The Witling

Nine

This time there were no hitches. Again they went to the place Pelio called the Highroom, but now they found the special servant who could jump them into the Keep itself: they emerged from the transit pool into a vast, pale-lit emptiness. The wan light came from scattered greenish patches that seemed to float in the dark. It took Yoninne several seconds to realize that those patches were the same funguslike material that had hung gangrenously from the walls of their dungeon in Bodgaru. But this place didn’t stink, and the floor was dry and unslimed beneath her feet. The room was an ellipsoidal cavern so long that the glow patches on the far wall were little more than green stars in the dark. Their transit pool was set on a fifty-meter-wide ledge that shelved out from where the cavern’s wall began curving over into the ceiling. Abruptly Yoninne realized that nearly half the greenish lights were actually reflections in an oval lake that filled much of the cavern’s floor. The water was so still that she might never have noticed it if she hadn’t seen the faintly reflecting hull of a boat moored against the near shore.

They started down the steps that led from the shelf. As usual, Pelio’s servants trailed a fair distance behind. “This is my family’s Keep,” said the prince with evident pride, “probably the best angeng” (?) “in the world.” She had a hard time following the rest of his description; there were too many words that she did not recognize. But she was able to piece together the overall story. Originally the Keep had been a natural cave, with only one small entrance, and that near the Highroom. The Guild had senged (felt? seen? sensed?) the cave’s location and sold the information to the Summerkingdom. Pelio’s ancestors had entered the cave and enlarged it to its present size. The single entrance had then been blocked. From then on, security was relatively easy to maintain: the Azhiri could not teleport to any point that they could not seng. And if you weren’t a Guildsman, the only way to seng a location was to travel—by some means other than teleportation—to within a few meters of it. After that, apparently, the spot could be senged from any distance.

Once in every generation, the passage from the Highroom to the Keep was unblocked. New members of the royal family climbed the narrow stairs that led up the cliff to the Highroom, and then walked down the passage from the Highroom to the Keep. A very few trusted servants—those destined to become Highroom attendants—accompanied them on the second leg of their pilgrimage, but only those of royal blood ever made the entire trip.

Most of the palace servants had made the pilgrimage up the stone stairs to the Highroom, so they could teleport themselves and—if need be—their masters that far. The Highroom attendants could then teleport the visitors inside the Keep. It sounded like a pretty good system: except for the royal family (and the Guild, of course), no one could get all the way into the Keep without another’s help.

“And the lake? Why is that there?” asked Leg-Wot as Pelio’s talk petered out. The boy still seemed friendly—after all, he had agreed to take her here this morning—but he was a good deal quieter, more nervous than before. Sometimes she thought he didn’t even want their conversations overheard by the bodyguards. She didn’t know what to make of it, and now that they were so near her goal, it was beginning to get on her nerves.

Pelio looked at her as she spoke, and his face creased with a shy smile. By human standards that face was strange—all round, with scarcely a chin or a point of a nose—and she wasn’t sure quite how to read it. Certainly no other person had ever looked at her the way he did. “The lake is for transport. We’re within one league” (one jump?) “of five different royal roads, so the members of my family can come quickly into the Keep even from outside the palace. That’s the whole point, you know: the royal family must have some retreat safe from all attack—a Guild attack excepted, of course.”

There it was, that “Guild” again. Sometime, she was going to have to learn more about that organization. But right now, she was much more interested in getting at their equipment; even with the maser they might have problems calling for help. It wasn’t a matter of power: Novamerika was at conjunction, not more than fifty million kilometers away. The maser could easily punch through to any medium-sized antenna at that distance—if the antenna pointed in her direction. But what if she and Ajão and Draere’s people had all been given up for dead? Then, the only time the Novamerikan colonists would aim their receivers at Giri would be to monitor the robot telemetry station Draere had left on that godforsaken island on the other side of the planet. She might have quite a problem synchronizing her transmissions with that station.

Once on the Keep’s main floor, Pelio guided them around the edge of the lake. The four-footed ball of fur that Pelio called Samadhom kept right at their heels.

Her eyes were adjusted to the dark now, and the place seemed like an open harbor lit by hundreds of tiny green moons. The air was not absolutely still; a faint draft riffled gently by her dress. The walls of the cavern swelled inward to the central lake, forming little hillocks along the floor. Pelio pointed to the holes in the walls. “Most of the rooms here share the air of the entire Keep. It’s too much trouble to reng fresh air into each room separately; the fewer servants allowed into the Keep, the better. And in general, no foreigners get in except when we have diplomatic receptions here. My family stores too much of value in the Keep to let just anyone enter.” Yoninne almost smiled at the unconscious pride of his tone. He was so self-contradictory. “I’ve had everything that was found where you were captured put in my own storage room.” They turned right and moved away from the central lake. In the dim green light she saw the rock rising on either side of them: they were walking up a miniature valley cut across the long axis of the Keep. The “valley” narrowed till it was more like a hallway without a ceiling. Finally they came upon a small transit pool.

Pelio said, “We could have jumped directly here, but I wanted to show you the Keep.” He turned to the guards as they caught up. “Jump us into my storeroom,” he said quietly, pointing at the nearest wall. “It’s about twenty yards in that direction.”

The shorter of the guards shut his eyes in concentration. “I seng it, Your Highness,” he said softly, matching Pelio’s tone. Somehow even small sounds seemed loud in the emptiness.

They slipped into the pool and emerged seconds later from a similar one in the interior room. The green-lit room was crowded with wooden cabinets and bronze bowls—the bowls filled to overflowing with what must have been gems and precious metals, though in the dull light their sparkle and flash were muted. Yoninne looked across the tangled heaps of treasure. The place was more like an unkempt attic than anything else. What was the use of all this stuff if they kept it hidden away?

Pelio started across the room, then came to an abrupt halt. The others piled up behind him, looked down, and saw the bodies. There was not a mark on them and their kiltlike uniforms seemed in perfect order, yet they lay on the floor like puppets with cut strings. One of the bodyguards pushed past Pelio, knelt beside the bodies, and felt for a throat pulse.

“They’re not even warm, Your Highness. Shall we sound alarm?”

“Yes—no!” The boy clenched and unclenched his hands. “Stand outside the room now. I must think—I mean, I must inspect the room for loss.”

“But, Sir-”

“Go!” he said. The two guards snapped to attention, but left only after they had convinced themselves no one was hiding in the room.

After they were gone, Pelio stood for a long moment as if dazed. Yoninne looked at him, then at the bodies. “Were they murdered?” she asked.

The prince nodded abstractedly. “Kenged, I should think,” he said, then noticed her blank look. “Someone jumbled their insides.” He said something else she couldn’t understand, but it sounded like cursing. “I just don’t see how something like this could happen here, in the Keep.” He was talking to himself now.

Samadhom sniffed mournfully around the bodies, as if trying to wake them. Yoninne looked abruptly away. The Azhiri race didn’t need knives or pistols; their Talent was enough. Those two men-servants by the look of them—had simply been … turned off. Draere’s death had been bad enough, but at least it hadn’t been murder.

You sentimental fool. Get off your tail and find that maser. The thought brought her back to her normal, efficient self. It was just her luck that when she finally got near her goal, some palace intrigue would get in the way. She moved closer to Pelio, and said, “The equipment? Where is that stored?”

Pelio glanced up, pointed carelessly at a cabinet across the room. It was a big one, more than four meters on a side. Its massive, deeply carved door was ajar and through the opening she could see a jumble of parachute fabric. The sight affected Pelio, too. “That door should be closed!” He strode swiftly across the room, Leg-Wot close on his heels. The prince pulled the door open wide and they waded through the knee-deep fiberene chute material. The ablation skiff and the burned-out hulk of the motor sledge sat within the cabinet, along with a rack of empty metal trays. A cold and unpleasant certainty was forming in Leg-Wot’s mind; most of their equipment had burned up with the sledge, but the maser and the machine pistols, at least, should be here. She scrambled around the side of the skiff to look in the hatch. Even in the dim light she could see it was empty. There were the sealed instruments and the web restraints, but that was all. The maser was gone. Gone.

She described the missing items to Pelio. “I had those all put here,” he said, pointing at the metal trays. From the stricken look on his face, she knew this was not some elaborate game he was playing with her. “So they killed to get just those things. … But how could anyone steal from the royal Keep?” His eyes widened. “Unless the thief were a Guildsman … or a member of the royal family.”

Leg-Wot turned angrily away from him. Now she and Bjault really were marooned—and under a death sentence to boot.