Hunt the Space-Witch! (27 page)

To his dismay Barsac realized he had lost sight of Sporeflien; the older man had ducked behind him, into the shadows. Too late he saw that he had been maneuvered into a trap: he started to turn, but Sporeffien was even quicker, and brought the jug of wine down against his head with a resounding impact.

Barsac reeled and took two wobbly steps forward. He saw the still unbroken jug lift again, and tried to shield his head; Sporeffien crashed it down against the back of his neck, rattling his teeth.

Barsac pitched forward. He heard harsh laughter, and the old man's dry voice saying, “Anyone but a greenhorn should have known nobody would ferry him to Azonda for a million units cash down in initiation-time. Let's go through his pockets, Emmeri.”

Chapter Three

He woke to the sound of falling rain, clattering against the caves of the houses and the stones of the street, and wondered for a moment how there could be rain aboard the
Dywain
. Then he remembered he was not aboard the
Dywain
. A moment later he made the unpleasant discovery that he was lying face down in the gutter, one hand dangling in a fast-flowing rivulet of rainwater, and that he was soaking wet, encrusted with mud, and suffering from a splitting headache. The gray light of dawn illuminated the scene. He looked around. It was an unfamiliar street.

Slowly he got to his feet, feeling chilled and dazed, and brushed some of the street-mud from his clothes ineffectually. He shook his head, trying to clear it, trying to make the ringing in his ears cease.

His left thigh felt strange. A moment after he knew why: the familiar bulk of his wallet no longer pressed against it. He remembered now the scene of the night before, and reddened. Those two thieves had cleaned him out. Played him for a fool, slugged him, taken his wallet and his eleven hundred units and his papers.

They had left him with a key, though. He stared at it dully until he realized it was the key to the apartment of Kassa Jidrill.

Kassa
. She had sent him to Sporeffien. She must have known how laughable was the idea of hiring a ferry to take him to Azonda. And so she must have deliberately sent him to Sporeffien knowing he would be worked over.

Angry as he was, he found it hard to blame her, or Sporeffien and his accomplice. This was a tough, hard world; a greenhorn with a thousand Galactic units or so in his wallet was fair game.

Only—Kassa had said she was going to return to Lord Carnothute and make a second attempt to get Zigmunn released from his Cult vows. Had she meant it? Or had that just been part of the deception?

Barsac did not know. But he decided to return to the girl's apartment, as long as he still had the key. He wanted to ask her a few questions.

The early-morning rain still poured down. He shivered, soaked through. The streets were deserted. He started to walk. A street-sign said,
Boulevard of the Sun
. He had no idea where that might be in relation to the Street of Tears.

He rounded a corner and entered a narrow winding street lined with hunchbacked old houses that leaned so close together above the street that little rain penetrated. Halfway down the street he spied the radiant globe of a winehouse, still open. And a man was leaving it. Barsac hoped he was sober enough to give him directions.

He hailed him. The man paused, turned, stared uncertainly at Barsac. He was a short man, thin, with a sallow pock-marked face framing a massive hooked nose. He wore iridescent tights of red and green and a dull violet cloak. His eyes were small and glinted brightly. He looked none the worse for his night's carouse.

“Pardon me,” Barsac said. “Could you direct me to the Street of Tears?”

“I could. Directly ahead until you reach the Square of the Fathers—you'll know it by the big ugly clump of statuary in the middle—and then make a sharp right past the Mercury Winehouse. Street of Tears is four blocks along that way. Got it?”

“Thanks,” Barsac said. He started to move on.

“Just a second,” the other called after him. The Earther turned. “Are you all right?”

“Could be better,” Barsac said shortly.

“You're all wet. And muddy. You've been beaten and robbed, haven't you?”

Barsac nodded.

“And you're a stranger, too. Need some money?”

“I can manage.”

The small man took three steps and placed himself at Barsac's side, looking up at him. “I know what it's like to be a stranger on Glaurus. I've been through it myself. I can help you. I can find you a job.”

Barsac shook his head. “Appreciation. But I'm a spacer; my ship lifts at the end of this week. I'm not looking for a job.”

“Many's the spacer who's been left behind. If you get into trouble, come to me. Here's my card.”

Barsac took it. It said,
Erpad Ystilog. Exhibitor of Curiosities. 1123 Street of Liars
. Barsac smiled and pocketed it.

“I'll wish you a good morning,” Ystilog said. “Do you remember the way to the street you seek?”

“Straight ahead to the Square of the Fathers, sharp right at the Mercury Winehouse and four blocks farther.”

Ystilog nodded approvingly. “You remember well, spacer. If you're ever in need of a job, come to me.”

“I'll think about it,” Barsac said.

The rain had virtually stopped by the time he reached the Street of Tears; only a trickle of drops came down now, and the sky had turned pearl gray and was on its way toward brightening. A filmy rainbow arched across the rooftops of the city, gauzy, tenuous, already melting away as the heat of morning descended.

But number eighty-one still seemed wrapped in sleep. Barsac mounted the stairs two at a time, pausing on the fourth-floor landing to draw out the key Kassa Jidrill had given him the night before.

But he did not need the key.

The door had been broken in. It was as if a battering-ram had crashed against it an inch or two from the place where the hinges joined the doorframe, and the wood had crumpled inward like a folding screen. The hall and the room both were dark. Frowning, Barsac nudged open the fragments of the door, pushing past the shattered door into the room.

He switched on the light. A moment later he found himself fighting the temptation to switch it off again.

Kassa lay neatly arranged on the bed, and the coverlet was soaked with blood. Barsac had seen horrible deaths before; this one took the prize.

She had been sliced open. A double-barred cross had been slashed into her body, the downstroke beginning between the breasts and continuing to the pelvis, the two crossbars incised about eight inches apart in her stomach. Her throat had been cut. And her face—

There was hardly a face left.

The clothes she had worn last night were stacked on the chair. A key lay on the floor near the bed. He picked it up; it was a duplicate of the one she had given him.

She had come home, then; she had locked the door. And someone had broken in.

Barsac found his hands quivering. He turned away, shaking his head slowly, and closed what was left of the door behind him.

There was a public communicator booth in the hall. Barsac entered the booth without bothering to flip the shutter release, and depressed the
call
stud.

He said, “Give me the police. I want to report a murder, operator.”

A moment later a sleepy voice said, “Millyaurr Homicide Detail. Lieutenant Hassliq speaking. What is it?”

“A murder, Lieutenant. In the Street of Tears, number eighty-one. The dead person is a party girl named Kassa Jidrill. I just found her.”

The was no increase of animation in Lieutenant Hassliq's voice as he said, “And who are you, please?”

“I'm a spacer in town on leave from the ship
Dywain
. My name is Barsac. I—met the dead girl yesterday afternoon for the first time. I just came back to her room and found her this way.”

“Describe the condition of the body, please.”

Barsac did, in detail. When he was finished Hassliq said, “I feared as much. All right, Barsac—we'll send a morgue truck right over to pick up the body. You don't need to stick around if you don't want to.”

“Won't you want to question me for the investigation?”

“What investigation?”

Barsac blinked. “A girl's been murdered. Don't you usually investigate murder cases in Millyaurr?”

“Not when they're Cult jobs,” Hassliq said. “What's the use? That party girl was killed ritualistically, if your description is accurate. Someone in the Cult took a dislike to her. But what can we do? It's next to impossible to regulate Cult activities; I'd only be begging to have my own face scraped off and a double-barred cross cut into my belly. No, thanks. We'll send a pickup man out for the body. Thanks for phoning in the information, Mr. Barsac.”

He heard a click, stared at the receiver a moment, and hung up. They weren't even interested in finding Kassa's murderer, he thought. They didn't care. They were
afraid
to care.

He went back to the room and sat by the dead girl until the morgue truck arrived. His quest for Zigmunn was taking on new colors; a robbery, now a murder had been woven into the pattern.

A ritualistic murder. A Cult murder. On Glaurus the Cult was law, it seemed. His heart felt curiously leaden; he avoided looking at the body on the bed. For Kassa all despair was ended now, suddenly, earlier than she had expected.

Half an hour passed; forty-five minutes. The rain began again, then stopped. Finally the truck arrived. Barsac heard the commotion on the stairs as the other boarders in the house, their curiosities aroused by the presence of the truck, followed the morgue men upstairs.

“In here,” Barsac called.

Two bored-looking men with a stretcher slung between them entered. At the sight of Kassa they winced.

“We get half a dozen of these a week,” one said. “The Cult keeps a sharp knife.”

They loaded her on the stretcher as if she were so much slaughtered meat. Barsac stepped forward and said, “What's going to happen to her body now?”

“She gets taken down to the morgue and entered. We wait a week for the body to be claimed. Then we send her to the crematorium.”

“You don't expect anyone to claim the body?”

The stretcher-bearer smiled scornfully. “She was a party girl, wasn't she?”

“Besides,” said the other one, “even if she was a nun of the Grand Temple. Nobody claims Cult victims' bodies. It isn't a healthy thing to do.”

Barsac scowled. “I'd like to see her get a decent burial. She was, well, a friend of mine.”

“Burial on Glaurus costs five hundred units, brother. Plus bribes. Was she that much of a friend? Don't throw your money away; she won't ever know the difference.”

They smiled at him ghoulishly and lifted the stretcher. Barsac let them take her away. He was remembering that he had no money at all, and in four days he was due to return to his ship and leave Glaurus probably forever.

On sudden inspiration he yanked open the drawers of the dead girl's dresser. Cheap trinkets, souvenirs, cosmetics—ah—ten crumpled five-unit bills. The price for a night, he thought.

Coldly he pocketed the bills. Turning, he saw a thin-faced old man staring at him.

“Here, you! No robbery, here! That money belongs to
me!
”

“Who the devil are you?” Barsac asked.

“The landlord here. It's the rule; if a boarder dies intestate, I inherit. Hand over that money, right here and now.”

“I need it,” Barsac said. “You don't. The girl doesn't. Get out of my way.”

He slammed the landlord against the greasy wall with a contemptuous slap of his flattened hand and made his way down the stairs and out into the Street of Tears, thinking of a dead party girl who would have been alive at this moment had he never come to Millyaurr.

It was nearly noon when he arrived at the field where the
Dywain
stood, and he was dizzy with hunger. He showed his identity bracelet to the field guards and trotted out to the great ship.

Captain Jaspel was supervising the repainting of the stabilizer fins, up on D deck. Barsac waited until the captain had finished his harangue of the painters, then said, “Sir?”

“Oh—Barsac. Where's that ace repairman of yours?”

“I haven't been able to find him, sir. Not yet, anyway. But there's still time, isn't there?”

“Not much,” the old captain said. “I'll have to send out the hiring notice tomorrow if I'm to get a man. I can't wait for your fellow any longer than that. You've been robbed, eh, Barsac?”

Smiling bitterly, Barsac nodded. “Foolishness, Captain. I'm cleaned out.”

“How much do you need?”

“Three hundred units advance against next voyage, Captain. Is that too much?”

“Probably. Take a hundred fifty. Then if you get robbed again it won't be so bad. And be careful, Barsac; I don't want to have to find a fuelsman as well as a repairman on Glaurus.”

Barsac pocketed his money and returned to the city. Hope of finding Zigmunn in time for him to get the job aboard the
Dywain
was dim indeed. But Barsac was no longer mainly interested in getting him the job; he simply wanted to see Zigmunn, if possible to release him from the meshes of the Cult. And there were questions to be answered about his robbery and about the death of Kassa.

He hopped aboard a crowded airbus with defective air-conditioning and rode it as far as Lord Carnothute's palace. There he got off, entered the palace, and demanded to see the governor.

He was conscious that he did not make an imposing figure, in his mud-stained, blood-streaked clothes, with his gaunt bruised face and beard-stubbled cheeks. But he was determined to see Carnothute.

The governor appeared, a looming elephantine figure in ultramarine cape and sheathlike leggings of cerise trimmed with black. Barsac looked up at him and snapped, “Let me talk to you in private!”