I turned suddenly into the kitchen in which the food for the hall of Cernus is prepared. Some startled slaves leaped up, each chained by one ankle to her ring; but most slept, drunk; one or two, too drunk to notice me, were sitting against the wall, their left ankles chained to their slave rings, a bottle of Ka-la-na in their grasp, their hair falling forward.
“Where is the paga?” I demanded of one of the girls. Startled, I saw, now that she stood forth from the shadows, that she had no nose.
“There, Master!” said she, pointing to a basket of bottles under the large cutting table in the center of the room.
I went to the basket and took out a bottle, a large one.
I looked about myself.
There was the odor of food in the kitchen, and of spilled drink. There were several yards of sausages hung on hooks; numerous canisters of flour, sugars and salts; many smaller containers of spices and condiments. Two large wine jugs stood in one corner of the room. There were many closed pantries lining the walls, and a number of pumps and tubs on one side. Some boxes and baskets of hard fruit were stored there. I could see the bread ovens in one wall; the long fire pit over which could be put cooking racks, the mountings for spits and kettle hooks; the fire pit was mostly black now, but, here and there, I could see a few broken sticks of glowing charcoal; aside from this, the light in the room came from one small tharlarion-oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, near the side where the kitchen slaves were chained, presumably to facilitate the guard check which, during the night, took place each second Ahn; the other lamps in the room were now extinguished.
I took another bottle of paga from the basket and tossed it to the girl without a nose, who had directed me to the paga.
“Thank you, Master,” said she, smiling, going back to her ring. I saw her nudge the girls on the left and right of her. “Paga,” I heard her whisper.
“Kajuralia,” I said to her.
“Kajuralia,” she said.
Again the thought went through me. You, Killer, would never make a Player. You, Killer, would never make a Player. Grimly, the paga bottle in my hand, I went back into the corridor and found the stairs that took one to lower floors in the cylinder, and eventually to its depths.
Lower and lower I went into the cylinder, the thought pounding in my brain: You, Killer, would never make a Player.
I was beginning to feel sick with fear, with anger. A realization that horrified me seemed to claw at the back of my brain, as the beast had torn at the door, unseen, in the corridor far above. You, Killer, would never make a Player.
Now, paga bottle in hand, I was passing guards and found myself walking down the narrow iron runways over the pens below, now filled with drunken slaves, some sleeping, some sitting stupefied in the center of their pen, some singing brokenly to themselves, some trying to crawl again to the trough to lap there at the paga mixed with their water. I saw one girl, drunk, putting her hands through the bars which separated the cage which she shared with other female slaves, from the cage adjacent to it, filled with male slaves. “Touch me,” she begged. “Touch me!” But the males lay in drunken sleep on the stones.
I passed through the level on which interrogations take place, the level of the kennels, and went lower in the cylinder, now far below ground, past even more iron pens and levels. When I would pass a guard I would hail him with “Kajuralia!” and pass by.
Always the thought burned through me, You, Killer, would never make a Player, and always I seemed driven by the black fear that would not speak itself but whose presence I could clearly sense.
Descending a last spiral of iron stairs I came to the lowest level of the cylinder.
“Who goes there?” cried a startled guard.
“It is I, Kuurus, of the black caste,” said I, “on the orders of Cernus bringing paga to prisoners on Kajuralia!”
“But there is only one prisoner here,” said he, puzzled.
“The more for both of us then,” I said.
He grinned and put out his hand and I bit the cork from the bottle, which was a very large bottle, and handed it to him.
“I have spent Kajuralia,” he grumbled, between guzzles, “sitting here without paga—they did not even send a girl down to me.”
I gathered from what he said that the guard was intended to remain sober, and from this that he had valuable materials under his care, and gathered also that the guard, from his disgruntlement, was ignorant of their value. It could of course be that he had merely been forgotten, overlooked in the general revels of Kajuralia.
Then the guard sat down heavily, not willing to try to remain upright longer.
“It is good paga,” said he. He took two or three more swallows, and then simply held the bottle, looking at it.
I left him and looked about. There were several corridors lined with small cells with iron doors, each with an observation panel. The corridors were damp. Here and there some water had gathered in recesses in the flooring. They were dark, save that each, at intervals of some thirty yards, was lit with a small tharlarion-oil lamp. I picked up a torch and lit it in the light of a lamp near the swirling iron stairs.
I heard the guard take another swallow of the paga, a long swallow, and then he sat there again, holding the bottle.
I walked down a corridor or two. The cells were locked but, by sliding back the panel, and holding the torch behind me I could see dimly into the cells. Each seemed piled with boxes; I recognized the boxes as being of the general sort which I had seen unloaded from the Slavers’ ship in the Voltai. I gathered that most, or a great many of the cells, on this level, might be filled with such merchandise, whatever it might be. Each of the cells was locked.
I heard the guard calling out from near the stairs. “The prisoner is in Nine Corridor.”
I strode back to him, stepping aside not to brush against a wet, silken, blazing-eyed urt scampering along the edge of the corridor wall.
“My thanks,” said I to the guard. I put my hand on the bottle but he retained it long enough to take yet another swallow, and then two more, and then he reluctantly surrendered it.
“I will bring it back,” I assured him.
“There is too much paga there for one prisoner,” mumbled the guard, rather groggily.
“True,” I said. “I will return the bottle to you.”
I saw him close his eyes and slump a bit against the wall.
“The Forty Cell,” he said.
“Where is the key?” I asked. The other cells had all been locked.
“Near the door,” he said.
“The other keys,” I said, “were not near the doors.”
“The other keys,” he mumbled, “are kept somewhere above. I do not know where.”
“My thanks,” said I.
I began moving down the Nine Corridor. Soon, in the flickering light of the torch, I could read the Forty on the tiny metal plate over one of the cells.
I slid back the observation panel. It, like the others, was about six inches in width and about an inch high. A man could do little more than thrust his fingers through. Inside, very dimly, I could see a slumped, dark figure lying near the back wall, chained.
The key box was about a yard to the left of the keyhole; and about four feet from the observation panel; it is a small, heavy metal box bolted to the stone of the wall; it opens and shuts to the left, by means of a round-knobbed screw, which must be turned several times before the small metal door opens. I rotated the screw and opened the box, and removed the key. I inserted the key into the keyhole and swung back the door. Lifting the torch I entered.
Startled by the light an urt scurried from my path, disappearing through a small crevice in the wall. It had been nibbling at the scrapings of dried gruel caked in a tin pan near the prisoner’s foot.
I could smell wet straw in the place, and the excrement of urts and a human being.
The slumped figure, that of a small man, naked, white-haired, stinking, skeletal, haggard, covered with sores, awakening, cri
ed out in misery, whimpering. He crawled to his knees, squinting against the torch, trying to shelter his eyes with manacled clawlike hands from the sudden, fierce, painful blaze of fire that his world must have then been for him.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
I saw that he was not actually an old man, though his hair was white. One ear had been partly bitten away. The white hair was long, white, yellowish.
“My name is Kuurus,” said I, speaking to him from the light of the torch.
Each of his limbs, and his throat, was separately confined, each chained individually to the wall, each chain running to a separate ring bolted in the stone; any one of the chains would have been sufficient to hold a man; I gathered that this prisoner must be unusual indeed; I observed, further, that the chains gave him some run, though not much, just enough to permit him to feed himself, to scratch his body, to defend himself to some extent against the attacks of urts; I gathered it was intended that this prisoner should, at least for a time, survive. Indeed, it seemed probable that he had lived under these miserable conditions for a long time.
I rose and found a torch rack in the room and set the torch in the rack. As I did so I saw four or five urts run for various small crevices in the stone.
I returned to the prisoner.
“You are of the black caste,” he whispered. “At last they are done with me.”
“Perhaps not,” I said.
“Am I to be tortured again?” he asked, piteously.
“I do not know,” I said.
“Kill me,” he whispered.
“No,” I said.
He moaned.
I looked on that small, trembling, skeletal body, the straggly hair, the sores; the mutilated ear; angrily I rose to my feet and searched about, finding some loose stone which, with my foot, I wedged into the several crevices through which the urts had darted.
Unbelievingly the prisoner with his sunken eyes, now accustoming themselves to the light of the torch, regarded me.
I returned to him; beneath the iron on his ankles and wrists, and on his throat, there were scars, like white bands, pale shadows of the dark metal; it would take months to form such scars, superseding the fearful sores that must first have been inflicted.
“Why have you come?” he asked.
“It is Kajuralia,” I said to him, simply.
I held the bottle to him.
“Kajuralia?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He began to laugh, softly, hoarsely. “I was right,” he said. “I was right.”
“I do not understand,” I said.
He began to suck at the bottle. There were few teeth left in his mouth; most had rotted and, apparently, snapped away, or had been broken off by him and discarded.
I forcibly drew the bottle from his mouth. I had no wish that he kill himself on the paga. I did not know what its shock would be to his system, after apparently months of torture, confinement, fear, poor food, the water, the urts.
“I was right,” he said, nodding his head.
“About what?” I asked.
“That today was Kajuralia,” said he.
He then indicated behind himself, on the wall, a large number of tiny, regularly formed scratches in the stone, perhaps cut there by a pebble or the edge of the tin drinking dish. He indicated the last of the scratches. “That is Kajuralia,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, regarding his crude calendar. There were a very large number of scratches.
“Like any other day,” he laughed.
I let him have another small swig at the paga bottle.
“Some days,” he said, “I was not sure that I marked the wall, and then I would forget; sometimes I feared I had marked it twice.”
“You were accurate,” I said, regarding the carefully drawn scratches, the rows methodically laid out, the months, the five-day weeks, the passage hands.
I counted back the rows. Then I said, pointing to the first scratch, “This is the first day of En’Kara before the last En’Kara.”
The toothless mouth twisted into a grin, the sunken eyes wrinkled with pleasure. “Yes,” he said, “the first day of En’Kara, 10,118, more than a year ago.”
“It was before I came to the House of Cernus,” I said, my voice trembling.
I gave him another drink of the paga.
“Your calendar is well kept,” I said. “Worthy of a Scribe.”
“I am a Scribe,” said the man. He reached under himself to hold forth for my inspection a shred of damp, rotted blue cloth, the remains of what had once been his robes.
“I know,” I said.
“My name is Caprus,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
I heard a laugh behind me, and spun. Standing in the doorway, four guards armed with crossbows with him, stood Cernus, of the House of Cernus. With him also was the guard to whom I had given the paga. In the background I could see the lean Scribe whom I had thought for these many months to be Caprus. He was grinning.
The men stepped within the room.
“Do not draw your weapon,” said Cernus.
I smiled. It would have been foolish to do so. The four men with crossbows leveled their weapons on me. At this distance the bolts would pass through my body, shattering against the stones behind me.
The guard to whom I had first given paga came over to Caprus and tore the bottle from his hand. Then, with the sleeve of his tunic, the guard distastefully wiped the rim of the bottle. “You were to have returned this paga to me,” said the guard, “were you not?”
“It is yours,” I said, “you have earned it.”
The man laughed and drank.
“You, Killer,” said Cernus, mocking, “would never make a Player.”
“Apparently it is true,” I said.
“Chain him,” said Cernus.
One of the guards, putting his crossbow in the hall, brought forth heavy steel manacles. My hands were thrown behind my back. I felt the heavy steel close on my wrists.
“May I introduce to you, Caprus,” said Cernus, looking down at the piteous chained figure by the wall, “Tarl Cabot of Ko-ro-ba?”
I stood stunned.
“Tarl Cabot,” I said, numbly, “was slain in Ko-ro-ba.”
“No,” said Cernus, “the Warrior Sandros of Thentis was slain in Ko-ro-ba.”
I looked at him.
“Sandros thought he was to be your Assassin,” said Cernus. “It was for that purpose he thought himself sent to Ko-ro-ba. Actually he was sent there to die himself by the knife of a killer. His resemblance to a certain Koroban Warrior, perhaps Tarl Cabot, would make it seem clear, in the darkness of the night, that the knife had been intended for that Warrior, and a convenient clue, a patch of green, would lead to Ar, and doubtless then to the House of Cernus.”
I could not speak.
“Sandros was a fool,” said Cernus. “He was sent to Ko-ro-ba only to be slain, that you would be lured to this house, where in effect you have been my prisoner for more than a year.”
“There must be some reason why you would want me here?” I said.
“Let us not jest, Tarl Cabot,” said Cernus. “We knew that Priest-Kings would suspect our House, as we intended that they should; so simple a ruse, and profitable a one, as selling barbarian Earth girls under the auspices of the House would guarantee their investigation. For this investigation they would need men. Surely they would wish, if possible, to choose a man such as Tarl Cabot.”
“You play well,” I said.
Cernus smiled. “And to guarantee that it should be Tarl Cabot, whom we know, and with whom we, so to speak, have an old score to settle, the matter of the egg of Priest-Kings, we sent Sandros of Thentis to Ko-ro-ba where he, poor fool, was to be slain in your stead, that you would be brought here.”
“You play brilliantly,” said I.
Cernus laughed. “And so we arranged to have you arrive in our house, the trusted spy and agent of Priest-Kings, who would thus think themselves movi
ng secretly and intelligently against us. And here, while we have through the months advanced our cause you have stood by, patiently and cooperatively, a dupe and a fool, our guarantee that Priest-Kings would not send another.”
Cernus threw back his head and laughed.
“You speak of ‘we’ and ‘our cause,’” I said.
Cernus looked on me, unpleasantly. “Do not mock me,” said he, “Warrior.” He looked at me then and smiled. “I serve those who are not Priest-Kings.”
I nodded.
“It is war, Tarl Cabot,” said he. “And there will be no quarter given.” He smiled. “Not then, nor now.”
I nodded once more, accepting his words. I had fought. I had lost.
“Will you kill me?” I asked.
“I have an amusing fate in store for you,” said Cernus, “which I have considered these many months.”
“What?” I asked.
“But first,” said Cernus, “we must not forget the little beauty.”
I stiffened.
“Sura reports that she has trained superbly, that she is now capable of giving the most exquisite of pleasures to a master.”
I tensed in the manacles.
“I understand she expects, with the other two barbarians, to be purchased by an agent of Priest-Kings, and carried to safety and freedom.”
I looked at him angrily.
“I expect,” said Cernus, “that she will put on an excellent performance.”
I wished that I might break the steel from my wrists and seize his throat.
“It should be worth seeing,” said Cernus. “I will see that you have a chance to see it.”
I choked with rage.
“What is the matter?” asked Cernus, concerned. “Do you not wish to see the little beauty presenting herself on the block? I expect she, with the others, will bring much gold to the House of Cernus, which we may then invest in our cause.” He laughed. “It will be time enough, afterward,” said he, “for her to learn that she has been truly sold.”
“You sleen!” I cried. I hurled myself at Cernus but two men seized me, threw me back, then held my arms.
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