by Andre Norton
To Kade’s surprise, the Overman, hesitating on the threshold, made no attempt to look about the room. If he had come hunting a missing slave he did not disclose that fact. Instead his attitude was uneasy and Kade’s confidence grew.
“The Overman wishes?" the Terran demanded with chill crispness.
“Information, starwalker,” Buk blurted out with little of his usual assumption of equality with the Traders. He slid one booted foot into the room and Kade guessed that he did not want to state his business in the open. The Terran stood aside and Buk oozed in, shut the door panel and set his plump shoulders against it as if to stave off some threatened invasion.
“There is a story,” he began, looking none too happy. “Now there are those who say that Lik saw a certain thing by the water and mocked that thing openly, then he was slain by that which he mocked.”
Kade leaned back against the end of the bunk. “There was an old, old carving on a rock by the pool,” he spoke gravely, “which Lik spat upon and mocked, yes. Then with the next dawn the kwitu which was like unto that pictured by the pool, came and rent him. This is no story, for with my two eyes I saw it.”
“And the thing by the pool. Who made it so?” Buk persisted.
“Who live in the mountains, Overman?”
Buk’s tongue, thick and a brownish red, moistened his blubbery lips. His fat rolls of fingers played a tattoo on either side of the control box at the fore of his ornate belt. His uneasiness was so poorly concealed that Kade’s half plan, shelved at Lik’s death, came to life again. Now he decided upon a few embellishments. If Buk was superstitious the Terran could well add to his growing fears.
“I have been asking myself,” Kade said, as if he were musing aloud and not addressing Buk, “why it was that the kwitu did not turn horn and hoof on me, for I was easy meat when the sonic failed us. However the hunt was not for me, but for Lik, and he was not the nearest nor the first that the bull sighted. It is true I had not mocked that which was carved beside the pool, rather did I speak well of it, since such old things are revered among my people.”
“But to believe so is the foolishness of lesser creatures,” Buk’s tongue made its nervous lip journey a second time. “Such thinking is not for masters.”
“Perhaps so,” Kade made polite but plainly false agreement to that sentiment. “Yet among the stars many things come to pass which no man can explain, or has not found a proper explanation to fit the circumstances. All I know is that I breathe and walk, and Lik does not, where Lik mocked and I did not. Perhaps this adds to something of meaning, perhaps not. But while I am on Klor I shall be careful not to mock what I do not understand.”
“Foolishness!” Buk grinned sickly. “The collared ones can not slay with a picture!”
“Not they, perhaps. But I have heard also of a Planner, a Netter, and a Spearman.”
Buk laughed again, but this time there was no mirth in that sound, it was close to the snarl of a rat cornered and knowing fear.
“Rocks! Mountains!” he jeered.
Kade shrugged. “I have told you what I know, Overman. Is this what you would have of me?”
Buk fumbled with the door panel, stepped back into the courtyard corridor, still facing the Terran almost as if he feared turning his back upon the off-worlder. He muttered something and was gone, slouching, his bristly head sunk a little between his shoulders.
Kade slammed shut the panel as Dokital crawled out of his hiding place. For a long moment they eyed each other, but the will to struggle was gone. The Ikkinni whipped out of Kade’s room, heading in the opposite direction to the one Buk had taken.
The Terran turned back to his tapes. Since the High-Lord-Pac had purchased the bear for collection there must exist some tri-dee from which the Styor had made his selection. And among them might just be one of a horse. Equines had been exported to a score of Terran colonized planets and should be listed on the Tradertapes.
Only a small portion of his mind was occupied by that search. Dokital’s demand for action, Buk’s display of superstitious fear, the attempt to murder him by the sonic failure; a hint there, a half-disclosed fact elsewhere—Kade had the breathless sensation of one confronted by a complicated tangle and ordered to have it unraveled within an impossibly short time.
How limited that time might be he learned only a few moments later. Commander Abu came across the courtyard with the news.
“They are sending a hop-ship from Cor to pick up the bear,” he announced. “And since the High-Lord-Pac has asked for a report on the hunt trouble, you might as well go along with the transport. Here,” he held a box of tri-dees. “We’ll suggest to his lordship that, because of the trouble, the Service will be glad to offer him his choice of any of these items. But don’t be too blatant. The Styor want their bribes shoved in their pockets around some corner when no one is looking, rather than slapped into an outheld hand.”
“You are going, too?”
The other nodded. “Pomp and ceremony,” he said wearily. “Commander speaks to planet governor. Oh, check your stunner in before you leave. No one wears an off-world weapon in Cor.”
As Kade hurriedly packed his jump bag he had no time to check the box of tri-dees. Nor did he see Dokital when he went to leave his stunner.
When the Terrans reached the landing apron Kade stood aside to allow Abu to proceed him up the ship’s ramp. And, as the younger man set foot on that slender link between ship and ground he experienced a sudden sharp pull at his scalp lock. Kade’s trained body went into action, falling back at the pull, but not quickly enough to carry his attacker with him. The grip was released and he sprawled clumsily on his back. As he scrambled up he looked around.
There was nothing to be seen, his assailant had vanished. He examined his small twist of hair with his fingers. The tight braid worn by his people was intact, and he could guess no reason for that odd assault at the foot of the Styor ship.
CHAPTER 6
COR AROSE ABRUPTLY from the rolling Klorian plain with insolent refusal to accommodate alien architecture to a frontier world. The city might have been lifted entirely from some other Styor-controlled planet and set down here bodily with all its conical towers, their glitter-tipped spearlike crests pointed into the jade sky. Arrogantly, they were not a part of the ochre landscape on which their foundations rested.
Since Styor ships were not adapted to Terran physique Kade had spent most of the trip trying to control a rebellious stomach and screaming nerves. Now he cultivated as impassive a set of features as he could while waiting on the landing strip for the arrival of the bear cage.
Gangs of Ikkinni slaves were at labor, with Overman half-breeds from half a dozen different Styor-controlled worlds in command. But the lords themselves were not to be seen. The pilot of the ship which had brought the Traders must be of the pure blood, none other ever being given a post of authority. And the Portmaster, invisible in his vantage chamber somewhere in the heights above them, would be Styor.
Kade, seeing no official greeters, knew again the prick of anger at this deliberate down grading of the Traders. The omission of such civilities was more pointed when a slender private-flyer set down half the field away from the freighter and an almost instantaneous swirl of activity there marked deference paid to some outplains lordling. The Terran took tight grip on his temper, promising himself that this time nothing he saw in the Styor stronghold, no insult covert and subtle, or open and complete, would provoke him into answer. The only trouble was, as he knew very well, Kade Whitehawk was not and never would be a proper exponent of the Policy.
Styor traveled in carrying-chairs. Overmen were on platforms, borne by slaves. Terran Traders walked along the canyon-deep avenues of Cor. The polished surface of tower walls flashed, dazzling to off-world eyes. There were no windows to break their lower stories, simply an oval door recessed slightly, always firmly closed, to be sighted here and there. Not a scrap of vegetation grew anywhere about the bases of those towers. But when Kade tilted his head to
look up, he could sight indentations masked in green-blue, in green-green, in yellow-green, marking sky-rooted gardens of exotics from the stars.
A protesting whimper from the cage slung between transport poles made known that the bear had again recovered from the journey drug. The Terran jogged forward to speak soothingly. He must not allow the animal to become so thoroughly frightened as to make a bad impression when it met its new owner for the first time, especially not when Kade’s purpose was to urge that owner to consider more such imports.
In spite of his discomfort on board the transport he had examined the contents of the sample box and was happily aware of the presence therein of a certain tri-dee print. He hooked that box to his belt, carrying nothing in his hands. At least in that he preserved a small measure of difference between Terran and burdened slave.
The heart of Cor was the Pac Tower. More than one garden feathered its length and the Terrans, together with the bear, found themselves in the highest of those where the foliage was almost that of their earth. The strips of sod which formed its paths could hardly be distinguished from the green grass of their mother world.
Released by Kade, the bear stood in the middle of a small clearing, head up, sniffing. Then, its attention caught by the laden branches of a berry bush, it shuffled purposefully for that lure.
“This is the new one?”
There was no mistaking the slurred voice of a Styor. Into the simplest sentence, Kade thought, the older masters of the star lanes could pack an overabundant measure of arrogance, as well as the ever present underwash of ennui. The Terran turned to face one of the floating chairs, hovering a foot or two above the shaved turf, bearing on its cushioned seat a Styor of unmistakably high rank.
The jeweled, scaled mask of an adult male hid half of the face, and the headdress above that, as well as the noble’s robe, was ostentatiously plain. Only the great gemmed thumb ring, covering that digit from base to nail, signified the exalted status of its wearer.
“As was promised, lord,” Abu replied.
The chair floated on and the bear, hunched down to comb berries into a gaping mouth, looked up. For a long moment the animal from Terra regarded the chair, and perhaps the man in it, appraisingly. Kade was ready for trouble. He knew that the bear must have been conditioned at the breeding farm for all eventualities which its first owners could foresee in an alien home. But reactions to the unusual could not always be completely prepared for, or against.
Apparently floating chairs, and Styor lords in them, had been a part of the bear’s training. It grunted, unimpressed, and then turned back to the more important occupation of testing these new and interesting fruits.
“This is acceptable,” the Styor lord conceded. “Let those who have such duties be informed as to the care.” The chair made a turn and then stopped dead. The occupant might have been suddenly reminded of another matter.
“There was a report brought to Pac attention.”
Kade discovered that an utterly emotionless tone could rasp like a threat.
“A report was made” Abu agreed.
"Follow. Pac will hear.”
The chair swept on at a speed which brought the Terrans to a trot. They passed under the arch of an open door, crossed the anteroom of the garden, and came into a bare chamber with a dais at one end, to which the Styor’s chair sped, setting down with precision in the exact middle of that platform. And that landing was a signal which brought from two doors flanking the dais, Styor guards, to draw up in a brilliant peacocking of jewels, inlaid ceremonial armor and off-world weapons, between the Terrans and the High-Lord-Pac.
“There was a slaying in the mountains,” the ruler of Klor observed, seemingly having no attention for either of the off-worlders before him, his stare fixed upon empty space a good yard or so above their heads.
“That is so, lord,” Abu agreed with equal detachment.”
“The saying is that a sonic failed.”
“That is so, lord,” echoed the Terran Commander, adding nothing to the formal words.
Kade, studying the half-masked faces of the Styors before him, especially that of the High-Lord-Pac, experienced anew the distaste which had always been a part of the old, old Terran distrust for the reptilian. Those visors, sharply pointed in a snout-like excrescence above the nose, imparted a lizard look to all Styor. And in the person of the High-Lord-Pac that quality was oddly intensified until one could almost believe that there was no humanoid countenance behind the scaled material.
“When the sonic failed, an Overman and some of his hunters were killed by kwitu,” the High-Lord-Pac continued in flat exposition. “And after his death several of the collared ones fled to the mountains, his control over them being destroyed.”
“The truth is as the great one says.”
“The starwalker who was with these hunters, he swears to this?”
“He stands before the great one now. Let the asking be made so that he may reply with his own mouth.”
That lizard’s snout descended a fraction of an inch. Kade could not be certain whether the eyes behind those gem-bordered slits saw him even now.
“Let him speak concerning this happening.”
Kade, striving to keep his voice as precise and cold as the Commander’s, retold his story—his edited story. Faced only by that array of masks he had no hint as to whether or not they believed him. And when he had done, the comment upon his version of the disaster came obliquely.
“Let this be done,” intoned the noble on the dais. “That all sonics be checked before they are issued for use. Also let the master-tech answer to Pac concerning this matter. The audience is finished.”
The chair arose, moved straight ahead as the honor guard hurriedly snapped to right and left offering free passage. Kade had barely time to dodge aside as the Styor ruler passed. Was this all? Would they have no further meeting and a chance to offer the High-Lord-Pac more off-world curiosities?
An Overman guided the Terrans to a room not far above street level, close to the slave quarters. Kade waited for enlightenment as his superior officer crossed the chamber, dropped his jump bag on a seat which was no more than a hard bench jutting out of the wall. A roll of woven mats piled at one end suggested that this also must serve as a bed when the need arose.
"What now?” Kade finally asked.
“We wait. Sometime the High-Lord-Pac will be in the mood for amusement or enlightenment. Then we shall be summoned. Since we do not exist except to supply his whims, such a time may come within the hour, tomorrow or next week.”
Certainly not a very promising forecast, Kade decided. He opened the tri-dee holder and, kneeling on the floor, he set its contents out upon the bench, sorting the beautifully colored small slides. There were so lifelike that one longed to reach into the microcosm and touch the frozen figures into life and movement.
Here were the smaller, long domesticated animals, cats, dogs, exotic fowl, a curved-horned goat, a bovine family of bull, cow and calf. Then came the wild ones—or the species which had once been wild—felines, represented by lion, tiger, black leopard; a white wolf, deer. Kade discarded a bear slide, and eliminated the elephants and the rest of the larger wild kind which could not be shipped this far out into space. Then he took out the last slide of all, balanced it on his palm, examining it avidly. To his eyes it was irresistible. But how would the High-Lord-Pac see it.
Abu had no present interest in the display of trade goods and his continued silence finally drew his companion’s attention. The Terran Team Commander got up from the bench, stood now by the door through which they had entered. There were no windows here. A subdued light, dim to their off-world senses, came from a thin rod running completely around the room where ceiling joined wall. But that light was not so dim as to disguise Abu’s attitude. He was waiting, or listening, or expecting—
Kade arose, still holding his choice of tri-dees. They were without weapons in the heart of the undeclared enemy’s territory. And Abu’s stance brought that
fact home to the younger man. When the Commander spoke he hardly more than shaped the words with his lips, using the tongue of their own world rather than Trade talk.
“Someone is coming. Walking.”
Not a Styor visitor then, unless a guard on duty. A second later the eyepatch in the door panel glowed. Abu waited for a moment, and then acknowledged with a slap from his open palm directly below the small screen. The light flashed off, they viewed a foreshortened snap of an Overman. Abu slapped a second time, granting admittance.
“Hakam Toph,” the stranger announced himself. “First Keeper of off-world animals.”
Abu made the same formal introduction in return, naming himself and then Kade.
Toph showed more interest in Kade.
“It is the one who cares for beasts?”
Abu sat down on the bench, leaving the answering to Kade.
“It is,” he replied shortly. The Overman was using the speech of an Ikkinni driver, and that in itself was an insult to the Traders.
“This one would know the habits of the new beast.”
“A record tape was sent,” Kade pointed out. He held up his hand at eye level, apparently more absorbed in the tri-dee he had selected from his samples, than in a sale already made.
And the Overman, catching sight of the array of plates on the shelf, came on into the room eagerly, drawn to the strange exhibits to be seen. Kade, nursing that last tri-dee stepped aside, allowing Toph to finger the small vivid scenes of beasts in their natural setting. The Overman was plainly excited at such a wealth. But at last he began to glance at the plate Kade still held, while firing a series of questions concerning the rest. When the Terran did not put his plate down or mention it, Toph came directly to the point.
“That is also an off-world beast?”
“That is so.” But still Kade did not offer him the plate.
“That is one which is rare?”