The Secret City

by Brian K. Lowe

  Sanja shot Jazil a look of pure hatred and squatted in front of me. Her face was streaked from crying. An icy finger traced my spine.

  “Sanja? What happened?”

  “The Wind and the Sand are dead,” she said in a cold voice. “Someone murdered them in their tent last night. Jazil thinks you did it.”

  My world seemed to shrink and narrow and my head throbbed. Dead? The last I remembered we were all in their tent, and the Wind kept proposing toasts like she meant to go on all night. I was unfamiliar with the liqueur, a brown syrup that went down smoothly but seemed to have a kick like a horse.

  “I…do not remember much about last night.” I looked up at Jazil. “But you were there!”

  His mouth was a line so thin his lips disappeared. “I left when I started to fall asleep. I don’t know how long you stayed, but I know you were looking at the Wind in a way the Sand didn’t like.”

  I tried to concentrate on bringing my breathing under control. I had had no time to assimilate my position, and my head still hurt, and while I was not thirsty yet, just the knowledge that I could not have a drink made my mouth dry.

  What was worse, I could not deny having had thoughts about the Wind. She had been a beautiful woman, supple and voluptuous in a way no Thoran or Nuum woman that I had met—even Maire—could match, vital and earthy as the women of my own time. Had she not been married, she might have made life with the Zilbiri bearable. After everything that had befallen me, could I have lost control and argued with the Sand over her?

  No. I had to believe that I was innocent. I was also a trained investigator. If I could just be allowed to examine the evidence, I could prove my innocence.

  “How did they die?” I expected another slap, but Sanja’s stare was apparently enough to forestall Jazil’s hand. When he didn’t answer, she spoke up.

  “They were strangled.”

  I had to laugh, a rough bark without humor. “Strangled? The two of them? You saw me last night—I could barely sit up. How could I have strangled two people? And without either of them shouting for help?”

  Jabil brought his face close to mine, and in the voice of a man who has practiced his lines many times said:

  “A man who could kill a sandclaw single-handed could do almost anything.”

  Lost for words, I appealed to Sanja with a stricken look, but it was plain there was no succor for me from that quarter. It occurred to me that she had not protested my innocence, only my treatment. With the Sand dead, she was the closest thing I had to a friend among these people, and it seemed even that bond had become strained, at best. I let my head hang. Whatever she thought of me, under the circumstances, I could not blame her.

  Then Jazil’s words drifted to the forefront of my mind: “…They might want him alive.…Mention either of them again and I won’t wait for you to be taken away.” He had never answered my questions.

  “Where am I being taken? Who is coming to get me?”

  Jazil laughed and pushed Sanja out of the tent ahead of him.

  I was left alone for the rest of the day, save for my guards, who changed every few hours, and although I barely saw their faces, each one seemed to take pleasure in letting me know whenever he took a drink, standing right behind me, gurgling noisily and sometimes letting a few drops fall on my shoulders and head, just enough that I felt water’s absence all the more keenly. I spent the time pondering the murders, more sure with each passing hour that I had not harmed either of my hosts. Perhaps I have sought the solace of the bottle on various occasions over the past two decades, but never have I been a violent man, given to rages, or even to overwhelming attraction to any woman save one.

  So who killed them? Jazil was the most obvious suspect: He harbored feelings for the Wind, and had before I arrived, not to mention the Sand’s death made him chief. Men had killed for either of those reasons, let alone both. Likely he had re-entered the tent late in the night, thinking all asleep, but in the midst of his murdering the Sand, or upon having done so, the Wind awoke and saw him, forcing him to dispatch her as well. Me, he left in an ignorant stupor to answer for his crimes come the dawn. Without living witnesses, and with no one to stand for me, his accusation was safe from challenge.

  It was only a hypothesis, but it fit the facts. Not that it mattered, since my unnamed doom must be fast approaching. This morning he had evinced such rage that I would not have been surprised to be thrown to the givas, but with night approaching I feared he planned to expose me to some even more hideous desert predator, and I held little hope that his sense of fair play would prompt him to unbind me first. Through the wall of the tent, I could trace the path of the sun toward the horizon, and I knew in my bones that its departure would herald my own. Almost simultaneous with the sunset, the tent flaps flew open and Jazil stalked in.

  “You can go,” he said to the guard, whose face I had never seen. “I’ll wait for them.” When we were alone, he came to stand in front of me. “I knew you were trouble the moment I saw you. How you fooled the Sand into believing you killed a sandclaw I will never know, but at least you won’t profit from it.” He held out the sack containing the venom and smirked. “But I will.”

  “Are you going to tell me what you plan to do with me?” If I knew, I could try to face it. There was a chance Jazil would hold out, to torture me further, but I had seen his kind before, and they like to talk.

  He was no exception. “I’m going to turn you over to the Nuum. I don’t know what you’ve done, but it must have been something very bad for you to end up here. Unfortunately, they weren’t willing to offer a reward. But they’re willing to pay very well for sandclaw venom, so I will get something out of it. Taking you away will be part of the deal.”

  The Nuum. Jazil didn’t know his fondest wish was about to be granted. As soon as the Nuum took me into custody, they would check my identity on the worldwide datasphere—and nothing would show up. I was a “ghost,” an unregistered alien. If I was lucky, when they found the Library in my possession, they would simply execute me on the spot and dump my body in the desert. If they realized who I really was…

  Sanja slipped into the tent, barely rippling the entrance. She stood with hands of hips, her eyes blazing.

  “When you were you planning to tell the rest of us about selling the venom to the Nuum?”

  He straightened and turned to face her in one unhurried motion.

  “I made a deal to sell the venom at a good price. I’m the Sand. That is my job. Until you are the Wind, your job is to abide by my wishes.”

  Sanja’s expression went from furious to exasperated, but she brought it under control as she glanced at me. I kept my own face passive. Time was running out. If an opportunity was going to present itself, it would have to hurry.

  “I brought that venom in. I have every right to participate in the sale.” She looked at me again, a sly smile touching her lips. “Especially now that my share is doubled.” She leaned into him, and a man of stone would have felt the heat. She whispered in his ear, and he shuddered. She pulled back. “Check the flaps,” she breathed.

  He turned to obey, and Sanja clubbed him with the hilt of her knife.

  She was cutting my bonds almost before Jazil hit the floor. “We don’t have much time. My giva is behind the tent. Once we get into the desert, nobody will follow us. Jazil isn’t nearly as popular as he’d like to think, and most people will be happy to let the desert have us.”

  Even with time of the essence, I insisted that binding Jazil was worth the effort, as it might delay pursuit. My reasoning was sound—or would have been, except that just as we had gagged him with perhaps too much enthusiasm, we heard a gentle whirring sound, coming closer. I had heard it before.

  “They’re here.” I used Jazil’s knife to cut a slit in the back of the tent. I could see the silhouette of the airship against the sky, and I was surprised at how small it was. It couldn’t have held more than two men; where they’d been planning to put me I had no idea. But ship itself g
ave me an idea—an idea far more appealing than a nighttime dash across a monster-infested desert on a surly mount that would as like eat me as carry me.

  I could fly their ship, but could I subdue two men by myself, without any noise, even with Sanja’s help? I was still stiff from being tied up all day, and although my headache had faded from sheer weariness, I could still feel the effects of last night’s binge. Whatever the Zilbiri drank, it was murderous if you weren’t used to it.

  “Sanja!” I hissed. “Can you get some of that liquor they fed me last night? Enough for two men?”

  Sanja stared at me. “Are you that thirsty?”

  “No, I’m going to make a toast. A couple of glasses and they’ll be unconscious until morning.”

  “How are you going to get them to drink it?”

  I smiled wryly. “If you gave them the look you gave Jazil, they would drink poison.”

  By the time the Nuum had set down, I was standing in front of the tent, swathed in all the cloth I could find. With any luck, they would attribute my size to my voluminous wardrobe. I was relieved to see that the rest of the tribe had found pursuits of their own to occupy them. Apparently the Nuum were no more popular here than in other Thoran enclaves.

  “You’re the…Sand?” one grunted.

  I stood aside, pulling the tent flap open. Jazil was inside on the floor, trussed like a sacrificial lamb, gagged, and blindfolded. Nuum and Thorans communicate by a combination of sound and telepathy, so a gag was only partially effective, but by blindfolding Jazil, we could confuse him and make his mental shouting less focused.

  “This is the one,” I muttered, nudging Jazil with my foot. “The venom is over there,” and I gestured vaguely. “Sit. We’ll have a drink to celebrate.”

  The Nuum exchanged a glance of obvious distaste.

  “We’ve got a schedule to keep,” said the one who had spoken before. He was slightly taller than the other, but still a half a foot shorter than I. His companion sported the closest thing to a belly I had yet seen on one of Earth’s overlords. The only schedule these two had was their wish to get this duty over with as soon as possible.

  “Sit!” I insisted quietly. “This is my house.”

  They sighed and found stools. Jazil was struggling now, but I’d tied him very tightly. I nudged him again with my foot near a sensitive area. In truth, I would rather have kicked him, but that was how he had wanted to treat me, and I refused to be like him. Yet.

  “Well?” the Nuum asked. “Are we drinking?”

  My answer was mooted by Sanja’s return. Unlike me, she had eschewed extra robes—in fact, she was down to one thin shift, and I would not have bet she was wearing anything underneath. One glance at my guests told me that had completely forgotten about their schedule.

  Sanja knelt gracefully and passed them two full cups. I motioned for them to drink. “Guests first.” They were only two happy to oblige, and when Sanja leaned forward to take their empty cups, straining the fabric of her shift, they had no thought of objecting to seconds.

  It had taken four cups to incapacitate me, but the average Nuum is significantly smaller than I. This pair was snoring after three.

  I took their weapons and the sandclaw venom while Sanja grabbed clothes. Then we took the airship and turned our backs on the encampment of the Zilbiri—my refuge, and Sanja’s home.

  Chapter 4

  Confession

  We abandoned the airship near the edge of Mindal, the town where, according to Sanja, the Zilbiri traded various small artifacts they carved and what rare goods they could wrest from the desert, including, occasionally, sandclaw venom. It was still dark when we set down, but we didn’t know how long it would be before the Nuum woke up and put out a call for help through the local datasphere. When the airship was tracked down, whoever was found with it would be detained at the least—and being shot was not out of the question. I had seen far worse.

  “I have some money,” Sanja said. “There are places we can eat that are open all the time.”

  The thought of food hit me like a tidal wave. I had not eaten in over 24 hours, and had only drunk what we could filch from the tent as we fled, but the tension of our escape and the necessity of keeping a constant watch for Nuum had kept the thought of hunger at bay, not that there had been anything edible on the airship.

  “Food!” I croaked. “A steak! A steak! My kingdom for a steak!”

  Deep in my pocket, I knew the Librarian was laughing, since he monitored everything that was going on around me, even if I’d had no chance to consult him since I was trussed up. He, at least, would have understood my misapplied quotation. Sanja, on the other hand, was looking at me as though I had lost my mind.

  “All right, follow me. I’ve been here with the Wind a few times. There’s a place nearby where we stop—used to stop.” If there was any catch in her voice as she corrected herself, I couldn’t hear it. I wondered if Sanja had fully realized her situation. I had been on the run before, and I had left homes never to return, but she had not. Was she prepared to make her way in the world? For that matter, what was she going to do—or I with her? She had risked everything to save me on nothing but her own instinct; I could hardly abandon her now, not to mention that she might be literally the only friend I had in the world.

  First things first. I had to eat. I had known a sergeant in the infantry who had moved heaven and earth to get his men provisions when the quartermaster and I and probably General Pershing himself would have sworn it couldn’t be done. “You can’t use your brain if your mind’s on your stomach,” was his motto, and he was as good as his word. He was a man-eater, and the ranks hated him for it, but they’d have marched into Hell at his back.

  Sanja lead me through a small doorway in a moderately-sized building. A small sign on the door read simply “Food,” probably a nod to the fact that in a world such as this was, with Thorans, Nuum, alien species, and mutations both human and animal walking the streets, limiting oneself to a specific cuisine was tantamount to courting bankruptcy. Still, the smell that smote me as we moved through the doorway was as palpable as the hunger inside me, and I knew that I would eat whatever was put in front of me even if I didn’t want to look too closely at it.

  Being at least an hour before dawn, the diner, for that was how I perceived it, was sparsely attended. Because the Nuum had outlawed all but the most basic technology, diners sat at tables waiting for their food in a tableau so familiar that I could pretend I was home in the 20th century—if not for the customers.

  I counted four, three Thorans and one lizard-man, a species new to me. He glanced up automatically at the sound of the door, his tongue flickering in and out almost too fast to see. Then his gaze dropped resolutely back to his plate, but not before I sensed that he was nearly blind.

  The others, too, had frozen in their places for just a moment, then returned carefully to their own affairs, although the pair nearest us discreetly moved their chairs to make more room for us. The proprietor stood stock still, one hand still resting on the counter where he had been wiping up crumbs in a routine as old as Time.

  Suddenly he collected himself, stashed the rag, and stepped out from behind the counter, babbling apologies. When I was living among the Nuum, their meals were ordered by computer and delivered by invisible force-fields, lacking any human touch, but here in the hinterlands, where only Thorans and other “lower tiers” lived, matters were far different.

  The proprietor lead us to a corner away from the other diners where two chairs and a large table sprouted seamlessly from the floor. Apparently, even here some level of technology was allowed, probably because it was hardly the kind that could be subverted for what the Nuum would consider criminal purposes. The man seemed nervous, wiping his hands with a towel—some things never change—and I suddenly realized the reason for his anxiety: He thought I was Nuum. Why one of the Overlords would lower himself to eat in a place like this was incomprehensible, but then again it was far above his place to raise su
ch a question, so he jumped to be of service and hoped I would leave his establishment having not inflicted on him any bodily harm. He was going to be stunned when we actually paid the bill.

  We sat, and menus appeared on the surface of the table in front of each of us, unlike any menus I had ever seen. There was no text, only pictures. I pretended to peruse it while I watched Sanja, who placed her hand on one and assumed a thoughtful look, then repeated herself at another picture. I imitated her and received a mental description of the dish I had chosen, complete with smell, taste, texture, and a subtle hint informing me of the price. It was easy to pick and choose from the offerings on the basis of personal taste, although as to the last consideration I was completely at sea. In my previous visit to this era, I had never had occasion to use money—not that I had had any. I had literally no idea how much anything cost. Still, Sanja had been here before, so all I needed to do was compare relative prices and choose something reasonable.

  She and the proprietor were staring at me—or rather, Sanja was, and the proprietor was trying his very best to appear that he was not.

  “Are you going to order?” she asked after a moment. “I thought you were starving.”

  “After you,” I said, and I thought I caught the proprietor in a shocked blink.

  “I already did,” she replied, and I realized in a flash that ordering, too, was accomplished telepathically, although somehow the proprietor knew when it was done. I swiftly chose my dish and he went away with a mental sigh of relief so profound it leaked out around his mental shields and I actually heard it.

  “He’s terrified of you,” Sanja observed.

  “Really? I had not noticed.” Flippancy was not my usual style, but for the first time in a day I felt I could relax. “He thinks me a Nuum.”

  Sanja’s shoulders slumped as she sank further into her chair, which changed to suit her. “That’s obvious. The question is: What are you?”

  That question had been hanging in the air since we met, but while the Sand decreed it out of bounds, it remained merely a potential. Now it was real, and I was not sure how to answer it. The moment stretched on for a long time.