The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister

by Banister, Manly

  Kor lifted his gaze to the young woman across from him.

  “Perhaps the young lady could suggest something.”

  One of the Triszmen unwrapped a fold of cloak from his face. One eye peered out, balefully.

  “She don’t sing, Reverend.”

  The girl opened her mouth as if to speak, appeared to think better of it, and shot a beseeching glance at Kor. He would have given a great deal to look into her mind just then, but indiscriminate mind-tapping was prohibited by the Brotherhood. It was impossible to do it without being detected.

  * * * *

  The sun stood high as the carriage finally pulled off the road among a clump of cottonwoods. The road twisted and turned among low hills, following a small stream that wound among scrubby trees before losing itself farther on in the desert sands. At this particular point, the stream had been widened and deepened to make a watering place.

  The carriage door swung open and the driver barked at them, “Hour stop. Lunch. Water the horses. All out!”

  It was good to stretch one’s legs in the open. Kor walked briskly up and down, performing the ritual Exercises of the Men. The horses, loosed from their traces, stamped, neighed and plodded into the stream to stand, drinking.

  The Outlanders had retired in a small group to the shade of a cottonwood. The bundle of rags held by one turned out to be a lunch for all three. The Triszmen and their woman companion had disappeared.

  Kor walked around the carriage curiously, but there was no one on the other side. It was quiet in the oasis, except for the far splashing of the horses in the stream and the quiet drone of a horde of flies that had settled on some horse droppings.

  Kor was about to round the rear of the coach and join the coachman with his horses, when the sound of rapid footsteps drew him back. He turned. The young woman hurried toward him from the far side of the road.

  “Reverend! Reverend Sir!”

  The expression on her face bespoke trouble. She was breathing heavily.

  “You must stop them!” she gasped. “They are fighting!”

  “Who are fighting, lady?”

  “My husband and my brother. You must stop them!”

  She started back, gesturing quickly. Kor paused, alert. He dared use his mind here. He palped the unseen extent of the oasis. A hundred yards away, in a small draw, he sensed two men crouching motionless. Fighting? thought Kor.

  “Peace!” he commanded quietly. “It is not proper for a man of the cloth to intervene in family affairs. Why are they fighting?”

  The woman came back slowly. She wrung her hands. Tears stood in her eyes.

  “Please. They will kill each other!”

  “Why are they fighting?”

  She began to sob. “I left my husband and returned to my family, but my husband came to get me. My family would not give me up, only consenting upon my husband’s promise to be a good husband to me in the future. My brother accompanies us back to the city to be sure that conditions are now as my husband promises. They got into another argument. But please hurry, Sir—before one should hurt the other!”

  Her story, outside its vagueness, was full of flaws, Kor thought. If she were an Outlander, then her brother was an Outlander also. Why, therefore, did he wear the clothing of a Triszman? What sort of a blundering trap was this? He decided to see.

  “Very well. I will go with you.”

  The Triszmen still crouched motionless, but as Kor and the woman approached, he heard the sudden ring of steel on steel. One shouted an oath.

  The two were going heavily at it in the draw, slashing and thrusting with their weapons as Kor and the woman quickly approached. Kor could have taught them a few things about handling their steel, and he almost smiled at the thought that either of these could harm the other with their faked thrusts and phony feints.

  “Hurry! Hurry!” the woman cried, distraught.

  “You can see that I am unarmed,” Kor pointed out, keeping a wary eye on the fencers. Their footwork was execrable, he noted, and their stance utterly impossible.

  “Speak to them, Sir!”

  “Very well, if that will do.”

  He strode toward the slashing pair.

  “Ho—you two!”

  Neither combatant paid him the slightest attention.

  The air was thick between them with the glint of flashing blades, curdled around them with the sulphurous utterance of oaths.

  “Stop your fighting!” Kor shouted. “I command you to be at peace!”

  Both Triszmen whirled at once, teeth showing in grins of savage pleasure. One ran at him, blade leveled.

  “Kill the Scarlet Saint!”

  How stupid of them, Kor thought, to believe they could kill him. He had already mentally detected the blaster in the other Triszman’s belt. As the fellow drew his weapon, depending on the swordsman to keep Kor distracted, Kor nullified its charge with a simple shift of electrons. He sidestepped the lunge of the advancing swordsman, seized that worthy by the arm, whirled, and flung him at his fellow conspirator.

  The two sprawled on the sandy ground, rolled over, leaped up and started running. The woman was already running away, clawing her way up the steep side of the draw. In a moment, all three were out of sight, and soon the sound of their hasty departure died away.

  “A very clumsy maneuver,” Kor pondered. “I wonder why? Did they actually think they might kill me? Of course, they must have … there was that fellow with the blaster. I wonder where they got to?”

  It took only a moment to locate the trio. Three horses had been tethered in the next ravine, and the conspirators were already mounted and riding like mad to reach the highway farther down.

  Kor smiled faintly, tossed the unretrieved rapiers behind a boulder, and returned to the coach to while away the remainder of the noon hour. He had not provided himself with lunch since food was not a necessity when he chose to do without it.

  The missing Triszmen caused a little delay while the driver swore, apologized, fumed, and sent the Outlanders to look for them. The Outlanders came back empty-handed.

  “If they like it here,” growled the driver, “they can just stay—if they haven’t been picked up by a band of Roamers. This country is full of ’em!”

  The thought of Roamers—outlaw wanderers of the wastelands—spurred the driver to furious action. He got the remainder of his passengers aboard as quickly as possible, leaped to his box and whipped the horses into a plunging gallop down the road, and did not slow down until open country surrounded them once more.

  Most of Rth was burning desert in these latter days, and this part of the world was no exception. It might even, Kor thought, looking at it from the lurching coach, be a little worse than the rest. Kor was more than pleased that the Trisz had already moved against him, scornful though he was of their method of attack. He kept alert, but no further incident occurred to unsettle his tranquility. For days the coach staggered and ground along the dusty way, changing horses at convenient stops, discharging and taking on passengers. Kor kept a watchful eye upon every new traveler but all acted with disarming innocence. Mostly, they were the natural inhabitants of these desert plains. Some were obviously journeying from distant parts, but no more came dressed as Triszmen.

  Nights were passed at cheerless inns along the forbidding route. These inns were maintained by the land travelers associations that ran the coach lines, and were supported by the outrageous toll exacted from passing wayfarers.

  * * * *

  It neared sunset, a day’s travel from the city of the Trisz. The coach shuddered to a creaking stop in an inn courtyard. Stiff, weary passengers climbed down. How he might have saved himself all this, Kor sighed. A simple “twist” of his mind, and he could have journeyed almost instantaneously to Ka-si. Were not the precautions imposed by the Bro
therhood a little extravagant?

  The stuffy air of the inn reeked of stale food, spilled synthetics, sweat and grime. For appearances sake, Kor ate a meager supper of stewed meat and a buttery synthetic, then retired to his room.

  As usual, he slept on the floor. After nineteen years of sleeping on the stone floor of his Institute chamber, he could not be conditioned, even by a coach ride, to try sleeping in a soft bed. Moreover, he distrusted the appearance of the sagging iron frame and patched bedclothes. They looked inhabited.

  Kor awoke in the still dark of the night. In the stable behind the inn, a horse stamped restlessly. The inn creaked and crackled as its board frame radiated day-stored heat into the chill desert night. Creeping things rustled under the flooring and in the walls. A mouse gnawed persistently somewhere.

  Kor’s extra-sensory perception functioned, dispelling the dark. He sensed a Person—a man of the People—leaning above the bed, feeling cautiously over the quilts with his left hand. His right held a long, sharp knife.

  Kor studied him briefly, enabled to visualize the scene in his mind. He had not seen this fellow before in his travels, but had noticed him last night at the bar of the inn, swilling synthetic alcohol.

  The Person was small, poorly dressed. He looked hungry. Just now, he had thin lips, drawn back from wolfish looking teeth as he pawed for the body he expected to find lying there.

  Kor raised himself on his elbow.

  “Are you looking for some one, friend?”

  The Triszman—obviously such, in spite of his poor dress—whirled with an expression of fear and consternation. He peered blindly into the dark; his small, rodent-like head jerked to right and left. He held the knife uplifted as if to ward off attack.

  “You seem disturbed that I am not asleep in my bed,” Kor observed. “May I ask to what I owe the honor of this visit?”

  The Person made gulping, strangled sounds and began to edge toward the window.

  “You cannot move,” Kor told him. “Please answer my question.”

  The intruder stiffened. His face lost all expression.

  “I came here to kill you,” he said in a flat, emotionless tone.

  “Why?”

  “I am a Stabber—I kill for hire.”

  “You mean you have no personal reason to dislike me?”

  “No.”

  “Yet you would kill me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Again, why?”

  “For the money. He offered to pay me well.”

  Kor nodded in the dark and pushed easily into the Person’s mind. It was something he had to do, to avoid killing the fellow. And he would have to cover his action afterward. His lip curled in disgust in many of the things he found there; others stirred him with pity. He sorted through the memories, for the most part obscured by what obviously was synth-addiction. Finally he extracted the image he sought…it had the proper associations. He perceived the saintly looking face of a fleshy man of middle age, surrounded by a bluish halo.

  “Is this the man who hired you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is this sensation of blueness I feel about him?”

  “He is a Wearer of the Blue.”

  Kor lifted his eyebrows. “His name?”

  “I do not know.”

  “What is his Chapel?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “Very well.” Kor carefully memorized the remembered features of the Blue Brother. He would be on the lookout for that one. He studied the wretched Person narrowly.

  “Who knows you are in my room?”

  “Nobody knows. I have taken a room here since three days ago. I have been waiting for you to come.”

  “You know, don’t you, that it is a serious sin to attempt the life of a Scarlet Saint?”

  “I know it is.

  Kor thought carefully. He could easily destroy this fellow, but what would he gain by it? He must move with care to avoid showing his own hand. Naturally, the Person’s mission must fail, but how to make that failure appear natural? The problem puzzled Kor for the space of several seconds. The tenor of the fellow’s answer provided a clue to Kor’s action.

  “You are poorly dressed in need of money.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have received religious instruction at a chapel?”

  “Yes.”

  Kor smiled. “Then you know that the Lord Sun forgives the sins of the people.” The would-be assassin repeated the phrases as Kor uttered them. “There is salvation for the wicked as well as the righteous. None is turned away, and he repenteth in his heart… The Lord Sun cleanses…he heals…he makes pure…he showeth himself to whomsoever seeketh.”

  The assassin fell on the floor and moaned, hands over his face.

  “Arise,” Kor said kindly. “The Lord Sun forgives. You are saved. In token of your salvation—do you know how to make the Sign of the Conqueror?”

  The prostrate person whimpered. “Yes.”

  “Arise and make it. In token of your salvation, your clasped and lifted hands will glow with the Sun’s glory!”

  The fellow got to his feet, lifted clasped hands in the Sign. A faint glow quickly brightened and grew into a blaze of supernal light that flooded the room with a naked glare. A look of transcendent ecstasy turned the rat-like little features of the man into a picture of weird beauty.

  “Go in peace,” Kor told him gently. “Tell all whom you meet of the glory you have witnessed in the Lord Sun.”

  That was enough, Kor decided. He had broken a minor rule of the Brotherhood, but he had not broken his oath. Proselytizing by mental impression was a forbidden practice, but it was a lesser evil than murdering the unfortunate fellow.

  Kor hoped the incident would distress the Trisz, at the same time that it would appear alienly normal to them. Not professing to understand human religion, the Trisz suffered it to exist, tolerating it as a simple-minded, though curious, indigenous custom—a useful instrument for holding the People in check.

  CHAPTER V

  The Trisz city of Ka-si was built on the bluffs above the ancient, bone-dry bed of the river Miz-zou. The desert swept in from the western plains, a sea of sand that lapped at the spired mound of the city and flowed eastward almost to Set-loo, where the Mis-pi still trickled southward in a scanty flow to the shrunken sea.

  Accustomed as he was to the irrigated greenness of the Institute surroundings in the mountains, Kor still found strange beauty in the windswept wastes that pressed in upon the city. Overhead, the cloudless bowl of indigo minimized the half-mile-high reach of city spires, sun-gleaming in brilliant contrast against the sky.

  Once, Kor knew, the sky had been not indigo, but as blue as the robes of the Brothers. Water vapor had clustered then in cottony gobbets high in the upper air, and the sun had shone bright yellow upon a land that was everywhere lush and verdant.

  It still rained upon Rth, but not often in most places, and in many places never. The Sun was swollen and old, and the waters of the planet were dissipated. Rth struggled in her last days. Soon she would be dead, and her People with her, and her Men, and every last living thing under the Sun. Because of the Trisz.

  History implied that Rth was still green when the Trisz first came. Her oceans had been filled with cubic miles of precious water. But slowly over thousands of years the Trisz had deliberately sapped the planet. Nobody knew exactly why or how, but the best observations of the Men had long ago led them to believe that the Trisz converted Rth’s water into energy and transmitted that energy to the parent-body, somewhere in the lost reaches of cosmic space.

  Some day, having squeezed the planet dry, the Trisz would load up their ships with their goods and their slaves, would destroy their cities and return to the void whence they came, or to other worlds
still under their sway. When that happened, taught the Men, the last People would be left alone on Rth, to gasp out their sorry lives with their dying planet and nearly dead Sun.

  It was a grim picture, a picture etched into Kor’s mind by repeated lectures at the Institute. Further, the student Men had been conducted by the Masters to planets already deserted by the Trisz. There they had viewed the withered bones of ancient worlds that had given up their life-blood and their lives to the remorseless siphoning of the Trisz. What happened to the lost inhabitants of these worlds? Not even their bones remained on the wind-scoured plains in token of the living beings that once had swarmed there.

  Perhaps it was already too late to save Rth…but the People might yet be saved, if the Trisz could be destroyed. There were still young, green worlds in the galaxy, fresh worlds untouched by the Trisz, or where the aliens had just begun operations, worlds which had not yet felt the full stamp of their greed. If the Trisz could be destroyed, their ships would remain to ferry Rth’s People to far stars and more hospitable planets.

  * * * *

  Kor walked slowly through the city streets. The lower levels of Ka-si swarmed like a hill of desert ants. The city was the dwelling-place of Triszmen, the bondsmen of the invaders. Outlanders might visit, but not settle permanently in the city, unless taken into the service of the Trisz.

  Every comfort was built into the lavish apartments, every convenience in the colorful shops and amusement resorts. The People who worked for and with the Trisz were the favored of Rth. They had everything. They wore elegantly styled, flamboyant costumes of line materials under their yellow robes. Their living quarters had plumbing, automatic food preparers, artificial lighting, refrigeration, television, air-conditioning—all the comforts of a civilized race.

  The People of Ka-si looked happy—feverishly happy. They were so madly happy that they rushed from one joy to another, lifting their spirits with the bright colors woven into their garments, with the sparkling vitalization of their synthetic drinks, with their rounds of sex and exuberant debauchery.