“Sir!” Anvra’s voice had an edge to it. “The name of duLein is an honorable one. It’s my contract-mate you’re speaking of.”
“Apologies, mistress,” said Jax stiffly. “But you’ve no self-obligation to a man you believe not contracted to you.”
“Until I have proof,” snapped Anvra, “my self-obligation holds. We women don’t shed our contract-duties as lightly as some men shed the duties of their Brotherhood.”
As they glared at each other, Anvra’s wings half-spread, Doug Bailey found his tongue.
“Wait a minute,” he said “Let me hear that again—you know where I come from?”
Anvra and the two men turned back to face him. “Kathang…” Etam duRel patted Doug gently on the arm. His blurred features leaned down toward Doug; his voice sounded blurred but understandable in Doug’s ears. “Don’t you remember how we were two of the workers on the construction of the Portal? Think! There were other planets we opened the Portal to besides Damned World. Remember the world that was all shadow ocean, and the transparent bodies of the water-creatures we recovered from it?”
“What’s the use of trying to explain to a madman, Etam?” grumbled Jax. “To remember what you ask, he’d have to abandon his fantasy. He’s incurable. He should be quietly put out of the way—”
“That decision’s not yours to make, Aerie Master,” said Anvra. “When he sold off his right to protection by the Sorcerers, he also took back the right of Sorcerers to judge or condemn him.”
“Yes, if he’s Kathang,” Jax admitted. “You got us here because you think he actually is from the Damned World. Isn’t that right?”
“I don’t believe—or disbelieve,” said Anvra stiffly.
Etam spoke. “Why do you doubt he’s Kathang, Mistress?”
“Because of the things he’s done,” Anvra answered. “Things I, as contract-mate, happen to know Kathang would not do. For example, Kathang was no public coward; not, at least, to the point of having his wings cut off and being sentenced to the sewers. But there were braver men—”
Her gaze flashed suddenly, warningly, at Jax.
“I can say that about Kathang, Aerie Master, because my self-obligation still holds,” she interrupted herself. “You cannot, in my presence, because your Brotherhood is broken. I say, frankly, that there were braver men than Kathang duLein, even if he is the last to bear the ancient and honorable name of the duLeins. This man I aided against two Cadda Noyer is one of the bravest.”
Jax rose from his chair.
“And this is all you have to tell us, then?” he asked Anvra. “You brought us here simply because you think Kathang is acting more courageously than he used to?”
“Look at what he did,” blazed Anvra, ruffling her wings, glaring up at the big man. “Kathang’s soul was legally transferred into the body of a fighter about to die, so that the fighter could be preserved in Kathang’s body. But Kathang didn’t perish with the dead body. Instead he activated the body and defeated a professional fighter! Kathang—who in the gym never wore anything but padded dowels!”
“Even that can happen by accident—”
“Then how about the two Cadda Noyer bullies?” she demanded. “He also defeated them. He even killed one—”
“I understand you helped.”
“I?” Anvra laughed scornfully. “A small woman? I tell you he defeated them both himself. He actually crushed one’s chest, ruining his own hand in the process. What ordinary man—let alone Kathang—could strike a blow like that? Sirs, you’re blind if you don’t see something more here than a man out of his mind with the effects of an incompleted transfer spell.”
Jax shook his head.
“As Kathang must have told you when he was sane and a Sorcerer,” Jax said, “only dead specimens can be recovered from other worlds through the Portal.”
“But a soul—” she began.
“Can only be transferred from another plane by a spell operating on that plane.”
Jax held up his hand to Anvra as she was about to interrupt him passionately.
“We know,” he said, “that Kathang was in his own body before the spell was begun. We know the spell sent him into the body of a fighter facing what looked like certain death. He had to obey that spell. So—he went into the fighter’s body.”
“That has to be true,” put in Etam, rising also from his chair and speaking earnestly to Anvra. “Kathang couldn’t have moved into the fighter’s body unless the fighter were already dead—or anticipating death so strongly he was as good as dying. The soul in any healthy, living body is too strong to be ousted—you know that. That’s why we can’t pull anything but dead or dying animals through a Portal. All right, the fighter was essentially dead. If you’re correct in what you think, that left two bodies and two floating identities— Kathang’s and the stranger’s.”
“What’s your point?”
“Well, mistress, if the stranger beat Kathang into the Fighter’s body, that left Kathang with only one place to go—back to his own body, which was perfectly usable, since the transfer spell only drives out the soul temporarily. If you’re right, and a stranger from the Damned World is inhabiting this body here with us, then Kathang also has to be alive and in his own body somewhere. But I was told Kathang’s body died immediately and was carted away by the Cadda Noyer for disposal. So Jax is right, you know, mistress. Your idea of a stranger in Kathang’s body is an impossibility. It has to be Kathang on the bed here—even if he is insane and doesn’t recognize himself.”
They left, the door of the room opening and then shutting behind them. Anvra stood staring after them, her wings ruffling slightly.
“What was that?” demanded Doug. “That business about if I’m crazy, I ought to be put out of the way quietly?”
Anvra turned.
“The insane can’t be allowed to live at large and become a danger to the community, Kathang,” she answered in level tones.
“You know that. You may not have a Brotherhood to take the responsibility of amputating your wings and locking you up—but the Magi will do it, if necessary. Unless you can be made sane.”
“I never felt saner,” he told her. “Come to think of it, I never felt more alive—” He broke off suddenly, staring closely at her. “If you don’t think I’m Kathang, you’re going to a lot of trouble to help a stranger.”
“A stranger?” Her eyebrows lifted. “Kathang, you know better than that!”
“But I’m not Kathang and I don’t know,” he answered goodhumoredly. “That’s right, isn’t it? Think about it for a minute. If I wasn’t Kathang, I wouldn’t know—is that correct?”
Anvra thought it over. “All right, I’ll talk to you as if you really are a stranger from some other place. What I’m doing isn’t for you. If you’re Kathang, you know that I wasn’t going to renew our contract anyway—and you know why. If you aren’t Kathang—” She hesitated. “What I’m doing, I’m doing out of respect to my honor and my duty of self-obligation. They demand of me that I help my contract-mate.”
“But you don’t believe I’m Kathang?” he pressed.
“No, I don’t,” she snapped at him. “Still, I’m not infallible. If by some wild chance I’m wrong and it should turn out I’d abandoned you though you really are Kathang, my contract-mate, then I’d have failed in my self-obligation—and everything I believe in.”
“I see.” His thoughts raced. Whatever had happened to him during the transfer of souls, one thing was certain. He had been shaken up more by it, mentally and emotionally, than he had been by anything else in his life. His old bitterness, his indifference to death, were gone. He wanted to live—in fact, he intended to live.
“Help me, then,” he said to Anvra.
“How?” She stared at him strangely. For all her snappishness and disclaimer of any interest in him other than as an insane Kathang, her eyes at times held a curious softness for him.
“Talk to me as if I were a stranger. Tell me things.”
“
For example?”
“What was I doing at that fight in the first place?”
“You had already gambled away all you had,” she answered, “except your apprentice-fee in the Brotherhood of Sorcerers. You mortgaged that in a bet and lost it. Then you had nothing left except your life. So you bet that. You bet your body as a replacement for the fighter whose corner you were in. If he had won, you would have won—enough, that is, to buy back into the Sorcerers. But he lost.”
“The Cadda Noyer,” he said. “Who are they?”
“They run the fights—among other things,” she said. “One of the gray Brotherhoods. I’d never contract-mate myself to a Cadda Noyer. Some day the Magi will declare them outlaws for any member of the community to kill on sight. But for now they’re tolerated. It was the Cadda Noyer from whom you stole that fighter-trained body. They’ll be waiting outside this Aerie now for the six days of grace to expire. Then my Brotherhood will have to make you leave. Your own Brotherhood could have given you sanctuary indefinitely. They could even have bought off the Cadda Noyer— maybe.”
“Maybe.” Doug added, “So you can change bodies any time you want, in this world of yours?”
“Change—” The sharp note in her voice brought his eyes back to her face. She was all but glaring at him, as she had glared at Jax. Suddenly conscious of having to look up to her, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and rose unsteadily to his feet.
“Sit down,” she said, catching his shoulders and pushing him.
The edge of the bed caught the back of his knees and he sat down heavily. “No, people can’t change bodies any time they want,” she said. “The person giving the body has to have signed his life away according to the law under the Magi. A fine thing it would be if a person could change bodies whenever he wished! A criminal could disappear from the eyes of justice any time he felt like it. The Magi have to approve each transfer, don’t you see?”
Doug’s mind was clicking off conclusions. “Where do these Cadda Noyer—where’s their headquarters?”
“Their local Aerie? Or their Chief High Aerie?”
“The one nearest to that Sorcerer Aerie where Kathang used to work—where that Portal is.”
“You mean the local Aerie,” she said.
She stepped around his bed and pointed off at a tower perhaps five miles distant. He stared at it. There was an illusory shadow hand before his eyes. It blurred fantastically. He seemed to see telescopically, shadowedly, into the very interior of the tower, where two figures lay still in an underground room.
“How do I get there?”
“You?” Once more there was that strange softness mixed with the sharpness of her voice and gaze. “You get there by flying fifty feet out beyond your bed. Half a dozen of the Cadda Noyer will escort you personally to the Aerie. I told you that they’re waiting—”
Baffled, he stared at the tower. Like a huge gray finger it pointed upright in the distance, half threatening, half beckoning.
“What happens to dead bodies?” he asked.
She frowned at him.
“They’re held several days to make sure all life is gone. Then a Magus is called in to certify to the death. The individual’s name is removed from both Brotherhood and community rolls. Then the body is burned.“ Anvra continued to frown. ”Why?“ she asked. ”Why did you want to know that?“
“I have a body around here somewhere—the real body I was born with.” He added thoughtfully. “There must be some way of getting into that tower.”
“The Cadda Noyer Aerie? You want to get in there? Well, you’re not Kathang, that’s clear.” She shook her head impatiently. “Do you think Aeries are built so they can be gotten into? What use would an Aerie be if anybody could get in without the permission of the Brotherhood owning it?”
He was still gazing at the tower. It seemed to him that his mind had never been so clear and swift-moving. The shadow hand was gone but the blurred image of the two motionless figures in the room flashed in and out of his brain.
Doug swung on her.
“You’re a Water Witch, you said.” He watched her. “Doesn’t that tower have water and sewer connections?”
“Of course,” she answered. Then she paled and seemed to shrink from him. “You’re not thinking of invading the aerie through the underground piping?”
“I’m in no position to be finicky—”
“Finicky!” She shuddered. “No, you’re not Kathang. You’re not even a normal human being!”
The horror in her face went beyond ordinary squeamishness at the thought of passage through a sewer. She was plainly shaken by some deeper emotion.
“What’s so bad about your pipes, Anvra?”
“They are… underground. Underground! Away from the light and the air. Away from the sky!”
Then he understood. He remembered the note in Jax’s voice when Jax had spoken about Earth’s people as wingless, about the Earth as the Damned World. To a flying people, being without wings would literally be hell. And being forced underground—where they could not use wings, where they were locked from their natural open environment—would be double hell.
All the better, thought Doug grimly. If such were the case, there was that much more chance he could travel through the piping unobserved.
“As you say.” He rose again to his feet, fending her off as she tried to stop him. “I’m different. Let’s see if you can’t find me a route to their tower through its water or sewer pipes.”
III
Less than an hour later, his thin brown legs were encased in hiphigh boots of some thin rubbery material. He was clothed, all but his arms, in an insulated one-piece suit of the same stuff. Anvra had found the garments for him.
Doug stood beyond a water-tight door at the top of three steps leading into a tunnel perhaps ten feet in diameter. He was in the subbasement of the Water Witches’ tower. The tunnel—a great metal pipe—seemed lit by a phosphorescence covering all the surfaces above the ankle-deep water. The pipe ran straight, losing itself in brilliance both far ahead and far behind.
The pipe was not one of the sewers, Anvra had said. It was part of the storm-drain system. In case of a flash rainstorm, anyone in the drain would be swept away and drowned. But this was not the time of year for thunderstorms. Now only a bare trickle of water was pumped into the drains to nourish the fungus that coated the drain walls and illuminated their interiors for the benefit of the slave working crews.
Doug stepped down into the drainpipe and felt the water tugging at his ankles. A splashing behind him made him turn. Anvra, carrying the pipe-charts for the area between this tower and that of the Cadda Noyer Aerie, had entered the water behind him.
“All right.” He reached for the charts. “I’ll take those.”
“Will you?” she said, holding on to them. “And how are you going to read them?”
He saw that she, too, had on a pair of the rubbery wading boots.
“You aren’t going with me?”
“I am,” she said. “You can’t read the charts. You’re no Water Witch! You can’t even read the pipe markings. You’d never get there.”
He respected her courage. A flying woman, she was forcing herself to go underground, swallowing her horror.
“Your self-obligation at work again, I suppose?”
“That’s right.” She was tight-lipped.
“Well… thank you,” he said. He started forward. The rounded surface underfoot obliged them to walk single file and he heard her splashing along behind him.
Doug was genuinely touched. Kathang must have been a damn fool not to have appreciated this female more than he had. Loyalty such as Anvra showed was something to admire.
Thus began the long wading trip through the phosphorescent corridor. They said nothing except when they came to an intersection or a branching. Then Anvra would stop briefly to compare her charts with the markings on the pipe wall at that point. She would give directions and they would move on. She had explained earlier th
at there was no direct route from the Water Witches’ tower to that of the Cadda Noyer. In effect, the distance to the tower would be almost doubled by the route they had to take.
Doug had held himself to a slow, steady pace from the start, remembering how his legs on occasion had threatened to betray him. In spite of his precautions, after a time he felt his thigh-muscles beginning to ache. The ache woke him to the fact that had not previously registered on him. The water through which they had been wading had deepened gradually until now he was slogging through in knee-depth. Also, there was a new, strange ache—across his back. He discovered that he was, instinctively, holding his wingtips high above the wet.
A sudden, different sound of splashing sounded behind him. He swung about—to see Anvra stumbling, going down into the water. He moved to catch her just in time. She was a limp weight in his arms. Looking down at her in the eerie light of the phosphorescence, he saw that her eyes were closed.
Her face looked like a death mask in old ivory. Her wings were soaked clear to the feathers of their top joints. Plainly, the massed feathers took up water like a sponge. Anvra, being shorter and weaker, had not been able to hold her lower wingtips out of the water as Doug had done. She felt heavy in his arms with the added weight of liquid, and she was icy cold.
“Anvra!” He had noticed that her hands were empty. She must have dropped the charts.
He shook her. Her eyes fluttered open.
“Anvra,” he said, “where are we? Are we headed for the tower?”
“Straight… ahead…”
Her eyes closed again.
“How far?” he demanded. “How far, Anvra?”
But she was no longer answering.
He lifted her in his arms—one hand up under her wing-sockets, one hand under her knees—and waded heavily forward. After forty or fifty steps his arms began to tremble with the load. He was forced to stop.