“Ugly?” the captain rapped.
“Quiet at the moment. But rumbling. Like a volcano.” The master-at-arms wiped sweat off his forehead. “I was just going to send down to the examination huts for Lieutenant Balden.”
Ogric kept his face from showing his feelings, but he made a mental note to remind Lieutenant Balden privately that when he was put in charge of getting a batch of workers aboard, that didn’t mean lounging at the barrier gate and eyeing the women among them. But he wasted only a moment on that. In the forefront of his mind was what the port commandant had told him when he first landed and went to present his compliments.
“I wish you joy of them,” the port commandant had said. “But I’ll tell you what your advertising is going to bring in—the dirtiest bunch of thieves and cutthroats who ever disgraced this continent. They’ll come out of the Dyasthala, the thieves’ slum in the city which they cleared the other day about half a century after the job fell due. I guess your only advantage is that none of them will trust any of the others out of sight, so you won’t have the danger of them organizing mutiny. But you’d best make the trip a fast one to Vashti—or I wouldn’t put it past them to conceive the idea of taking over your ship and setting up as pirates.”
Was it starting before they’d lifted for space?
Ogric wished profoundly that he could simply turn the lot of them back on the ground and go somewhere else for his workers. But he was in government service, and under orders to supply willing labor for the Vashti mines, so he’d have to make the best of it.
“All right!” he said, making up his mind. “Hold the rest of the intake in the hold where they’re being fed. Close off all the corridors leading out of the workers’ quarters. Get Lieutenant Balden to sort out the zombie, the man who started it, and anyone else he thinks, or you think, might put us in the picture, and have them up in my cabin in half an hour. And get the workers calmed down. And send a man to the port commandant with my compliments and tell him I’ll be late for dinner. Got that?”
“Aye, sir,” the master-at-arms said, and doubled away.
“He’s a what?” the intellectual lieutenant said, sounding rather bored, when the master-at-arms came panting with the message.
“Sold to a devil, they say. And they’re so scared of him they’d rather go back to starvation than ship to Vashti with him even with their contracts worth twenty thousand.”
A horrifying memory clicked in the lieutenant’s mind. He straightened up as though he had been kicked at the base of the spine and stared wildly around for Zethel. But there was no sign of the big man.
Sold to a devil? And supposed to be dead? It couldn’t really be the original of the story. But if even the government authorities of Berak had taken the notion seriously enough to clear out the thieves’ quarter and thus risk spreading some thousands of the criminal class all over their city, then who could say what the illiterate superstitious might not make of it? He had to swallow hard before he could trust his voice; then he barked at the master-at-arms to come with him back to the ship and show him where the trouble was.
The corridors in the workers’ quarters were lined with anxious faces peering out of the doors. Some of the bolder ones had emerged despite the threat of men armed with gas-guns at every intersection, and were warily eying each other as though none of them was sure who the “dead man” really was.
Lieutenant Balden halted nervously, looking down the corridor where the trouble had begun. In a low voice he spoke to the master-at-arms.
“Tell them I’m coming to put this thing right,” he said. “Promise them there’ll be no trouble.”
The master-at-arms shouted the message ringingly down the corridor. It had no visible effect, except that some of the men and women in the passage drew back into nearby rooms. A dry feeling in his throat, the lieutenant allowed the master-at-arms to lead him forward.
Before the last door in the corridor they pasued. “I think he’s still in here,” the master-at-arms said, leaning on the panel and sliding it aside. “Yes. That’s him.”
“Him?” the lieutenant echoed in surprise. He stepped forward involuntarily. Yes, it was definitely the pale-haired, old-young man he had seen at the examination hut. And come to think of it, there had been a dead look in his eyes.
He choked the idea off firmly. Glancing around the cabin, he saw gear belonging to about four or five other people scattered on the bunks. And one other person besides the pale-haired young man—a girl, about the same age, with plain untidy brown hair cut irregularly short, her freshly scrubbed face rather attractive and heavily freckled across the nose and cheekbones, her mouth full and almost pouting. She was taking garments out of the bag in which they had been issued to her and stowing them in a locker, as calm as could be.
The pale-haired young man, on the other hand, was doing nothing at all but staring into space.
“You!” Balden said. “Are you the cause of all this trouble? Are you the man that everyone’s saying is possessed of a devil?”
The lackluster eyes turned to look at him. The head gave a forward dip that might have been a stillborn nod.
“The name’s Kazan,” the master-at-arms supplied. “Anonymous orphan; that’s his whole name.”
“Kazan!” Balden said. “What’s it all about? What started this nonsense about you being back from the dead?”
“I am,” Kazan said in a rustling voice, and went on staring into space.
Helpless, Balden hesitated a moment and then switched his attention to the girl. “You there!” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Clary,” she answered. “That’s my whole name, too.”
“Were you here when this began?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you run with the rest of them, then?”
She raised burning eyes to him. They were a little sunken in her face, as though she had been undernourished for a long time. She said with a touch of scorn, “The man who started it was a lumbering fool called Hego, with much more muscle than brain and less guts. I’m from the Dyasthala. I don’t believe in devils. And anyone with an eye in his head could see that he isn’t any more dead than I am. Feel him—he’s warm. He’s got a pulse. Hego must be insane.”
The master-at-arms said puzzledly, “If he is crazy, sir, how come he got through the examinations?”
It crossed Balden’s mind wildly that a parallel question might be, “If Kazan is dead, how did he get past?” But he pulled himself together before he voiced the words. He said, “All right, both of you. Come with me. We’ll take you up to the captain and get it straightened out.”
His impatience mounting visibly, like a needle on a dial ascending towards the red danger mark, Ogric listened to Hego, then to Balden’s gloss on the story, quoted from Zethel, then to the master-at-arms, Clary, and four other workers who said they also knew the story, chosen from at least a hundred.
Halfway through the fourth confirmatory recitation, Ogric slammed his open palm on the arm of his chair with a sound like a firecracker and bounced to his feet.
“Enough!” he barked. “I never heard anything like it! A walking corpse! Devils! Miracles! Lunacy, all of it—half comet-dust and half nightmares! You there sitting like a booby in the corner—what’s your name, Kazan! You’ve listened to this garbage about your coming back from the dead. What have you got to say about it?”
Kazan shrugged. He didn’t seem very interested. He said, “You heard what Hego said. It’s quite true. They threw me in the lake with my hands manacled.”
“Then how by the blaze of Sirius did you get out alive?” Ogric demanded.
A curious look crossed Kazan’s face. He said, “I—I think something bit through the manacles. And something took hold of me, and another creature attacked it, and I found myself in the mud on the beach.”
From Hego, standing by the door with his face sheet-white, a groan like a dying man’s. He could not tear his fascinated gaze from Kazan, not even to blink.
> “Quiet, you!” Ogric ordered. He drove fist into palm. “Well, the answer’s simple enough. We’ll put him back on the ground, since most of these idiots won’t ship with him, and we can better afford to lose one man than hundreds.”
“Did he sign the same contract I signed?” Clary said. Her small face seemed to have set like stone, and her eyes burned more fiercely than ever.
“What?” Ogric snapped.
“I can read,” Clary said. “The contract I signed was solid as rock. Bound you, as well as me. I have my eye on cash at the time when I think about marrying. Did you ask him whether he wants to dissolve the contract? Or do I go back down with the rest of the workers and tell them the contracts they’ve signed are so much wrapping paper?”
Ogric lowered himself into his chair again, staring at her. He said, “What’s your interest in this, young woman?”
“None, specially.” She shrugged. “Except I don’t like fools”—she shot a contemptuous glance at Hego—“and I don’t like seeing people made fools of.”
Balden cleared his throat. He said, “If I could make a suggestion, Captain—”
Ogric spun his chair to face the lieutenant. In a frosty voice suggesting he didn’t think the suggestion would be worth hearing, he said, “Yes?”
“I saw this man’s test results. He’d be worth keeping anyway as valuable material to train for a responsible job. We’ve got one worker here—this girl Clary—who scoffs at the superstitious nature of the others. We can probably find enough to fill, or partly fill, one of the cabins. Then we can persuade the rest by playing on their greed or by shaming them that they’re being foolish. The Vashti pull isn’t too long from here.”
“Any pull with this situation stewing aboard the ship would be too long,” Ogric growled. “But the proposal seems sensible enough. Come to think of it, if anyone might well be put on the ground again, it’s this shivering idiot Hego. But no doubt you, young woman”—he gave an ironical half-bow to Clary—“would have something to say about that as well.”
Clary returned his gaze evenly. “You wouldn’t be making a fool of him,” she said. “He’s been one since birth, looks like.”
Ogric couldn’t help it. He chuckled. “You’ve a head on your shoulders,” he said approvingly. “Let’s see if there’s something in it. You’re going to see if you can find ten more like yourself among these silly workers, who’ll have the sense you’ve shown—and if you do it, there’s a bonus for you on top of your contract pay.”
VIII
No one could have said whether it was the struggle between superstitious fear and simple greed, or merely Dyasthala cunning, which in the end compelled Ogric to promise a contract bonus to those workers who agreed to share quarters with Kazan as well as to Clary herself for finding them. There were going to be some pointed questions asked when he presented the accounts for this trip; still, he’d got off lighter than if he’d been obliged to honor the forfeiture clause in one of the contracts, or if he’d lost half the workers already signed up and had to hold back his departure while he hunted down some replacements.
In fact, it had not occurred to Clary to suggest to those she approached the idea of holding out for a bonus like hers. It wasn’t in the frame of reference of Dyasthala thinking. The reason she had sprung to Kazan’s aid in the captain’s cabin was because she and he both were opposed to authority—it wasn’t out of sympathy. The offer of the bonus, certainly, had worked in her case very well; without it she would never have argued so persuasively with the reluctant workers.
And it was clear that she wasn’t completely successful. That could be seen from the way the new occupants of the cabin hesitated when they came through the door for the first time, looking about them, seeing Kazan, being only slightly reassured on finding Clary calmly sitting on the next bunk to his. And it went on as it had begun. None of the others spent any more time than they had to in Kazan’s company, and often during the sleep period a light would go on, and one of the people in the cabin would lean over the side of the bunk and stare down at Kazan as though to make sure he was genuinely asleep and not dead.
At first Clary had viewed these goings-on with real scorn. In her mind she classed Hego with the foolish but wealthy people who had sometimes sent into the Dyasthala to consult the so-called witches and wizards there. Everyone in the thieves’ quarter knew that their trances and oracles, their illusions and their speaking with tongues, were just another way of parting rich folk from their money, rating somewhere on the criminal scale between confidence trickery and the disguising of stolen goods for resale.
Then it gradually dawned on her, first, that many of what she regarded as her own people seemed to have caught the contagious fear of Kazan; second, that Kazan himself—aside from confirming Hego’s story in the captain’s presence, which could be discounted—had never said anything one way or the other.
This was alarming.
Kazan, indeed, appeared not to be in the least involved in what went on around—and often because of—him. It seemed to make no difference that for the duration of the voyage he was the key person aboard the ship. When he was not required for some duty or other, or to collect his thrice-daily rations in the workers’ canteen, he lay on his bunk, staring at the underside of the bunk above. It occurred to Clary at last that he might as well have been really dead. He was dead in his mind.
She’d seen cases like that in the Dyasthala. They were everywhere. But at first she could not associate the pale, calm, rather handsome Kazan with the slack-lipped and filthy idiots who could be found in the old days playing with the gutter mud of the thieves’ quarters, sometimes seizing a bright coin tossed to them with a little chuckle of pleasure at such a gaudy plaything—and usually losing it again to a child of normal intelligence who know how to trade it for some worthless but glittering scrap of colored glass.
Long experience in handling random-gathered groups of migrant workers had developed a system in the fleet of ships serving the Vashti mines. Though Ogric had spoken dismally of any voyage as being too long with a problem like Kazan aboard, in fact the tension was kept under control by fairly simple means. Keep the minds of the workers occupied, was the prime rule.
Hence during every arbitrary day there was a training class in the canteen, to teach some administrative job, or to put a shine on the reading ability of those who possessed it. There were also many entertainments—by the standard of the crew’s home world, very crude, but to the children of the Dyasthala and in fact to most of the other workers new and interesting. As a result, Kazan was often left by himself in the cabin, staring at nothing.
That gave Clary her chance.
She slid back the door-panel almost silently and stepped through as though afraid of being heard, then closed it with equal care. No one was present except Kazan, who lay as usual flat on his back, his vacant eyes on the bunk over him. There were folding seats clipped to the walls. Clary took one of these gently from its place and opened it as she walked to the side of Kazan’s bunk.
Then she slammed it down on the floor with a crash that made the metal of the cabin ring angrily, and sat on it. Even that barely disturbed the mirror surface of Kazan’s calm.
“All right,” she said when he had rolled his head incuriously to look at her. “Out with it, Kazan. Who are you?”
As simply as that, it began.
For that question was the key to the nightmare haunting him—a darkness populated with hungry monsters, in which his mouth, open to scream, filled with sour water and the taste of the beasts around, in which his ears were deafened first by a rasping hoot rising towards a whistle, then by a rush of water. A struggle against cruel steel shackles holding his wrists, so that he could not even strike out against the huge threatening creatures that shared the darkness with him.
That was the beginning. What followed was that the darkness took a shape—a vague, formless, ill-defined shape with ember eyes. He seemed to be outside it and inside it at the same time, for he could
look at it and still be engulfed by it.
The remorseless argument that went with the macabre images fell too readily into words. Kazan had gone to his death. Kazan manacled and helpless who had forgotten the trick of making steps of air had plunged into the lake and been swallowed up.
But Kazan had also been sold to a devil by human devils who had not asked his leave, and the devil had taken him out of the clutch of death to serve for a year and a day. Kazan accordingly was dead. Let the devil move the corpse as he would, Kazan could have no part in it.
Yet, he was still aware. He could remember things, foggily, as he had remembered that he knew Hego. He had no sense of discontinuity except the break between the moment when he was seized by the thing in the black water, and the moment he realized he had been flung on to a patch of soft mud beside the lake, and aside from his bruises and the sickness the foul water had brought on him was unhurt. He could even remember the click which he had felt rather than heard when the vast cruel beak made its first stab at him and severed the steel cuffs linking his wrists. He could even remember that the end of the beak was rough, and had rasped the skin of his back, and torn a hole in his fine black shirt with the silver piping, so that afterwards the thermostatic circuitry did not work.
Or perhaps the water had put it out of action.
Was he Kazan, saved by a combination of miracles? Or was he the puppet of a black being with eyes like coals?
“Who are you, Kazan?”
That fresh-faced girl insisting that he answer—he could hate her for voicing the question, he could pound her to a sack of bones in blue-bruised skin because he had wished to do that to Bryda and her sneering lover, the prince. He had come from the shore of the lake driven by only that lasting hatred out of all the many desires which once had motivated him as Kazan. He had been cheated, as they informed him much later.