Gordon R. Dickson (16 page)

“Now,” he said to Ro. “To Slothiel’s. You’ll have to find him for us. I don’t even know where his quarters are.”

She touched his arm, and they were abruptly in a different suite of rooms.

“Slothiel!” called Jim. But no answer came back through any of the three doorways leading off from the room in which they had appeared.

“He’s not here,” said Ro. “And it’s no use our moving all over the Throne World looking for him. He could be one jump ahead of us, and we’d never catch up with him that way. The best thing is just to wait here for him, Jim.”

“Wait?” said Jim. “Waiting is the one thing we can’t afford to do. Can’t we—”

He broke off. For Slothiel had just appeared before them.

“Welcome home, Jim,” said Slothiel. “You’re the first of our conquering heroes to get back. I heard you’d landed ship, but when I went to your quarters just now, you weren’t there. I tried Ro’s—and all I found was a batch of discarded power bands. So I came back here to look for messages—and, here you are!”

He smiled and waved Ro and Jim graciously to hassocks. Adok he ignored.

“Sit down,” Slothiel said. “How about something to eat and drink? I can get you—”

“Nothing!” interrupted Jim. “Slothiel, are you loyal to the Emperor?”

Slothiel raised his eyebrows.

“My dear ex-Wolfling,” he drawled, “all Highborn are loyal to the Emperor. Otherwise how could we be loyal to ourselves?”

“There’s loyalty and loyalty,” said Jim bluntly. “I didn’t ask you if you were loyal, in the academic sense. I asked you if you were loyal in the—say—Starkien sense?”

Slothiel stiffened slightly. His white eyebrows drew together.

“What sort of catechism is this, Jim?” he asked. But the tone of his voice was no longer one of completely idle banter. Under a surface of indifference there was a note of hard interest.

“You haven’t answered me, Slothiel,” said Jim.

“Should I answer, then?” murmured Slothiel in the tone of voice of a man choosing between two canapes on a serving tray. But his eyes remained unmoving on Jim. “After all, I am a Highborn, and this is only an ex-Wolfling, a being of the lesser races … yes, I will answer. I’m loyal, Jim.” His voice had suddenly become hard, with none of the soft nonsense left about it. “Now, what is this? And I want a straight, direct answer!”

“My Ten-units of Starkiens on Athiya,” said Jim evenly, “were baited into a military trap that would have been no trap at all, if it hadn’t been equipped with an antimatter weapon.”

“Antimatter?” Slothiel’s face stiffened for a second in astonishment, then quickly relaxed again as his Highborn mind accepted the incredible statement and ran quickly on to examine the implications of it. Within a few seconds he looked at Jim again. “Yes, you’re right, Jim. We should see Vhotan about this.”

“That’s what I’ve intended to do, all along,” said Jim. “I was only waiting to find you and take you along with the rest of us.”

“Rest of us?” Slothiel glanced at Ro and Adok. “You and I are sufficient.”

“No,” said Jim. “I need Adok with me as a witness to what happened. And Ro stays with us because it’s safest for her.”

“Safest?” Slothiel shot a glance at Ro, who was watching both men and looking puzzled. “Oh—yes, I see what you mean. She could be taken and used as a hostage against you by whoever’s behind this if we left her unprotected. All right, Starkien!”

He beckoned Adok in close, and the four of them shifted as a group to their destination.

They appeared in a room that was not the same room in which Jim had encountered Vhotan and the Emperor before. This was a larger room, something like a ballroom with a lounge area at one end. All the other walls of the ballroom except that which opened upon the lounge area were covered to the high, white ceiling with light-green draperies. In the center of the ballroom floor sat a peculiar instrument with a basketball-shaped head that was slowly rotating. In time with its rotation, various patterns in many colors other than blue flickered and played and swam around the ceiling. The Emperor was seated—almost sprawled—on the large hassock at the edge of the ballroom floor, staring raptly up at those patterns.

Nearby were three Starkiens, carrying rods and wearing power bands. Vhotan was some twenty feet away from the Emperor, standing over a table surface patterned with studs.

Except that he was not seated, his position and actions were very much like those Jim had seen in him once before.

With the appearance of the four people, the three Starkiens had automatically drawn their rods. Vhotan looked sharply up, caught sight of Slothiel, and waved the rods back into their belt loops. He turned from the table surface to face the group, scowling a little at Jim.

“I wasn’t notified your Ten-units had returned to quarters,” he said to Jim. “I can use those men right now.”

“That’s why I ordered them not to return to quarters,” answered Jim.

Vhotan frowned sharply.

“What do you mean?” he said sharply. “And who gave you the authority to—”

He was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a servant—a man of the same appearance of Melness, carrying a small white box.

“This has just been delivered for you, Vhotan,” the servant said. “It was sent through the Princess Afuan from the Governor of—” The servant gave the imperial name for Alpha Centauri.

“All right,” scowled Vhotan. The servant disappeared. Vhotan carried the box over to his table service, felt about it for a second, and then lifted off a cover. His scowl deepened.

“What is this?” he asked. He started to swing back to face them, but at that moment a new voice interrupted him.

“Why, it’s Oran,” said the voice. It was the Emperor, woken from his gazing at the refulgent patterns of the ceiling, and now walking over to peer interestedly into the box. His hand went down and came up holding what looked like a chunk of granite, rough-cut, perhaps three inches in diameter. “And there’s a note with it.”

He picked up a card from the box and looked at it.

“It says, ‘At the request of my good friend, Jim Keil,’ ” said the Emperor, turning to face Vhotan and the group as he read, ” ‘this specimen of rock from his homeland, the planet Earth, as a souvenir for the Highborn, Vhotan.’ “

The Emperor, smiling delightedly, lifted his eyes to Vhotan.

“It’s a present for you, Vhotan,” he said cheerfully, “from our ex-Wolfling, here! Here, you’d better take it!”

The Emperor tossed the rock to the older Highborn, whose long hands went up automatically to catch it in midair.

Vhotan’s right hand closed about the flying object, and instantly he was covered with a brilliant blue light—an eye-baffling light in which his outlines were distorted and altered from the human into something unclear, but heavy and thick-bodied, bestial.

The Emperor screamed, stumbling backward and throwing up both long-fingered hands to shield his face from the sight.

“Nephew—” It was the voice of Vhotan, but somehow distorted and mangled into a growling bass. He raised blue-dazzling, thick, pawlike arms of light and took a step toward the Emperor, protectively.

The Emperor screamed again and stumbled backward, almost falling over a hassock, but keeping to his feet. His heels rang on the bare floor beyond the lounge area. He flung up a long arm with finger pointing.

“The Blue Beast!” he screamed to his Starkiens. “Kill it! Kill it!”

If there was a hesitation on the part of the Starkiens, it was for less than a fraction of a second. At once the three rods were drawn and came up, and the blue-haloed figure of Vhotan, still stepping toward the Emperor with arms outstretched, was laced with white fire.

The figure slumped. The blue light went out. A small piece of reddish rock rolled unheeded across the carpeted floor of the lounge section. Silent and still, sprawled upon that same carpet, lay Vhotan, his face untouched, but his body and limbs almost dismembered by incredible burn-lines.

There was no more sound or movement in the room. The Emperor stood staring at Vhotan. He stared for a long moment before his face and eyes began to change.

“Uncle?” he said in a quavering, uncertain voice. “Uncle?”

Slowly he began to move toward Vhotan. As he got closer, his shoulders bowed, and his face twisted like a man undergoing some process of torture. Slowly he came up to Vhotan and stood over him. He gazed down into Vhotan’s untouched face. For such a violent death, Vhotan’s face was strangely serene. His eyes and mouth were closed; the muscles of his features were relaxed. From the neck up he looked like someone engaged in a moment’s silent meditation or thought.

“Vhotan …” began the Emperor on a note of anguish. But then his voice died in him, like the voice of a talking doll which had run down. He froze, unmoving, in the position in which he was, leaning over Vhotan, his arms half-reaching down toward the body of the older man. For a moment, to Jim, it seemed impossible that such a pose could be maintained. But the Emperor stayed as he was, as unmoving as a statue cast in plaster of paris.

Behind Jim, Slothiel stirred. He stepped forward toward the Emperor.

“Oran!” Slothiel said.

There was sudden amused laughter at the far end of the ballroom floor. Out of the corner of his eye, Jim caught sight of the three Starkiens spinning about swiftly, their rods coming up.

Then there were three odd, coughing sounds; and as Jim finished raising his head, he saw the three Starkiens stumble and fall. On the polished ballroom floor, they lay as still as Vhotan lay.

Jim turned to look toward the far end of the polished floor. There, just in front of one of the green curtains, stood Galyan, holding a black rod in his right hand, and a strange, handgun sort of device, with a long, twisted barrel, in his left. Behind Galyan were Melness and Afuan. As Jim caught sight of them, Galyan tossed the handgun contemptuously away from him. It skidded across the polished floor until its further progress was blocked by a leg of one of the dead Starkiens.

Followed by Melness and Afuan, Galyan walked toward the lounge end of the room. His heels rapped with a strange loudness on the polished surface of the floor. He laughed again at the small group still standing there, as he came.

“You’re quite a problem, Wolfling,” he said to Jim. “Not only do you come back alive, but, having come back, you force me into taking action ahead of schedule. But it’s all come out all right.”

He reached the end of the polished floor and stepped onto the carpet. He stopped and transferred his gaze from Jim to Slothiel.

“No, Slothiel,” he said mockingly. “Not ‘Oran.’—‘Galyan.’ We will have to teach you to say ‘Galyan.’ “

Galyan’s words seemed to echo all about them. Looking at Slothiel, Jim saw the other Highborn begin to stiffen and straighten. Galyan was the tallest of the Highborn that Jim had seen, with the exception of the Emperor himself. But Slothiel was almost as tall. And now that he abandoned his carefully indifferent slouch, it could be seen how tall he was. The two men, both well over seven feet, faced each other across a distance of perhaps a dozen feet of carpeting.

“You’ve never been able to teach me anything, Galyan,” said Slothiel in a dry, hard voice. “If I were you, I wouldn’t expect to begin now.”

“Slothiel, don’t be an idiot!” Afuan spoke up. But Galyan cut her short.

“Never mind!” he said sharply, his lemon-yellow eyes still glittering unmovingly on Slothiel. “Who are we to tell Slothiel what to do? As he said—we’ve never been able to teach him anything.”

” ‘We?’ ” Slothiel smiled bitterly. “Are you into the Emperor’s second person plural already, Galyan?”

“Did I say—we?” responded Galyan. “A slip of the tongue, Slothiel.”

“Then you don’t intend to kill him?” said Slothiel, indicating the frozen figure of the Emperor with a slight movement of his head.

“Kill him?” said Galyan. “Of course not. Care for him—that’s what I’m going to do. Vhotan never did take the best care of him. He’s not well, you know.”

“Are you?” asked Jim.

Galyan’s eyes flickered for a moment to Jim.

“Be patient, little Wolfling,” Galyan purred. “Your time is coming. Right now I’m amusing myself with Slothiel.”

“Amusing yourself?” said Slothiel with a grim irony that matched the cruel humor in Galyan’s voice. “You’d better be thinking up explanations for how Vhotan died.”

“I?” chuckled Galyan. “The Emperor’s Starkiens killed Vhotan, at the Emperor’s order. You saw that.”

“And who killed the Starkiens?” said Slothiel.

“You, of course,” said Galyan. “You went out of your head at the sight of Vhotan ordered killed for no reason—”

“No reason?” echoed Slothiel. “What about that disguised blue distortion light? Jim never had the Alpha Centauran Governor send it to Vhotan. That was your doing.”

Galyan twitched a finger. Melness scuttled forward and sideways, to pick up the small granitic-looking shape from the carpet and tuck it into a pocket in his kilt. He retreated hastily behind Galyan again.

“What distortion light?” asked Galyan.

“I see,” said Slothiel. He took a deep breath. “But of course I didn’t kill the Starkiens.”

“I wouldn’t go around telling the other Highborn that, if I were you,” said Galyan. “The Emperor will need someone to look after him; now that Vhotan’s dead, I’ll be taking our uncle’s place. If you go around telling a wild story like that, the Emperor may well decide that you need treatment and isolation for your own good.”

“Oh? But even if I say nothing,” drawled Slothiel, “those three Starkiens were killed by a heavy-duty intersperser. The other Starkiens, when they get back, will wonder how three of their number could have been killed by a rod while those three were wearing full power bands. I can prove that I haven’t been near the heavy-duty weapon armory for years.”

“No doubt,” said Galyan. “But you said, ‘when the other Starkiens get back.’ You see, they won’t be back.”

Slothiel looked about suddenly at Jim. Jim nodded.

“So the Wolfling brought back word of our little traps on the colony planets, did he?” said the voice of Galyan. Both Jim and Slothiel looked back at the tall Highborn. “You know then, Slothiel. The Starkiens won’t be back. I’ve got it in mind to create some new Starkiens—some responsible to me rather than to the Emperor. At any rate, you see your own choice. Be silent—or be removed from the social scene.”