have gotten away from Zakroyan, you had plenty of time. If you had known the best way to go."

  "I've got it marked on my map now."

  "You're expecting to go back, are you?"

  "I hope not. I'm pretty sure it would be a waste of time. But you never know about these things."

  "Are you still determined to try to find your father?"

  "Absolutely, especially now that I have some reason to believe he might still be alive."

  "Look, Rikard, it's been eleven years, according to you, since he dropped out of sight. Maybe he is still alive. But even if he is, he didn't disappear without a reason. Maybe he doesn't want to be found. Take my advice. Find someone who'll sell you a ticket off Kohltri and go home."

  "Are you afraid I'll get myself killed?"

  "Exactly. You're not your father. You don't know the first thing about survival down here. Maybe Bedik won't come after you, but Zakroyan certainly will. And half the rest of the people of this city, if they thought they'd make a bill or two."

  "I've survived so far."

  "You've had good luck so far."

  "That's true, I have. Look, I've got one more place to try. If that doesn't pan out, all my leads will have run dry, and there will be nothing left for me to do except go home. But I'm not leaving while I'm alive and have any chance at all."

  "What is this lead of yours?"

  "The Troishla."

  "You're crazy."

  "That's as may be."

  "Don't you know what kind of a place that is?"

  "I've heard stories."

  "Well, they're all true, whatever they were. You walk in there, all that will happen is you'll provide those characters with some sport for an hour or two, and then they'll have your head on a stake."

  "So I should just give up?"

  "Yes."

  "Would you?"

  "I'm not you."

  "You never learn anything by not trying."

  "Learning does you no good if it kills you."

  "I'm going to die anyway, so I may as well do it doing what I want."

  Suddenly people began running from something behind them. They turned to see the golden, shining, serpentine transparency of a dragon descending to the street just half a block away.

  "Let's move, kid," Polski said, grabbing his arm and rushing him along toward the hostel. They reached the door to the courtyard at a run. Polski shoved the door open and Rikard, beside him, looked over his shoulder to see the creature just meters behind them, its eyes looking directly at him. What appeared to be a forelimb was reaching for him.

  With a yell he lurched against Polski and knocked them both sprawling through the door and into the courtyard.

  Polski twisted over on his back and started an angry protest. He cut it short when he saw how close the dragon was. He grabbed Rikard's arm, dragged them both to their feet, and jerked Rikard across the court toward the hostel lobby. Rikard caught a glimpse of the dragon coming over the wall into the courtyard just as the door slammed shut with them safely inside.

  Part Four

  1

  Rikard started out for the Troishla early the next morning.

  Leonid Polski had stayed at the hostel until the dragon left and had tried to talk Rikard out of visiting the notorious tavern, but Rikard had been stubborn. Polski had refused to show him the route until Rikard told him he'd find his own way. Then the policeman had sketched in the streets on Rikard's false map.

  He remained alert as he walked toward the west edge of the city. His experiences the day before had taught him that it could be fatal to let one's attention wander while strolling these streets. This time he saw the first set of muggers when they were still a block away. He detoured to avoid them.

  A little while later he thought he noticed a woman following him. Without being obvious about it, he kept track of her, and after three blocks he was sure.

  He checked his map while walking. Polski's route was plain, but the printed portion was totally unreliable here, and he didn't dare make another detour for fear of getting lost.

  He kept on walking. After another block the woman had closed the gap to only a hundred meters or so. After another block she was walking beside him.

  She was almost as tall as he was, and quite striking in appearance. She wore leathers, a gun on her hip, and her face had the same hardness Rikard had seen on all the other citizens of the city.

  "Kind of far from home, aren't you?" the woman asked after she'd walked beside him for half a block.

  "Everybody I meet says something like that."

  "My, aren't we sharp this morning."

  "State your business or leave me alone."

  The woman grabbed Rikard's arm and jerked him around, and he, with the same motion, hit her on the side of the jaw. Her head snapped to the side and she staggered to her knees, clutching for her gun. He kicked her hand away; the weapon went spinning into the street. The other pedestrians paid no attention.

  "Lesson one," Rikard said. "Never talk to strangers." Then he turned and went on his way. She did not pursue him.

  Once again he felt exhilarated. Maybe he would be able to survive in this city after all.

  The only other trouble he had was when he passed through a neighborhood where children were playing, the first he'd seen so far. Several of the older ones, ten or twelve years of age, formed a jeering ring around him. They danced and yelled along with him until he'd gone three more blocks.

  The buildings began to thin as he neared the western edge of the city. Between them were empty lots, not overgrown but carefully planted with trees, shrubs, and flowers. Rikard's theory was that the citizens' emphasis on horticulture was their way of compensating for an otherwise harsh psycho­social existence.

  The street angled to the right. Beyond the bend he could see, three blocks away, the bulk of a huge building, right at the end of the street. It was the Troishla.

  He stopped where he was, suddenly afraid. He had no doubts about his ability to get into the Troishla. His real problem would be in coming out again.

  Everything he'd heard about this place had been bad, con­juring up images
of brutality, perversion, and violence. He didn't know how much was exaggeration and how much the truth, and doubted that it mattered. He slowly walked a block closer, hating his fear and struggling to master it, and stopped again.

  Whether the stories were true or not, he had decided that he was going to go in there and commit this world's two prime sins: talk to strangers and pry into their business.

  He tried to think what his father would have done. He certainly wouldn't have just walked in cold. He'd have had some kind of plan, not so much of action but of attitude. He'd have decided ahead of time, based on his knowledge of the situation, whether to be humble or arrogant, silent or loquacious.

  And he would have found all the exits. That was the first thing Rikard could do. It would give him time to come up with some kind of plan for the rest of it.

  He didn't want to be seen obviously casing the place. He walked a block to the north, losing sight of the building momentarily behind the other structures, then went back west to the street on which the Troishla stood, on his left now, five stories tall, isolated from the other buildings north and south of it by lawns.

  The Troishla was an old building, older than anything else Rikard had seen in the city so far. There were even a few anomalous windows in the north-end wall, behind narrow railed balconies. The east front of the building was a blank, with only a single, large door at the end of the street one block to the south. There was no other door on the northern side as far as Rikard could see. There were only trees and woods at the back. It was right on the edge of the city.

  He crossed the street that ran in front of the Troishla, to a double-sized empty lot between it and the next building north of it. This lot, like all the others he'd passed, was well tended, not left to weeds and junk. At the back of the lot, however, was wilderness, a forest. The Troishla extended twice as far back as the building now on Rikard's right. The trees came right up to its back wall and around its near corner.

  Rikard stayed close to the wall of the neighboring building sixty meters north of the Troishla, and moved along it halfway to the forest at the back. From here he could easily be seen by anybody looking out the tavern's windows, if they were in fact transparent. Anybody who saw him would know he was a tourist, and any further caution on his part would be superfluous.

  But if he hadn't been seen yet...

  He walked quickly straight back into the woods. The forest beyond the lot was not dense, more like a wooded park. Fallen limbs littered the ground under the trees, the occasional shrubs were leggy, natural, untrimmed. Leaf mold lay thick on the ground.

  He did not pause until the Troishla was all but obscured by intervening foliage. If he had made it undetected this far, he should be safe.

  He wanted to see the back side of the Troishla, but the foliage obscured all details. He walked through the woods, parallel to the back wall, until he had come to its middle. Then, choosing his way carefully, so as to remain concealed as much as possible, he approached the tavern again.

  He got to within fifteen meters before he decided he was close enough. He found a place where he could crouch down and peer under low, bushy branches. He was in shadow, and unless he disturbed the foliage too much, he should be in­visible to anyone inside looking out.

  There were two more doors in the back wall, one near each corner. There were more windows back here, especially at the top two floors. Each had a minuscule balcony barely deep enough for one person to stand on. There were no outbuildings, power blocks, or external stairs. There was no obvious correlation between the arrangement of windows here and those on the north end of the building. After a moment he carefully backed away.

  He retreated a hundred meters or so, until the tavern was almost out of sight, then continued around to the south. He moved cautiously, as quietly as he could, keeping one eye on the Troishla, to make sure he couldn't be seen and to keep from wandering too far away and losing sight of it altogether. His toe came up hard against something, and he fell.

  He lay still for a moment, waiting to hear if anyone had taken notice. The woods were silent. He picked himself up cautiously and looked down to see what had tripped him.

  He kicked whatever it was free from the ground. The end mat had been exposed looked just like broken stone, though of an unusual amber color, but the part that had been buried had a different texture and sheen.

  It was about as big as his head. He bent down to pick it up. It weighed a lot less than he expected. The undersurface was broken off and looked as if it had been made of some kind of porcelain or plastic, he couldn't tell which. The part that had been exposed to the elements was not in fact weath­ered, but artificially made to look that way.

  He saw that there were other, similar fragments all around his feet, protruding slightly from the ground, their earth colors not that different from the leaf mold. It looked like the site of a ruin. Rikard could not tell from their arrangement on the ground what the shape of the original building might have been.

  He kicked up another chunk buried even more deeply than the piece that had tripped him. The "stone," almost russet, showed no weathering or signs of organic attack. He knocked the two stones together. They did not chip or crack.

  Judging from the way the stones had been embedded in the soil, the way the roots of the trees grew around them, and the locations of the trees themselves, growing among the detritus, they had to be very old.

  Kohltri had been colonized less than a thousand years ago. That might have been enough time to bury these stones as deep as they were, but it was not long enough to have caused the destruction of what they had originally been a part of, unless whatever had once stood here had been deliberately torn down.

  The material of which they were made looked like nothing he had seen elsewhere in the city, or on any other world, though there was a vague resemblance to weathered quartz. These fragments would have to be very old indeed to have crumbled naturally, as they appeared to have done.

  That indicated that these pieces of plastic or porcelain were the remains of a previous civilization. The bartender across from Boss Bedik's dome had mentioned a people called the Belshpaer, and had said that the materials that the mines extracted were the remains of an even earlier civilization. . . .

  He heard something moving farther back in the woods. He crouched down closer to the ground, though there were no bushes here to hide him. He held his breath. His hearing became super sharp. After a moment, the sound came again, like someone walking through the woods".

  He stayed frozen in his crouch, trying to think of some plausible explanation for his being here. He could not see who was making the noises; they were too far back in the woods. But he thought he could detect a strange quality to the sound which he couldn't put his finger on.

  The footsteps, if that was what they were, were moving away from him. Once he thought he heard somebody speak, or rather, three or four people speaking in unison, in strange, thin voices. But the distance was too great, and the intervening foliage muffled the words, if they were words.

  The sounds died away. He waited, then straightened to his feet. He remembered the Troishla and glanced nervously over his shoulder. There was nobody there; he could barely see the building through the bushes and trees. The only thing he heard now was a bird calling somewhere.

  Whoever or whatever had been walking through the woods had distracted him for too long. He dropped the pieces of "stone" and, keeping one eye on the Troishla, the other on the ground at his feet, hurried south through the trees.

  He went past the end of the tavern and angled back toward the city so that he would come out of the woods behind the next building south. This was a commercial building, and conventional for Kohltri. It had no exterior windows at all. He pressed himself against its wall and moved back toward the Troishla until he could see the whole of the tavern's southern face. Like the north end, it had a few balconied windows but no doors.

  He backed away and went around the south end of the building, away fr
om the Troishla. He came back to the street half a block from the tavern. There were only a few cars on the street and no pedestrians. Although he felt terribly conspicuous in his offworlder clothes, nobody paid him any attention.

  He wasn't sure that his reconnoitering had accomplished anything. But now mere was nothing more he could do but go in. He hoped he would be able to come out again.

  2

  He opened the front door of the Troishla and stepped into a high, vaulted room with exposed rafters ten meters overhead. There were two tiers of galleries against the far wall reached by stairs at either end. There was a long bar under the galleries, and thirty or more round tables, with five or six chairs each, filling up most of the rest of the room. Only the area in front of the door was clear.

  The tables were over half filled, and there were about twenty people at the bar. A door on the first gallery overhead opened, a man came out, went to the next door, and went in. Chandeliers hung on chains from the high rafters. The air was thick with tobacco and other smoke, the smell of alcohol in various forms, and the not-well-muted rumble of the pa­trons.

  Most of these people were dressed in leathers, but a few had fancier attire—not tourist clothes, but something else. Everyone wore a gun of some kind. There were at least three card games in progress. Somebody in a far corner laughed too loudly.

  Rikard could allow himself only a moment to size things up. He was too obviously a stranger and could not walk in as if he belonged here, but if he hesitated too long, it would look as if he were uncertain about being here at all.

  He tried to think how he would act if he were someone on the run, come to Kohltri to avoid arrest and trial. But assuming the role of a refugee would be dangerous; he didn't have the right attitude to pull it off. Someone would be sure to find him out. His best bet was to play it straight for the moment.

  He walked up to the bar, moving toward an empty place near the end at the right. He felt eyes on him as he crossed the room. Nobody said anything; he did not falter. He dared not show the fear he felt. If he did, they would be on him in an instant.