The Ladder in the Sky (5 page)

VIII

No one could have said whether it was the struggle between superstitious fear and simple greed, or merely Dyasthala cunning, which in the end compelled Ogric to promise a contract bonus to those workers who agreed to share quarters with Kazan as well as to Clary herself for finding them. There were going to be some pointed questions asked when he presented the accounts for this trip; still, he’d got off lighter than if he’d been obliged to honor the forfeiture clause in one of the contracts, or if he’d lost half the workers already signed up and had to hold back his departure while he hunted down some replacements.

In fact, it had not occurred to Clary to suggest to those she approached the idea of holding out for a bonus like hers. It wasn’t in the frame of reference of Dyasthala thinking. The reason she had sprung to Kazan’s aid in the captain’s cabin was because she and he both were opposed to authority—it wasn’t out of sympathy. The offer of the bonus, certainly, had worked in her case very well; without it she would never have argued so persuasively with the reluctant workers.

And it was clear that she wasn’t completely successful. That could be seen from the way the new occupants of the cabin hesitated when they came through the door for the first time, looking about them, seeing Kazan, being only slightly reassured on finding Clary calmly sitting on the next bunk to his. And it went on as it had begun. None of the others spent any more time than they had to in Kazan’s company, and often during the sleep period a light would go on, and one of the people in the cabin would lean over the side of the bunk and stare down at Kazan as though to make sure he was genuinely asleep and not dead.

At first Clary had viewed these goings-on with real scorn. In her mind she classed Hego with the foolish but wealthy people who had sometimes sent into the Dyasthala to consult the so-called witches and wizards there. Everyone in the thieves’ quarter knew that their trances and oracles, their illusions and their speaking with tongues, were just another way of parting rich folk from their money, rating somewhere on the criminal scale between confidence trickery and the disguising of stolen goods for resale.

Then it gradually dawned on her, first, that many of what she regarded as her own people seemed to have caught the contagious fear of Kazan; second, that Kazan himself—aside from confirming Hego’s story in the captain’s presence, which could be discounted—had never said anything one way or the other.

This was alarming.

Kazan, indeed, appeared not to be in the least involved in what went on around—and often because of—him. It seemed to make no difference that for the duration of the voyage he was the key person aboard the ship. When he was not required for some duty or other, or to collect his thrice-daily rations in the workers’ canteen, he lay on his bunk, staring at the underside of the bunk above. It occurred to Clary at last that he might as well have been really dead. He was dead in his mind.

She’d seen cases like that in the Dyasthala. They were everywhere. But at first she could not associate the pale, calm, rather handsome Kazan with the slack-lipped and filthy idiots who could be found in the old days playing with the gutter mud of the thieves’ quarters, sometimes seizing a bright coin tossed to them with a little chuckle of pleasure at such a gaudy plaything—and usually losing it again to a child of normal intelligence who know how to trade it for some worthless but glittering scrap of colored glass.

Long experience in handling random-gathered groups of migrant workers had developed a system in the fleet of ships serving the Vashti mines. Though Ogric had spoken dismally of any voyage as being too long with a problem like Kazan aboard, in fact the tension was kept under control by fairly simple means. Keep the minds of the workers occupied, was the prime rule.

Hence during every arbitrary day there was a training class in the canteen, to teach some administrative job, or to put a shine on the reading ability of those who possessed it. There were also many entertainments—by the standard of the crew’s home world, very crude, but to the children of the Dyasthala and in fact to most of the other workers new and interesting. As a result, Kazan was often left by himself in the cabin, staring at nothing.

That gave Clary her chance.

She slid back the door-panel almost silently and stepped through as though afraid of being heard, then closed it with equal care. No one was present except Kazan, who lay as usual flat on his back, his vacant eyes on the bunk over him. There were folding seats clipped to the walls. Clary took one of these gently from its place and opened it as she walked to the side of Kazan’s bunk.

Then she slammed it down on the floor with a crash that made the metal of the cabin ring angrily, and sat on it. Even that barely disturbed the mirror surface of Kazan’s calm.

“All right,” she said when he had rolled his head incuriously to look at her. “Out with it, Kazan. Who are you?”

As simply as that, it began.

For that question was the key to the nightmare haunting him—a darkness populated with hungry monsters, in which his mouth, open to scream, filled with sour water and the taste of the beasts around, in which his ears were deafened first by a rasping hoot rising towards a whistle, then by a rush of water. A struggle against cruel steel shackles holding his wrists, so that he could not even strike out against the huge threatening creatures that shared the darkness with him.

That was the beginning. What followed was that the darkness took a shape—a vague, formless, ill-defined shape with ember eyes. He seemed to be outside it and inside it at the same time, for he could look at it and still be engulfed by it.

The remorseless argument that went with the macabre images fell too readily into words. Kazan had gone to his death. Kazan manacled and helpless who had forgotten the trick of making steps of air had plunged into the lake and been swallowed up.

But Kazan had also been sold to a devil by human devils who had not asked his leave, and the devil had taken him out of the clutch of death to serve for a year and a day. Kazan accordingly was dead. Let the devil move the corpse as he would, Kazan could have no part in it.

Yet, he was still aware. He could remember things, foggily, as he had remembered that he knew Hego. He had no sense of discontinuity except the break between the moment when he was seized by the thing in the black water, and the moment he realized he had been flung on to a patch of soft mud beside the lake, and aside from his bruises and the sickness the foul water had brought on him was unhurt. He could even remember the click which he had felt rather than heard when the vast cruel beak made its first stab at him and severed the steel cuffs linking his wrists. He could even remember that the end of the beak was rough, and had rasped the skin of his back, and torn a hole in his fine black shirt with the silver piping, so that afterwards the thermostatic circuitry did not work.

Or perhaps the water had put it out of action.

Was he Kazan, saved by a combination of miracles? Or was he the puppet of a black being with eyes like coals?

“Who are you, Kazan?”

That fresh-faced girl insisting that he answer—he could hate her for voicing the question, he could pound her to a sack of bones in blue-bruised skin because he had wished to do that to Bryda and her sneering lover, the prince. He had come from the shore of the lake driven by only that lasting hatred out of all the many desires which once had motivated him as Kazan. He had been cheated, as they informed him much later.

Some of that part was blurred, too. Could the break have come there? No, for when he set his mind to it and concentrated he knew there was, in fact, no break.

Only his mind flinched away from some of the happenings at that time. The memories blended and ran into each other, like wet colors laid too closely side by side. The burning of the Dyasthala, the laying low of the buildings with crackling violence, and the people swarming out like insects from a disturbed nest—was it then that he had suffered the beating? Or was that when he went hunting for Bryda and Luth, and they took him for a madman and wanted to put him in a hospital, misled by his fine clothes into thinking he was one of the haughty? Then, the quality of what he wore showed despite the soaking in the filthy lake. Later he was dressed as he had been for most of his life—in rags. And a stink of himself.

Part of that picture ran off in its turn into a vision of the fine big room, and himself in front of the mirror, admiring garments he had demanded as the price of doing—what? No one could believe that he, Kazan, had carved steps out of the air and brought Prince Luth down them from prison. Not even Kazan could believe that. The devil did it. Using the body named Kazan. The vision of the mirror and himself so smartly clothed ran into a blurred picture of his rags and dirt, sometimes before his encounter with Bryda and the conjurer, sometimes after, at the time when he went with the rest to join the gray line on the gray concrete under the gray sky because in some obscure manner he had understood that this was a means of escape.

And last of all the vision of himself changed to a black, ill-defined shape which gazed into the mirror with eyes like dying coals.

That was the point where he started to scream.

Unnerved by the suddenness of his tortured cry, Clary leapt back from his side, upsetting the stool on which she had been sitting. Her face going pale, she listened and watched for as long as she could endure it. Some of the things that poured out made her mouth work and forced her to close her eyes for long seconds together.

Then, when she could stand no more, she hurled herself at the door and clawed it open. She fled incontinently down the corridor.

At the barrier between the crew’s quarters and those of the worker-cargo, she hammered till a spaceman came in answer. Seeing her, he immediately made to slam the barrier into place again; a worker had no business bothering the crew. He just had time to regret so doing.

Panting, Clary stood over his unconscious form. She hoped she hadn’t hit him too hard. A blow to the vocal cords was dangerous, and could easily kill. But it was his own fault, for not realizing that a weak-looking girl in the Dyasthala could not possibly have been weak, or she would never have survived her teens.

She had no idea which way to go now she was in the crew’s area of the ship. She could see only more corridors. The ship was riddled with them, like a piece of old and worm-infested wood. Things were rather more luxurious here, but to a Dyasthala thief gradations like that were of small importance. At random she decided which way to go, and broke into a stumbling run.

By a chance which later she looked back on as a small miracle, the first crewman she encountered since the misguided man who had tried to slam the barrier in her face was the only officer she had seen before except the captain. Catching sight of him fifty paces distant down a corridor that she crossed, she shouted at him and he turned. He recognized her at once. After a glance behind him, seeming nervous, he began to walk towards her.

“What is it?” he said. “And what are you doing in this part of the ship, anyway?”

“Have you got a doctor in this—this flying mantrap?” she flung at him.

Balden blinked. Again he glanced behind him, as though hoping someone would come to his aid. He said, “Ah—yes, we do have doctors aboard.”

“Then you’d better get one of them down to Kazan quick,” Clary said. “He’s sick in the head. That’s what’s been the trouble all along. What difference does it make whether his devil was real or not, if he thinks it was real? And”—her face twisted suddenly with remembered disgust—“he thinks it was real. By the wyrds, he thinks it was real!”

IX

When the white-coated young doctor brought Kazan back to the boundary of the crew’s and workers’ quarters two ships’ days later, Clary was waiting for him. He seemed to be in a daze, but it could be seen at once that something had happened to change him. He walked as though he meant it, was the way Clary summed it up to herself, instead of going with a kind of indefinable reluctance.

The doctor nodded to her. “You must be Clary,” he said. “Well, here he is. All yours.”

“How is he?” Clary demanded. “What was wrong with him?”

“Interesting case,” the doctor said with a trace of professional warmth. “I’m not absolutely sure what happened to him, of course. There hasn’t been very much time, but what I think is that this narrow escape from death he had sent him into a sort of fugue. The lack of affect was typical, and he had incomplete amnesia—rejection of unpleasant memories. I see this doesn’t mean very much to you, though. Get him to talk to you about it himself, then. He has all his memory back now, and it’s up to him to make his own kind of sense out of it. You’re his girl?”

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Clary said.

The doctor looked her up and down in a way that was not at all professional. A glint of humor showed in his eyes. He said, “He must have been in a worse way than I thought. Well, he’ll get another check before we hit Vashti, and I’ll have a word with the base doctor—show him my records. But he ought to be okay from now on.”

He raised his hand and stepped back while the barrier was pushed into place again. Clary found herself thinking that he was rather nice.

She turned away and found Kazan studying her as though seeing her for the first time. His eyes had come alive in his face now, as if his mind had been brought out from under a cloud. He said, “I feel a lot different. Thank you.”

The moment she heard his voice she too had a feeling that this was a first meeting. Unaccountable embarrassment made her glance down at the floor; she saw herself make a childlike movement with one foot, as she might have dug her toe into the ground a long way away in the Dyasthala. She muttered, “Well, I didn’t do anything.”

“Thanks anyway,” he countered.

She hesitated. Then the urgent need to know what had come of this startling change in him caught hold of her. She gestured down the corridor. “Everyone is at the class in the canteen,” she said. “Come and tell me what they did to you, and what really caused your trouble.”

A few moments later they were sitting facing each other in the empty cabin and Kazan was leaning back and looking with a puzzled expression at a spot on the far wall.

“What they did to me,” he said. “That—well, I’m not sure. The doctor tried to tell me, but I didn’t get most of it.” A frustrated note crept into his voice. “He said something about selective stimulation of the brain. They put something over my head, and I went through all the things that were bothering me in a sort of slow motion so I had the chance to pick out what was real and what wasn’t. It didn’t hurt, but some of the things made me
sweat.
”

“But you know why you were in the mess you’d got into?” Clary pressed him.

“That, yes.” Kazan rubbed his hands together thoughtfully. “Do I have to tell you about the lake, and the rest of that?”

Clary shook her head quickly. She said, “I heard that just—just before I went to get the doctor to you. It was horrible.”

“That’s so. But—well, see it like this. I came to on the mudbank by the lake, and just about all I could feel was that I was full of hate. To my ears I was full of it. I didn’t care about that dustbrain Hego, or the other one who helped to put me in the lake, Axam. It was Bryda I was after, and her sneering Prince Luth. I was going after them. I was going to sell out Luth’s proposed revolt, first of all. But that was too remote to satisfy me. Short of throwing him and Bryda in the lake where they’d thrown me, I wanted to see them die some other way. A good, ugly way.”

Clary tried not to shudder, and failed. There was still acid venom in Kazan’s voice when he spoke of Bryda and Luth.

“Well, it would take too long to tell you everything that got in my way. The thing that finished it was simple. Luth had this man Yarco serving him—a good guy, that I might have liked if I hadn’t met him the way I did. Yarco had been lost on a bet before he was born to the prince’s father, and he’d spent fifty years of life pledged to the royal family, never free to lift a finger for himself. And the night I was put in the lake Yarco killed himself. Word got around. It was held to be a bad omen. So when the prince’s revolt started to go wrong, someone close to him decided to cut his losses and poisoned him. I don’t know what happened to Bryda. Maybe the same.

“You see, the only thing which had been driving me since I got up off the mud by the lake was my need to get even with Luth. I lost the chance. I got the idea into my head that I should have been dead anyway. So I acted as dead as I could, I guess.”

“How did they get you out of it?” Clary said.

Kazan shrugged. “Just made me see I was being a fool. I don’t know about that devil yet—and what seems crazy, I know for sure now that I didn’t dream about making the steps in the air. I really did that, and not even what the doctor put me through made me remember how I worked the trick. It doesn’t worry the doctor; he just said it was a quasi-real memory, whatever that means, and would take a long time to set right, but it wouldn’t worry me badly any more. Because he made me see the important thing.”

“Which is—?”

“That it was me, and not any devil, that got me out of the lake alive. He said some of it was sheer luck, but the rest was myself. He explained how sometimes under stress your mind will go into overdrive, and you’ll do things that will get you out of trouble without having to waste time on figuring them through beforehand. He made me see that the way my manacles were bitten through was the result of my desperately trying to get away from the monster’s beak. And the way I got thrown on shore was a result of the monster trying to get a tasty morsel—me—out of reach of a competitor.”

“You’re not satisfied with that, are you?” Clary said in an even voice.

There was a long silence. Kazan stared at her, a haunted look coming and going behind his eyes. He said at last, “No. How could you tell?”

“You sound as though you’re trying to convince yourself,” she answered.

He got to his feet and began to pace back and forth in the narrow limits of the walkway between the bunks. “The doctor did warn me,” he said after three turns. “But he said what counted was that now I’ve started to think that I can do something about it again, instead of just refusing to face it because it was too big for me.”

“You’ve certainly made a start on that,” Clary said, wanting to reassure him. “But something is still worrying you.”

“Yes, this devil, that’s all. Because if the devil was a clever conjuring trick to delude Bryda, then I didn’t make the steps in the air. I couldn’t have. But Hego was there and saw me do it. Many people saw me. And if the devil was real—”

He broke off and sat down, his face going pale.

“What?” she prompted.

“Then I’m pledged to it for a year and a day,” Kazan said in a dull voice.

She rose from her place opposite him and sat down beside him, putting her arm round his shoulders in a comforting gesture. She said, “Kazan, why don’t you just think it out? Do you feel that this—this devil is doing anything to you? Haven’t you been shown that your own actions can account for what’s happened? Surely if you can’t find any difference in yourself then that’s the same as there being no difference.”

“I guess so,” he said wearily, putting his palms up to rub at his eyes in a quick tired gesture.

“What did the doctor say about that?”

“Pretty much what you’ve said. Tell you the trouble, though. There’s one man I’d have liked to ask about it, and I can’t, because he’s dead. That was Yarco. He used to sort of hint at the way he felt, never having been his own master. He used to talk about the decree of the wyrds, and about our being at the mercy of the stars. It seemed to make sense to him. It explained his life for him. But I never took the opportunity of talking about it with him, and now I never can.”

Clary was silent for a moment, frowning. She felt frustrated. Her mind wasn’t used to coping with such abstract problems as these—the nature of possession if there was such a thing, of human destiny, of free will and bondage. She could get an intuitive grasp of the way Kazan must be suffering, but she could not hold on to the concepts long enough to show in words that she understood. But there was something frightening about his predicament, she could tell that, and she was moved to do the only thing she could, which was to show her sympathy.

She said awkwardly, “It seems to me you could think yourself into his place. It doesn’t seem all that different from having been born in the Dyasthala, to me. That was a weight, too. I made up my mind when I was just a kid that I was going to get out of the Dyasthala, and I worked at it. Learned to read. Learned to count. Took whatever I could whenever I could that looked as if it might come in useful to get me out of there. I’d looked at all the people who didn’t make it. I didn’t want to end like them. Know what I mean?”

Kazan turned his head and after a moment’s pause nodded.

“But I guess I wouldn’t ever have made it,” she went on in a lower voice. “Not if they hadn’t cleared the whole quarter and made us get out. There were always too many problems. There was always the one you couldn’t figure out before you ran into it, because it wasn’t part of the Dyasthala’s world. And those were the problems you didn’t get the chance to tackle a second time, so it wasn’t any good learning from your fist mistake.”

“I do know what you mean,” Kazan said. He leaned his elbows on his knees. “Is that why you signed on to work on Vashti?”

“Well—somewhat. But there was the man I was living with, too—the man who taught me to read. He thought he was going to live off me, and I didn’t.”

Kazan nodded. He didn’t need details.

“And you?” Clary said.

“Why did I join the line to sign on, you mean? Oh, mostly I went because that was where people from the Dyasthala were going. I had this crazy notion out of fear. I was going back into the Dyasthala because people have always gone there to hide, and I guess I hoped in the back of my mind that the devil couldn’t trace me there. Same reason took me out to the spaceport with the rest. Maybe the devil couldn’t follow me off the planet. But that was a crazy hope, of course.”

Something in his tone alerted Clary. She said sharply, “What do you mean?”

“When the conjurer called up the devil inside his ring,” Kazan said slowly, “the first thing the devil said was ‘What world is this?’ And the conjurer said something in reply. I thought it was a charm to control the devil. But I heard it pretty clearly, it turned out, and the doctor was able to make me remember it even though I didn’t understand it. He recorded it and played it to me, and said that it was a set of stellar co-ordinates. Like an address, he said. The conjurer was actually telling the devil what world he had come to and where it lay in the galaxy.”

He shivered; she felt it all up the arm she had laid across his shoulders.

“If you want to look at it that way,” she said, “it’s a pretty poor devil that has to be told where it’s come to. I think you’re right in hoping that it can’t follow you to Vashti. How’s it to know where you’ve gone?”

He shook his head. “No, you don’t understand,” he said in a hopeless voice. “I was pledged for a year and a day, and only a couple of months have gone by. The problem isn’t: how would it know where I’ve gone? It’s how am
I
to know what it meant by service, and how do I know that I’m not already serving it by going to Vashti? Maybe it wanted me on Vashti!”

When Clary could offer no answer, he got to his feet. A crooked smile lit his face, which reassured her a little. He said, “Of course, I know the only thing to do is to wait and see. And a year and a day isn’t long anyway. Whatever the doctor did for me, he at least seems to have given me the guts to sweat it out. And you’re helping me too, you know.”

Clary met his eyes steadily. After a moment she said, “I’m very glad. I really am very glad indeed.”