The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 5

Ruiz dropped into the murky steams of the uninhabitable lowlands, a hundred kilometers from the edge of the great plateau on which the Pharaohan culture had survived. The Pharaohans called the lands beneath the mists Hell, and Ruiz could see why. The temperature in the depths was just under the boiling point of water, the atmosphere was unbreathable, and the animals that lived in Hell were tough, dangerous, and as hideous as the most vividly imagined demons.

He guided the Vigia through the corrosive mists, until he hovered five hundred meters below the lip of the plateau, safe from the eyes of the Pharaohan priesthood, which maintained observatories along the top of the escarpment.

Then he considered the recent events. An attempt had been made to expunge him before he could begin his mission. The poachers therefore conspired with persons on the League’s orbital platform. But who? The factor? The Dilvermooner was Ruiz’s first and obvious choice; but the obvious choice wasn’t always the right one. In an organization as far-flung as the League, interunit chicanery was an unfortunate constant. There could have been a half-dozen factions vying for advantage on the platform, which — like any other strategic outpost — boiled with intrigue. It might have been a one-man operation — just the tech, instructed to watch for League agents and then to take a run at arranging a fatal accident. Or… he suddenly wished he had not been so frank with Auliss Moncipor. Or it might indeed have been the factor, in which case Ruiz was still in considerable danger.

He devoted some thought to the matter, while the Vigia hovered in the steamy dark; then he issued orders and the boat began to move. As the Vigia passed around the perimeter of the plateau, she dropped radio repeaters at irregular intervals. The repeaters took up stations in the clouds.

Four hours later the Vigia had completed her circuit of the plateau. Ruiz touched the vidscreen, entered the factor’s personal code. The signal flashed around the repeater string, beamed upward when it reached a randomly selected point, then jumped to another. Prinfilic answered immediately. “Hello? Ruiz Aw? Is that you?” The factor looked slightly rumpled, as though the hours since Ruiz’s departure had been unpleasantly eventful.

Ruiz allowed the vid to transmit his image. “Yes, Ruiz Aw here.”

“Where’s here? I can’t seem to get a fix on your position.”

“Well. Just a precaution. Did you find the dead assassin?”

Prinfilic’s eyes wavered slightly. “Yes,” it said. “Assassin, you say?”

“Didn’t you find the block of crystal?”

Prinfilic’s odd smooth face went a shade paler. “Crystal? What crystal?”

Ruiz watched the herman closely. Either Prinfilic was a superb actor — not inconceivable — or the factor was not entirely in control of the situation on the platform.

“The crystal that I picked out of Vigia’s ass and left by the body. It was gone?”

Prinfilic drew a deep breath, and a muscle jumped in its jaw. “It was gone.”

Ruiz smiled. “Then you have a problem, too, I’d guess. At any rate, I’m forced to adopt a policy of compartmentalization. Apparently elements inimical to the League are operating in your organization. Would you agree?”

The factor glared from the screen, looking a little wild-eyed. But after a moment it nodded its elegant head. “So it seems.”

“Here’s how I must proceed, Factor. I’ll dispatch a message drone to Dilvermoon, in case those inimical elements should detonate the crystal before you can find it. Meanwhile, I’ll begin my investigations here on the surface. You for your part must immediately institute a blackout of orbit-to-surface communications. You understand the necessity for this?”

The factor was now visibly verging on hysteria. “But, my quotas—”

Ruiz cut him off. “This isn’t open to discussion. If the channels remain open, who knows what dangerous instructions might reach those enemies I must deal with here below? The Vigia will monitor the spectrum, and release another drone, should anyone aboard the platform violate this order. Signify that you understand.”

For a moment, Ruiz thought Prinfilic would defy him, but then the factor nodded, face suddenly grim.

Ruiz cut the transmission.

Ruiz slept for a few hours, waiting for dark, and then prepared his disguise with meticulous care. He applied a long-term depilatory to his scalp. He instructed the medunit to apply the temporary tattoos he had chosen during the passage to Pharaoh, then endured the prickly sensations of the inkjets as they passed over his head. Afterward, he looked into the mirror and saw a barbaric stranger. The tattoos swirled over his skull in sinuous fine-lined patterns of clear red and dark magenta, curled down past his brows, emphasizing the sharp jut of cheekbone, the blade of his nose. Narrow eyes glared back at him, glittering with metallic intensity. He tried to smile at himself, but the effort lacked conviction and the smile never spread beyond his mouth. After a moment it metamorphosed into a snarl.

Ruiz shook himself and turned away from the mirror. He dressed in the bizarre finery of a snake oil peddler, many-colored layers of shredded and braided fabric, following the premise that the best disguise is often the most outlandish. The eye, he had found, slips uncritically over the details of an amazing sight. He was confident that no one would identify him as an offworlder. He congratulated himself that his tattoos were artful, and his own coppery skin and black eyes were fortuitously similar to the Pharaohan norm. He donned a half-dozen cheap-looking silver rings — microdevices which would enable him to perform the small illusions that were part of the obligatory social acts on Pharaoh. He applied kohl to his eyes, pasted a beauty star to his cheek, and attached earrings of silver and jet. Among his rags, he hid various weapons and tools, all disguised as Pharaohan religious objects — amulets, fetishes, icons.

When Ruiz was finally ready, he took up the special staff he’d designed and built in the Vigia’s workshop, put into his pouch a little splinter gun — disguised as a conjuror’s wand — and then shrugged into his merchandise pack, which contained a good supply of the poison-derived drugs that would be his stock-in-trade. He trudged through the Vigia to the air lock. Standing in the lock, he gave the boat her final instructions. He breathed in the smells of pangalac civilization one last time, metal and plastic and ozone, machine oil and disinfectant.

He took a disposable rebreather and a set of climbing hooks from a locker. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go up. Hover just under the cloud line.”

Ruiz felt the tug of acceleration, as the Vigia swooped upward. He strapped the rebreather to his face and the climbing hooks to his feet.

Then the Vigia stopped and the lock fell open, the ramp just touching the face of the cliff. The corrosive steams of Hell rolled into the lock, and Ruiz darted out, leaping onto the cliffside, hooks humming. The hooks thrust steel rods into the crumbling rock and supported his weight. He turned to look at the Vigia, but she had already retracted her ramp and dropped down into the concealing murk, to wait for his return.

He moved up the few meters to the top of the clouds and paused. Cautiously he raised his head above the murk, into the clear Pharaohan night. Two of Pharaoh’s three small moons rode high in the sky, giving enough light that Ruiz could easily see the Worldwall above him, and the nearest demonwatch tower, a hundred meters to his left, cantilevered out from the wall.

No lights showed from the tower; the Watchers kept their balconies dark, so that their night vision would remain acute. He dropped back down into the mists, to consider the situation. He had no great desire to remain on the cliff; monstrous predators might be gathering in the darkness below, climbing the cliff, hungry. On the other hand, he didn’t want to find a patrol of demonkillers waiting for him at the top of the Worldwall, either, though that would be the lesser of the two evils. So he took several deep breaths from the rebreather, tugged it loose, and cast it away. Then he surged from the murk and slithered up the cliffside and then the Worldwall, moving over the dark stone as rapidly as a frightened lizard.

He reached the top of the Worldwall without incident, and was congratulating himself on having made a clean entry as he pulled himself over the parapet. But as he unstrapped the climbing hooks from his feet, he heard a quick shuffle behind him. He whirled, to see a tall thin man in the livery of the Watchers rushing at him with a nasty-looking trident. As the man opened his mouth to shriek a warning to the other Watchers, Ruiz swayed aside from the man’s thrust and in the same motion struck out with the one set of climbing hooks he had removed. The hooks sank into the man’s throat, just above the collarbone, and the shout turned into an unpleasant bubbling sound. Ruiz caught the trident before it could clatter on the stone. The unfortunate Watcher toppled off the Worldwall and fell silently into Hell.

Ruiz crouched under the parapet, hoping the alarm had not been raised.

A few minutes passed, and all remained quiet. While he waited, Ruiz had leisure to regret the killing of the Watcher, who was only doing his job — preventing the Hell monsters from raiding the edges of the plateau and making sure that the Hell gods stayed below. Ruiz felt a deep melancholy, a sensation he suffered whenever his work caused him to hurt an innocent person. He wondered, at such times, why he continued to do what he did, and at the moment he could think of no answer that pleased him. Did the Watcher have a family? Would they be waiting for him to come home from his stint on the Worldwall? An unhappy little drama played out in Ruiz’s mind. He saw wide-eyed children watching at the window of a hut; he saw an apprehensive woman, pretending unconcern for the children’s sake. He saw weeping and bitter regret — all, all, his fault.

After a while he forced himself to put those thoughts away. He slipped down the steps cut into the inner wall and stole away into the Pharaohan night.

By daylight Ruiz was trudging along a dusty road, which struck straight as a string through a great planting of catapple trees. As the sun rose, peasants came from small huts set back under the wiry branches and began to tend the trees, which were hung with buckets and piping arranged to collect the thin sap. The peasants, thickset round-faced men and women burned almost black by the Pharaohan sun, watched Ruiz with narrow suspicious eyes and would not speak to him, even when he leaned on the stone wall that rose at either side of the road and waved at them. He recalled that except on rare and profoundly celebratory occasions, the peasantry could not afford the pleasure drugs the snake oil peddlers distributed and, naturally enough, resented the idle grasshopper existence of the snake oil men.

He shrugged and went on, until he came to an open area in which men wearing leg irons toiled to remove the stumps of dead trees from the dry powdery soil. Several overseers in white-and-red-checked kilts stood about, occasionally touching the more laggardly prisoners with short limber whips.

Ruiz paused again and beckoned to one of the overseers, a tall cadaverous man with sunken cheeks and the jagged blue tattoos of a second-class coercer. The overseer stared at him, expressionless, for a long moment, then ambled to the wall and stood slapping the butt of his whip into his palm. He said nothing.

Ruiz smiled and ducked his head obsequiously. “Noble coercer, might I trouble you for a drink of water?”

The overseer studied him, then spoke abruptly. “Show me your plaque,” he ordered.

Ruiz nodded submissively and fumbled out a small slab of glossy porcelain into which a forged seal had been pressed, and on which a line of graceful cursive characters had been brushed in black slip. All Pharaohans who traveled beyond their home nomarchy were required to carry the plaques, which described their identity and permitted activities. “Here, here… all’s in order.”

The overseer snatched the plaque, examined it closely. After a moment he grunted and returned it. “Can you pay? No charity here; a measure will cost you a full copper nint.”

Making a great show of searching through his rags, Ruiz produced a small worn six-cornered coin and proffered it to the overseer. The overseer pocketed it and turned back to his charges, who had slowed their efforts slightly. The overseer shouted irritably at his subordinates; they applied their whips with vigor.

At the far edge of the cleared area stood a battered steam wagon under a ragged canopy. In the small patch of shade was a tripod, which supported a large, red clay water urn. Ruiz vaulted the wall and made his way past the prisoners, who watched him sidelong from red-rimmed eyes.

When he reached the wagon, a small scowling man with a smear of black grease across his forehead appeared from the interior of the wagon, holding a large wrench. From his rough brown robe, identical to the prisoners’ garb, Ruiz assumed him to be a trusty. Like the other freeborn prisoners, his tattoos were obscured by strips of shiny pink scar tissue, but enough remained to show that the trusty had once been a snake oil man. Ruiz repressed an apprehensive shudder.

“Ah, good sir,” Ruiz said, grinning broadly. “Perhaps you’ll help me.”

“Unlikely,” the small man said, with no change of expression.

Ruiz retained his smile. “Yon noble coercer was kind enough to sell me a measure of water.”

The trusty laughed, a short, explosive, humorless bark. “‘Noble coercer,’ indeed. You’re Rontleses’ friend?”

“Not I. I’m just a seller of dreams, just a wayfarer.”

“In that case I’ll assist you.” The trusty put down the wrench and hobbled toward the urn. Ruiz saw that his legs had been broken and allowed to heal unset.

“What did he skin you out of, our noble Rontleses? May milliscorps colonize his crotch.” The trusty held out his dirty hand. “Give me your skin, wayfarer.”

“A copper nint,” Ruiz said, and gave over his water skin, which was empty. The trusty laughed bitterly again, fished a key out of his pouch, and unlocked the urn. He turned a tap and cloudy water flowed into Ruiz’s skin. “It’s stinkwater, you know,” the trusty said conversationally. “Give you the green shits for sure.”

Ruiz received the full skin, hoping that his immunizations had been sufficiently comprehensive. “Thank you, good sir,” he said, and took a swig. It was, as promised, foul. He repressed the urge to gag. He recorked the skin and hung it about his neck.

The trusty shrugged and relocked the urn. “Don’t thank me. Or curse me when your guts turn to slime. I’d have given you some from the overseers’ private store, if I’d dared. But I’d rather not have my legs broken again; next time I might not learn to walk so well.”

Ruiz declared himself satisfied, at which the trusty looked at him as though a diagnosis of madness had been confirmed. “Well, if one’s to be a fool, better a happy fool than a sour one,” the trusty said.

“Well said. Perhaps you’d advise me?”

“Why not, so long as Rontleses doesn’t notice my absence from the belly of his junk pile.”

“What can you tell me of Stegatum? Is it a convivial town?” Stegatum was the capital of the local nomarchy, a center for processing catapple sap and other agricultural products. It lay another five kilometers down the road, and a League agent maintained an inn there.

The trusty made a gesture of dismissal and spat. “Stegatum? It’s an armpit like any other armpit. The farmers will show little interest in your wares, but a few merchants and craftsmen scratch out a living there, and, of course, it has the usual glut of dungheap nobility.”

Ruiz scratched his coin, as if thoughtful. “Can you recommend a good inn?”

The trusty laughed uproariously, which attracted the attention of the overseer. The trusty sobered instantly, picked up his wrench again, and faded back into the wagon’s depths.

Ruiz left, saluting the overseer respectfully as he passed. He wondered what sin the trusty had committed to be condemned to one of the nomarch’s slave gangs. The snake oil men were accorded greater latitude than other minor merchants — if less respect. They were commonly held to be mad, due to the constant and necessary sampling of the hallucinogens they traded in, so that their eccentricity was tolerated, and in some quarters even admired. All in all, Ruiz was happy with the disguise he had chosen, but the condition of the gimpy prisoner indicated that it was not a perfect one.

The road passed the last of the catapple plantations and rose into a more pitilessly arid region, a terrain of large gray boulders sparsely distributed over flats of pink quartz gravel. Ruiz followed the track for hours, seeing little but an occasional steamwagon. These freight carriers were driven by gaunt women in faded blue robes, none of whom wasted a glance on Ruiz. He learned quickly to move aside when he saw the first cloud of dust. Twice men passed him riding striderbeasts — tall, bipedal, reptilian creatures, covered by fine scales and moving with a smooth elegant gait. One animal was black and the other a tarnished green, and both wore silver-mounted saddles and jeweled bridles. Neither rider acknowledged Ruiz’s greeting, though he saluted respectfully.

By midafternoon Ruiz was descending a potholed side road into a less barren valley, which contained extensive gardens and, at the far end where the valley was deepest, a huddle of one- and two-storied mud houses, shaded by the feathery fronds of tall old dinwelt trees. On a flat bench just above the village was a public square, the so-called Place of Artful Anguish, a standard amenity in every village and town on Pharaoh. Above that the waste began again.

In the valley, the air was marginally cooler and a bit moister, and Ruiz felt a sense of pleasant arrival.

A half-dozen small boys appeared at the roadside to stare at him with large eyes. They assembled in a line, ranked from tallest to shortest, and they held various bits of homemade paraphernalia, stickhoops and tanglestrings and improvised coin-snaps, with which they had evidently been playing conjuror. Ruiz smiled at them. They edged away slightly, but said nothing.

“Hello, noble young gentlemen,” Ruiz said.

“Ain’t such,” the boldest of them answered defiantly.

Ruiz spread his hands in a gesture of disbelief. “How was I to know, unfamiliar as I am with your lovely environs?”

“Talks funny,” said another of the urchins.

“Ought to know we’re not sirs. Sirs don’t stink of the lizard tannery, or wear cloutcloth. Sirs be riding on striderbeasts.” This was contributed by the smallest of the boys, who spoke with careful logic. The others rolled their eyes, and the first speaker tugged the smallest one’s ragged hat down over his face.

“He’s young yet,” the first speaker explained.

“I see,” said Ruiz, struggling to control a grin. “Well, perhaps you can assist me, since you seem to be well informed. Is there a decent inn here in Stegatum, for so I hear your lovely village is called?”

The boldest boy rubbed his pointed chin. “Depends what you’d call decent. How swank’re your notions?”

“Not impossibly so. A bed free of wildlife, and decent food will satisfy the most extreme of my hopes.”

“Then the Denklar Lodge comes closer than the Pougribalt Roadhouse. You staying the night?”

“Such is my plan.”

“Smart. You heared of the trouble on the Worldwall? Last night, not thirty kilometers from here, a demon came over the edge and ate a Watcher whole. It’ll be running the back country tonight, looking for another dinner. Tonight’s a good night to snooze behind a strong door, and the Denklar wins on that count too. Costs, though.” The boldest urchin delivered this speech in calm tones of relish.

“Thank you. I’ll take your advice.” Ruiz hitched up his pack and would have gone on, but the boys watched him with greater expectation than his outlandish appearance warranted. He recalled that they might expect a new bit of conjuring from a stranger who was inclined to be friendly, so he sighed and nodded.

White smiles broke out on the dark faces.

“Watch my hand, then,” Ruiz instructed them, and showed them both sides of his right hand, then slowly clenched his hand into a fist. They watched with an intensity beyond their years.

One of Ruiz’s rings budded, into the interior of his fist, a tiny bit of memory crystal, which quickly grew into the semblance of a red garnet the size of a thimble.

He opened his hand to show the gem. The boys weren’t yet impressed, though they were polite enough to wait for something more notable. “Can’t be real,” said the smallest boy, dubiously, for which he received a swat on the shoulder.

Ruiz laughed. “No, indeed, it’s not a real garnet; in fact, it’s the rare and lovely chrysalis of the fabulous ruby-winged flitterbuzz.”

“So you say,” said the smallest boy, not discouraged. But he looked intrigued, as did the others.

“Watch again,” Ruiz instructed them. He cupped his other hand over the garnet, then crushed his hands together. The crystal collapsed into glitter dust, soundlessly, unseen by his audience. His ring extruded another bit of crystal, and Ruiz felt it stir with the semblance of life. After a moment, he opened his hands, and a tiny winged insect straightened its shimmering wings. It sat on his hands for an instant, then fluttered and launched itself upward. It would climb toward the sun until its energy cell was exhausted, and then it would dissolve into drifting powder.

Ruiz flung the glitter dust at the boys, who laughed their appreciation.

“Not bad,” the smallest one said.

Ruiz bowed low and resumed his way toward the village.