The Avengers of Carrig (4 page)

“Tomorrow it is lawful that the king be killed!”

Saikmar son of Corrie moved as in a dream to take his place among the other members of Clan Twywit in the hall of audience. In his veins the blood seemed to rush like a mountain torrent; he felt he was watching his own actions from a distance, as a man does when drunkenness severs the body from the mind’s control without blurring the mind’s awareness. Yet this was in no other way like being drunk, as far as he could tell from his limited experience of that state. It was closer to ecstasy.

Those about him—his mother, his uncle who had stood
guardian to him since his father’s death, his sisters, his aunts, and cousins to the third degree—were proud of him, and as he passed by on the way to his seat in the front rank they clapped him on the shoulder or called encouragement to him. But he was not proud of himself. His ecstasy was beyond pride. He was not completely here in the hall. Part of him was out there above the Smoking Hills, riding the turbulent air in a flimsy glider—already lost in tomorrow.

The huge semicircular audience hall was filled with benches arranged in wedge-shaped groups, widening from short ones at the front, where three might without comfort cram side by side, to long ones against the wall adequate for twenty. The order in which the clans sat was determined by lot. As it had fallen out Clan Twywit this year claimed the central wedge, and so when he took his place Saikmar found himself directly facing the throne on which Sir Bavis would preside.

He was dimly aware that most eyes were upon him, but took no notice. Those eyes were seeing a youth as tall as a man, but curiously slim, all his bones even to those of his skull being narrow and light—birdlike, people said. A few years ago none would have foreseen him as his clan’s best contender, for he spent his time studying, dancing, singing, and climbing trees by himself away from the rough-and-tumble of his fellows. Now, though, at eighteen, he had learned to express his dancer’s grace through the medium of a glider, to finger its controls with the same delicacy as a musical instrument, and his light build and nervously quick reactions had marked him out far above the rest.

Limping a little (he had been thrown by a spirited graat and broken a leg which healed short) his uncle, Sir Malan Corrie, chief of the clan, took his place on one side of Saikmar, and his mother on the other. His mother was queenly still, though growing old, and carried herself grandly.

And now there was a clash of gongs and silence followed the dying reverberations as doors behind the dais opened to admit Sir Bavis, surrounded by his acolytes and servers and all his splendid retinue. Saikmar’s eyes fastened on the face above the glossy black beard. Could it be true, as gutter-gossip held, that this noble head of the noblest clan
had dragged contenders year by year to ensure that the king would not be killed? Oh, it was past belief! That ringing voice as it uttered invocations to the gods sounded like a bell of sincerity, resonating to the very marrow of Saikmar’s bones …

Then, when the invocations were done, there came the appeal for contenders against the king. Saikmar felt his heartbeat quicken; he turned to look at the first of his rivals as he rose to give his name to the notator for the record. Of course, the contenders had been selected weeks—in some cases months—ago. But for the sake of the ritual the notators had to hear them speak for themselves and write the names down in the honor roll. (For some contenders, lost among the volcanoes, an entry on the roll had to stand as their only memorial.)

In olden days, ancient traditions reported, the pattern was not so rigid as now; contenders were not confined to one from each clan, and even men from outside the Carrig territory had been permitted to attempt the king’s life: Red Sloin, for instance, about whom a famous ballad had been made. Waiting his turn to speak, Saikmar heard a few lines of that song in his memory.

Then his uncle was urging him to rise, and he was recalled to the present with a start. Making his voice as deep as he could—for it was high and clear, and sometimes he was taunted because it had never actually broken, merely slid from a boy’s treble to a youth’s tenor—he announced his name, his clan, and his intention to go forth against the king.

One moment later he had forgotten, and was lost anew in visions of the hunt.

It was not until after the contender from the last clan had been listed that reality broke in on him again, and then in a strange, unlooked-for fashion. The great doors at the rear of the hall had been heard to open, but no one had looked round, assuming that with the approach of darkness servants were coming to light the torches, or attend to some other necessary task. Now, though, from a pool of shadow a bass voice rang out.

“And I! I also would go to hunt your king!”

Startled—Sir Bavis perhaps the most startled of all—the assembled nobles craned to see who had spoken. Emerging
from obscurity, he proved to be a man of at least thirty, possibly older, heavy-set, with dark brows. He wore a southland costume of loose belted shirt and flapping breeches, and he hooked his thumbs defiantly into the belt as he confronted the hostile glaring of the company.

After a moment’s silence, indignation against the intruder broke out like floodwater breaching a dam, and Sir Bavis had to command the bearer of the loudest gong to hammer on it before he could cut through the tumult. When he had a semblance of order, he shouted, “Come forward and make yourself known!”

Expressionless, the stranger tramped up the aisle alongside the folk of Clan Twywit, and Saikmar, heart hammering, wondered if he had had some kind of premonition just now, when he found
The Ballad of Red Sloin
running through his brain.

Sir Bavis was half out of his seat now, staring at the dark-browed man. “Why, you came for audience this afternoon with Trader Heron—I recognize you now. You’re the southerner, the one called Belfeor!”

“Correct,” the stranger said sarcastically. “But please don’t tell me that that prevents me going to hunt the king. Red Sloin wasn’t a Carrig man either, and I ask no more than you accorded him.”

Considering what he had been through since his arrival in the city, Belfeor reflected with grim satisfaction, he felt he had made a most impressive entry. Of all the incredibly bad luck, to fall in with a Galactic agent—to find themselves in his very house! When there could hardly be a dozen agents on the planet, and probably half as many.

Still, things had not turned out too badly. Though Pargetty was inclined to panic at first he’d had to agree that if Heron—or whatever his real name was—had charged in wearing nothing but a towel, and moreover forgotten himself sufficiently to address them in Galactic, he could have had no previous inkling of his guests’ off-planet origin. Which in turn implied that they had disguised themselves well. And further meant that he had had no chance to report their presence to the authorities. All was not lost, therefore. But they had to move quickly.

The servants had panicked only because of the energy
gun. Given a few minutes in which to grow angry at their master’s death, the bravest of them would return. They snatched up the communicator and replaced it in the native wooden case which disguised it as a “shrine”—an obvious cover, because many of the indigenous cults venerated ancestral relics and protected their containers with elaborate curses aimed at thieves and despoilers—gathered what few of their belongings were absolutely indispensable, and hurried out of the room. As he left, Belfeor launched two more bolts at the body of Trader Heron and saw the wooden floor beneath his corpse crackle into a blaze.

“We’ll burn the house!” he snapped at Pargetty. “We’ve a good chance they won’t believe the servants’ story—they may think them crazy at least until tomorrow, and by then we should be out of their reach if what you’ve told me is true.”

Pargetty, pale-faced, gave a nod and fumbled his own energy gun out from beneath his shirt. Sighting to the other end of the long passage, he started a fire there also to block the door of Heron’s private suite. When they had descended the external staircase to the stableyard behind the house, they completed their work with two more shots through windows, and coils of smoke began to pour from the rooftop.

“That’ll occupy their minds,” Belfeor said grimly. “It’s good dry timber—it’ll be a furnace in no time. And now we’d better get lost in the city.” He spun on his heel and began to set a fast pace through a maze of back alleys; there was no risk of literally getting lost, however, so long as they could see the crest of the rocky citadel which dominated Carrig.

“How long until the assembly in the fortress?” Pargetty panted, struggling to keep abreast of his companion.

“It starts as soon as the evening star appears—two of this system, presumably. Blast Heron for interrupting! I wanted an accurate time-check from the ship.”

“How long before they start worrying up there?”

“They’re probably worrying already, damn it. Your first job is to find a place where you can set up the communicator again and explain what happened. Make sure they don’t panic, above all. Emphasize that Heron can’t possibly have passed the word to anyone and there’s
no reason not to go ahead as planned. Presumably Heron used his caravan journeys as cover for a regular beat, and that means you were right when you told us there wasn’t a permanent agent based in Carrig. By the time news of what’s happened to him filters through to another agent on this planet, we’ll have had months to get dug in.”

Pargetty nodded doubtfully. “But for all we know he was scheduled to make a report directly he got here. Won’t the Patrol investigate at once if that’s the case?”

“You’re asking
me?”
Belfeor countered. “You’re supposed to know the answer to questions like that, I thought!” And, before the reddening Pargetty could reply, he went on: “Anyhow, that’s a risk we have to take. Here, I think we’ve gone far enough together; we’d better split up now. I’ll rendezvous with you tonight at—no, of course I won’t. If they accept me like they’re supposed to, I guess I’ll have to go through the mumbo-jumbo, the all-night watch and the rest of it. You’re on your own, then. I’ll link up after the king-hunt. Don’t do anything rash!”

And then there was no problem except getting into the fortress, which he managed with a cover story so flimsy he could hardly believe it, though he had been assured beforehand that it would succeed. All he did was to show the guards a little southland trinket and tell them it was a luck-charm he intended to give to Saikmar—and they let him by. Obviously they must all have bet heavily on Saikmar and wanted him to have any luck that was going.

If the hint about Red Sloin was equally effective—whoever Red Sloin might have been—he was certain of bringing off his gigantic gamble.

All the time that the argument was raging in the hall, Saikmar was staring in puzzlement toward the intruder. He looked
old.
Old for a contender, anyway. And heavily built, even stocky. It was hard to picture a man like that piloting a glider among the chimneys of the Smoking Hills. Moreover, unless he intended to do as Red Sloin had done in the legend—crash his glider deliberately against the king’s neck—how could he hope to triumph? Saikmar knew very well how slender his own chances were, and he had the double advantage of youthful reflexes and years of daily practice, except in the bitterest month of winter.

And this Belfeor did not have the air of a man who wanted to die.

It was altogether absurd, Saikmar concluded. You
had
to be young and agile to kill the king, even when there was only a new and inexperienced one to cope with. All the authorities agreed on that; no champion on record had killed the king more than four years in succession. At twenty-five you were already stiffening up, too slow to match with a lithe male parradile.

Behind him there was a sudden clamor. Luchan, who had been last year’s contender for Clan Twywit and whose glider had crashed after a blow from the king’s left pinion, leaving him less of a man by one arm and one eye, was on his feet and shouting at Sir Bavis.

“Your doing!” he barked. “A scheme of yours to keep power in the hands of Clan Parradile!”

Instantly there was fresh uproar, and the waves of sound beat at Saikmar’s head like fists. Other ready accusers were found from other clans, and slanders were soon being hurled like javelins. At last Saikmar could stand it no longer, and stood up bellowing for silence.

Because he was the most favored contender, they shamefacedly allowed him to be heard. He did not plan the words; they merely tumbled out of him. He cried, “Has none of you a grain of sense? Have you looked at this man Belfeor? Have you wondered what chance he has against the king? He claims to have come to the city for the first time tbday—no matter how skillful a pilot he may be, what chance do you think he stands among the treacherous up-and down-draughts of the Smoking Hills?”

His point was beginning to sink in. He saw expressions growing thoughtful on every side.

“Luchan! Were you Sir Bavis, and had you some dirty scheme to twist the will of the gods, would you pick such a man? I’ve no idea what drives him to make his challenge, but I doubt if he knows what kind of ordeal he’s exposing himself to. I think he must just be gambling foolishly on a chance of power. Well, let him! If he compares himself to Red Sloin, let him! If he’s as good a man as Sloin was, he’ll prove it tomorrow; if not, he’ll meet inglorious death. I say he’s welcome to let the king break his silly neck if that’s what he wants!”

Breathing hard, Saikmar sat down, vaguely astonished at himself. His mother bent over and whispered some compliment in his ear; he returned only a distracted nod, waiting to see what would happen now.

“But it’s against all custom …” a worried voice said from the left of the hall.

“Against custom perhaps.” Sir Bavis seemed to have recovered his aplomb and spoke with his usual authority. “But against the law it is not I feel Saikmar son of Corrie has spoken well. And I declare before you all, and especially before Luchan—whose tongue would appear to have loosened in his mouth since last we were gathered here!—that I have seen this upstart Belfeor but once before, when he came to throw himself upon the city today with the rest of Trader Heron’s caravan. Beyond that I know nothing about him.”