Janazik padded around to stand before him. He was not the only Khazaki in the cellar; there were a good dozen others. Mostly they were young males, and Anse recognized them. Bolazan, Pragakech, Slavatozik—he’d played with them as a child, he’d fared out with them as a youth and a man to the wars, to storm the high citadel of Zarganau and smite the warriors of Volgazan and pirate the commerce of the outer islands. They were good comrades, yes. But Father and Jamie were dead. Ellen, Ellen was vanished. Only a fragment of the human community remained; his world had suddenly come down in ruin about him.
Well—his old bleak resolution came back to him, and he met the yellow slit-pupilled gaze of Janazik with a challenging stare.
They were a strange contrast, these two, for all that they had fought shoulder to shoulder halfway round the planet, had sung and played and roistered from Krakenau to Gorgazan. Comrades in arms, blood brothers maybe, but neither was human from the viewpoint of the other.
Dougald Anson was big even for a Terrestrial; his tawny head rode at full two meters and his wide shoulders strained the chain mail he wore. He was young, but his face had had the youth burned out of it by strange suns and wild winds around the world, was lean and brown and marked with an old scar across the forehead. His eyes were almost intolerably bright and direct in their blue stare, the eyes of a bird of prey.
The Khazaki was humanoid, to be sure—shorter than the Terrestrial average, but slim and lithe. Soft golden fur covered his sinewy body, and a slender tail switched restlessly against his legs. His head was the least human part of him, with its sloping forehead, narrow chin, and blunt-muzzled face. The long whiskers around his mouth and above the amber cat-eyes twitched continuously, sensitive to minute shifts in air currents and temperature. Along the top of his skull, the fur grew up in a cockatoo plume that swept back down his neck, a secondary sexual characteristic that females lacked.
Janazik was something of a dandy, and even now he wore the baggy silk-like trousers, long red sash, and elaborately embroidered blouse and vest of a Krakenaui noble. It was woefully muddy, but he managed to retain an air of fastidious elegance. The bow and quiver across his back, the sword and dirk at his side, somehow looked purely ornamental when he wore them.
He was almost dwarfed by Anse’s huge-thewed height. But old Chiang Chung-Chen noticed, not for the first time, that the human wore clothing and carried weapons of Khazaki pattern, and that the harsh syllables of Krakenaui came more easily to his lips than the Terrestrial of his fathers. And the old man nodded, gravely and a little wearily.
Janazik spoke rapidly: “Volakech must have been plotting his return from exile a long time. He managed to raise a small army of pirates, mercenaries, and outlawed Krakenaui, and he made bargains with groups within the city. Two days ago, certain of the guards seized the new guns and let Volakech and his men in. Others revolted within the town. I think King Aligan was killed; at least I’ve seen or heard nothing of him since. There’s been some fighting between rebels and loyalists but the rebels got all the Earth-weapons when they captured the royal arsenal and since then they’ve just about crushed resistance. Loyalists who could, fled the city. The rest are in hiding. Volakech is king.”
“But—why us? The Terrestrials—what have we to do with—”
Janazik’s yellow eyes blazed at him. “You aren’t stupid, blood-brother. Think!”
After a moment Anse nodded bleakly. “The Star Ship—”
“Of course! Volakech has seized the rocket boat. No Terrestrial in his right mind would show him how to use it, so he had to capture someone who understood its operation and force them to take him out to the Star Ship. Old Masefield Henry was killed resisting arrest—you know how bloody guardsmen are, in spite of orders to take someone alive. Volakech ordered the arrest of all Terrestrials then. A few surrendered to him, a few were killed resisting, most were captured by force. As far as we know, this group is all which escaped.”
“Then Ellen—?”
“That’s the weird thing. I don’t believe she has been caught. Volakech’s men are still scouring the city for ‘an Earthling woman’ as the orders read. And who could it be but Ellen? No other woman represents any danger or any desirable capture to Volakech.”
“Ellen understands astrogation,” said Anse slowly. “She learned it from her grandfather.”
“Yes. And now that he is dead, she is the only human—the only being on this planet—who can get that rocket up to the Star Ship. And Masefield Carson knows it.”
“Carson? Ellen’s older brother? What—”
Janazik’s voice was cold as Winter: “Masefield Carson was with Volakech. He led the rebels inside the city. Now he’s the new king’s lieutenant.”
“Carson! No!”
“Carson—yes!” Janazik’s smile was without mirth or pity. His eyes sought out Philip, huddled miserably beside the lamp. “Isn’t that the truth?”
* * * *
The boy nodded, too choked with his own unhappiness to cry. “Carse always was a friend of Volakech, before King Aligan outlawed him,” he mumbled. “And he always said how it was a shame, and how Volakech would know better what to do with the Star Ship than anyone now. Then—that night—” His voice trailed off, he sat dumbly staring into the flame.
“Carson led the rebel guardsmen in their seizure of the city guns,” said Janazik. “He also rode to the Masefield house at the head of a troop of them and called on his people to surrender on promise of good treatment. Joe and the mother did, and I suppose they’re held somewhere in the citadel now. Phil and Ellen happened to be out at the time. When Phil heard of the uprising, he was afraid to give himself up, in spite of the heralds that went about promising safety to those who did. He heard how the rebels had been killing his friends. He went to Slavatozik here, whom he could trust, and later they got in touch with me. I’d used this hiding place before, and gathered all the fugitives I could find here.” Janazik shrugged, a sinuous unhuman gesture. “Since then I’ve seen Carse, at a distance, riding around like a prince of the blood, with a troop of his own personal guardsmen. I suspect he really runs things now. Volakech wants power, but only Carse can show him how to get it.”
“And Ellen—?”
“No sign of her. But as I said, I think she’s in hiding somewhere, or the guards wouldn’t be out looking for a woman. She wouldn’t give herself up.”
“Not Ellen.” A grim pride lifted Anse’s head.
“Remains the problem of finding her before they do,” said Gonzales Alonzo. “If they catch her and make her plot an orbit for the rocket, they’ll have the Star Ship—which means power over the whole planet.”
“Not that I care who’s king,” growled Pragakech. “But you know that Masefield Carson never did want to use the ship to get out to the stars. And I want to see those other worlds before I die.”
“To the thirteenth hell with the other worlds,” snarled Bolazan. “Aligan was my king, and it’s for me to avenge him and put his rightful heir on the throne.”
“We all have our motives for wanting the blood of Volakech and Carson,” said Janazik. “Never mind that now; the important thing is how to get at their livers. We’re few, Anse. Here are all the free humans we know of, except Masefield Ellen. There can’t be more than two or three at large, and perhaps ten dead. That means the enemy holds almost a hundred humans captive. Discounting children and others who are ignorant of Terrestrial science, it still means they’ll be able to operate the guns, the steel mill, the atomic-power plant—all the new machines except the rocket boat, and they only need Ellen for that.”
Anse nodded, slowly. “What is our strength?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Not much. I know where about a hundred Khazaki warriors are hiding, ready to follow us whenever we call on them, and there will be many more sitting at home now who’ll rise if someone else takes the lead. But the enemy has all the guns. It would be suicide.”
“What about the Khazaki who fled?” Usually, in one of the planet’s violent changes of governments, the refugees were powerful nobles who would be slain as a safety measure if they stayed at home but who could, in exile, raise strong forces for a comeback. Such a one had Volakech himself been, barely escaping with his life after his disastrous attempt to seize the throne a few years back.
“Don’t be more stupid than you can help,” snorted Janazik. “By the time they can have rallied enough to do any good, Volakech and Carson will have the Star Ship, one way or another, and then the whole world is at their mercy.”
“That means we have to strike back somehow—quickly!” Anse stood for a moment in thought.
The habits of his warring, wandering years were coming back to him. He had faced death and despair before, and with strength and cunning and bluff and sheer luck had come through alive. This was another problem, more desperate and more urgent, but still another problem.
No—there was more to it than that.
* * * *
His face grew bleak, and it was as if a coldness touched his heart. Carson was Ellen’s older brother, and even if they had quarreled from time to time he knew she had always felt deeply bound to him. Carse is everything I never was. He stayed in Krakenau and studied and became an educated man and a skilled engineer while I went hallooing over the world. He’s brave and a good fighter—so am I—but he’s so much more than that. I imagine it was his example that made Ellen learn the astrogation only her grandfather knew.
And now I’m back from roaming and roving with Janazik, and I’m trying hard to settle down and learn something so that I won’t be just a barbarian, a wild Khazaki in human skin, when we go out to the civilization of the stars. So that I won’t be too utterly ashamed to ask Ellen to marry me. And it was all going pretty well until now.
But now—I’m fighting her brother—
Well—he pushed the thought out of his brain. After all, apparently she was in opposition to Carse’s plans too.
“I wonder why they tried to kill me?” he asked aloud, more to fill in the time while he thought than out of curiosity.
“You’d be of no use to Carson, having no technical education,” said Janazik, “while your knowledge of fighting and your connections with warlike groups make you dangerous to him. Also, I don’t think he ever liked your paying attention to Ellen.”
“No—he always said I was a waster. Called me a—an absorbed Khazaki. I’d’ve split his skull if he hadn’t been Ellen’s brother—No matter now. We’ve more important things to talk over.”
Have we, now? he thought sickly. Carson must know Ellen well, better than I do. If he thinks he can have me killed without making her hate him, then—maybe I never had any chance with her then—
“How’d you happen by?” he asked tonelessly.
“I’ve been out from time to time, looking for Ellen and killing guardsmen whenever I could catch them alone.” Janazik’s white fangs gleamed in a carnivore’s smile. “And, of course, I expected you back from your fishing trip about this time, and watched for you lest you blunder into their hands.”
Anse began to pace the floor, back and forth, his head bent to avoid the basement rafters. If Carson was in control, and out to kill him…. There was more to it than that, of course. The whole future of the planet Khazak, perhaps of the fabulous Galactic civilization itself, was balanced on the edge of a sword. If Volakech or a descendant of his took the warlike race out among the stars, with a high level of industry to back a scheme of conquest—
But it didn’t matter. All the universe didn’t matter. There was only Ellen, and his own dead kin, and himself.
A man’s heart can only hold so much.
Janazik stood quietly back, watching his friend’s restless prowling. He had seen that pacing before, and he knew that some scheme would come out of it, crazy and reckless and desperate, with his own cool unhuman intelligence to temper it and make it workable. He and Anse made a good team. They made the best damned fighting team Khazak had ever seen.
Presently the human lifted his head. There was silence in the hiding place, thick and taut, so that they could hear their own breathing and the steady drum of rain on the trapdoor.
“I have an idea,” said Anse.