VIII

 

 

No one could have said whether it was the struggle between superstitious fear and simple greed, or merely Dyasthala cunning, which in the end compelled Ogric to promise a contract bonus to those workers who agreed to share quarters with Kazan as well as to Clary herself for finding them. There were going to be some pointed questions asked when he presented the accounts for this trip; still, he’d got off lighter than if he’d been obliged to honor the forfeiture clause in one of the contracts, or if he’d lost half the workers already signed up and had to hold back his departure while he hunted down some replacements.

In fact, it had not occurred to Clary to suggest to those she approached the idea of holding out for a bonus like hers. It wasn’t in the frame of reference of Dyasthala thinking. The reason she had sprung to Kazan’s aid in the captain’s cabin was because she and he both were opposed to authority—it wasn’t out of sympathy. The offer of the bonus, certainly, had worked in her case very well; without it she would never have argued so persuasively with the reluctant workers.

And it was clear that she wasn’t completely successful. That could be seen from the way the new occupants of the cabin hesitated when they came through the door for the first time, looking about them, seeing Kazan, being only slightly reassured on finding Clary calmly sitting on the next bunk to his. And it went on as it had begun. None of the others spent any more time than they had to in Kazan’s company, and often during the sleep period a light would go on, and one of the people in the cabin would lean over the side of the bunk and stare down at Kazan as though to make sure he was genuinely asleep and not dead.

At first Clary had viewed these goings-on with real scorn. In her mind she classed Hego with the foolish but wealthy people who had sometimes sent into the Dyasthala to consult the so-called witches and wizards there. Everyone in the thieves’ quarter knew that their trances and oracles, their illusions and their speaking with tongues, were just another way of parting rich folk from their money, rating somewhere on the criminal scale between confidence trickery and the disguising of stolen goods for resale.

Then it gradually dawned on her, first, that many of what she regarded as her own people seemed to have caught the contagious fear of Kazan; second, that Kazan himself—aside from confirming Hego’s story in the captain’s presence, which could be discounted—had never said anything one way or the other.

This was alarming.

Kazan, indeed, appeared not to be in the least involved in what went on around—and often because of—him. It seemed to make no difference that for the duration of the voyage he was the key person aboard the ship. When he was not required for some duty or other, or to collect his thrice-daily rations in the workers’ canteen, he lay on his bunk, staring at the underside of the bunk above. It occurred to Clary at last that he might as well have been really dead. He was dead in his mind.

She’d seen cases like that in the Dyasthala. They were everywhere. But at first she could not associate the pale, calm, rather handsome Kazan with the slack-lipped and filthy idiots who could be found in the old days playing with the gutter mud of the thieves’ quarters, sometimes seizing a bright coin tossed to them with a little chuckle of pleasure at such a gaudy plaything—and usually losing it again to a child of normal intelligence who know how to trade it for some worthless but glittering scrap of colored glass.

Long experience in handling random-gathered groups of migrant workers had developed a system in the fleet of ships serving the Vashti mines. Though Ogric had spoken dismally of any voyage as being too long with a problem like Kazan aboard, in fact the tension was kept under control by fairly simple means. Keep the minds of the workers occupied, was the prime rule.

Hence during every arbitrary day there was a training class in the canteen, to teach some administrative job, or to put a shine on the reading ability of those who possessed it. There were also many entertainments—by the standard of the crew’s home world, very crude, but to the children of the Dyasthala and in fact to most of the other workers new and interesting. As a result, Kazan was often left by himself in the cabin, staring at nothing.

That gave Clary her chance.

She slid back the door-panel almost silently and stepped through as though afraid of being heard, then closed it with equal care. No one was present except Kazan, who lay as usual flat on his back, his vacant eyes on the bunk over him. There were folding seats clipped to the walls. Clary took one of these gently from its place and opened it as she walked to the side of Kazan’s bunk.

Then she slammed it down on the floor with a crash that made the metal of the cabin ring angrily, and sat on it. Even that barely disturbed the mirror surface of Kazan’s calm.

“All right,” she said when he had rolled his head incuriously to look at her. “Out with it, Kazan. Who are you?”

As simply as that, it began.

For that question was the key to the nightmare haunting him—a darkness populated with hungry monsters, in which his mouth, open to scream, filled with sour water and the taste of the beasts around, in which his ears were deafened first by a rasping hoot rising towards a whistle, then by a rush of water. A struggle against cruel steel shackles holding his wrists, so that he could not even strike out against the huge threatening creatures that shared the darkness with him.

That was the beginning. What followed was that the darkness took a shape—a vague, formless, ill-defined shape with ember eyes. He seemed to be outside it and inside it at the same time, for he could look at it and still be engulfed by it.

The remorseless argument that went with the macabre images fell too readily into words. Kazan had gone to his death. Kazan manacled and helpless who had forgotten the trick of making steps of air had plunged into the lake and been swallowed up.

But Kazan had also been sold to a devil by human devils who had not asked his leave, and the devil had taken him out of the clutch of death to serve for a year and a day. Kazan accordingly was dead. Let the devil move the corpse as he would, Kazan could have no part in it.

Yet, he was still aware. He could remember things, foggily, as he had remembered that he knew Hego. He had no sense of discontinuity except the break between the moment when he was seized by the thing in the black water, and the moment he realized he had been flung on to a patch of soft mud beside the lake, and aside from his bruises and the sickness the foul water had brought on him was unhurt. He could even remember the click which he had felt rather than heard when the vast cruel beak made its first stab at him and severed the steel cuffs linking his wrists. He could even remember that the end of the beak was rough, and had rasped the skin of his back, and torn a hole in his fine black shirt with the silver piping, so that afterwards the thermostatic circuitry did not work.

Or perhaps the water had put it out of action.

Was he Kazan, saved by a combination of miracles? Or was he the puppet of a black being with eyes like coals?

“Who are you, Kazan?”

That fresh-faced girl insisting that he answer—he could hate her for voicing the question, he could pound her to a sack of bones in blue-bruised skin because he had wished to do that to Bryda and her sneering lover, the prince. He had come from the shore of the lake driven by only that lasting hatred out of all the many desires which once had motivated him as Kazan. He had been cheated, as they informed him much later.

Some of that part was blurred, too. Could the break have come there? No, for when he set his mind to it and concentrated he knew there was, in fact, no break.

Only his mind flinched away from some of the happenings at that time. The memories blended and ran into each other, like wet colors laid too closely side by side. The burning of the Dyasthala, the laying low of the buildings with crackling violence, and the people swarming out like insects from a disturbed nest—was it then that he had suffered the beating? Or was that when he went hunting for Bryda and Luth, and they took him for a madman and wanted to put him in a hospital, misled by his fine clothes into thinking he was one of the haughty? Then, the quality of what he wore showed despite the soaking in the filthy lake. Later he was dressed as he had been for most of his life—in rags. And a stink of himself.

Part of that picture ran off in its turn into a vision of the fine big room, and himself in front of the mirror, admiring garments he had demanded as the price of doing—what? No one could believe that he, Kazan, had carved steps out of the air and brought Prince Luth down them from prison. Not even Kazan could believe that. The devil did it. Using the body named Kazan. The vision of the mirror and himself so smartly clothed ran into a blurred picture of his rags and dirt, sometimes before his encounter with Bryda and the conjurer, sometimes after, at the time when he went with the rest to join the gray line on the gray concrete under the gray sky because in some obscure manner he had understood that this was a means of escape.

And last of all the vision of himself changed to a black, ill-defined shape which gazed into the mirror with eyes like dying coals.

That was the point where he started to scream.

Unnerved by the suddenness of his tortured cry, Clary leapt back from his side, upsetting the stool on which she had been sitting. Her face going pale, she listened and watched for as long as she could endure it. Some of the things that poured out made her mouth work and forced her to close her eyes for long seconds together.

Then, when she could stand no more, she hurled herself at the door and clawed it open. She fled incontinently down the corridor.

At the barrier between the crew’s quarters and those of the worker-cargo, she hammered till a spaceman came in answer. Seeing her, he immediately made to slam the barrier into place again; a worker had no business bothering the crew. He just had time to regret so doing.

Panting, Clary stood over his unconscious form. She hoped she hadn’t hit him too hard. A blow to the vocal cords was dangerous, and could easily kill. But it was his own fault, for not realizing that a weak-looking girl in the Dyasthala could not possibly have been weak, or she would never have survived her teens.

She had no idea which way to go now she was in the crew’s area of the ship. She could see only more corridors. The ship was riddled with them, like a piece of old and worm-infested wood. Things were rather more luxurious here, but to a Dyasthala thief gradations like that were of small importance. At random she decided which way to go, and broke into a stumbling run.

By a chance which later she looked back on as a small miracle, the first crewman she encountered since the misguided man who had tried to slam the barrier in her face was the only officer she had seen before except the captain. Catching sight of him fifty paces distant down a corridor that she crossed, she shouted at him and he turned. He recognized her at once. After a glance behind him, seeming nervous, he began to walk towards her.

“What is it?” he said. “And what are you doing in this part of the ship, anyway?”

“Have you got a doctor in this—this flying mantrap?” she flung at him.

Balden blinked. Again he glanced behind him, as though hoping someone would come to his aid. He said, “Ah—yes, we do have doctors aboard.”

“Then you’d better get one of them down to Kazan quick,” Clary said. “He’s sick in the head. That’s what’s been the trouble all along. What difference does it make whether his devil was real or not, if he thinks it was real? And”—her face twisted suddenly with remembered disgust—“he thinks it was real. By the wyrds, he thinks it was real!”