The Chalice of Death (10 page)

“Well done,” he said. Reaching below his uniform for his money-pouch, he produced two green bills of Imperial scrip. One he handed to the wigmaker, saying, “This is for you. As for the other—go into the street and wait there until a Kariadi about my size comes past. Then somehow manage to entice him into your store, making use of the money.”

“This is very irregular. Why must I do these things, Sir Earthman?”

“Because otherwise I'll have you flayed. Now go!”

The wigmaker went.

Navarre took up a station behind the shopkeeper's door, clutching his gun tightly, and waited. Five minutes passed.

Then he heard the wigmaker's voice outside, tremulous, unhappy.

“I beg you, friend. Step within my shop a while.”

“Sorry, wigmaker. No need for your trade have I.”

“Good sir, I ask it as a favor. I have an order for a wig styled in your fashion. No, don't leave. I can make it worth your while. Here. This will be yours if you'll let me sketch your hair style. It will be but a moment's work …”

Navarre grinned. The wigmaker was shrewd.

“Well, if it's only a moment, then. I guess it's worth a hundred units to me if you like my hair style.”

The door opened. Navarre drew back and let the wigmaker enter. Behind him came a Kariadi of about Navarre's general size and build.

Navarre brought his gun butt down with stunning force on the back of the Kariadi's head, and caught him as he fell.

“These crimes in my shop, Sir Earthman—”

“Are in the name of the Overlord,” Navarre told the quivering wigmaker. He knelt over the unconscious Kariadi and began to strip away his clothing.

“Lock your door,” he ordered. “And get out your blue dyes. I have more work for you.”

The job was done in thirty minutes. The Kariadi, by this time awake and furious, lay bound and gagged in the wigmaker's stockroom, clad in the oversize uniform of Joroiran's Daborian guard. Navarre, a fine Kariadi blue in color from forehead to toes, and topped with a shining mop of black Kariadi hair, grinned at the grunting prisoner.

“You serve a noble cause, my friend. It was too bad you had to be treated so basely.”

“
Mmph! Mgggl
!”

“Hush,” Navarre whispered. He examined his image in the wigmaker's mirror. Resplendent in a tight-fitting Kariadi tunic, he scarcely recognized himself. He drew forth the Kariadi's wallet and extracted his money, including the hundred-unit Joran note the wigmaker had given him.

“Here,” he said, stuffing the wad of bills under the Kariadi's leg. “I seek only your identity, not your cash.” He added another hundred-unit note to the wad, gave yet another to the wigmaker, and said, “You'll be watched. If you free him before an hour has elapsed, I'll have you flayed in Central Plaza.”

“I'll keep him a month, Sir Earthman, if you command it.” The wigmaker was green with fright.

“An hour will be sufficient, Verru. And a thousand thanks for your help in this matter.” Giving the panicky old man a noble salute, Navarre adjusted his cape, unlocked the shop door, and stepped out into the street.

He hailed a passing jetcab.

“Take me to the spaceport,” he said, in a guttural Kariadi accent.

As he had suspected, Kausirn had posted guards at the spaceport. He was stopped by a pair of sleek Joran secret-service men—he recognized the tiny emblem at their throats, having designed it himself at a time when he was more in favor on Jorus—and was asked to produce his papers.

He offered the passport he had taken from the Kariadi. They gave it a routine look-through and handed it back.

“How come the look-through?” he asked. “Somebody back there said you were looking for a prisoner who escaped from the Overlord's jail. There any truth in that?”

“Where'd you hear that story?”

Navarre shrugged innocently. “He was standing near the refreshment dials. Curious-looking fellow—he wore a hood, and kept his face turned away from me. Said the Overlord had captured some hot-shot criminal, or maybe it was an assassin. But he got away. Say, are Jorus' dungeons so easily unsealed?”

The secret-service men exchanged troubled glances. “What color was this fellow?”

“Why, he was pink—like you Jorans. Or maybe he was an Earthman. I couldn't see under that hood, of course, but he might very well have been shaven, y'know. And I couldn't see his eyes. But he may still be there, if you're interested.”

“We are. Thanks.”

Navarre grinned wryly and moved on toward the ticket booths as the secret-service men dashed down toward the direction of the refreshment dials. He hoped they would have a merry time searching through the crowd.

But the fact that he was effecting a successful escape afforded him little actual joy. The Lyrellan knew of his plans, now, and the fledgling colonies of Earthmen in Galaxy RGC18347 were in great danger.

He boarded the liner, cradled in, and awaited blast-off impatiently, consuming time by silently parsing the irregular Kariadi verbs.

Chapter Nine

Customs-check was swift and simple on Kariad. The Kariadi customs officers paid little attention to their own nationals; it was outworlders they kept watch for. Navarre merely handed over his passport, made out in the name of Melwod Finst, and nodded to the customs official's two or three brief questions. Since he had no baggage, he obviously had nothing to declare.

He moved on, into the spaceport. The money-changing booths lay straight ahead and he joined the line, reaching the slot twenty minutes later. He drew forth his remaining Joran money, some six hundred units in all, and fed it to the machine.

Conversion was automatic; the changer clicked twice and spewed eight hundred and three Kariadi credit-bills back at him. He folded them into his pocket and continued on. There was no sign of pursuit, this time.

Deliberately he walked on through the crowded arcades for ten minutes more. Then, all seeming clear, he stepped into a public communicator booth, inserted a coin, and requested Information.

The directory-robot grinned impersonally at him. “Yours to serve, good sir.”

“I want the number of Helna Winstin, Earthman to the Court of Lord Marhaill.”

His coins came clicking back. The robot said, after the moment's pause necessary to fish the data from its sponge-platinum memory banks, “Four-oh-three-oh-six K Red.”

Quickly Navarre punched out the number. On the screen appeared a diamond-shaped insignia framing an elaborate scrollwork
M
. A female voice said, “Lord Marhaill's. With whom would you speak?”

“Helna Winstin. The Earthman to the Court.”

“And who calls her?”

“Melwod Finst. I'm but newly returned from Jorus.”

After a pause the Oligocrat's emblem dissolved, and Helna Winstin's head and shoulders took their place on the screen. She looked outward at Navarre cautiously; her face seemed paler than ever, the cheekbones more pronounced. She had shaved her scalp not long before, he noticed.

“Milady, I am Melwod Finst of Kariad West. I crave a private audience with you at once.”

“You'll have to make regular application, Freeholder Finst. I'm very busy just now. You—”

Her eyes went wide as the supposed Finst tugged at his frontmost lock of hair, yanking it away from his scalp sufficiently far enough to show where the blue skin color ended and where the pale white began. He replaced the lock, pressing it down to rebind it to his scalp, and grinned. The grin was unmistakable.

“I have serious matters to discuss with you, Milady,” Navarre said. “My seedling farm is in serious danger. The crop is threatened by hostile forces. This concerns you, I believe.”

She nodded. “I believe it does. Let us arrange an immediate meeting, Melwod Finst.”

They met at the Two Suns, a refreshment place not too far from the spaceport. Navarre, who was unfamiliar with Kariad, was not anxious to travel any great distance to meet Helna; since he was posing as an ostensible Kariadi, an undue lack of familiarity on his part with his native world might seem suspicious.

He arrived at the place long before she did. They had arranged that he was to find her, not she him; not seeing her at any of the tables, he took a seat at the bar.

“Rum,” he said. He knew better than to order the vile Kariadi beer.

He sat alone, nursing his drink, grunting noncommitally any time a local barfly attempted to engage him in conversation. Thirty minutes and three rums later, Helna arrived. She paused just inside the door of the place, standing regally erect as she looked around for him.

Navarre slipped away from the bar and went up to her.

“Milady?”

She glanced inquisitively at him.

“I am Melwod Finst,” he told her gravely. “Newly come from Jorus.”

He led her to a table in the back, drew a coin from his pocket, and purchased thirty minutes of privacy. The dull blue of the force-screen sprang up around them. During the next half hour they could carouse undisturbed, or make love, or plot the destruction of the galaxy.

Helna said, “Why the disguise? Where have you been? What—”

“One question at a time, Helna. The disguise I needed in order to get off Jorus. My old rival Kausirn has laid me under sentence of death.”

“How can he?”

“Because he knows our plan. Kausirn's spies are more ingenious than we think. I heard him tell the Overlord everything—where we were, the secret of the Chalice, our eventual hope of rebuilding the civilization of Earth.”

“You denied it, naturally.”

“I said it was madness. But he had some sort of documentary evidence he gave the Overlord, and Joroiran was immediately convinced. Just after I had won him over, too.” Navarre scowled. “I managed to escape and flee here in this guise, but we'll have to block them before they send a fleet out to eradicate the settlements on Earth and Procyon. Where's Carso?”

Helna shrugged. “He's taken cheap lodgings somewhere in the heart of the city while he waits for word from you that his banishment is revoked. I don't see much of him these days.”

“Small chance he'll get unbanished now,” Navarre said.

“Let's find him. The three of us will have to decide what's to be done.”

He rose. Helna caught him by one wrist and gently tugged him back into his seat.

“Is the emergency
that
pressing?” she asked.

“Well …”

“We've got twenty minutes more of privacy paid for—should we waste it? I haven't seen you for a month, Hallam.”

“I guess twenty minutes won't matter much,” he said, grinning.

They found Carso later that day sitting in a bar in downtown Kariad City, clutching a mug of Kariadi beer in his hand. The half-breed looked soiled and puffy-faced; his scalp was dark with several days' growth of hair, his bushy beard untrimmed and unkempt.

He looked up in sudden alarm as Helna's hand brushed lightly along his shoulder. “Hello,” he grunted. Then, seeing Navarre, he added, “Who's your friend?”

“His name is Melwod Finst. I thought you'd be interested in meeting him.”

Carso extended a grimy band. “Pleased.”

Navarre stared unhappily at his erstwhile comrade. Filthy, drunken, ragged-looking, there was little of the Earthman left about Carso. True enough, Carso was a half-breed, his mother an Earthwoman—but now he seemed to have brought to the fore the worst characteristics of his nameless, drunken Joran father. He was a sad sight.

Navarre slipped in beside the half-breed and gestured at the bowl of foul Kariadi beer. “I've never understood how you could drink that stuff, Domrik.”

Carso wheeled heavily in his seat to look at Navarre. “I didn't know we were on first-name terms, friend. But—wait! Speak again!”

“You're a bleary-eyed sot of a half-breed,” Navarre said in his natural voice.

Carso frowned. “That voice—your face—you remind me of someone. But he was not of Kariad.”

“Nor am I,” said Navarre. “Blue skin's a trapping easily acquired. As is a Kariadi wig.”

Carso started to chuckle, bending low over the beer. At length he said, “You devil, you fooled me!”

“And many another. There's a price on my head back on Jorus.”

“Eh?” Carso was abruptly sober; the merriment drained from his coarse-featured face. “What's that you say? Are you out of favor with the Overlord? I was counting on you to have that foolish sentence of banishment revoked and—”

“Kausirn knows our plans. I barely got off Jorus alive; even Joroiran is against me. He ordered Kausirn to send a fleet to destroy the settlement on Earth.”

Carso bowed his head. “Does he know where Earth is? After all, it wasn't easy for us to find it in the first place.”

“I don't know,” Navarre said. He glanced at Helna. “We'll have to find the old librarian who gave us the lead. Keep him from helping anyone else.”

Carso said, “That's useless. If Kausirn knows about the Chalice and its contents, he also knows where the crypt was located and how to get there. At this moment the Jorus fleets are probably blasting our settlements. Here. Have a drink. It was a fine planet while it lasted, wasn't it?”

“No Joran spacefleet has left the Cluster in the last month,” Helna said quietly.

Navarre looked up. “How do you know?”

“Oligocrat Marhaill has reason to suspect the doings on Jorus. He keeps careful watch over the Joran military installations, and whenever a Joran battlefleet departs on maneuvers we are apprised of it. This information is routed through me on its way to Marhaill. And I tell you that the Joran fleet has been absolutely quiet all this past month.”

Reddening, Navarre asked, “How long has this sort of observation been going on?”

“Four years, at least.”

Navarre slammed the flat of his hand against the stained table top. “Four years! That means you penetrated my alleged defensive network with ease … and all the time I was trying to set up a spy-system on Kariad, and failing!” He eyed the girl with new respect. “How did you do it?”