Moving on, Darzek felt much better about his wasted fifteen days. The inventive genius who had contrived that generator certainly knew enough about electricity to contrive any number of other things. Perhaps even a pazul.
A moment later he became aware that he was being followed. He turned; Sajjo hurried to catch up with him. She took his hand and skipped along at his side. She must have followed him all the way to the caravan, and if the night creatures, now flitting about them in hordes, were frightening her, she gave no sign of it.
The workers received a half-day holiday every ten days. This holiday also was their payday. Officials distributed coins, and there were peddlers who came out from Northpor to help commemorate the occasion. With the second such payday, the workers had accumulated enough money to make substantial purchases. Wives and children appeared in stylish outfits, and the workers themselves began to discard their patchwork clothing in favor of practical, long-wearing outfits of dusky green.
On that second holiday, Darzek went for a relaxing walk through the forest with Sajjo. She bounded along at his side, ecstatic in her new dress, trousers, and shoes. He had exchanged his own sweep’s costume for the green of the forester, and as he strolled along he reflected that they must make a handsome couple.
Sajjo now did her own hair styling. Her first efforts had produced the impression of a gigantic bird’s nest of unknown species, but with a little practice she had become quite artistic. Her days were radiantly happy now; she kept the little caravan impeccable, and she had come to enjoy, in her quaintly quiet way, her status as the head of the superintendent’s household. Whenever she could she continued to follow Darzek about with a devotion that was sometimes embarrassing—especially when he wanted to visit the latrine.
But their forest outing had a purpose. A couple of days before, he had found an old piece of canvas-like cloth rotting on the forest floor. He put Sajjo to cleaning it, and when she finished there was an undamaged piece large enough to make an awning for their caravan home. He had performed the necessary measurements, and now he wanted to cut a couple of poles to support the awning.
He was cautious enough to ask permission. His superiors were surprised and wanted to know why. When he had explained, they were still surprised, but they matter-of-factly gave permission to cut strip saplings—strip being a bastard kind of wood that now and again got spared in the forest and crowded out the valuable maz trees. Workers were encouraged to make their caravans home-like.
Darzek found two strip saplings of the necessary size, cut them, and let Sajjo help him strip them and trim them to the proper length. With each of them carrying one, they started back through the forest toward their village.
Suddenly Sajjo froze. She literally halted in midstride, with one foot a few centimeters off the ground, and at the same instant she held up a hand to stop Darzek. He regarded her with puzzlement, and then he stared in the direction where her eyes were riveted.
A knight, clothed in the pale blue colors of the Duke Lonorlk, was crouched in the undergrowth, arm back, whip coiled for action, gaze fixed on a small forest pool. His clothing matched the forest vegetation so well that Darzek had trouble picking out his silhouette a second time even though he knew the knight was there.
Darzek remained motionless; Sajjo gradually let her foot sink to the ground, but she seemed scarcely to be breathing.
Suddenly, on the far side of the pool, one of Darzek’s workers strode into sight. His wife followed a short distance behind him, carrying their infant child. Mother and child had been wan and sickly when they arrived in the forest. Now both had bloomed and gained weight, and she and her husband were like young lovers, going everywhere hand in hand and laughing much and saying little.
As the worker strode forward, a large, spotted, long-legged forest creature leaped up, took half a dozen bounding strides, and disappeared into the forest on the far side of the clearing. The knight, who perhaps had been waiting in ambush for hours, leaped up at the same moment and snapped his whip—futilely, for it did no more than cut a red furrow on the beast’s flank as it disappeared.
The knight swiftly recoiled his whip and turned on the frightened worker, mustaches bristling furiously. Before Darzek could move, the whip snapped a second time and the worker fell, his throat cut deeply. He gasped and choked for an instant and died. The knight coiled his whip again and turned on the woman and child.
But this time Darzek was ready. As the knight drew back his whip, Darzek charged. The butt end of the sapling struck the knight squarely at the base of his skull. The whip fluttered ineffectually as the knight crashed to the ground. He lay there, motionless.
Another whip sang past Darzek’s ear. He whirled; he had not seen the second knight, but Sajjo had. As the knight aimed his whip she had charged into him, burying her pole in his stomach. While he lay on the ground, gasping, Darzek leaped to him and coolly smashed his skull.
He stepped back and turned to the woman, who was paralyzed with terror. Go home, his fingers told her. Go back to your caravan at once. You left your husband walking in the forest. You saw nothing.
She rushed away with her child. Her face was frozen in emotional shock, but at least she seemed to comprehend.
Darzek bent over the first knight. He was dead. Quickly he dragged the second knight to his side and cut a short piece from one of his saplings. This he placed in the dead worker’s hand. Then he motioned to Sajjo, and the two of them calmly strolled away.
She emulated both his stride and manner instantly, and he observed her self-control with a father’s pride. In spite of the horrifying scene she had witnessed, she walked along with him as though nothing had happened.
He found another strip sapling and cut and trimmed it. He hid the one from which he had cut the piece he’d left with the dead worker. Then they quietly finished their walk. And, when they reached their caravan, they worked together to erect the awning.
Darzek never learned how the duke’s officials interpreted the evidence of that tragedy by the forest pool. Most likely—since there was no science of detection on Kamm—they had not known how to begin. They found two dead knights and a dead worker. They certainly knew the habits of knights well enough to reason that the worker had interfered with a hunt. One of the knights had killed the worker; somehow the worker had freakishly managed to kill both knights, and that completed the equation.
Except for the worker’s wife.
Late that afternoon they took Darzek to identify the dead worker.
Then they turned his wife out of her caravan. Darzek, seeing this happen, went out himself and invited her into his own living quarters.
It is not permitted, an official said stiffly.
I am a worker without a wife, Darzek said. Am I not permitted to-have one of my own choice?
Of course. But the wife of a worker who has slain a knight is not permitted to remain. If you choose her as your wife, you must leave with her.
Darzek thought for a moment. It was time he left the forest anyway, and he was still feeling outraged at what he had witnessed. I could not in good conscience permit a female with a small child to try to return to Northpor alone. I will leave with her.
The officials shrugged and walked away.
Darzek told Sajjo to pack their belongings, with enough food for the walk to Northpor. He told the widow they would leave together.
A short time later two other officials, Darzek’s immediate superiors, called on him. Darzek was a valued employee. They attempted to reason with him. He already had risen high in the duke’s service. He certainly would rise much higher. Why should he sacrifice his career over a secondhand wife of a treasonous worker? They would ask the duke himself to select a wife for Darzek from among his own servants.
The worker was my friend, Darzek said. He was not treasonous. He worked hard and served the duke well. He and his wife were happy. I will not abandon his wife.
They shrugged in turn and went away. Darzek looked after them uneasily. He had no
idea whether such dedication to principle would be respected or viewed as an act of treason on his part. It seemed wise to leave at once.
Sajjo had made a neat bundle of their belongings, which consisted only of extra clothing they had bought. She had packed food into a small crock and added another crock of cider. The widow, also, was ready to leave.
But Sajjo had disappeared.
It was already dusk, and night descended quickly in the depths of the maz forest. Darzek frantically looked around the village and asked his neighbors; no one had seen her.
He waited in an agony of indecision: Had she suffered a belated reaction to the horrors of murder? Had she simply run off rather than leave the forest?
Suddenly he saw her, moving furtively among the trees. She carried a bulky sack flung over her back. Darzek grabbed his own belongings, motioned to the widow to follow, and hurried off. He did not pause to redistribute their possessions until they finally reached the surlane to Northpor.
Then he took the widow’s child, a bright, gurgling male baby named Badje, and grabbed as much as he could carry with his free hand. Sajjo insisted on keeping her sack, which obviously was heavy. The widow carried her own possessions and the food, and they started off along the surlane. Since the widow and Sajjo were both in splendid health, Darzek hoped they could reach the city early the next morning. If they did not, he intended to hide out during the day and finish the journey the following night.
As they walked, he listened as intently as his impaired hearing permitted, and a short time later he heard what he had expected: the muddled rhythm of approaching nabrula hoofs.
He rushed his group into hiding at the laneside, and an instant later six knights galloped past, looking from side to side and obviously searching for something. They took to the laneside again when he heard them returning.
For the remainder of the night he continued to listen for approaching nabrula and alertly watch for potential hiding places; and he remarked to himself that a society where the nobility sought revenge on innocent wives and children of commoners was disgustingly reminiscent of too much of Earth’s history.
It was almost morning when he finally became curious about Sajjo’s precious burden. She was reluctant to show it to him, but finally she submitted with a shy smile.
He opened the sack; it was the electrical generator from the office caravan.
She had seen his interest in it the night he was hired in Northpor, and she had followed him the night he had inspected it. When she knew they had to leave, she had stolen it for him.
He burst into laughter, seized her, and kissed her. This was a daughter after any Synthesis agent’s heart.
Now he could not wait to get to the Synthesis headquarters. His arrival there would electrify the agents in more ways than one.
CHAPTER 8
The second night after Darzek’s return to Northpor, he drove with Sajjo as far as the mart. It was his first outing with a newly acquired nabrulk and cart, and he preferred to learn how to handle the beast when the city’s lanes were empty.
They clunked and screeched along the now invisible mosaics of the colored cobblestones, and their cart was the only thing that moved except for the crews of sweeps, whose torch-lit progress could be glimpsed from time to time.
The mart—the colorful, vibrant center of commerce and entertainment—was dead. Carts, wagons, nabrula were gone. Tents and booths were closed. All was deserted.
Like the workers and their families in the forest villages, the citizens of Northpor retreated to their dwellings at night. It was the most salient feature of Kammian psychology and the one most difficult for the outsider to comprehend. The Kammians avoided the night. In the rural areas they could be said to have abandoned it to those luminous and pheromonal insector reptile-like creatures that shunned the day.
But the night creatures were rarely seen in cities. City dwellers so despised them that they took pains to leave nothing about for the creatures to eat. Even nabrula droppings were scrupulously swept up each evening and placed in covered crocks. Further, any potential lairs or hiding places for such creatures were ruthlessly sought out by day and their occupants slaughtered. The only locale in the entire city of Northpor where the night creatures went unmolested was the mart.
Darzek had not been aware of this. He happened upon their luminous display unexpectedly, and he halted the cart to watch it. The night creatures lived in the soil and amid the stones of the life pyramid. And they fed at the shrine of death.
All of the bits and particles and chunks and pieces of food impaled on the pole during the day as offerings to the Winged Beast were consumed by these nocturnal creatures, who descended on the black shrine like a scintillating plague of thieves. They lighted the mart with their darting luminescence, making bold patterns of colored light as they battled for the Winged Beast’s scraps. There were dozens of species and dozens of color and flight patterns.
And not all of them were luminescent. Darzek got a whiff of a particularly vile scent and caught his breath.
He turned to watch Sajjo. She, at least, seemed to be adaptable. She had overcome her fear of darkness enough to follow him about in the forest.
But she was not watching the night creatures. She was watching him. He started the nabrulk with a flick of the reins.
Darzek and his family had entered Northpor at dawn, along with the stream of carts and wagons headed for the mart. He planned to go directly to the Kammian version of an inn. Both Sajjo and the widow, Wesru, knew where several inns were located, though of course they had no personal experience of them. Once he’d found accommodations, Darzek intended to systematically search for the Synthesis headquarters, shouting his way through the lanes of Northpor. And he would take Sajjo along, to keep him from getting lost or wandering in circles.
But he found the Synthesis headquarters himself, without shouting, on his way into the city. He found it by recognizing the house opposite, which he had scrutinized more carefully than he realized while looking out of the window at the traffic on the morning of his arrival. In his earlier, frantic search, it had not occurred to him to look for the house across the lane.
Once he had found it, he had no difficulty in identifying the headquarters house. He turned and marched up to the front door, with Sajjo and Wesru following him wonderingly. During a lull in the traffic noises, he knocked vigorously and shouted, “Anyone home?”
There was no response. He tried the door; it was locked. He knew that he had left it unlocked.
He handed the baby to Wesru. Wait here, he said.
He moved around to the back of the house, tiptoeing through the flowers and noticing as he did so that they were beginning to look scraggly. Weeds were springing up among them.
The rear door also was locked. Darzek quickly picked the lock and entered the house, shouting again, “Anyone home?”
The remains of his breakfast lay on the bench where he had trimmed the hard crust from the bread he ate. The remainder of the loaf was still there, now covered with mold. He passed quickly through the house, from the upstairs rooms to the concealed trap doors in the basement and the transmitter frame below.
He’d found the right house, but there was no sign that anyone had been here since he left. Dust lay thickly everywhere.
He went to the front door, tripped the ponderous lock, and opened it. Come in, he told Wesru and Sajjo. Welcome home.
While they waited, their wonderment had changed to uneasiness. Now their uneasiness was transformed to astonishment. The immediate problem was food, and Darzek dispatched Wesru and Sajjo to the nearest neighborhood forum to buy as much as they could carry. While they were gone, Darzek functioned as baby-sitter and tried to convince himself that he’d made progress since he last sat in this kitchen. “But in what direction?” he demanded, and he had no answer.
By the time they had finished a hasty breakfast, all of them were reeling with weariness. Darzek got the others comfortably ensconced in an upstairs bedroom, hoping th
at the luxury of the place wouldn’t keep them awake.
He had no time for sleep himself. There was something very peculiar about the agent situation on Kamm, and the more he thought about it, the more uneasy it made him.
He went directly to the subbasement, closing the trap doors after him. His first stop was the moon base. There was no one there. Neither could he find any certain indication that anyone had been there recently. The floor of the supply room was jammed with cartons brought in by the automatic conveyor. Several cartons had been opened, seemingly at random, but Darzek could not say whether this had been done since his own arrival on Kamm.
He spent some minutes contemplating the complexities of the communications center. Any kind of an SOS message about missing agents would eventually reach Supreme, so probably it was just as well that he didn’t know how to send one.
He returned to the base transmitter and visited in turn each of the other four Synthesis headquarters on Storoz. He quickly determined that these were located in the other four Free Cities controlled by the Sailor’s League: Midpor, Eastpor, Southpor, and Westpor. All were houses in comfortable neighborhoods. All were deserted. Only one building showed signs of recent use. There was fresh food in the headquarters in Southpor, the rooms had been dusted recently, and the flower-crammed yard had received cursory attention. At the other three houses, the yards were weed-cluttered, food lay molding or rotting in the pantries, and nothing had rippled the interior dust for weeks.
In the Southpor headquarters, Darzek left a message written in the Galactic script: “I’m in Northpor. Lazk.”
Next he did a quick tour of Synthesis headquarters on the two continents. He found them as deserted as those on Storoz, but the evidence there was of planned departures. No perishables had been left behind, and arrangements seemed to have been made about upkeep. Lawns and gardens were in good shape.
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