I suddenly had a pang of ridiculous guilt. I covered it by bowing again and backing towards the door.
That night I had no trouble going to sleep. The respite was welcome. I knew I could trust Shavarri to do as she had promised. As to securing the attack on the Acre—if that was what was wanted by Olafsson—it had already occurred to me that even if Shavarri convinced Pwill not to undertake it, the Over-lady Llaq would be so desperate at the condition her son was in that she might easily be persuaded to act instead, probably with no more work on my part than dropping a few hints where I knew they would reach her.
I must have been asleep for some hours, dreamlessly content, when there came a battering on the door of my room. Whoever it was wanted an answer and quickly. Thinking still muddled by sleep, I got off my night couch and went to the door,
The moment I saw who was there, all my plans evaporated, and my mind cleared as though cold water had been thrown in my face. The visitor was Pwill Heir Apparent, his face contorted with sickness and fury, and in his hand he held a naked sword.
CHAPTER XVI
I REMEMBERED AFTERWARDS saying to myself—because I could not yet think of anything else—how I hoped that I would never again see anyone in such a state. His eyes seemed to have swollen and protruded from their sockets so that the whites showed all round the iris. His whole face was glistening with moisture: sweat on his forehead, tears on his cheeks, saliva on his chin. He apparently could not close his mouth to swallow properly, for he kept gulping air and his tongue came up against his palate after every gulp so I could see its yellowish underside. He was wearing leisure clothes of Earth-made synthetic fabric, and the gaudy shimmering material was dark with wet and clung to his body.
Without a word he drove me back into the room, sword in hand. The tip of the blade wavered continually, but with tremendous effort he always forced it back towards me. When he was across the threshold he fumbled behind him for the catch of the door and drew it shut and locked it.
“Now,” he said in a horrible choked voice, “give me coffee.”
“I have none,” I said curtly. “I told Forrel so.”
“Liar!” he spat. “Forrel said you refused to give him any. Give me coffee!
“Forrel is the liar, not I,” I snapped. “He told you that to save his own cowardly hide. He was at fault for not eking out the supply, but giving you too much at a time. If he had not been weak, there would have been coffee for you next time you asked.”
“Give me coffee!” Pwill, Jr. replied with maniac intensity.
My heart sank. It was certainly true that Forrel had lied to cover his own mistake. But this man was too far gone to listen. He was one huge hungry need, and he was no longer rational.
But I could not pity him. I thought of Kramer’s wife dead of malnutrition, and his son’s poor eyesight for the same reason, and I thought of all the people of Earth who had died, or suffered hunger, or fallen needlessly sick because of what the Vorra had done to them without cause.
The sword shook wildly before my face. I said in the iciest voice I knew, “So you, heir to the House of Pwill, come sniveling like a beggar to an Earthman! What a sight for your father to see!”
Even that did not break through his blind greed. He did seem to realize at last that it was no good asking me again, though. He turned towards my food cupboard and snatched at the lock; when it did not yield he smashed it with his sword, sobbing.
His staring eyes searched the shelves and his nostrils distended as he sniffed like a beast for the scent of coffee. He certainly did not find it; I had never kept a batch of the beans in my food cupboard, preferring to hide them in my mattress for greater safety.
The truth finally penetrated. He let the sword fall to the floor with a ring of metal. His head slumped forward. For a moment I was deceived; I thought he was going to collapse, weeping perhaps.
But as I made to step forward to him, he jerked as though galvanised. One hand went up to the shelf nearest him and closed on a heavy pottery jar of salt. With more than animal violence he spun round and hurled it straight at my head.
I ducked, but too slowly. I felt a sharp dizzying knock on the crown of my head which prevented me from recovering my balance, and then he was on me, kicking, biting, clawing, and all the time making noises between a sob and a scream. I knew there was no one to hear him; I was alone in the corridor here, with only storerooms on either side of my own room. It was my life at stake.
That simple fact was what made me react so swiftly. It had been almost the first part of my long, long training back on Earth which taught me how to kill efficiently with my bare hands. No one could count how many careless Vorrish soldiers had lost their fives through thinking that an unarmed Earthman was not dangerous.
I ignored his futile battering at my head and shoulders, his mad attempts to close his hands on my throat. I freed my right arm from where it was trapped between his body and mine, bent my hand back to the right angle which it had taken months of practice to achieve—without that practice, what I had in mind would have dislocated my own wrist—and rammed it upwards against his chin.
I pushed his weight off me and got awkwardly to my feet, staring down at him as it came home to me what I had done. All Shavarri’s helpful lies, all her scheming to protect me as I had protected her, would not serve me now. Here on the floor of my own room the heir of the House of Pwill lay with a broken neck. His head snapped back in two stages, the first bloody as his teeth were clamped shut on his lolling tongue, the second fatal. There was a sound like a dry stick snapping inside a roll of cloth.
I left him and went to the top shelf of the food cupboard, fumbling with shaking fingers behind the ranked pots of Earthly preserves until I found the tiny precious flask of brandy I had saved ever since my arrival. I uncapped it and drank it down at a gulp. Its warming fire helped me a little. I threw the empty flask aside and turned back to the corpse.
Dozens of possibilities filed through my mind. If this was not to prove the ultimate disaster for me, I had to contrive some really clever scheme to cover what had happened. I thought of trying to smuggle the body outside into the great yard, and arranging it so that it would seem to have fallen from one of the balconies. I had to dismiss the idea at once. There was no chance at all of going undiscovered by the night watch.
Surely it would be no use to hide the body and pretend nothing had happened… ?
I checked myself. I felt a kind of hard smile move across my face. Was that so useless? Suppose that I could hide the body completely. Suppose also—this I did not know, but I could hope for it—suppose Shavarri had already had the chance to whisper her hypnotizing instructions to Pwill Himself. She would assure Pwill that I was innocent and had obeyed his orders; she would tell him that Forrel was to blame.
Then, when the heir was found to have vanished, I could drop hints—or at the worst, could tell Pwill boldly to his face—that he had probably gone to the Acre in search of coffee, and that perhaps he had been kidnaped. Would not Pwill then call out his soldiers, whatever Shavarri had said about attacking the Acre, and march to hunt for him?
Again, I could not be certain. But there was always Llaq, even if Pwill Himself did not respond as planned.
Then I would do that. Now: where to hide the body? I considered the fact that one of the main sewers serving the house ran beneath a nearby corridor; you could hear it plashing under a heavy wooden manholecover a few moments’ walk from this room. It would not be enough simply to tip the body into the stream. By morning it would be miles away, true—but it would be on the estate, and anyone chancing to go to the river into which the sewer flowed would be sure to recognize the dead man. I would have to find an alternative—yet the sewer seemed the obvious place.
What I had to do, I decided, was to get the body into the tunnel and then instead of letting it drift with the stream, anchor it somehow so that the Vorrish counterpart of rats could work on it. They certainly would. Every day dozens of them were found in the s
torerooms here and killed.
I would have to move quickly. I shoved the body unceremoniously out of sight under my nightcouch, just in case someone by a million-to-one chance happened to have heard the cries and came to investigate. Then I hurried down the almost pitch-dark corridor.
At the intersection nearest to the manhole I had in mind, a torch was guttering in a sconce. It was one of the jobs of the nightwatch to change the dying torches for fresh ones when they passed. I took one of the spares from the rack beside the sconce, lit it, and heaved up the manhole cover.
The fetid air beneath almost made me giddy for a moment. Then a fresh draught began to blow, tugging at the flame of my torch, and I could proceed. There was probably a little ladder under the opening, I reasoned, and I knew there was a slimy walkway alongside the stream. I craned down to look.
Yes, that would do well. For there were several iron hooks in the wall not far away, whose purpose I could not guess but which would suit me perfectly, and at the intrusion of my torch I heard many rats scurrying to escape the light.
I hurried back to my room.
I could not remember ever having made such an agonizingly slow trip in my life as that short hobbling walk with the dead weight across my shoulders. I had found a length of rope in one of the storerooms near my quarters, and had lashed the feet together and the arms to the sides to prevent them swinging, but nonetheless the burden was a dreadful one. Once I almost let it fall into the stream, which would have been fatal to my scheme, but by my fingertips I clung to it and after an age managed to get it down the hole and on to the slimy flagstones beside the water.
There I left him, tied up on four of the iron hooks, for the rats to deal with. I spent no time down there that I could spare, for the stink was choking me, and before dawn I had to clean up myself and my room and hide all the traces of the fight we had had.
I was wearily scrambling back out of the manhole when I heard the footsteps—a slow measured pace, the steps of a man on a routine patrol.
Horrified, I glanced alt the torch guttering in its sconce nearby. How had I overlooked the obvious? The torch was low now, and that meant that the patrol would soon come by to renew it, and here he was at hand!
I had no time to slam shut the cover of the manhole. In any case, the noise would have alerted the oncoming man, the last thing I wanted. My mind raced.
“Hey! Soldier!” I called out. The footsteps halted for one startled moment, then came on at a run.
He rounded the corner of the corridor and stopped short again on seeing me.
“I heard noised!” I said curtly. “I came out and found this cover open. Could it be a thief trying to break into the storerooms, do you think?”
Clearly this young soldier was not very bright. He said, “Uh—I guess! Is there anyone down there?”
“I’ve been trying to see,” I said. “Maybe your eyes are sharper than mine. Here, take a look!”
I gestured to him to come forward. Unsuspecting, he did 80.
. This I regretted more than the death of Pwill Heir Apparent, I found. But it had to be done. I chopped down on the back of his neck where his shaven nape showed between the edge of his helmet and his uniform tunic, and he died without a sound. He fell forward with a splash, half in, half out of the stream in the sewer. I heard more scuttering, and saw some dark shapes move out of shadow, eyes gleaming in the dim light of the torch.
I shut the cover. I had to open it again a moment later, and gave the final insult to his corpse by vomiting all over it.
I did not expect to sleep again when, after clearing up all the traces, I wearily crept back on to my night couch. But I had to pretend that everything was as usual.
To my surprise I did fall asleep again for the last hour or 80 before the dawn.
I dreamed of being eaten by rats.
CHAPTER XVII
IT BECAME CLEAR when I got up the next morning at my normal time and started about my day’s affairs that there must have been an almighty row in the family’s quarters the night before. All the retainers wore the hangdog expression which was the usual sign of Pwill having lost his temper. No one spoke to me if he could avoid it. I’d grown used to that. But today the Vorrish staff took pains to make the fact obvious.
I was scared stiff. I hadn’t been so frightened since the distant night I’d spent trying to forget the dangerous knowledge which I risked revealing to the oversuspicious Pwill, just before being brought here from Earth. Perhaps not even then, because this time the danger was far more personal than it had been then. No matter how much is at stake, a man finds it easier to fear for his own safety than for the safety of others.
It was three hours before the expected summons came for me to attend on Pwill Himself in his morning reception chamber. I steeled myself and went with the messenger as calmly as I could. I tried not to think how slender was the thread on which my life now hung.
The morning reception chamber was not very large, and it was usually crowded when Pwill was holding his first after-breakfast conferences with his senior staff. Today it was almost empty except for Pwill, two of his body servants, a young officer I recognized as having been a friend of Forrel’s, and—
For a long moment I did not recognize the creature on the floor in front of the high-backed chair where Pwill sat. It seemed more animal than human. It crouched on the floor, its legs and arms manacled, and tried to dab at the huge patches of whip-raw flesh on its shoulders. Then the swollen face turned blindly up towards me, and I saw it was Forrel.
I could not speak. Somehow I managed to bow to Pwill and wait for him to let me out of my torment by indicating whether or not Shavarri had convinced him of Forrel’s guilt, my innocence.
I was so grateful that Llaq was not here.
At first when I came in, Pwill looked grimmer than a thundercloud, and I expected him to command his servants immediately to treat me as Forrel had been treated. But after a moment a curious puzzled expression came to his face, and I saw him shake his head as though to clear it.
That smacked of Shavarri’s work. I began to relax.
“Shawl” Pwill said at length. “Has your devilish Earthly poison cost me my heir?
“I—do not understand,” I parried.
Look at that miserable wreck,” Pwill growled, and waved at Forrel. “For these months past he has deceived me. He has kept coffee for my son, and supplied it to him when he was asked. Under the whip he confessed the truth. He further said that he had it through you!”
I felt my guts tighten. Pwill gave me another puzzled glance and went on, “I know—somehow I know—that this is a lie invented to save his skin. Well, it was unsuccessful. He had no more coffee to give my son, to keep up the poisoning, and now my son has disappeared. This pitiful traitor swears that he set out to find himself coffee. He would have come to you to demand it! Did he come?”
I wagered my all on half the truth. I said, “He would not have come asking me. Forrel came to me yesterday to beg coffee. I told him what was true!—that I had none and would get none for him. Doubtless he reported this to Pwill Heir Apparent.”
Abruptly Pwill got up from his chair and began to pace the floor. Not looking at me, he said, “Where then might he have gone? One place, and one place only.”
I stole the chance to glance down at Forrel, fearful that he might deny what I had told Pwill. But he was lost in some delirium of his own. Probably he had not heard me speak.
“Is there coffee in the Acre?” Pwill demanded.
“There has been,” I said. “Whether there is now, I cannot say.”
“He would have gone to the Acre,” Pwill muttered. “He must have gone there. I must go after him. Shaw! Leave us.”
Surprised that the interview had been so short, I turned to obey. As I put my hand out to open the door, Pwill called me back.
“Remember this!” he said. “If I find you have been lying-no, but no matter.”
I watched him struggle with himself, in the same pitiful
way that a man given a posthypnotic command will struggle to find a sensible reason for committing the absurd act he cannot avoid. Once more he told me to go; once more he called me back.
“Shaw! If they say—at the Acre—if they say my son is not there, I will send for you to go into the Acre and find him.”
He was a broken man. I bowed, and this time I did go out.
But when Pwill had gone and was safely on the road to the city, four brawny soldiers came in search of me to take me to Llaq, and I knew that she was not going to be so easily deluded. I was marched to her luxurious apartments in the east wing of the seraglio, full of quiet maidservants and little shrill-voiced dwarfs who climbed on the curtains and swung there, screaming like monkeys.
The soldiers placed me in front of the high cushioned divan where Llaq held court, and she fixed me with burning eyes. She had been weeping.
“You slimy creeping animal, she said chokingly. “You two-faced subtle cheat, you schemer and poisoner—what have you done to my son?”
“I have done nothing to your Over-ladyships son,” I said as coldly as I could. “I have learned today that his false friend Forrel—”
She cut me short. “I am not to be fooled by such empty stories!” she snapped. “Did Forrel go into the Acre to buy coffee? Did he? Or did you? Coffee is of Earth and you are of Earth and you are here and you have been often to the Acre. Soldier! Hit him!”
I sensed rather than saw which fist of which of my guards was coming up clubbed behind my head. I rode with the blow so that it scarcely hurt.
“Careful!” I said to the man who had done it. “Remember what became of Dwerri!”
Llaq snarled at me. “What Earthly poison you used on the former whipmaster I do not know and do not care. I’m not impressed by your evil trickery, your drugs and potions and the rest. What have you done to my son?”