Silence is Deadly (16 page)

Finally the little duke turned his back on the nabrulk and waddled over to the knights. A knight signaled, and the heavy portcullis was hauled up. This was not the door Darzek had entered, but a much wider one, through which four knights could ride abreast.

Lackeys hurried up with nabrula, and the knights swung into their saddles and went through the opening in ranks of four. A crowd of lackeys surged through after them.

Darzek went with the lackeys. At the outer wall the knights halted, their nabrula stomping and wheezing restlessly, while the lackeys arranged themselves along a massive gate. Darzek selected his own position with care. They heaved and pushed, and when the gate finally stood open, Darzek was stationed at its outer end. When the lackeys scurried to either side to get out of the way of the knights, Darzek simply moved around the end of the gate. And when, after the knights had ridden away, the lackeys closed the gate, Darzek was left outside.

He was not missed. He waited in the shadow of the wall until the knights had passed beyond his hearing and the portcullis had crashed down. Then he dashed to the safety of the sponge forest and limped off through the waves of light and scent emitted by Kamm’s night creatures, with his stolen lackey sandals severely cutting his feet.

Avoiding the road, Darzek went directly to the forest clearing where his supplies were cached. There he found the perfumer’s cart, the three nabrula, and Riklo, who was already lost in a restless, feverish sleep in the cart.

He watched her for a time, deeply concerned. Then he decided that sleep probably was better for her than anything he could think of doing. He stretched out beside her, and the two of them slept long into daylight. Darzek was awakened once, by the rumble of nabrula hoofs on the nearby lane. He sleepily muttered for them to go away, and they did.

Finally he stirred himself, slipping cautiously from the cart to allow the restlessly feverish Riklo to continue her sleep. He ate some dried meat, washing it down with pungent Kammian cider, and then he seated himself on a nearby sponge log to meditate.

When Riklo awoke, still feverish, he tried unsuccessfully to feed her. Finally he decided that she herself was the best judge of what her alien physiology required. He returned to his log, and after a time she joined him there.

“Feel like talking?” he asked her.

“No. But I suppose we’d better.”

“I’ll talk and you listen. Interrupt me when you feel like it. Just for a start, let’s consider a problem in Kammian psychology. You’re the Duke Merzkion. You have a pazul, an invincible death ray. Naturally this is the most valuable thing you own, so for safekeeping you put it in a room at the top of your castle and contrive a booby trap so the thing will kill anyone opening the door. Why?”

She did not answer.

“It’s a mystery to me,” Darzek went on meditatively. “But maybe it’s self-evident that this is the best way to protect a pazul. Let it protect itself. I assume there’d be a way to turn the thing on or off from outside the room. But consider this next step. There’s a mysterious stranger loose in your castle, and you suspect that he has designs on your pazul. Do you sit back, chuckling quietly to yourself, and wait for the pazul to kill him—as it did in fact kill another mysterious stranger a couple of nights earlier? You do not. You rush an armed guard to the spot. Is the guard supposed to protect the pazul, which doesn’t need any protection?”

Again Riklo did not answer.

“Obviously the guard was there to guard something. If it wasn’t the pazul, which didn’t need it, was there something else of value in that tower? And if there was something else of value there, why wasn’t the pazul placed to guard that along with itself?”

Riklo said regretfully, “I should have looked when I had the chance.”

“If you had, you’d be dead. Can you remember any more than you could last night?”

She could not. She remembered opening the door cautiously and peeking in. The next thing she knew, Darzek was carrying her.

“When the beam hit you, you staggered backward and collapsed,” Darzek said. “In doing so, you closed the door. That saved your life. It also saved mine. If you hadn’t got there first, I would have found the pazul a few minutes later, and I wouldn’t have opened the door a crack and peeked into the room. I was ducking into those rooms quickly, as Wenz must have, to get out of sight. I would have walked into the full blast of it. Tell me this. If the Duke Merzkion has a pazul, why hasn’t he marched off to conquer Storoz with it? He could, easily.”

“He wouldn’t dare,” Riklo said. “The Sailor’s League would retaliate if he touched the Free Cities. No ships would come to Storoz. The economy would be ruined.”

“Would the Sailor’s League retaliate if he limited his conquests to the provinces and didn’t interfere with the Free Cities?”

“No,” she said, after a moment’s thought. “If he promised to respect the rights of the Free Cities and not interfere with trade, they wouldn’t care who ruled the provinces.”

“Then why hasn’t he marched? With his pazul, he’d be invincible.”

Riklo leaped to her feet. She staggered, regained her balance, and excitedly waved away Darzek’s helping hand. “Merzkion isn’t the only province where we’ve lost agents! Some of the other dukes must have pazuls!” She paused to reflect. “The Duke of OO, for one. And probably Fermarz. And there could be others. I’ll go back tonight and look at the pazul through the window. There couldn’t be any danger in that, since it’s aimed at the door. I should have done it last night. Now that we know where it is, and what it does—”

“No,” Darzek said firmly. “We don’t know how it’s aimed, and we don’t know what it does. And no stranger is going to get into or near the Duke Merzkion’s castle tonight or any other night for a long time. He’ll have the grounds under guard and every approach watched. He’s already searching the countryside. The sooner we leave here, the better. We have work to do. We’ve got to get Wenz’s specimens to the lab. We’ve also got to devise a shield against that metal detector, or we won’t be able to carry secret equipment. After that, I’m going to call on one of the other dukes. It’s reason enough for not marching to war with your pazul if you know your neighbor has one.”

They returned to Northpor as fast as their three nabrula could take them, traveling by night and hiding by day until they left the province of the Duke Merzkion. And Riklo was ill and feverish most of the way, lying weakly in the cart. Twice she hemorrhaged badly, from the nose, and several times she became disorientated and babbled to Darzek in a language he did not understand.

The moment they arrived in Northpor, he put her to bed in Wesru’s capable care. He went directly to the moon base, where he transferred the Wenz specimens and then spent a futile hour searching for medicines and medical information that could be helpful to Riklo. The base file had no suggestions concerning pazul disease.

He was more successful with the metal detector. The file directed him to a special kit of protective films. A few tests told him which film to use, and he returned to Northpor and lined the secret compartments of the cart with it.

Sajjo and Hadkez burst in upon him to ecstatically recount their enormous success with the perfume sales. They hauled him off to the factory to sample three new scents Hadkez had developed, and Darzek gave Hadkez the task of restocking the cart for its next expedition. The news that Darzek was leaving again plunged Sajjo into gloom, and she dashed off to her own room.

That night Darzek took over the watch in Riklo’s room. He armed himself with a pad of paper from the moon base. Between his ministrations to the feverish Riklo, he filled the pad, writing down everything that had happened since his arrival, and what he had learned, and what he thought it meant. He also described what he intended to do next, and why. The next morning, he took the pad back to the moon base and left it in a conspicuous place. And he appended a note for the Department of Uncertified Worlds Headquarters, expressing his opinion of departmental procedures where twenty agents could disappear without leaving a single memo that could be useful to those trying to find them.

Riklo was feeling much better. She’d suffered cruelly in the jolting cart, and a day of rest in a comfortable bed improved her condition drastically; but she was still weak, and her prognosis seemed so uncertain that both she and Darzek accepted without mentioning the fact that it would be a long time before she could travel.

“You’re leaving at once?” she asked.

“I must,” Darzek answered. “As long as there’s a possibility that any of the missing agents are alive, I have to keep trying to find them.”

“You’re going to OO?”

“Perhaps. But first I’m going to call on the Duke Merzkion’s neighbor, the Duke Fermarz. What do you know about him?”

“Very little. Most of the dukes seem like blurred copies of each other. When are you leaving?”

“As soon as I’ve made a few arrangements.”

On the Northpor quay he spoke to a sea captain, who referred him to another captain; and Darzek quickly negotiated passage for himself, his cart, and his three nabrula to Fermarzpor, a small town that was the Duke Fermarz’s only seaport. The ship would sail with the midnight tide. Darzek went home to make his final preparations.

He chose his supplies with care and packed them away in the secret compartments of his cart: binoculars, a kit of medical supplies, three extra Winged Beast amulets, a pair of stun rifles, a blade that looked like a machete, a rope equipped with a gun that shot it to a height of twenty meters, half a dozen hand lights, and a torch that produced enough heat to melt metal. As far as Darzek knew, there was no metal in Storoz except coins, but this time he intended to be prepared for anything.

He drove his cart aboard the ship, got the nabrula comfortably housed in a shed behind the long cabin, and went home for another farewell with his household. Sajjo was so disconsolate that she would not come down to say good-bye to him.

* * * *

The following night, after an unusually fast run down the coast, Darzek harnessed his nabrula to his cart. The sailors unblocked the wheels, the captain—pleased with a passenger who paid in advance in coins, caused no difficulties, and could lift a mug of cider as well as a sailor—raised both hands in farewell, and Darzek drove his cart ashore at the port of Fermarzpor.

He also drove straight through the pleasant little town and some distance into the country before he found himself a resting place, so as to leave any inquisitive port officials far behind. He unharnessed the nabrula and tied them so they could graze. Then he reached back into the cart for the tarp and blankets he used for bedding—he preferred the ground to the hard boards of the cart bottom.

His hand encountered something that twisted and struggled. He snatched it away and ripped the canvas flaps open.

It was Sajjo.

He regarded her with mingled dismay and amusement, but because she’d been hidden in the cart since the previous night, he only asked,
Are you hungry?
The light was too dim for talking, but when he brought out food, she ate ravenously.

The light also was too dim for recriminations. After she had eaten, he waved her back to the comfortable cocoon she had fashioned for herself at the rear of the cart. He made up his own bed on the ground. They would talk in the morning.

Riklo and Darzek had traveled as husband and wife and as perfumer and keeper of secrets, or fortuneteller. But Sajjo needed no special role beyond that of a perfumer’s daughter, and she assumed it ecstatically. They wended their tedious way from wayside forum to stinking wayside forum, with pleasant interludes of travel through a lovely countryside.

The Province of Fermarz seemed much more prosperous than that of Merzkion. It was crisscrossed with small farm holdings and dotted with attractive little villages, some of which had their own artisans. But Darzek knew that the Duke Merzkion also had rich farm lands near the coast, and his enormous holdings in sponge forests were worth a very tidy income.

Sajjo shyly confessed on the first morning that it was Riklo who had suggested stowing away.
She said you needed help and someone to look after you.

Darzek had hardly seen her during his abbreviated stay in Northpor. Now he observed that she was centimeters taller and that her business experience at the Northpor mart had given her a poise that made her seem years older. Her alert young mind had easily picked up the manners and tastes of her stylish mart customers. Now her hair was beautifully dyed and arranged flawlessly, and she wore the simple clothing designs appropriate to her age with an adult flair.

She immediately made herself invaluable, performing all of the housekeeping, cooking when there was time for it, and vending their perfumes, which permitted Darzek to wander about as much as he liked, talking with peasants or fellow vendors who had the inclination, and observing what he could.

But there was little enough to observe in a foul-smelling, unkempt forum, where the Mound of the Sun was eroding away and the carved Winged Beast had blown from its pole in the last storm. The peasants continued to worship as though the life pyramid reached its customary height and the Beast were still present. In the rural areas of Kamm, even change did not produce change, and it was a relief to Darzek when, at the end of the fourth day, they came to the castle of the Duke Fermarz.