The Stolen Future Box Set

by Brian K. Lowe

  “It was actually my idea to draft you onto the team,” Hargreen confided. “But Bryal is in charge, so it was up to him to ask you.”

  “I thought he was going to say no,” Bryal added. “But here he is!”

  By now the other teams had caught wind of the fact that I was competing, not watching, and the tenor of their cheers had changed to a more muted muttering somewhere between defiance and doubt.

  Bryal had noticed it too. “They’re afraid of you, that’s for sure. There’s never been a jast-ball player your size. I’m hoping it won’t occur to them to gang up on you at least until we can grab the ball.”

  “They can come after me even if someone else has the ball?” My understanding of the rules of the game ranked barely above zero on any scale. I had been given to understand I only had to hold onto the ball no matter what and fight my way toward whichever goal line I was directed, but it was now becoming obvious there were nuances I should have studied.

  “It’s free-for-all,” Hargreen said. “Most of the action centers around the jast-ball, because that’s how you score. But if the other teams see you as enough of a threat, they may try to neutralize you early.”

  I would have loved a definition of “neutralize” in this context, but Bryal tried to give me a friendly punch on the shoulder that landed somewhere above my elbow.

  “Don’t look,” he murmured, “but we’ve got an audience.” I stared at him. The entire square was packed with shouting, jostling slaves of both sexes. “One of the masters,” he clarified. “Daela Pram is standing in an alleyway up the street.” A couple of my teammates tried to steal surreptitious glances, but he put a stop to it. He said to me: “The young klurath like to watch, and sometimes the adults, but they don’t like it when we notice. So they pretend they don’t care, and we pretend we don’t know.”

  I nodded as though this were sage advice, even though Bryal and the others were completely wrong. Daela Pram wasn’t anywhere near the jast-ball field; he and Gaz Bronn were reviewing paperwork in the kinlama’s office, which was part of the reason I had been allowed to join my fellow slaves here. The “Daela Pram” watching us was the Librarian, projecting a holographic klurath to hide the fact that I had hidden the branch library at that spot, as well as a small cache of weapons. As long as he stood there, the library was safe from discovery by a slave, and any klurath who wandered by would almost certainly be of a lower rank than Daela Pram, and thus easily brushed off. It wasn’t the most foolproof of plans, but it was better than carrying the library in my pocket through a three-way rugby scrum. It probably would not have suffered any damage, but it could have left a huge bruise on my thigh.

  With the watching “klurath” studiously ignored, and the crowd whipped into a frenzy that our arrival had only redoubled, there was nothing left to do but play jast-ball.

  The commencement was simple, a set-up that had not changed in millennia save for the addition of the third team. The crowd had cleared away, leaving a large, roughly triangular patch with lines delineating the boundaries, and more marked a few feet short of what would have been the points had the triangle been drawn with any precision: the goal lines. I noted with dismay that this oddly-shaped arena not only betokened that I would be besieged by two forces at once, but also that the goal line, which on a two-team field would have run the breadth of the rectangular playing area, was only a few feet long. There would be no racing to outflank an opponent who stood between me and my goal; one or two men could easily block it entirely and the only way past would be through. Indeed, our own team had already delegated a pair for that very duty behind me.

  Why was I not surprised that these goal protectors were the largest men on each team—or that the other two teams appointed three men each for this job?

  There was no time to worry; the ball was produced and placed exactly in the center of the field, roughly fifty yards from the edges. We all stood with our backs to our respective goals, and even before Bryal told me, I knew that on signal we would all charge the ball with everything we had. The first man to reach it would seize it. It did not take an expert to deduce that with my longer legs, I was the hands-down favorite to reach the ball first. Ahead of the other two teams, and ahead of anyone on my team who might be counted on to shield me.

  This was going to hurt.

  There was a shout, and we were off.

  I had only one chance, and that was to keep moving. The others knew they had no chance to beat me to the ball, but I would have to slow down to grab it, and they were going to swarm all over me as I tried to get up to speed again. My feet were pounding and my arms were churning and the crowd became a blur of sound as my sight darkened into a narrow tunnel with the jast-ball at its end. As I neared it, I slowed, just as expected, but then I did something that they did not expect.

  I halted, swung my right leg, and kicked the ball high into the air toward a goal line.

  Everything stopped. The players and audience, suddenly silent, watched as the ball rose lazily and fell again, beyond the oncoming players. Of all the men on the field, only I was in motion.

  I burst through the stunned opposing line like it was paper and coursed toward the ball now rolling away from me and toward the three-man line. I was almost sure my ploy had worked to perfection until one of the goal protectors regained his senses and ran for the ball, which was nearer to him. He seized with a cry of triumph—

  —and I ran him down. In size, he was but a youth in comparison to me, but a lifetime of slavery had made him solid. We fell together after a bone-jarring collision, the jast-ball squirting off I know not where. Nor did I care for a moment, as I tried to clear my head.

  And a moment was all I got. Within seconds I was buried under a veritable mound of flesh. Even though I did not have the ball, I felt I must be the target of every player on both teams, not trying to subdue or restrain me, but hitting and kicking me as fast and hard as they could! This wasn’t a game, it was an assault! I had been set up by Gaz Bronn’s enemies!

  There were so many that only a few could actually make contact with me at once; I suspect they pummeled each other as much as they did me, and I further suspect they did not care. But when one lucky fist snaked through the tangle and tagged me quite painfully on the nose—that was when they made me angry.

  And when we savages from the dawn of time get angry, the results are not pretty.

  Gathering myself against the turf, I heaved upward with a bellow that would have made Timash proud, scattering jast-ball players like monkeys off an elephant’s back. I lashed out in turn, fists crunching and elbows jabbing and feet stomping and I did not stop until I was free and my foes lay about me in blood and pain. Vaguely I heard the mob shouting my name.

  I didn’t know where the jast-ball was and I didn’t care. I seized the nearest groaning man by the collar and pulled him up with one hand. If what I felt was any reflection of how my face looked, I must have loomed over him like a bloody demon from the Ninth Circle.

  “Who put you up to this? Who told you to do this?”

  “Keryl! Keryl!”

  The slave I had picked up was babbling incoherently, spitting blood. He might have been protesting his innocence, but I couldn’t tell. There was something in that shouting, something in the waves of telepathic frenzy that struck a chord, a memory…

  …of someone I knew.

  Dropping the slave, I spun about and there, standing and waving at the mouth of an alley opposite where the Librarian was lurking, was Sanja! She was flanked by two men; a moment later one of them grabbed her and dragged her back into the shadows, and I stood for a moment stunned, unable to process what I’d seen.

  That was when my own team attacked me.

  Chapter 27

  Fight

  Even with the mental and verbal screaming of the crowd and the painful groans of the men lying all about me, something about the focused energy of the oncoming gang aiming straight for my unprotected back forced its way through the noise and warned me so
that I dropped to my knees a second before impact. Instead of slamming into me at full sprint and smashing me face-first into the ground, my attackers overran me. I collapsed into a ball, protecting my head and allowing them to tangle themselves hopelessly. In that instant of confusion, I reared up and stood over them, the entire mass sprawled before me.

  There was no time for mercy. The woman who held the secret to finding my wife and my best friend, the woman who could help me to get out of here, was barely thirty yards away. I ran over my former teammates, not pausing at any noises I made or heard, and ran with a desperate speed toward where Sanja had disappeared.

  I scarcely slowed as I turned into the alleyway, and a blind man could have skewered me. I was bloody, bruised, already exhausted, and unarmed. This was obviously a trap. I knew that two men had hold of Sanja, and probably more awaited. I didn’t hesitate, but ran straight into the lion’s mouth.

  There was one person standing in the alley. Sanja had a bloody knife in one hand and a smile on her face. I noted crumpled figures on either side of us, and I was fairly certain some of the darker shadows on the walls were blood. If any of the bodies still breathed, I could not discern it.

  “Keryl!” Sanja ran up to me, throwing her arms around me. “I saw them rushing you, but they pulled me back before I could warn you.”

  She felt wonderful in my arms, not the way Maire would feel, but like a daughter you thought you had lost.

  “I was so surprised to see you they almost got me.” I was still catching my breath and my mind was whirling. Despite what she’d done to free herself, we were in terrible danger. “Come on,” I said, grabbing her free hand. “We’ve got to get back. I’ve got to get my weapons.” If this were a concerted assassination attempt, Gaz Bronn might be a target as well, which meant looking like Daela Pram might not be enough for the Librarian to guard my belongings. I led Sanja back to the mouth of the alley and peered toward the jast-ball field.

  It was a madhouse. The crowd had taken the disrupted game as an opportunity to vent its frustrations on each other. Hundreds were heaving backward and forwards, throwing things, pushing, a dozen small fistfights erupting that I could see from my vantage. Who was actually fighting whom, and whether any of the players I had knocked down had been able to keep from being trampled, I could not say.

  Swiftly we ran across the street, Sanja recoiling when she saw a klurath looming up in front of us, and automatically assuming a fighting stance, brandishing her knife.

  “No! No! It’s all right!” She could hardly harm a hologram, but I didn’t want her charging through him and landing on my weapons. “It’s the Librarian.” “Daela Pram” vanished in an instant and I retrieved my gear.

  “Nice idea,” Sanja said.

  “Thanks. Let’s—”

  A shout arose behind us as a half-dozen klurath swept into the street. They had been headed for the rioting mob, only to turn when they saw us. I ignored their order to halt and we did our best to lose them in the twisting streets.

  “I hope you know where you’re going!” Sanja ventured after one particularly confusing triple-turn that seemed to leave us running opposite our original direction.

  “I have a guide,” I puffed, and resolved to save my breath. Truthfully, while the Librarian’s directions were usually perfect, I was beginning to wonder myself. And just then we emerged on a broad avenue that I recognized led straight to Gaz Bronn’s entryway—and the dozen soldiers that guarded the door, arms bared and ready.

  “That’s where we have to go. Through them.”

  “Are they friends?” Sanja asked.

  We stood in the shelter of a convenient doorway, I catching my breath, Sanja seeming no worse for wear.

  “I wish I knew. I can barely tell Gaz Bronn and Daela Pram apart. These could be Gaz Bronn’s men, or someone else’s.” It occurred to me Sanja would not know who I was talking about, but there was no time for explanations.

  “Is there another way in? Another entrance we could try?”

  I considered, then shook my head. “Even if we could get there, all the entrances are probably guarded. Gaz Bronn was afraid something like this might happen; that was why I was chosen as his bodyguard.”

  Sanja gave me an appraising look. “I wondered where the weapons came from.”

  “Long story.” I returned her stare. “I assume yours is, as well.”

  “Oh, yes. And yes, Maire is alive; so is Timash. I think they’re more worried about you than they are about themselves.”

  I took another look down the street to avoid having to answer. Even though my mind is a complete blank to the people of this age, I needed to keep myself in control if I was going to have any chance to get back to Gaz Bronn, let alone rescue Maire. Given the opportunity, I would have pestered Sanja with a hundred questions and likely killed us both with inattention.

  “Keryl,” the Librarian whispered in my mind, “the klurath who were following you have just emerged onto the street twenty yards behind us. They are headed this way.”

  Wordlessly, I pulled Sanja back into the alley whence we had come, barely ahead of the oncoming patrol.

  “Well, now we can see who’s who,” I whispered. Indeed we would.

  “What happened?” called one of the klurath before Gaz Bronn’s door.

  “He got away,” replied the leader of our pursuers, answering our question just as I had feared. “We thought he’d come here.”

  “Not yet,” said the first. Although they were now in close proximity, the nuances of telepathy made it possible for me to eavesdrop at a distance where sound would not have carried.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter much, does it? It’s not like he can hide amongst the slaves.”

  A true enemy, like a true friend, will spare no effort for your feelings. If your situation is hopeless, you may count on him to remind you of it.

  “We have to try to get out of the city,” I whispered. “We can get back to The Dark Lady and…” And what? Even if we made it back to the ship, we had very little chance of sailing her, and even less of escaping. A single patrol ship would outgun us. I tried to switch tactics. “Do you think you could find your way back to where you and the others were being held?”

  Sanja shook her head. “This is the first time I’ve been outside the walls since we were captured. And the compound we were in was guarded. We’d never get back in, much less get everyone out. But we could—”

  Her suggestion was interrupted by a sudden commotion in the crowd of guards. I heard a door open. Someone was trying to fight his way out of the house, but mob surged forward with a shout and blocked him. The surge halted, but the shouts continued, and I could hear the sounds of ringing steel. The defenders could not escape, but the attackers were blocked from entering. At that moment everyone’s entire attention was on the house; I could have walked up and taken any one of them in the back. It would have been a suicidal gesture in the face of those odds, but it gave me an idea. I pressed my sword into Sanja’s hand.

  “Take this and step back where you won’t be seen by anyone entering the alley. When they come down here…you know what to do.”

  “Wait!” she hissed, but I was already in the street.

  I waited until I thought there was a lull in the general chaos, then yelped as though I had just come out and seen them all for the first time. Then I dashed back into the alley and past Sanja’s hiding place.

  Perhaps ten klurath pursued me down that narrow path, and Sanja waited for the last of them before she struck. The only other time I had seen her fight was when we met and she took on the sandclaw. The klurath were quick, but not sandclaw-quick. They were heavily armed and they outnumbered her, but the space was tight and she had the element of surprise.

  And of course, when they turned to face her, I brained the nearest klurath with my stave, grabbed his sword, and laid to with a vengeance. In a few moments the alley was splashed with lizard-blood and only humans were left alive.

  A few moments to catch our
breaths, and then by mutual assent we made our way back again to the street. Another group of klurath met us there, but I held out my arm and stopped Sanja before she could act.

  “Hold on! They’re friends.” Thanks to Heaven, the leader of this pack was Daela Pram.

  “Keryl Clee. Gaz Bronn thought you would escape. We were trying to make our way out the surface door but the war party’s men had already blocked it. Then we heard some of them to run away. That gave us the room to fight our way through.” One of his men scraped past us and called Daela Pram’s attention to the mess we had left behind. “Ah,” he said. “That explains it. If Gaz Bronn ever hires another bodyguard, you can come to work for me.” He spared a glance for Sanja’s bloody weapons. “Both of you.”

  “You said you were trying to get out through the surface door?” I asked. “What is happening below?”

  “Follow me,” he said, leading us back to the house. “The corridors are full of fighting. We don’t know why, but things have exploded into open warfare. The peacekeepers are nowhere to be found. We don’t know who we’re fighting, but we do know there’s a traitor in the house.”

  “A traitor?”

  Daela Pram bobbed his head in the manner of klurath nod. “There are doors that are always kept locked, especially these days. Someone opened them. There were armed klurath in the house before anyone knew they were there. If one of the slaves hadn’t managed to raise the alarm, we’d all be dead.”

  “You are right, it was all planned. They got me down to the jast-ball field so I would be unavailable to protect Gaz Bronn, and unarmed besides. Then they ganged up on me. And I think it was Hargreen. He hated me, so he set me up on the jast-ball field.” He was the one who told Bryal to recruit me to the team. He could have recruited others as well; if he promised them they would be taken care of afterward, they would have believed him.