A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

V

Flandry’s office, if that was the right name for it, seemed curiously spare amidst the sybaritic arrangements Kossara had observed elsewhere aboard. She wondered what his private quarters were like. But don’t ask. He might take that as an invitation. Seated in front of the desk behind which he was, she made her gaze challenge his.

“I know this will be painful to you,” he said. “You’ve had a few days to rest, though, and we must go through with it. You see, the team that ’probed you appears to have made every imaginable blunder and maybe created a few new ones.” She must have registered her startlement, for he continued, “Do you know how a hypnoprobe works?”

Bitterness rose in her. “Not really,” she said. “We have no such vile thing on Dennitza.”

“I don’t approve either. But sometimes desperation dictates.” Flandry leaned back in his chair, ignited a cigarette, regarded her out of eyes whose changeable gray became the hue of a winter overcast. His tone remained soft: “Let me explain from the ground up. Interrogation is an unavoidable part of police and military work. You can do it on several levels of intensity. First, simple questioning; if possible, questioning different subjects separately and comparing their stories. Next, browbeating of assorted kinds. Then torture, which can be the crude inflicting of pain or something like prolonged sleep deprivation. The trouble with these methods is, they aren’t too dependable. The subject may hold out. He may lie. If he’s had psychosomatic training, he can fool a lie detector; or, if he’s clever, he can tell only a misleading part of the truth. At best, procedures are slow, especially when you have to crosscheck whatever you get against whatever other information you can find.

“So we move on to narcoquiz, drugs that damp the will to resist. Problem here is, first, you often get idiosyncratic reactions or nonreactions. People vary a lot in their body chemistry, especially these days when most of humanity has lived for generations or centuries on worlds that aren’t Terra. And, of course, each nonhuman species is a whole separate bowl of spaghetti. Then, second, your subject may have been immunized against everything you have in your medicine chest. Or he may have been deep-conditioned, in which case no drug we know of will unlock his mind.”

Between the shoulderblades, Kossara’s back hurt from tension. “What about telepathy?” she snapped.

“Often useful but always limited,” Flandry said. “Neural radiations have a low rate of information conveyance. And the receiver has to know the code the sender is using. For instance, if I were a telepath, and you concentrated on thinking in Serbic, I’d be as baffled as if you spoke aloud. Or worse, because individual thought patterns vary tremendously, especially in species like ours which don’t normally employ telepathy. I might learn to read your mind—slowly, awkwardly, incompletely at best—but find that everybody else’s was transmitting gibberish as far as I was concerned. Interspecies telepathy involves still bigger difficulties. And we know tricks for combatting any sort of brain listener. A screen worn on the head will heterodyne the outgoing radiation in a random fashion, make it absolutely undecipherable. Or, again, training, or deep conditioning, can be quite effective.”

He paused. Wariness crossed his mobile countenance. “There are exceptions to everything,” he murmured, “including what I’ve said. Does the name Aycharaych mean anything to you?”

“No,” she answered honestly. “Why?”

“No matter now. Perhaps later.”

“I am a xenologist,” Kossara reminded him. “You’ve told me nothing new.”

“Eh? Sorry. Unpredictable what somebody else does or does not know about the most elementary things, in a universe where facts swarm like gnats. Why, I was thirty years old before I learned what the Empress Theodora used to complain about.”

She stared past his smile. “You were going to describe the hypnoprobe.”

He sobered. “Yes. The final recourse. Direct electronic attack on the brain. On a molecular level, bypassing drugs, conditionings, anything. Except—the subject can have been preconditioned, in his whole organism, to die when this happens. Shock reaction. If the interrogation team is prepared, it can hook him into machines that keep the vital processes going, and so have a fair chance of forcing a response. But his mind won’t survive the damage.”

He ground his cigarette hard against the lip of an ash-taker before letting the stub be removed. “You weren’t in that state, obviously.” His voice roughened. “In fact, you had no drug immunization. Why weren’t you narcoed instead of ’probed? Or were you, to start with?”

“I don’t remember—” Astounded, Kossara exclaimed, “How do you know? About me and drugs, I mean? I didn’t myself!”

“The slave dealer’s catalogue. His medic ran complete cytological analyses. I put the data through a computer. It found you’ve had assorted treatments to resist exotic conditions, but none of the traces a psychimmune would show.”

Flandry shook his head, slowly back and forth. “An overzealous interrogator might order an immediate ’probe, instead of as a last resort,” he said. “But why carry it out in a way that wiped your associated memories? True, such things do happen occasionally. For instance, a particular subject might have a low threshold of tolerance; the power level might then be too high, and disrupt the RNA molecules as they come into play under questioning. As a rule, though, permanent psychological effects—beyond those which bad experiences generally leave—are rare. A competent team will test the subject beforehand and establish the parameters.”

He sighed. “Well, the civil war and aftermath lopped a lot off the top, in my Corps too. Coprolite-brained characters who’d ordinarily have been left in safe routineering assignments were promoted to fill vacancies. Maybe you had the bad luck to encounter a bunch of them.”

“I am not altogether sorry to have forgotten,” Kossara mumbled.

Flandry stroked his mustache. “Ah … you don’t think you’ve suffered harm otherwise?”

“I don’t believe so. I can reason as well as ever. I remember my life in detail till shortly before I left for Diomedes, and I’m quite clear about everything since they put me aboard ship for Terra.”

“Good.” Flandry’s warmth seemed genuine. “There are enough unnecessary horrors around, without a young and beautiful woman getting annulled.”

He rescued me from the slime pit, she thought. He has shown me every kindness and courtesy. Thus far. He admits—his purpose is to preserve the Empire.

“What pieces do you recall, Kossara?” Flandry had not used her first name before.

She strained fingers against each other. Her pulse beat like a trapped bird. No. Don’t bring them back. The fear, the hate, the beloved dead.

“You see,” he went on, “I’m puzzled as to why Dennitza should turn against us. Your Gospodar supported Hans, and was rewarded with authority over his entire sector. Granted, that’s laid a terrible work load on him if he’s conscientious. But it gives him—his people—a major say in the future of their region. A dispute about the defense mechanisms for your home system and its near neighbors … well, that’s only a dispute, isn’t it, which he may still have some hope of winning. Can’t you give me a better reason for him to make trouble? Isn’t a compromise possible?”

“Not with the Imperium!” Kossara said out of upward-leaping rage.

“Between you and me, at least? Intellectually? Won’t you give me your side of the story?”

Kossara’s blood ebbed. “I … well, speaking for myself, the fighting cost me the man I was going to marry. What use an Empire that can’t keep the Pax?”

“I’m sorry. But did any mortal institution ever work perfectly? Hans is trying to make repairs. Besides, think. Why would the Gospodar—if he did plan rebellion—why would he send you, a girl, his niece, to Diomedes?”

She summoned what will and strength she had left, closed her eyes, searched back through time.

{Bodin Miyatovich was a big man, trim and erect in middle age. He bore the broad, snub-nosed, good-looking family face, framed in graying dark-blond hair and close-cropped beard, tanned and creased by a lifetime of weather. He eyes were beryl. Today he wore a red cloak over brown tunic and breeks, gromatz leather boots, customary knife and sidearm sheathed on a silver-studded belt.

Dyavo-like, he paced the sun deck which jutted from the Zamok. In gray stone softened by blossoming creepers, that ancestral castle reared walls, gates, turrets, battlements, wind-blown banners (though the ultimate fortress lay beneath, carved out of living rock) above steep tile roofs and pastel-tinted half-timbered stucco of Old Town houses. Thence Zorkagrad sloped downward; streets changed from twisty lanes to broad boulevards; traffic flitted around geometrical buildings raised in modern materials by later generations. Waterborne shipping crowded docks and bay. Lake Stoyan stretched westward over the horizon, deep blue dusted with glitter cast from a cloudless heaven. Elsewhere beyond the small city, Kossara could from this height see cultivated lands along the shores: green trees, hedges, grass, and yellowing grain of Terran stock; blue or purple where native foliage and pasture remained; homes, barns, sheds, sunpower towers, widely spaced; a glimpse of the Lyubisha River rolling from the north as if to bring greeting from her father’s manse. Closer by, the Elena flowed eastward, oceanward; barges plodded and boats danced upon it. Here in the middle of the Kazan, she could not see the crater walls which those streams clove. But she had a sense of them, ramparts against glacier and desert, a chalice of warmth and fertility.

A breeze embraced her, scented by flowers, full of the sweet songs of guslars flitting ruddy to and from their nests in the vines. She sat back in her chair and thought, guilty at doing so, what a pity to spend such an hour on politics.

Her uncle’s feet slammed the planks. “Does Molitor imagine we’ll never get another Olaf or Josip on the throne?” the Gospodar rumbled. “A clown or a cancer … and, once more, Policy Board, Admiralty, civil service bypassed, or terrorized, or corrupted. If we rely on the Navy for our whole defense, what defense will we have against future foolishness or tyranny? Let the foolishness go too far, and we’ll have no defense at all.”

“Doesn’t he speak about preventing any more civil wars?” Kossara ventured.

Bodin spat an oath. “How much of a unified command is possible, in practical fact, on an interstellar scale? Every fleet admiral is a potential war lord. Shall we keep nothing to set against him?” He stopped. His fist thudded on a rail. “Molitor trusts nobody. That’s what’s behind this. So why should I trust him?”

He turned about. His gaze smoldered at her. “Besides,” he said, slowly, far down in his throat, “the time may come … the time may not be far off … when we need another civil war.”}

“No—” she whispered. “I can’t remember more than … resentment among many. The Narodna Voyska has been a, a basic part of our society, ever since the Troubles. Squadron and regimental honors, rights, chapels, ceremonies—I’d stand formation on my unit’s parade ground at sunset—us together, bugle calls, volley, pipes and drums, and while the flag came down, the litany for those of our dead we remembered that day—and often tears would run over my cheeks, even in winter when they froze.”

Flandry smiled lopsidedly. “Yes, I was a cadet once.” He shook himself a bit. “Well. No doubt your militia intertwines with a lot of civilian matters, social and economic. For instance, I’d guess it doubles as constabulary in some areas, and is responsible for various public works, and—yes. Disbanding it would disrupt a great deal of your lives, on a practical as well as emotional level. His Majesty may not appreciate this enough. Germania doesn’t contain your kind of society, and though he’s seen a good many others, between us, I wouldn’t call him a terribly imaginative man.

“Still, I repeat, negotiations have not been closed. And whatever their upshot, don’t you yourself have the imagination to see he means well? Why this fanatical hatred of yours? And how many Dennitzans share it?”

“I don’t know,” Kossara said. “But personally, after what men of the Empire did to, to people I care about—and later to me—”

“May I ask you to describe what you recall?” Flandry answered. She glared defiance. “You see, if nothing else, maybe I’ll find out, and be able to prove to their superiors, those donnickers rate punishment for aggravated stupidity.”

He picked up a sheaf of papers on his desk and riffled them. The report on me must have violated my privacy more than I could ever do myself, she thought in sudden weariness. All right, let me tell him what little I can.

{A cave in the mountains near Salmenbrok held the sparse gear which kept her and her fellows alive. They stood around her on a ledge outside, but except for Trohdwyr shadowy, no real faces or names upon them any more. Cliffs and crags loomed in darkling solidity, here and there a gnarled tree or a streak of snow tinged pink by a reddish sun high in a purple heaven. The wind thrust slow, strong, chill; it had not only an odor but a taste like metal. A cataract, white and green half a kilometer away, boomed loud through thick air that also shifted the pitch and timbre of every sound. Huddled in her parka, she felt how Diomedes drew on her more heavily than Dennitza, nearly two kilograms added to every ten.

Eonan of the Lannachska poised almost clear in her mind. Yellow eyes aglow, wings unfurled for departure, he said in his shrill-accented Anglic: “You understand, therefore, how these things strike at the very life of my folk? And thus they touch our whole world. We thought the wars between Flock and Fleet were long buried. Now they stir again—”

(Both moons were aloft and near the full, copper-colored, twice the seeming size of Mesyatz (or Luna), one slow, one hasty across a sky where few stars blinked and those in alien constellations. The night cold gnawed. Flames sputtered and sparked. Their light fetched Trohdwyr from darkness, where he sat on feet and tail in the cave mouth, roasting meat from the ration box. The smoke bore a sharp aroma. He said to Kossara and her fellow humans: “It’s not for an old zmay to tell you wise heads how to handle a clutch of xenos. I’m here as naught but my lady’s servant and bodyguard. However, if you want to keep peace among the natives, why not bring some Ythrians to explain Ythri really has no aim of backing any rebellion-minded faction?”

Steve Johnson—no! Stefan Ivanovich. Why in the name of madness should she think of him as Steve Johnson?—replied out of the face she could not give a shape: “That’d have to be arranged officially. The resident can’t on his own authority. He’d have to go through the sector governor. And I’m not sure if the sector governor wants Ythri—or Terra—to know how bad the situation is on Diomedes.”

“Besides,” added -?-, “the effects aren’t predictable, except they’d be far-reaching. We do have a full-scale cultural crisis here. Among nonhumans, at that.”

“Still,” said a third man (woman? And was his/her nose really flat, eyes oblique, complexion tawny?), “whatever instincts and institutions they have, I think we can credit them—enough of them—with common sense. What we will need, however, is a least a partial solution to the Flock’s difficulties. Otherwise, dashing their hopes of Ythrian help could drive them to … who knows what?” (If those features were not a mere trick of tattered memory, well, maybe this was a non-Dennitzan whom Uncle Bodin or his agents had engaged.}

“Yes,” Kossara opined, “the trick will be to stay on top of events.”

Was that the very night when the Imperial marines stormed them?

{Or another night? Trohdwyr shouted, “Let go of my lady!” In the gloom he snatched forth his knife. A stun pistol seat him staggering out onto the ledge, to collapse beneath the moons. After a minute, quite deliberately, the marine lieutenant gave him a low-powered blaster shot in the belly.

No surprise that Kossara didn’t remember the fight which killed her companions. She knew only Trohdwyr, stirring awake again. His guts lay cooked below his ribs. After she tore loose from the grip upon her and fell to her knees beside him, she caught the smell. “Trohdwyr, draganr He coughed, could not speak, maybe could not know her through the pain that blinded him. She raised his head, hugged it close, felt the blunt spines press into her breasts. “Dwynafor, dwynafor, odhal tiv,” she heard herself crazily croak.

A man dragged her away. “Come along.” She turned on him, spitting, fingers rigid for a karate attack. Another man got a lock on her from behind. The first cuffed her till the world rocked. “All that fuss over a xeno,” he complained, and booted Trohdwyr for a while. She couldn’t tell whether the ychan felt the blows; but his body jerked like a dropped puppet.}

{The office was cramped, its air stale. The commander of Intelligence said, “Nothing slow and easy for you, Vymezal. Treason’s too urgent a matter; and traitors deserve no careful handling.”

“I am not—”

“We’ll soon find out. Take her away, O’Brien. I want her prepared for hypnoprobing.”}

{Downward whirl through shrieks, thunders, flashes, pain and pain, down toward emptiness, but oh, she cannot reach blessed cool nothing; eternity has her.

The Golden Face, the cinnabar eyes, an indigo plume above, a voice of mercy: “Rest, Kossara. Sleep. Forget.” No more.}

{She was still dazed, numb, when the drumhead court-martial condemned her to life enslavement.}

Flandry considered the papers in his hands. Her few dry words appeared to have turned him as impersonal, for he said in the same tone, expressionless, “Thank you. Not much left in your mind, is there? No explanation of your hatred for the Empire.”

“What do you mean?” exploded from her. “After what I told!”

“Please,” he said. “You’re a bright, educated, reasonably objective person. Taking your memories as correct—which they may not be; you could be recalling pieces of delirium—you should be able to entertain the possibility that you and your friends had the bad luck to meet fools and brutes such as infest every outfit. You should consider using established procedures to have them identified, traced, penalized. Unless, of course, you’re so set in your attitude that this business seems typical, mere confirmation of what you already knew.”

He glanced up. “Have you been told exactly what’s in this report on you? The Intelligence report, that is.”

“No,” she got forth.

“I didn’t expect you would. It’s secret. Let me give you a summary.” His vision skimmed the sheets he flipped through as he recited:

“Overtly, you and your attendant Trohdwyr arrived at Thursday Landing for a duly approved xenological research project on behalf of your, um, Shkola, among the Diomedeans of the Sea of Achan area. The declared motivation was that Dennitzans have lately opened trade with a comparable species near home, and want an idea of what to expect from continued impact of high-technology civilization on them. Quite normal. The Imperial resident provided you the customary assistance. He and his household depose that you were a charming guest who gave them no hint of bad intentions. However, you were soon off for the field. They never saw you again.

“Meanwhile, Naval Intelligence was busy throughout that part of space. There was reason to suspect some kind of hostile operation, taking advantage of widespread disorganization caused by the war and not yet amended. Diomedes was certainly a trouble spot, secessionism steadily gaining strength in a principal society of the planet. Those revolutionaries seemed to hope for Ythrian support.

“But other, more reliable sources indicated Ythri had nothing to do with this. Then who were the humans known, from loyal native witnesses, to be active on Diomedes? If not Avalonians, working for the Domain they live in, who?

“With the help of informers, Intelligence agents tracked down a group of these subversives to a mountain hideout. Seeing what they took for a Merseian, they leaped to conclusions … not unjustified, it turned out. The gang resisted arrest and, except for you, perished in the fire fight. Blasters in an enclosed space like a cave—the marines were wearing combat armor and your companions were not. The fact that the suspects fought, under those circumstances, seems to prove they were as fanatical as your psychograph says you are.

“Hypnoprobed, you revealed you were the deputy of your uncle the Gospodar, come to check on the progress. His idea was that Dennitzans posing as Avalonians could incite an uprising on Diomedes. This by itself would draw Imperial attention there. The apparent likelihood of Ythri being behind it would decoy considerable of our armed strength, too. Then at the right moment—you quoted your uncle simply as speaking of a ‘lever’ to use on the Imperium, for getting concessions. But you spilled your belief—and you ought to know—that, if events broke favorably, he’d seize the chance to rebel. Depending on circumstances, he’d either try for the throne, or carry out the same plan as the late Duke Alfred was nursing along, to rip a sizable region loose from the Empire and place it under Merseian protection.

“Which, of course”—Flandry lifted his gaze again—“would give the Roidhunate a bridgehead right in that frontier. Do you wonder that the treatment you got was rough?”

Kossara sprang from her chair. “How crazy do you think we are?” she yelled.

“We’re bound for Diomedes to find out,” he said.

“Why not straight to Dennitza like an honest man?”

“Others will, never fear. Detective work on an entire nation, or just on its leaders, takes personnel and patience. A singleton like me does best vis-a-vis a small operation, as I suppose the one on Diomedes necessarily is.”

Flandry’s eyes narrowed. “If you want your liberty back, my dear, rather than being resold when I decide you’re not worth your keep, you will cooperate,” he said. “Think of it not as betraying your folk, but as helping save them from disastrously wrong-headed adventurers.

“We have a libraryful of material on Diomedes aboard. Study it. Ponder it. Something may jog your memory; a lot that you’ve forgotten is probably not irretrievably lost. Or you should be able to make deductions—you’re a smart girl—deductions about likely rendezvous points remaining, where we can snare more agents. Or, better yet, I’d guess: Diomedeans involved in the movement, never identified by our people, they should recognize you, if you show yourself in the proper ways. They should make contact and—do you see?”

“Yes!” she screamed. “And I won’t!”

She fled.

The man sat quiet for a while before he said to the empty air, “Very well, if you wish, Chives will bring you your meals in your cabin.”