The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 10

By midnight, Anstevic had reached the top of the mesa on which Brinslevos Keep was built, and hobbled his striderbeast in a small pocket among the rocks. He took a slipsuit from his saddlebag and exchanged his oil man rags for the near-invisibility of the suit. When he switched it on, he became no more than a flicker of shadow on the moonlit stone, and he walked boldly up to the mesa top sally port and picked the lock.

He gained entry without difficulty; the port was guarded only in times of siege, and since the League’s acquisition of Pharaoh some thirty generations past, no wars had been permitted to disrupt the smooth delivery of product to the League slave pens.

His knowledge of Brinslevos Keep was superficial, but in past visits he had left locator beacons in various parts of the Keep, and now he tuned his finder to the one in Brinslevos’s private chambers. He took an infrared safelight from his pocket and adjusted the slipsuit’s goggles, then set off through the red-gleaming darkness. He met no one else in the corridors.

Fifteen minutes later, he was opening the ark in which Brinslevos kept his pipes and his punkweed. The ark was a fanciful silver effigy of an arroyo lizard, all jaws and teeth, whose head split open to reveal a storage cavity. He lifted out Brinslevos’s humidor of punkweed.

From a pocket of the slipsuit, he drew an atomizer and sprayed the weed. He stirred it to distribute the poison evenly, then returned the humidor to its ark and closed the jaws. The ark made a tiny click, and Anstevic froze. From the Lord’s sleeping chamber came a mutter and a sigh. Silence.

Minutes passed while Anstevic waited, but he heard nothing further, and he finally drifted out of the Lord’s chambers.

When he was back among the rocks in which he had hidden his striderbeast, he pulled back the hood of the slipsuit and laughed with a pure and childish delight. It had been so easy. Brinslevos would insist on buying the Uberfactorial’s wares, and then Brinslevos would die. His guards would hang the Uberfactorial from the battlements immediately — following the odd Pharaohan religious dictum that a victim suffers a year in Hell for every hour that his assassin survives him — and then Anstevic could return to the reliable pleasures of Kobatum, mission accomplished. He would have to wait until that night to confirm the agent’s death, but no matter… the hard part was done. As the dawn washed the mesa top with pale color, Anstevic made himself comfortable under an overhang that would provide some shade at the hottest part of the Pharaohan afternoon.

In the morning the door slammed back and the hunchback ushered a grim-faced coercer into the cell. Ruiz sat up on his cot and was surprised to recognize Rontleses, from whom he’d bought water his first morning on Pharaoh.

“Greetings, noble coercer,” Ruiz said politely.

“Stand when you speak to me,” answered Rontleses.

Ruiz scrambled from the cot. “As you command.”

Rontleses looked dusty and tired, as though he had just arrived from the catapple plantations. “I’m required to instruct you. Tonight you’ll attend the Lord. He’ll sample your oils, and you’ll accompany him on his journey. Be very careful what you allow him to take. If he becomes ill, he will assume you have poisoned him, and you will suffer a terrible death. The Lord’s executioner is an imaginative man.”

“I’ll bear your instruction in mind at all times,” Ruiz said sincerely.

“See that you do.”

The coercer spun on his heel and left. The hunchback brought in breakfast, which if anything was more unappetizing than supper had been. The rest of the day passed slowly, unenlivened by anything more entertaining than mild gastric distress. Finally Ruiz dozed.

The rattle of the key in his door woke Ruiz, and he sat up abruptly. His head swam for an instant; then he was ready. The ray of sunlight was gone and the room was dark. He sensed that many hours had passed, that it was very late. Ruiz slid from the bed and over to the wall, poised to deal with any enemies that might appear.

But it was only the hunchback steward, who poked his unlovely head through the doorway. He said nothing, but he grinned and made gestures with his smoky lamp, indicating that Ruiz was to follow.

Ruiz picked up his pack and went with great reluctance. He felt more than ordinarily oppressed by the circumstances; he felt sure that he had exerted less control over the situation than he should have. He might have dragged his feet, except that the hunchback moved briskly and the lamp’s yellow light was the only illumination.

The steward conducted him through a maze of rough tunnels, through echoing rooms, and through hallways of tatty magnificence, until they reached the audience room of Brinslevos Keep.

A hundred torches flared dramatically along the tapes-tried walls, but the hall was empty of courtiers. Threadbare carpet marked a red path across the black porcelain tiles to the gilded throne on which Brinslevos sprawled. Behind the Lord, poised in an attitude of baleful curiosity, stood the Lord’s conjuror and executioner, a short man with a round bland face and a lipless mouth, who wore a black robe and carried an ornate ivory wand.

“Come, come,” Brinslevos called out, in his oddly pitched voice, which vibrated with mad gaiety.

Ruiz paced over the carpet with all seemly haste and went to a knee before the throne. “Your servant,” he said, in low tones.

“Yes, yes,” the Lord said. “Rise. Show us your wares. By the way, what is your name?”

“Wuhiya, great one.” Ruiz opened his pack, and two boys in the nomarch’s livery trotted forth from the anteroom, carrying a table, which they set beside Ruiz. Ruiz nodded his thanks, and laid his vials on the table. They made a fine sparkling display in the torchlight, and the Lord came down from his throne to inspect them.

For an instant, Ruiz looked into Brinslevos’s eyes, which glowed with some unreadable but intense emotion. Ruiz was abruptly terrified, though nothing of his fear reached his face — or so he hoped. Here, he thought, would be a truly dangerous man, were he not mad. And even so…

Ruiz stood back humbly, and the Lord fingered the vials, an artlessly avid smile on his narrow face. “Interesting, interesting.” Brinslevos selected a vial of green latigar. “Describe the effects of this one, good Wuhiya.”

“It is the venom of the latigar dragon, great one, processed by the artifice of the Jings, who range down the slopes of Hell on the north side of the world. The dreams the latigar brings are subtle and introspective, much concerned with the nature of reality. An oil beloved of philosophers.”

Brinslevos dropped the green latigar, chose a vial of blue-purple cansum. “And this?”

“The venom of the cansum constrictor, great one — morphed by a process known only to the cave-dwelling Inklats, who wear no tattoos and feed their snakes on human flesh. Very rare. Very expensive. It brings dreams of mortality; it shows the face of life for what it is, a mask on a skull. The skilled dreamer can learn to value the mask, or so it’s theorized.”

“You’ve never taken this oil?”

“No, great one.”

Brinslevos weighed the vial in his elegant hand. “Then we will embark on a voyage of discovery together, Wuhiya.”

The Lord’s conjuror frowned and gave Ruiz a glance of cold dislike. But he said nothing.

Brinslevos had gone, leaving Ruiz to wait in the empty audience room. He repacked his vials, then spent a few uneasy minutes shifting from foot to foot. The Keep was uncannily silent, except for the sputter of the torches. When the hunchback steward finally came to fetch him to the Lord’s chambers, he was almost relieved. The hall had a dark ambience, a trembling aura of ancient horror, as though unspeakably ugly deeds had occurred on the black tiles.

The steward took him through another maze of twisting corridors. Ruiz began to think that the Keep was a great deal larger than he had originally estimated. Apparently the majority of its spaces had been carved from the bedrock and the battlements he had glimpsed from the road must be only the tip of these great subterranean works. Ruiz tried to memorize the turns, but by the time they arrived at their destination, he was unsure of the way out.

The Lord Brinslevos had furnished his chambers in eccentric fashion. The walls were hung with hunting trophies — so thickly that the rough stone was almost completely obscured. Some were notable, and Ruiz wondered if the Lord had personally killed them. Here was a pangolin swarter, great-tusked head lifted in red-eyed challenge. There was the hide of a greenback Helldemon, covering ten meters of wall. In the far corner stood an enormous stuffed river lizard, rearing on its hind legs, nightmare jaws gaping. The floors were covered by deep soft carpets that swirled with pale hues, peach, celadon, ivory. Fat cushions, covered in cloth-of-gold and beaded with ruby spangles, were scattered in random heaps; here and there were low tables in red and black lacquer. It struck Ruiz as an odd combination, as though a strong-minded taxidermist had moved in with a relentless interior decorator.

Brinslevos sat upon a cushion by a table covered with the paraphernalia of the oil smoker. The Lord gestured for the steward to leave, then beckoned to Ruiz, who stepped forward.

“You do me far too much honor, great one,” said Ruiz.

“Nonsense.” Brinslevos looked up and his face pinched. “Sit down — don’t stand there looking down at me. Have you no respect?”

Ruiz sat hastily, before the annoyance on the Lord’s narrow face could mature into rage. “My apologies, great one.”

Brinslevos glared at him for an instant, and Ruiz looked down at his hands. He was unhappily aware that he was in a great deal more danger than the night he had climbed up from Hell into Pharaoh. The Lord was far more unpredictable than a Helldemon, and possibly more lethal, as the vast hide on his wall seemed to testify.

“Well, no matter,” Brinslevos said. “I’m a tolerant man; I grant almost everyone one mistake. If I love you, I might grant you two, though I don’t advise you to test my affection yet.”

“Yes, great one.” As he spoke, Ruiz looked Brinslevos in the eye and smiled pleasantly, remembering Denklar’s advice — that the Lord found excessive humility as irritating as arrogance.

Brinslevos laughed. He looked for a moment like a child, innocent of malice — a trick of his madness, or so Ruiz presumed. “So. Let us smoke.”

Ruiz nodded, and from his pack he drew forth the simple brass pipe he favored and packed it with punkweed. He wondered that he was as calm as he seemed to be; perhaps Ruiz Aw was mad, too, to be smoking oil with a dangerous lunatic. But now there seemed no way out.

Brinslevos opened a silver effigy box made in the shape of an arroyo lizard and took a porcelain waterpipe from it. He filled the pipe from his own humidor of weed, then added a drop of the cansum oil, first to his and then to Ruiz’s pipe.

The Lord ordered the lamps dimmed, so that the visions would have no difficulty in suppressing reality. Unseen hands saw to this, so that the room was filled with gloom and the bizarre shadows cast from the dead creatures on the walls.

Brinslevos waited until Ruiz had held the bowl of his pipe over the flame and drawn deeply; then he followed.

Lavender smoke leaked from the Lord’s high-bridged nose. After a long moment he released his breath suddenly, and so did Ruiz.

“Ahh… sweet,” said Brinslevos. Strangely, the Lord now seemed calm, as though the oil had reversed some polarity in his head, tipping him toward sanity.

Ruiz felt a tide rising in his body, a tingling flood of unease. His expensive reflexes clamped down automatically, damping the swing toward hallucination. He shook himself, forced those reflexes to relax slightly, so that he could appear to accompany the Lord on his trip into otherness. It wouldn’t do for the Lord to suspect Ruiz of some sort of trickery — this was a world full of hands that were quicker than the eye.

“Tell me what you see,” Brinslevos ordered, after several more puffs.

“Yes, great one,” said Ruiz. He opened the floodgates of his sensorium a little wider, and waited.

Evil dreams scrabbled through on little clawed feet.

He took a deep breath and shuddered it out. He began to babble. “I see myself, a servant in a house where two beautiful monsters dwell. They are less human than the Helldemons who crawl up the wall of the world, but they speak in soft breathless voices, they wear garments of spider velvet, they smell like the desert, clean and dead.”

“What do they look like, Wuhiya?” The Lord’s eyes were like moonstones, a lambent pale gray.

“Like perfect corpses. Their skins are white as the finest porcelain, without a wrinkle, smooth and hard. They have long hair, like black smoke, the male and female both. Their faces seem human, but under the clouds of their hair each hides a hundred eyes, which watch in all directions. Sometimes I see the glitter of these eyes…

“Their fingers are knives, unless they are icicles.”

“Ahhh…” sighed Brinslevos, leaning back and closing his eyes. “You have the voice. Use it.”

Ruiz gave himself more freely to the dream, began to see more clearly the dark things he imagined. He spoke the shapes the drug showed him. “Their feet are perfect, narrow, high-arched, perfumed. They walk like human beings, but where they set their feet down, roots strike deep, tiny white wires, racing downward like worms born of lightning, to take strength from the ground. When they lift their feet from the ground the worms fall away and die, invisible.

“The beautiful monsters wear fine scarlet sashes about their hips, so that their genitals are hidden. Now they remove their sashes and I see only smooth bright metal between their legs. I don’t know what they wish me to do, but never have I been more afraid.” For an instant it was true, and he struggled against terror.

Ruiz fell silent, and neither spoke for a long time. It was so quiet in the room that Ruiz heard his heartbeat, measuring out the seconds.

Sweat streamed down Brinslevos’s face, and he muttered inaudibly. Then the Lord said, in a stronger voice, “I hear the grinding of machinery in the darkness — first the rasp and rattle of tiny cogs and then the pumping of many small pistons. The sound grows and changes, until it becomes a steel music, and I know that a great machine, unseen in the night, rises on all sides of me, up to the stars and beyond. I seem to float, light as smoke, in the center of this machine, which now seems so huge that no world could support it. I can see nothing but the flicker of starlight through the girders and levers and wheels.

“At first I thought myself at the center of the machine, but now I understand that I am trapped in one tiny pocket of it, and that a million others float here, too, each in his own separate cage. It is a cage; I feel that now, and I wonder why I am being kept.”

Brinslevos moaned, a sound of puzzled agony that threatened to pull Ruiz into the Lord’s vision. Ruiz damped his reaction to the drug and swam up from the depths.

Brinslevos spoke urgently, in a rising panic. “Why? Why! The gears grind faster and faster, until the darkness shudders with the motion, and I can hear nothing else, not even my thoughts. I grow heavier, I start to sink, toward the danger below, a gnashing beast of metal, with cogs for jaws and rods for muscles. It’s hungry and I carry no weapon, I am naked and cold and weak.” Brinslevos twisted and flung out his arms. “Something’s gone wrong…. “He screamed, a sound that completely sobered Ruiz. The Lord’s face was suddenly distended with terror, as if some awful creature had forced its way under his skin and was trying to push out. His eyes bulged with insupportable horror, his mouth strained to wring the last bit of sound from his scream — he seemed to be unable to draw his next breath.

Any moment, servants or guards would come running, and what would Ruiz Aw tell them? “I’m sorry; I seem to have poisoned your Lord, excuse me now.”

Ruiz leaned forward and pressed his left pinky ring against the Lord’s corded neck. A full-spectrum antidote and strong sedative jetted into the Lord’s carotid, and the Lord fell back unconscious, face relaxing.

An instant later, something exploded against the back of Ruiz’s head, and he knew nothing for a while.