A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows df-7 Read online

  “Well, I’m not privy to high strategic secrets, but I’m close enough to him that I must have a fair amount of critical information—the kind which’ll be obsolete inside a year, but if used promptly could help Merseia keep our kettle longer on the boil, with that much more harm to us. And I have a freer hand than anybody else who’s so well briefed; I could certainly come if I chose. And an invitation from Tachwyr could be counted on to pique my curiosity, if nothing else.

  “The whole idea was yours, wasn’t it?”

  Aycharaych nodded, his crest a scimitar across the Milky Way. “Yes,” he said. “I already had business in these parts—negotiant perambulantem in tenebris, if you like—and saw nothing to lose in this attempt. At least I have won the pleasure of a few hours with you.”

  “Thanks. Although—” Flandry sought words. “You know I put modesty in a class with virginity, both charming characteristics which should be gotten rid of as fast as puberty allows. However … why me, Aycharaych? Do you relish the fact I’ll kill you, regretfully but firmly, the instant a chance appears? In that respect, there are hundreds like me. True, I may be unusual in having come close, a time or two. And I can make more cultured noises than the average Navy man. But I’m no scholar, no esthete—a dilettante; you can do better than me.”

  “Let us say I appreciate your total personality.” The smile, barely visible, resembled that upon the oldest stone gods of Greece. “I admire your exploits. And since we have interacted again and again, a bond has formed between us. Deny not that you sense it.”

  “I don’t deny. You’re the only Chereionite I’ve ever met—” Flandry stopped.

  After a moment he proceeded: “Are you the only Chereionite anybody has ever met?”

  “Occasional Merseians have visited my planet, even resided there for periods of study,” Aycharaych pointed out.

  Yes. Flandry remembered one such, who had endangered him here upon Talwin; how far in the past that seemed, and how immediately near! I realize why the coordinates of your home are perhaps the best-kept secret in the Roidhunate. I doubt if a thousand beings from offworld know; and in most of them, the numbers have been buried deep in their unconsciousness, to be called forth by a key stimulus which is also secret.

  Secret, secret … What do we know about you that is substance and not shadow?

  The data fled by, just behind his eyes.

  Chereion’s sun was dim, as Flandry himself had discovered when he noticed Aycharaych was blind in the blue end of the spectrum though seeing farther into the red than a man can. The planet was small, cold, dry—deduced from Aycharaych’s build, walk, capabilities, preferences—not unlike human-settled Aeneas, because he could roam freely there and almost start a holy war to split the Empire, nineteen years ago.

  In those days he had claimed that the enigmatic ruins found upon many worlds of that sort were relics of his own people, who ranged and ruled among the stars in an era geologically remote. He claimed … He’s as big a liar as I am, when either of us wants to be. If they did build and then withdraw, why? Where to? What are they upon this night?

  Dismiss the riddles. Imperial Intelligence knew for certain, with scars for reminders, he was a telepath of extraordinary power. Within a radius of x meters, he could read the thoughts of any being, no matter how alien, using any language, no matter how foreign to him. That had been theoretically impossible. Hence the theory was crudely modified (there is scant creativity in a waning civilization) to include suggestions of a brain which with computerlike speed and capacity analyzed the impulses it detected into basic units (binary?), compared this pattern with the one which its own senses and knowledge presented, and by some incredible process of trial and error synthesized in seconds a code which closely corresponded to the original.

  It did not seem he could peer far below the surface thoughts, if at all. That mattered little. He could be patient; or in a direct confrontation, he had skill to evoke the memories he wanted. No wonder that the highest Merseian command paid heed to him. The Empire had never had a more dangerous single enemy.

  Single—

  Flandry grew aware of the other’s luminous regard. “ ’Scuse me,” he said. “I got thinking. Bad habit.”

  “I can guess what.” Aycharaych’s smile continued. “You speculate whether I am your sole Chereionite colleague.”

  “Yes. Not for the first time.” Flandry drank again. “Well, are you? What few photographs or eyewitness accounts we’ve garnered, of a Chereionite among outsiders—never more than one. Were all of them you?”

  “You don’t expect me to tell you. I will agree to what’s obvious, that partakers in ephemeral affairs, like myself, have been rare among my race. They laid such things aside before your kind were aught but apes.”

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “In action I find an art; and every art is a philosophical tool, whereby we may seek to win an atom deeper into mystery.”

  Flandry considered Aycharaych for a silent span before he murmured: “I came on a poem once, in translation—it goes back a millennium or more—that’s stayed with me. Tells how Pan—you know our Classical myths—Pan is at a riverside, splashing around, his goat hoofs breaking the lilies, till he plucks a reed and hollows it out, no matter the agony it feels; then the music he pipes forth enchants the whole forest. Is that what you think of yourself as doing?”

  “Ah, yes,” Aycharaych answered, “you have the last stanza in mind, I believe.” Low:

  Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,

  To laugh as he sits by the river,

  Making a poet out of a man:

  The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,

  For the reed which grows nevermore again

  As a reed with the reeds in the river.

  Damn! Flandry thought. I ought to stop letting him startle me.

  “My friend,” the other went on gently, “you too play a satanic role. How many lives have you twisted or chopped short? How many will you? Would you protest me if the accidents of history had flung Empire rather than Roidhunate around my sun? Or if you had been born into those humans who serve Merseia? Indeed, then you might have lived more whole of heart.”

  Anger flared. “I know,” Flandry snapped. “How often have I heard? Terra is old, tired, corrupt, Merseia is young, vigorous, pure. Thank you, to the extent that’s true, I prefer my anomie, cynicism, and existential despair to counting my days in cadence and shouting huzza—worse, sincerely meaning it—when Glorious Leader rides by. Besides … the device every conqueror, yes, every altruistic liberator should be required to wear on his shield … is a little girl and her kitten, at ground zero.”

  He knocked back his cognac and poured another. His temper cooled. “I suspect,” he finished, “down inside, you’d like to say the same.”

  “Not in those terms,” Aycharaych replied. “Sentimentality ill becomes either of us. Or compassion. Forgive me, are you not drinking a trifle heavily?”

  “Could be.”

  “Since you won’t get so drunk I can surreptitiously turn off your mindscreen, I would be grateful if you stay clear-headed. The time is long since last I relished discourse of Terra’s former splendors, or even of her modern pleasures. Come, let us talk the stars to rest.”}

  In the morning, Flandry told Susette he must scout around the globe a few days, using certain ultrasensitive instruments, but thereafter he would return.

  He doubted that very much.

  X

  Shadow and thunder of wings fell over Kossara. She looked up from the rolling, tawny-begrown down onto which she had come after stumbling from the forest. Against clouds and the plum-colored sky beyond, a Diomedean descended. She halted. Weariness shivered in her legs. Wind slithered around her. It smelled of damp earth and, somehow, of boulders.

  An end to my search. Her heart slugged. But what will I now find? Comrades and trust, or a return to my punishment?

  The native landed, a male, attired in crossbelts and armed with a knife and r
ifle. He must have been out hunting, when he saw the remarkable sight of a solitary human loose in the wilds, begrimed, footsore, mapless and compassless. He uttered gutturals of his own tongue.

  “No, I don’t speak that,” Kossara answered. The last water she had found was kilometers behind. Thirst roughened her throat. “Do you know Anglic?”

  “Some bit,” the native said. “How you? Help?”

  “Y-yes. But—” But not from anybody who’ll think he should call Thursday Landing and inquire about me. During her trek she had sifted the fragments of memory, over and over. A name and nonhuman face remained. “Eonan. Bring me Eonan.” She tried several different pronunciations, hoping one would be recognizable.

  “Gairath mochra. Eonan? Wh … what Eonan? Many Eonan.”

  There would be, of course. She might as well have asked a random Dennitzan for Andrei. However, she had expected as much. “Eonan who knows Kossara Vymezal,” she said. “Find. Give Eonan this.” She handed him a note she had scrawled. “Money.” She offered a ten-credit bill from the full wallet Flandry had included in her gear. “Bring Eonan, I give you more money.”

  After repeated trials, she seemed to get the idea across, and an approximation of her name. The hunter took off northward. God willing, he’d ask around in the bayshore towns till he found the right person; and while this would make the dwellers curious, none should see reason to phone Imperial headquarters. God willing. She ought to kneel for a prayer, but she was too tired; Mary who fled to Egypt would understand. Kossara sat down on what resembled pale grass and wasn’t, hugged herself against the bitter breeze and stared across treelessness beneath a wan sun.

  Have I really won through?

  If Eonan still had his life and liberty, he might have lost heart for his revolution—if, in truth, he had ever been involved; she had nothing more than a dream-vision from a cave. Or if he would still free his people from the Empire, he might be the last. Or if cabals and guerrillas remained, he might not know where they hid. Or if he brought her to them, what could she hope for?

  She tossed her head. A chance to fight. Maybe to win home in the end, likelier to die here: as a soldier does, and in freedom.

  Drowsiness overflowed. She curled herself as best she could on the ground. Heavy garments blunted its hardness, though she hated the sour smell they’d gotten. To be clean again … Flandry had saved her from the soiling which could never be washed off. He had that much honor—and, yes, a diamond sort of mercy. If she’d done his bidding, tried her best to lead him to whatever was left of her fellows, he would surely have sent her back, manumitted—he’d have the prestige for such a favor to be granted him—unscathed—No! Not whole in her own honor! And release upon a Dennitza lashed to the Empire would be a cruel joke.

  Then rest while you can, Kossara. Sleep comes not black, no, blue as a summer sky over the Kazan, blue as the cloak of Mary … Pray for us, now and in the hour of our death.

  A small callused hand shook her awake. Hunger said louder than her watch what a time had passed while the sun brooded nightless. She stared into yellow eyes above a blunt muzzle and quivering whiskers. Half open, bat wings made a stormcloud behind. He carried a blaster.

  His face—She sat up, aware of ache, stiffness, cold. “Eonan?”

  “Torcha tracked me.” Apart from the piping accent, mostly due to the organs of speech, his Anglic came fluent. “But you do not know him, do you?”

  She struggled to her feet. “I don’t know you either, quite,” she got out. “They made me forget.”

  “Ungn-n-n.” He touched the butt of the gun, and his crest erected. Otherwise he stood in taut quietness. She saw he had arrived on a gravsled, no doubt to carry her.

  Resolution unfroze him. “I am Eonan Guntrasson, of the Wendru clan in the Great Flock of Lannach. And you are Kossara Vymezal, from the distant planet Dennitza.”

  Gladness came galloping, and every weakness fled. “I know that, barem! And you dared meet me? Then we are not finished yet!”

  Eonan drew the membranes over his eyes. “We?”

  “The revolution. Yours and mine.” She leaned down to grip his upper shoulders. Beneath fur and warmth, the flight muscles stood like rock.

  “I must be careful.” His tone underlined it. “Torcha said you promised him a reward for fetching me. I paid him myself, not to have him along. Best we go aside and … talk. First, in sign of good faith, let me search you.”

  The place he chose was back in the highlands. Canyon walls rose darkly where a river rang; fog smoked and dripped till Kossara was soaked with chill; at moments when the swirling grayness parted, she glimpsed the black volcanic cone of Mount Oborch.

  On the way, Eonan had fed her from a stock of preserved Terran food, and explained he was the factor for Nakamura Malaysia in the area where he dwelt. This gave him wide contacts and sources of information, as well as an easy excuse to travel, disappearing into the hinterland or across the sea, whenever he wished. Thursday Landing had no suspicion of his clandestine activities. He would not speak about those until she related her story in full.

  Then he breathed, “E-e-e-ehhh,” and crouched in thought on the gravsled bench. Finally, sharply: “Well, your Terran officer has likeliest concluded you slipped off in search of the cloudflyers—the, keh, the underground. A spacecraft was seen to lift from hereabouts not many sunspins ago. When I heard, I wondered what that meant.”

  “I imagine he went to warn the resident and start a hunt for me,” Kossara said. “He did threaten to, if I deserted.” Anxiety touched her. “Yes, and a tightened space watch. Have I caused us trouble?”

  “We shall see. It may have been worth it in all events. To learn about that spy device is no slight gain. We shall want your description of the place where you threw the ring away. Perhaps we can safely look for it and take it to study.”

  “Chances are he’s recovered it. But Eonan!” Kossara twisted around toward him. “How are you doing here? How many survive? With what strength, what plans? How can I help?”

  Again the third lids blurred his gaze. “Best I keep still. I am just a link. They will answer you in the nest where I have decided to take you.”

  The hideout was high in a mountainside. Approaching, Kossara felt her eardrums twinge from pressure change and cold strike deep. Snowpeaks, glaciers, ravines, cliffs, crags reached in monstrous confusion between a cloud ocean which drowned the lower slopes, and a sky whose emptiness the sun only seemed to darken. Silence dwelt here, save for ah- booming over the windshield and a mutter of native language as Eonan radioed ahead.

  Why am I not happy? she wondered. I am about to rejoin my comrades and regain my past—my purpose. What makes me afraid?

  Eonan finished. “Everything will be ready,” he informed her. Was he as tense as he looked? She must have come to know Diomedeans well enough during her stay that she could tell; but that had been robbed from her. What had he to fear?

  “I suppose,” she ventured, “this is headquarters for the entire mission. They tucked it away here to make it undiscoverable.”

  “Yes. They enlarged a cave.”

  She recalled another cave, where she and Trohdwyr and a few more had huddled. “Were we—those who died when I was captured—were we out in the field—liaison with freedom fighters whose homes were below timber-line? Maybe we were betrayed by one of them”—she grimaced—“who’d been caught at sabotage or whatever, and interrogated.”

  “That sounds plausible.”

  “But then nobody except us was destroyed! Am I right? Is the liberation movement still healthy?”

  “Yes.”

  Puzzlement: “Why didn’t I tell the Impies about our main base when they put me under hypnoprobe?”

  “I do not know,” Eonan said impatiently. “Please be quiet. I must bring us in on an exact course, or they will shoot.”

  As the sled glided near, Kossara spied the defense, an energy cannon. It was camouflaged, but military training had enhanced her natural ability to notice t
hings. A great steel door in the bluff behind it would go unseen from above, should anyone fly across this lofty desert. Instruments—infrared sensors, neutrino detectors, magnetometers, gravitometers, atmosphere sniffers, a hundred kinds of robot bloodhound—would expose the place at once. But who would think to come searching?

  The door swung aside. The sled passed through and landed in a garage among several aircars. Here were warmth, echoes, a sudden brilliance of light better suited for eyes human or Merseian. Kossara shed her parka before she stepped off. Her pulse raced.

  Four stood waiting. Three were men. She was not surprised to see the last was a big green heavy-tailed person, though her heart said O Trohdwyr—and for an instant tears stung and blurred.

  She rallied herself and walked toward them. Her boots thudded on the floor; Eonan’s claws clicked. Those in front of her were simply clad, shirts, trousers, shoes on the men, a tunic on the zmay. She had expected them to be armed, as they were.

  It flashed: Why did I think zmay, not ychan? And: They aren’t Dennitzans! None of them!

  She slammed to a halt. The men differed widely, genes from every breed of mankind scrambled in chance combinations. So they could be from Terra—or a colony within the Empire—or—

  Eonan left her side. The Merseian drew his pistol. “Hold,” he rapped. “You are under arrest.”

  He called himself Glydh of the Vach Rueth, nicknamed Far-Farer, an afal of his navy’s Intelligence corps. His immediate assistant was a lanky, sallow, long-nosed man, introduced as Muhammad Snell but addressed by the superior officer as Kluwych. In the middle of wreck, Kossara could flickeringly wonder if the Eriau name had been given him by his parents, when he was born somewhere in the Roidhunate.

  They took her to an office. On the way she passed through such space and among such personnel that she estimated the latter numbered about twenty, two or three of them Merseian by species, the rest human. That was probably all there were on Diomedes: sufficient to keep scores of native dupes like Eonan going, who in their turn led thousands.