Star Winds

Chapter TEN

“Caught you!”

Leaping from his bed, Rachad seized hold of the intruder who was in the act of stealthily lifting the lid of a clothes chest, and dragged him to the window. In the pale light of Castarpos the burglar blinked, his face paper-like, his throat feeling the prick of Rachad’s copper-pommelled poniard. It was Suivres, the Duke of Koss’s agent in Corrum. Just as Rachad had expected.

Outside the dank attic room, the town lay sleeping, looking like a slumped forest, its streets winding upward to the castle on the summit of the hill. Contemptuously Rachad pushed Suivres from him.

“Thief! Thought you would make off with my property, eh? Easier than dealing honestly, isn’t it?”

Suivres cleared his throat, and looked about him until he spotted an oil lamp gleaming in Castarpos’s light. With commendable aplomb he reached in his pocket for a flint and struck a spark onto the wick.

He turned to Rachad as the lamplight filled the room, not in the least abashed. He was dressed in puffed breeches and a tight-fitting doublet. He had a dried, somewhat weary face, the eyes pale and restless.

“I merely wished to confirm that you do indeed possess the remainder of the text,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “No theft was intended. After all, so far you have only produced one page.”

“Which you have taken to Amschel to have authenticated.”

“True. And it is authentic.” Suivres looked around the shabby rented room. “Where?…”

Rachad grinned. “Not here. I’m not as stupid as I look. I have it in a safe place, never fear.” He looked at Suivres speculatively. “I see you did not have the courtesy to return my page.”

Suivres shrugged. “There is one aspect of this business that puzzles us,” he said. “What are you doing on Arp? There is no other alchemist within systems of here, that I know of. Hardly the place to come if you are really searching for the matching half of the book.”

“It’s simple enough,” Rachad replied instantly, his mind tumbling over itself for an explanation. “While I was in the Ragnak system I heard that someone here was making the same inquiries as myself. So here I came to follow it up.”

“Ha ha! That someone was myself, putting out feelers on the Duke’s behalf.” He straightened, and seemed to make up his mind. “Very well, then. I am authorized to take you to the Duke, with the book. We leave in a few hours. Where is the book?”

“How do we get there? How far is it?”

“Only a few light-years. We travel by horseback to where I have a ship hidden, some miles over the horizon.”

Rachad felt nervous now that the moment of departure was approaching. “How can I trust you?” he said irritably. “Once we are away from here it will be easy for you to have me murdered and seize the book for yourself.”

Suivres raised his eyebrows in an offended manner. “Really! You insult my liege-lord to think he could behave in such a fashion!”

“Really!” Rachad snorted. He had heard plenty about the eccentric duke during the time he had been living in Corrum. His name was mentioned in mumbles and whispers. There were endless tales of the perversions and grotesques practiced within the sealed-up Aegis, where none of the normal standards of mankind was observed.

“The stories rife about the Duke do not give one confidence in his conduct,” he pointed out stiffly.

“All of them exaggerated… Many of them, at any rate.” Suivres waved a hand dismissively. “The Duke is noble, a gentleman. Now what’s the matter with you? You were keen enough before.”

Rachad bit his lip. Perhaps his best guarantee of safe conduct was that he had managed to pass himself off as an adept. Very likely Amschel was as eager to meet him as he was to meet Amschel.

“All right. I’ll collect the book, and meet you in two hours.”

“Excellent. Join me outside the town, on the polar road. I’ll have steeds waiting.”

After Suivres had gone Rachad dressed himself and sat down for a few minutes to think. Far-off Earth seemed appealingly cozy and safe now that he had begun to immerse himself in the rough-and-tumble of Maralian society. Maralia was so big. And yet it was but one of many star countries. This part of the galaxy, it seemed, was a confusion of kingdoms, empires, principalities and even one or two independent republics.

And over it all spread the shadow of the Kerek. Rachad knew now what fear went with the speaking of that name, and that the position of Maralia, indeed of any human nation, was insecure. There were times when his brash self-confidence faltered, and he felt out of his depth. Especially when he thought of the hated and unbalanced Duke of Koss, a decadent hermit who, so it was said, despised the whole cosmos.

But Rachad’s heart sank when he thought of the coming exploit. Entering the Aegis seemed to him now like descending into a deep hole from which there was no escape.

The horses provided by Suivres were of a long-legged variety bred specially for Arp, and they fairly leaped and clattered along the road that followed the contours of the slate-colored landscape.

Rachad had approached the meeting place with caution, but there was no evidence that Suivres planned anything treacherous and gradually his fears had abated. In his saddlebag was the lead-covered tome he had recovered from its keeper, his landlord (who had not taken kindly to being awakened in the middle of the night), and by now Baron Matello would have been informed of his departure. No doubt he was already sending word to his secret camp near the Aegis.

For two hours the loping Arp horses cantered along the highway, until eventually Suivres reined in and turned off to lead the way across slablike terrain which gave off ringing clicks when struck by the horses’ hooves.

Behind them the road passed out of sight. Their steeds slithered down shingle into a deep gully masked by snake-like trees which bore broad olive-green leaves. There, hidden by the overhanging branches, was a ship.

Though of spacefaring design, she seemed even smaller than the Wandering Queen, especially as she currently showed neither masts nor booms. Urging his mount forward between the trunks of the slippery trees, Suivres uttered a low halloo. Men appeared, wary and with drawn weapons at first, but quickly recognizing him.

Soon, with much sweating and groaning, the ship was being hauled on runners to the shallow end of the gully, where she stood under an open sky. Rachad went aboard while the horses were stripped of packs, saddles and bridles, and set loose. Sprits went out; sail was raised and found a current despite the nighttime hour.

Stealthily the ship wafted into the air, and before long had gained space. Casting out her whiplash rods, on which she then bent extraordinary lengths of silk, she went hurtling away from the amber sun.

For speed the smaller starship could not match the Bucentaur, and the journey lasted a week. They cruised through a small cluster of stars which glowed in a dozen colors, looking like a splendid, dazzling brooch. Finally they approached an aggressive, furnace-like sun, its surface whirling visibly white and red.

Three planets endured the vagaries of this contentious star. The ship slanted down toward the largest of them: a craggy world of gravel and granite.

The Aegis was set amid mountains, and seemed itself an artificial mountain, jutting up from the tumbled and chaotic slopes, lustrous gray in color, like graphite. Slanting pilasters buttressed its sloping walls, creating an effect, Rachad thought, not unlike that aimed at by the builders of the Temple of Hermes Trismegistus. But clearly no outward show was intended in this case. No crenellations crowned its heights. No window grills or firing slits relieved its sullen immensity. The Aegis brooded, looking inward, separated from the rest of existence.

The starship alighted on a downward slope and reeled in her sail rods. Rachad, clutching his precious tome to his chest, followed Suivres onto the gravely surface, shivering in the cold wind. It was hard to imagine that the obdurate, seamless mountain ahead of him was in fact under siege. Yet somewhere nearby, if what Baron Matello had said was true, an armed force hid, provisioned, presumably, from the mining towns that dotted the planet.

They trudged up the slope. “If the Aegis is impassable, how do we get inside?” Rachad asked, catching his breath.

“That is arranged with considerable circumspection,” Suivres answered wryly.

The vast fortress loomed over them. They made for an oblong outcropping that protruded from the foot of the Aegis. Although it was hard to see how anyone could have been watching, a part of the oblong slid aside, revealing a square chamber within.

Suivres pointed to the poniard in Rachad’s belt. “Get rid of that. No weapons are allowed within the Aegis.”

Reluctantly Rachad threw the poignard to the ground, and they stepped into the casemate. Behind them the panel closed up again. Light shone from a square gap in the ceiling, but it was impossible to see what, if anything, lay beyond it.

“This is the main gate?” Rachad whispered anxiously.

“Only a side door. The main entrance hasn’t been opened in fifty years.” Suivres raised his voice, calling out to an unseen guard. “I, Suivres, bring the guest who is expected!”

Rachad touched the wall of the chamber. The adamant of which it was made was smooth and silky—but hard as diamond.

Suddenly the wall facing the main bulk of the Aegis slid upward. Beyond lay the interior of the Duke of Koss’s lifetime retreat.

As he stepped through the portal, a bewildering melange of impressions swamped Rachad’s senses. There was the sound of flute music, drifting on the air as if through countless chambers. And then there was the air itself—so flooded with innumerable intriguing scents that it was like dark wine. The air was heavy, heady, with this meld of scents, which seemed to have been present for so long that it had fermented, producing an indescribably decadent aroma.

Guarding the portal stood a line of pikemen in pied livery of lilac and yellow, the chest blazon consisting of some sort of geometrical figure. They stepped aside, allowing the newcomers to pass between a gathering of people dressed in sumptuous but subdued colors, staring at Rachad curiously but silently.

Behind them lay a sybaritic scene that was hard to reconcile with the harshness of the mountain landscape outside. Indeed it was quite unlike what Rachad would have expected on entering any normal castle. Where were the inner defenses, the keeps, the sloping ramparts? The Aegis needed none, he realized. Its defense relied in toto on its adamant walls.

Instead, the portal opened onto an arcade richly hung with plush drapes of plum red and deep purple. On either side extended cross passages and staircases. At the far end were two broad sets of steps, one ascending, one descending, suggesting that the Aegis was as extensive below ground as it was above (a fact already known to Rachad through his talks with Flammarion). Up from the depths of the lower stair-passage there drifted a sparkling mist, or smoke, which thinned out into streamers and curlicues.

Yet despite the arcade’s size, it lacked spaciousness. The Aegis’s obsessively self-enclosed nature pervaded it, making it almost claustrophobic.

Rachad’s eyes rested on a huge statue that commanded the near end of the arcade. It was of a figure in a flowing robe, tall but with broad shoulders. The hair was cropped short and hung in a fringe over a bulging brow.

The face was extraordinary. It bore a pained, sneering, almost insane look—a look of ultimate rejection. The eyes stared straight ahead, as if fixed on something incomprehensible and horrifying.

This, Rachad thought, must be the Duke of Koss.

Suivres halted. Someone else had entered the arcade and was walking unhurriedly toward them. It was a man dressed in a loose, flowing purple robe, a man who might have been the model of the statue, except that he was slimmer and somewhat younger in appearance. The statue, Rachad realized, was of the old duke. This was the present master of the Aegis, the son and successor.

The resemblance between the two was striking, and yet markedly different. The second duke appeared austere rather than brutal, distracted rather than insane, an aesthete rather than a man of power. His eyes seemed permanently glazed, except when they focused, for long disturbing moments, on some object—as they did on Rachad, making him feel naked and transparent.

Hastily Rachad copied Suivres’s low bow. “Your Grace,” Suivres said humbly, “may I present Rachad Caban, an artifex, owner of the fragment we seek.”

“If all is as it seems, you have indeed done well, Suivres,” the duke murmured, his faint voice sounding to Rachad like the distant piping of the wind. “I shall reward you.”

“To serve Your Grace is reward enough!” Suivres replied ardently. It was evident that the duke inspired enormous respect in those around him, so much so that as he drew closer, with effete movements and giving off a waft of pungent scent, Rachad found himself trembling.

“Give His Grace the tome!” Suivres hissed out of the side of his mouth. With a start Rachad handed over the lead-bound book, noting as he did so that though barely above forty years of age if his appearance was any judge, the duke’s swept-back hair was streaked with gray.

Gracefully accommodating himself to its weight and bulk, the duke opened the volume and for a minute or two seemed deep in thought, his face bent to the beautifully colored pages. Eventually he nodded slowly, and again looked directly at Rachad.

“It has an authentic air. Have you studied the Asch Mezareph?”

“Er… I’ve examined it,” Rachad replied hesitantly.

“You seem very young to have had any extensive alchemical experience…” the duke observed pensively. “What operations have you performed?”

Rachad felt obliged to evade the question. “I owe everything to my master and mentor,” he said. “He sent me in search of the knowledge we lack, entrusting the book to me for the purpose.”

The duke pondered this. “Well, we shall find much to discuss in this text, you and I, not to speak of Master Amschel. Come, let me conduct you through my realm.”

Due to some acoustic effect the flute music faded as they approached the steps at the end of the arcade. The duke turned at the head of the stairs, smiling faintly at Rachad. Then he descended the steps, becoming shadowy in the thickening mist.

A tinkling sound reached Rachad’s ears as he encountered the first coils of the sparkling smoke. Stepping down the staircase was like floating through a cloud. The tones, initially random and inchoate, increased in volume and texture, coalescing as he moved into a collage of shifting, novel melodies of incredible complexity and color.

The duke’s voice drifted to him. “Does the melody mist please you? The smoke is composed of crystal particles, each emitting a tiny tone. In addition the crystals have a vibrational empathy with one another; they respond to each other, creating elaborate webs of sound that movement translates into times and harmonies. No composer could equal the inventiveness of the mist… music, I find, is a unique adjunct to the stirrings of the soul… My Aegis is everywhere pervaded by music… One could become lost in music…”

The murmuring voice went on, droning against the ever-meshing, ever-separating and commingling maze of melody, which was beginning to lull Rachad into a state of helpless fascination, especially as the melodies were so alien to his ear. But then they reached the bottom of the steps and, a little farther on, emerged into clearer air.

The duke stopped and stared straight ahead, his face slack, his eyes vacant. Then he turned and looked blankly at Rachad.

“Eh? What? Oh yes, it’s you again.”

They strolled across a mosaic floor strewn with what looked like rose petals. The music had faded to a tinkle, like the sound of a running stream in the background.

“You have seen the statue of my father,” the duke said. “He was a much maligned man. They called him a criminal, a traitor, a thief… whereas he was merely a philosopher, whose disgust with life led him to construct his own artificial life. In those days many famous philosophers and artists were invited into the Aegis… they settled here, and have brought up a generation who have known only the Aegis…”

“But do outside affairs never interest you, Your Grace?” Rachad asked.

“Never. The outside world does not exist, as far as I am concerned. Here we have created our own cosmos…” The duke made a wry mouth. “Would that I could seal off the Aegis from the rest of space and time altogether, to live self-existent, and alone… Amschel has spoken of the possibility, once the Great Work is completed.”

“But you depend on the outside for some things, surely? What about food?”

“The Aegis needs no supplies, either of food or of fuel. We grow food in our own culture gardens. And as for light—” He directed Rachad’s attention to the lamps that illuminated the concourse through which they were passing, milky hemispheres set in the ceiling and giving forth a clear white glow.

“The bowls are filled with a luminous substance which retains its glow for five years,” the duke told him. “It can then be revived by means of an alchemical process.”

“Extraordinary!” Rachad said. “I’ve never heard of that before!” For some reason it impressed him even more than the melody mist. Yet still he felt compelled to press the point of the duke’s isolation. “But tell me honestly, Your Grace—could you really stay aloof if Maralia were faced with a Kerek invasion?”

“Kerek? Kerek? I’ve heard that word somewhere…”

“An alien race who are making war on mankind!” Rachad supplied, amazed to see the unconcern on the duke’s face. “A race who may well end up enslaving the whole of humanity!”

“Enslave? Not I, not I… This invasion you speak of will wash over the Aegis but never break it… Never will man or alien dictate to me…”

They walked on, deeper and deeper into the Aegis. And as its atmosphere engulfed him, Rachad found himself less and less able to speak of outside events…

In fifty years the Aegis had become an inward-looking world of stunning artistic perfection. It was an art gallery, a museum, a sybarite’s palace, all rolled into one.

In his short tour Rachad saw only a fraction of the vast and mysterious building. But it was enough to give him the flavor of the duke’s aesthetic experiments—for he soon realized that though many men of genius had been at work here, they were all influenced by the peculiar private tastes the duke had inherited from his father. Everywhere there was quiet music, sometimes from the drifting melody mist, sometimes from indefinable distant sources, much of it strange and jarring to the ear—developed, Rachad imagined, from the odd dissonances and mindtwisting themes, lacking key or regular rhythm, that the melody mist generated. And often there were eerie cries, bellows, prolonged and unintelligible monologues, and frighteningly strange singing—though whether all of this emanated from madmen or from some form of drama that was being performed, Rachad did not inquire.

Yet despite all these sounds, an unnerving air of silence prevailed in the Aegis. Every noise, every cry, every note of music, seemed to be surrounded by this silence, seemed to be separated from every other sound by long gulfs of silence. It was a heavy, blank silence that to a newcomer was depressing. It might, Rachad thought, result from the surrounding walls of deadening adamant—yet somehow it seemed to him to be the endless silence of a long and continuing decadence.

The duke took him through a series of suites, each drenched in a particular color: the blue suite, of a rich luminous blue; the saffron suite, the magenta suite, and so on. “By lingering in these,” the duke told him, “one’s mind becomes saturated with a single color. Given long enough, I believe a human being would become incapable of perceiving any other color—anything but blue, for instance.”

“Has the experiment been carried out?” Rachad asked.

“Yes, by a second cousin of mine,” the duke replied. “He stayed for one year in the magenta suite. But he never emerged to put our thesis to the test. One day he accidentally opened an artery with his scarlet razor. Being unable to distinguish his flowing blood from the crimson satins, he quickly bled to death without realizing it.”

Wordlessly they left the monochrome rooms. Rachad found himself in a small picture gallery hung with a charming set of largish paintings. They all showed similar scenes: graceful men and women in long robes, conversing and relaxing in Arcadian settings, in shady groves, amid fluted columns and spacious colonnades. Their intelligent, serene faces, their ease of gesture, showed them to be a highly cultivated people. Rachad could imagine them to be the philosophers of ancient times, discoursing on the nature of the world.

“These are by Giacourt,” the duke announced evenly. “In my view, the greatest painter Maralia has ever produced. He spent his last twenty years with us.”

He conducted Rachad through the opposite door. Beyond was an identical gallery, hung with what at first seemed to be identical paintings. It took only moments, however, to realize the difference. In expression and stance, the figures had been subtly altered. They looked at one another now in a sly, speculative way, as if seized by new thoughts and feelings they could not subdue.

Beyond that was yet a third gallery, also identical. Here, using the same figures and the same settings, the artist had carried his sequence to a nauseating conclusion—an orgy of perversion, rape and hideous butchery that left Rachad sick and trembling with horror.

“Giacourt had no illusions concerning human nature,” the duke murmured. “You find such visions disturbing, perhaps? No matter… here in the Aegis you may enjoy whatever pleasures you choose. Come, and I will show you something that is the answer to all life’s strivings.”

They walked through a seemingly endless garden of multicolored orchids of enormous size which threw off clouds of heavy, sleepy scents. Purple and pink humming birds darted hither and thither, dipping their beaks into the giant bells and emerging dusted in golden powder. The garden was lit not by ceiling lights but by pulsing globes mounted on four-foot-high pedestals, so that a jungle of flaring shadows seemed to be added to the scene.

Finally they descended some steps and came to a sunken part of the garden. Here, in a low grotto, was what appeared to be a tiled circular mud bath, in which a dozen or so people sprawled with eyes closed, as if in sleep.

“This we call dream-slime,” the duke said, his distant, drifting voice adopting a caressing tone. “The recipe for the concoction was discovered by my father’s personal apothecary, after much trial and error… and considerable mental derangement of the patients he used as subjects.”

Stooping, he scooped up a handful of the mud, then took Rachad by the wrist and daubed a gob of it on the back of his hand. Immediately Rachad felt a warm, tingling sensation in the flesh of his hand. From it, a feeling of pleasure began to seep into him, a piercing, near-orgasmic pleasure, with an as-yet-undefined sense of expectancy…

He stared at the slime. On closer inspection the clay-colored stuff was actually composed of millions of motes, each a different color so that they all merged into the same muddy brown.

The pleasure intensified. With sudden panic he slopped the slime from him, letting it fall to the tiles, and wiped his hand on his breeches.

The duke laughed softly. “That was merely a foretaste. The real meaning of the slime is in the dreams it brings—waking dreams that take the place of current reality, or sleeping dreams, as you will.”

“It sounds… unhealthy,” Rachad muttered.

“Oh, no… the slime creates no fantasy world. It gives one nothing false or invented… it can create no new experience. What it does is cause one to live over again the pleasurable events one has already experienced—but to experience them intensified and heightened to exquisite, almost unbearable levels. Have you ever felt that life’s pleasures are a disappointment? How often, young man, have you desired a maid, only to find, when eventually you enjoy her, that it is less of a delight than you imagined it would be? Then what you need is the dream-slime. In it you can experience the highlights of life over again, but with an intensity that would make you faint away were you awake.”

Rachad stared bemused at the slumberers in the slime bath, for the first time noticing that they were all naked. “You will appreciate by now,” the duke said in a near-whisper, as though he barely possessed the energy to speak, “that we in the Aegis live a life of the utmost debauchery of the senses, indeed of all the faculties. And if our senses become jaded by abuse, if our bodies can no longer be stimulated to respond, why, it makes no difference. Dream-slime will add all that is missing, and more.”

Wordlessly Rachad followed his guide out of the orchid garden. His mind was scarcely on the other wonders that the duke showed to him, such as the waterfall of drugged wine that tumbled for seven of the Aegis’s levels, splashing onto rocks to form sparkling pools in which one could bathe and become sated. Indeed by this time his own capacity for new sights was itself sated, so much so that he merely felt bewildered when the duke showed him one of the most impressive of the Aegis’s artistic accomplishments: a number of salons and apartments based on illusion, which by means of clever lighting tricks, oddly shaped rooms and ingenious screens that moved unseen by the observer, left the occupant disorientated and unable to make normal perceptual judgments. He was then receptive to new perversions of the senses that were then introduced. Here were boudoirs where, by moving from one part of the room to another, one became either a midget or a giant in relation to one’s sexual partner. Here were private bordellos where women seemed to flit in and out of the walls, the floor, the air, attacking their client in endless streams and enmeshing him in an inescapable web of lechery. Here were painted picturamas so cunningly devised that Rachad could not believe that he would not be able to step into the incredible scenes they depicted.

Shortly he was to receive more evidence that the duke richly deserved his reputation for insanely wanton sensuality. Perceiving that his charge was by now surfeited with new impressions, the haughty aesthete observed that the Aegis’s day was well advanced, and that it was time to repair to the regular evening banquet.

While the meal progressed he turned the pages of The Root of Transformations, commenting lengthily on the text and pointing out significances in the illustrations, even in fine details, which were entirely novel to Rachad, and which he suspected would have been so even to Gebeth. Closing the book, the duke continued, in the vague and faltering voice that clearly belied a keen intellect, to talk of alchemical principles in general. He spoke of the fusion of positive and negative, of the alchemical marriage which must always take place within a sealed vessel, of the joust of the red and black knights, and so on. Going on from that, he gave Rachad the first clear account he had ever heard of the three primordial forces of sulphur, quicksilver and salt.

To this one-sided discourse Rachad added little, firstly because he knew little, but also because the duke’s table habits left him stupefied. His own food was familiar and appetizing, but to the duke there was served dish after dish of different foods altogether—unrecognizable stuffs which gave off bizarre aromas. The flavors, it seemed, were equally strange, a combination of the delicious and nauseous so overpowering that several times the duke lost control and turned to vomit into an urn placed near his chair.

Nor were his table pleasures limited to this stretching of the range of the palate. Rachad’s eyes bulged as, at intervals, young women, youths, even children, came forward from the sides of the hall and, in full view of everyone present, performed lascivious and perverted acts upon the duke’s person. In mid-sentence the duke would pause to grunt and moan, turning up his eyes in ecstasy. Then, giving Rachad a friendly leer, he would continue the talk where he had left off.

Finally he pushed away the latest offering, a plate of odious-smelling pale fruit, and gestured to the retainer to indicate that he was satisfied. Rachad looked around the hall. The other diners, who talked little, and came and went as they pleased, had noticed nothing unusual. The denizens of the Aegis were individualistic, little given to formality, and mostly pursued private interests.

The duke leaned close. “One thing is plain, young man—you know little of alchemy. Do not prevaricate, now.”

Rachad grimaced ruefully. “I am only an apprentice,” he admitted. “My hope is to become Master Amschel’s assistant in the completion of the work. Then I will return to my own master and impart to him the method of the preparation of the stone.”

The duke pursed his lips, adjusting his dress and brushing away the fondling hand of a maiden who bent over him.

“I shall speak to Amschel of your desire,” he murmured.

A silence descended, the same dead, stifling silence that Rachad had noted before. He realized that the duke was a classic case of self-obsession. He was trapped within his own consciousness, encased to a point that in the outside world would have been regarded as insanity, but that here passed without comment. Indeed, the whole Aegis was a hymn to solipsism, to the rejection of any outward involvement, to the creation of a world that sprang solely from one’s own desires.

“And when shall I meet Master Amschel?” Rachad asked.

“Tomorrow. But enough—the hour is late, and my strength flags.”

The duke rose and sauntered toward the wall, turning just before he reached it. “And so to my bed of slime. I bid you good night.”

A section of wall slid aside. Within, Rachad saw a small chamber containing a sort of bath or coffin rimmed with ornate gilt and filled with the same muddy concoction he had seen in the orchid garden.

The duke entered. Before the wall closed again an attendant helped him strip. He lowered his bony body into the bath. His eyes closed, the slime enclosing him and leaving only his face showing.

A footman approached Rachad. “Allow me to show you to suitable apartments,” he said quietly. “Any reasonable service you require is available. You may, if you wish, partake of a slime-bed. But I warn you, once you have sampled it you will not willingly leave the Aegis again.”

“Thank you—all I need is a place where I can sleep normally.”

The footman led him away, and Rachad’s mind became busy. He could not dislike the duke, but there was the awful extent of his degeneracy. This was not the healthy, robust world Rachad knew.

Up until now he had not been sure whether he would in fact attempt to carry out the mission Baron Matello had set him. But now he found it easy to rationalize such treachery. He was, he told himself, furthering not only his own ambitions but also helping mankind to defend itself against the Kerek.

At the earliest opportunity he would endeavor to open up the Aegis.