“Well,” said Mikal, smiling, “for one thing, she would have done something akin to what Seleni just did for us. She would have insisted on lifting our spirits, told us not to defeat ourselves by being negative. So let’s honour her by making that the starting point; in other words we will succeed in this endeavour no matter what. We’ll figure things out, and we’ll make them work.”
“Now you’re talking,” said Seleni.
*****
The two women slept in Milla and Gorsh’s huge bed through the night, since Jaqui’s “Boss” did not return to let her out of the cabin. The bed was so big that they did not in any way disturb one another; Kati commented before she crawled under the covers that it could have held a family with three kids, “and a dog and a cat, besides”. Jaqui refrained from making jokes about Gorsh and his desire for sons, via Kati, although Kati had a quip ready for the possibility. After the uncomfortable ride in the tainted flyer, which itself followed a long flight across the ocean from Suderie, she was tired and slept well, in spite of having her mind confined to the space of the cabin.
In the morning she was the first one up, tiptoeing into the bathroom, and then the kitchen, so as not to wake Jaqui up. The kitchen, she discovered was well stocked with various herbal teas, and several varieties of porridge grains and nut flours. She picked the variety of the flours that the Lordz household had been partial to, and made a potful, pleased that she had thought to ask Max’s cook how it was prepared. The task was not a difficult one, and she made tea while waiting for the porridge to cook, at the same time exploring the extent to which her mind could wander in the confines of the cabin.
By the time the tea and the nut porridge were ready she had determined that her range had been stunted enough that she simply could not mentally reach into the outside world. How had that been done, she wondered, and why? What need did Milla and Judd Gorsh have to isolate themselves thus from psychic influences? Were they maybe on bad terms with the Planetary Spirits? Nature Spirits, however, were not into judging people; as a rule, as long as humans were not doing whole scale harm to a world, they were willing to leave well enough alone, understanding that people had to learn their lessons however they learned them.
Kati sat down to eat, and to think about this.
On Vultaire, the Planetary Spirits had rallied behind her Team and the rebellious Vultairians because they felt that the oligarchy had entrenched itself into the society in such a manner, and over hundreds of years, that even the balance of Nature was being threatened. The Cellar Child, born from the pain and horror of events that had taken place in the Prison cellars of the Capital City had not been a participant in the above-ground events, but confined to its underground maze, at the insistence of the nearest Nature Spirit, the Forest Essence. The Child had been an unhappy, lonely spirit, goaded into action by the presence of two sensitive humans: Kati herself, and the Shelonian Master Healer Vorlund.
What was going on, here on Wayward, that was different, more problematic than what she had encountered on Vultaire?
The Cellar Creature had as its home base the cellars of the Citadel, another age-old construct, and probably witness to as much, if not more, violence, pain, unfairness, and hate, as the Vultairian Prison cellars had seen. But this Creature was a much more sophisticated evil, capable of tearing pieces of itself off, and having these pieces root themselves in other locales, like flyers, spaceships, and the perimeter of this cabin. Dare she try to approach it, to see what it was all about?
Kati wished that she had the wisdom of Master Healer Vorlund to draw on for advice. But Vorlund was not available, nor was Llon, or even the Wise Woman whom Llon had befriended. She was alone, except for Jaqui who was a nice, feisty lass, but inexperienced, and not particularly gifted when it came to matters psychic. Mikal could perhaps have helped her, or Xoraya, but Mikal was outside in the world now, and Xoraya was trapped in the Citadel cellars by the same entity that she herself was trying to figure out. Only Xoraya was worse off than Kati was, under the mind-tangler, and out of her body, and in a place where the murk of the Cellar creature was all around her. Although, hadn’t the girls, Jaqui and Shyla, brought a jini into the cellar; perhaps Xoraya and her husband, Xanthus, were doing better than she realized.
She had only herself to rely on, but she needed to do something; she was not about to lie down and wait for others to solve her problems! And it did seem that the only route open to her was to approach the entity which was her jailer.
She emptied her porridge bowl and finished her mug of tea; then made sure that the food and drink would remain hot for Jaqui when she arose. Fighting her reluctance, she then went to lie on the couch, and closed her eyes, determinedly settling into the light trance state which allowed her to range about, far and wide, usually. The Granda was alert; The Monk was ready to rescue her if that became necessary.
Her psyche slipped through the wall with not a problem; then it came to a standstill.
“Why?” she queried mentally. “Why are you stopping me?”
“Papa wants you penned in here, baby girl,” something answered her, in a slightly sneering mental tone.
“And you obey Papa?”
“I don’t obey anyone.” The answer was a definite sneer. “I do what I want to do.”
“You want to do what Papa wants you to do, though?”
“At times. Like now. You’re a pretty girl with a lively mind. A lovely item to have inside my enclosure.”
“But I’m allergic to you. In the flyer I was sick, exposed to your miasma.”
“A pity, that. This cabin is the only place where I can keep you.”
“You realize that you’re keeping me for Gorsh, don’t you? Is he Papa?”
“Maybe he’s Papa, and maybe he’s not. I will keep you safe from him, if you wish. I won’t let him maul you. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”
“You’ve been listening to Jaqui and me, have you?”
“Oh, I hear everything! I remember everything! Well, maybe I remember everything; I don’t quite remember if I remember everything!”
Oh dear. Kati made a point of not directing this comment at the creature, hoping to keep a tiny bit of privacy that way.
“The thing’s nuts,” subvocalized The Monk acridly.
“Who said that?” the entity asked. “Who thinks that I’m crazy?”
Kati decided that it was time to bail out, left her trance and opened her eyes. She would try to connect with the entity again at a later time, when, with a bit of luck, it might have forgotten the Granda’s comment.
“Don’t frigging ruin what I’m trying to do,” she subvocalized, and noted that The Monk retreated to the back of her mind, grumpily.
Jaqui was just getting up.
“You got up before me, this morning,” she said, “and here you’re the one who was sick last night.”
“I believe that you had quite the day, too, yesterday,” Kati said magnanimously. “I made some tea and nut porridge, if you want breakfast. They’re on the stove.”
“Oh, how nice!” Jaqui exclaimed. “I could get used to rooming with you! But I very much doubt that I’ll get the chance. The Boss will find something for me to do in the Compound around the Citadel, or even in the Citadel itself. Maybe I’ll get to go down into the cellars and find out that your friend has flown the coop.”
“You may want to keep your mouth shut about that, until you actually go down there and discover it,” Kati suggested.
“Unless Tere has already been down there, or is doing so, even as we talk. In that case he’ll be bruiting the news to anyone who’ll listen, wondering why Mosse never came up to announce it.”
*****
Tere, in fact, was staring at the empty gurney on which Mikal had slept, with eyes wide.
“What happened here?” he asked Murra. “Where did the Federation man go? He couldn’t have just disappeared!”
Murra shrugged his shoulders.
“I guess the drug stopped working on him,”
he said. “He just got up, said that he was leaving, and went out. Didn’t Mosse mention it? He came here at one point and saw that the Agent was awake. He accused me of shorting on the drug, but there’s no way I could have done that—you know it’s impossible. I guess that once he was up, the Cellar Creature couldn’t confine him anymore, and I certainly couldn’t.”
“The Boss is going to be really mad.”
Tere continued to stare, even as he inserted the measured vials of the drug and nutrient solution which he had brought with him, into the life support equipment of the other two gurneys.
“How are the other two doing?” he finally asked Murra. “Does it look like they might be waking up, too?”
“I haven’t noticed any changes in them,” Murra replied. “But then, they’re a different species from us and the Agent. The Scientist has told me that this drug was first developed on Xeon for use by his people. This version was something that he was changing so that humans could use it, too. He thinks that this happened because he had not had time to do enough experimentation before Gorsh took it over, and started to use it to keep people under. There had been no long term testing on humans, so no-one knew that this could happen.”
“He’s still going to be mad as a drunk hornet,” Tere muttered. “It doesn’t matter how it happened. Someone should have caught the Agent before he could just walk away.”
Murra shrugged.
“Don’t look at me. Nobody gave me a communicator with which to call Gorsh—or anyone else, for that matter. Like I said, Mosse did come in, and did some shouting; I assumed that he would have climbed up, if he had no other way of communicating, and told your boss what had happened.”
“Well, he didn’t. I expect that he’ll pay for the oversight. I just hope the Boss doesn’t turn on me in his anger. I’m blameless.”
Tere dragged his feet on the way upstairs, and to Gorsh’s office. When he finally reached the office he discovered that the Boss was not there. This was the second morning in a row that the big man had not shown up in his office at his usual early hour, so Tere, one of whose jobs was to run errands, was puzzled. Was this Kati woman who he had been chasing after all afternoon, really this important? Was she worth the Boss setting aside everything else?
Should he check out Gorsh’s apartment, he wondered. But what if she, this Kati, was there with him, and he had her in his bed? Tere had knocked on the door once when Jaqui had been in there with him—or had that been in the back room behind the office?—and Gorsh had not been pleased to have been interrupted.
With a sigh, he finally decided that he would have to approach The Overseer about the matter. He did not like dealing with the Overseer; he was a busy man, and could be even more short-tempered than Gorsh often was, when pressing problems were brought up to him. But this was a serious matter, and Tere knew that if he didn’t bring it up to the authorities as soon as he could, he would pay a price. And his life had not been nearly as bad as that of some of the other chattels, he well knew. Being Gorsh’s errand boy was not even close to the worst job in the Compound, never mind Milla’s Estate. He did not particularly want to be willy-nilly sent off to do something else, like maybe to do heaven knew what in Strone, for some lame-brained Councillor, like had happened to Nic.
Thus, he swallowed a few times, and then knocked on the Overseer’s office door.
“What?” shouted the Overseer, tossing the sheaf of papers that he had been looking at, on his desk, as soon as he had grasped what Tere was saying. “How, by the Demons, did that happen?”
“I don’t know,” Tere said, trying not to tremble. “Murra, the funny-looking boy said that he just woke up, and got up. And then he just left.”
“And then he just left!” the Overseer yelled. “He couldn’t have just left! The Cellar Creature had orders to keep him there, mind and body, the same as the other three inmates, including the boy! Even if the drug—somehow—stopped working, he couldn’t have just left! The Cellar Creature should have stopped him! Why didn’t Mosse make the Creature stop him, if the Creature was feeling too lazy to do so?”
“I don’t know,” Tere repeated himself. “Murra said that Mosse came into the back room after the Agent had woken up, but he didn’t do anything, just yelled at the Agent, and at him, and then stomped back to his quarters.”
“And he didn’t come up here to warn us that this Star Federation Agent, whose mind Gorsh wants to mine for information about the Peace Officer Corps, had come out from under the mind-tangler?”
“I guess not,” Tere said. “If he had, you’d already know about it, and I wouldn’t have to be here, telling you.”
He sighed. He could tell from the Overseer’s tone that Mosse might end up with lash marks on his back. He just hoped that he wouldn’t be there with Mosse, getting whipped. The Overseer liked to whip people, especially girls. The one good thing Tere could think of was that, fortunately, he was not a girl. The Overseer might have had enough of lashing a male by the time he was finished with the Mage, and not bother with anyone else, since there were no girls implicated in Mikal’s disappearance.
“Damn, I don’t have time for this! And Judd is off at the Estate, been there overnight, doing Demons only know what, whether with his wife, that Kati woman, or maybe Jaqui—I understand she’s the one who ferried the new woman to the cabin on the Estate! I don’t want to bother him—he doesn’t like going into the Citadel cellars anyway. He’s not that comfortable with whatever it is that the Cellar Creature exudes that is so useful for blocking minds and messages.”
The Overseer stared into the middle distance for a moment.
“Go back down, boy, and tell Mosse to come up here to my office,” he then said. “Maybe I can deal with that shit before the Boss gets back.
“Now, how the heck did the Federation Agent get through the Compound without some guard picking him up? We’ve got guards all over. Though we are way too open to the city proper; maybe it wasn’t that difficult for a lone man to slip through.”
Tere realized that the man was talking to himself and that he had dodged the whipping post. He turned on his heels and hurried out of the office, heading back towards the Citadel and its cellars. He didn’t care if the Overseer lashed Mosse the Mage. Mosse was a miserable creep, anyway.
*****
“Seleni, would it be possible to get the Planetary Spirits to reason with the Cellar Creature?” Mikal asked at one point.
“I don’t think that it’s possible to reason with that Creature,” Seleni replied. “I get the sense that it’s quite mad. It has grown out of the atmosphere created by all the ugly things that have happened in those cellars over the millennia. And there has been plenty of that, believe me.”
“What about crushing it with kindness? Surely the Planetary Spirits could do something like that? They have been allowing it to live on their energies all this time, after all.”
Mikal was being as persistent as he thought Kati might have been.
“You could go for a walk in the river valley, and ask the Spirit there, yourself,” Seleni said with a smile. “It’s clear that the Spirits like you. The way the Valley Spirit interfered for you, through the jini, when the Cellar Creature intended to roughly turn you back into its underground realm, when you were leaving the cellar, is a definite indication that you have made a positive connection with the Nature Spirits. I suspect that they won’t turn you down, no matter what you ask.”
“Hah,” crowed Lank. “Mikal, you’re getting to be more and more like Kati all the time! She an influence on you, or something?”
“Sounds like she’s a good influence,” said Chrysalia. “Most people that I’ve met so far—and granted, I haven’t been off my own world all that long yet—don’t give nearly enough credit to the non-material aspects of the universe. And see where it’s gotten them? Some ambitious rascal figures out how to use a negative spirit in a cellar as a device to block all kinds of communications! Because nobody knows how to counter what he’s done, he starts
taking over his world, as well as developing a crime syndicate which operates in Star Federation space as much as it does on the Fringes and in Wilderness space. Pretty pathetic that, if you ask me.”
“Does your insult to us run-of-the-mill humans of this galaxy mean that you can help us stop Gorsh?” Mikal asked with a wry smile. “As well as undo whatever the knife-maker managed to do to compromise the safeties that your people are in the habit of setting around their friends?”
“Remind me of that, will you?” Chrysalia complained, wrinkling her nose. “Not about to let me be arrogant, are you?”
“Things will go better if each of us displays a little humility,” Mikal said with a smile. “Not that I’m discounting the wisdom of your people, Chrysalia.”
“No wonder the Planetary Spirits like you, Mikal,” Seleni said, laughing. “You’re a natural politician! Do you ever stoop to insulting anyone?”
“I’ll insult Judd Gorsh, the first chance I get. More than that, I’ll break his jaw for him, if I get close enough to do so!”
“No you won’t,” Lank protested. “You’ve sworn an oath of non-violence, remember? But you, with our help, Kati’s help, and the help of the people and the Nature Spirits of Wayward, will take him to Federation Space Station, to face Federation justice!”
“Thanks for reminding me of that, Lank,” Mikal said, taking a deep breath. After thinking for a moment he continued. “Though, the oath actually refers to my not taking sentient life. Sometimes, a bit of judicious violence can’t be helped. But, it’s true, my feelings towards Gorsh can hardly be described as judicious. I do have my raw spots.”
“Go and take that nature walk, Mikal,” Seleni said. “The rest of us can play the ‘What would Kati do?’ game here, inside, while you do that. And you might come back with something quite useful for us.”
*****
“You haven’t had an answer from that Federation Agent in Salamanka, have you, Max?” Nabbish asked.
He had come into Max’s Government office, without knocking.
Max had been busy scrutinizing some of the paper work involving the extension of Milla Gorsh’s Leaven Estate. Most of the enlargement had taken place some years ago, when the Council of the Families had still been running things, and the documents giving her control over some of her neighbouring Estates were problematic. If the Continent Nord had had proper courts of law, and enforcement of the laws, it would have been easy enough to call into question what had been done. Max had been brooding about this, wondering how difficult it would be to set up proper institutions to take care of such things, and who would be the right Councillors to ask to do the work, when Nabbish had appeared at his open door.
Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers Page 49
